SHOWCASE JULY, 2022

Object & Idea

Jul 19, 2022

∙ Paid

Dear Readers,

We’re piqued and hopeful for our first issue of Showcase, where we synthesize Object and Idea. 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.

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 Showcase enthusiastically calls for previously published work alongside unpublished work.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!

This month we feature a poet named Jenny Qi and fiction writer James De Monte. These are early to mid-career writers who have something to say, an angle, an intriguing voice. They teach and hold or have held jobs outside of English and writing. They’re adept people, who think deeply about their craft and creativity. We’re proud to publish them in our launch issue and hope you’ll read their writing and words—their object and idea—with interest, open to the warm flash of good poetry and the enriching depth of a concise story. Enjoy.

PROSE

A Flash Story by James DeMonte

OBJECT:

Effetto Montagna

Deep down, three and a half miles from the mine mouth, is where they blew Papa up and buried what parts they never would recover of him. This was in January, icicles looming like raised pickaxes. Most of the other dead came from nearby, too, everybody from little camps with their own people, all talking their own language.
Somebody said it was powder smoke. Somebody said it was the very dust of the coal. Somebody else said it was oil dripping from the roof. Cousin Natale knew it was white damp.
The President of the Ohio District of the United Mineworkers told you all you’d get compensation, your fathers’ burials paid for by the state, or the company, or somebody. Temporary morgues were put up in pool halls and beer joints. The Blue Goose is where your zio, Federico, lay, overcooked and grimy. New widows and orphans and old priests and young nuns and curious spectators and dazed miners blocked the roadways. Mrs. Leotta from Grant St. lost all three sons: Beppo, Lino, and Popeye.
Rescue workers went in without masks, fought through tunnels half-collapsed and strewn with timber and steel beams. Other miners, whose eardrums had been cracked in half, blocked air with makeshift brattices of burlap and wood.
The Slovak fire boss who Papa never trusted to begin with found most of him about an hour after they got the others. The Daily Recorder celebrated the Slovak fire boss for his bravery, for risking himself to find the dead. His people had come here at the same time as yours and lived in Barnhill, and he used to go to Mass before he divorced his wife.
Of course, there were a lot who made it out, plenty more than who got blown up. But nobody beats a coal mine: white damp got Papa straight away, and black damp probably got the Slovak fire boss somewhere down the line.
And don’t forget:
The State Industrial Commission has heeded the lessons of the terrible accidents in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. And the State Industrial Commission has worked diligently to promote mine safety education. And the State Industrial Commission has forbidden taking blasting powder in or out of haul-ways with electric wires, the blasting powder you miners buy yourselves. And the State Industrial Commission will work exhaustively to determine the exact cause of this explosion. And the State Industrial Commission will be sure the limestone solution is sprayed adequately, to subdue the dust. And the State Industrial Commission will pay your family eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents a week for the next seven years. And the State Industrial Commission will pay your family one hundred and fifty dollars right now for the burial. And the Rosemarie mine will be reopened by February. The bituminous door of the big coffin opened back up.
Are you not eating? Are you not sleeping in homes with roofs over your heads? Are your children not in schools, receiving a Catholic or a public education? Are libraries not being built? Are the pews not full on Sunday? Are you not free to sit in those pews? Are the roads not now being paved?
This is the cost of industrializing. This is the cost of mass production. This is the cost of private individuals having the right to breath freely and earn a living. This is the cost of lessons learned. This is the cost of manifest destiny. This is the cost of assimilation.
This is the cost of one slim crust of bread.
This is the cost of effetto montagna.
This is the cost of us letting you people in here to begin with.

IDEA:

I wanted to write about immigration and assimilation, as well as loss, and that’s what this story and my full collection is about. Eastern Ohio’s rich and tragic history of mining coal has shaped much of my writing life. My own heritage has, too: a mix of Tirolese and Siciliano immigrants—Northern and Southern Italians—along with Appalachian Americans. With all this in mind, I gave myself the limited space of flash fiction to get at these themes. The writing and revision process then became more poetry than prose. A good example, I believe, would be one simple line about peripheral characters, which seems to capture all of the aforementioned themes: “Mrs. Leotta from Grant St. lost all three sons: Beppo, Lino, and Popeye.” This foreign woman suffered incredible loss, all three sons crushed to death in the same coalmine, the coalmine the reason this family even showed up here. In terms of craft, I wanted the older sons to still have foreign names while the third went by a nickname out of American popular culture, an example of that family’s own assimilation process. Ultimately, though, all the boys have now become fully assimilated underground—three dead Americans.

INTERVIEW

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

James: It’s part of a collection I’ve written called Where Are Your People From?. It’s unpublished, but the whole thing was just picked up by Cornerstone Press at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point and should be out in 2023. The stories are all interconnected and center on a retired coalminer who’s also a first-generation American, beginning just after his 90th birthday. I’d wanted to write one about his dad’s death but wasn’t sure how to do it. I’d tried writing a standard-length story with a typical dramatic arc, and I wrote it in various ways. It never quite worked, and I never felt like I was doing it justice or getting at the gravity of a story like that with what I’d originally written. So I stripped it all down, changed the voice and changed the structure.

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?

When I composed the original version [of the above-mentioned collection], I think I was just getting it all down, the ideas. I felt the excitement of creating it, of that whole process, but I knew the story was not quite working. And I tried to imagine what the experience of losing a parent to something like a mine explosion would be. One of my grandfathers lost both his father and his stepfather to the same coalmine, years apart. My other grandfather’s dad survived a mine explosion. My wife’s grandfather survived one, too. Both of them—the survivors—died young anyway due to all sorts of health complications probably related to those explosions. This is all to say, I haven’t gone through it, but family of mine has and there’s probably no way to effectively express what that is like—for me, at least—with a traditional narrative structure without it seeming forced or manufactured. So, aesthetically, I wanted to make it a bit surreal and dreamlike. I rewrote it that way and then focused and edited, line by line, word by word, in the way one might a poem. It’s a story, but the paragraphs work as stanzas, I think.

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

I’m fascinated by stories I’ve heard of Appalachian and immigrant families who purportedly had portraits of John L. Lewis, the labor leader who organized the coalminers, next to Crucifixes above their mantels at home. My grandmother told me her own parents, who’d immigrated from small towns in Trentino-Alto Adige in what’s now Northern Italy, saw John L. Lewis as a saint. Lewis used to give speeches where he said these miners were just looking for one slim crust of bread. I’d wanted to write a story around that idea.

Stylewise, I greatly appreciate writers like Sandra Cisneros and Jamaica Kincaid, whose individual vignettes connect as part of a longer story but can be read as standalone pieces, which is what I attempted here. Kincaid’s use of the second-person voice in a story like “Girl”—of firmly placing the reader as a participant in the narrative—has always appealed to me, too. I ended up writing the rest of the stories in my collection in this point of view.

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 can’t say for sure. I’ve read others like Robert Creeley, who argued that each piece of writing takes its own shape, grows its own skin. As I’d mentioned, I knew I was stripping this all down and writing in a new way compared with what I’d originally attempted, but I was not quite sure how long it would end up being or what shape it would take. I figured it would be short, though, and wanted to pack the punch of flash fiction. As it stands, I am satisfied that it says what I want it to, and it is published here on Showcase and will later appear in the full collection, too, so it’s done in that sense. It stands on its own as piece about both loss and assimilation, and it serves the larger narrative of my full collection. I may look at it years from now, though, and wish I’d done it differently, which is often the case.

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 writer I greatly admire is Salvatore Scibona. His book, The End, explores the fellowship and hardship of Italian Americans in Northeast Ohio, offering a contrast to other one-dimensional and often romanticized portrayals of us throughout popular culture. Also, I’ve read a lot of Maggie Anderson and Diane Gilliam, two writers whose narrative poems often dealt with life and loss in coalmining communities in places like West Virginia and Ohio. The author I’m most inspired by, Maj Ragain, died just a few years ago, the day my second son was born. He was a writer from Southern Illinois but based in Northeast Ohio, and I’ve read and re-read his books over and over. I’d recommend Fresh Oil, Loose Gravel most of all. Each of his pieces—poetry and prose—has much to say, full of wisdom and truth, but Maj Ragain never pretended to know all the answers or to know any more than his readers. Rather, he seemed to be engaging in some larger conversation, and I’ve wanted to do the same.

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POETRY

by Jenny Qi

OBJECT:

When This is All Over

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Here is what I will miss:
running through the park,
even when I hated it, cursed
my legs for their sourness;
the heron walking into the pond,
small white reflection
emerging from the verdure,
so lush it brushes the sky teal;
bees floating from poppy
to lupine to cobweb thistle,
tender hum and churn
like waves lapping the shore
like language like love so certain
how could it be any other way?
even the fog, that cool grey mist
stalking the shoreline, feeding redwoods
pale honey from a mercurial god,
feasting on city lights in waning hours;
& at the end squinting into the bright
ocean, once described by the Greeks
as wine, because they didn’t have words
for the color blue or there wasn’t yet blue
or maybe they were drunk
off its immensity

IDEA:

When I wrote this poem, it sort of marked a transition for me from focusing on personal to collective grief, and that is reflected in the structure of my first collection Focal Point and the placement of this poem in that book. That feels to me like a natural progression of grief in hindsight, and I’ve seen this sort of transition in other works, including Victoria Chang’s recent books, which I’ve loved and related to so deeply. Perhaps in part because of my experience with the early loss of my mother, all of my obsessions and themes are colored by the awareness of loss. But that perspective probably also comes from the aerial view I tend to take because of my family of historians and my training as a scientist, and it’s also this difficult time we live in. Even as I try to write a poem about joy in nature, I can’t help but think about what was lost before and what will be lost in the future.

INTERVIEW

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

I’d been invited to write and publish a poem with Midst, which records your poem as you write and revise it, and I was thinking about the joy I’d felt on a recent camping trip and the constant undercurrent of sorrow of climate change.

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 enjoy thinking about language, and sometimes a poem arises for me from thinking about a word, its etymology or the way it sounds. So I suppose rather early, and then again in revision.

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

I like to think this is fitting into the recent-ish rise of ecopoetry. Writing about the natural world is certainly not new, but I feel there is an increasing urgency to that writing because of the incredible existential threat. My work is also deeply rooted in place, particularly Northern California, which is an adopted home but at this point the home I’ve known the longest.

The beauty of a poem is that I don’t generally mean to say anything—I start with a feeling or image or meditation of some kind, and I write into it and hopefully am surprised by where it leads.

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 influenced by too many writers and works to name. I was deeply impacted by Rose McLarney’s poem “Gather” early in my poet life. And I think part of it was that I’d always lived in urban spaces, and suddenly the growth cycle of apple trees came alive for me through that poem. So when I consider the evolution of my thinking about the natural world and my fascination with plants, I think of that poem.

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