Meet Our Contributors, MQR 54:3
Meet the poets, essayists, fiction writers, and translators of MQR 54:3.
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Unsolved Histories: A Postcard, A Package, and the Pieces of a Family Unearthed
Last July, in an attempt to spare us from the summer heat, my son and I took refuge inside an estate sale. The house was overrun with strangers, everyone ogling the goods left behind by the home’s previous owners. We, too, did our fair share of ogling—peering into rooms and closets in search of treasures left behind. Eventually, I found them: dozens of vintage postcards from around the world, none of them yet sullied by stamps.
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Bent Beneath the Low Heavens: An Interview with Dan Rosenberg
“Philosophers have worried over the mind-body problem for centuries, but poets have ignored that problem just as fruitfully for just as long: We know that thinking happens in the body, through the body—that invulnerable Achilles still needed an intricate shield to protect his body, to celebrate it and glorify it, fated for death though it was. We know that for things to truly exist in our poems (‘No ideas but in things!’) they must be embodied: the real toads in our imaginary gardens.”
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Enchanted by Opera: Win Two Tickets to See Jamie Barton
Win tickets to see opera sensation Jamie Barton perform the songs of Joaquín Turina, Ernest Chausson, Franz Schubert, Antonín Dvořák, and Sergei Rachmaninoff.
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Home Visits
Many of my friends live all across the continent from me, in San Francisco, in Cambridge, in New York and Philadelphia. They live in places that are built for visitors, with landmarks and historical sites and an actual nightlife. So when they choose to visit me, I get anxious. Ann Arbor is a lovely place to live, but to visit? To do what? I can hardly take my guests to Costco, where I spend my weekends, treating myself to a hotdog and a drink for a dollar fifty. I can’t take them to Kroger and scour the manager special aisle for deals on stale cupcakes and irregular bacon. I get scared that my friends, coming from their cosmopolitan cities, will get bored. They will start to wonder, like I already was, why they spent the time and money to visit. And why all of my favorite activities involve discounted food.
On “Home is Burning”: An Interview with Dan Marshall
“I think I was writing the blog to make my friends laugh—the content was definitely frattier, more about the easy jokes—but I tried to make the book more widely accessible. The book-writing process was more about picking the most important moments, wrapping them around a theme, and framing the journey—not to sound like some pretentious little art dickhead. But, it was about giving the story shape. It took a few drafts to get there, but I finally started to realize, ‘Okay, this is really a story about somebody and his siblings going through an intense situation and being forced through it to grow up and take on a little more responsibility.'”
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“American Ships,” by Brenda Peynado
When the American ships arrived, they looked like giant white women swimming towards us on the horizon. American marines shouted orders from the crooks of the ships’ pale elbows, readied guns in the corner of vicious smiles. I was pushing Pablito’s stroller on el Malecón, and the people around me said, Look, what is that? But I knew. I had seen them before, decades ago in the first invasion.
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The Novella Is Not The Novel’s Daughter: An Argument in Notes
The novella is slender but gaping. It embraces pause and pattern and gesture. It declares, “I can say more with less” and then it does. It is not an unwieldy short story but cohesive, taut, succinct. It is the novel’s architectural foundation, the stripped and fleshless core that argues the frame of a story might be enough.
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Girl on a Bridge
In blending Cassie’s childlike fantasy with altruism and justice, Ringgold highlights not only one child’s ability to use play to prepare for the stresses of the adult world, but also the power fantasy maintains even for adults when it comes to seeking justice and defining freedom. Flight may be a typical childhood dream, but it’s also a deep motif of resistance in African-American folklore. (In 1985, author Virginia Hamilton packaged that motif expressly for young readers in her gorgeous collection The People Could Fly.) While Cassie’s dress changes color above the George Washington Bridge, the page is bordered with pieces of Ringgold’s story quilt–in which Cassie’s story originally appeared–a testament to the idea that the dream/memory is not only Cassie’s, but that of an entire community.
Gimme Shelter: A Few Indulgently Bleak Thoughts on “Property Brothers” and Process
As writers we have all toured dream homes we’re too poor to afford. Maybe Katherine Anne Porter’s “Noon Wine,” for me, or Tobias Wolff’s “Desert Breakdown, 1968,” or Danielle Evans’s “Virgins.” Yes, I tour these stories and compile my greedy wish-list: a mysterious stranger, I like that; a road trip gone wrong, of course; a heartbreaking decision both right and wrong at the same time, I wouldn’t want my story to go without one of those. I put down the book and open the computer. There’s my draft, all at once in various states of disrepair. I read back over it and wonder with distaste when and how, like floral wallpaper, these sentences had ever seemed a good idea to anyone. I hold my own story against my dream stories, I hold my vision for my story against its ruinous half-state. I moan: I just can’t see it.
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