Welcome to the Issue: A note from Kim Jernigan, Editor
Travellers in a strange land, there’s a transport of them in this issue. What are they doing? Trying to ward off stray dogs, child soldiers, unsettling insights, diarrhea. Forging temporary alliances. Attempting to crack the code of an unfamiliar, sometimes threatening culture. How are they travelling? Through space and time—foraging in the dustbins of memory where their younger selves try to divine something of the strange and estranging world of adults, discovering that memory itself is in motion, buffeted by need, longing, loss, misinformation, misunderstanding, revision, or omission. How far do they travel?To the ends of the world. Who travels with them? The living and the dead.
On the road is Carrie Snyder, a poet and fiction writer we have had our eye on since her undergraduate days. The three stories published here mark a new direction for her, writing that is closer to the bone and that demonstrates a thrilling maturity, both stylistically and in its emotional complexity and nuance. Their protagonist, Juliet, a girl on the cusp of adolescence, has travelled to war-torn Nicaragua with her parents and younger brothers. Her parents are peace workers, well-meaning but naive. We witness Juliet’s dawning sense that they aren’t able to protect her, a sense made more urgent by her circumstances though it is the universal realization of children, and the heartbreaking reality of parenthood.
We asked Carrie to reflect on the writing of these stories: “Transformation came all in a rush, “ she says “...as if I’d cracked a code and could see previously invisible patterns and shapes.” But along with this euphoria came a counter current of guilt at “the ambivalence of the writer’s cause...her thievery, her coolness, her power to shape and reshape.” Reading this confession, I remembered that the ten-year-old Juliet is accused of being a thief and a sneak; the child in the story is, in some sense, mother to the writer?
Poet Shoshanna Wingate is new to our pages. In her poems “Chapel Hill, North Carolina,” “The Cotton Mill,” and “Living with the Dead” and in an accompanying conversation with TNQ poetry editor Barbara Carter, she travels back to her childhood in the southern U.S., a childhood of rural poverty, family dislocation, cultural upheaval, but not, for all that, an unhappy childhood. Her words, her way of figuring the writer’s work, resonate interestingly with Carrie’s. Here’s Carrie (in the story “Rats”) on the way the adult Juliet constructs her childhood: “And none of it will be true, and all will be. And even that is not true, because there is nothing absolute about telling, there are only fragments, shards, the rare object retained whole, ciphers removed from original context, hoarded by shifty, impecunious memory.” And here’s Shoshanna on her poem “Living with the Dead”: “I’m too aware of my own ambiguities to allow my poems any kind of finality...[M]y relationships with my dead are changing and evolving still, even though it’s essentially a oneway street. ... Nothing is static, not even the dead.”
Mark Rogers’ story “Bloemgracht,” is similarly haunted. When we first read it, we were drawn to his idiosyncratic style and to what, I suspect, drew his characters to each other: something in the way they talk. A make-shift family of travellers adrift in North Africa, they communicate in a truncated way, through suggestion and understatement; each is a mystery for the others to unravel. “Bloemgracht” begins, in a sense, with silence—an impromptu performance of “Silent Night”—and ends there as well, the perfect rest point for a story that’s as much about talk as travel.
In 1996 we published John Metcalf ’s “Forde Abroad,” winner of the gold medal for fiction at the National Magazine Awards that year. “Ceazer Salad,” another in the Forde saga, appeared in our Salon issue last summer. Like John Updike’s Bech, Forde is a fictional alter-ego for his author, an instrument for vengeance upon benighted reviewers, ideologues, and the forces of ignorance more generally. Well, sort of. Bech really is the antithesis of his creator—he’s Jewish and profane, a stoppered talent—and the tone of the stories is satiric. Forde is less an alter-ego and more a caricature—he shares his creator’s nostalgia for an idylic rural childhood, his conservatism (expressed, in part, as a love of archaic language and objets d’art), his fondness for his wife with whom he communicates in a coded language born of long familiarity and affection—and the tone of the stories is elegiac.
In “The Museum at the End of the World,” Forde is again abroad. Long-time TNQ readers will recognize some of the story’s parts, published here and in John’s literary memoir, Shut Up He Explained, in illustration of how a writer alters experience in the service of fiction, and they may be interested, as I was, to see how the parts have come together into a fictional whole. “The Museum at the End of the World” is, in John’s own words, “a comic story full of loss and diminishment.” Among other instances of narrative sleight-of-hand, it contains an astonishing passage describing a mimed sexual act which is, almost imperceptibly, internalized, so what is at first observed has its climax in Forde’s imagination. The story is accompanied by David O’Rourke’s interview, “In His Corner, Still Standing,” undertaken in John’s 70th year. The title makes a sly reference not to John’s age but to his reputation as a battered literary pugilist. The travel theme is extended in a new occasional feature, The Writer At Large, in which Mark Jarman channels a college quarterback in Rome, “alive and at large”—and far gone in drink. Elsewhere, Susan Stenson celebrates the season; Travis Lane sings moon songs, leaf songs, and hears the tick of time; Patrick Pilarski listens to wavebreak and other people’s singing; Tom Wayman suffers the wound of loneliness.
The delightful and thoughtful essays by Erling Friis-Baastad and Patricia Robertson, a husband/wife pair, are part of our “Magazine as Muse” series. The series as a whole gives a nod to our “industry” (a word I use wryly—we’re industrious at The New Quarterly, but hardly corporate), though my secret intention when I launched it was to tease out some coming-of-age stories, true confessions about the issues and attitudes that preoccupied our writers as they suffered adolescence: Russell Smith’s obsession with punk rock, Rebecca Rosenblum’s experiment with Manic Panic, Trevor Coles’ dream of becoming a race car driver. I’ve moved the next entry in our “On Criticism” series, Eric Ormsby’s reflections on the differences in the literary culture of Canada, the U.S., and Great Britain (all places he’s lived and published reviews), to our next issue in order to keep this one at a comfortable size. It will appear, turn-and-turn about, alongside a lengthy review of Eric’s own work as a poet and a lively trio of new poems. Shoulder your rucksack and come along for the ride.
