Notes and Errata

Missed Carriages

The first time, I thought it was for real because those were the only kinds of stories I’d heard, and although I know it sounds gross, I took the drugstore test I’d peed on to my parents’ house and when they didn’t answer the door I left it on the brick window ledge, my mom was out buying groceries or something, and I called a bit later and said, “Go look outside,”
Continue reading
Atropa

The first time, I thought it was for real because those were the only kinds of stories I’d heard, and although I know it sounds gross, I took the drugstore test I’d peed on to my parents’ house and when they didn’t answer the door I left it on the brick window ledge, my mom was out buying groceries or something, and I called a bit later and said, “Go look outside,”
Continue reading
Memorizing the Past, (Re)writing the Present

In the classic play The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde calls memory “the diary we all carry about with us.” But memory isn’t perfect—it never has been—and we all know well enough that one person’s memory doesn’t mirror another’s, even if that person is, in other ways, your mirror.
Continue reading
Sounding What Has Gone Silent in Little Neck

In a Literary Hub article, Providence-based poet and playwright Darcie Dennigan writes about writing her sophomore novel Little Neck in the hushed idyll of beautiful cemeteries. Atmospheric Riverside Cemetery, crumbling Oakland Cemetery, and St. Mary’s Cemetery—in which her great grandmother Marguerite and baby cousin are buried.
Continue reading
Somewhere in a Garden, Black Roses: Emil Szittya, His “Films” of Nonexistence

Imagine, if you can, a painting. All broken up, colors smearing, shapes all turned around, things recognizable but in their wrong places; is there meaning?
Continue reading
The World Has Ended (A Few Times Already)

directly from the publisher here. If you’re reading this, you probably don’t need to be reminded about how social media, AI, short-form content, and/or the decline of literacy all seem to portend the demise of the Novel as an artistic form.
Continue reading
In Search of the Modern(ist)

The central question I’d like to ask is: how and why has the novel evolved (and evolved in this way) in the post-Dickensian era? I take into that inquiry a conviction in Modernism—somewhat alternatively conceived, perhaps, than might be typical—as the most important, surely most interesting, occurrence to happen to the novel since its formation. A great deal has been said about this topic already, of course; it seems lately that Modernism is rather less dead than…
Continue reading
Sleeping Arrangements

On a Bronx fire escape, curled up on couch cushions, desperate for a breeze
Continue reading
California Style in Acid Green Velvet

California’s literary folklore is carried mostly in sleazebaggery. Criminals and hardened detectives, drunken romps through Los Angeles, groupies (and more) of the 60s and 70s, conflict between the haves and have-nots. A literary history of oddballs, creeps, underworlds, lively cities. Places crawling with character and romance and evils and everything else that make people on the page feel so vibrant, so tangible.
Continue reading
Narrative, Poetry: Form and Meaning in Sing, Dark Times

Considering technological developments of the past half-century such as the domination of redundant images and the proliferation of artificial intelligence, language can be observed as undergoing intense processes of disintegration and (re)formation, with obvious implications for literary production and interpretation. The age-old question stands: what shall we do about form? Narrative?
Continue reading