Quarterly Volume IV || Summer 2023
Chers amis de L’Esprit,
Bienvenue à our fourth quarterly, Summer 2023! In this edition, we are featuring four excellent pieces of original work, calls for submissions, a new Editorial Meditation, and more.
L’Esprit is closing in on finishing Issue Three, and will have exciting announcements soon. Keep an eye out for updates on our reading in October and AWP in February, along with a Featured Writer reveal.
As always we start, in the tradition of Eliot’s Criterion, with A Commentary.
A Commentary
To change is to know, probably someone has said, at some point. To leave a thing behind—a place, a time, a self—and go off and find some other thing, a replacement or revision or reverse, this is the way life seems to proceed, with or without our understanding or our will. It happens overtly and covertly, gradually and all at once, irrevocably and only for a little while. But it is inexorable, change, and just as soon as we recapture our footing, then again does the ground begin to shake.
In this, our fourth Quarterly, L’Esprit is fortunate to be publishing four pieces—our highest yet for an inter-issue release—and breaking ground in two locations. We’ve our first work of translation, in Diane Josefowicz’s rendering from the French of two prose poems by Anna de Noailles, and our first piece of drama, S. T. Brand’s Dublin. We’re also running a pair of short pieces from Ivan de Monbrison and a narrative study from Karen Multer. Find excerpts from all this excellent work below, and in full on the site.
We’re also for the first time handing over the Editorial Meditation reigns to our wayward Editor, me. Jessica has more than ably provided the first two editor’s features in our Quarterlies, and to everyone’s relief she’ll be back in October. I remain rather unbelieving at the growth we’ve seen at L’Esprit, and writing these A Commentaries has been an insightful manner of checking in on the burgeoning life of our little enterprise.
There are also exciting spots out on the horizon. We’ve now nearly filled Issue Three, which will be coming in mid-October, and we’re beginning our conversations around AWP in February, which L’Esprit will attend, in some manner or another. Look out for more on both—including our reading to launch I3—soon.
The spring and summer of this year have been the time of anniversaries—our twin birthdays, of Woolf and Joyce, and then our twin publication dates, Bloomsday and Dalloway Day (funny how that works out, right in line with our publication schedule, too)—and of L’Esprit itself. I found myself in Paris a few weeks ago, from which I wrote that protean Meditation, in the bars and along the streets where I’d first thought to start a literary journal. It was an excellent trip, tracking along many of the epicenters from the lives and work of our literary ancestors, and perhaps some of our readers enjoyed following on social media.
And it got me thinking, as things are wont to do, about change, and place, and the impossible dream of anything ever staying the same. Perhaps it’s a misguided dream, but for all our sanguine glances towards what will be of the future, we remain a skeptical species, never quite getting on with the shapes lurking unseen in the dark. Something innate in those skulls of ours, I suppose. As I wandered Europe among the ghosts of Woolf and Joyce, Clarissa and Leopold, I began to wonder whether we can really know anything about ourselves at all.
I’ve left California after nine years, to return to that beautiful, frozen Acheron from whence I came, Chicago. The body crosses the river, but the soul has changed. I’ll miss California—a place rather more Olympian (in more ways than one) than Chicago—which has taken nine years and given back quite a bit more. I of course will not be the same person who returns, just as it is not the same I who is leaving the mythic edge of our fabled continent as the one who arrived. But the dreams—of possibilities of the future and the meaning of the past—those remain, changing in kind, perhaps, but carrying on, forward, across the black water.
There’s an underworld of the mind that exists, both in fiction and reality—this is, in some ways, what L’Esprit has set out to champion and explore. It is here that our memories mingle with our past selves, the idea of the people we were forever suspended as we imagine them—nevermind how true such notions are—seen but untouchable across the ancient river. It is the power of fiction to alchemize life into art, and it is perhaps nowhere else better seen than here, in the depths of the mind. The narratives we create from day to day and moment to moment, that great thread spun and woven by our own restless soul—it changes without our noticing, and at times it takes the strange potency of art, the dark magic of powerful fiction, to relive, in the minds of others, the people we used to be.
Consciously,
L’Esprit
D. W. White, 24 June 2023
Call for Submissions
L’Esprit is currently reading for Issue Three, due out in mid-October. We have about two spots left!
We’re especially interested in getting more critical work (be it book reviews, literary criticism, autotheory, or craft essays), and writing in translation. We have a Submittable project dedicated to essay proposals, as well.
See our Submission Guidelines for more details on all of the above.
Submittable
L’Esprit is on Submittable!
Find us here.
Publication Announcements
L’Esprit is once again happy to share a few recent publication announcements from past contributors!
“One Penny Sit-Up, Two Penny Hang,” in Ellipsis Zine, by Karen Walker
“That’d Be Good,” in Unleash Lit Issue 3, by Sue Mell
The Campland Guide to Pack Fitting: 8 Easy Steps in Bruiser, by Kent Kosack
Like Brando in the Opening Scene of Last Tango in Paris in the London Magazine, by Kent Kosack
“Wallpaper” in Ignatian Literary Magazine, by Robert Stone
“Kite” in Touchstone, by Robert Stone
Félicitations à tous!
Quarterly IV Features
L’Esprit is pleased to present our Quarterly Features for Summer 23, including our first work in translation and our first piece of drama. We also have a breakneck set of prose poems and a darkly cerebral personal narrative.
Find excerpts below, and the complete works in the Notes & Errata section of our website.
“The Monkey-Scholars” and “Vacation”
Ivan de Monbrison
How could he have understood it all and yet reality is not so difficult to apprehend but he is too young he was still always too young and defenseless today the weather is gray you don’t know what you are going to do you don’t even really know who you are
The Monkey-Scholars || Continue Reading
*
Silence has raised its hammer and banged on the head the head fell it fell on the ground and it rolled slowly on it and you woke up you were in broad daylight in the center of the city there was on the river that is called the Seine white seagulls flying and a few black cormorants there were people walking in pairs or families along the banks
Vacation || Continue Reading
Dublin
S. T. Brant
ONE
Why’s this play called Dublin? Dude’s never been to Dublin.
TWO
Ehh, he read “Araby” waiting for his girlfriend to go through a line for some rollercoaster at Six Flags once and became obsessed.
Continue Reading
Those Eggs Are Going To Cost You
Karen Multer
My ambitions nearly always outweigh my actual resolve. Case in point: this will begin as an essay about ambition, but it’s almost assured that by the end it will have become something entirely different. Ambition and I have always had an unreliable relationship, one marked by periods of intense focus followed by even longer periods of staring at the ceiling, grasping for meaning that eludes me.
Two Prose Poems by Anna de Noailles
Diane Josefowicz
A warm poppy from which fled a yellow butterfly like a frozen bit of honey on the wing; a dark rose, shriveled and odorless, torn from the pure basin of the Vestals
Le Magasin
A reminder that we now offer print and digital editions of all full issues, alongside our current online versions. The new section of the website, Le Magasin, is the place to find everything we’re selling.
Issues One and Two are available now, and future issues will be released in all three formats simultaneously. Thanks to everyone for your support of fearless writing!
Editorial Meditation
To conclude, the debut Editorial Meditation from Editor D. W. White.
12 Rue de l’Odéon
It’s an odd thing, memory. It so very rarely does what we’d like, or expect. One takes a trip, sees the Sights To See, does the Things To Do, and then, back home in the ordinary run of life, it’s the cafe with the gregarious waiter, the interchange with the flashing lights, the subway car and the hotel clerk that are remembered. Of course those big events are there, to be recalled with a bit of effort and the endless albums of clouded photos, but the moments that simply arise in the mind, unaided and uninhabited, are the small ones, the ones that were unexpected and unplanned—the, in a word, ordinary.
‘An ordinary mind on an ordinary day’—this is what Virginia Woolf, in that ruthless disquisition “Modern Fiction”, calls for the novel to encapsulate. What might that mean? What is the ordinary day, the ‘stuff of life’? For Woolf it’s everything—the banality and the memory, the profound and the forgotten. Clarissa Dalloway doesn’t remember some charged sequence of sweeping Victorian resonance, she remembers Sally Seton running through an upstairs hall, a nothing moment on endless loop in her mind—the little things. This seems to be how our minds work in general, and is part of what makes modernist literature so compelling and fascinating; beyond the innovation in technique and narrative mode, it is the fixture on the quotidian reality, the day-to-day ephemera that earlier (and later) novelists dismiss out of hand. With the right perspective, an understating of how to harness the awesome power of existence, it becomes art. For when one truly looks back on something, tries to recall a stretch of life and how it was, more often than not we find it is the trivialities that are preserved, the nothingness that makes up meaning.
*
I am writing this from a Parisian window in the sixth arrondissement. Before this trip, I’d last looked out this window eighteen months ago, working at at a section of a manuscript that would become one of my favorite things I’ve done. I am writing this also at a time of change, preparing to return to Chicago after nine winterless years in Southern California—something I would not have predicted, would not have believed. It’s hard to know how things will turn out. It seems the future has very little interest in our dreams.
On that earlier trip I also had the first idea (or at least the first serious one) to start a certain literary journal, in a bar a few blocks from here. There’s something about one’s history in a place that follows you around, that seems to know when you’ll be coming back. We cannot reach through time, cannot go back and start again. But we can leave ourselves messages from the past, we can return to the places we used to walk, read these notes in our new and present future.
Today, there is a Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris. Slick and sprawling, lapping up tourists from Notre Dame l’immortalité as it rises like a phoenix among cranes and storyboards and digesting them in a maze of tote bags and book stamps. It of course has nothing to do with the mythic shop run by Sylvia Beach and memorialized by Ulysses, save for name and occupation. It is an abattoir, selling false meat to the hungry masses. For those in the know, those grinning bards on beige canvas belie something far more gauche than the left bank. But it says something important, I think, about place, and the power of physical space as a conduit to memory, our own and those of which we dream.
‘Essay’ comes from, essentially, to try—in the French they’re rough synonyms, harkening back to Montaigne’s attempts—and this attempt figures to serve as exemplar of that inherent uncertainty. That (this) aforementioned journal, of course (of course), was founded during the centenary of the publication of Joyce’s masterpiece, itself an anything-but-ordinary examination of a regular day. Joyce and Woolf are the foremost L’Esprit literary ancestors, the heritage we seek to imbue in ourselves and find in the work we publish. This trip, which began the day I moved the last of my things out of my Long Beach apartment (not exactly a recommended approach), takes me—and, by social media extension, L’Esprit—through many of the places that shaped the work the journal admires, from London to Paris to Dublin and back again. I thought I would try and make something of all this, memory and time and place, what it means to leave and what it means to return.
Au Revoir
Keep in touch for all the new happenings around the corner, and we’ve hoped you’ve enjoyed our Summer Quarterly. See everyone soon!
Thank you for your support of fearless writing, and à la prochaine.
Consciously,
L’Esprit
L'Esprit Literary Review 