Showcase February 2023
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.
Welcome to Showcase!
February and beyond we’re back to our normal programming. We want to thank everyone one final time for submitting to the Showcase/Freewrite prize for the January issue. Our selections for the issue and for the prize, were Erica Manto-Paulson for Poetry and Jennifer Nguyen for prose. Congrats to them!
As a reminder, we publish 1x per month on the 3rd Tuesday (sometimes or thereabouts) and feature writers of all origins and all levels. If you missed it, here’s last month’s issue!
It feels as if Spring is coming and we can’t wait for buds & bees, excursions, farmers markets rife with new yields. We wish you fullness, with your writing practice and with you mastery of self. As always, keep reading widely and support writers. Pay success forward, and treat each other with generosity. Let’s build a positive and positively enticing writing community such that readers, casual and devoted, continue to find us.
In this month’s issue,
Ben Carter Olcott probes what it means to be at once steadfast and illusory, in small ways channeling Borges, ruminating on the individual and the city. Clean, succinct prose delivers his message. And Ruth Osman delves into ecology and memory, latticing environmental hazards faced by present day ocean-dwellers with the tragedy of the middle passage using a strong, evocative free verse. Both pieces are thinking pieces as well as feeling pieces. They work in different ways, with different subject matter to yet pry into the who and why of us, people, in the now, certainly, but across time as well.
We hope you’ll give each piece and their ideas your focus. We always find the craft and undergirding thought to be enlightening. Close inspection is as important as the experience with all of our Showcase pieces. Read, ponder, and enjoy!
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Joan Frank, author of the just released novel, Juniper Street.
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PROSE
Flash Fiction by Ben Carter Olcott
—Originally published by Showcase: Object & Idea.
OBJECT 1:
The Chessman
The eighty-year-old man has kept his appointment at the chess table for at least the decade as far as anyone can tell or remember, the chess table in the park in the transient city, the city for the young. People leave, work for a year and then leave, leave for bigger and brighter and faster. The old man is a fixture in an unfixed place. Day in and day out, he is at the chess table in the scrabble of a park, more concrete than soil after years of municipal “renovation.” The chess table, too, has survived the bulldozer, the cement mixer. It is a granite bit of intransigence—a cube set in the earth, a rude board roughly chiseled in. There is no room for players’ legs beneath, no comfort carved out of the rock that seems to reject all human interest. The benches: more granite, two slabs, no backs. They are old, old and indifferent.
The man sits hunched over the stone, elbows up in an implacable posture. He plays himself when no one shows up to play him. A rotation of chess friends, seemingly the only elders in the city, come in and out. Some laughing teenagers challenge him—some prodigies approach with childish, world-burning focus. The man’s attention is a different tone and a different timbre—he is like gravity, ever-present, fixed on our heavenly sphere, a steady downward pressure, a forcing of your feet to the ground. He is an indelible, unshakeable presence—a thing that makes you present. He doesn’t win every game. He is not a Grandmaster. But in his presence, we must consider the pieces and the pieces or surely, we will lose.
He dresses aptly for the changeable weather. He is an average-sized man, thin in his old age, and hunched. He keeps a newsboy’s hat pulled low. To see his eyes, you must play him. And even then, he is not forthcoming. But those who have seen them say they are warm and watery and large and shockingly childlike: a baby’s blue eyes—it’s as if they see light for the very first time, a kind of astonished look to them. Everything the chessman sees is utterly new, happening first again, although he is known to be an e4 player as white and surely, surely, he has seen the same games over and over, games of a similar shape, initiatives all alike under similar constraints. Of course, the pieces never change. How often has he considered the crooked hook the knight makes? Or the slashing gaze of the bishop? And yet it is new for him. Or—do the eyes lie? We can’t know for certain what a thing really is by its appearance alone, this is common wisdom. Perhaps the old man is caught in a kind of catatonia by this endless game—he has lost his soul and become the pure robotic motion of the gameplay—he has become chess, chess itself. That is his beginning and end. He would be like the city in this way, a seeming game, a mechanism, an endless exchange of pieces and people who seek a similar goal that cannot be exhausted. In the city, the young find and lose lovers, gain wisdom and lose wisdom, procure jobs and lose them, and after the years’ worth of gambits and trades and sacrifices have been made, we have a result: draw, loss, victory. Most often a draw. And they set up the pieces at another table, another city, to begin again knowing ever so little more. Such is chess, such is life.
Perhaps this is what the chessman knows in his solitary, blinkered, astonished existence: he has all of life in his hands. He breaks a new heart every time a pawn is lost: a dear John letter is sent to the bereaved lover; a funeral is held, a mother weeps at a casket; some short, meteoric life is ended in a brave idealistic defense. He knows it is a matter only of the next game. Perhaps he is at the controls of this city, the watchmaker of it all, setting the dials, moving the world by voodoo or spirit in a one-to-one motion of piece and person—whatever animating force floats your boat. It is no matter. The chessman keeps the only game in town—it is the game of the town. And perhaps he really is at the controls. One may reflect on one’s time spent in the city and note a rigidity and sameness to its affairs, a kind of structure and mechanism—indeed a kind of robotic replication endlessly variant but always played within a set of desires, attitudes, stratagems. Opening, middle game, end game—the chessman is the conductor of the chess city, and this alone saves it from its oblivion.
IDEA 1:
It's strange, isn’t it, that chess pieces—inanimate shapes no matter the medium—have names. They live, so to speak, in the Feudal Age. The bishop, the knight, the king, the queen—they form a round table, a paranoid elite; eight zealous pawns protect God and Country, dull broadswords borne aloft; rooks loom in the wings, stone bastions brave against total siege. They represent a bygone social reality—out of time but intact in history, intact on the eight-by-eight board where each piece has its duty (this history goes on, further into the past to India, where a chess-like game was first invented.) We move the pieces as bloodless metaphors for war, metaphors handed down over bloody millennia. That is a human inheritance: a collective memory we can’t ignore. In our age, AlphaZero is the greatest player in the history of chess—AlphaZero is an Artificial Intelligence funded by Google, and AlphaZero plays chess without any understanding of the Feudal Age or war or blood. The pieces do not have names, refer to no bodies: they are nodes in a dataweb. For that mind, the game is all mechanism, executed to a calculated perfection that exceeds human capability. There is no metaphor in the greatest brain to ever think chess. It is a kind of oblivion, a loosening of history—and what of the algorithmic city, life itself: do its operations not at times feel hopelessly remote, over-executed, indifferent? Yet the old man at the park is still there: he is playing in the rain. He remembers what it means to bleed. You can see it in his eyes: he remembers what it means to play. He’s still there.
INTERVIEW 1
Showcase: We’d love to hear how you conceived of the piece. Can you tell us about the inspiration behind it?
Olcott: Sometime during the pandemic, in search of inspiration—some way of drawing blood from stone—I set myself the constraint of writing stories that could fit on a single page of my notebook. In my practically illegible, tiny scrawl, quite a bit of story muscled its way in over a series of pieces. But this fiction, which sprung from many futile hours of online chess-playing, many futile hours in isolation, demanded more space. The blood came quick—and enlivened the innocent eyes of this forgotten chessman, the hypothetical arbiter of this story’s ancient games.
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 am always listening first—following an internal music I can’t totally account for. A song is playing, and ideas or words in their many tastes and senses and polarities magnetize to that under-music. It’s all intuition at first—I follow a resonant note that is then shaped by word choice and sentence structure. It’s a dance. The music informs the diction informs the sentence-rhythm. They all inform one another, too. After, I’ll clean up the missteps: that’s the technique. And then I’ll listen again. Rewrite, listen, rewrite, listen.
Where do you feel this work fits in on a historical level? How about aesthetic or stylewise and can you particularize your answer?
This story is written in something like the magic realism mode in that it speculates the “impossible”—that a solitary man in the liminal space of a park’s concrete chessboard may in fact be something like John Locke’s Deistic God. The grand watchmaker exists: you can play him in chess, you can meet his e4 with the Sicilian Defense if you so choose. He’s on Spruce Street. His eyes are baby blue. The narrator, however, doesn’t exactly confirm this reality—modernly, they reserve their skepticism until there are no other options. In some sense, the narrator belongs to a story of Poe’s, whose protagonists cling to their rationality until only the irrational remains viable.
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?
Limitation is the piece, in a sense. The unnamed narrator, the impossible chessman, the follies of modern living, and of course, the arbitrary rules of the chessboard itself all circumscribe the familiar sense that we are limited participants in the game of life, each of us one small gear in a great mechanism that ticks and whirrs beyond our control or reasoning. The challenge of a piece like this that speaks to the “beyond,” a word that must always be in quotes, is a problem of something like escape velocity. The words must somehow unfold in a manner that feeds fuel to the final thrust of imagination. In this story, that fuel is a hard clarity to detail, a sort of soporific repetition to the monologue, and the chessman’s vulnerability—a strange empathy for the chess pieces themselves—set against inhuman stone.
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?
Borges’s Ficciones changed my writing permanently, and this story owes a great debt to his genius. His exquisite mechanics, and his insistence on the artifact-quality of story, elevates prose to high art. His artifice—his constraint—generates a rulebound world we can then step out of—it is a portal to revelation. Simulated, yes—God is not speaking from a burning bush—but what else do we have? Stefan Zweig’s Chess Story speaks here, too—in its willingness to take the maddening psychology of chess to its furthest extent. Lydia Davis has a word here—although who can match her concision?
POETRY
A Poem by Ruth Osman
—Originally published by Showcase: Object & Idea.
OBJECT 2:
Leap of Faith
Written when two hundred pilot whales beached themselves on the Australian coast. In memory of the countless kidnapped Africans who jumped overboard during the Middle Passage.
Clicks and whistles tumble in the surf
bounce off black bodies
slick and smooth
their lungs crumpled
crushed beneath their weight.
And still they come
reaching for flight
breaching the waves
ballooning flotsam
covering the shore
to where sand meets
blue-lipped sky.
Like that other leap
but turned inside out
upside down
warped by time
thrumming the spiderweb—
a chord plucked.
Again
black bodies
slick and smooth
the crack of the whip
the splash as they hit the water
sinking fast and true.
Weighted by shackles
they waited for the turned back
for the sun in the captor's eye
for the rush of wind
that would ease their flight
back home.
IDEA 2:
This poem was written in free verse, with emphasis on sound (“reaching for flight/ breaching the waves/ ballooning flotsam”), rhythm ( “but turned inside out/ upside down/ warped by time”), and resonant imagery (“covering the shore/ to where sand meets/ blue-lipped sky.”)
The first two verses explore the whales breaching, while the last two describe how and maybe why kidnapped Africans may have chosen death by drowning. The verse between the two extremes (‘Like that other leap …”) attempts to locate the point in time and space (from a metaphysical perspective) where the two occurrences meet, that plane being described as a spiderweb.
INTERVIEW 2
Showcase: We’d love to hear how you conceived of the piece. Can you tell us about the inspiration behind it?
Ruth: “Leap of Faith” was written when hundreds of pilot whales beached themselves on the Australian coast, followed by hundreds more in New Zealand. It was an attempt to get the feeling of loss and despair out of my body and onto paper.
But as I mapped out the poem's perspective, it occurred to me that there was a sort of nexus between these incidents and the choice made by countless kidnapped Africans to end their lives during the Middle Passage.
This poem was my attempt to connect these two threads that weave themselves through our histories.
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?
Expressing feeling, not just in the emotional sense but the foundational warp and weft of an experience, the energy and vibration of it, and the many ways in which it is tied to our individual and collective conscious and unconscious. This is what I enjoy dredging up in my work. So I look for imagery and connections that take us down those pathways.
I often start with an idea that I’d like to explore. And in the process of writing, I find that the idea chooses its own path, particularly as it relates to perspective, trajectory, etc. I try to get the rough draft down before revising for word choice and other stylistic concerns. But I invariably end up spending a lot of time rewriting lines and verses as I go along. Once a draft is completed, I return to it after a few hours or days to edit and revise.
Where do you feel this work fits in on a historical level? How about aesthetic or style-wise and can you particularize your answer?
This particular piece is both eco- and afro-centric in its perspective. This situates it in the here and now, particularly in relation to social justice and environmental movements.
Stylistically, the poem’s form (free verse) and its use of relatively straightforward language places it well within the confines of modern poetry. Although there is an emphasis on rhythm, sound, and imagery that hearkens back to poets, particularly black poets, of the early 1900s.
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 piece attempts to connect two types of tragic occurrences across a time-space continuum, and to mark the spot where the two threads meet. I’m not sure that this intention was as obvious as I wanted it to be.
It’s also a tragic piece, which some journals and their readers may not readily appreciate. The current focus seems to be on black glory and power, not necessarily on the aspects of our history that call on us to grieve.
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?
Poets and authors from Margaret Atwood and Sylvia Plath to Lucille Clifton, and more recently, Adrienne Maree Brown and Bayo Akomolafe, have all influenced my worldview and my craft over the years. This particular piece would not have been written had I not been heavily impacted by Brown’s “emergent strategy” and Akomolafe’s visionary take on the nature of time and “blackness.”
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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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