Evelyn Somers is the associate editor of the Missouri Review and a past contributing editor for Bloom. Her fiction has appeared in Crazyhorse, Georgia Review, Shenandoah, the Florida Review, South Dakota Review, Pank, the Collagist, and others. She is the recipient of a Barbara Deming Foundation grant for fiction. Books she has edited as a freelancer have won the John Simmons award, the Drue Heinz, and the Peter Taylor prize for the novel and have been published by both university and small presses and larger, commercial presses. She is at work on a novel and a variety of shorter projects. Her website is evwords.com.

“Seeing the Problem” from The World Is All That Does Befall Us

Thomas Walton’s work has appeared most recently in Gold Man Review, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and the anthology Make It True; Poetry from Cascadia. He edits PageBoy Magazine in Seattle WA, where he lives, builds gardens, and volunteers in his daughter’s fourth grade class … yeiks! 

“Home for Wayward Girls” from the eponymous collection

It’s a Thursday night when the police knock on our door.  The knock is like any other but when I open it, they fill our front stoop with their largeness, their dark uniforms, guns and billy clubs.  Through the open windows of their car, I can hear the police radio reporting crimes.

The bigger of the two asks to speak to my parents and since my father has had Beefeater’s all night, I call out “MOM!”

“Oh my,” is what she says when she rounds the corner, like she is expecting the paper boy collecting, or girl scouts selling thin mints.  Renee is right behind her and the three of us face them but nobody asks them to come in.  Renee’s got a piece of lace showing at the scoop of her pullover. It’s from the bra she just got at Sears and I know because I was with her when she tried it on.  It’s tan, but Renee is so fair, it might as well be brown against her vanilla. The guy doing the talking, the bigger one, whose navy blue uniform shirt is all untucked on one side, where the billy club dangles—he’s not even pretending to know that staring’s impolite.  He is focused on where that lace disappears.

“We’ve got a warrant to come in and find a runaway—Larissa Kramer?”

“She’s here,” my mom says. “She’s staying with my daughter.  Her parents kicked her out.”

“Well, they may have, but they want her back now.  You can send her out or we can come in and search, Ma’am.”

“Amelia, go get Larissa,” she says.  “Hurry,” she adds, so I run, even though we are not allowed to run in the house.  I barge in without knocking, another rule I’m breaking, because the New Orleans Police Department is at our front door. But what I see is Larissa already halfway out that bedroom window.  Gina’s standing there holding the pulled out screen, like it’s a poster board presentation for school.

I take my time walking back to the front door, not knowing whose side to be on—let Larissa get a headstart, or let the policemen know she’s escaped, and halfway to Kabel Drive by now. I give her some time, since she’s on foot, barefoot, and they’ve got cars. Worse than that, guns.

Melanie Bishop’s young adult novel, My So-Called Ruined Life (Torrey House Press, 2014) was a top-five finalist last May for both the John Gardner Award in Fiction and CLMP’s Firecracker Awards. Bishop has published fiction and nonfiction in Glimmer Train, Georgetown Review, Greensboro Review, Florida Review, Puerto del Sol, The American, Potomac Review, Vela, and Family Circle. She received a screenwriting fellowship from the Chesterfield Film Project, co-sponsored by Universal Studios and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment. For 22 years, she taught creative writing at Prescott College in Arizona, where she was Founding Editor, and Fiction/Nonfiction Editor of Alligator Juniper, a national literary magazine, three time winner of the AWP Directors’ Prize. Currently Bishop lives in California, where she’s an editor and a writing coach, and hosts retreats in Carmel-by-the-Sea. She reviews books for Carmel Magazine, New York Journal of Books, and Huffington Post.

Mary Larkin won the Southern Indiana Review Mary C. Mohr Editors’ Award in Fiction for her story “All That Was His,” 2012. She received Honorable Mention in Broad River Review’s 2013 Ron Rash Awards judged by Jill McCorkle. Larkin’s fiction has been anthologized and appeared in many journals, including Shenandoah, TheChattahoochee Review, The Nebraska Review, Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, Inkwell, and others. She is a Pushcart Nominee, a Writing Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, a 2015 Writing Fellow of The Hambidge Center, and the recipient of Hollins University’s Andrew James Purdy Award as well as their AWP Intro Journals Award nominee. Larkin received her MA in Creative Writing from Hollins, and her PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University. She has work forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Spring, 2016.

“This Word Is Earth” from Swarm

I have a story that I’ve told myself so many times I no longer know if it is true or not. It has to do with the fireplace in my parents’ house, and a face I dreamt I saw there. The face was made of spirals – eyes and mouth – and if I got too close to the cold hearth, the face would loom up from the void and suck me into darkness.

For the next year, I avoided the living room at all costs after dark, skittering past the fireplace and bolting out the other side of the room like a startled calf. My parents were used to such odd behavior. There had also been a period of time in which I became convinced that a skeleton who lived in the upstairs toilet would crawl up the pipes and grab me if I didn’t leap off the bathroom tile and onto the safe-zone of the hallway carpet before the toilet finished flushing. There was also a texture-sensitive zombie who did nothing but stand by my bedroom door at night because he couldn’t cross from carpet on to wood. 

I had a rich imagination. 

But then, years later, I read something about the Mound Builders of Ireland, and how they worshiped an earth goddess. Her image appears in tombs built under dolloped mounds of earth that dot the landscape. She was the goddess of the hearth, worshiped at the center of the home: the fireplace. 

And then, there was her picture. Her eyes and mouth were spirals. 

I felt a sting of recognition, as if I had discovered her, myself. 

I was convinced that I had dreamed the image of the Mound Builder’s goddess before she had even been discovered by scientists of my generation. Perhaps I was psychic. Perhaps I was born of Druid blood and felt, at heart, as if I’d always known her. Perhaps I called back the distant memory of a dream and made it fit the image I had seen in National Geographic. 

My mother took one look at the picture and told me it looked nothing like the face I used to draw.She told me that the face I used to be afraid of was from a picture book – Uncle Wiggly’s Bedtime Stories – and I hadn’t dreamed it at all.

Harmony Button’s work has been included in Best American Notable Essays of 2015, she has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Web awards, and she was awarded the Larry Levis Prize (Academy of American Poets). Her work as appeared in journals such as Colorado Review, Chicago Quarterly, Southwestern American Lit, Cobalt, Rock & Sling, Bayou and Drafthorse. Find out more at www.harmonybutton.com.

In Cleaver Magazine‘s winter issue, among poetry and prose, flash fiction and art, is a book review by Clare Paniccia of Carey McHugh’s American Gramophone. Paniccia opens with a suggestion:

In approaching Carey McHugh’s American Gramophone, one might first consider this question: What is the song of America, or American culture? It’s easy to jump to the obvious conclusions—the United States has strongly defined itself through its velocity, whether in industry, technology, or commercial growth, and its music has become largely representative of these themes, with contemporary pop artists representing the almost-electric shine of the digital age, rock bands highlighting the working-class, and country groups crooning over the “loss” of an easy-going, slow-paced lifestyle.

She’s hesitant to suggest that we impose on these poems our notions of what it means to be “American”—notions which, although true of a certain brand of Americana, do not do justice to the now-muddied origins of this concept or of this land. Nor is this true of McHugh’s fervent vision: hers is an America stripped of its associations and left with its most unruly, primitive form. Paniccia continues:

…what if America’s song isn’t something you can quickly flip to on a radio? What if America’s song is something that deviates completely from the mainstream—something pared to its most visceral form: an instrumental, organic, and natural tone? Think of the vibrating note of a fiddle, the deep strum of a guitar, and bare, haunting vocals. The sounds of folk and Americana that seem to eek out of valleys, creeks, and forgotten forests—quietly shivering their way into the undercurrent of the American everyday. These are the notes that wind from McHugh’s own gramophone, characterizing this dark collection with a taste of folklore and caution that asks the reader to step out of his or her American associations and return to the frontier’s beginning—the land at its most original, and its most severe.

Paniccia is right to characterize McHugh’s world as one of transience and volatility: for to speak of nature and its song is never to speak in constants, but rather in ruddy uncertainty. Divided in several sections, American Gramophone may be seen perhaps as a meditation on a forgotten history—one free from the notions of industry and development—with Section Two specifically serving as an epitaph to a society now living among ruins.

Poems like “Aviaries and Asylums” and “The Plenty” document this history, detailing how the individual has turned from the organic in an attempt to construct tools and resources to overcome earthly constraints; yet, McHugh’s song always carries in the background, accompanying inevitable failures—“I will try four strings tuned in fifths to the sound of falling.”

To read the review in its entirety and for more of Cleaver, head over to their website for their winter issue.

NOTE: Joshua Bernstein submitted two manuscripts to this year’s prose reading period. Stick-Light, one of two submissions, is a complement to In Josaphat’s Valley, both of which were selected as finalists.

J. A. Bernstein’s stories and essays have appeared in dozens of journals, including Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, and Tin House. A former Fulbright Scholar and finalist for the James Jones First Novel Award, he lives in northern Minnesota, where he is an assistant professor of English at the University of Minnesota Duluth.

On Friday, December 18th from 6:30-9:00 PM, join African Voices Magazine for a night of books, wine, and painting. Their Paint & Sip Gathering is the perfect pre-holiday opportunity to mingle, paint, and indulge in some book talk with other creatives. African Voices says of the event: “Artist D. Cross will guide you in a journey of self-expression and empowerment.  Let your muse lead you — paint your vision board for 2016 or whatever you desire. No experience in art is needed, bring your sense of adventure! There is a Jacob Lawrence and Gwendolyn Knight in all of us.”

Registration is $20 before December 15th and $25 thereafter, which includes the cost of art materials and refreshments. The African Voices Upper West Side office is easily accessible by the 1, 2, or 3 trains at the 96th St stop.

Lice

Elizabeth Denton is the author of the short story collection, Kneeling on Rice (University of Missouri Press). Stories from her second collection, Mick Jagger’s Green Eyed Daughter and Other Stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Blackbird and The Yale Review, where her story “Mick Jagger’s Green-Eyed Daughter” won The Yale Review Prize. She has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and has won several grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. She earned her MFA from Columbia University and taught briefly at Yale University and City College. She teaches fiction writing at the University of Virginia and lives in Batesville, Virginia with her husband, writer Mark Edmundson.

Of Note Magazine offers an intersectional approach to art and activism, covering issues such as race, class, education, the prison industrial complex and sexism. Their focus—through mediums such as photographs, sculpture, video, and prose—is on using art as a template for both expression and change. From its “Impact” section on their website, Of Note says:

Through its curated issues, OF NOTE has featured over 70 Artists from 40 countries who use the arts to address social justice/human rights issues. OF NOTE’s long-form journalism authored by its roster of over 30 emerging and established internationally-based Writers has focused on how artists are:

1. addressing mass incarceration in the United States
2. responding to current immigration debates and challenging preconceived notions about immigrants
3. championing the education of girls in developing nations
4. raising awareness about indigenous communities around the world
5. bringing attention to the plight of girls caught in Colombia’s drug and gang wars and illuminating the heroic stories ofEthiopian girls who fight back against child marriage
6. documenting the plight of abandoned children with albinism in Zimbabwe
7. shedding light on the dangerous journey of migrants between the Guatemalan/Mexican border
8. combatting the culture of silence surrounding domestic violence in Indian communities
9. fighting illiteracy among the ‘Born Frees” in South Africa
10. confronting sexism in the portrayals of women and girls in the media

Of Note‘s current issue, “The Burqa“, tackles a subject most timely: the systematic oppression of minority groups in the United States and elsewhere based on religious belief, appearance, and cultural signifiers. Islamophobia runs rampant, showing itself in ways new and old, from electoral politics to the No-Fly List to targeted hate crimes. In a powerful editor’s note by Of Note founder Grace Aneiza Ali, the burqa is explored as a means of denoting identity for both wearer and oppressor.

While many employ the burqa as fodder for debate, the Artists Of Note we’ve selected for The Burqa Issue use their creative voice and art practice to examine the complicated experiences of the women who actually wear the burqa—by choice or by force. These multi-disciplinary global artists employ the burqa, actual and symbolic, in their photography, documentary film, poetry, graffiti, street art, murals, sculpture and painting, to trouble our perceptions.

While their art questions, provokes, defends, indicts, or unapologetically takes a stance for or against the burqa, it is art that is first and foremost deeply personal, before it is political. Each of these women know intimately, and at times painfully, how the world encounters women donned in burqas because they have worn them or borne witness to stories of the women they love—their mothers, sisters, aunts, matriarchs and friends—who have.

Last spring, in their “Imprisoned” issue, Of Note featured artists whose work focuses on mass incarceration and the racist and classist tendencies of the United States that set people of color up for the “school-to-prison pipeline.” It is unsurprising, then, that Randall Horton found himself the topic of discussion once again, as he has broken that mold of his own accord. A piece by Sally Ann Hard titled “Randall Horton: From Prison, to Poet, to Professor” is one of the highlights of this issue. Horton’s poem “A Reoccurring Nightmare In Maximum Security” opens the essay, in which Sally Ann Hard shares her own experiences loving a man behind bars. Hard’s subsequent activism focuses on ensuring that, after release, prisoners can transition back into society with the least possible stigma.

Previous issues of Of Note can be found online.