Contributor Notes: Dora Malech

Interviews and guest posts from the writers and artists of Versal 10. This week, we hear from Dora Malech he author of Say So (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011) and Shore Ordered Ocean (Waywiser Press, 2009). Her poems have appeared in publications that include The New Yorker, Poetry, American Letters & Commentary, and Poetry London. A graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she has been the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, a Writer's Fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Italy, and inclusion in the International Writing Program's "Life of Discovery" creative exchange in China. She has taught writing at institutions that include the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop; Victoria University's International Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington, New Zealand; and Saint Mary's College of California, where she served as a Distinguished Poet-in-Residence. She lives in Iowa City, where she writes, creates visual art, teaches, and directs the Iowa Youth Writing Project, an arts outreach program for children and teens.

Have you been to Amsterdam? What did you do while you were here? If you've not been yet, what do you think you'd do in our fair town?

I have. I visited the amazing Jane Lewty and Wade Geary at Thanksgiving 2011, and it was most likely the best Thanksgiving of my life. I ate my weight in stroopwafel, had my mind blown across the spectrum of human emotion and ideas by art and history (visiting the Anne Frank house, going to the Rijksmuseum, taking a tour of the canals), and met some incredibly welcoming and brilliant writers and artists (including the Versal crew!). I also gave a reading at the English Bookshop and gave a Q&A with Jane's students at Universiteit van Amsterdam. I felt so grateful to have had the chance to see Amsterdam through the eyes of a tourist, but I felt even more grateful that Jane and others allowed me to simply live their Amsterdam lives with them for a few days.

I was also on a deadline to finish a piece as part of an International Writing Program collaborative exchange and performance. I went to Amsterdam with all of my thoughts and notes, and I spent most of my mornings there writing and revising in Jane and Wade's spare room. I ended up finishing the piece there and reading it for the first time at the English Bookshop reading. The piece is not "about" Amsterdam, but it deals with travel and flight and distance, and it will forever be linked to Amsterdam for me.

What is the first creative thing you ever did?

I know that when I made colorful crayon scribbles as a very small child, and my mother asked me to tell her what I was drawing (a house? a dog?), I would cryptically tell her that they were "designs." I hope that doesn't make me sound like I was a pretentious toddler. I also think that playing pretend was (and still is?) a big part of my creative life. I have an older sister, so for a long time, my creative life was collaborating with her on imaginary identities and worlds.

What is the dumbest thing anyone has ever said to you about being a writer?

I can't say the dumbest, but I can say the most obnoxious. When I finish giving a reading, I always feel very raw and pretty vulnerable and dazed. Whether or not it shows to the audience, I feel like I put it on the line emotionally when I read. It is, therefore, the worst possible moment for someone to play weird power games with me (intentionally or not), because I am off balance and overly receptive. Multiple times, someone (and yes, it's usually a man, and yes, he's usually older than me) comes up to me and says "Can I give you some advice?" Rather than saying, "Buzz off. Who just gave a reading, me or you?" I say "Sure." Then I get a lecture on what he would have done differently (I've gotten everything from "Don't give any context for your poems; leave the audience wondering" to "Don't look at your watch; it's distracting.") I always wonder if these folks give lectures to everyone, or if I have some kind of "kick me" sign on my back. Perhaps they're well-intentioned, and it's obviously not a huge deal in the greater scheme of things, but I keep hoping I'll come up with a witty retort for the next such occasion. I suppose it falls right into Rebecca Solnit's "Men Explaining Things" paradigm. 

If you were an angle, what kind of angle would you be?

I would be my Chihuahua mutt. Backstory: I named my dog "Angel" in a moment of pure, unadulterated sentimentality when she came into my life. She was a puppy that fit in my hand, and I was a weepy 20-year-old college student. She is my favorite creature on earth, but she is not angelic. At a certain point, we stopped calling her "Angel" and started calling her any number of different names, including "Angle," which is a much more accurate name. So, yeah, I'd be that Angle. 

If you could meet a writer from the 15th, 16th or 17th centuries, who would it be? And what would you talk about?

Oh lord it would be Shakespeare. We'd talk about everything. Everything. Everything. And then we'd spoon for a while. 

Tell us something few people know about you.

Well, I just told you that I want to spoon with Shakespeare, so my fantasies about other dead writers won't seem that revelatory now. I'll go less personal: I have an extra vertebra in my spine.

Other than Versal (which has clearly been awesome), what's one great place you've been published?

I've loved being published in Anti-, because it seemed like the editor, Stephen D. Schroeder, really believed in my work at a point when I didn't necessarily believe in it myself. I'm also just in great company with the other writers and artists he publishes, and I was psyched that Anti- included both my poetry and my visual art at different points.

Why did you send work to Versal? Be honest.

I met the Versal editors in Amsterdam and also got to spend some quality time with Versal 9. I felt like it was an aesthetically gorgeous and exciting publication, and it felt "curated" like a good art show, not just kind of thrown together. Megan Garr encouraged me to send work, and I was more than happy to do so. 

What has lasted you ten years?

My red Schwinn bicycle. A brown corduroy jacket with a fake-fur hood from TJ Maxx. Some amazing friendships (I started grad school in 2003, so I'm coming up on the ten-year anniversary of some of my dearest poetry-friendships).

Tell us what you're working on right now.

I'm working on a third book of poems that's still in flux, and on a number of other projects. Bringing my visual art and text together. Exploring anagrams as heuristics. Working on longer poems. Trying to find my way from one word to another.

Versal 10 Bakfiets nominations!

We are pleased to announced this year's Bakfiets Pushcart nominations from Versal 10:

Selections from Interface, Erin Costello
Audio Tour: The Paintings You Missed, Gerald Fleming
Who We Are Beneath the Glass, Roxane Gay
With Distinction(s), Dora Malech
Dear Mutated Gene in my Daughter’s DNA, Bill Neumire
The Garnet Cave, Bess Winter

Congratulations to the nominees! Maybe this year we get lucky!

Contributor Notes: Ben Merriman

Interviews and guest posts from the writers and artists of Versal 10. This week, we hear from Ben Merriman, whose story/stories "A Hard Place to Love" rock out starting on page 121. Ben's the fiction editor over at the Chicago Review and you can tumble with him here.

Have you been to Amsterdam? What did you do while you were here? If you've not been yet, what do you think you'd do in our fair town?

I have not yet been to Amsterdam, but I spend my time in most large cities the same way: visits to art museums and bookstores, followed by gossip or chatter with writers and artsy types.


What is the first creative thing you ever did?

This seems like an invitation to offer some kind of origin myth about my creative life, or retroactively square my early experiences with my current life, but in fact there is very little from my childhood that feels my own. I once compared the recollection of my own life to watching a poorly edited student film.

To say something dull that comes closer to answering the question: I began to make serious efforts at writing fiction in 2008, around the time I started graduate school.


What is the dumbest thing anyone has ever said to you about being a writer?

I am not sure anybody has yet said this to me so directly, but in conversations about writing I have often sensed that many people I have met want to be writers because they want to be personally loved for having written appealing words. This desire is not “dumb,” but it strikes me as quite possibly unhealthy: a writer may hope that people will love one's writing, though there is no assurance of this, but there is no reason why a reader should love a writer for what they write, and given that the best writers are so often unpleasant, or at least badly flawed, human beings, loving a great writer, by virtue of their being a great writer, could be a wounding and unsatisfactory kind of love, just as being loved for what one has done, rather than being loved for what one is, would certainly be a hollow kind of love, a mixture of tinny adulation and a fear, probably correct, that to continue being loved would require that one continue to earn it by new creative exertions. The psychic misery of celebrities demonstrates the basic pathology of this logic.

I hope that there may be a sincere and realistic impulse underneath this common unstated wish.  If “I want people to love me because I am a good writer” really means “I am smart and I want people to value this part of me,” then this could reduce to “I want to be in the company of people who value what I value.” Looking for intellectual peers seems to me like a good reason to write, and in fact not so different from what many of us are looking for when we read.


If you were an angle, what kind of angle would you be?

Oblique.


If you could meet a writer from the 15th, 16th, or 17th centuries, who would it be? And what would you talk about?

Marguerite of Navarre: I have ripped off a couple of stories from the Heptameron, itself substantially a ripoff, and Marguerite was famous in her own time as a refined and pleasant companion. I assume we would gossip.


Tell us something few people know about you.

I am probably the worst judge of what other people know about me; things that I take as common knowledge may be obscure, and things that I try to hide may be quite obvious. However, people who have only seen my name in literary magazines may not know that I am a sociologist, just as many acquaintances from my academic life don't know that I write fiction.


Other than Versal (which has clearly been awesome), what's one great place you've been published?

In general I have been very pleased by the places that have published my work, but one that stands out is The Lifted Brow, a bimonthly magazine published in Australia. As with Versal, publishing in The Brow has made me feel a little less provincial. More importantly, I am a great admirer of Australian literature, which, evolving in partial isolation, has become something very weird and singular, so I was flattered that Australians, or at least one Australian editor, would find my own writing worthwhile. I've been publishing there in a column, “Something Happens,” and I hope that my name will burrow itself down into Australian literary consciousness.


Why did you send work to Versal? Be honest.

I picked up a copy of Versal 9 at Printers' Ball in Chicago. My partner flipped through it and suggested that I could publish here. (In fact, said I could publish here “with no problem,” an estimation of my skill that is both kind and a good deal higher than my own estimation.) 


What has lasted you ten years?

Nothing so far, but my partner and I have been together for eight years. I feel sanguine about our chances of hitting a decade.


Tell us what you're working on right now.

I am revising a novella about reading Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, which I have titled Aesthetic Theory. If there happen to be any editors or publishers reading this, I would appreciate any help they could offer—I expect it will be rather difficult to get this work published.

I have recently gotten back to Chicago after a trip to China, so I expect I will soon be writing about my trip, if only for my friends, who are curious to hear about my time with bureaucrats, academic officials, and urban nouveaux riches. The highlight will be my account of the unsuccessful efforts of several provincial Party officials to get me drunk at a noontime banquet.

Contributor Notes: Lisa Annelouise Rentz

Interviews and guest posts from the writers and artists of Versal 10. Next up, a conversation with the wonderful Lisa Annelouise Rentz, whose story "Conrad's Hammer" can be found on page 91. Lisa's stories have been published most recently by the Oxford American, Liars' League London, the Not A Stitch gallery show in Philadelphia, and in a book from They Draw and Cook. She lives in South Carolina.

Have you been to Amsterdam? What did you do while you were here? If you've not been yet, what do you think you'd do in our fair town?

I have been to Amsterdam. I spent the summer in Germany after high school and we visited for just one day — my friend was still in school, so it was actually a field trip. We went to the Van Gogh Museum and the Rijks Museum, and walked all around town. This was 1988 — I remember the street bums and canals, finding an Indonesian shop that sold bags of krupuk, and hearing Creedence Clearwater Revival on the bus's muzak. Later I made sate sauce for everyone to go with the krupuk.


What is the first creative thing you ever did?

As an adult — when I was first dating my husband, I hand-drew a silly drivers license for him.


What is the dumbest thing anyone has ever said to you about being a writer?

Announcing "I'm a writer!" because they're in a critique group and keep a journal. I think most people are and can be and should be avocational writers — it's an important skill for daily life. For being a civilization. But at the same time, cool it with making "writer" into a title for a business card.


If you were an angle, what kind of angle would you be?

90 degrees all the way.


If you could meet a writer from the 15th, 16th or 17th centuries, who would it be? And what would you talk about?

Maria Sibylla Merian, she studied and documented insects by making beautiful drawings (which include writing, introductions, etc.) of the creatures and their habitats and predators and prey. I've only read up on her lightly, so if we met, I'd love it to be back in her 15th Century studio so she could show me around. She was German, so we might be able to chat. I'd like to hear how she financed and arranged her travels to South America, and how she stayed committed to her work. Show me the originals please, and let's see the notes too! I just googled her to refresh my memory-- and she eventually lived and died in Amsterdam, and according to wikipedia the city of Amsterdam sponsored her for a trip to Surinam! I have a newly finished story set in the near future with a character based on her. I learned about Merian from a friend, an accomplished nature artist and teacher. She's got a great out-of-print book that's a compilation of Merian's work.


Tell us something few people know about you.

I really like privacy.


Other than Versal (which has clearly been awesome), what's one great place you've been published?

Liars' League London, because it's London, and because their live reading-performances and e-audio files are a new format for me. Plus I don't know who else would have taken that piece about how Santa and Lillef (the future Mrs. Claus) met.


Why did you send work to Versal? Be honest.

Well I do judge a website by its cover, so I definitely approached Versal that way at first. And perhaps there was a suggested theme for issue 10 which I felt "Conrad's Hammer" suited. Either way, as I dig around looking for the right place for my work, I try to get a feel for the quality and editorial needs of the journal. Also, I like the low submission fee, it's very fair. I don't often submit to annual publications, out of impatience, but Versal appealed to me.


What has lasted you ten years?

Too much of some and too little of others.


Tell us what you're working on right now.

I'm working on a short story that's getting pretty long already. Like "Conrad's Hammer", it's set where I live now, more explicitly this time. It's about objects, antiques and heirlooms and art— the neat old stuff that's still around and how the current owners handle it all. Haves and have nots. The bad guy is a pastor, an Episcopalian priest. I tried to resist that, but it's true, I find a lot of religious people to be more harmful than good. It's also set at Christmas, and right now it looks like the end of the story will be a big Christmas bash, where I plan to kill off the pastor during the festivities.

For the Amdammers: local lit stuff

The English Bookshop's recent (and jam-packed) Meet & Mingle was a wonderful demonstration of how much literary energy there is in Amsterdam right now. It's a far cry from what I flew into 11 years ago. And like clockwork, this fall once again brings some new literary programming to town, so I thought I'd take a moment to highlight two programs that I'm especially excited about.

ART OF FICTION: The wonderful Nina Siegal (of Time Out Amsterdam fame) has put together a top-notch series on the art of fiction writing. Fictioners out there, you're not going to get a workshop much better than this in our buurt. Nina's not only got her own novel on the shelves, but she has also worked with some of the leading writers of our time. The four workshops can be taken as a whole or individually, and the price is CRAZY CHEAP. For more information, click here.

LITERARY WALKING TOUR: The English Bookshop is now hosting literary walking tours through this amazing city. Anyone who loves the printed word and wants to know more about the fascinating literary and cultural history of Amsterdam will love this new offering. And it's a great tip for your visiting family and friends! Complete details can be found here.

And as you probably know, or should know, The English Bookshop hosts an array of workshops and writing groups, from children's book writing to poetry critiques. Check out their site for details.

Keep an eye on this space, dear friends, because we also may, just may, have something new up our sleeve.

Happy writing, Amdam!

Submission call: Send your work to Versal 11!

Amsterdam's acclaimed literary & arts journal, Versal, is now reading for its 11th edition. Its editors are looking for excellent prose, poetry, art and the inbetween.

Guidelines and submissions here: www.versaljournal.org/guidelines

A $2 submission fee applies, or submit for free between October 1 and October 7, 2012.

For a close look at Versal's tastes, purchase the current no. 10 or a back issue: www.versaljournal.org/order. Pre-order Versal 11 when you submit and we’ll waive the submission fee.

The deadline for submissions to Versal 11 is January 15, 2013.

Contributor Notes: Eric Magrane

This year we're posting "Contributor Notes": interviews and guest posts from the writers and artists of Versal 10. After a cucumber season hiatus, we're back with Tucson-based writer Eric Magrane, who recently visited the border wall between the US and Mexico and wrote about his experience there.


OF BORDER WALLS & LIGHTHOUSES
July 2012
(photos by Adela C. Licona)

Recently I visited the U.S./Mexico border wall on a scouting trip for a Border Wall Poetry Sounding. Glenn Weyant, sound-artist provocateur, has been playing the border wall as an instrument for six years and this is the first time that I joined him. Along with Wendy Burk and Adela Licona, we left Tucson before sunrise on a Sunday early in July, and drove the seventy miles to the border in Sasabe for our first stop.

As we traveled toward Sasabe, the border patrol presence was ubiquitous. We saw at least ten border patrol vehicles to every one non-border patrol vehicle, and the non-border patrol vehicles were likely off-duty border patrol agents. Clearly, this is big business.

The wall along this section of the border cuts through desert and grasslands and has a sublime presence. Stretching out across the rolling terrain, the wall continues to the border of the Tohono O’odham Nation and then abruptly stops. (This has sent many migrants through the T.O. nation, which extends over both sides of the current U.S./Mexico boundary.)

The wall is a manifestation of a geopolitical climate where the far-right state legislature of Arizona passes draconian and xenophobic laws such as SB 1070 (of which the U.S. Supreme Court recently struck down much, but left the “Show me Your Papers” provision intact), and a ban on Mexican-American studies complete with banned books (see one of our illustrious school board members discuss the Mexican-American studies ban on a piece from the Daily Show).

In the meantime, the number of deaths from border crossers trying to cross this terrain is staggering. As of the fourth week of July when I write this, the number of deaths since October 2011 stands at 94 (The humanitarian organization No More Deaths keeps a running tab on their website.) And the wall doesn’t just affect human migration; it keeps many other species from their natural crossings, threatening the biodiversity of the region.

With this backdrop, we are here to interact with the wall as something other than an embodiment of fear and divisiveness. Glenn describes it this way: “If it is accepted that the border wall can be repurposed as an instrument when played, then this symbol of fear and loathing is capable of producing beauty, encouraging listening, developing unity, engaging dialogue and presenting an alternative narrative.”

And now I’m thinking about lighthouses. In Megan Garr’s introduction to Versal Ten, she writes, “set at the boundary where sea and land converge, the lighthouse fixed itself in my young mind as my first metaphor, a personification of who I wanted to become and the site of where I thought the world’s honesty could be glanced.”

If we think of objects as metaphors and embodiments of ideas, the contrast between a lighthouse and a border wall couldn’t be more distinct. One is a beacon and the other is its opposite. What would it take to turn what divides us into something that brings us together? Or, in an object-oriented ontology, can we interact with this object and change it and how it thinks?

Along with Glenn’s musical equipment, we brought poetry along, some in the form of language on clear acrylic glass that could be reflected onto the wall. The language included the words “BRIDGE” and “MISERY” and the phrase “OPEN SESAME”. The video here shows the reflection of OPEN SESAME while Weyant and Burk play the wall.





What role does art have in the world? It may be solipsistic to think that playing the wall as an instrument and interacting with it as a location to practice poetics could be a form of alchemy and could shift deeply embedded social and geopolitical structures that are deleterious to our species and to the earth. However, I believe—and hope—that it may add to that “collective willpower of our humanity, of our art, and of our drive to protect both” that Garr also writes of in the Introduction to Versal Ten.