We got the call yesterday. Christopher Merkner’s “Last Cottage” (vol. 7, no. 1) has been selected to appear in the upcoming Best American Mystery Stories anthology. Yay! For some insight into the story’s utter awesomeness, see Suzanne Warren’s January 12th Why We Like It post.
Posts Tagged ‘7.1’
“Last Cottage”: Why We Like It
Wednesday, January 12th, 2011When one of us finds a poem or story in our pages that we especially like, it’s common for us to adopt the voice of that piece for the rest of the day. On any given week in the office, you might hear us conducting staff meetings in the omniscient past, or addressing the fax machine in the vocative “O.” But when long-time volunteer Suzanne Warren bounded into the office speaking in the eerie first-person plural of Christopher Merker’s “Last Cottage” (volume 7, number 1), we crowned her our POV queen. Sadly, Suzanne left her minions shortly thereafter to pursue a career in Wisconsin’s lucrative vacation-rental industry. But she did leave these notes behind:
Suzanne Warren: “We know the Larsons.” So begins Christopher Merkner’s “Last Cottage,”
a Gothic horror tale of lakefront Wisconsin real estate. “Last Cottage” is told from the point of view of a first-person plural narrator—the we of the first sentence. Stories related from this vantage point—notoriously hard to pull off—generally fall into one of two camps. The story may be lyrical and elegiac, invoking the pleasurably blurred ego boundaries of lovers or children; think of Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven or Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides. Alternately, the narrating we suggests mob violence and militarized groupthink, as in Donald Barthelme’s “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby.” “Last Cottage” falls in the latter camp. That is, a group of townspeople tell of their progressively more violent harassment of the Larsons, owners of the titular summer cottage.
These narrators are poor and desperate. They believe the Larsons’ property, the last on the lake, stands in the way of their little town’s economic development. The Larsons, on the other hand, are pleasant and well-off, blessed with the luxury of innocence. They suspect nothing, and that is their undoing. Here, we find ourselves unsure of our sympathies. Don’t we, too, resent those who have more than we do? Don’t we, too, hate the Larsons, just a little, for not knowing they are despised? Yet Merkner refuses us the comfort of easy allegiances. Far from the smug rich folk we might imagine, the Larsons are resourceful and uncomplaining. They greet each of the indignities visited upon them by the townspeople with pragmatic good cheer. They are better people than these locals, are they not?
The pleasures of “Last Cottage” are not all cerebral. Mention must be made of the sheer wonderful weirdness of the storytelling—which includes a quantity of dead fish and some highly unusual lovemaking—and the beauty of the writing. We learn, for example, that “the locusts were scorching the ears of the trees” on the Larsons’ property, an image made more resonant by the eavesdropping townsfolk Merkner conceals in the foliage.
These spies in the trees, the tellers of the tale, are classic unreliable narrators, their assertions of innocence belied by horrific acts. “Last Cottage” functions as an elaborate justification, an apologia of sorts, on the part of these storytellers. In the tale’s last lines, they define themselves by their lostness, a dispossession we’ve come to understand as spiritual as well as economic. In the end we learn who we are: monstrous victims, blinded by fury to the humanity of the perpetrator.
CR Contributor D.A. Powell to Be in Best American Poetry 2011
Wednesday, January 5th, 2011
Kevin Young has selected D. A. Powell’s poem “Bugcatching at Twilight,” first printed in issue 7.1 of Cincinnati Review, for inclusion in Best American Poetry 2011. Congratulations, D. A.!
Summer Issue Bonus Material: Laura Van Den Berg, Ron Wallace
Sunday, October 24th, 2010As you already know, if you’ve been following, we’ve been posting bonus material all month, to hold our readers over until the winter 2011 issue arrives (any day now!). We asked all the writers in our summer issue to tell us about the ideas that lead to their poems, stories, and essays. Below are the final two, by Laura Van Den Berg and Ron Wallace. If you missed all the others, scroll down and check them out.
Laura Van Den Berg: I loved having the opportunity to delve into Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City and to craft my impressions into the essay “Chronic Conversation.” Though of course aware of Lethem’s contribution to contemporary letters, I was woefully under-read when it came to his work and so it was a joy and a challenge to have a chance to sit with this ambitious and intriguing novel.
Ron Wallace: When I started writing poetry seriously forty years ago, I was in love with the music of language and content to bake the kind of fruitcakes of image and sound that my mentors, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas, were famous for. Pound’s warning to “go in fear of abstractions,” and William Carlos Williams’s prescription “no ideas but in things” further reinforced that recipe for poetic practice. These days I’m facing my fears, embracing abstractions, and striving directly to explore ideas in my poems, even though the older I get the less I seem to know.
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Summer Issue Bonus: Henry Rappaport, Chuck Rybak, Maura Stanton
Saturday, October 23rd, 2010The winter 2011 issue is at the press! In the meantime, enjoy some bonus material. We asked all the writers in our summer issue to tell us about the ideas that lead to their poems, stories, and essays. We’ll be posting their comments all month, until the new issue is out. Here’s what Henry Rappaport, Chuck Rybak, and Saara Myrene Raappana had to say:
Henry Rappaport: Like turning on a radio and hearing a song you love, sometimes you get to sing along. And it’s such fun. Good fortune or grace, it just happens. Maybe it is helpful and instructive to say this, although it’s amorphous and vague. And it’s not dumb luck either. I doubt it would come along if not for those times the interference is so strong all the fiddling in the world won’t get it right. I doubt I’d recognize it if it did. Once in a while you wake in the right place at the right time and all you have to do is sing.
Chuck Rybak: “Cinderella, as Told by Birds” developed from my experience of trying to read the classic Grimms fairy tale to my daughter at a time when she was already completely enamored with the Disney version. It had been a long time since I’d read the Grimms tales, and I was surprised at how raw and violent the story was: self-mutilation, the final image of the birds plucking out the step-sisters’ eyeballs. Needless to say, I did a lot of creative editing on the fly, often midsentence. It was from that editing and improvising that this poem was born, and I thought a lot about how to answer the question, “Who would have an objective, dispassionate, or completely different perspective of the brutality here?” I found my answer in the birds, who could always be heard outside the window when I paused and tried to think of a more gentle way to put things to a three-year-old.
Maura Stanton: “Horse in a Swimming Pool” had two sources. To begin with there was a tiny article in a local newspaper about a horse that had fallen into a swimming pool. After swimming for a while, the horse had finally been rescued by the fire department. I was inspired to write about the horse, but how? Luckily I was reading a translation of Voices from the Plains by Gianni Celati around that time, an amazing and visionary book of stories set in Italy’s Po Valley, and felt encouraged to tell the horse’s story in a simple and direct way.
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Summer Issue Bonus: D. A. Powell, Kevin Prufer, Saara Myrene Raappana
Friday, October 22nd, 2010The winter 2011 issue is at the press! In the meantime, enjoy some bonus material. We asked all the writers in our summer issue to tell us about the ideas that lead to their poems, stories, and essays. We’ll be posting their comments all month, until the new issue is out. Here’s what D. A. Powell, Kevin Prufer, and Saara Myrene Raappana had to say:
D. A. Powell: These poems are part of a larger project, focusing on California’s Central Valley. The ways in which the rural landscape has been altered by developers is something I’m trying to capture through the use of subordinate clauses and traditional punctuation. The sentence itself is an imposed order. The language, though, retains elements of the wild.
Kevin Prufer: I have followed D. A. Powell’s work since a mutual friend, Rick Barot, first sent me a manilla file folder full of his poems back in 1997. Powell didn’t have a book out yet, but his early poems struck me immediately for their technical brilliance, their humor, their sheer hyperactivity, and their many complicated sadnesses. Over the years, I’ve met so many other young writers who were similarly affected on first encountering his poems. And, more than that, so many of us have seen our own work deeply influenced by Powell’s. For that reason, I was thrilled to write this long essay for The Cincinnati Review. I hope it inspires readers to seek out his poems.
Saara Myrene Raappana: I’m pretty sure I’ve read about studies indicating that we all tend to personify inanimate objects. As a child, I had a near-crippling inability to shut off those personification tendencies, and the result was a quiet but persistent hum of guilt that ran throughout my childhood as I threw away grinning tin cans, ran past those dolorous doorbell chimes without so much as a hello, or bounced a tennis ball against the long-suffering house siding. The richness of the internal worlds I perceived in those objects still fascinates me, so I started making lists of titles for poems from the perspectives of those objects. “The Hardwood Laments Its Lowly Position” was one of them.
“Don’t Let’s Talk Things through Anymore” is a poem about covertness, obviously in subject but more so in process: I was trying to hide a personal subject in an impersonal poem and to hide rhyme in something that could appear to be free verse. Rule #1 was that I had to express the emotions of a situation vividly without mentioning a single thing about the situation itself. Rule #2 was that I had to (in the first draft, at least) make sure that every line included a word that rhymed with at least two other words somewhere in the poem, but it didn’t matter how far apart they were. I came upon the solution of zeroing in closely on a single phrase (“talk things through”) and then letting the rhyme pattern guide the direction of the poem. I was surprised, not only by the images the poem settled on, by the number of unintentional rhymes and sound repetitions that emerged.
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Summer Issue Bonus: Christopher Merkner, Philip Moustakis, Edith Pearlman
Thursday, October 21st, 2010The winter 2011 issue is at the press! In the meantime, enjoy some bonus material. We asked all the writers in our summer issue to tell us about the ideas that lead to their poems, stories, and essays. We’ll be posting their comments all month, until the new issue is out. Here’s what Christopher Merkner, Philip Moustakis, and Edith Pearlman had to say:
Christopher Merkner: A while back I tried to write something sweet and good and pure about my hometown and the people I know and love, and “Last Cottage” is what arrived. It’s a shame. I’m pretty sure none of this story is true. I mean, I suppose I remember Slocum Lake having an unnatural swarm of carp sucking the water’s surface in summer, gasping, looking very desperate, terrified and terrifying, seemingly very eager to get the hell out of that cesspool. I’ll never forget all those eyes looking at me, all those mouths mouthing in silence, and I’ll of course never forget the good and pure people who lived with me in that sweet part of Illinois.
Philip Moustakis: In “In-Between Places,” I am making an argument for Simon more than writing his story. In fact, I am far more comfortable making arguments than writing stories. What’s the argument? If I could explain it—if I could make the rational argument—I could just write an essay. But I can’t, so I need the story.
Edith Pearlman: I would like to promote writing as an amateur enterprise. There are very few artistic endeavors and sports that do not have an amateur component—think of painting, singing, theatricals; think of tennis and soccer and baseball. There are opera companies that are largely amateur; there are amateur architects. Writing as a hobby can be taken up as seriously as writing as a profession. The craft can be studied, practiced, and mastered for the pleasure of only a few readers, just as the amateur pianist has only a household audience and the tennis player no audience at all. A few readers? I am happy with one—that is to say, all my writing is directed toward a single ideal reader, literate, leisured, interested in being interested. When I think I have satisfied him, I myself am satisfied.
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Summer Issue Bonus: Koster, Langemak, Luongo
Wednesday, October 20th, 2010While we wait for the winter 2011 issue (out next month!), we’ve assembled some great bonus material from our summer 2010 issue. We asked all the writers in issue 7.1 to tell us about the ideas that lead to their poems, stories, and essays. We’ll be posting their comments all month, until the new issue is out. Here’s what Dana Koster, Liz Langemak, and Margaret Luongo had to say:
Dana Koster: I’ve always loved the freedom that comes from constraint, but I’ve also never been good at following rules. “Ghazal for Aurora Chasing the Deer” and “Kablooey” are part of a fourteen poem series of ghazals that I’ve been tinkering with for the past three years, all of which follow the basic couplet format of the ghazal, but which diverge rather recklessly from there. In the traditional construction of the form, a single word is repeated at the end of each couplet, and each couplet ends with a period. In my poems, the repeated word gets twisted, ever morphing into something slightly different—”dying” becomes “Diane” which becomes “dynamite,” and the couplets bleed into each other rather than ending on a complete thought. The result is something more loose and quite a bit more strange.
Liz Langemak: I don’t tend to like hotels, but I wrote “At the Palmer House Hilton” after my recent stay there because I admired how the room presented simple things really well. As someone who’s aware that she tends to write poems as skins for ideas, I wanted to try beginning with straight images—particularly the amazing towels at the Palmer House—and see what happened. Maybe I’m easily impressed, or I just need to get new towels myself, but I loved those towels on their rack and that whole room. Writing this poem refocused my writing and reminded me that Williams was right about things: they’re a good source of their own ideas.
Margaret Luongo: Three years ago, I was getting ready to teach a summer semester in London. A few nights before I left, I had a dream in which a friend of mine held up a white sock, the fine kind a girl would wear, and shook it at me. He said, “I can’t,” and then more emphatically, with more sock shaking, “I won’t!” As I awoke, a story formed around that image—or the premise of the story did, along with more images. I was in a rush to leave the country, so I didn’t write it down. On my first night in London, when I thought I could die from jet lag, I wrote the story and felt embarrassed that the first thing I’d written in London had nothing to do with London. “Girls Come Calling” is set in Florida, which I am embarrassed to say I still miss
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Summer Issue Bonus: Kelly Davio, Eva Hooker, Lew Klatt
Tuesday, October 12th, 2010The winter 2011 issue is at the press! In the meantime, enjoy some bonus material. We asked all the writers in our summer issue to tell us about the ideas that lead to their poems, stories, and essays. We’ll be posting their comments all month, until the new issue is out. Here’s what Kelly Davio, Eva Hooker, and Lew Klatt had to say:
Kelly Davio: As a child, I was fascinated with the idea that, even in complete silence, the body is surrounded by radio waves. I thought that if I focused hard enough, I might discover how to use my brain as a kind of transponder. While I eventually gave up that experiment, I’m still interested in the idea of the body’s interaction with intangible information. “Electromagnetic Compatibility” explores, with a bit of kid-like exuberance, what it might be like to find the secret to that interplay.
Eva Hooker: “Emblem of Increase” and “Labour” began as a teaching exercise. After we read The Tempest, I asked my students to imagine the pre-story and the after-story of the play and write poems. I fixed myself on Miranda’s mother. I had in mind a series of poems, a small fascicle, made for Miranda by her mother: “The Miranda Journals.” “Emblem of Increase” is, then, a gift-poem, each stanza imagined as a page in a book of “birth & kin & sisters,” made by the kind of woman who lived “cleaving unto study.” “Labour” is a gift-poem within the act of dying, just after birth. Mother gives her daughter sayings through which she can braid warrants of illusion and claim the caul & skin & nerve of wonder.
Lew Klatt: In “A Better Mousetrap” I found myself engineering weirdly symmetrical stanzas in pursuit of what the title suggests, a better mousetrap. It seems to me, though, that no matter how innovative they are, all poems fail at what they attempt; the poetic impulse cannot be captured in words without eventually killing it. In “A Better Mousetrap,” I’m wondering aloud about this paradox, as well as searching in the mouse’s (and my own) gray space for signs of life: an appetite for “greater things” and a desire to wander.
I began “King Salmon” on the steps of the courthouse in Seattle after another visit to famous Pike Street Market. Very quickly the poem became more than a meditation on fish and evolved into a slanted parable. The salmon in the poem are made to dream, and the question that begins to surface is how exactly those dreams will get realized—in the imagination of the fish or in the humans that consume them?
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