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The heat may be boiling, but we have some refreshing poetry and prose. Read to cool down, to stay in the shade. Being cool is also reading outside of the gated canon. Being cool is reading those vaunted and lucky folks, as well as broadly outside of the highest prizes and most prestigious zines. Be cool! Read widely. Support art and writing from real, breathing writers—A.I. might be coming.
Without further ado, this week’s selections are...
Scott Ward for Poetry and
Mauro Altamura for Prose (Short Fiction)!
As with many reading periods, we’ve kept some work for future consideration and notified those folks—thank you submitters, all! If your work is still in process, that means we’re continuing to consider it. We thank you for the opportunity to have read or to read again.
As a reminder, we feature writers of all origins and all levels. If you missed it, here’s June’s issue! Be eclectic in your reading tastes. There’s always something strange, interesting, and maybe even breathtaking in the places you least expect. Being weird with reading can really enhance your ear. (We recommend Showcase for a solid weird start). As always, pay success forward, reward opportunity with opportunity. Read your peers’ work. Offer to check out drafts. Let’s strive to make our sphere mutualistic and uplifting.
Let’s build a positive and positively enticing writing community such that readers, casual and devoted, continue to find us and make a type of home in our midst.
Mauro Altamura delivers a memoir-ish fiction piece that uses 2nd person to poignant, enveloping effect. Notice the beginning, how the voice changes and incorporates more detail and tells a type of story, and then where and how it ends, how you feel by the by.
And Scott Ward delivers a highly thought-out and spirited poem based on a quoted line from Dickinson. We love the intertextuality and poetry in conversation. Ward’s piece is poignant and cerebral.
Both pieces are thinking pieces as well as feeling pieces—we like this! Both writers delve deeply and honestly into their work in the interview and Idea sections, which we recommend.
We found the work compelling on many levels and hope you’ll do several reads. Close inspection is as important as the experience with all of our Showcase pieces. Read, ponder, and enjoy!
Short Fiction by Mauro Altamura —Originally published by Showcase: Object & Idea.
OBJECT 1:
Prayer
Pray every day. Store up grace for when you die. Pray at school, pray in your class. Pray before lunch, pray after eating. Pray every hour. Pray for your coming death. Pray to remember another hour of your life has passed, pray the Lord it’s not your last. Pray while you stand, in blue blazer and tie, gray pants, white shirt. Fold your hands, point your fingers to heaven. Hope you’ll go. Hope you won’t cry when you realize what that means. You’ll have to die to get there. Be scared (how else to say it) to death. Realize there are so few hours left. One more has passed. Stand, regardless, and pray. Stand in a straight row behind the boy in front of you. Watch the clock’s red hand approach twelve. Watch the hair line sweep smooth over nine, ten, eleven. Straight up. Then down past four, five, to six. The bottom. The devil’s number. Hell. No way out. Eternity. You know how long eternity is, Mister? Think it over while you stand. Then think some more. You can’t imagine how long. Not if you had forever. Stand in your scuffed shoes and stained pants. Worry about Sister coming from behind, close to your neck, her sour milk breath, her too-fragrant odor of cream’s hope to soften red hands, the only part you ever see besides the white oval of a squeezed face. Except, once, a wisp of light hair, escaped from her habit. Revealed hair, forbidden hair. Hair never spoken of, never known. But you know her hands. Hard like the thick geography text with a stiff spine. The hand, the book, that slams the back of your head. The sound of it from somewhere beyond. The sound of memory, a part of a locked up life. Her blow to your little body, the body no one is supposed to touch. So how can the little body have its head cracked? Why would someone try? Hell. That’s why. To remind you of eternal punishment, the fire that will be forever, if you disobey. The unannounced death-hand across the back of your head. Of course you’ll never see it; exactly the point. A thick, gold ring circles her finger. The ring that symbolizes marriage to Jesus (Bow your head when you say the name. Bow it!) and no one else. The ring that catches your scalp so it feels as if blood will come. But it won’t. You won’t bleed, you’ll have no proof. No pierced hands or feet or side. No thorns on your crown. Just the hand’s blow and your flesh turned foul. Because you laughed. You smiled. You waved to the girl you like. “Smiling? Get up,” says Sister. Stand in the corner. Stand with your back to everyone. Stand so no one will see your face. Go to the chalkboard, with the erased traces of multiplication and spelling. Names of the absent or late, those who missed homework, were doing wrong. Being wrong. Now on the punished list. Name after name added and erased, but always remaining, like sins embedded forever on souls. Only God can read those names. He sees everything. No one else. Only look at Jesus crucified. Look how Jesus suffers on the cross for you. See the pain he’s in? See how he writhes? See him nearly naked, garment ripped just above his crotch, the sweaty arms nailed wide, legs curled, trying to reach himself? If they hadn’t nailed his feet and hands in place, he’d be in a ball. A little ball, curled in, holding himself. Little plastic doll-man on a piece of wood, looking to the sky, waiting for when he’ll die, watching for when it will at last come. “Please make it come,” little plastic doll-man might say. “I don’t like this at all. Why am I the one up here? They don’t care. None of them.” Little doll-man might cry in agony, make everyone else think about dying, too. Whipped and spat on. Cursed. He carried his cross. They nailed his hands and feet into wood. That’s the story they made up. A myth, so they could hit you when you don’t listen. So they could unleash their rage on you for being the boy you are while theyhave to be lost in their thick black robes, cinched with the knotted rope, wood beads trailing behind, in stifling heat, or frozen air, the smell of themselves closed inside the too heavy cloth, day in and out, laying at night in their own sweat, no one else’s. Never another’s. They invented little plastic doll-man to put you in the corner, to give them satisfaction, something they can think on when they sit with their beads and wonder who they are – as if they’d ever ask themselves that question, would dare try to unlock that secret. They won’t. They can’t. Instead they must consider who they might bring to grace. Whose soul should they fight for? Who will they make see light? Who can they make pray, make see what is right? Who? You. That’s who. All they think of is you.
IDEA 1:
I think I’ve analyzed the piece a fair amount above regarding the choices I made. I hope that I’ve communicated clearly about my process. But I do want to mention another issue. I was a visual artist for many years, working in photography and video. (Some of my work is on Instagram or my website) I most often tried to get at a feeling in my photos, an ephemeral quality that was internal, that may have been inexpressible in words, even difficult to describe to myself. I kept working for years and had success. When I decided to pursue writing, I first thought about writing stories based on events that had happened to me, my family, etc, events I wanted and was compelled to write about. But now, lately, after writing for a time, that same notion of internal feeling – which I can’t fully define – and that I tried to mine through my visual art, is what I’m after in writing. How can I communicate to others, or even to myself, what’s going on in my head or my heart, what I am feeling, thinking, how my specific experience in the world resonates? I may often fall short, but that’s my task and goal. I think “Prayer” has gotten me a little closer. Onward.
Showcase: We’d love to hear how you conceived of the piece. Can you tell us about the inspiration behind it? What led you to the subject matter? Can you expound on the significance of the curled, plastic Jesus imagery? What does the voice do for the reader from your perspective, and how might the effect of the story be different if it were in 3rd person?
Altamura: Thirteen years as a Catholic school student has left me with plenty of memories, many good, many disturbing. This piece is set somewhere during seventh and eighth grade when the nuns who taught us were particularly quick to pounce on normal pre/early teen behavior. Too many times I felt the sudden, unannounced crack of a hand or a book, many more times I heard the sound of my classmates being smacked or hit. I wanted to write a piece that would approximate a similar rapidity, echoing the unexpected blows we received, while holding within the piece the notion of an overarching but harmful justification for the abuse. I wanted to delve into how prayer was viewed in relation to ‘salvation’ and explore the thinking behind the actions, why it was sanctioned. Just to contextualize, I grew up in the 1960’s, so the piece is particular to that period in Catholic schools.
Crucifixes were everywhere around me, particularly in school. So often I’d look at the figure of Jesus on the cross, many times made of plastic, and wonder what might be going on in his head. I so often wondered what he was really thinking while he hung on the cross, before he died. Also, his body was near-naked, disturbing but somewhat sexy for a kid like me, where every allusion to bodies and their components was confoundingly exciting.
I used a second person narrator and thought of it as an elder authority figure addressing me, specifically, or perhaps others who had similar experiences. I thought third person wouldn’t work here, because perhaps this isn’t universal enough of a scenario. I wanted it to be memoir-ish, albeit not specifically about me.
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?
As I wrote above, this piece was motivated by personal history, and I’ve tried to get at a long-ago situation and experience, which I needed to explore. The novels I’ve worked on are of similar origin. “Prayer” was written fast, more as a notebook entry, different than my fiction pieces. I knew it had to be short, snappy, to mimic the events described.
Once I have a draft, I go through the story/piece and change words, phrases, sentences, trying to get to a sound or flow that seems correct, that seems right for the narrator. I love the initial stages of writing, where I don’t worry about making sense, or about the words I’ve chosen. The blank page is freedom to let my imagination leap and let whatever seems to want to come out do so. I’m not a big wholesale reviser, so much of the first rush of writing often remains through later drafts.
Where do you feel this work fits in on a historical level? How about aesthetic or stylewise and can you particularize your answer?
I’d cite the precedent in other media: Federico Fellini’s film “Amarcord,” for its depiction of boyhood. Photographer Mario Giacomelli’s “Scanno Boy,” a photograph I own (See below), which hangs in my work room, for its glowing young boy among the darkness and cloaked figures.
One thing regarding “Prayer” and history: it does feel to me like the prayers I’d say as a kid, prayers centuries old that had the sing-song repetition of words and phrases, short sentences, and of course always the fact that you (I, we) had to keep repeating the prayer, day in and out. I like the idea that “Prayer”, too, might have a meditative quality, might be praise to a higher power, a plea, a confession.
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 format worked for me. The piece had to be short, and I also edited it down from earlier drafts for submission to SHOWCASE, which helped it. I think the piece might not make sense to some readers who aren’t familiar with Catholicism, or even the specific Catholicism as it was practiced and taught in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s. There’s a lot of shorthand in here: how nuns smell, their habits (i.e. both their clothing and their actions!) corporal punishment in schools. Sure, most people know about these things, but to have experienced the terror of the situation, to really believe Hell was just one unconfessed mortal sin away – well, that’s a specific time and place in history. That’s one thing we writers do, though, explain how events, life, felt and sounded, how they smelled. Therefore, this piece is reliant on the knowledge and history that’s been written about Catholicism and other religions, and specifically how that life was enforced onto kids in school, and an attempt to communicate that to a wider audience.
I do feel I got at the internal idea(l) that I wanted. Not exactly, but not too far away. See my analysis in the last question.
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 won’t compare “Prayer” to the writing, but the conflicts in “The Last Temptation of Christ,” by Nikos Kazantzakis and “My Name is Ascher Lev,” by Chaim Potok, come to mind. A struggle of faith and the fear of retribution is wrestled with in those books (as I remember it) and that has often been part of my identity and certainly operative in this piece. Full disclosure – I am not unafraid of the consequences of writing or having “Prayer” published. Though I stopped practicing Catholicism decades ago, I don’t think the fears will ever go away.
I am influenced by everything I read. Right now I’m rereading Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The next long piece I have planned to work on will incorporate/be influenced by these books.
—First appeared in The Charles Carter: A Working Anthology, (online) August, 2019.
2 OBJECT 2:
Haunted House
“Art is a house that tries to be haunted.” –Emily Dickinson
I have locked my Door— To hold Calvary in. This is not Expiation— For my Errors here.
Daily I walk the shore— That laps against my Brain. A quiet as before A wedding march begins
Permeates this stillness— This Haunted House of Words Where the Bee worships And wind Transports the Bird.
There is no man who knows My silent Ecstasy— My words together mar A white, Inviolate sea
That stretches out like Snow— Or a wedding gown. In such a simple Garment, I would not deign to Drown.
I want to hold that Sea— Its Measure in my palm And let it give to Me— Immortal Eponym.
There is the ladder of Dust The blind casts down— I go to place my Foot Upon its Yellow rung.
I choose the White election! Without the cup or host, I whisper—through the walls— This house's lonely ghost.
2 IDEA 2:
An obvious challenge that Ms. Dickinson set for me in “Haunted House” involves her legendary use of the dash. I was anxious to see if I could make those dashes work in expressive ways. Everyone who has seen Dickinson’s hand written drafts knows those dashes are tamed, inexorably I’d say, by print. In Dickinson’s hand they are various in effect, sometimes short like hovering commas, sometimes a violent stroke across the page that impels the eye with energy and direction. I of course was confined to the humble Times New Roman two-hyphened, somewhat etiolated, dash. But I did my best. In stanza five, I hope Ms. Dickinson might approve of my dash, “That stretches out like Snow— / Or a wedding gown.” The dash makes the reader pause over “Snow,” playing out the momentum, stretching the line out, so the next line surprises the reader with the wedding gown image, that surprise being emphasized (I hope) by the rhythm since the line has only two stresses instead of the expected three of the normative meter. There’s not space enough here for a full discussion of my failures, so here are a few concerns I have. I worry that the pace of the poem is too headlong. I think my use of polysyllabic diction might overwhelm the poem in places or perhaps (alas) throughout. I have doubts that the last stanza works as I had hoped. I wanted the line, “I choose the White election!”, to connect with the previous figures for the blank page—the white sea, the snow, the wedding dress—to suggest the idea that Dickinson rejected romance, marriage, and religion in favor of writing and art. I wanted that idea to balance the emotion evoked by the “lonely ghost.” I fear the figurative connection is too tenuous in my execution and the emotion overwhelms the idea.
Showcase: We’d love to hear how you conceived of the piece. Can you tell us about the inspiration behind it? What led you to the subject matter? Can you expound on the use of nature, both plants and animals, their interactions and imagery in the poem? How closely did you track word choice, line breaks, when to switch sentences for this poem?
Scott Ward: When I was in college, I read a poem by Theodore Roethke titled, “No Bird,” a lovely and admiring elegy for Emily Dickinson. The beauty of Roethke’s poem was heart-rending and his poetic facility exquisite, and so, of course, the poem filled me with a raging jealousy. Upon that first reading, I knew one day I would try something like it though it would be decades before I felt up to the task. In my poem, the nature imagery has nothing from my own experience; I’m channeling all the details through Dickinson’s aesthetic and treatment in my attempt to capture her voice and style. For me, word and image, of all poetic technique, are the two elements that are essential to my writing process. Most of what I try to do on the page involves an exploration of words that evoke sights, smells, textures, or sounds; therefore, I don’t really track word choice (until I’m revising). I don’t really think about choosing words at all, at least not when I’m working in a state of effective concentration. Choosing words is the essential work, the bait I use to try and coax that shy animal imagination out from under the cerebral couch.
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?
There are few things I love more than learning about poetic technique. I have always to be on guard against the impulse to follow my wife around the house reading incredible passages from Saintsbury’s A Historical Manual of English Prosody because I love my wife more and wish to stay married to her. I teach creative writing and my teaching is centered on technique and craft. Yet at the start of each semester, I stand before my aspiring poets and tell them, “If one could write a poem with a recipe, everyone would do it and they would all be great. Craft will not make a good poem.” And yet I urge my students to consider it a necessity. Craft does two things for the working poet. First, it makes her a more aesthetically informed and insightful reader. When a reader’s mind is brimming with craft knowledge, she understands, admires, and takes more pleasure from all the poems she reads. And when all of this aesthetic experience is treasured away in the poet’s mind, the second salutary result obtains. She discovers when she sits down to compose, she does so with a sensibility that is refined and honed to the creative task. She sits down in the presence of the mystery. And she does so not because she is applying the rules, but because she is drawing upon the generous conduit of her highly developed sensibility that allows other poems and other poets to speak through her. This is how art makes us better than we could ever be on our own. And this preternatural connection to our communion of saints, writers and poets dead and living, entering into conversation with them as we work—that’ pretty exciting too.
Where do you feel this work fits in on a historical level? How about aesthetic or style-wise and can you particularize your answer?
I think the most immediate influences on my work are the mid-twentieth century American poets, including Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Donald Hall, Richard Wilbur, and William Carlos Williams. I studied under the poet James Dickey for my masters in creative writing. But of course “Haunted House” is essentially an imitation of a nineteenth century poet. Therefore, my poem exhibits Dickinson’s deep roots in poetic conventions and her advances in taste and aesthetics. The roots involve the form, one which Dickinson often employed, called Half Measure (a line of three beats plus a terminal pause that allows the line to keep the time of a four beat line), and it flows through Dickinson’s poems back through American and English hymnody, through earlier English verse, bubbling from its clear source in the accentual-alliterative verse of Anglo-Saxon poetry. The advances come in content and treatment. Dickinson’s poems rely on natural images of local woods and fields. Her voice is authentic and not affected by the artificial intonations of the Fireside poets. So if the reader finds himself comfortably familiar with “Haunted House,” it owes entirely to the genius of Emily Dickinson, whose talent anticipates in a miraculous way the colloquial voice, embrace of concrete detail, and lyric treatment of the twentieth century poets.
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 late poet Richard Hugo, in his wonderful book The Triggering Town, writes, “I would much rather mean what I say than say what I mean.” I don’t think I have ever, in what I might be so bold to call my mature experience as a writer, started a poem with something to say in mind. I don’t think I am clever or talented enough to write that way. When I was in my twenties, I heard Richard Wilbur at a reading answer a question about how he began a poem. He said that before he started a poem, he decided the subject, the form, the length, and the theme, and once those matters were settled, he would sit down to write. I can remember thinking, Good Heavens, if I tried to write like that, I’d never produce a word. When I write, I try to discover something I had no idea I wanted to say, and once I’ve said it, then that’s what I meant all along! I did not feel limited by the submission requirements though I submitted a poem I had already written, and from my answer above it should come as no surprise that I would likely not write a poem for a themed issue of a journal or some such a thing. I would only submit if I already had something suitable. I would be quick to add that the aesthetic focus of Showcase is really creative. By means of this imaginative juxtaposition of written art and writers’ techniques and perspectives, readers and writers can make rich discoveries.
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?
Well, concerning “Haunted House,” I’ve already talked a lot about Emily Dickinson, whom I adore. She inspires me by the sheer brilliance of her poems and by the fact that she built such a great artistic edifice in spite of all the barriers hemming her in as a woman in the nineteenth century. I feel fortunate to live in an age in which one can access poetry from around the world, and fortunate as well to participate in the traditions of American poetry, in which I find pleasure and inspiration everywhere I turn. I am surprised and astonished every time I read Anne Sexton. I love Wallace Stevens. I think Martin Espada’s “Alabanza” is a great American poem. I find enormous pleasure in the poetry of Mark Doty and Stanley Kunitz, whose poem “The Wellfleet Whale,” is a thing of immense beauty. I love the superlative talents of Donika Kelly and Natalie Diaz. Crazy Tony Hoagland is a poet I love to read and teach. His poem “America” should be read by everyone. I am never far away from the work of Yusef Komunyakaa. His poems are accomplished, his voice singular, and his books unforgettable. Dien Cai Dau is a favorite of mine, and I also revere Taboo. And would any life be possible without Whitman?When it comes to poetic accomplishment, contemporary American poetry presents an embarrassment of riches, a deep well of inspiration.
Chad Sokolovsky, Author of Prophecy Mechanic (Poems)
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
Scott Ward, Author of Rebel: The American Iliad.
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.
Payment Calculator (payments made to writers so far):$1300
Please subscribe to our new format, share with friends, colleagues, and classmates, and consider submitting work. Submitting is free at a limited rate, which you can read about just below.
Update: At our one year anniversary (July), we’ll be permitting individuals to repeat submit on a quarterly basis. So, submitting will be capped at 1x per 3 months. We want to encourage more and different submitters. We also want to encourage folks who were not selected to put in some time to changing their piece before resubmitting the same one (we get a lot of submission spamming which makes it difficult to give the attention new work deserves). If you’d like to submit more than 1 piece, we ask for a reading fee. Folks who become monthly subscribers will be able to submit 1x per month for free and up to 5 poems or 2 flash pieces, and will be capped after that. Yearly subscribers, in addition to being named as a supporter, will be able to submit extra pieces for free and 1x to our larger contest in December. If funds are tight, we encourage anyone in need of a fee waiver to write to us! We also encourage submerged and historically underrepresented voices, the whole spectrum of writers, to engage.
Update 2: In our 2nd year of operation, we are looking at ways to both expand the content we offer as well as convert our literary endeavor into something that can be sustaining for the editors while also increasing payouts for the writers we publish. We’re considering a quarterly contest that carries a dedicated issue to one writer, as well as a best of the year prize. We also may produce an anthology or print version of our letter on an annual or semi-annual basis.
Finally, we will read very actively and pledge an eight-week turn around for all submitted work. We will generally 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!
