Let's Discuss! Harvard Review Issue #59
LIT MAG READING CLUB discussion of Harvard Review & registration link
Welcome to our Lit Mag Reading Club discussion!
Hi, friends. I’m delighted to open up this month’s lit mag reading club conversation. For November we’ve been reading Harvard Review 59.
This issue contains four short stories, five essays, poems from eighteen poets, and one photo essay. A majority of the contributors boast impressive credentials, including National Book Award wins, appearances in Best Of anthologies, grants from the NEA and Guggenheim Foundation, awards from PEN USA, etc. etc. Several are also affiliated with academia, as professors in colleges or MFA programs.
However, if this list appears intimidating, it need not necessarily be. A few contributors appear to be relative newcomers, with just one or two publishing credits. One contributor is a recent college graduate (albeit of Harvard College).
Now, what about the contents?
What struck me most about this issue was, well, how frankly enjoyable it was. All the pieces pulled me in, but most especially the short stories, with situations that were engaging and featuring characters that, in all but one instance, were deliciously—and devastatingly—dysfunctional.
The poetry was also fun, which is not a word I typically use to describe most poetry, and certainly not what I would expect to find in poetry produced from a lit mag out of Haahvahd. But it was indeed fun, with much of it snappy in tone, narrative in style, containing propulsive threads pulling the reader straight to the next line and the next, and often tinged with humor.
Now, I’m curious: Do you read lit mags from start to finish, in the order that the works are presented? Or do you skip around, starting with the things that pull you in most?
If you went in order with this issue, then you might have noticed the editorial hand at work, creating a beautiful flow among the pieces and across genres. We start the journal off with Morgan Talty’s drug-addled hero, then move to Nick Flynn’s speaker who once “lived in bars,” then glide right into Carmen Giménez’s speaker who says, “There’s love and there’s addiction…”.
Natalie Kinkade’s essay about human connection and interplanetary communication entitled “We Were Here” echoes Talty’s story, in which the protagonist’s asking himself “How did we get here?” is a repeated refrain. Cecily Parks’s essay exploring the origins of her name and her Chinese ancestry leads right into An Rong Xu’s photo essay, “Grandpa,” a tender portrait of Guang Yao Xu, a man who “could be whatever he wanted to be” but who, to the artist, was simply “Ah Gong…the same innocent name every Chinese child uses to refer to their grandfather.”
Roxana Von Kraus’s essay that ends with “a grand performing stage” leads to Rodrigo Toscano’s poetic clouds which “are on center stage.” Samuel Koláwolé’s harrowing short story in which a young African girl afflicted by epileptic seizures is accused of being a witch is followed by Matthew Olzmann’s light-hearted but poignant poem describing Saint Catherine of Alexandria, “Patron saint of…unmarried girls…”
Koláwolé’s’s story also contains the line, “Sighing was how her mother released her worries, like steam bubbling through a kettle’s spout.” A kettle later features in the climactic moment of Silvia Spring’s story, as two long-time friends face a standoff and “[t]he kettle clicked, the water boiled. Neither of us moved.”
Additionally, Spring’s story, which relies on temperature to underscore dramatic tension—a freezing cold house encloses a frosting-over friendship, a fireplace that finally gets lit “crumble[s] into ashes”—leads seamlessly into Richard Tillinghast’s poem “Two Fires,” which begins with “Red coals in a campfire.”
There is more, but I think you get the idea. In her editorial note, Editor Christina Thompson sites setting as a key feature of the works presented here. Interestingly, the settings were not the most memorable aspects for me, though I did note that several works have a connection to Boston.
Personally, what I felt to be a unifying thread among the pieces was a certain sensibility. Many of the pieces here are humorous. Not laugh-out-loud funny, but with a kind of exuberant quickness that belies much more serious concerns.
Take Matthew Olzmann’s poem “Regarding the Recent Scar on My Jawline.” He writes,
they ask what happened I say jackal rendezvous
they say no really tell us I say renaissance
festival jousting anomaly they say…
The poem goes on in this manner, each of the speaker’s explanations outlandish, yet all the more cutting for his attempts to stay humorous in the face of something evidently too painful and private to discuss. Meanwhile, the white space that slices down the center of the poem, such a strikingly playful visual, also highlights all that cannot be spoken about, while intersecting the poem like a scar.
For another light touch, there is Rodrigo Toscano’s “Clouds and Us” where clouds
make faces
puff up, darken
and pee softly
or raucously
friggin clouds
And Nick Flynn’s “OOOO” tells us of a woman in a bar while our speaker, who once “lived in bars,” now waits soberly for his take-out order:
…As the woman returns
from the john, she runs a finger along
my shoulder & says, I like your
infinity shirt. She then shows me
her inner forearm, a tattoo that looks
like four O’s laid beside each other…
…A double infinity, she whispers, as if
it were a car waiting outside. That’s
a lot of infinity, I offer…
This humorous sensibility can also be found in Laura Mullen’s poem, “On Being Told That My Students Are ‘Digital Natives.’” This is definitely not a laugh-out-loud poem. “Humorous” is likely the wrong word entirely.
But as with the others mentioned, there is a kind of buoyancy to the writing, a quick-flowing movement that both pulls the reader along to the next line and then sends that reader back to retrace steps that seemed to turn somewhere with whip-smart inventiveness. The language play works hand in hand with the speaker’s sassy backtalk as she deconstructs, nay, veritably shreds, an oft-used expression, while also showing deep care for her students and all that they face.
What an interesting image what a helpful way to look at it
…if my students are “Digital Natives” that means
Their Fatherland is Look at this rape murder or video
Filmed on a phone…
And though my students are AIDS Natives we discovered
Ourselves together as confused and fearful Covid Immigrants
No clue how to live in the country our country goes on
Becoming and when I’m told that my students are Social
Media Natives I wonder what can be built on that hot slope
Mullen’s poem leads seamlessly—in terms of subject matter, if not tone—to Anna V.Q. Ross’s “The Crossing.” This poem is taken from a news item and covers the drowning “of thirteen women…off the coast of Lampedusa.” The women are referred to as “migrants,” though, Ross writes, “let’s name them people,/ those sisters, mothers, children—”
As for the fiction, I was pulled into all four of the stories, most so Sylvia Spring’s “The Burning House” with its slow-burn of tension simmering between two estranged friends. This appears to be Spring’s second major lit mag publication, so kudos to her.
The story starts with a cursory description of a couple, Tad and Sabine. A third-person narrator tells us, “A few months after their wedding, Tad and Sabine bought a house on Cape Cod.” Okay, not an especially dramatic opening. But, there is a certain distance from these two as no clear point-of-view is established. Whose story is this? we wonder. Tad’s story? Sabine’s? Will it be everyone’s?
Then this narrator informs us, “Not a second home but a new one, which meant a move across the country…” Now, that’s interesting. “Not a second home,” the narrator says. As if, naturally, a second home was the very first thing on our minds.
There is a familiarity here, as if the narrator is saying, “I know what you’re thinking. But it’s not that.” Yet for many readers, those who don’t own multiple homes or who don’t do summers in beach towns like Cape Cod, the idea of a second home would not even occur to us. It had not occurred to me, until the narrator pointed it out.
Who, then, is this narrator? With just two seemingly simple opening lines, this voice has established an unusual relationship with the reader. They’re distant but familiar. They seem to want to guess what we’re thinking, but are quite possibly guessing wrong.
And, wouldn’t you know, that tension with the reader is the exact tension that will play out between the two protagonists of the story, Sabine and MJ. They are ostensibly best friends who met freshman year of college. And yet they are both keeping secrets from one another, they are close but estranged, completely unable to communicate.
MJ, it turns out, is the narrator of this story. The opening intro, we learn on the second page, is actually MJ’s reporting about her friend’s life. It’s MJ telling us about the house on Cape Cod. It’s MJ pre-empting our thoughts about a second home. Thus another question arises. What do we make of this narrator who begins her own story by telling us about someone else’s life?
If all this sounds complicated, it really isn’t. The story is in fact quite simple and straightforward.
“The Burning House” is placed at the end of the journal. It’s usually around this point that, I confess, I often feel a kind of lit mag fatigue. Like I’ve been at a party all night with so many interesting people that my brain cannot possibly sustain one more conversation.
However, Spring’s story had me immersed throughout. Aside from the subtle but compelling narrative devices I’ve mentioned, the plot is direct, the sentences unadorned. Hot and cold are major motifs that both amplify tension and reveal emotion. But otherwise the language is not particularly wild.
It doesn’t, for instance, contain the kind of stunning page-long paragraph of text that ends Will Powers’s piece “Summerhouse.” Nor does it shock the way Samuel Koláwolé’s does, as a young girl fights desperately to flee her family after she’s been taken to a priest to have her mouth searched “for bits of human flesh she might have eaten that no ordinary eye could see.” (In this case the girl, Sephora, is sentenced to a room to “[undergo] purification rituals…to be whipped and chained.”)
Spring’s story also doesn’t contain a character wrestling with an environment directly created by socio-political circumstance, as does Morgan Talty’s “Half-life.” Though, there are arguably similarities, as when Talty’s narrator comes home and “refused to look at myself in the mirror.”
Talty’s story is actually more akin to much of the poetry here, in the way humor is used to get at something more painful below the surface. Throughout “Half-life” the protagonist goes through different phases of understanding his own existential situation. It begins with him being asked “how we got down here,” (a silo underground covered in “dirt and blown wet leaves and crushed cans of cheap beer”). Later, he repeats the question to himself, “How’d we get here?”
Talty’s narrator is a twenty-eight-year-old drug addict, jobless, living at home with his mother. Later, he wonders “if How’d we get here? is the wrong question. Maybe the right question is How do we get out of here?” Later still, after wondering if the questions “How did we get here? and How do we get out of here? sometimes have the same answer,” the narrator eventually comes to consider whether he “had the fucking question all wrong.” The situation, he thinks, “had nothing to do with us. It had everything to do with me. How did I get here, and do I get out?”
By the end, does he actually get out? Like Spring’s story and Powers’s story, the question of freedom is ambiguous. When his mother asks, “Are you there?” it seems he isn’t exactly sure, both if he’s “there,” or even where “there” really is.
But, I digress.
What I found so impressive in Spring’s story is the clarity and emotional honesty. It’s a story that is unflamboyant yet which bristles with tension and discomfort. I just had to know what was going to happen next. I was saddened to see the inevitable losses transpire, but was satisfied as a reader by all the ways that they did.
There are so many powerful works in this issue of Harvard Review. Ultimately Spring’s story, like so many of the pieces here, conveys all the ways we strive and fumble—in underground silos and lumbering trains, in strangers’ homes, on distant planets, through the hoarding of objects and the photographs of our loved one’s hands and feet, through stray conversations in a bar and in jazz concerts, as teachers, spouses, students, historians and beyond—for connection.
Now I want to hear from you!
Did you read Harvard Review 59? What did you think?
Which pieces stuck with you?
What surprised you about the works?
Did you see the works in communication with one another?
What pulled you in and why?
Please share your responses freely. As you do, please be respectful. Thoughtful criticism is welcome. Please keep it constructive. Don’t say anything you wouldn’t say to a writer in a workshop with you. Some of the contributors to these magazines may even be participating in the Lit Mag Club and will read your comments!
Thanks for being the thoughtful, engaged, understanding and passionate readers and writers you are.
We will be speaking with Editor Christina Thompson on Thursday, November 29th at 12:00 pm est. If you haven’t yet registered, you can do that below. (Registration link is behind the paywall.)
The conversation will be recorded and made available afterward. If you can’t attend but have questions you’d like me to ask Christina, drop me a line!