Quarterly Volume VIII || Summer 2024
Chers amis de L’Esprit,
Bienvenue à our eighth quarterly, Summer 2024! In this edition, we have new original writing–including our first two book reviews–calls for submissions, news and updates, and more. We also have an Editorial Meditation from Dan White in the form of a photojournalistic essay, Towards A New Teleology: Art as Philosophy.
L’Esprit is very happy to say we’ll be having another reading in Manhattan on July 30th! More details to come soon.
As always we start, in the tradition of Eliot’s Criterion, with A Commentary.
A Commentary
High above Zurich is a zoo. Next to this zoo is a cemetery, kept in immaculate Swiss condition and left open at all hours. During my flight back from Paris last week, with a twelve hour, overnight layover, I stopped by this cemetery to see Joyce’s grave. It felt like something I might have done a decade ago, although this time I got a hotel. I only slept for four hours, but then I wasn’t planning to fly the plane. Anyone who has a chance to go see this cemetery, should. Go in the morning, preferably in mid-June, when the sunrise comes right through a gap in the trees running along the ridge falling back from Joyce’s tomb. Afterward, walk along the park nearby and watch the fog burn off from the hills as it makes its way down towards Zurich, huddled around the lake in the shadows of the snow white Alps. It’s a moment.
Joyce was famously a bit peripatetic, and picked up languages along the way. I suspect, as I come slowly to speaking ever-more-adept French, that this had something to do with his prose. I don’t mean, so much, in the obvious sense; the multi-lingual neologisms or runs of foreign words, but in a more fundamental, compositional one: it seems that Joyce, at play with all these languages, grew to understand the inherent impossibility of using any of them to completely get at lived experience. His fiction works in this way, relying more on aesthetic than mimetic meaning, comfortable and making peace with the duality of words: they can be used to express just about anything, except the deepest, most obvious truth.
At L’Esprit, as we may have mentioned, we’re fans of this sensibility, which we might call Modernist. It’s an orientation towards the intersection of language and reality that strikes me as at once more ambitious and more pragmatic than a more typical approach. As we move into our third year of existence, we’ve found a great number of writers who are interested in similar ideas, and have been happy to share some of that work. This Quarterly sees another landmark for the journal, in the publication of our (two) inaugural book reviews. It is a form that allows for play with the use of language in fiction, digging up some semblance of the meaning therein. We hope to feature more of these in the future, following Eamon McGrath’s review of Ivana Bodrožić’s Sons, Daughters and our own Jessica Denzer’s coverage of Diane Josefowicz’s L’Air du Temps (1985).
It being summer, (or Summer), we also have new fiction: two playful, elusive pieces which play with form and style by Allison Whittenberg and Jon Doughboy, and then a story from Ami de L’Esprit Michael Nath, our first-ever Featured Writer, back in the Quarterly for the first time in a while. Find extracts of all the below, and read them in full on the Notes and Errata section of the site.
We also have a number of past contributor publication announcements and an Editorial Meditation in the guise of a photojournalistic essay, complete with decidedly non-professional pictures. There is quite a bit to look forward to in the coming months, as well. Issue Five is shaping up nicely (although we’ve still space available), with some exciting pieces forthcoming, we’re planning a reading in Manhattan next month, and we’re already talking about AWP25, back in Los Angeles. Hopefully, by the next Quarterly, we’ll be able to announce some happenings with a bit more specificity.
The growth of the journal has been a great ride thus far, and much fun to be a part of and, mostly, to watch. As with writing itself, the development of a literary journal in so many ways takes on a life of its own. Something I’ve learned, perhaps the best thing (à mon avis) to learn, in the type of High Modernist writing that we take as our inspiration here at L’Esprit, is that it is the act, the gesture, the movement towards truth, far more than any (ultimately ill-fated) arrival, that constitutes meaning. It is not a didactic, internally-complete expression, that lends a thing significance. It is not any sort of mapping experience onto language, but rather the experience of language. Words qua words. It is the moment on the hillside in the sun.
Consciously,
L’Esprit
D. W. White, 30 June 2024
L’Esprit Reading
We’re excited to announce a second L’Esprit reading, after the great fun in AWP, this time in Manhattan on July 30th. We’ll have more details soon; keep an eye on our socials for more information!
Call for Submissions
L’Esprit is still reading for Issue Five, due out in mid-October.
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.
Publication Announcements
L’Esprit is once again happy to share a few recent publication announcements and other news from past contributors!
“Stacey, hurtling through central Wisconsin” by Karen Walker in Cosmorama
Rhinoceros by Robert Stone in Metachrosis
Intimacy by Robert Stone in PulpLit
“On Learning to Tap Dance at Midlife” by Diane Josefowicz in The Boston Globe
“Go Away, Closer: Time and Perspective in Annika Rose by Cheri Johnson” by Diane Josefowicz in West Trade Review
“Favourite” by Robert Stone in Suburban Witchcraft
“As If” by Sue Mell in JMWW
“‘Sherman Did’” by Rachel Rodman in Third Wednesday
“Allerednic” by Rachel Rodman in Brilliant Flash Fiction
“May Day” by Karen Multer in River and South Review
“Nothing to See Here,” by Richard Risemberg in Off Course
“Problems of Living” by Sarah Haufrect in West Trade Review
Two Visual Poems: Aged and Past Perfect by Amy Marques in Streetcake Experimental Magazine
Duets by Amy Marques as Editor/Curator & Visual Artist
Sussuros Chinos Anthology contains translations of two pieces by Amy Marques: “Breathless Confessions” & “Before” (aka “It Takes Two to Tango”), originally published in L’Esprit!
“So Much More to Say” by J. M. Eno in Manawaker Studio’s Flash Fiction Podcast
Michael Nath appeared as the Featured Author in the Spring 2024 issue of West Trade Review
Finally, félicitations to Diane Josefowicz on L’air du Temps (1985) being named a 2024 Indie Next finalist. Find a review of the book, by our very own Jessica Denzer, in this very Quarterly!
Félicitations à tous!
Creative Writing Quartets
Issue Two contributor Rachel Rodman is running an experiment called “Creative Writing Quartets” and looking for more volunteers. In a Quartet, four writers work in parallel, building on one another’s work over the course of 3 “movements.”
Zoom “performances” last approximately 1.5 hours; anything written in the course of a Quartet remains the intellectual property of the writer.
If interested, contact Rachel at rcrodman@gmail.com.
Submittable
L’Esprit is on Submittable!
Find us here.
Issue Four 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 Four is now available in print and digital editions!
All previous issues are also available in all three formats.
Thanks to everyone for your support of fearless writing!
Summer Quarterly Original Writing
This Quarterly sees our first-ever book review, and our second, along with a variety of short fiction and an Editorial Meditation to conclude.
Previews of each are below, and find the complete pieces on the Notes and Errata section of our website.
The Writing Snake
Jon Doughboy
Short Fiction
While digesting five literary creatures the writing snake opens its mouth with this question < What if there is no audience? Because people don’t read and if they do read, they read YA books about self-pitying teenagers overcoming obstacles in a hero with a thousand faces arc except the hero doesn’t have a thousand faces, he just has one and it’s a shitty face, let’s face it, folks, it sucks, and what if there is no audience (POEM) because people don’t read…
Insomnia
Allison Whittenberg
Short Fiction
The mind
Is
As fragile as
The dream
It dreams
I wrote this poem in 2018, at the tail end of the long journey back.
Pulling Down The Blinds
Michael Nath
Short Fiction
When we sat to dinner, they were still outside. Had they nothing better to fucking do? From the table we watched them chat. Couldn’t be anything heavy. Nearside cop made me think of my old man, one particular season of my youth; which was probably happier than I remember …
Could say the same of all time.
Yeah.
Dinner was smoked mackerel. Huzza. By now, the cops were lolling. Sylvia wondered if they’d had anything to eat.
Christ’s sake! They’d have stuffed themselves in the canteen at lunchtime. Of that you could be sure.
Oh, The Humanity!
Eamon McGrath
Book Review
Humans, famously, are social animals, our lives inseparable from a complex web of relationships. But we are also interior beings with rich emotional lives that, try as we might, we struggle to articulate in all their nuance and complexity.
Sons, Daughters, the third novel by Croatian poet and writer Ivana Bodrožić, explores the space between our interior and exterior selves. Each of the novel’s three parts is told from a different perspective, with most of the action unfolding retrospectively, and Bodrožić’s lyrical and ruminative prose, deftly translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać, evokes the tangle of memory and the inexorability of the past. The novel explores the confines of bodies, sex, and gender – and, implicitly, who we are permitted to be.
Perturbed Spirit
Jessica Denzer
Book Review
I don’t know much about perfume. In fact, I know nothing. As a sometimes wearer of deodorant, and as a buyer of unscented moisturizer and laundry detergent, the world of designer scents is unknown territory to me. I do know a little French, however, and I do know the work of Diane Josefowicz, specifically her translations of French poet Anna de Noailles, two poems of which we published in the 2023 Summer Quarterly. So of course, when I received Josefowicz’s latest novel L’Air du Temps (1985), from Regal House Publishing, I assumed I was in for something slightly French, perhaps retro Parisian, something about time, about the air, perhaps about the spirit of the moment.
Towards A New Teleology
Art and Philosophy
The first thing I thought of walking into my Paris hotel room was that the photograph above the bed conveyed an essential teleological impulse that the photo by the door did not. Teleological is one of those odd words that are extremely, even officiously, common in certain circles, and effectively unknown elsewhere. Squarely within the former circle lays the UIC English Department, for reasons that principally involve an ongoing, inexhaustible obsession with a certain Prussian rabblerouser. Despite my best efforts, a few things have suffused my vocab. Dialectics aside, the pictures struck me. They were both of the Louvre. The first one, on the wall over the twin beds pressed together in the European fashion, foregrounded the pyramid, with its glass and angles and insistent modernity, placing a portion of palace wall alongside side, on something of equal footing. The other photo, near the door, I only noticed on turning around. Its composition instead relegating a sliver of pyramid to the extreme corner of the frame, spotlighting the ornate Cour Napoleon façade in all its splendor. The photos on each door of the Louvre Floor presented similarly engrossing claims about a possible linear progression of history; my voyages to the elevator were beset by the philosophical potential of radically extant hotel artwork.
There seemed to be a statement made by these photographs, something about the progress of history, or the creep of technology, or the outward manifestations of time. Did placing the more conservative photo by the door signal some subtle condemnation made by the proprietor of touristic greed? Was the picture over the bed indicative of the interior designer gesturing towards an idyllic harmony of tradition and innovation aimed to encourage restful sleep? I was perplexed, and intrigued. So I did what any grad student might do; I wrote down one sentence of notes and went out into Paris, promptly forgetting about my nascent essay idea until the last hours of my trip.
Read the remainder of the essay in the Notes & Errata section of L’Esprit
Au Revoir
We hope you’ve enjoyed our Summer Quarterly, and keep in touch for some exciting developments this summer!
Thank you for your support of fearless writing, and à la prochaine.
Consciously,
L’Esprit
L'Esprit Literary Review 