SHOWCASE AUGUST, 2022
Object & Idea
Dear Readers,
Thanks for returning; we adore your eyes! We’re on a 1x per month publications schedule, which means we’ve been apart for quite some time. As a reminder, last month was our first publication! Check out James De Monte’s flash fiction piece and Jenny Qi’s poem if you haven’t yet.
May our writers and their words entreat you through the vapors of August!
This week, we’re featuring yet more bona fide work from lovely humans and writers: A creative flash non-fiction short from Holly Haworth and a poem from Philip Metres. Showcase aims to bring top flight, creative, voice and style-centered contemporary writing to new readers and juxtapose the creative work with a short essay from the author about the work—how the author views their own creation. We also provide a brief 5-question interview to further access the author’s creative thinking in general and about their published piece with Showcase. A writer’s self critique, self vision wants to be forefronted, so you won’t see bios and photos in our issues; you will find links off site to the author’s landing page of choice. At Showcase, the writing and thinking about writing is preeminent.
Our selections this month come from another set of early to mid-career and established writers who have something to say, an angle, an intriguing voice. They are generous and striving in their work, in their ideals, and with their time. They’re deep thinkers who ponder craft, what it means to be creative, and how to integrate ideals with their creative lives. In other words, they’re naturals and we’re proud to publish them in our second issue. We hope you’ll read their writing and words—their object and idea—with interest, open to the warm gush of contentment afforded by good poetry, and the buzzing headspace yielded from a concise yet melodic essay. Enjoy.
PROSE
Flash Nonfiction by Holly Haworth
—Originally Published August 20, 2019, New York Times Magazine
OBJECT:
Letter of Recommendation: Crickets
Insects had the earth about 400 million years before we did. For centuries stacked on centuries, what a great whirling, stirring buzz it must have been: the pulsing thrums of cicadas, tiny whine of mosquitoes and droning hum of bees. Though it has certainly quieted down a bit during the past few hundred years, every night the persistent cricket presses on. Stubborn stridulating cricket! Chirp, chirp, chirp, as if nothing has changed for millenniums.
A field cricket lazes all day in its burrow. Then, in the evening, just when you’re ready to relax, out comes the well-rested cricket with its own built-in instrument, ready to make a ruckus. The instrument is in two parts: on the top of the lower wing a rough blade called a scraper; on the underside of the upper wing a row of bumps, like teeth. Scraper saws teeth. And scraper saws teeth. And scraper saws teeth.
Males of the more than 900 species the world over sing primarily to win a mate — and to ward off competition. They’ll do anything to be heard. One species of cricket in the tropics slaps up a mud wall around the mouth of its burrow, leaving a small gap where it can stand and call. This earthen megaphone amplifies the song to an earsplitting volume. Though crude, this audio technology competes, worrisomely, with the best of our own such designs. The tree cricket can’t eke out many decibels on its puny, papery wings. So from a leaf it gnaws out a hole the shape of a pear, then jams its body through so its wings fit against the edge and — voilà — the volume’s turned up by a factor of four.
The female strolls through the night, listening for a tune that strikes her fancy, for the boom boom of the low-range frequency of a large and loud male. Machismo will get a cricket everywhere — including some places he doesn’t want to go, like the belly of his partner; sometimes, the female eats her male’s wings while they mate. But still they wham and bam. In some species, males drum their bodies against branches and tree trunks. This clatter goes all through the night with no respect for us humans.
Though it seems like a lot of noise, perhaps if a cricket was given the chance, he would defend his music the way Iggy Pop defended punk rock to a dismissive television journalist in 1977. It is “music that takes up the energies and the bodies and the hearts and the souls and the time and the minds of young men who give what they have to it and give everything they have to it,” he said. “What sounds to you like a big load of trashy old noise is in fact the brilliant music of a genius — myself. And that music is so powerful that it’s quite beyond my control. When I’m in the grips of it, I don’t feel pleasure and I don’t feel pain. ... Do you understand what I’m talking about?”
When evening comes, I turn down Iggy Pop on the stereo and step outside for a different sort of concert. Though cricket song does take up the energies and bodies and hearts and souls and time and minds of young males, crickets — unlike Iggy Pop — do not like an audience. They will not perform antics for us. Try to get in the front row, and suddenly the show will end.
The best strategy for getting a good seat is not to mill about, beer sloshing around and spilling, but to take a seat anywhere and sit back. Anywhere, because the sound will surround you no matter where you are. It is good to lay a blanket out, for the big load of trashy old noise that is the nightly cricket concert, while at first a fire-in-the-heart wide-eyed jamboree soon enough can send you into stargazing reverie, and soon thereafter to sleep. So I’ve heard.
Starting out, a few squeak meekly as a breeze rustles the long grasses. A flock of geese, also stalwarts of the old cacophonous order, might go honking and flapping and honking and flapping and honking and flapping across the sky in an unruly shifting vee, stealing the show awhile. Then the pale pinks and yellows of sky darken to plush purples and bruised blues, and the crickets start to amp it up. Then it is full dusk, and you begin to feel at last overtaken, surrounded, for Venus is now making herself known, throwing you into an inevitable, crushing confrontation with other revolving bodies, reminding you, after a long day of managing to drown out such distractions, that you are on a planet spinning wildly, careering around a greasy galactic track, tilting this way and that to the tune of insects raking their wings against wings. The trill is deafening now, looping and thrumming. You are in the mosh pit of the universe — not at all at the center but another thrashing body in the dark pit, knocked about in glorious, sweaty chaos — wounded, an outcast, but belonging here nonetheless in this squawky, grating orbit. The noise! The rapturous noise!
Then, softly, there comes a swirling in your innermost heart, the long-gone stars spooling out ancient silvery light to beat all your best efforts at ignoring such trifles. And now your body is a warm hum. You are a quiet pulse, your even breath rising and falling. And now you are in the full thick dark drifting into dream with the chirp, chirp, chirping.
IDEA:
In all of my writing, I’m interested in creating a feeling of awe or wonder about the so-called “natural world,” the world that is so much more than human. In this piece, I wanted to try to encapsulate the experience of something very mundane—hearing crickets chirping on a summer night—and, within a small space, try to make it feel sublime, as it does in real life to me. I was also interested in being playful and joyful, because that’s how crickets make me feel. Because they’re repetitious yet buoyant, I wanted to employ that kind of language, to mirror them. I feel that I’m always playing with getting as fully into the creatures that I’m writing about as possible, allowing them to shape my language and style, to bend my consciousness. In turn, I hope that my readers experience a slight altering of their perceptions of the world.
INTERVIEW
Showcase: We’d love to hear how you conceived of the piece. Can you tell us about the inspiration behind it?
Holly: I had just moved states to begin an MFA program 9 years ago. We were given a prompt, I think, to write a piece for workshop of less than 1,000 words. So this was the first piece that I ever wrote for a workshop. It was August, I was in a new place, and the crickets were singing in full force. Especially when I’m in the midst of major life transitions, I tend to cling to simple, sensory interactions with the natural world to inspire and ground me in my writing. And I began as a music journalist at 19 and spent my early 20s writing about music. So though I didn’t even realize it when I began my MFA at 30, I was also still inspired by musicians and artists working in other art forms, which is why Iggy Pop appears here too. To circle back around, then, I want to point out that a word limit, like the container of a song, can serve as a kind of generative inspiration for creating something. I think of this as a little ditty.
What motivates you on a craft and aesthetic level? At what point do you consider the nuts and bolts of technique, style, word choice, and other items?
What motivates me is whatever wild drive us creatures seem to have to create beautiful forms. Since writing this piece, I’ve learned that there are actually nearly 4,000 species of crickets, and each sings a completely unique song in frequency and pitch; the highly attuned can identify the species by ear. What motivates me is the same thing that motivates a cricket, or a bird, to learn and sing a particular, crafted, and structured song: a mysterious, ancestral force whose power lies beyond our understanding. Consider, etymologically, means “with” (con-) “the stars” (sīder)—there’s an esoteric meaning embedded in this word, a history of thinking with the stars, of our languaging minds reflecting the sidereal galaxy that spun us into being. That is to say that even the galaxy thinks of technique and style (obviously!), and the planet made billions of years of choices about molecular structures that eventually brought forth life. That is to say, I don’t believe that we’re ever capable, in any moment, of not considering technique, style, and word choice, even when we’re dreaming and unconscious. I think that’s just who we are, with the stars.
Where do you feel this work fits in on a historical level? How about aesthetic or stylewise and can you particularize your answer?
Historically, I am embedded within the English-speaking American nature-writing tradition, with Thoreau as a sort of origin point. He is an ancestor I look to in my lineage. My writing, though, as it must be, is very much of this moment, as was his. What I judge this “moment” to be—whether we are calling it the Anthropocene or something else, and I usually prefer something else, like Báyò Akómoláfé’s “Afrocene,” or Natasha Myers’ “Planthropocene”—is a tipping point or culmination of a Western, colonizing mindset that long imagined our human intelligence was somehow utterly unique on the planet, and that our technologies could solve everything. That illusion is crumbling miserably now, as our shorelines fall into the ocean, our waters become more and more poisoned, our climate more dangerous, our rainwater undrinkable, the planet increasingly desertified due to our short-sighted agricultural practices, etc., etc. So I would say as a historically situated writer, I am always interested in questioning our perceptions of technology and asserting that technology, and intelligence, is in no way exclusive to the human species. You can see some examples in this piece of how crickets also innovate and employ technologies. Jane Goodall was the first to officially set down in the scientific record the use of tools by other-than-human primates; she observed chimpanzees using stiff blades of grass to extract termites from their holes. I’m pointing this out to say that as a writer I don’t just look to a so-called “literary” tradition but also to a scientific one, which is also political. I would say that my work is post-Goodall, and, now, post-Simard, the scientist who firmly established the existence of plant communication, a language system of trees.
Here we’d like to understand the limitations of the piece as you see it, which can include genre or submission requirement limitations. Were you able to express your internal ideal exactly in what you meant or wanted to say?
Never! I renounce the ideals of completion and perfection! We are always circling around what we mean or want to say with “exactitude”—which I believe is a cultural concept we enact on language that doesn’t actually exist when we begin to use words. It turned out, actually, that this first tiny piece I wrote in graduate school was published six years later in The New York Times Magazine, and became something of the seed for my first book, which I’m at work on now. Even within the much larger space of a book, I don’t feel that I’m fully able to say what I mean. If we did achieve exactitude, perhaps it would shut down our sense of possibility and curiosity, both as readers and writers. I would say that I am now stalking the imperfections and the cracks in between my words and sentences, where the mystery is always slipping through. That seems to me the interesting part, what keeps us pushing through the chaos toward form. Songs and stories out of the darkness. But to be more pointed, I would change many things about this piece now, beginning with the last lines, which would be, following the last sentence that you read: “You don’t feel pleasure and you don’t feel pain. Do you understand what I’m talking about?”
Are there any pieces, books, or authors to whom you’d compare your work, or that inspire you? Which of the above have influenced you and this piece in particular?
I’ve been very inspired throughout the years by reading science, especially by ecologists, botanists, and biologists. Again, I would say that I look outside of a so-called literary tradition, to the work of those within the fields that Richard Powers calls “the humbling sciences.” On that note, I loved The Overstory. I would say I have had many inspirations that may not seem apparent on the surface of what I write, but that have fed my soul immeasurably and in unquantifiable ways: Jack Kerouac, Anton Chekhov, Gabriel García Márquez, Charlotte Brontë, Willa Cather, Emily Dickinson, Barry Lopez, John McPhee, Rebecca Solnit, and Annie Dillard have been my favorite writers over the years.
POETRY
by Philip Metres
—From Shrapnel Maps, Copper Canyon Press, 2020
OBJECT:
One Tree
They wanted to tear down the tulip tree, our neighbors, last year. It throws a shadow over their vegetable patch, the only tree in our backyard. We said no. Now they’ve hired someone to chainsaw an arm—the crux on our side of the fence—and my wife, in tousled hair and morning sweats, marches to stop the carnage, mid-limb. It reminds her of her childhood home, a shady place to hide. She recites her litany of noes, returns. Minutes later, the neighbors emerge. The worker points to our unblinded window. I want to say, it’s not me, slide out of view behind a wall of cupboards, ominous breakfast table, steam of tea, our two young daughters now alone. I want no trouble. Must I fight for my wife’s desire for yellow blooms when my neighbors’ tomatoes will stunt and blight in shade? Always the same story: two people, one tree, not enough land or light or love. Like the baby brought to Solomon, someone must give. Dear neighbor, it’s not me. Bloom-shadowed, light-deprived, they lower the chainsaw again.
IDEA:
Shrapnel Maps is a definitely a book obsessed with the question of neighborliness. Not only who is my neighbor, but what do we owe our neighbors? Growing up in the Catholic tradition is where I first heard this question articulated, and the ethical injunction to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Both, it turns out, are difficult loves. For some, it’s hard to love our neighbor. For others, it’s hard to love ourselves. Both are necessary but sometimes come in conflict. It’s also true that the speaker (who is also some reflection of me) seems to prefer a kind of peace that seems to be conflict-avoidance. He would give something up rather than struggle for it. In a way, that’s a failure to love oneself. In the three religions of the Book, and indeed perhaps at the core of every religion, is the question of how we welcome the stranger, the other. The Torah calls the people to welcome the stranger thirty-six times, more than just about any other commandment. The Qu’ran also speaks about hospitality; after all, these three religions emerge from a desert culture where hospitality was not an affectation. It was a necessity to stay alive.
Also this: what John Paul Lederach suggests are the peacemaker’s disciplines in his book, The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace: “…the capacity to imagine ourselves in a web of relationships that includes our enemies; the ability to sustain a paradoxical curiosity that embraces complexity without reliance on dualistic polarity; the fundamental belief in and pursuit of the creative act; and the acceptance of the inherent risk of stepping into the mystery of the unknown that lies beyond the far too familiar landscape of violence.”
INTERVIEW
Showcase: We’d love to hear how you conceived of the piece. Can you tell us about the inspiration behind it?
Philip: “One Tree” is a fairly autobiographical poem. One morning, when we were eating breakfast, my wife noticed that the neighbor was instructing workers to cut our tulip tree in the backyard. My wife’s reaction, and my reaction to her reaction, became grist for the mill of the poem. It’s safe to say that the speaker (who is a version of me) is full of fear, and wishes to avoid this conflict at all costs—even, weirdly, to the cost of his own relationship.
In the broadest sense, “One Tree” is not just about a particular dispute between neighbors (or between spouses)—it’s a microcosm of all the conflicts in the world, from the personal to the national and global. Conflict is part of being human, but the question becomes: how can we deal with conflict in a way that doesn’t lead to violence and oppression? I hope that the poem invites us to consider how we deal with conflict, as well as our responsibility to others and to ourselves.
As an Arab American living amidst a large Jewish Orthodox community outside Cleveland, Ohio, I imagine my experiences as metaphors for navigating neighborliness in a divided land—not only our neighborhood, or Israel-Palestine/Palestine-Israel, but all Edens, all lands, divided by borders and fears and hungers and laws. I decided to place “One Tree” at the very beginning of Shrapnel Maps because I wanted a poem that was closer to a parable, something that wouldn’t require extensive historical or political background to understand.
What motivates you on a craft and aesthetic level? At what point do you consider the nuts and bolts of technique, style, word choice, and other items?
I decided to write this poem as a prose piece because I wanted to create a brief, inviting foyer into the rather intimidating funhouse of the book, Shrapnel Maps. I wanted a poem that didn’t even feel like a poem, something whose style was almost invisible, like in a story by Chekhov. It is a space to breathe in a book that challenges the reader with multiple perspectives and realities. As a poet, I’m constantly seeking form—whether received or created. Form is the term for the shape, the architecture of the poem. A Russian poet once said to me, quoting another Russian writer, my homeland is Russian literature. Those of us in diaspora, in exile, or alienated in all the ways that we can be unhoused, still long for home and homeland. How often have we found in a poem or story a home that the world did not provide? Literature can be forms of home, forming home, homing form.
Where do you feel this work fits in on a historical level? How about aesthetic or stylewise and can you particularize your answer?
As in Sand Opera and the rest of Shrapnel Maps, and indeed everything I’ve written, I’ve always been interested in rendering visible the nexus between huge political decisions and systems and their lived experience on the ground by those who bear their brunt. A map is drawn in another country and suddenly, bulldozers come to build a wall between a village and their olive orchard, to use another example from Palestine/Israel.
Here we’d like to understand the limitations of the piece as you see it, which can include genre or submission requirement limitations. Were you able to express your internal ideal exactly in what you meant or wanted to say?
I think this poem revealed more about myself than I could see until I wrote it. That my aversion to conflict actually creates further conflict—and that I need to look at that part of myself in order to grow as a human being.
Are there any pieces, books, or authors to whom you’d compare your work, or that inspire you? Which of the above have influenced you and this piece in particular?
If I were to name a few “cousins” for Shrapnel Maps, I would say, off the top of my head, Mahmoud Darwish’s oeuvre, Tyehimba Jess’s Olio, Aaron Davidman’s Wrestling Jerusalem, Marwa Helal’s Invasive species, Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, Edward Said’s After the Last Sky, Antje Krog’s Country of My Skull, the work of Svetlana Alexievich, George Abraham’s Birthright.
A note about Showcase:
We recognize that many great pieces sit in obscurity having been published once and provided brief light, only to then languish. But let the creative waters churn. Let what was once sediment rise again as nutrients. Showcase enthusiastically calls for previously published work alongside unpublished work. We also pay writers. As we grow and if we hit certain benchmarks which we’ll share along the way, we’ll be able to raise the payout to writers. Please subscribe to our new format, share with friends, colleagues, and classmates, and consider submitting work. Submitting is free, but capped at one submission per person to encourage all submerged and historically underrepresented voices, the whole spectrum of writers, to engage. If you’d like to submit more than one piece, then we charge a reading fee. We will read very actively and pledge a six-week turn around for all submitted work. We will publish monthly on the third Tuesday as well, providing as many opportunities as we can for writers. We hope you will read this issue and continue following our journey!
Finally, we’re sponsored this month and next by Ephemera’s The Write-In Residency. Please have a flash, a quick looksee.
The Write-In Residency
The Write In Residency will sponsor 2 individuals, where each awardee is gifted a curated package of 10 new books in multiple literary genres each from a different independent publisher, a Moleskin & pen, and a $300 award to upgrade their writing nook or home office. It’s a staycation for the bookish!
Folks will be able to apply directly via Submittable or become a paid yearly subscriber to Ephemera and then apply for free (subscribers will be sent a special link). Read about subscriptions here. Best of luck!
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