Showcase November 2022

Object & Idea

Dear Readers,

Despite early winter chills and too-short days, we welcome you to our letter focused on literature, craft, & analysis.

We publish 1x per month on the 3rd Tuesday and feature writers of all origins and all levels. Please read last month’s issue!

Showcase showers you in pre-icicle beauty, in November rainy days spent curled up with cocoa or tea, a throw, and an easy view of the soggy cold world. Stay warm and stay reading!

One final note: read till the end for our announcement of the Showcase-Freewrite Prize for the January Issue. Here to skip to the end.

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In this month’s issue,

we’re featuring great work from more mid and early-career lovely humans: flash fiction from L. Favicchia—a dreamy story worthy of our appreciation and analysis—and poetry from Shannan Mann—a classic form called ghazal with Arabic origins and an interesting rhyme scheme.

We’re so intrigued by our writers this month, each posing a different look at how to think about craft and creativity, particularly the self in relation to work (these writers truly open up about their inner thinking and we thank and bless them for their generosity.

Their work deserves multiple and close inspections. Readers will see much to relate to, much in object & idea to learn from. Please join in with discussion of your own work or (constructive) opinions. Read, ponder, and enjoy!

• Jump to Prose

  • Idea

  • Interview

• Jump to Poetry

  • Idea

  • Interview

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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.
  

Become a Patron of Showcase to appear at the front of every issue. Follow this link for our full list of supporters: HERE!

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PROSE

Flash Fiction by L. Favicchia
—Originally published by Showcase: Object & Idea, November, 2022.

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OBJECT:

Hypnopomp

I had nightmares long after Father had drained the marsh, and it was a while before I could hold frogs again, afraid they may try to avenge themselves on me, bubble up through holes in my back, leave me always open. The Suriname toad gives birth this way, burying her young in her own flesh, releasing them through skin that looks like it would forever whistle if she walked through a windy forest in her aftermath, and I was always afraid of that kind of love. But my mother brought him to me, an admirably sized toad, one who had earned his place here but had fled to our grassy yard with the marsh filled and gone.

His face was half mowed away but still sputtering. My mom was too weepy with guilt to fully form words, but she trusted me at ten. I watched the abandoned lawn mower rolling by itself, the vibrations from its own popping motor carrying it slowly forward. I took the toad in my hands, an unexpected puddle, brought it to the garage and placed it in the straw-lined box where the one-legged infant chickadee hadn’t made it through the night—I had buried its soft, motherless body but left the box where it was. The toad tipped over and kicked its legs until I sat it back up, blood-damp hay matted to its missing face. Father’s small, agile hammer lay out in the open on his anvil.

My mother had corralled the mower, and it sputtered for a moment before remaining silent, leaving the front yard half pinstriped. The soggy remnants of marsh were left in limbo, too water-filled to ever cut, a protest against my father who had drained it, expunging many years of myths about drowned surveyors, of moaning slippery elms dropping branches upon wayfarers, of long, low groans and corn knives hidden beneath burial mounds, and many generations of leopard frogs. Sloped and dried, the water was slowly growing back beneath straw and forcibly planted grass that threatened to sink tires. It never wanted to grow there, and most of the seeds resisted germination, though a few were forced into life. I took the toad to the rocks by the black drainage pipe, set it on quartz and steadied my hand—it had no eyes to look at me.

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IDEA:

This piece was originally a short prose poem of no more than 100 words. The main narrative elements existed, and I knew they all meant something, but I didn’t know what. The marsh and all its living creatures had been a setting of great import to me in all of my writing, and it seemed I always returned there. This prompted me to more deeply consider this constant return and why, from an emotional standpoint, it seemed to keep happening—why this land and these animals were so important and why I felt such a strong connection to them. A lot of my theoretical work is based in animal and animacy studies, which suggest that othered groups of people are denigrated by a stereotyped link to nature, which is perceived as less “animate” than humans. It is in this way that Western society has justified the abuse of or violence towards animals and the environment and, thereby, those people stereotyped as passive, feminine, animal-like, or otherwise linked to nature. I was aware of this link since I was a child, though I couldn’t put a name to it or identify the concept. However, I realized that it was this previously unconscious or subconscious knowledge that caused me to feel such a deep connection between not only myself and nature, but to what my father was inflicting upon the nature around me, which I saw as an extension of what he was inflicting upon me. This allowed me to identify the deep guilt I felt for not having tried to do something for the marsh which, as it turned out, also mirrored my inability to protect myself.

I don’t often discuss the intended meaning of my work as I believe that, particularly in pieces which are not overt, the reader may find different connections to the work that differ from the intent but are perhaps more meaningful to that individual. However, ultimately I returned to this piece to flesh it out in light of this small revelation I had had, adding more interiority and strengthening the connections between the speaker and the animals and marsh to create what ultimately is intended to be a narrative of a speaker reflecting upon their abuse and the regret they feel towards their own self-preserving passivity which inevitably led them to either respond just as passively towards or even contribute to the same abuse inflicted upon them.

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INTERVIEW

Showcase: We’d love to hear how you conceived of the piece. Can you tell us about the inspiration behind it, why it’s framed as a dream? On another note, the piece is filled with lush detail in such a small space, can you talk about details, how that works, how you managed it?

L. Favicchia: This piece contains a lot of semi-autobiographical elements, or snippets of memory from my childhood. Nature has always been extremely important to me, beginning simply as fascination when I was a child and developing into a much deeper connection and personal philosophy later on. While the piece is probably equal parts fiction and truth, it draws upon several real events which, as a child, left me with a sense of guilt that I didn’t understand until I was older. The piece is framed in a dreamlike way not only because that was how my experience of many of these events felt at the time, but also because memory to me can often feel like a dream, be misremembered or altered, forgotten or invented like a dream, while the emotional core remains true no matter how much time passes. The main inspiration for this piece comes from one of its truths; my father draining the marsh in our front yard, which was a heartbreaking event for me and also had an enormous impact on the ecosystem of the place where I grew up. It was an event that had many emotional and physical consequences at the time and which now I reflect upon as an image of the abuse I both experienced and witnessed as well as the guilt and regret I have often felt, or still feel, at my learned inability to prevent what was happening around me, and the fear that kept me silent and unable to advocate for myself or the people and things I cared about. These lingering feelings have remained manifest in these dreamlike memories. The condensed details I believe come from having relived, redreamed, and reanalyzed these events in my head over and over again for so many years—by now I have replayed every moment, envisioned how they could have been different, dreamed about every possibility so many times I think I could probably tell the same story again and again in one hundred different ways.

Bonus Q: Why did you mention the hammer and anvil in the second paragraph? What do you think that brings to the piece, offers to the reader?

When a colleague of mine read this piece, they jokingly referred to that image as “Chekhov’s hammer,” and to some degree that was the intent. The hammer and anvil on their own serve as an image or reminder of my father’s presence, even when not physically present. He is a farrier, so the hammer and anvil are the cornerstone tools of his trade. By themselves they are innocent enough, but in the context of this piece, wherein the young speaker’s mother hands them a toad who is injured to a degree that is clearly fatal, my intent was to create a sense of anxiety and/or a reluctant sense of understanding in the reader, perhaps mirroring what the speaker also reluctantly knew in that moment—that the hammer and anvil would surely reappear by the end of the narrative, and likely not in a pleasant way.

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? What’s it like to work with theme and motif within the parameters of Flash?

While I write in multiple genres, my foundations are in poetry, so image, rhythm, and using as precise language as possible are three elements that are very important to me, no matter what genre I’m working in. Flash is such an interesting genre to me, particularly since it has many overlaps with prose poetry, and I often feel that the two terms can be interchangeable. What I like about Flash is the fact that while it is narrative, it still offers opportunity to employ the poetics I enjoy, which involve a lot of repeating images and motifs. At the same time, Flash offers a bit more length to work with, which allows more time and space to incorporate those repetitions in a way that I find to be more satisfying—having some breath between certain images allows for them to be more subtle and, I think, more powerful in that subtlety. For instance, returning to your previous question regarding the hammer and anvil, I don’t think that’s a move that I could have pulled off in a short, lyrical poem. However, I also appreciate that Flash is still fundamentally a short genre. As mentioned, I primarily work in poetry or hybrid poetic forms, so my strengths lie in theme, image, and motif, whereas traditional plots, character arcs, etc., while I appreciate them in others’ writing, don’t tend to be my primary interests or strong suits. Ultimately, I find that Flash is a genre that I get along with well in that it allows me the space for more narrative writing and an opportunity for more storytelling while also working under constraints that I find comfortable for my poetics.

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

I really love this question, though I also find it intimidating. I find it challenging to consider where something in the present fits on a historical level, as I’m sure, aside from some of the writing movements that named themselves in the moment, most people weren’t necessarily identifying where their writing was coming out of historically. However, if I had to say, in my studies, I was always drawn to the Confessional poets and to postmodern civil rights and feminist writers who championed the power of the authorial “I,” writing in a deeply open and honest manner, and more speculative writers who employed narrative fragmentation and historiographic metafiction. In my work as a whole, I think I tend to use the authorial “I” to speak to both individual yet emotionally universal experiences shared by people of various marginalized identities related to gender, sexuality, disability, and chronic illness. I am also very interested in the concept of lying versus truth-telling in writing and personal narrative, particularly as it relates to personal history and experience as well as reinventing or re-envisioning lived experience and social realities or fictions. From a form perspective, I find I am constantly frustrated by genre distinctions. On one hand I do understand why they exist and enjoy reading and writing in them from time to time, yet I also find these distinctions to be limiting and, as many writers push back against such distinctions in creating and writing in hybrid forms (i.e., prose poetry, flash, micro fiction), I wonder if we are not just inventing new words to describe the same thing, or to describe something which doesn’t need to be bound by description. From a form perspective, these are the things I am constantly thinking about and pushing back against, though to what degree of success I don’t know.

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?

As far as limitations go, I am grateful to Showcase for taking an interest in this piece, as I feel I was able to do exactly what I wanted with it. However, in an environment where journals have to divide their submission queues into different genres, I have found submitting this piece and pieces like it to be rather challenging. I often find with pieces like this that I am not sure whether to submit them as poetry, flash, micro-fiction, creative nonfiction, micro-CNF, etc., and I do feel that pieces like this are potentially limited by whatever interpretation or definition of those genres the people reading them are working under. I find it is often a guessing game trying to assess what genre to file pieces like this under and whether or not my guess will end up working for or against the reception of my work and my chances of getting these pieces out into the world.

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?

Funny enough, most of the authors whose work has inspired me or whom I enjoy reading the most write in ways which are very stylistically different from my own writing. However, I do think there are certain craft elements I’ve borrowed or learned from them. For instance, I really love Kimiko Hahn’s use of layered images in her poetry, and George Saunders’s and Aimee Bender’s use of surrealism. I am also a big fan of Kelly Link and Karen Russell and the unique speculative narratives they tell. The influence that is probably easiest to see in this piece, however, comes from Lauren Slater’s Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir. I felt a deep connection to this book as it deals with mental illness, familial relations, and the experience of growing up with a chronic illness, but, as implied by the title, the reader never really knows what is true, what is a half-truth, or what is entirely fabricated. It raises some truly fascinating questions about truth in the literal sense and truth in the sense of lived experience, which is full of the many complexities that age, time, memory, emotion, longing, perceptions of our interactions with others, and repression imbue. These are the ideas that I find myself considering all the time in my writing and which I feel Slater executes exceedingly well.   

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POETRY

by Shannan Mann
—Originally published by Showcase: Object & Idea, November, 2022.

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OBJECT:

In Marriage

I have laced the worms in the dirt like he did my hair in marriage. 
Birth lilies, burn weeds — repeat. There is no fresh air in marriage.

Love lives longest if it is left unnamed. You believe in perfection,
but to find David glowing in a block of marble is rare in marriage.  

God rummages through the galaxies to find another. He has gone
crazy, lovers chant, who now will hear our prayer in marriage? 

The broken wedding glass was meant to bless us till death. 
Reflect on yourself, I won’t alone stare in marriage.

Why am I here? For every question, you tug a skein off my dress.
The answer is your body. You’ll see fire, not flesh, if I bare in marriage. 

If you find yourself waiting for a train to another universe and remember
that you forgot your baggage — go anyway, have an affair in marriage. 

An orgy of memories — give me sleep instead — turn yourself over
until it’s over. Sex with yourself is the same as despair in marriage.

For you: fortune, spice, marvel, door, shoe, a lock;
for me: silence, violins, a window is care in marriage.

My parents loved each other so much they wanted to be the one
to bury the other. I thought I’d end up elsewhere in marriage.

The costume I’ve stitched will look white in any light.
Desire is the only dress time cannot repair in marriage.

This is not an atonement, I want to be defeated.
Shannan, play the game though it is unfair in marriage.

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IDEA:

I should first note the most important components of a ghazal. A qaafiya is the rhyming word that precedes the radeef, the word or phrase which repeats at the end of each couplet. For my radeef, I chose the words “in marriage.” The qaafiya is usually a word that has several rhyme possibilities but this need not be a necessity as ghazals can be composed of just a single couplet also. My qaafiya rhymes with “hair”, “air”, etc. I found the musicality and simplicity of this coupling to be particularly helpful in flowing the piece along. Now, a ghazal is written couplets which may or may not connect with each other. They connect, of course, by theme, by radeef. But they do not have to follow a strict narrative link. That is, for example, the third couplet could, in theory, be traded for the sixth and no difference will be made to the overall meaning of the piece. Urdu ghazals are sung within a community of passionate poets and lovers of poetry who call back to each other different lines, and repeat the qaafiya and radeef again and again — the chant rising and filling the circle of voices. A ghazal, truly, is an act of community — it forever seeks to link, to connect, to respond, to move. Thus, one of the most important aspects of the form is how the individual lines of the couplet respond to each other. Do they displace each other, do they reunite something, do they add, subtract, divide, conquer? What drama is created between the lines? Is there a surprise? Is there a realization? What treasure lies at the end of the rainbow that is the couplet? As a last point, the final couplet will often see the name of the poet appear in a self-referential manner. The poet addresses themselves in the third-person to reach some wisdom that has been peppered throughout the poem. In my small way, then, I have attempted to suffuse each couplet with these principles, honoring the previous master while simultaneously creating a fresh work as a woman of colour in the here and now.

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INTERVIEW

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

Shannan: This was perhaps the fourth or fifth ghazal I wrote after becoming enamoured with the form thanks to Agha Shahid Ali’s seminal work Call me Ishmael Tonight. Love, heartache, grief, politics, religion — these are all great themes for this evocative and rhythmic form. A breaking marriage, then, collects many of these into a bouquet of glass and smashes it to stardust. Of course, personal experience was complicit in this particular ghazal’s composition. Without going into too much detail, I wanted to write something that could stir me towards some concrete action while at the same time provide a balm for some recent emotional cracks and aches. Action was certainly stirred.

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 used to love pretty words a lot. In fact, I still collect any unique or sonically pleasing or just beautiful words in a document. But earlier, I would Jackson Pollack my poems in the paint splatter of pretty words and think them rather clever. It wasn’t until my then poetry peer and now partner firmly asked me to reassess my chaotic linguistic calisthenics by studying the meaning-making of poetry that I calmed down. I began to unpack narrative. I thought of poems as small stories, snapshots, very beautiful, very delicate, very precise. Now when I read poems, I feel an instant affinity with work that focuses first on meaning and story. Language is certainly important, that builds the story. But language is subservient to purpose. Lately I have seen a trend, for example, of poems overstuffed with exotic words — say, names of plants — but they seldom string together a coherent, honest sentence. A good poem is a testament to something transformative witnessed by the poet, shared in confidence with the reader. They need to make sense. And if they look damn good making sense, well — all the better.

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, this — as I think any ghazal in the English language will be post Shahid — is an homage to the masters, but particularly to Agha Shahid Ali. I can, with great honour and love, say that I wrote this in his shadow. There is no better place to be than at the feet of the masters. This is not lip-service humility. Art comes from beyond us, whether that is a divine source, or something else, most artists will agree that they feel creative inspiration to be elusive yet personal, transcendental even in its temporal tangibility. The ghazal, in particular, grounds me in this understanding. There is something about this ancient form that pays respect to all the great poets who sang and bled their love and angst like battle cries and prayers enwrapped in music.

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?

Several times I’ve received comments about my ghazals from editors saying that, while it’s promising, they just don’t understand why I’m rhyming or why I’m repeating certain words. They tell me perhaps the poem would be stronger if I just kept the repetition to one line, dropped all the end rhymes, and focused on less dramatism and more imagery. Unlike the comments I receive for other poems, I have categorically rejected all of these. Because they clearly do not know what a ghazal means. Shahid lived and preserved the form and I have learned it through his writing, lived it through his words. And I am grateful to be continuing his legacy of growing and spreading the true form of the ghazal rendered in English. I am always deeply grateful for comments on my work. I just wish more people were as informed about poetic forms from other cultures as they are, say, of the sonnet or the villanelle.

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 I think I’ve gone on about Shahid in almost all my answers so please, please read his books. Get The Veiled Suite and find a quiet corner in your home and read until the sun comes up twenty four hours later. You’ll feel a kinship like no other. Other than Shahid, this ghazal would not be possible without the music of the su, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s qawwalis, Mirza Ghalib’s ghazals and poems, and Ghulam Ali’s songs. These works crackle with the fire of timeless beauty and love that all Poetry seeks to burn into skin.

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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

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The Freewrite Prize in Poetry/Prose

Our January issue will feature the winners of our Showcase-Freewrite Prize! Normal submission rules apply but for a reading fee for the prize submission. Work selected will feature in the January 2023 issue and the writers will receive a boosted honorarium of $100 and a Freewrite Traveler. The deadline is December 31st. During this time, free submissions will be open for December and February.

Please follow the link to our full post on the prize for rules & info on the Traveler: MORE INFO

To submit to the prize directly follow this link: PRIZE

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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.

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!

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