Quarterly Volume VI || Winter 2024
Chers amis de L’Esprit,
Bienvenue à our sixth quarterly, Winter 2024! In this edition, we have new original writing, calls for submissions, news and updates, and more.
L’Esprit will have our reading at Big Mood Wines in Kansas City for AWP! February 9th at 6 PM. We can’t wait, and hope to see many of you there.
As always we start, in the tradition of Eliot’s Criterion, with A Commentary.
A Commentary
What does it mean, to delay? It is an unpopular word these days, if the lexicographers are to be believed: two hundred year lows in usage, for delay. This coheres—if there’s anything the modern world is sure about, we want it now. Two hundred years is also about the time scholars have been preoccupying themselves with the “central question” in Hamlet, re: that delay. Before that, it seems, playgoers were more concerned with the theatrical devices taking up space in the middle of the plot, rather than the vicissitudes of our black prince himself. Apparently if not suitably entertained, Elizabethan audiences were prone to grow restless and impatient, demanding that something interesting happen already. What was it again, that Marx said about history?
Our patient friend comes to us from the Old French, délayer. Today, délayer is a French verb, meaning to thin, to dilute, to mix. It makes sense, after a moment. To delay is to mix the future in with the present, to dilute the now, to thin out a moment until it becomes elongated, stretching back defiantly into the past. Descartes insists that we posit our existence anew at every moment; this becomes somewhat easier with a bit of temporal mélanger.
This recursive, darting approach to memory is found in the writings of our two literary ancestors, Joyce and Woolf. As L’Esprit celebrates their birthdays this week, and prepares to mark our own, I’m thinking about memory, and that delaying action against oblivion Modernism makes through technique. Clarissa Dalloway refuses to forget Sally Seton, as Molly Bloom cannot forget Gibraltar, due to the vivid omnipresence of their memories. In their minds, which in turn create the composition of the works in which they appear, the past and the future mix in together with the present, and the seemingly simple narrative is delayed, through narration, into something beyond.
In Kansas City in two weeks L’Esprit will turn two years old, marked by a live reading with a few amis of the journal. It is very exciting to reach this milestone, and Jessica and I are looking forward to being able to do so in person with contributors and friends. Something we have tried to do from the beginning is find work of the highest artistic merit we can, no mean feat in the current literary world, which can oftentimes require patience. We take our role as mediators of art seriously, and spend time thinking and discussing the pieces we accept, and the ones we do not. As we start to see our reputation grow, and continue to put together issues we can be proud of, the method begins to show through the madness, the délayer tree bears fruit. It seems this Hamlet character might have been onto something after all.
We use anniversaries to mark time, to return to those places in the past we know but cannot say. It is fundamentally human, this urge to return, but there is something dark in it too, time as the euphemism for death. Woolf and Joyce were born 142 years ago this week, in the heyday of delay, when modern life was speeding up beyond all reason or proportion, society as it had been known soon to be crumbling from its very center. The world, of course, was not ending; time kept moving on. It’s hard to stop that which does not truly exist. For all our feats of memory, that’s an easy one to forget. However cataclysmic the moment, it’s but one, and will be soon succeeded by another. In fact, by the time it’s been realized, it already has.
I think Hamlet wasn’t really delaying at all. Like Molly and Clarissa, Lily Briscoe and Leopold Bloom, Hamlet was both creation and progenitor of a narration attuned to the power of time. Truth is only realized in the way the story is told, not in the things that are said themselves. Much like Camus’ Meursault, Hamlet spends his time with us moving from death to death, possessed of a knowledge that cannot be said. Once he understands he begins, following that ancient workshop dictum to show and not tell. He conduct is not one of delay but rather délayer, mixing the past with the present into the future, mixing unsayable truth with expressible act. His play is thus a peroration, an extended action, a getting to the point—as Wittgenstein puts it, words are deeds.
And what better thought indeed for a literary journal. A sincere merci beaucoup to our ancestors, our readers, and our contributors over the last two years. We look from our past into our future, and take heart in having much more time yet to wait.
Consciously,
L’Esprit
D. W. White, 25 January / 2 February 2024
Call for Submissions
L’Esprit is still reading for Issue Four, due out in mid-April.
As always 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.
Pushcart Nominees
We’re pleased to announce the L’Esprit 2023 Puschart Prize Nominees.
Linette Marie Allen, The Reader
Beatriz Seelaender, Tongue Twisted
Diane Josefowicz, Two Prose Poems by Anna de Noailles
Eric Daffron, Fragments of an Intermittent Lover
Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould, translation of Hormoz Shahdadi’s Night of Terror
Michael Nath, Talbot and the Fall
Félicitations à tous!
Submittable
L’Esprit is on Submittable!
Find us here.
Publication Announcements
L’Esprit is once again happy to share a few recent publication announcements and other news from past contributors!
“I will not be blue” by Karen Walker in voidspace zine
“Transported” by Sue Mell in Cleaver Magazine
“A Craft Chat with Sue Mell,” by Andrea Caswell in Cleaver Magazine
“The Vindicator” by Robert Boucheron in Summerset Review
“The Corner Store” by Robert Boucheron in Literary Heist
“Evan Who Saw Shapeshifters” by Taylor Thornburg in Heartwood Literary Magazine
“Thread Count” by Kent Kosack in Back Patio Press
“A Formula for Elephants” by Kent Kosack in Exacting Clam
Duets Anthology, Amy Marques as Editor & Artist
“Otherwise,” Robert Stone in Bruiser
“When the World’s Too Much,” a review of The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu by Augusto Higa Oshiro, trans. Jennifer Shyue, by Diane Josefowicz in Suspect
And finally, pre-order the novella “All According to Norm” by Beatriz Seelaender!
Félicitations à tous!
Le Traité
Later this year, Editor Jessica Denzer will undertake a multi-part treatise interrogating questions of the marketplace, artistic pedagogy, and what is expected of women in publishing.
Look out for How Not To Write: On Creative Morality, Artistic Instruction, and the Female Narrative beginning in January.
And be warned.
Issue Three at Le Magasin
A reminder that we now offer print and digital editions of all full issues alongside our current online versions. Find everything on the dedicated section of the website, Le Magasin.
Issue Three is now available in print and digital editions!
Issues One and Two are also available in all three formats.
Thanks to everyone for your support of fearless writing!
Quarterly Six Original Work
In settings ranging from emergency rooms to underground stations, and authors on either side of the Atlantic, We’re thrilled to have four new pieces of fiction in our Winter 24 Quarterly.
Enjoy excerpts of each below and find the full stories on our site.
Eight Prayer Cards
At some point, I came into possession of a prayer card bearing the image of Saint Francis. It’s one of those objects I don’t remember getting; it seems to have appeared out of nowhere, or else I’ve always had it, since I was born, since the womb. It’s gorgeous and glossy, like it’s perpetually covered in a thin layer of dew. Saint Francis smiles a bone-white smile- clean as death. It has his prayer on it, or at least one attributed to him.
Life in Resus
“Brian,” the Nurse in Red says, shaking him, before turning and lazily calling, “Cardiac arrest, get the trolley,” – a few heads turn and bodies amble over with faces drawn as the Red Nurse places her hands on his chest and pushes, ribs cracking under her, the chest moving up and down, up and down – then a Blue Scrubbed Nurse places pads on his chest as the Registrar, with arms folded, announces from his vantage point at the foot of the bed,
The Blender
The blender! A long time coming, the blender was, and what a poor substitute the hand-me-down food processor did make next to the blender. Ah-ha, the blender.
No luxury model—a modest GE discounted further—the blender sometimes yielded mana but more often less couth lassis. Spirulina beetroot chia mud gulped, another morning chore. Manuka butter egg yolk spritzer choked down, keep the peace and save face. But when it was good wasn’t it so good?
The Unhelper
Tourbillion Park. That fella staring at the cascade like he could make it run back up – if I had sway in this world, I’d have a pair of topboys elbow him off the bridge. Let the patroon flounder in the carp pond!
On a dull day, none but him and me – and a blonde by the rockery vaping: grey coat, old daps, hairfall of brilliant coils. I’m smelling the vape from here, when along he rolls through the cinnamon cloud. Tidy beard, smiling eyes.
Au Revoir
Keep in touch for all the new happenings around the corner, and we’ve hoped you’ve enjoyed our Winter Quarterly. See everyone in Kansas City soon!
Thank you for your support of fearless writing, and à la prochaine.
Consciously,
L’Esprit
L'Esprit Literary Review 