Overheard at Conversations & Connections Conference

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3QRollout!!!

Join us for publishing tips and other writing advice at 3QR’s semi-official rollout at the Conversations and Connections conference in Washington, D.C.’s Dupont Circle this Saturday, April 21. Check out the conference website.

Another memory, also music. They’re sitting in one of the front rows in the orchestra of the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, but all the way to the left. He tried to get center seats but they were sold out. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is playing Respighi’s Pines of Rome. “There’s no other orchestral music I know of—maybe Firebird,” he said when they were choosing which six concert to go in their subscription series, “that has as great a buildup and a more powerful ending, and I’ve always wanted to hear it performed live.” “Anything you want,” she said, “except Bruckner. I’m not familiar with it, either on record or the radio, though I have liked his Fountains of Rome.” During the last few minutes of the piece, when the music is building to the climax, he moves his right hand as if he’s conducting, and continues to, his motions getting increasingly more vigorous, till the end. Later, when it seems the entire audience around them is standing and applauding, he stays seated, grinning at her and crying a little, and says “Don’t mind me. And stand if you want. But what do you think? Did you like it?” and she says “No, no, I’ll sit with you, and I liked it a lot. I can see why one could get overcome by it.” “I didn’t embarrass you with my hand-waving?” and she says “Not whatsoever. You did a brilliant job of conducting. They never played better. Not a weak moment from any section in the orchestra. What I’d like to know, though, is how, in what I assume were the exact times they were supposed to come in, you got the birds to tweet.”

Sibelius. He drives a poet and her husband to the train station after she gave a reading for his department. On the way home he turns on the Baltimore classical music station. It’s playing a piece he’s never heard before but which sounds like Sibelius. He parks, sits in the car in his carport till the piece is over so he can get the name of it. Nightride and Sunrise. Few days later he buys a CD of five Sibelius tone poems, listens to the whole CD that night and then just that one piece every night for around a week. He wants her to listen to it with him—not at dinner but in the living room where the CD player and speakers are—but she’s always busy in her study researching and writing a paper for an academic conference in a month and also things to do with her teaching. Finally, he knocks on her study door and says “May I come in?” He tells her “Really, I want you to listen to that new CD I got. Just one piece on it; it’s only fifteen minutes long. It’s so moving and evocative of the sea and sky—you’ll love it. And like the Firebird Suite and Pines of Rome, it has an incredible powerful ending.” She says “I’ve heard it, I’ve heard it; you’ve played nothing else the past week.” “But you heard it with your door shut. You’re not getting the full impact of it. Come on; you’re resisting too much. I’m going to have to insist,” and he takes her hand. “You don’t like it the first time, I’ll never ask you to listen to it again.” “All right,” she says; “looks like I can’t stop you,” and they go into the living room. He says “Sit in the Morris chair; you’ll hear it best from there. Some wine?” and she says “Too early and I still have work to do, even after dinner.” “Fire?” and she says “Too warm and too much of a bother.” “Maybe I should shut off the lights. I know I listened to it twice that way, totally in the dark, and you really see the imagery Sibelius is trying to create,” and she says “Sweetheart, just play it.” The CD’s already in the player from last night. He turns the system on, gets out the third track, turns off all the lights in the room and sits at the end of the couch near her chair. After it’s over, Finlandia comes on. He turns on the floor lamp between them, turns off the CD player and says “So?” “It was lovely,” she says. “Sea, sky, sun rising, waves breaking…well, I don’t know if I’ll go that far, but I got, as you said, a full picture. Thanks for the experience of hearing it the way it should be heard. I love it when you get enthusiastic about something other than what you’re writing. Now, work calls,” and she gets up and kisses him. “One thing, though. Please don’t play it again right away, or when I’m home for the next few days. It could lead to my hating such a beautiful piece of music,” and she goes into her study and shuts the door.

She says “We know we’re both very fertile—my abortions and your inseminating several girlfriends—so there’s no doubt we’re going to conceive. But the ‘how’ of it is something I’ve been looking into. This article by a gynecologist I read says the best way is for me to get into the doggy position and for you to enter me from behind, penetrating as far as you can without hurting me when you’re about to come. And after you come, for you to stay in me like that for as long as you can till you fall out. But to try not to fall out. Even if you feel your penis has become soft, keep it in till there’s nothing you can do to stop it from leaving. That’s what the article said, and that our chances are increased in all this by about triple. Tonight is as good a time to start as any. But to assure conception, we’ll do it every night—and we’re not supposed to do it more than once a day, to keep your sperm count high, and ideally at twenty-four hour intervals.” “Let’s do it now, then,” he says. “It’s been more than twenty-four hours,” and she says “Fine with me.” They go into the bedroom, undress and she gets on the bed. “Shouldn’t you take off your bra?” and she says “I didn’t think it necessary, but okay.” She takes off her bra and gets in the doggy position, rests her forehead on two pillows, and he gets on the bed. “Shouldn’t we play around with each other a little first?”  and she says “If I know you, you’re already erect. Let’s not let any of your precious sperm dribble out.” He gets behind her and sticks his penis in. “Just remember, when you feel you’re about to come—“ and he says “I know.” He comes and she says “Now stay in, as deep as you can get—you’re not hurting me.” He stays in for another minute, says I think it’s had it and is about to flop out,” and she says “Let it do it on its own,” and a few seconds later it does. “Now I’m supposed to stay in this position for another five minutes,” and he says “Are you comfortable? I don’t know how your head could be,” and she says “I’m all right.” He’s sitting on the bed now and rubs her buttocks, then kisses them. “You have a sweet tush,” he says. “Sweet like ‘taste’?” And he says “Like ‘lovely, pleasing, adorable.’” “No, I don’t. Be honest. I have a large tush,” and he says “Sweet, too. I love your tush. I love everything about you. All this talk and my touching you is making me hot again. Can I try to stick it back in? There’s only a fifty-fifty chance I’ll be successful,” and she says “No, that might mess things up.” They get off the bed a few minutes later and dress. This was in New York. Their Riverside Drive apartment. When they were still using the bedroom for themselves. They were both on winter break. They were getting married in the apartment in a month. So it was around mid-December. They thought September or October would be a good time to have their first baby. Later in bed, after she turns off her light and they kiss goodnight, he says “So I guess we make love again tomorrow around seven,” and she says “That’s what the article said. As long as it’s twenty-four hours after the last time. It couldn’t have been very much fun for you, so technical and mechanical. At least you didn’t have to wait for me to put in my diaphragm and you could come anytime you wanted to.” “Not true,” he says; “I enjoyed it. I’ve always liked that position. It’s maybe the most exciting for me, although I wouldn’t have minded a little more warming up. It’s you whom it couldn’t have been much fun for,” and she says “The objective was more important than the pleasure. Once we know I’m pregnant, we’ll go back to doing it any way we want.” “And if you have your period?” and she says “If I do, and I tend to doubt that, we’ll still do it any way we want for about a week and then go back to doggy.”

It’s three years later. Again, mid-December. Riverside Drive apartment, both on winter break. No, she’s on break; he’s on leave for a year because of a writing fellowship he got. She’ll be on leave the following fall, when they plan to have their second child: not too soon after the first one, they think, and where the two kids will still be close in age. The hollywood bed’s now in the bedroom for Rosalind; the double bed in the living room for them. They wait till they normally go to bed, around eleven-thirty. She says “I’ll get in the same position I did to conceive Rosalind. I think it worked with her the first time we did it. You remember the article I told you about then,” and he says “Vaguely.”

3QR Author Note

3QR Author Bios

LIBERO IL PASSO: FREE TO STEP OR PASS

Consider, for a moment, the concept of the Three Quarter True Story: No censorship for writers. No betrayal for readers. No locked doors with mixed messages.

When teaching fiction and nonfiction to university students, I’ve found that the question invariably comes up: What is True? We discuss whether any remembered moment can be absolutely accurate, or whether the writer’s own filters color what he or she observes. Such questions are debated as well among my writing colleagues at conferences and writers’ workshops. Does it even matter what is true? Well, the first answer to that is: Yes. To nonfiction writers it does. A great deal of in-depth research, time-consuming immersion, careful interviewing, and paranoid fact-checking goes into such seminal nonfiction works as Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb or David Simon’s Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. Such writers, as far as I know, resisted the temptation to fill in the gaps of the unknown with  fabricated facts or exaggerated character descriptions. Nonfiction has long implied a commitment, or contract, with the reader: This really happened.

Some writers, and publishers, however don’t resist. Therefore, we have scandals such as James Frey’s ‘memoir’ A Million Little Pieces. As publicized on the infamous episode of Oprah’s talk show in 2006, various details in the book, including the rebel Frey’s supposed jail stint, were simply made up. Frey, according to a 2008 Vanity Fair article, said he first pitched his book to publishers as an autobiographical novel in the mode of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. But “TRUE STORIES” are sexy, and, as the book became a bestseller, Frey became a braggart caught up in the web of his own lies. Many would say it was not worth the risk when his readers, like Oprah, felt betrayed, and his name vilified.

Then we get to the masters of nonfiction, whose books are termed creative nonfiction or narrative journalism. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood; George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London; Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia; Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes; John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil; or Beryl Markham’s West with the Night, etc. Capote himself considered his book a “nonfiction novel.” Yet, with all of these works and others, questions were later raised about their accuracy and adherence to truth—whether some scenes, characters, and dialogue were fictionalized, or, in the case of Markham’s memoir, her sexual escapades as an aviatrix in Africa simply glossed over because her third husband likely wrote the book with, or for, her.

Yet something about all this “gotcha lit crit” started to bother me: Who are we to say these books should not have been written or the author’s very real accomplishments, adventures, experiences, or depictions devalued entirely. The bigger question: Isn’t it censorship to say someone shouldn’t write whatever they want, the way they want, just because we don’t have a category for it? Film, after all, has the “based-on-a-true-story” genre, and the viewer knows what he or she is getting into. One of my students once asked, “Why can’t we have .74 stories?” Thus, the kernel was planted for The Three Quarter Review: Poetry and Prose > 75 percent True.

Some might argue, however, that such altered works should simply be considered fiction. Truth is fiction’s strange bedfellow, after all. And yes, there is a storied history of real events inspiring great works of literature. Henry James, for example, was known as the consummate eavesdropper of parlor and party chatter. The plot of his novel, Washington Square, came directly from real life. The first lines in his original notebook entry, according to recent editions of the novel, read:

February 21^st. Mrs. Kemble told me last evening the history of her brother H.’s engagement to Miss T.H.K. [He] was a young ensign in a marching regiment, very handsome (‘beautiful’) said Mrs. K., but very luxurious and selfish, and without a penny to his name. Miss T. was a dull, plain, common-place girl, only daughter of the Master of King’s Coll,. Cambridge, who had a handsome private fortune . . .”

Thus the novel’s essential plot was fashioned—the complicated triangle between the shy, simple heroine, Catherine; the coxcomb Morris Townsend; and the distrustful father, Dr. Sloper. As James later noted in his essay titled “The Art of Fiction:” “It goes without saying that you will not write a good novel unless you possess a sense of reality, but it will be difficult to give you a recipe for calling that sense into being. Humanity is immense, and reality has a myriad forms . . .”

Some of the writers for this inaugural issue of The Three Quarter Review remark on this overlap of imagination and reality (see 3QR Author Notes): As novelist Stephen Dixon writes: Some fiction I take almost whole from my life, some fiction I take almost whole from my imagination. My imagination is part of my life, of course, but the unlived part of it.

Fiction brings such tranformation of experience, and translation of imagined realities, to the literary table. Still, “things that really happened” offers an undeniable primal, narrative draw for readers. Alice Munro, in her 1982 essay “What is Real?” addressed the fiction writer’s dilemma:

Whenever people get an opportunity to ask me questions about my writing, I can be sure that some of the questions will be these:

‘Do you write about real people?’

‘Did those things really happen?’  . . .

Writers answer such questions patiently or crossly according to temperament and the mood they’re in. They say, ‘No, you must understand, my characters are composites; those things didn’t happen the way I wrote about them . . .

Later in the essay, Munro concludes: “Yes, I use bits of what is real, in the sense of being really there and really happening, in the world, as most people see it, and I transform it into something that is really there, and really happening in my story.”

In the end, it’s this sort of literary juncture—where nonfiction writers feel awkward and fiction writers misunderstood, where debate and argument reign—that great work can be accomplished.  After all, a mostly true story, transformed, has a certain kind of sex appeal to modern writers as well. As 3QR author B.J. Hollars puts it: When I write, I am often pigeonholed into genre; I am writing either an essay or a story.  But what makes The Three Quarter Review unique is that it actively encourages the blurring of genre. Yes, we are recounting truths, but we are also acknowledging the multiple versions of that truth. In some ways, we hope to create a Fifth Genre: The Three Quarter True Story. Because, regardless of category, art is sparked when writers capture visceral truths—tactile details and verity of emotion—that make up this Magic Realist Existence we call life.

The Three Quarter Review is being launched as the cornerstone of The Three Quarter Story literary project, a three-year event featuring readings, panel discussions, and writing contests tied to the concept. The inaugural issue of the annual online journal now offers the 3QR News blog, and will soon include other multi-platform features. The journal showcases stories, poems, and essays that allow writers to stretch out a bit. While welcoming work that is fully accurate in all factual and emotional content, 3QR is also a venue for stories told as truly as possible, with the understanding that we can rarely know anything 100 percent.

3QR Staff

Contact Us

Author Bios

Feel free to comment below on the 3QR Method.

Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson, Editor, The Three Quarter Review, is a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University’s Writing Seminars and Advanced Academic Programs, a nonfiction essayist, and the author of Literature on Deadline (Celumbra/Pacific Isle 2007). Her literary essays have appeared in print or online at the literary journal, The Sun, Creative Nonfiction, Connecticut Review, Urbanite, and Utne Reader, as well as on NPR’s “The Signal.” Her work has been featured in two book collections: Signs of Life in the USA (Bedford/St. Martin’s) and Letters to J.D. Salinger (University of Wisconsin Press). She is a former staff writer for The Miami Herald and Johns Hopkins Magazine, among other publications. As a foreign correspondent, she has written for The Baltimore Sun, Palm Beach Post, and American Journalism Review, reporting from Argentina, Ecuador, Nepal, India, Cuba, and China. Cavanaugh Simpson earned a master’s degree in creative writing from Hopkins’ Writing Seminars and a bachelor’s in journalism from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her master’s thesis, on Cuba’s dissident journalists, was funded by Harvard University’s Goldsmith Research Award. She is currently an editor at the Baltimore Review. Her literary blog can be found at litdeadline.wordpress.com.

Brian W. Simpson, Managing Editor and Staff Photographer, The Three Quarter Review, is editor of Johns Hopkins Public Health magazine. His photographs have been published in The Baltimore Sun and Johns Hopkins Magazine. His poetry has appeared in Quarterly West, The Lucid Stone, and RATTLE. He’s published articles from Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Zambia, India, Nepal, Spain, the Czech Republic, and Cuba. In past lives, he worked as a newspaper reporter in Florida, a technical writer in Moldova, a freelance writer in Baltimore, and a fry cook at Popeyes. Currently, a Master of Public Health student at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Simpson earned a master’s degree in poetry from Hopkins’ Writing Seminars, and degrees in English and journalism from the University of Texas at Austin.

The Three Quarter Review: Poetry & Prose > 75 percent True is now accepting submissions for our next annual issue. Prose up to 3,000 words. Up to three poems. Submissions must be at least 75 percent factual.
Short pieces welcome. Typed, prose double-spaced. Manuscripts cannot be returned. Be sure to include your email address.We review only those submissions sent via regular mail. If you have not heard from us within three months, assume that we are unable to publish your work at this time. We will communicate electronically once a piece is accepted. Most of our stories are edited, in collaboration with the writer, for fine-tuning and polish.

Address:
3QR: The Three Quarter Review
P.O. Box 42812
Baltimore, MD 21284
3qreview@gmail.com

Quotable Thought: The plot–instead of finding human beings more or less cut to its requirements, as they are in the drama– finds them enormous, shadowy and intractable, and three-quarters hidden like an iceberg.

– E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

On Learning, Late in Life, that Your Mother Was a Jew

                          Methuselah something.  Somethingsomething Ezekiel.
                                                                                                —Albert Goldbarth

So that explains it, you say to yourself.
And for one split second, you confront
the mirror like a Gestapo operative—
narrow-eyed, looking for the telltale hint,

the giveaway (jawline, profile, eyebrow)—
something visible that could account
for this, the veritable key
to your life story and its denouement.

It seems the script that you were handed
long ago, with all its blue-eyed implications,
can now be seen as something less than candid—
a laundry list of whoppers and omissions.

It’s time for something else to float
back in from theology’s deep end: the strains,
perhaps, of A-don o-lam, drowning out
the peals of Jesus the Conqueror Reigns,

inundating the lily and the rose,
stifling the saints (whose dogged piety
never did come close, God knows,
to causing many ripples of anxiety)

and you’re waiting for the revelation
on its way this minute, probably—
the grand prelude to your divine conversion,
backlit with ritual and pageantry.

But nothing happens.  Not a thing.  No song,
no shofar, no compelling Shabbat call
to prayer— no signal that your heart belongs
to David rather than your old familiar, Paul.

Where does a faithless virgin go from here,
after being compromised by two
competing testimonies to thin air—
when both of them are absolutely true?

Explication of a True Story

                                For Lani, my college roommate

Now that you’ve told me
what my father did to you
in the boat on Lake Mendota
the summer we both turned twenty—
that there had been a moment when he
carefully released his grip
from the throttle of the Evinrude
and snaked his hand down inside
the top of your magenta bathing suit—
       I understand the plot.

And when I think about your face,
your startled rage, your fierce blush,
I recall that your assaulter was a man
who went about his everyday affairs
a scion of respectability, genteel
down to his cordovans: the linen
handkerchief, the perfect press
in his Van Heusen shirt, the ching
of change in a front pocket—
       These are the symbolic elements.

I did see him naked once,
when I was nine. He lay sprawled
across his bed, snoring like a diesel
in the slatted sunlight.
Between his legs lay coiled his
enormous apparatus—a gilded pile
of gunnery which even then I sensed
boded mighty ill for somebody, sometime.
         This you would call foreshadowing.

And I’m sure that every thought
you have of me dissolves into that day
on the lake. You have it memorized
by now, and I am always at the heart of it:
the other one violated- the daughter, mortified.
       And that would be the moral of the story.
        The message.  The denouement.

Another Thing I Ought to Be Doing

                                Many women fail to check their own breasts for suspicious
                                lumps on a regular monthly basis.
                                                                – The American Cancer Society

So now I should be taking special care
of them, is that it? Every month go pat
pat pat—when what they’ve done for me is flat
out zero?  Nothing?  Case in point: where
were they when I was fourteen, fifteen,
and topographically a putting green?

Not to mention nights when I disgraced
my gender, stuffing tissue paper down
my polo shirt or confirmation gown—
my philosophy on staying chaste
having less to do with things profound
than fear of giving off a crunchy sound.

And now you’re saying, Minister to them!
these very breasts that caused me great gymnasiums
of misery and high humiliation—
Institute a monthly regimen!
meaning I’m to walk my fingers gingerly
around these two molehills in front of me.

Sorry, but my hands have dropped straight down
like baby birds.  They will not rise
to the occasion, won’t get organized,
refuse to land on enemy terrain.
They simply twitch and fidget in my lap
as if they sense a booby trap—

As if they hear the moron in my head
insisting that I’ll never be caught dead.

3QR Author Note

3QR Author Bios

Jessica Anya Blau

Dario DiBattista, an Iraq War veteran, has published articles and essays in The Washingtonian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Connecticut Review, and World Hum among other venues. He is a frequent blogger for http://www.notalone.com, which is a resource website for returning veterans. He lives in Towson, MD where he is the Senior Nonfiction Editor for the JMWW  literary journal. He earned his MA in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins. He has completed two books – a memoir and a novel – and currently receives literary representation from Writer’s House Literary Agency.

Featured Writer Stephen Dixon’s selection for 3QR in excerpted from his new novel, His Wife Leaves Him, due out in December 2012 from Fantagraphics Books, which is also publishing in April an updated soft-cover version of his last story collection, a three-volume work titled What is All This?. Dixon, a longtime professor at The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, has been nominated for the National Book Award twice, in 1991 for Frog and in 1995 for Interstate. His work has also earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy Institute of Arts and Letters Prize for Fiction, the O. Henry Award three times, and the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories (two times each). His novels include Gould (Henry Holt, 1997); 30: Pieces of a Novel (Henry Holt, 1999); and “I” (McSweeney’s 2002). Dzanc Books, meanwhile, is bringing out an e-book series of 24 of Dixon’s past books of fiction. And Fugue State Press, also this spring, will publish, for the first time in print, a novel Dixon wrote 40 years ago: Story of a Story and Other Stories: a Novel.

Brandi Dawn Henderson is an international story seeker on a journey proving truths to be no strangers to fictions. She collects cowboy boots and tattoos, alternates between loving and loathing the exotic, and is trying her very best to make at least one life immeasurably better. Her work has been featured in Mason’s Road literary journal, Lost Magazine, Urbanite, and JMWW. She contributes to the trio of Time Out magazines throughout India, and writes a monthly advice column for First City Magazine in New Delhi.

B.J. Hollars is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.  He is the author of Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence and the Last Lynching in America (University of Alabama Press, 2011), In Defense of Monsters (Origami Zoo Press, 2012) and Sightings: Stories (forthcoming from Break Away Books/Indiana University Press, 2013).  He has also edited three anthologies.

Ann Eichler Kolakowski is a Pushcart Prize nominee and was The New Formalist‘s featured poet for December 2011. Her publication credits include String Poet, Slipstream, Little Patuxent Review, and The Madison Review. From 1997 to 2000, she served as the assistant director of Gemini Ink, a nonprofit literary arts center in San Antonio, TX. She is a poetry student in the Master of Arts in Writing program at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where she also works in development communications.  “A Quartet of Ghosts” is drawn from Searching for Warren, a manuscript-in-progress that chronicles the lost mill town of Warren, Maryland, which was destroyed and flooded in 1922 to create the Loch Raven Reservoir, the primary source of Baltimore’s municipal water supply.

Edward Perlman is the poetry advisor and program coordinator for the Master of Arts in Writing program at Johns Hopkins University; he is also the owner and publisher of Entasis Press (entasispress.com), a literary press publishing fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He is a frequent contributor to the Sewanee Theological Review, and his own essays and poems have appeared in numerous journals and publications. He holds a bachelor of arts degree in philosophy from the College of William and Mary, a master of arts degree in education from Virginia Tech University, and a master of arts degree in writing from Johns Hopkins.

Philip Sultz, is a painter, collagist, poet, and writer who has been represented by the Allan Stone Gallery in New York since 1977, and by the Saatchi Gallery website in London. He first exhibited in New York in a bicentennial exhibition, “Forty Years of American Collage,” at the Buecker and Harpsicord Gallery in 1976. He received a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in painting in 1975, and has exhibited countrywide, and in Canada, Australia, Italy, and Finland. His most recent writing and poetry are on literary websites, Blazevox, Eveveryday Genius, Percontra, and Matchbook. He is Professor Emeritus at Webster University, St. Louis. Sultz is also a published writer and photographer of American West settlement life, with an extensive collection of photographs acquired by the Jackson Hole Museum and Historical Society in Jackson, Wyoming.

Marilyn L. Taylor, former Poet Laureate of the state of Wisconsin (2009 and 2010) and the city of Milwaukee (2004 and 2005), is the author of six collections of poetry.  Her award-winning poems and essays have appeared in many anthologies and journals, including Poetry, The American Scholar, Able Muse, Measure, and Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” column. Taylor taught poetry and poetics for fifteen years at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and serves on the advisory board of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Western State College, Gunnison, CO.  She is a Contributing Editor for The Writer magazine, where her articles on craft appear bi-monthly. As part of 3QR’s ‘On Second Thoughts” feature, Taylor’s poems represent previously published works later acknowledged to be mostly true: “On Learning Late in Life, that Your Mother Was a Jew” was originally published in The GSU Review; “Explication of a True Story” was originally published in The Ledge; and “Another Thing I Ought to Be Doing” was originally published in JAMA.

Charles Talkoff is from New York. His short fiction has appeared in Undergroundvoices.com, JMWW, the Midway Journal, and Urbanite. His short story collection, Abandon the Rain, was published by High Windows Press in 2010, and his first novel, The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover, will be published in the Spring of 2012 by 8th House Press of Montreal.

Jennifer Holden Ward is a resident of Baltimore and a graduate of the Master of Arts in Writing program at Johns Hopkins University. Her nonfiction has appeared in Urbanite,  StepMom Magazine, Patch.com,  and is forthcoming in The Potomac Review. When she’s not teaching English as a Second Language, she enjoys hiking, traveling, and observing the world.

See 3QR Author Notes

 * For my grandparents: Jimmie and Arlie Robitzer *

     Buzzy had a Volkswagen Bug that Shecky Freeman sold him for $380.00.

There was a hole the size of a saucer in the floor of the backseat.   When Louise turned in her seat, looked down at the hole and watched the grey and brown road rush beneath her, she felt wildly dizzy.

“So don’t look!” Buzzy would say, each time Louise peered down there.  But she did it anyway.  Something would show up someday, Louise thought, something odd and original, a hand, or a baby, or a love letter, rushing away from her as if on a fast-moving stream.

It was January 11th, 1960, and they were on winter break, driving to Vermont to see Louise’s mother, Jimmie, and her father, Arlie, at Seyon Ranch, a five-thousand acre estate that Arlie had bought the year Louise had started middle school.  Louise was bundled and scarved; the heat was on in the car, but the hole let in a fist of cold air that swooped up and hit Louise wherever her flesh was uncovered.

There were only two things Buzzy knew about Arlie.  The first was that Arlie had been hit by lightning three times.  Strike one: Arlie was on the phone when he leaned onto a metal sink.  The lightning came through the phone line and knocked him down cold.  Strike Two: Arlie stepped out onto the front porch and looked up at the clean sky when a bolt of lightning came down, went through him and killed the dog, Gomer, who was sleeping under the porch.  Each time Louise told that story, she was sure to add how angry Arlie was about the dead dog.  Strike Three: The lightning came down the chimney during an electrical storm and chased Arlie through the house.  The rest of the family was there in the living room, screaming as they watched Arlie try to outrun the balls of crackling electricity.  Louise often said that it was the strangest thing she’d ever seen.  This story had been told in Buzzy’s room one night during a thunderstorm, of course, and as Buzzy jumped off the iron bed for fear they’d be struck, Louise explained to him that once you’ve been hit by lightning you have a greater than normal chance of getting hit again: you’ve become a conduit, in a way, partner to the stormy skies.  Buzzy didn’t believe her, and he slept on the stained and loamy-smelling frat-house couch that night, while Louise slept alone in his bed.

The second thing Buzzy knew about Arlie was that he hated the idea of God.

“Did you tell them I’m Jewish?” Buzzy asked.

Louise had made a person-to-person collect call just before they had left, informing her parents that she was engaged to be married, the wedding would be February 2^nd, and she’d be at Seyon in mere hours to introduce them to her fiancé.

“I told them,” Louise said, and she pulled her satin scarf tight around her neck.

“What’d they say?”

“Nothing,” Louise said.  “My mother sort of grunted and my father said he was surprised.  That’s all.”  It wasn’t all he had said, but it was all she was going to tell Buzzy.

“What’d you say?  Did you tell them the rabbi’s giving you private lessons to convert?”  Buzzy asked too many questions about her parents, her older brother, her childhood and Louise rarely felt like answering them.  Wasn’t it enough that Buzzy loved her and thought she was the most magnificent woman in the world?

“I’ll tell them about the lessons with the Rabbi later,” Louise said.  “I don’t want to give them too many surprises at once.”

“You didn’t tell them about the baby, did you?”

“No,” Louise said, although Arlie had guessed and said so on the phone.

“A Jew?!” Arlie had said.  “Are you pregnant?  Why marry a Jew when you have a choice?  Christ almighty, Louise!”

Five hours after they took off, Buzzy stopped the car in front of the sign posted at the entrance to the property.  He read it out loud:

“Seyon Ranch.  Private Property.  Trespassers will be shot.” Buzzy had never seen a sign like this.  He grew up in a row house in New Jersey where women talked over the railings, the Fuller Brush man came in for a meal, and his grandmother took over his bed when she didn’t feel like walking home.

* * *

Buzzy looked like a different man swathed in hunting gear.  His head was puffed up by a red, plaid, wool-lined hat that had earflaps and tied under his chin.  His legs were bulked up, pants tucked into borrowed knee high boots.  His orange leather gloves made his hands look massive, stiff.  Louise thought she detected a small shake as he held the shotgun Arlie had given him.

“You sure you want to go?” Louise asked Buzzy.  Her father had already stepped out onto the porch.  He was talking to the dogs, deciding which ones to take.

“I’m going to get myself a twenty-point buck!” Buzzy shouted, loud enough that Jimmie could hear.

Louise looked back at her mother who was rinsing their tea cups in the sink.  “You’re going rabbit hunting,” Louise said.

Buzzy leaned in close to his fiancee’s ear.  “Do those dogs bite?” he whispered.  Buzzy had never had a dog.  Or a cat.  He was allergic, and asthmatic.  And afraid.

“They’ll only bite if Arlie tells them to,” Louise said, half smiling.  They were sweet dogs, liver colored German short-haired pointers.  Great hunters, faithful, a little overly-enthusiastic sometimes.  But Arlie trained them well, loved them well, treated them better than he treated Louise and her older brother, Rex.

Buzzy pushed himself out the door, trying to ignore the dogs who were gathering around his legs as though he were made of hamburger.

They drove in a jeep, shotguns posted on the gun rack, deep into the woods of Seyon Ranch.  Buzzy didn’t know how Arlie could tell where he was going—it all looked the same, craggy tall trees, deep, almost-bluish white snow.  Arlie parked the jeep, handed Buzzy his gun and started walking.  Buzzy followed, turning back every now and then to make sure his footprints were visible in the snow.  Two dogs came along: Truman and Eisenhower.

“Tell me something,” Arlie said, without looking back at Buzzy.  “Where are you gonna play golf?”

“Play golf?”
“Yeah.  What country club is going to take you?  You can’t go to a normal club because you’re a Jew.  And you can’t go to the Jew clubs because you’ll be married to my daughter.  So where the fuck are you going to play golf?”

Buzzy had never played golf before.  In fact, until he went to Brandeis, he had never even met someone who played golf.  He briefly considered telling Arlie that Louise was converting, they’d be welcome at any of the Jewish country clubs, but then he imagined Louise’s face, the ways her eyes hardened when she was angry.  She wouldn’t want Buzzy to tell Arlie about the conversion. She’d do it when she thought the time was right.

“I guess I’ll just play on the public courses,” Buzzy said.  He had heard a fraternity brother describe a game played on a public course in New Jersey.  A black man was there and everyone wondered how he had enough money to buy a set of clubs.

“Public?” Arlie laughed and marched ahead.

Neither spoke for a few moments. Buzzy listened intently to the whispering crunch his boots made in the snow.

“How long do we have to hike?” Buzzy finally asked.  He was tired and thirsty and wished he’d brought a canteen.

“Hike?  This isn’t a hike, this is a walk in the goddamned woods!”  Arlie looked back at his future son-in-law and laughed.

“You own all this?” Buzzy asked.  “Have you seen it all?”  A drip of snot was frozen on the edge of Buzzy’s nostril.  His black eyelashes felt iced but when he tried to clear them with his mitted hand he only seemed to smear more ice on his face.  Buzzy looked at Arlie’s flushed, clear face.  There must be something in his blood, Buzzy thought, anti-freeze or something that he was born with.

“I can see it all from my roof,” Arlie said.  “When you stand on the roof and turn in a circle, everything you see is mine.  Not Louise’s and not even Jimmie’s.  Goddamned mine.”

Buzzy wondered what there was on this earth that he could call his.  The Volkswagen with the hole in the floor.  His books.  Louise.  Yes, he hoped, prayed.  And now that she was pregnant it seemed inevitable: Louise would soon be his.

Arlie stationed Buzzy at a spot in the woods that looked like all other spots in the woods and left Eisenhower with him.

“The dog will flush out the rabbits,” Arlie said.  “You just stand here, wait for Eisenhower to bring it within range, then shoot.”

“Where will you be?” Buzzy asked.  He didn’t like the idea of standing alone in the woods—even with a gun in his hands to protect him from a bear who might emerge from hibernation, or a fearless, trespassing hunter who would mistake him for a bear.

“I’ll be far-the-fuck away so that you don’t shoot me in the goddamned balls!”  Arlie laughed, then turned to head off with Truman.

“When are you coming back?” Buzzy asked.

“Once we’ve each got a couple of hares,” Arlie called out over his shoulder, still walking away.

Buzzy put down his gun and framed his hands around his mouth so Arlie, who was receding in the distance, could hear him better.

“How will you know when I have a couple?!” he shouted.

Arlie didn’t appear to hear, but then he suddenly turned and walked back a few paces.

“Buzzy!” he said, as he approached.

“Yeah?”  Buzzy was worried Arlie was going to shoot him.  Maybe the whole hare hunting thing was a ruse to get him out in the woods, and now it was time for him to die: cold, alone, with a couple of crazy dogs who would lap up the bloody trail.

“Whatever you do,” Arlie said, “don’t shoot the dog.  You can shoot yourself, you can shoot a tree, you can shoot whatever the fuck you want out here.  But don’t shoot the goddamned dog.”

“Got it,” Buzzy said, and he picked up his gun and pretended to aim far in the distance away from Arlie and away from the dog, although, really, he wasn’t even quite sure how to fire the thing.

* * *

Buzzy felt like he’d been waiting hours, but maybe it had only been twenty minutes.  Buzzy wasn’t good at waiting, it was something he rarely did.  And time alone, in silence?  Well, Buzzy would rather be with his mother, who pecked at him like a hen at corn, or with his father, a braggart who seemed to compete with him, than spend a few minutes alone.  When all was silent and there was little to distract him, Buzzy felt like his head was going to pop off his neck and explode.

The dog ran in and out of the snow-covered brush, but nothing, not even a mole, was flushed out.

And then it started to snow.  Buzzy was worried about their footprints.  How would they ever find their way back to the truck?

Eisenhower, with his nose to the ground, trotted by Buzzy.

“Hey,” he said to the dog in a voice you’d use to call a cab.

Eisenhower looked up at Buzzy.

“Take me to Arlie.  Let’s find Arlie and go home.”

Eisenhower tilted his head to one side and sat.

“Arlie!”  Buzzy shook the gun toward the dog.  “Go to Arlie!”

Eisenhower stood and walked off.  Buzzy followed.  Whether he was flushing out rabbits or not, the dog would go to his master, Buzzy assumed.

Buzzy thought he’d been following the dog for at least an hour, but then he reconsidered, reminded himself that time went slowly for him and maybe it had only been ten or fifteen minutes.  Either way, he was cold and tired, and crystals in his eyelashes were making everything look woozy when he blinked.

And he was hungry.  Buzzy hadn’t had anything for breakfast, and the bologna sandwich Louise had packed him for the car wasn’t that big, wasn’t like a sandwich his mother would have made.  And then there was Jimmie.  Sure it was nice that she wasn’t a kisser, didn’t consume her daughter with smacking busses and cheek pinches, but you’d think she’d have offered them something to eat after a long trip like that.  There hadn’t even been dinner on the stove—the house didn’t smell like food.  In fact, there seemed to be little evidence that anyone had eaten anything, ever, in that kitchen.

Buzzy thought of the food his own mother would have prepared for his arrival: kugel, blintzes, chicken noodle soup.  He was immersed in visions of food when he looked up and noticed he was at the edge of a small field or clearing.  The dog ran off ahead of him, toward the trees on the other side of the clearing.  Buzzy was following the dog when his right foot popped down through the snow, making a cracking sound that whipped through his body like a bolt of lightning.  He was so startled by the noise, that it took a second for Buzzy to realize that his boot was filling with cold water.  Buzzy pulled his foot out and tried to step gingerly—he looked like a marionette with a high-kneed, wobbly, wide stride.  But each step cracked through and water had now soaked both legs up to his knees. Buzzy eyed a tree stump near by.  He tried skating across the snow toward the stump, but broke through once more.  When he reached the stump, Buzzy climbed atop it.  Streaks of coldness ran from his knees to his feet.  It burned more than anything.  Buzzy looked around from his perch.  No dog.  No Arlie.  Not even a rabbit.

“ARLIE!” Buzzy yelled.

Even an echo would have made Buzzy feel more comfortable.  But there was no echo; his words went out and vanished as if they’d never been said.  Buzzy had never heard such loud silence. He had never been in a place where there wasn’t a horn honking, or a fraternity brother snoring, or parents bickering, or a radio quacking.

“I’m going to freeze to death or starve to death or be eaten by something,” Buzzy said aloud.  Again his voice vanished, neither heard nor echoed.

“AR-LIE!”  Buzzy tried again.

He waited for as long as he could contain himself—three, maybe four, minutes.  Then he lifted his shotgun and fired once, in the air.  The kick from the gun almost pushed Buzzy off his perch.  He dropped the gun in the snow, leaned down without climbing off the stump and picked it up again.

Buzzy looked at the gun, wondered if he had to do anything to fire another shot—cock it, or load it, or . . . Arlie had just handed him the thing and told him to shoot.  There was snow in the muzzle.  Buzzy thought it might look cool to see the snow blow out with the bullet.   He poised the gun on his shoulder, looked around and was about to fire when he saw a figure in the distance.

“ARLIE!”  Buzzy hollered.  “I’m stuck!”

Eisenhower and Truman ran toward Buzzy and jumped up at his frozen boots.  Buzzy lifted his arms, holding up the gun, and waved back and forth toward Arlie.

“Well at least you didn’t shoot the goddamned dog,” Arlie said as he approached the edge of the clearing.

“I fell through,” Buzzy said.  “I’m stuck.”

“You’re on a goddamned beaver dam,” Arlie said.  “You fell through?”

“Yeah. To my knees. Can we go home?”

“To your knees?!”  The rosy anti-freeze-filled look vanished from Arlie’s face.“Get on your stomach,” Arlie said, “and roll across the ice like you’re rolling down a hill.”

“But I’ll get covered in snow!” Buzzy said.

“Roll across the goddamned ice!” Arlie shouted.  “Just to here—“ Arlie took a few steps closer to Buzzy where brushy leaves were poking out of the snowline.

Buzzy inched down from his perch and lay in the snow, his hands above his head holding the shotgun.

“Now roll, goddammit!  Move your ass and roll!”

Arlie thought he had never seen a more pathetic site than a skinny Jewish kid rolling across a half-frozen beaver dam.  These people should stay in the city, he thought, they don’t deserve nature, they aren’t worthy of it.

“Now get up,” Arlie said, and he stuck a hand down to Buzzy and pulled him to his feet.  Buzzy was covered with white powder, like a sugar coated crueler. He looked like a ten-year-old kid who’d just wiped out on a sled.

“We gotta get a move on,” Arlie said, and he began walking quickly, with Buzzy stiffly loping behind.

“You know, I’m kinda sleepy,” Buzzy said.  “Can we just rest for a minute and then go home?”  Buzzy was finding it hard to keep up with Arlie and the dogs.

Arlie stopped and turned toward Buzzy.  “You’re sleepy?!”

“Yeah.  Can we rest.  I’m beat.”  Buzzy looked up at the sky that was changing color so quickly it was like a thick dark blanket had suddenly been tossed over Vermont.

“Jesus fuck-me Christ.  Come on, Buzzy.  Move your ass, we gotta get home.”  Arlie took off, pushing through branches, moving with the swiftness of the dogs.

* * *

Arlie threw the guns in the back of the jeep without hanging them on the rack.  He paused, picked up the gun Buzzy had used and examined the muzzle.

“Did you drop it in the snow?” He asked.

“Yeah.  I was about to shoot it again to see the snow fly out when you showed up.”

“Well that’s one death you escaped.  Let’s hope you got six more to go.”  They got in the jeep, Arlie started it up, turned on the headlights, and pulled out as if they were in a road race.

“What’d you mean that’s one death I escaped?” Buzzy asked.

“With snow packed in and iced-over like that, the thing would have blown up in your face.  Don’t they have guns in New Jersey?”

“Not in my neighborhood they don’t.”  Buzzy looked out the side window then looked away.  Trees were swooshing by in a black blur, the jeep was bouncing so high it felt airborne at times. Arlie pulled into the back of the house and parked near the glass-walled mudroom.

“Come on, come on, come on,” he said, pushing on Buzzy’s shoulder to get him out of the car.

“In the mudroom, quick!” Arlie said.

Buzzy ambled toward the brightly-lit glass room.  He was a little stiff and slow as there was no bend or give in his frozen boots.

“Sit down,” Arlie said, and he patted a wooden bench that sat below a row of flannel coats hanging on pegs.

“You know my feet really aren’t even cold any more,” Buzzy said.  “It’s the strangest things ‘cause these boots seemed to be—“

Arlie had a hunting knife out and was slicing the frozen laces of Buzzy’s boots.  When the laces were cut, Arlie tried to wedge open the boots with his hands, but they were as solid as cement encasing Buzzy’s feet.

“Wow,” Buzzy said.  “Should we just let them thaw?”

“You’re gonna have two less feet unless we get these fuckers off you fast and get you in a hot shower.”  Arlie stuck one foot against the wall to gain purchase, he grabbed Buzzy’s right boot, yanked with all his might and went tumbling back, crashing through the glass wall as the boot cracked off.

Buzzy leaned forward on the bench, he feared he had just caused the death of his future father-in-law.  He didn’t want to call out Arlie’s name, as he was too afraid of the silence that might follow.

Louise and Jimmie ran into the mudroom, both coming to a stop in the doorway.

“He was pulling off my boot,” Buzzy sputtered.  “And he just flew back—“

Arlie picked himself off the snow and stepped through the opening in the broken glass.  He brushed glass confetti off his legs and chest, resumed his position and tugged off the left boot.

“Louise, run up and start a shower for him.  Buzzy, get your ass up there in the hot shower, but don’t you dare start stripping your clothes off in front of my daughter or me.”

Louise took Buzzy’s hand and rushed him away.  Arlie turned back and looked at the hole his body had made.

“Goddamned city Jew, walked right into a beaver dam.”

“Oh yeah,” Jimmie said, with her usual nonchalance.

“If he doesn’t lose his feet, I’m gonna make him pay for the glass.”

“And if he loses them?” Jimmie picked up a broom and dust pan that she kept in the mudroom and began sweeping the floor.

“If he loses them?  Well he sure as hell isn’t marrying Louise if he loses them.  No son-in-law of mine is going to be a goddamned cripple.”

“But a Jew is okay?”

“Better than a cripple.  Better than a Christian.”  Arlie surveyed the damage as Jimmie swept up.  “Christ almighty.”

When Buzzy came down from the shower he showed no signs of frostbite.  He sat on the brown leather chair next to the fire in the den as Arlie bent down and looked at his boney white feet.

“No numbness at all?” Arlie said.

“I feel fine.”  Buzzy wiggled his toes in a way that Arlie found obscene.

“What the hell kind of socks did you have on?”  Arlie sat on the chair beside Buzzy, squinting as he looked him up and down.

“I had on four pairs.  Three cotton and then a pair of wool socks on top of the cotton ones.  And I had on long underwear that went down to my ankles.”

Arlie paused a minute, then started laughing.  Louise walked in the room with four drinks on a tray: a scotch each for Arlie and Jimmie, a tea for herself, and a glass of water for Buzzy.  Jimmie followed Louise in.  She passed out cork coasters that had pictures of waterfalls and deer on them.  Buzzy wondered why Arlie was laughing.  And he wondered why he still didn’t smell anything from the kitchen.  Would he ever get a meal?

“Now what’s so funny,” Jimmie said.

“This goddamned kid,” Arlie pointed at Buzzy with his scotch, “was so well-insulated, he didn’t even get a chill.”  Arlie hooted again, then took a gulp of scotch.

“Well why did he tell me his feet were warm?” Louise asked.  She remembered when her brother almost lost a finger from drawing pictures in the snow—his finger was warm, Rex had said, that’s why he kept drawing.

“Layers!” Arlie said.  “Water was trapped in the layers, probably heated up from his body heat and goddammit, he was warm!”

“Well, how many pairs of socks do you have on?” Buzzy asked.

“One!  No one in the whole state of Vermont would walk out the door wearing more than one pair of socks!”  Arlie laughed again.

Buzzy was glad to see Arlie laughing.  He hoped it meant he wouldn’t have to pay to replace the glass in the mudroom.   Between the gold ring he bought Louise and the money he donated to the synagogue for giving Louise Hebrew lessons, there was nothing to spare.

Arlie didn’t ask Buzzy to pay for the glass.  And he and Jimmie didn’t show up for the wedding.  They paid for it, however, on the agreement that Louise wouldn’t embarrass them by inviting anyone from the family.

For Louise, her wedding day was exceedingly lonely.  Buzzy had a blast.

3QR Author Note
Author Bios

THE BUS STOP PARK

Of all the crazy things I’ve seen along
the path that hacks the corner off the bus
stop park, a plot of die-hard ivy beneath
a gingko tree where bits of colored glass
shimmer like jewels the forty thieves have dropped,
this one takes the cake. Trust me; I’ve seen
some crazy things over my years of riding
the 42: the half plucked chickens’ heads
mounted on sticks and stuck into the ivy,
all in a row behind a cardboard rooster;
the pair of black stiletto heels nailed to
the gingko tree beneath a painted heart
dripping down the bark. And now this, an hour
after dawn on a late autumn Monday,
the path a muddy puddle from an all-
night rain, not another soul at the stop,
a soul to back me up: still as a stump
when I round the corner, a great blue heron.

COLLECTING

On the oval, silver box’s serpentine front
and sides, one continuous wave rendered
in metal with the same precision Dutch
masters summoned in paint falls back upon
itself; a square-rigged ship sails a tossing
Dutch sea on the inset ivory top.
A purple silk interior holds silver
scissors, thimbles, hooks, a needle case.
A pretty thing, though useless. Vain really.

I wonder why I’m dead intent on adding
this to my modest box collection. I
cannot say what attracts me so to it.
The ship?  The needle case?  The ivory clasp?
Did some sea sprite spy in me a mate,
a dreamer who, voyages still before me,
will sail far coasts in sterling moonlight, loot
ivory treasure from a hold, and hear
the clash of swords each time I darn my socks?

3QR Author Note

3QR Author Bios