Showcase January 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!
January is our special prize issue where we publish a prose writer and a poet after running a contest in conjunction with Freewrite. Our thanks to everyone who submitted! It was lovely to read everyone’s work and, while it was a tough decision, in the end two people stood out to us. Our selections for this issue, and for the prize, are Erica Manto-Paulson for Poetry and Jennifer Nguyen for prose. Their words, craft, thinking, and presence were affecting. We were moved and inspired!
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!
Showcase wishes you a great start to the new year, much zeal and zest in your practice and writing. Keep reading widely. Support writers. Pay success forward, and treat each other with generosity. Stay cozy and stay reading!
In this month’s issue,
Jennifer Nguyen delves into family relationships, how they iterate and how questions can connect generations and yet loom between them as both a wall and buffer. Erica Manto-Paulson delves into memory and family, using space and numerals to contain and distribute thought across stanzas for the purpose of examining the heart and mind.
We hope you’ll give each piece and their ideas your attention. There’s a lot to feel, a lot to gain and learn. Close inspection is as important as the experience with all of our Showcase pieaces. Read, ponder, and enjoy!
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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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PROSE
Flash Non-Fiction by Jennifer Nguyen
—Originally published by Ponder Magazine.
OBJECT:
Escape
That night, mom, when the hurricane blanketed our house with reservoir waters, did it feel like that evening in 1978? Back then you were 22, packed anything you could eat or sell, and walked to the shore of a Danang beach. You boarded a fishing boat headed anywhere except Vietnam.
Did you know that I have so many questions for you?
*
What made you leave? Did you ever step back towards grandma’s shuttered candy shop?
You never told me about the full journey from Vietnam to Houston, but I know slivers of the story. In your defense, I am afraid to ask. One evening, I watched you make dinner as I contemplated visiting a local fortune teller to forecast a trivial event like my job performance or whether I would get a raise. Unlike you, I’m fully American, sensitive to rejection and pain.
“Fortune tellers never tell my fortune,” you said as you chopped, boiled, and stir-fried, describing a trip you took from Danang to Saigon to see a fortune teller. This journey was after the country fell to communist rule, after the government sent someone to watch your house believing our family had gold, after you were sent to a farm outside the city to sing songs and be taught a lesson. You delivered these details in our preferred storytelling style – all facts, few feelings.
I can’t remember what you cooked that night, but I remember what you asked the fortune teller in Saigon: “Should I escape from this country?”
You said he couldn’t read your fortune. It would be unlucky. But it didn’t matter because a gung had already made an arrangement on a fishing boat by the time you returned.
“Not my decision to leave. Everyone above me. Time for dinner,” you said.
What was in your bag? Did you pack everything you needed?
On an overcast day, in Galveston, we stood on the seawall and looked into the opaque waters. I was a teenager, already disconnecting from your world. It’s scary, you said, being on a fishing boat for days, surrounded by nothing but infinite ocean. Once, you and I boiled water for a package of ramen. You laughed thinking of a gung, standing port side, heating seawater for his bowl of noodles. He didn’t need salt, you said with amusement. Unlike you, I wasn’t amused.
There were other bits of answers that appeared without my asking, jolting me back from my imagination. Before each first day of school, you would buy me a pair of Lee Jeans. One August, you proudly showed me the logo tags that I loathed to feel against my skin. You sewed those on in a Hong Kong factory, you told me. You were able to make a few dollars for boxed char sui fan lunches and fruits as you waited to be sponsored by a brother in Texas. I was not ready to hear how long you waited, if you lived in tents, if they surrounded you with barbed wire to keep you away from everyone else. Instead, I cut the tags off my Lee Jeans to free myself of irritation.
Mom, were you scared?
That night, when Harvey drove the floodwaters up to your ankles, I called you past midnight. I was 2,000 miles away, uncertain if what I was reading online was what you were living. The voice that picked up the phone was not the one that had once lulled me to sleep singing “Que Sera, Sera.” It shivered in tone, perforated with muffled splashes of you scooping away water with a cup. I wanted you to tell me that everything was fine – like you always did even when it wasn’t.
An abrupt electric pop severed one of your sentences. What’s that, I asked. You had to go, you said. You still haven’t told me what that sound was.
Hours later, through articles and our hurried conversations, I reluctantly pieced together tatters of your escape. At sunrise, you put a few bottles of water and some valuable papers in a bag. With our dog in your arms and a life jacket on your chest, you left the house, walking into knee-deep water. As you waded, a boat found you, pulled you from boundless floodwaters and offered to steer you anywhere except home. I’m still anxiously awaiting the rest of the story.
*
I wonder, what will we eat or see or touch that provokes the next scrap of story? The whirr of a boat engine? The feeling of wet shoes? The smell of salt? Will it remind you of that night in 1978? Will I be strong enough to hear more?
Mom, are you okay?
IDEA:
I wrote this piece on September 11, 2017, about a week after my mother lost her house and many of her belongings to Hurricane Harvey. Far away in California, I was unable to immediately and physically assist her after the traumatic storm. Writing “Escape” was one of the only ways I could productively make sense of the event – and my grief – from afar. Hearing my mother recount her journey from her flooded home gave me a glimpse to a parallel departure that she rarely spoke about: her escape from Vietnam in 1978. The piece is crafted around a series of questions to my mother, which are questions that I have yet to ask – that I am afraid to ask. The fear stems from an aversion to hearing more painful stories or, perhaps, a superficial concern that the answers aren’t as interesting as my imagination. Thus, “Escape” represents the kinship I have with my mother – a series of seemingly non-sequitur stories tied together by questions.
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 your 2 favorite lines? What do you like most about this piece?
Nguyen: “Escape” was originally a blog post written in 2017. After five years, I returned to “Escape” as a revision experiment of transforming the original blog post – a just-in-time reactionary piece – to a more reflective, perennial essay. The revision not only focuses on Hurricane Harvey and my mother’s 1978 boat escape from Vietnam, but also weaves additional snippets of stories that transpired in-between. As a result, “Escape” is not just about two pivotal events, but the relationship I have with my mother as embodied by those events. Accordingly, my favorite sentences are: “An abrupt electric pop severed one of your sentences. What’s that, I asked. You had to go, you said. You still haven’t told me what that sound was.” The lines are an apt summary of the relationship I have with my mother.
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 write both humor and kind-of-sad-not-so-funny pieces. In both types of writing, I strive for accessibility and movement. One of the greatest writing joys I have experienced was hearing an elder uncle and my father say that they read my writing. I loved the idea that I – a woman more than 30 years younger – could have an intergenerational conversation about history and trauma with older Vietnamese men through my writing. Thus, I work hard in funny and not-so-funny pieces to use lucid and clear language; subversive humor that energizes the reader; and carefully selected stories within the story that compels and propels the reader forward in the piece.
Where do you feel this work fits in on a historical level? How about aesthetic or stylewise and can you particularize your answer?
I am proud to be a part of the Vietnamese American writing community, which has a wealth of talented storytellers – from Bao Phi to Ocean Vuong to Thi Bui – who are constantly creating to fill historical gaps. In America, the “Vietnam War” is often told through the lens of the United States Armed Forces and its veterans. In Vietnam, the “American War” is described by “Northern Vietnamese” armed forces – the so-called winners of the war. The stories of my father and mother – people who fought and lost in countless ways – occupy an oft-forgotten liminal space. I see my work as a part of a collective project to widen that liminal space and transform it into a dominant narrative.
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?
This is the one time I will probably ever write this: “Escape” represents exactly what I want to say and how I felt at the time. Itʻs a Lunar New Year miracle!
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?
A few years ago, a friend introduced me to Vanessa Angelica Villarreal’s work. Since then, her essay “La Cancion de la Nena: An undiscovered guitar prodigy in the borderlands” is always next to me as a guide through my writing process. I love the way she gorgeously and seamlessly weaves music, Texas landscape, and her fatherʻs coming-of-age to create a single narrative tapestry. The other essay by my side is “Letting Go” by David Sedaris (yeah, that guy) which ties the author to his mother through storytelling that undulates in emotion and humor. Also, shout out to my professors-turned-mentors Norma Tilden and Jennifer Fink who influence me in their writing, their teaching, and their generosity.
POETRY
A Poem by Erica Manto-Paulson
—Originally published by Showcase: Object & Idea
OBJECT:
TITLE
Life Mosaic
(After a poem by A. Mills)
1.
In this memory I am spun. tongue. sharp,
suckling on my mother’s arm while I slept
beside her, she asked her hippie friends how
to keep a baby from sucking on you
in the middle of the night and put
hot pepper sauce on her skin before bed
then waited to see if it would burn me.
2.
Sharp. tongue. sprung. In this memory
I am thirteen and telling my father
what I really think of him and he says
the tongue is a rudder that can steer
my whole ship off course. I imagine myself
as the Santa Maria, her stern lifting
Christopher Columbus all the way out of the water
as she steers herself into the storm.
3.
In this memory now I am tongue tied,
sharp and spun around like a top inside
when he walks by me in the halls,
I practice what it might be like to kiss him
on the back of my hand, slithering
my tongue along the webspace between
thumb and index finger, I taste
like salt and the tinny copper of a penny.
4.
Sharp, spicy sweet, tangy spun cotton candy
at the city pool, kids lined up for concessions,
whistle blown, adult swim and all of us
had to get out. Corralled, sugar high, hot sun
evaporating pool water down to a filmy chlorine residue
on goose-bumped skin, waiting to jump back in.
5.
Tongue—like what I have always known,
spoken tongue, like what I am trying to tell you,
native tongue, we are born without words—
the newborn frenulum stretching
her tongue from her mouth for the first time,
lengthening then scrunching like an inchworm
towards her mother’s breast, her umbilical cord flattening,
her mother’s nipples already starting to weep.
IDEA:
My father used to tell me that my tongue was like the rudder of a ship in that it is small but has the power to determine the direction of a very large vehicle. I think this was meant to be stern advice but I could not help but intuit some sense of pride and wonder that he had in the strength of his young female child. With poetry, the tongue of the speaker is what sets the course for the way the piece will move from word to word, line to line, stanza to stanza. The tongue also refers to a native, spoken (or unspoken) tongue, or in other words understanding and intuition which is ultimately linked to survival.
In this poem, each memory has its own stanza but it is also further divided from the rest of the memories with a number, which has a cataloging effect on the way the poem reads as almost scientific/detached. I felt this important so that what is revealed in each stanza could be pressure cooked with detail/imagery/metaphor. The last stanza is different, however. It is not as contained into a little room, like the other stanzas, because it is pre-memory. The reader is brought in to the mosaic in real time. The speaker steps away from the lens, looks directly at you. Asks if you can hear what she is trying to say. As a midwife assistant and birth worker, I am fascinated by pre-memory.…the gestational experience and the primitive imprinting of survival, all of which make an appearance in the last stanza.
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 your 2 favorite lines? What do you like most about this piece?
Manto-Paulson: I owe this piece to a poetry prompt from my friend and mentor, Pauletta Hansel (Cincinnati Poet Laureate Emeritus). I was in the midst of big change and working hard on several projects that had nothing to do with poetry, so in a very (creatively) dry place. All thought and energy was funneling into the work I was doing, which felt wrong. I am a poet. If I’m not writing, something is off. She suggested writing to a prompt as a way of unlocking some of that energy and I was surprised at what came of her prompt. It was unexpected. My favorite lines are in the second stanza where the speaker imagines herself as the Santa Maria because it speaks to an inner storm that is wild and unimagined - the origin of all thought and the real power behind what influences.
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 craft-obsessed. I will fall down the rabbit hole of enjambment and the number of lines in a stanza and verb tenses and imaginary verbs…again and again, with great pleasure (and also some amount of torment). Style, in this piece, required consistency and dependability so the reader could almost imagine the next stanza while also enjoying the feeling of having no idea what they would be exposed to next. That allowed me to open each stanza as its own unique little room and show, for a moment, the entire lifetime lived within each one.
Where do you feel this work fits in on a historical level? How about aesthetic or style-wise and can you particularize your answer?
Historically, it is anchored in the 80s. Any 80s kid knows this poem. The child of the hippie, the whistleblower, the ways free-love didn’t always trickle down into the breastmilk of the mothers. The poem also relies heavily on form—the speaker is breaking the silence but the poem must be a container for that shattering.
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?
This piece, itself, is an embodiment of limitation. It is shards of memory and the way a larger image boasts of resolution and yet it stands on nothing. Each tiny piece, itself, is a galaxy of possibility but it is also contained in space. I did not feel limited by the submission requirement but challenged by it.
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 am a midwife assistant and doula so my poetry is heavily influenced by my work with childbearing women. I am obsessed with gestation, birth, death, the universal mother in its many literary forms. I am inspired by poetry that can translate silence with words the way a birthing woman can translate creation with her body. Jane Kenyon’s or “Coming Home at Twilight in Late Summer,” Marie Howe’s “My Mother’s Body,” and Nancy Reddy’s “First Light” are examples of this.
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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
About Showcase:
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Could someone here let me know the names of the editors of this magazine? Thanks very much!
Loved the story and perspective. Poignant and very visual