Showcase December 2022

Object & Idea

Thank you to our Patrons

• Joan Frank, author of the just released novel, Juniper Street.

• Robert Kirvel, author of a fine book of essays, iWater and other Convictions.

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Welcome to Showcase!

This month we have two mid-career, excellent writers to present, Hadley Moore and Genevieve DeGuzman, people who are thinking, practicing, and breathing literature. We appreciate them for their commitment and their craft!

Also on our minds: expanding each issue to include a 2nd mailing with more interview and insight into each writer’s philosophy and background. Alternatively, we might expand and publish 2 issues per month. We’re also thinking about having a “never published” issue and an “MFA” issue. Would you care to vote which idea you’d be most interested in?

For now, we publish 1x per month on the 3rd Tuesday (sometimes a day late) and feature writers of all origins and all levels. Please read last month’s issue!

Showcase rains down holiday spirit and goodwill, in December daytime is sparse, so be sure get your vitamin D and your literature in balanced proportions. Stay cozy and stay reading!

One final note: Showcase is hosting a prize for January. We look forward to seeing your best, handsomest, work! Each submissions allows for several pieces, making this a very robust and writer-friendly prize. 1 for prose & 1 for poetry!

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In this month’s issue,

It’s a luxury to have one writer per category in each issue such that we can really connect and become familiar with their work, how they think of their writing and who they might be with greater context. These writers really chew on their subject matter, hone in on and breathe craft. It’s a treat to present them in this issue and we offer our thanks and appreciation.

Their work deserves multiple and close inspections. Readers will see much to relate to, much in object & idea to learn from. Please join in with discussion of your own work or (constructive) opinions. Read, ponder, and enjoy!

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Join Our Patrons

• Joan Frank, author of the just released novel, Juniper Street.

• Robert Kirvel, author of a fine book of essays, iWater and other Convictions.

Become a Patron of Showcase to appear at the front of every issue. Follow this link for our full list of supporters: HERE!

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PROSE

Flash Fiction by Hadley Moore
—Originally published by Knee-Jerk Magazine, 2011

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OBJECT:

Map

I didn’t write you a poem and maybe you knew I wouldn’t, like all the letters I never answered.

But I don’t feel the urgency anymore of studying the faded map in the basement, our fingers tracing the interstates, criss-crossing lines to connect me to Knoxville or Austin, you to Berkeley, Minneapolis, New York. I don’t replay the evening, don’t think about dancing in the mirror, and I can hardly remember holding my breath when we both made it to Seattle or Key West.

You said if I ever had a garage sale you’d buy everything—the stringless guitar, the clown rag doll, the too-small couch, the old books. Trash, all of it, but I knew what you meant: you wanted to buy the scene, so you could pack it and carry it with you cross-country from Michigan to New Mexico, set it up again when you got somewhere.

I was supposed to write you a poem about all of this, but I don’t write poetry, and I no longer want to take the map off the wall and hold it down, my palms on Ohio and North Dakota, knees pinning Louisiana and Colorado, as though I could hold you here, hold you to me. I want you to fold up the map, fold up the room with its mirror that reflected a woman in love, and take it with you.

Put it in the back of your car with all the other junk you haul around.

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IDEA:

I referred to a real map as I wrote “Map,” as verisimilitude is important here; could, for example, a person believably hold down a poster-sized map with her hands on Ohio and North Dakota, knees on Louisiana and Colorado? Did I get my proportions and distances roughly correct? Could I actually picture this scene in my mind’s eye, so that it might make an arresting image for the story?

Beyond that, I asked myself if there was music in the rhythms and sounds of the place names and the way they follow one another. These were not chosen for any significance beyond wanting to cover a large swath of the United States—to convey flight, even fleeing—and to feel some satisfaction in the sounds too.

When it came to the other items in the room, I was looking for a sort of useful strangeness to them, to make up a litany of things that might very well collect in a basement, memorable enough to be later purchased at a garage sale, but without any real value so they might also just be hauled around as junk.

So there are a lot of true objects—a map, a couch, a mirror, and so on—and I think these help to anchor the ideas: the speaker describing what she didn’t do, the ways she no longer feels or thinks, what she wishes the person she’s addressing would do since she’s not contemplating the scene herself anymore.

This is likely why the story is so short, actually. She’s got very little to say now: there’s no poem here, and hardly even any story to tell.

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INTERVIEW

Showcase: We’d love to hear how you conceived of the piece. Can you tell us about the inspiration behind it? How did you come to write the last line and what do you think it contributes?

Moore: This piece is a departure for me in many ways. It is the shortest story I’ve ever written—by a lot, by pages and pages, and thousands of words. And it also does have its origin in autobiography (another departure), though it could not be called nonfiction, not with any honesty.

There had been a literal U.S. map on a literal wall, and I loved thinking and writing about the possibilities of geography to represent not only physical distances but growing and perilous emotional ones. Paper maps feel old-fashioned now, but I have some I’ve hung on to; they can be such lovely objects, both practical and aesthetic.

The last line I think cuts through the lyricism of the sections that tie one place to another and reminds the reader that, after all, the speaker was supposed to write a poem and didn’t—and there are reasons for that. There is no poem here, no poetic situation anymore, no poetic ending for the two people in the story. The map is junk; it turns out the whole evening was junk too

Also, sometimes I just love a well-placed single-sentence paragraph.

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? Also, “Map” tends toward minimalism, from what we can tell. Do you agree and what spurred that choice?

I do everything at once as I’m drafting. I’m not necessarily recommending that to others, but it seems to be the way my brain works. By the time I have a full draft it’s more like a second draft than a first one because I revise as I go, thinking about craft elements at every level, from structure to line-editing. This has the benefit of providing greater clarity to my order-craving mind, but it also means that I am very slow. Sometimes I lament my slowness; other times I manage to remind myself to accept it.

In subsequent drafts I am more likely to separate story considerations: structure first, line-editing last. I do love exactitude, and I like to get to that point late in the process of more precise cutting and honing.

I would indeed call this story minimal, and not just because it’s so short, but because it provides only narrow context for these two characters, the speaker and the person she’s addressing. Different stories have different requirements, and I think this is one suited to a few careful details but not a great deal of information.

Where do you feel this work fits in on a historical level? How about aesthetic or stylewise and can you particularize your answer?

Minimalism can feel particularly post-modern, I think, but spareness of language and concept are hardly new developments. Before I started reading as a writer, not just as a hobbyist, I read only contemporary fiction, mostly novels. But in the past fifteen years or so, I’ve expanded my reading widely, not just across genre and geography, but also across time. I had long been wary of those old convoluted-seeming tomes of, say, Dickens or James, but it turns out they were not so daunting, not so inscrutable.

I hope it doesn’t sound coy or flippant to say that everything I’ve ever read or studied has taught me something; all have been gathered and rendered into the grist, or the compost, or the batter—choose your metaphor—from which I extricate the seeds of my story ideas.

I suppose this answer is quite the opposite of particularizing! But it is the truth of how I see my own small connection to the larger world of literature.

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?

The short answer is yes, I think so. But there’s always something lost from idea to page, and it is always at least a little bit sad that way in the offing. The good news is that there’s often surprise in the writing process, useful ideas that could be found only by doing, not by planning. So, some things are lost; some are gained.

In the case of this story, to begin I had only the vision of the map itself, the connecting—by interstate, by finger—of place to place. But when I sat down to write, that first line—“I didn’t write you a poem”—presented itself, and from that point it seemed there was perhaps a whole story there, not just a sort of extended image.

As for submission requirements, I don’t think it’s helpful for the work to start with those in mind; that seems stifling to me. Allow the story to be what it is, however long or short, and then find publications where it might fit.

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 always feel so intimidated comparing myself to other writers, particularly those I admire most! I’ve never found a good way to answer the question of comparison, but I love talking about works I find most memorable.

I re-read a lot and lately I’ve got the story collection The News from Spain by Joan Wickersham on heavy rotation. Each of the seven stories shares the book’s title and refers, somewhere in the text, to “the news from Spain.” Each story is so well wrought and rigorous that the book beautifully contains and transcends its conceit.

I’m also forever flipping through and marking up the novella “Hema and Kaushik” in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth—gorgeous and heartbreaking and unsparing; the story “Stone Animals” in Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners—utterly unexpected and well, magical; and “The Story of Biddy Mason” in Dana Johnson’s In the Not Quite Dark—the way she leaps forward in time is breathtaking.

I could go on and on. One of my very favorite things is recommending books and stories.

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POETRY

A Poem by Genevieve DeGuzman

—Originally published by Stonecoast Review, 2018.

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OBJECT:

Mandala

A bear in the forest wears fish skin for paws. When she wakes one day in that bleak winter, maybe as she feels herself opening, giving birth to her cubs on a December morning, she will remember an old throbbing rooted in the keratin scars that carry her. She will remember those distant dreams of wood smoke and blood over coals. Of silver dashed scales. Of tidal froth hypnotized to the moon. She will remember how something was wrested from the water and pinned on. A pinafore memory brief as lupine blooms.

In forgetting, a bear will storm some abandoned farm, astonished she made it without a rifle crack breaking her resolve. The compost pile will be full of fat grubs, crawling starbursts in her mouth. She will keep no superstitions, freed from the mermaids sutured on her as a bargain. She will feed her cubs this simple paradise. Joy ache of slippers of fish slipping off healed limbs. New skin, tender but sturdy, like her young. She noses their bellies, wades in. Awake to the thin membrane of territory and perimeter. Awake to the hillsides inlaid in ash that will be one day, demanding to be like eternity, erased

and then repeated.

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IDEA:

On the surface, “Mandala” is a nature poem about a bear mother going about its life: coming out of hibernation, giving birth, foraging, raising its cubs. The poem’s context and origin, however, evoke surreal and layered aspects beyond what the quotidian scenery entails. For me, “Mandala” is about grappling with a particular conundrum of the Anthropocene: pastoral beauty and the natural order of things juxtaposed with human destruction and havoc, where animals and the natural world and all its marvels can burn at our hands. The impending doom is taken out of time by an omniscient speaker (did it already happen? will it happen again?). This temporal displacement makes the scenes-right-out-of-a-Planet Earth documentary feel dreamy and ruminative. Placed deep in the background, the fire or natural disaster becomes a hazy memory—or vision—like a distant cacophony that barely registers. Readers just might catch the dark undercurrent like a scent in the air.

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INTERVIEW

Showcase:  We’d love to hear how you conceived of the piece. Can you tell us about the inspiration behind it?

DeGuzman: I grew up in Southern California. Back in late 2017, I watched in horror as the Thomas Fire burned through Ventura and Santa Barbara counties near Los Angeles and through Los Padres National Forest. At the time, it was declared California's largest wildfire on record, burning nearly 300,000 acres during its stoic march through the hillsides.

During all that apocalyptic madness, a news story caught my eye recounting efforts by wildlife officials to treat two black bears with terrible burns. They used a novel approach that involved stitching sterilized strips of tilapia fish skin onto the burn sites. The collagen in the skin would accelerate healing. Vets sewed on the fish skins and then wrapped the area with corn husks and rice skin. The two black bears, one of them pregnant, underwent the procedure on their paws.

The image of the bears with their paws wrapped in fish skin stayed with me. It left an indelible impression: an image of tenderness juxtaposed with violence. The image also clarified the central direction of the poem: the bear becomes a hybrid creature of sorts with its fish mittens (“mermaids sutured on her as a bargain”)—a dreamlike (im)possibility that I wanted to tease out. The wrapped paws made me think of chimeras and the mythic and eternal, though the whole thing also has a temporal quality to it, too. The bandages were meant to wear out. Eventually, the bears would be released and move on. But as is the nature of forest fires in today’s warming world, the bear’s experience was bound to repeat itself. Tenderness and violence; life and death. “Mandala” was an attempt to capture these discordant moments and their eternal reoccurrence.

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?

Stylistically, “Mandala” was a bit of a departure for me. It is a prose poem, which I don’t generally write. The prose poem format felt like the right format for several reasons:

First, I think there is nothing more surreal than combining prose and poetic elements. In the case of this poem, it evokes for the reader a stream-of-consciousness sensation, as if they are being lulled by a narrator reading a news account inside a dream (which is how I felt at the time watching accounts of the fire).

Second, I felt the poem needed to expand, unconfined by line breaks. It needed velocity and momentum. The images needed to run to some outer margin, much like a fire might in the forest, swift and devouring everything in its path. However, I didn’t run the lines to the actual margins of the page; “Mandala” pushes up against a tighter preset border. From that, I thought of the mandala, which is a tight geometric configuration of symbols that tell or guide a spiritual journey of sorts. The poem can be thought of as a journey for the bear (and for the reader, too) perhaps.

Finally, I wanted a form that was gentle—to contrast with the implied violence. Enjambment and line breaks can feel jagged or cascade too freely. They demand strict attention and scrutiny. The prose poem format lulls the reader. In this poem, I think it added to the dreamy effect—again a contrast to, or shroud against, the cataclysm in the background.

Where do you feel this work fits in on a historical level? How about aesthetic or style-wise and can you particularize your answer?

To my non-academic knowledge, the first person to make prose poems en vogue was Charles Baudelaire. His rational was quite fetching. He wrote: “Which one of us…has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience?” Then there was Rimbaud, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and others who dabbled in the form. Among contemporary works, I often think of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, which takes the utilitarian qualities of prose and adds poetic illumination, in order to wrestle with racism and social dysfunction in America.

With “Mandala,” I strived to do something similar, to tackle the abject horror that comes from watching a natural disaster like a massive wildfire unfold and run its course. The wildfires that increasingly ravage the West Coast no longer shock me. I look on them now with a dissociated numbness, sadly. Okay, this is our reality. We deal, we try to mitigate. The bear still needs to feed her young. The circle of life continues even as it all burns down.

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 wish I could have written more—not more of this poem but additional poems. After “Mandala” came out, I did have some ambitions to write a chapbook of animal poems that engage with natural disasters or climate-change catastrophes. Since then, I’ve moved on to other projects, but I might revisit the idea later. The themes/idea feel large and malleable and more relevant than ever. It can’t be contained in one poem.

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?

For “Mandala” and other poems I’ve written that lean heavily into nature imagery, I often return to the work of Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Traci Brimhall for craft inspiration. They write about nature and use nature imagery in their collections, braiding violence and tenderness into their work in innovative ways, creating poems with hydra-heads of meaning that multiply and turn and deepen with each reading.

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Showcase is generously supported by:

• Cathy Rose, Writer.

• Jane Ciabattari, Author of Stealing the Fire: Stories

• Scott Archer Jones, Author of And Throw Away The Skins

• Lucy Ferriss, Author of The Misconceiver

• Cara Diaconoff, Author of novel, I'll Be a Stranger to You

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The Freewrite Prize for Poetry/Prose

Our January issue will feature the winners of our Showcase-Freewrite Prize! Normal submission rules apply but for a reading fee for the prize submission. Work selected will feature in the January 2023 issue and the writers will receive a boosted honorarium of $100 and a Freewrite Traveler. The deadline is December 31st. During this time, free submissions will be open for December and February.

Please follow the link to our full post on the prize for rules & info on the Traveler: MORE INFO

To submit to the prize directly follow this link:

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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!