SHOWCASE SEPTEMBER, 2022
Object & Idea
Dear Readers,
We welcome you back, you with your warm and discerning gaze!
We publish 1x per month, and last month was our second publication! Be sure to check out Holly Haworth’s flash nonfiction piece and Phillip Metre’s poem.
May our Showcase entreat you through the transitions of September!
In this month’s issue, we’re featuring great early-career work from very interesting and lovely humans: A flash fiction short from Catherine Niu—a story with oomph—and poetry from Kara Knickerbocker—a poem with grit. Both pieces are first published by Showcase.
We’re so intrigued by our writers this month, both of whom are early career, pioneers or explorers in their own right. They ponder their work, the ideas, symbols, and secondary meanings as well as their craft; they’re writers whose work deserves a close read, whose interviews will inform and intrigue. Please do make sure to delve into their writing and words—their object and idea; there you’ll find the spiky warmth of of truths both difficult and complex, insight into the human body and mind—felt and thought. Enjoy.
PROSE
Flash Fiction by Catherine Niu
—Originally Published September 19, 2022 by Showcase: Object & Idea
OBJECT:
Borrowers
We only had a loveseat couch in our first apartment together, so when guests came over, we would roll our office chairs out as extra seating. We watched TV on a small monitor that we had inherited from grads who had inherited it from other grads or maybe it was undergrads. In order to get a good view of the screen, the person on the rolling chair would need to get pretty close to the loveseat, so really, everyone got quite close together, watching whatever it was we were watching.
This one time, we watched an animated movie about little people called Borrowers. The movie was something easy, inoffensive to everyone, and no one’s top choice. The Borrowers were the size of crickets. They could be fully drenched by one raindrop apiece. They lived in the human house and borrowed sugar cubes and used fishhooks as grappling hooks. In the movie, the young girl Borrower would be seen by a human boy. It would be too dangerous for the Borrowers to stay put, now that their presence was known, and they’d begin to prepare to move away from the human house. In the movie, the girl Borrower would find a sewing needle and slip it, like a sword, into her belt. She would use the borrowed needle-sword to save everyone.
I sat in the rolling chair. It was green. It spun. Your visiting friend sat on the loveseat, nearest me, and you sat beside him at the other end. When the movie began, I put my glasses on, and your friend said, suddenly, “Hey, come closer,” and tugged my rolling chair towards him, and I rolled easily. And even though I loved you, was in love with you, owned a loveseat with you, and found your friend off putting when he did that—tugged me closer—for just that second, I got a sharp thrill, a betraying rush.
I never told you about that thrill. I let you think it was just the two of us in love, every moment of our lives. I convinced you that I was yours, I made you swear that you were mine. But really what I’ve done is I’ve kept these thrills around me like treasure. I find them all through the years, and tuck them into our love. I let them shore up around us, slip in and save us, keep me from breaking us, time and time again, like a charm. I have borrowed them from other lives, other places, that aren’t ours.
But, then again, there are books I borrowed from the library that became so familiar to me that they became mine. I mean in the sense that even after I returned them, they stuck with me forever. In my mind’s eye, they are always piled in a sunny corner, spines stacked, and if I pick them up, they will be the weight I know they are. I guess what I think is that you don’t need to forgive me. It’s true that I love you, that I am yours, and you are mine—in the way of the books I mentioned, the library ones.
IDEA:
“Borrowers” began with a particular image that I had in mind of a group of young people huddled around a small TV screen. They watch a movie none of them are particularly interested in but all have agreed to watch. I felt there was something more to the moment, and I wrote this story to try and discover what it was.
Why the narrator was telling us about the Borrowers was the most difficult and important part of this story to me. In the last two paragraphs, the narrator reveals her true concerns and why she is telling this story: her desire to make clear, or to better articulate, the complications she feels about life and love. The Borrowers are part metaphor, part literal; they are a backdrop against which the narrator’s concerns can be seen.
The last two paragraphs are also a confession and a defense of the narrator’s own hypotheses, actions, and decisions. If a lifetime simultaneously has the permanence of ownership and the impermanence of a borrowed object that must be returned, does this absolve us in some way of our actions? How is the idea of “borrow” simultaneously kind, magnanimous, suspicious, theft-like, visible, invisible? And what exactly is love? Is it simply something capable of holding all of these qualities, and is this what gives it the weight that we know?
INTERVIEW
Showcase: We’d love to hear more about how you conceived of the conflict of this piece, how the narrator comes to accept what are ultimately not “real” but very intense betrayals of a type?
Catherine: I’m not sure that the narrator comes to accept the betrayals so much as she tries to confess them to the reader and to herself. This confession is an attempt to make peace with what feels like deceit. Could it be that she has only engaged in what Adrienne Rich describes of love, “a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other”?
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?
To me, the joy of writing is all about finding the most truthful and evocative way of telling something, and this has everything to do with craft and form. What motivates me is the possibility that great writing has of recreating an emotion or experience in a way that revivifies it and the person reading it. I am always attempting to do this in my work, and I make craft choices from the first to the final draft in order to achieve this effect.
Where do you feel this work fits in on a historical level? How about aesthetic or stylewise and can you particularize your answer?
All stories are in conversation with their readers, and beyond this, I think stories with similar forms begin to create their own atmosphere, as do stories within similar historical periods. In this sense, I suppose “Borrowers” fits into the very short fiction universe, with all that it brings. I do think the narrative voice in the last paragraph has a Lydia Davis ring to it that might be too much, but I think I like it.
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 am happy with the complicated feeling that the story manages to draw out of the initial image I began working with, but also think that what Jane Austen describes about human disclosure and its limits applies to this story. “Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken.”
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 inspired by many great writers (to name just a few: James Baldwin, Elena Ferrante, Jenny Offill, Linda Gregg, Aracelis Girmay, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Grace Paley). Over the years I also studied with Professors Anne Cheng, Anne McClintock, Rob Nixon, Lucy Corin, Pam Houston, and Katie Peterson and count myself lucky to have their influences on my work. This piece in particular feels Lydia Davis-esque to me in terms of narrative style.
POETRY
by Kara Knickerbocker
—Originally published September 19, 2022 by Showcase: Object & Idea.
OBJECT:
Whatever Pulls From A Body
What is making your stomach turn, now? The doe splayed out on the road’s shoulder: backward bent leg, the hoof clean off, a glossed black pool you see yourself in. The next day, the maggots come. Whatever pulls from a body, you think, what can always still be taken from it. You want to say sorry. You want to reattach what’s been split open, pour a little rain water, say a quiet prayer if you can remember how. You just want to lie down next to it, let the rocks cut your girlhood knees, the blooddirt knot your unknowing hair. Like you’d take any way out of this hurt, even through someone else’s windshield.
IDEA:
Everything in this poem stemmed from what I have been learning about loss and grief and how sorrow moves through the body, and how a body moves through the world. Loss has always been a recurring theme in my work, but I became more interested in the natural world and reading poets who wrote about it, like Mary Oliver and Kelli Russell Agodon.
During the pandemic, my father became very ill. Before he passed, I returned to my childhood home in the country and took long walks along the road, often seeing deer or rabbits splayed out on the asphalt. As morbid as it sounds, I would study them—how their organs were emptied, the matted fur, the flies or vultures or maggots coming to feed off of what was “left of a body” and what could still be taken from it. I was haunted by that fact, yet almost comforted, and the line stuck with me until I could work through it on the page.
As human beings, I know we find our own way of navigating death and its aftermath. As poets, I believe part of our gift is being able to translate that trauma into a deeper meaning. We can use language as a vessel for so many things: to connect, to understand, and, ultimately, to heal.
INTERVIEW
Showcase: We’d love to hear how you conceived of the piece. Can you tell us about the inspiration behind it?
Kara: Like so many of us who were confined to the spaces of our homes during the past few years due to the pandemic, I turned toward nature. I found myself taking long walks as often as I could, noticing the contrast of the treetops jutting against the sky, the songs of a bird on a telephone wire, but also—at my family’s home in the country—I would see a lot of death. A splattered frog or a shriveled salamander, a groundhog or a deer with their organs spilling out along the highway. This piece emerged after one particular walk where I came upon a dead fawn, so beautiful and yet all lost of life. Of course, vultures had swooped in and the maggots had come, and it just had me thinking about how so much can still be pulled from a body. The sight of that fawn, paired with that thought, left me haunted by the question until I could put it down on the page. This is often how poems manifest for me—through a line or an image I can’t ignore.
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 poets, we all have our own obsessions and motivations. I think what I’ve realized is that, sometimes, the technique is almost unconscious and automatic, natural like our breath or a reflex. I have written most consistently in free verse, not focused in particular on form at the start, but more so by image and tone. I read my drafts aloud because I want to hear what sings off the page, where my breath and the line breaks meet, how I can create tension within the line. Alliteration is a tool I do like to use often, and I find myself leaning into more consonants when I want harsher sounds, to sharpen the poem to cut the reader, in a way. Overall, I aim to draft a piece from the emotion of an idea, image, or line, and get it all down first, then revisit later to edit and chisel the poem to its final stage.
Where do you feel this work fits in on a historical level? How about aesthetic or style-wise and can you particularize your answer?
What a fascinating question! I’ve long admired the work of Sylvia Plath and Kim Addonizio, and though I’d never compare myself to these greats, I could see my work threaded with poets who write in the personal lyric, more so confessional poets. I’ve always been interested in shorter poems that echo the underlying theme of fragility: travel and exploration, the human body and its capabilities, and the human condition (love and loss, the transition from child to woman, etc.).
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 don’t feel held back with this piece nor with any submission requirements in particular. We can argue whether or not a poem is ever really “finished,” but for me, this feels complete, and I am thrilled that it will be published in Showcase and sent into the world.
As Robert Frost said, “A poem…begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. it is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion finds the thought and the thought finds the words.”
Writing poetry is an act of self discovery in many ways. I don’t know that I set out to say one specific thing—I often end up surprising myself or coming to a revelation in the process. This poem is short and concise, not heavy in its language or long in its lines, because I felt stripped down and helpless, almost defeated, during this experience, and that’s reflected in these simple fragments and repetition. It’s a surrender, of sorts.
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?
Truthfully, I am most inspired by contemporary voices like my peers. My writing life was nurtured most while I was living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with the Madwomen in the Attic creative writing workshops through Carlow University. These women age from eighteen to over eighty years old, with different backgrounds and lifestyles, all with incredible stories to tell. The strength of their voices and the talent in that community is undeniable. Jan Beatty, longtime director of the Madwomen, is one of my literary idols and her influence on my writing has been transformational. She writes into wounds and is unflinching in her lyrical narrative poems, never shying away from saying the hard thing. However, this piece in particular felt more in conversation with some of Linda Gregg’s work, which I’ve been leaning into. Specifically, I am thinking of her poem “There She Is.” These same questions are still haunting: “I look and think / how to forget. How can I live while she / stands there?”
Other writers I admire are Ada Limon, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Kim Addonizio, Richard Blanco, Augusten Burroughs, Dorianne Laux, Cheryl Strayed, Richard Siken, and John Green, among others.
A note 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!
Finally, we’re sponsored this month and next by Ephemera’s The Write-In Residency. Please have a flash, a quick looksee.
The Write-In Residency
The Write In Residency will sponsor 2 individuals, where each awardee is gifted a curated package of 10 new books in multiple literary genres each from a different independent publisher, a Moleskin & pen, and a $300 award to upgrade their writing nook or home office. It’s a staycation for the bookish!
Folks will be able to apply directly via Submittable or become a paid yearly subscriber to Ephemera and then apply for free (subscribers will be sent a special link). Read about subscriptions here. Best of luck!
I am going to start saving these and pulling them out for my creative writing classes--hat an incredible resource to start discussions about the writing process!