Le spectre de la rose by Valentine Hugo, 1912 via New York Public Library.

Yesterday on the Tin House blog, Robert Ostrom shared a recent conversation with Carey McHugh about her book American Gramophone, taxidermy, and flying, among many things.

CM: …There’s a lot of taxidermy in the book. And in fact, we had this one deer head hanging in our living room for a long time. It was a deer that my dad had shot, and I was always appalled by it. I didn’t understand it. Why was it inside the house? Why did it have eyes? I remember being really young and looking up at it, and I remember this panic but also intrigue. How did this come to be here like this? And sometimes they’d take it down to dust it and I’d just pet it and be like, “Is it creature? Is it ornament? What is this thing!?”

It’s a reminder, maybe, of some history that I visit but don’t completely enter. Because I don’t hunt like my dad and my uncles and my brother. I’m a vegetarian in fact. But it’s something that’s always been present in my life. There was always talk of camo and bird dogs and guns. It wasn’t like those things were foreign objects. They were always in the mix somehow. And that’s so foreign to my life now that I think I go back there in my memory and I try to pull it up somehow and understand it.

Come for McHugh’s always wise musings on poetry, memory, and the writing process, stay for the smart (and adorable) questions Ostrom relayed from his seven year-old niece.

American Gramophone is available for purchase online through Amazon.

Dallas Woodburn, a recent Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing,
has published fiction and nonfiction in Zyzzyva, Fourth River, The
Nashville Review, The Los Angeles Times, North Dakota Quarterly, and
Monkeybicycle, among others. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she
won second place in the American Fiction Prize and her work appears in
American Fiction Volume 13: The Best Unpublished Short Stories by
American Writers (New Rivers Press). Her short story collection was
previously a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short
Fiction and the Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize. She is the founder of
Write On! For Literacy, an organization that empowers young people
through reading and writing endeavors: www.writeonbooks.org.

“Selvin the Christmas Elf” from Girl with a Goat’s Voice

Nate Liederbach is the author of the story collections Doing a Bit of Bleeding, Negative Spaces, Beasts You’ll Never See (winner of the 2014 Noemi Book Award for Fiction), and the forthcoming Blessings Galore and Tongues of Men and of Angels: Nonfictions Ataxia. He lives in Eugene, OR and Olympia, WA.  

“Ghost Deer” from True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape

Colin’s story:

“This happened before my Dad took off, like a long time ago.” Colin’s blinking a lot, because he just got contacts, and it makes his eyes look big and wet, plus with his reddish brown hair and brown freckles, and the fact that he’s skittish and slim, he looks a lot like a deer himself.

Fiona turns from the sink and says over the rushing water, “What did you say about a deer?”

“Is this your Seder story?” Little My asks.

“It’s just this deer, okay? One day Dad was like, Get your nose out of that video game, Son, we’re going hiking.”

“He never called you son,” Fiona says.

“Whatever. You know I hate hiking. So then we were walking in the gorge, like a long way up, up by Taughannock Falls, and no one else was there because it was like October and grey and cold and no one wanted to be there, obviously. Then we saw this deer. It was tiptoeing along the cliff edge above the falls. When we saw it we were all, Whoa, holy crap! The deer heard us and freaked. It tried to turn around on the ledge or whatever. And it fell off the cliff. Like a long way.” Colin’s face is so pale now his freckles seem to pulse. His eyes blink.

“Are you serious?” Fiona says, turning off the faucet.  Daniel’s shirt floats winey, salty and abandoned in the sink. Fiona’s standing by the table holding the kosher salt. “I thought deer were sure-footed, like cats.”

“It was lying half in that pool at the bottom of the gorge and half on the like, gravel,” Colin says. “Its back was broken or something. It couldn’t move even when we got up close to it, except it’s eyes were rolling around. We realized if we left it there, the coyotes or dogs would get it.”

“Did you call the cops?” Little My asks.

“We put it out of its misery,” Colin says, “or whatever you call it.”

“Coño,” Daniel says. “When did you say this happen?”

“Nobody ever told me this,” Fiona says. “What do you mean you put it out of its misery?”

“Dad was like, ‘Son, you have to put this deer out of its misery.’ And he handed me a big rock.”

“Ghost Deer” won and was previously featured in The New Guard’s Machigonne Fiction Contest.

The Los Angeles Times called Micah Perks’ first novel, We Are Gathered Here (1997, St. Martin’s),  “a tightly woven story that is as fanciful as it is grimly real.” Her memoir, Pagan Time, came out in paper in 2009 from Counterpoint, has been translated into Korean and is an audio book from audible.com. In 2010 The San Francisco Chronicle listed it in Best Summer Reading and Adirondack Life listed it as Adirondack Required Reading.  She’s published short stories in Zyzzyva, The Massachusetts Review, and Epoch, amongst many others, and her stories have been anthologized in The Encyclopedia Project, Viz Inter Arts, The Best Underground Fiction and others. Four of her stories have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She has been given multiple residencies at The Blue Mountain Center and received a Saltonstall Foundation For The Arts grant. She won an NEA in 2008 for the first chapter of her novel-in-progress. Recent essays have been published and are forthcoming from The Rumpus andTin House. Micah lives with her family in Santa Cruz California, where she co-directs the creative writing program and is a professor in the Literature Department at University of California, Santa Cruz. She’s at work on a novel.

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.

Ben Gantcher, one of this year’s poetry finalists, recently shared with us an idea for a free, print on-demand publishing house. On his website, Gantcher has listed two poems from Doctor Caliban—the finalist selection of his we featured last month—as well as a chapbook, Strings of Math and Custom, and an unmade book, Zombie Defense Guide. All titles are available for download and can easily be printed and folded into a book free of cost. The idea is to bolster independent and self-publishing, one foldable book at a time.

Ben Gantcher’s Zombie Defense Guide.

“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.