The South Carolina Review

The South Carolina Review Volume 53.1, Fall 2020

A orange, yellow, purple, and white sunset over a black cityscape.
Cover of SCR issue 53.1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SCR Issue 53.1 includes fiction by Kevin Wilson and Evan Lavender-Smith, poetry by Lisa Summe and Elsa Cross, and an interview with Toni Jensen, author of Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land.

 

CONTENTS

POETRY

1 DWAINE RIEVES  Factory
2 OJO TAIYE  Last Rite
14 ALINA STEFANESCU  Artifice
24 LAURA MINOR  Author’s Prayer; In Fractals of Matter on Earth Where Heaven is a Metaphor for Heaven
36 TODD BOSS  Never Done
38 JOHNSON CHEU  What Would I Do Able-Bodied?
65 ELSA CROSS  Footnote; Coda
Translated by SUSAN AYRES
77 LISA SUMME  Regret in X Parts; When I spend the night, first time; At My Grandma’s Funeral I Think Only of My Grandfather
91 TODD DAVIS  What We Died For
92 BRITTON SHURLEY  To Francisco Starks, who Stole my Car from my Driveway, Late One Saturday Night
94 FOX HENRY FRAZIER  Silver-Eyed Lilínabalén’s Enduring Curse Is Thought to Be the Reason that the Caxxinoqi Have Preserved Their Ancient Prohibition Against All Practices of Divination
100 BRADFORD TICE  Our Affairs
117 RONALD DZERIGIAN  After National Public Radio Names Seventeen Dead
118 ALAMGIR HASHMI  Garbage News
127 STEPHEN FELLNER  Second Attempt at a Cantrip for my Mother’s Dementia
128 MICHAEL MALAN  Beside the Waiting River
137 DAVID TROUPES  Then Almost an Unbroken Forest

FICTION

3 ALYSSA NORTHROP  Thanksgiving
16 KEVIN WILSON  The Blue Tiger
26 KOSISO UGWUEZE  Frontier
39 EVAN LAVENDER-SMITH  Letters from Her Piano Teacher
68 AMY KIGER-WILLIAMS  Tybee Island
84 STEPHEN HUNDLEY  Abstinence for Arkansas
97 RAYMOND DEEJ  Matters of Geese
102 KATHERINE ANN DAVIS  Where There Were Cracks
120 ANNA LOWE WEBER  Fault
129 CHRISTINA YANG  Crossing the Bridge

NONFICTION

140 MIRIAM MCEWEN  Carrying Witness: A Conversation with Toni Jensen

BOOK REVIEWS

145 WALT HUNTER  That Was What Life Was Like: David Blair’s Barbarian Seasons
148 TARA JO LENERTZ  Memories Woven in Space and Time: Julia Koet’s The Rib Joint
152 JENNA RICHARD  The Weight of Silence: Lisa Summe’s Say It Hurts
155 JOHN RICHARD SAYLOR  A Very Effable Sadness: John McNally’s The Fear of Everything

CONTRIBUTORS

157

Carrying Witness: A Conversation with Toni Jensen

 

Two photos, the photo on the left is an image of author Toni Jensen. The photo on the right is the cover of her book Carry.
Toni Jenson and book cover.

 “Toni Jensen is a writer of power dynamics, physical trauma and generational pain. She is a writer of human error and environmental impact. She is a writer of uncommon beauty in unexpected places. Jensen’s deeply personal essays also serve as dispatches from the frontlines of an America often willfully ignorant of its own crises. Her new memoir Carry is about gun violence, land and Indigenous people’s lives. The book’s prose is both stately and riotous as Jensen moves through childhood memories of hunting trips with her father into the adult dread of a violent American culture, one which continues to assault native bodies. An associate professor in Creative Writing and Indigenous Studies at the University of Arkansas, she also teaches in the low-residency  MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. On the last day of July 2020—amid the anxieties of a pandemic and the national outcry against police brutality—I was privileged to talk with Toni (over Zoom) about the language of violence, what it means to be American, and the bright, wholesome things that have sustained her writing process.” – Miriam McEwen

 

Miriam McEwen: I just wanted to start at the beginning, if we could, at the literal beginning with the title of Carry. Could you talk about how the prominence of that word signals to the reader its various meanings throughout the book? How did that materialize for you? I know sometimes titles can be suggestions that come later. Was that word really singular in your development of the book?

Toni Jensen: The book started with a couple of essays. The ones that were written before I necessarily thought of it as a book were “Women in the Fracklands” and “Carry,” a much different version of “Give and Go” and “The Invented Histories of Domestic Birds.” So the first handful of chapters—except for chapter two—mostly were essays that I wrote as individual essays. It seemed clear after writing those that I was headed toward a book. I think it was one of those rare instances where the title was my idea, and no one questioned it. Just the idea(s) of campus carry, concealed carry, carrying guns, carrying history, carrying witness, the different things we carry around in our bodies—those were some of the ways I saw Carry working.

MM: I think it works so beautifully and so powerfully. You say, “the different things we carry around in our bodies.” And in the book, you write about the distinction between the words survival and survivance. How did you arrive at a deeper meaning through—I’m not sure what to call it—this particular conjugation?

TJ: Survivance is a term coined by Ojibwe writer Gerald Vizenor. He and Diane Glancy were the editors of From the Hilltop, my first book. So I really love both of them, and I really love their work. But that word of Gerald’s is one so many of us have picked up. I think [survivance] is different from survival because survival implies that it’s in the past. It implies that you’ve gone through this process and you’re done, and survivance implies the process, the continuation. It’s ongoing. And I think survivance better describes the circumstance so many people are in right now.

MM: Right. This word is one that probably a broader population than ever can understand, given the rise of coronavirus. And did COVID-19 change the trajectory of the book, or did you kind of touch down in the same place of coming home, wanting to find home, meanings of home and family and land?

TJ: I wouldn’t say the pandemic changed the book because the book was mostly written when coronavirus happened. Just having a chapter called “Contagion” in the book made it feel necessary to integrate that, and also the fact that there’s more violence now. We’ve had more gun violence since coronavirus began. In the same way that back in March there wasn’t toilet paper on the shelves, there were also lines and lines at gun stores. And so, to address that trend was important because I think a lot of people in urban areas on the coasts are maybe unaware of what happens in the middle of the country. In Arkansas, where I live in Fayetteville, we’re just south of Bentonville . Everyone shops at Walmart. There are at least seven or eight Walmarts in Fayetteville (maybe more). All those franchises in a city with fewer than 80,000 people. This is Walmart country, so it’s common for people to also buy guns there.

MM: My geographical context here in Mountain Rest, South Carolina is only slightly similar. But I have witnessed how Walmart can often double as a gathering place of sorts, and I so appreciate the awareness your work has for rural consumer culture. All right! I’d like to talk to you now about birds, and please forgive the terrible transition. But the recurrence of bird images throughout the memoir reflects your principle themes really well. I kept thinking about the way a bird collects materials to carry back to its nest. The essays use the vocabulary of bird groupings so viscerally; these definitions almost train the reader to examine the ways in which a woman’s body is objectified. Was that use of language intentional from the very beginning? At what point in your writing process did you realize that you wanted to include that more scientific consideration of birds?

TJ: The first essay I think that would have started with is “Women in the Fracklands,” and it began pretty organically. I’m interested in the definitions of things: how we name birds, how we name animals, how we name each other. There’s a lot in the book about categories of violence, too: domestic violence, domestic shootings versus workplace shootings versus school shootings—how some [phrases] are considered escalation as far as terminology and also as far as criminal sentencing, and some are considered demotion. I guess how we name anything affects our perception of it, so I was interested in birds for a similar reason. But, also, the book is heavier content, and I’m keenly aware that heavier content needs balance. You have to have something concrete and beautiful, or something funny or both, as balance. So the birds are woven in as part of that consideration.

MM: You really challenge the reader to define for themselves what constitutes violence by using phrases such as “everyday violence” and “extraordinary violence.”  It’s that verbal act of demotion and escalation you just mentioned. I was also very taken with this refrain of “our America,” which appears throughout the essays. What do those words, presented as a whole, signify to you? And what do you hope the repetition of “our America” will instigate in the reader’s emotional consciousness?

TJ: “Our America” is really purposeful because mostly the only people I hear saying “in our America” are from an entirely different political viewpoint than my own. So we can find common ground in that, if we reappropriate it, if we take it back. It is all of our America. We all live here. And I think for Native people in particular—we like to be defined by our tribes, by our places, by our communities, by our nation’s first. Not everyone, but in many cases that’s true. But, also, we do live in this greater construct called America. We vote in national elections. We vote in local elections. We vote in city elections, if we live off-reservation. I think it’s important that we are considered in the framework of what it means to be American. Also, we were here first. It wasn’t called the United States then, but we were here. I think that’s very important. As far as “everyday violence,” I do think there will be people who find some of the things I consider everyday to be extraordinary. I know that, but I think that gets us questioning differences in worlds, right? And I think questioning is good.

MM: Yes, you report on the violent discrepancy between definitions of “normal.” And in the same way you talk in the book about groupings of birds, you also have kind of a master list of words that speak to hidden violence, or else words that convey troubling multiplicities. I’m wondering how it became apparent to you that so many common words (shooter, verge, off-season, in season) were in need of serious investigation.

TJ: Several of those words are related to sport. I knew that I wanted to have sports be in there because even the NRA was once a sporting organization. A sporting organization for outdoorsmen. That was true through the seventies, and I think that we forget that. It’s easy to forget that. Especially for a lot of readers of the book who will be younger than I am—they don’t have living memories of the seventies or eighties.

MM: Right. I know I always think of the NRA as this monster we have to combat, but having it put into a context of innocuous (for people, at least) sports living was just very educational for me. And I hope for others.

TJ: I hope so, yeah. I think that it makes the NRA seem like it can be changed. If, in my lifetime, it can go from a sportsman organization to what it is now—basically a political gun lobbying group more than anything else—it can change again. It can be taken back; it can be shifted back to what it once was. I’m not suggesting dismantling the NRA because I don’t think that can be accomplished in our lifetime, and because I don’t think [dismantling] would serve all of its members. There are a good many members who joined because their fathers or grandfathers were members before them. Or their grandmothers, in some cases. There’s still that population.

MM: Clearly so much travel and research and investigation went into the creation of this book, so I wanted to ask what you were reading, watching, and listening to during its development. What were some of the things that were most helpful?

TJ: In 2016 through 2018, there was a lot of back and forth travel. There’s a band called the Water Liars; the name comes from a Barry Hannah short story. I listened to their album Wyoming all the way across the country and back. I love that album. There were a few books of poetry I read and reread: Joy Harjo’s A Map to the Next World, Jamaal May’s The Big Book of Exit Strategies, Ada Limón’s Sharks in the Rivers, Louise Erdrich’s Baptism of Desire, Sherwin Bitsui’s Dissolve, Joan Kane’s Milk Black Carbon. Proxies by Brian Blanchfield is a book of nonfiction written by a poet, and it really opened up the lyrical possibilities of nonfiction for me.

MM: With all the places and histories this memoir represents as parts of yourself, do you feel at all that this book is its own sort of destination? What was the awareness or understanding you arrived at upon its completion, and what intellectual and/or emotional space do you hope your readers will find themselves in upon reaching the end?

TJ: I do feel like I’m certainly not in a unique position, having lived in all of these places. Many people have lived in a lot of places across the country, but I’ve lived in a lot of places that are considered particularly violent. And I liked living in most of them, at least to a degree. I had these experiences with violence, or people I love did, so I described those. But I hope that readers come away with a sense of the scope and history of a place, of each place. I think showing the beauty of the landscape and the tribal history of each place is important. It’s how I see the world.

We’re On Submittable!

We’ve made the switch! For consideration to be included in the latest issue of SCR, find us on Submittable. Simply search “South Carolina Review” in the search bar of the “Discover” tab. Current submissions for the Spring 2021 issue 53.1 are open until September 15, 2020.

We will no longer be accepting submissions through email, but we are excited to see you over at Submittable. SCR submissions are free and are accepted on a rolling basis. To create an account, visit submittable.com

No previously published work, work accepted elsewhere, or multiple submissions accepted. Please note that we cannot acknowledge receipt of manuscripts and that we cannot return manuscripts under any conditions. Contributors will receive two copies of the issue in which accepted work appears.

SCR publishes fiction and poetry primarily, but will also consider creative nonfiction, scholarly essays, and book reviews. The editors of SCR thank you for your interest in submitting a manuscript for their consideration.

Congratulations to Poetry and Fiction Prize Winners!

Photo accompanying "The Long Distance Runner" by Joshua Jones in SCR 52.2.
Photo accompanying “The Long Distance Runner” by Joshua Jones in SCR 52.2.

The SCR would like to sincerely thank all of the authors who contributed to Volume 52.2. Congratulations to the winners of our Ronald Moran Prize in Poetry and Fiction, Isabel Duarte-Gray for “A Portion for Foxes,” (poetry) and Joshua Jones for “The Long-Distance Runner” (fiction). Check out both winning pieces in the 52.2 table of contents under “Recent Issues.

Each recipient, chosen from authors included in each year’s fall and spring issue who have no more than one published book, receives a $250 prize.

The South Carolina Review Volume 52.2, Spring 2020

Painting of an orange and white boat docked at the edge of a blue lake with green mountains in the distance. The SCR logo is placed at the top left corner in white.

SCR Issue 52.2 includes fiction by James Ulmer and Joshua Jones, along with poetry by Julianna Baggott and Susanne Paola Antonetta.

 

CONTENTS

POETRY

2 SUSANNE PAOLA ANTONETTA  Clue
5 SASHA FLETCHER  i told you so
15 TRAVIS LAU  Still Life; Recovered: Vegetable Knife
33 JUDITH CODY  Ultrasound of a Poem
34 ISABEL DUARTE-GRAY  A Portion for Foxes
44 JAN C. GROSSMAN  The Decision
46 JULIANNA BAGGOTT  The Facebook is Empty and Sad
58 JAY DESHPANDE  Narrative Comes Easy; Love in Swan
64 J. ALAN NELSON  Time to Fuck Over Romeo
82 LIZ BOWEN  Amnesia; Aphasia
92 MATTHEW LIPPMAN  What Mingus Knew
105 CAROLINE MAUN  Where I Grew Up
117 CHARLOTTE PENCE  Becoming That Adult
118 MICHAEL ROGNER  Vinyl
120 LELAND SEESE  Dress Shoes
135 AVIVA KASOWSKI  Closure

FICTION

6 JAMES ULMER  The Far Hill
18 JOSHUA JONES  The Long-Distance Runner
36 BRENDAN GILLEN  What Goes Up
48 JENNY ROBERTSON  Ground Truth
60 SARAH BLACKMAN  The Donora Smog
66 DUSTIN M. HOFFMAN  The First Woman
84 MATTHEW FIANDER  Gizzards and Hearts (Mostly Gizzards)
94 MICHAEL GILLS  Swimmer
106 WILL RADKE  Black and Blue
122 CATHERINE BELL  Outward Bound

NONFICTION

75 MATTHEW VOLLMER  Three Essays

BOOK REVIEWS

136 DORSEY CRAFT  “Butterfly on a Chain”: Maurice Manning’s Railsplitter
141 PRESTON TAYLOR STONE  Toward a Queer/Blind Poetics: Kathi Wolfe’s Love and Kumquats
144 DUSTIN PEARSON  Tommy Pico’s Feed Serves Somthing-for-Everybody Appeal
147 Gary Kerley “All’s Fair in Love and Memoir”: Remembering Pat Conroy

CONTRIBUTORS

153

An Interview with Author Sadie Hoagland

SCR Assistant Editor Wesley Kapp interviews Sadie Hoagland on her story collection entitled American Grief in Four Stages. Hoagland’s story, “Extra Patriotic,” is featured in SCR Volume 51.2.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interview with Author Sadie Hoagland 

WK: American Grief in Four Stages is described as a short story collection that explores the inability of language to capture traumatic experiences. I find this idea compelling, and I thought that each story in this collection revealed this truth in different ways. Can you tell us more about this concept and what inspired you to create this specific body of work?

SH: Our tendency as humans is to try to find a narrative that explains our lives, and yet some events defy the logic of a narrative. There is no story that can explain suicide, for example, and the language we use to comfort the bereaved is itself clichéd (e.g. “Sorry for your loss”). I was interested, and even frustrated by this failure in my own life, and so some of the stories in the collection engage this failure of language directly, such as the title story and “Warning Signs.” Both of the narrators of these stories are using extreme language posturing to try to bring the reader into their own state of shock: “If I knew why my little brother shot himself through the head then, man, I’d be rich.” They are also using language as armor; knowing that words can’t express their loss, perhaps they can at least use language to hide their pain. In other stories, the ineptitude of language is explored much more subtly. For example, in “The Crossword,” an old woman is using crossword clues as memory cues, and each word reveals a complex root system into her past, proliferations of meanings of the word known only to her. Pie is a three-letter crossword answer, but also a memory of the woman as a young girl, with her cousin, a tension in the air. Language, then, always conceals more than it reveals in this way; it connects us by what we say, while always reminding us of that which remains hidden within us, what we don’t say. I’m intrigued by this idea (which is probably why I am a writer). 

WK: I love the title “Cavalier Presentations of Heartbreaking News”, and I thought it described that story so well. It seems that everyone has their own way of giving and receiving bad news, and I found it interesting to see that play out in this particular story. Can you tell us a little bit about why you wrote this story? I’m also really interested in the concept of electric birds.

SH: Ha! I feel like you read right through this story straight to me. I do think people present bad news often very casually, and I never not feel it. Perhaps this a great weakness, or a strength that led me to fiction writing, but I do feel the empathy center in my brain is a tad large, and impractically so. I am often in the position of the narrator to a lesser degree, where someone tells me something that I process viscerally. Interestingly enough, when I was in my twenties, older women, strangers, would often tell me stories of almost brutal sadness and even more interestingly, several of these stories involved birds. This perhaps, on an unconscious level, is why I wrote this story. The electric birds were a starting point, that first line, “It was my birthday when I found out all the birds were electric…” came into my head and was too compelling a thread not to follow. But having the birds in the story also created a sense of tension between the possible and impossible that led me further into the plot. If it was possible that birds were electric, then maybe our narrator can find her way through the impossibility of a cancer diagnosis.   

WK: “Extra Patriotic” was published recently in South Carolina Review, and it has found a home in this collection. The story follows two characters dealing with PTSD. Similar to other stories in the collection, “Extra Patriotic” leaves the reader with an idea of what happens next but no sure answer. The characters press on, but we aren’t sure that happiness is in store for them. Each character responds to their situation differently. Why did you feel it was important to show these two different responses? Why can’t they make it work, in your mind?

SH: Our culture encourages people to be resilient, to “get over” whatever happens to them, and this is almost the only option. We don’t like to think about the people that can’t rise up out of their struggles, that’s not part of the American story. Yet we’ve learned through vets with PTSD, sometimes we’ve painfully and tragically learned, that this is not the case, we can’t always “get over it.”  And while some kinds of trauma are legible, or even have cultural currency, others seem to make people untouchable. Truly isolated. I wanted to think about two characters with two different kinds of trauma from life events that read very differently: one is a “hero,” a war vet, and one a “survivor” of her parents tragic and violent death. Both have different kinds of support systems. One is ready to move forward before the other can move forward, and this creates a distance between them. Perhaps it is surmountable, but not in the moment the story ends. I wanted the reader to remember, to feel, both the possibility of recovery through one character, but also the immensity of the task of recovering from trauma through the other character. 

WK: Your career has taken you from California to Utah to your current home in Louisiana. [Hoagland teaches in the PhD writing program at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette.] How have you seen your writing develop differently in each of these places?

SH: It takes me a long time to process space and place, and for a place that has affected me to make it into my writing. My novel, Strange Children, which comes out in Spring 2021 is about a polygamist community in Utah, where I grew up but didn’t write about until I had moved away. I haven’t lived in California for ten years, but I just finished a second novel that takes place in central California. So it seems that for me it’s almost easier to write about a place after I’ve left it. Perhaps there’s a certain clarity I get when I am no longer going about day-to-day life in a place, a distance that allows me to see the nuances of a “where.” Though I will say that even as I live here, Louisiana is starting to seep into my writing, mostly in the form of nonfiction as this place has a wild and strange heart that is almost too uncanny for fiction. 

WK: What are you working on now? 

SH: I am currently revising my second novel, with a working title of Upside Down in the Sky, about a woman grappling with a sexual assault in her workplace and the disappearance of her troubled mother the same week in California. As she searches and uncovers her mother’s story, she meets her estranged grandmother, starts tracking down a father she never knew, and also discovers that her mother has suffered things she could never have imagined. I am also working on a collection of nonfiction mini-essays about the female body as both a question and answer in various rhetorical spaces, like the medical community, and academia. Stay tuned! 

Spring 2020 Issue 52.2 In The Works!

Painting of an orange and white boat docked at the edge of a blue lake with green mountains in the distance. The SCR logo is placed at the top left corner in white.

With fiction and poetry by Julianna Baggott, Jay Deshpande, Suzanne Paola, and James Ulmer, SCR Issue 52.2 will be released in a few short weeks! Secure your copy of 52.2 by subscribing to our journal. For more information on sample copies, institution rates, and individual sales, please visit the “Store” tab.