Showcase March 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!
The vernal equinox has delivered us into spring. Thank you for lending us your eyes and energy, and thanks to everyone for submitting to this issue. Our reading for this issue was very difficult as so many folks sent in great work. It’s been a pleasure. Without further ado, this weeks selections are... Emily Adams-Aucoin for Poetry and Laura Barker for Prose! Congrats to them.
As a reminder, we publish 1x per month on the 3rd Tuesday (sometimes a week later) and feature writers of all origins and all levels. If you missed it, here’s last month’s issue!
In this warming last week of March, as the days lengthen bit by bit, we wish you fullness, fortune, and fair health. Keep up with your writing practice. Make time for reading, too. Read our literary newsletter to see what others are working on, how they conceive of self, of their craft and creations. As always, 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 and make a type of home in our midst.
In this month’s issue,
Laura Barker considers familiar estrangement, the meaning of guilt and scars, how objects of import, such as a ring, play into our understanding of how we feel and what we feel. Clean, direct prose delivers her message. And Emily Adams-Aucoin delves into motherhood, the peripatetic nature of feeling in relation to the identity and in so doing considers the darker side or the less socially acceptable side of reluctance, apprehension, and other truths that are a part of being a parent. Both pieces are thinking pieces as well as feeling pieces—we like this! They work by striking different notes but both chew on the concept of familial relations, child to parent and parent to child.
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!
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!
PROSE
Flash Fiction by Laura Barker
—Originally published by Showcase: Object & Idea.
OBJECT 1:
The Ring
Gavin was five when he realised something was up with his mother, and ten when he realised it was permanent, or at the very least, not going anywhere very fast. By age twenty he had moved out, and they went low contact at first, and then estranged. He read about estrangement on the forums, from both sides – estranged children, and parents of estranged children. The parents of estranged children were sinister and hilarious, claiming to not know anything of the reasons for estrangement in the same breath as touting that the reasons for estrangement were unreasonable.
When she wrote to him that she was dying, Gavin initially paid no notice. She used to tell him she was dying every time she wanted him to come visit her. She was not the kind of person who could say, “I miss you, will you come see me?” She would only ever say things like, “The doctors have told me I have only two weeks to live. Do you want to come and collect your baby photos before I pass to the other side?”
But of course Gavin knew that one day she would be right about the dying. She would win, in fact, he would be in the wrong. And maybe it was this time. It was so hard to know. So he asked for proof. She did not say what the illness was, so he was not expecting a particular kind of proof, but he definitely was not expecting the large sign-for box that arrived at his door at 09:00 on a Monday while he was in a Zoom call that started at 08:30. He went straight back to his safeguarding training and left the box at his feet, but he ripped off the initial layer of paper with his bare toes as he listened to the different kinds of abuses that can happen to children and vulnerable adults. At 09:45 they took a tea break and Gavin sliced the box open with a kitchen knife. Inside the large box was a lot of bubble wrap and inside the bubble wrap was a small ring box. He opened the ring box. Inside the ring box was a finger with a ring on it.
Gavin screamed and dropped the box. The finger bounced onto the sheepskin rug on his laminate floor. He bought the sheepskin rug from a car boot sale for £5, right at the end when everything went cheap. He had been looking for a reasonably priced sheepskin rug for months and he was extremely happy with it. He steam cleaned it every week, even after he read that article about how domestic steam cleaners do not heat the water up to an effective temperature and do not have the power required to do any kind of decent cleaning.
The bounce prompted Gavin to pick the finger up and take a close look. Fake. But a good fake, made of something rubbery that nonetheless had the texture of skin. It reminded him of realistic sex toys. The finger looked unmistakably like his mother’s ring finger, and he thought it particularly striking that she had included her keloid scar, something she was very embarrassed about. It also included her wedding ring, something she wore all day every day even though she had only been married for a matter of weeks, and it had been an annulment, not even a divorce.
The wedding ring first belonged to her ex-husband’s (not Gavin’s father’s) grandmother and it had been passed down the generations to his mother. Gavin had always admired the ring and his mother had always mocked him for his admiration, teasing him about his love of women’s jewellery, whilst claiming publicly to be proud of her gay son and a huge believer in gay rights.
The ring fit perfectly on his little finger and he wore it for three short weeks before the sight of it started to make him feel sick and he took it to a reputable jewelers and got a decent sum of money for it – nothing spectacular, but more than half his month’s rent. He put it into savings. He had been slow to open a savings account while in touch with his mother out of fear of her finding it, but now he was proud of the amount he had saved up. His mother died the next month. Did he regret not seeing her before she went? He was not sure.
IDEA 1:
I got engaged last year and I lost my engagement ring shortly after I put it on (my sister warned my girlfriend this would happen – I am really bad with jewellery and I don’t have a single bit of jewellery that’s outlasted my outstanding ability to mislay it). I think I lost it gardening so it might be buried in my back garden but I’m moving houses soon so I guess it will revert back to my landlord. Maybe someone will find it one day, although no-dig is becoming popular so maybe it will remain buried there until the heat death of the earth. When I was a child I used to look at my mother’s engagement ring. It has a ruby on it. She used to put it on the kitchen windowsill when she washed up or deep fried or held vegetables over a gas flame to get the char grill. I miss her hands, and her care. The other day I started to write her a letter thanking her for being my mother. When I was about eight my mother made me promise to never write about her or her mother. This story is a tiny bit for her but it’s also really not.
INTERVIEW 1
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 structure, how time works in the piece? And the ring, can you unpack what this might mean, why a ring? Finally, the message, the protagonist’s ambivalence…what is going on there?
Barker: I wasn’t particularly inspired before I wrote it tbh (to be honest), I do the Stephen King thing of trying to write 2,000 words every day whether you’re inspired or not (I’m usually not), and this was part of my 2,000 word count. I have a bunch of first lines saved up in a document and I picked one (‘I was five when I realised ___’) and I inserted the name Gavin because someone named Gavin had just emailed me. The rest of the story appeared as I was writing it. I like the use of ages, so you can jump around with time, and how the times of the day kind of places things, even though I personally never know what time of day it is. But I’m taking an a cappella improv course and my teacher just told us to all wear watches for the show so we know when to wrap up, so I’m about to become more time-aware. I have a vague AHDH diagnosis and I read that thing Gabor Maté said, that people with ADHD fear time slipping away, and this causes distress which leads to other things like distraction and inattention. There’s something of me in Gavin when he starts thinking about the car boot sale he bought his sheepskin rug at (I have the same £5 sheepskin rug) while he’s looking at his mother’s finger bouncing on the floor.
The ring is from an article I read about trigger warnings by Lindy West. West talks about the phenomenon of ring avulsion where a ring you’re wearing gets caught on an object and your whole finger gets yanked off (don’t Google this if you’re squeamish, is the warning West focuses on). I read the article years ago and then recently friends of mine said they wear these rings made of flexible material to avoid ring avulsion. The image of a ring on a finger that’s separate from the body has been in my mind since. I think in the story it means something about separation, and gifts.
The protagonist’s ambivalence. Okay. Hmm. I had a therapist once (hi Elizabeth) who said something about the difficulty of experiencing abuse from the same parents you experience care and love from. She talked about that back and forth. There’s this essay I’m obsessed with called Relentless Hope: The Refusal to Grieve about, well I guess about relentless hope (that your caregivers or their substitutes will be different) and the refusal to grieve (what you never had). I think when Gavin sells the ring he has in some way given up hope. A friend of mine spoke to me once about her estranged dad dying and I thought about that writing the last lines.
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’m actually not a very motivated writer; I’m more habitual (I write most weekday mornings on the tube on the way to work). If I was leaving it up to internal motivation rather than habit I think I would barely ever write. I never think of technique consciously but I am thrilled by other people’s. The first time I read Sula I was so humbled and entranced by her sparsity. So few words to encapsulate such a lot. I also got that reading Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John. Actually no that’s a lie, I do consider tenses, which I think is technique. I mostly write in present tense, or that point of view where you say ‘you’ all the time (‘you’re five when you realise there’s something up with your mother’), so Gavin’s story is a bit of a departure for me. Oh and I can’t remember where I learnt this but to mix it up with your sentence lengths (like alternating between super long and staccato), and I also read somewhere to never say anything after speech but ‘said’ (as in, don’t go saying ‘Khadīja replied curtly’ or ‘exclaimed Paul seductively’), and I do stick to this. I normally start out writing stories that are 2,000 words or 1,000 words. I might come back to them later and add extra or take away but after I’ve first written something I tend not to go back and look over it because I always find it vaguely disgusting. After six months or so I’m more like, “Oh I actually like this.”
Where do you feel this work fits in on a historical level? How about aesthetic or stylewise and can you particularize your answer?
I guess there’s something pandemic era about the Zoom call (although I actually used Zoom pre-pandemic), and I think the mainstream knowledge of parents estranged from their children forums became a thing a bit earlier. Maybe like 2010s? 2015s? The realistic sex toy skin is maybe something you’d read about on Autostraddle before purchasing. Overall I’d say it’s post-corona writing. I think of it as being black and queer writing: the keloid on his mother’s replica finger, something about him ripping up paper with his bare toes.
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 is pretty short. I would like to delve more into why Gavin’s mother sent him a replica of her finger with a ring on it as proof of her upcoming death. And what he does with the finger after he takes the ring off it. Oh and why she has a scar on her finger. I know you can get keloids from just braiding your hair too tight or getting a mosquito bite but I think the backstory is more than that.
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?
This is probably just going to be a list of my favourite authors. Here we go. Jamaica Kincaid, C.L. Clark, Toni Morrison, LiLi K Bright, Akwaeke Emezi, Ama Josephine Budge, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Yrsa Daley-Ward, Ocean Vuong, PJ Samuels, Rita Indiana, Olumide Popoola, Maria Machado, Jay Bernard, Bessie Head, Travis Alabanza, Carinya Sharples. I’m sure I’ve missed loads. For influence, hmm. Hard to say. I’m really not sure.
POETRY
A Poem by Emily Adams-Aucoin
—Originally published by Showcase: Object & Idea.
2 OBJECT 2:
Motherhood Apologia
the bottles are washed, the baby is fed.
none of the messes that we made remain.
let me confess as the guilt is so
heavy: today, there were some seconds,
minutes even, that I was a mother
only to myself, even as the baby sat
right there, babbling in her secret
language. I shed my mother skin,
sunned in the desert of my longing,
wrote this poem. meanwhile, the baby
watched with her big, wet, love-filled eyes.
she reached out for me & I knew that
I must put myself away again, as
one does to the sweaters come
summer, the closet barely closing,
stuffed as it is with what
accumulates over the years—
all that we fought not to lose.
2 IDEA 2:
Often, my writing acts as a sort of meditation. Similar to the practice of drawing enso circles, poetry can act as an invitation to bring you back to the present moment. This poem began as a concept: what do I feel the need to apologize for in my motherhood? What feelings or thoughts does society paint as shameful for mothers to have? Historically, mothers have been painted (literally and figuratively) as self-sacrificing and seraphic. This piece is a kind of response to that, an attempt to insert human fallibility into the conversation. Motherhood is full of contradictions. There’s so much love that it feels holy. There’s also persistent guilt, shame, and exhaustion. None of that takes away from the love, but all of it needs to be reckoned with. This piece is a part of that reckoning for me.
2 INTERVIEW 2
Showcase: We’d love to hear how you conceived of the piece. Can you tell us about the inspiration behind it?
Adams-Aucoin: In December 2021, I became a mother. Prior to giving birth, I did everything I could think of to prepare. I painted the nursery bright green, bought floral onesies, and stockpiled diapers in every size. I read the books and listened to the podcasts. Still, nothing could have prepared me for the way motherhood would change the very landscape of my inner world. I became obsessed with the idea of being a good mother. Pretty typical, right? But, still—philosophically, what does being a good mother mean? How much of our selfhood do we sacrifice as a parent before we begin to, inadvertently, teach our children to do the same? These are some of the questions that led to the creation of this piece.
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?
On a form level, I knew immediately that I wanted this piece to be one long stanza to mimic the chaotic nature of parenthood. Of course, it’s valuable to parse out exactly what feelings are present, but there’s also something to be said for accepting the whole mess of it, which is what I tried to do with this piece. Specific language choices were preserved through rounds of revision: “sunned in the desert of my longing” was one such choice. I wanted to use the desert to describe my longing because of the vast, harsh connotations associated with that ecosystem. Often, the small changes, like adding an em dash or a comma, come later in the writing process. The language and the feeling that the poem invokes are the first priorities.
Where do you feel this work fits in on a historical level? How about aesthetic or style-wise and can you particularize your answer?
While I feel that motherhood is an almost ahistorical topic, writing about it certainly isn’t. Before the 1970’s and the second wave feminist movement, it was relatively rare to find a poem that spoke honestly about motherhood, that talked openly about the challenges and struggles of the role. I think my work fits comfortably with those writers who wanted to express motherhood as they saw it, flaws and all.
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 think that any piece that talks about motherhood or parenthood is limited in nature because of the inherent complexities of that role. There are so many daily (hourly, minute by minute) joys and sorrows that to fit them all into one poem would be impossible. I do feel that I honored the moment that the poem speaks of, and that is all that I can ask of my work.
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’m inspired by countless writers and poets, but the ones that I’m reading lately are Sharon Olds, Mary Howe, Ada Limon, WS Merwin, Maggie Smith, and Tracy K. Smith. I’m especially moved by those writers that explore motherhood and their relation to it.
or
or
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:
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):$900Please 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!