Let's Discuss! Indiana Review Volume 44, No 1
LIT MAG READING CLUB discussion of Indiana Review & registration link
Welcome to our Lit Mag Reading Club discussion!
A few quick announcements/reminders: We will be chatting with Indiana Review Editor Bernardo Wade tomorrow, Tuesday, December 20th, at 1:00pm est. The registration link is at the bottom of this email, behind the paywall. If you are unable to see it, please email me to let me know. Some people have been having trouble accessing registration links and I want everyone who wants to attend our events to be able to!
Also, for January, we will be reading not one but two journals. Yes, this is ambitious. Yes, we can do it! The magazines are Conjunctions issue 79 and Southern Review fall 2022. I am still waiting to hear about discounts for these issues. But both journals have plenty of content online, so if you want to get a head start you can.
(Totally personal sidenote: I just noticed that issue 79 of Conjunctions has a novella-length story by Russell Banks!!! Who happens to be one of my favorite authors of all time!!! What are the odds he will join our conversation with the editor at the end of the month and you will all get to watch my head explode?!?!?!)
On to Indiana Review.
So, my friends, what did you think of this issue?
This issue contains 4 works of nonfiction, 19 poets, 6 short stories, as well as a folio themed “Borders Between Worlds,” containing additional fiction, poetry and nonfiction. It also contains finalists and the winner for the 2021 1/2 K Prize and the 2021 Creative Nonfiction Prize.
There is no visual art, other than the cover, which features a partly nude woman resting her chin in her hand. Her posture is sunken, her head appearing to weigh heavily on the hand that holds it up. Yet her gaze, set somewhere beyond the frame, is focused and watchful.
The image, titled “I’m Just a Poor Fool That’s Bluer than Blue Can Be,” by Bhasha Chakrabarti, encapsulates perfectly what I feel is the overall tenor of this issue. As I read the works here, the word that kept coming to mind was weight. These pieces are heavy. They deal with ancestry, racism, grief, death of family members, poor health, the end of relationships, climate crisis, dead-end jobs and alienation in the digital age. They feel, much like the woman on the cover, to be paying attention to the world, heavy with the weight of all that it contains.
Perhaps the woman on the cover could even be the speaker in the journal’s final poem, “our agreeable end.” Here Ruth Ellen Kocher writes: “i watch hours of/ network news// deduce that we’re/ almost out of time// our buoyant humanity/ useless after all…”
Stylistically, the pieces cover a lot of ground. Perhaps every ground. You poets will have to help me out with what some of these forms are called. Suffice it to say, there are a lot of forms represented, including one poem in all capital letters (George Abraham’s “PALESTINE IS A FUTURISM: PANDEMONIUM”); one poem that requires the journal be turned sideways to be read (“i can tell you” by Chantel Massey); a poem that appears in three columns down the page (“after her latest stroke my aunt sounds like Gertrude Stein” by Sandra Lee); and much more.
For you prose writers who might be wondering if this magazine is a good fit for your work, I would encourage you to go meticulously through your submission and make sure your language is as fresh and tight as can be. This is not a lit mag that wants familiar sentences. It wants striking metaphors and verbs that do work.
Consider this character description from Desmond Everest Fuller’s “Where It Comes From:” “Freshman year, Wade had no friends. We’d all tried to grind him down after he showed up on his first day with side-mirror ears off a face as open as an August sky.”
Consider the opening from Natanya Biskar’s short story “Dr. Bloch Takes His Rest” wherein the writer describes Friday night as “the weekend’s welcome mat.”
Lucy McBee’s essay “How to Ready Your Bones” uses a second-person directive to instruct the reader on frog dissecting as a way to write about her mother’s death. Notice the language here: “Get used to formaldehyde, the way it crouches on your taste buds, vinegars the lining of your nostrils, cling-films your eyeballs.” And later, “The church weeps incense.”
In terms of content, The Borders Between Worlds folio contains several stunning works. Patricia Patterson’s “Lucia Left Guadalajara and This is What Happened After” explores themes of ancestry, tradition and the pain of leaving a homeland. It begins,
Before she married the penniless man, Lucia Salvador Calderón walked the earth where generations of mothers buried their umbilical cords so roots would grow. Her mother had done the same many years before, tethering her three daughters to Mexico. Now that Lucia’s mother was gone, all she had was roots.
By the story’s end, Lucia will arrive at “the edge of the northern country,” where she “dove into the water and swallowed the river whole—all her grief, her history, her family, her inheritance, her homeland, her happily ever after.” It is a painful but necessary crossing in order for her new life to begin.
Rose Nguyen’s “To Speak, to Sing” is a poignant essay that looks at the ways we can come to learn our individual family histories and preserve identities through learning language. Nguyen writes,
Often I think of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, turned inexorably toward the past, bearing witness to the pile of wreckage laid at its feet—the price of process and civilization. We want to wrest history from the wreck, to make it whole. To make ourselves whole.
Amidst the weightiness of the pieces in this issue, there were several moments of levity, a few instances in which I smiled and one where I actually laughed out loud repeatedly. Massey’s poem “i can tell you” masterfully interweaves the weight of history with present, showing how a body can at once carry painful knowledge while also striving for joy and release.
the year is 1997 in Indiana. i can tell you this is a birthday party. i cannot tell you whose 10th birthday party it is. i cannot tell you that we knew this was 30 years after the Detroit uprising. my cousins & i,
around 9, wear afro wigs, hells, multi-colored sparkly dresses, courtesy of my aunt. i can tell you any Black girls’ becoming is a billowing revolt…
… as we sporadically grab our stomachs between steps, then nudge each other to stay in character. the music works its way up through our hands; we step & snap & step & snap…
Kira Homsher’s story “Network Support” is a pitch-perfect story of our digital age. It captures the deadening feel of our current technological dependencies as well as the wry self-awareness so many who’ve grown up in this era seem to possess.
When K’s boyfriend B goes out of town for the week, K struggles to resurrect her shoddy internet connection, while also seeking connection with the world at large. Homsher writes,
When the internet came back on, she could not tell if it was running any faster than it had been previously but nonetheless thanked the man and hung up. She recalled that she had previously posted a tweet about her boyfreind being gone for the week…If the man searched her name, would he see the tweet and come to her house and stalk her?…She clicked through to her settings and swiped a button labeled "Protect your Tweets,” then felt ashamed for being so paranoid and made her profile public again. Let him come, she thought. She could use the company.
The story’s end takes a turn that is both physically impossible and yet wholly believable. I won’t give away what happens, except to say that it has to do with a body’s complete subsuming by the digital realm. “K’s index finger hovered over the enter key, anticipating its familiar click and give. This was how everything began: with a little push.”
Natanya Biskar’s “Dr. Bloch Takes His Rest,” while exploring heartbreak and grief also manages to go someplace absolutely unexpected and wonderfully weird. The climax of the story is in fact one of the simultaneously saddest and funniest scenes I have seen in fiction in a long time. While watching the hero of this story literally jerk and writhe in a close-to-death experience, I laughed out loud several times.
The story, narrated in second person, begins in a way that seems banal enough, with a young man going to a bar on a weekend. But wait, halfway through that first sentence we learn: “[T]his is what you do: Go to a bar, drop a tooth, wait.”
Indeed, we soon learn, this is the protagonist’s schtick. Coping from a painful break-up, longing for a way to meet people, this man, who is a dentist, paints teeth with white-out, then drops them into the olive containers at bars. When he sees someone sitting at the bar, he points to the tooth as a way of starting conversation. Then he, get this, asks the stranger if they will pay him money to eat the tooth.
Only, on this night in particular, the man’s plan doesn’t go as hoped. The strangers at the bar are a couple, “Gal and Guy.” They’re not especially interested in the tooth, let alone in paying him to eat it. In fact, they’re a bit weirded out.
Instead of looking where you point, Guy eyes you. This is not how it is supposed to go. You are not Mr. Suspicious. You’re Mr. Funny Tooth Guy, funny, funny tooth guy, who other people want to get to know on a deeper level and invite to their homes to grill meats and whatnot. They’ll say to their friends, ‘Hey everybody, come meet this guy, we met him in a bar and he is just hilarious and surprisingly layered for a dentist.’”
As Gal and Guy appear to want nothing to do with the protagoinist— “You watch them go back to being two people, like two doors closing toward each other.”—he becomes desperate. He grabs the tooth and eats it anyway.
Only,
You throw too hard. The tooth hits the back of your throat and you gag. The white-out tastes exactly how it smells, like a flower made of chemicals. You tilt your head and squeeze your eyes and try to swallow, but you have very little saliva, and the tooth stays in the back of your throat, which tickles…You throw your head back a few times like an angry horse, and then, finally, the tooth goes down.
The tooth goes down the wrong pipe.
What ensues is a scene full of slapstick comedy rich with heart-wrenching longing. As our protagonist goes outside and hurls his body against an array of hard objects—a bicycle seat, the hood of a car—and finally collapses to the ground, he enters into fantasy where he envisions his ex-girlfriend smiling and speaking to him. It is grief over losing her that is lodged in his throat, we come to understand. Like anyone suffering from all-consuming heartbreak, he must find a way to dislodge this blockage from his throat, and breathe.
There is, of course, much much more in this issue. It’s worth mentioning that the issue’s font is a bit on the small side, making for a visually daunting reading experience at times. Yet, no doubt the small font allows for more work to be published here. This is an issue that is chock full of a variety and abundance of strong voices, calling out for all of us to stop what we are doing and pay attention.
What did you think, my dear reading buddies?
Which pieces resonated with you?
What surprised you about this issue?
What excited you?
Did you also laugh in certain places?
What did you enjoy most about this issue?
Please don’t be shy to weigh in! I want to hear what you think! Even if you only read one story, one essay or poem. What did you think of it?
Thoughtful criticism is also welcome. But 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.