One Year Later: A New OQ

For the last six months, Orange Quarterly has been undergoing very quiet yet elaborate renovations. The new website is nearing completion and new ideas have flourished behind-the-scenes. We're happy to announce today (on our one-year anniversary of publication) not only the release of our "disposable" issue 2.3, but also our commitment to the making of our first annual Anthology Orange and our adoption of the submission system Submittable.

On the Switch

We’ve made the switch! Submittable is a safe, secure and user-friendly way to submit your work efficiently to a wide array of magazines, contests and presses and track your submissions with ease. The switch, on our part, was both necessary and inevitable due to the high volume of submissions and inadequate methods for response and content organization editorially given constraints of time and human energy. We hope our writers and artists will appreciate the simplicity and proven success of this system as much as we do!

Call for Submissions

In celebration of this transition, we are now open for submissions! The next installment of Orange Quarterly (issue 3.1, winter 2013) holds the theme "time" in its fist and runs with it. We are happy to review submissions of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, artwork and photography that speak to the theme of "time" in any way. Submissions for “time” will close December 1, 2012, and a new theme for submissions will open shortly thereafter. (Please always feel free to send us your best work, regardless of our theme at the time, if you’re confident in it and our likely liking of it.) Review our editorial procedures and general guidelines here before submitting your work via Submittable.

Free Weeks

One week per reading season (for each quarter's theme issue), we read unsolicited submissions of poetry, fiction and nonfiction free of charge. (Visual art submissions are accepted year-round free to charge.) Orange Quarterly's first free week begins tonight (October 31) and will extend through November 8, 2012, at 11:59 p.m. EST. On November 9 until our next free week, we ask writers for a $3 reading fee to accompany submissions. (Writers may combine multiple works of the same genre into one document, in accordance with our genre-specific guidelines, for a bigger bang for the buck.)

On the Sometimes Reading Fee

With our transition to Submittable, we hope to strengthen our editorial process with literary submissions, improve our submission response time overall and maintain an organized, professional writer-editor dialogue. We absolutely do not want to financially distress writers; the ability for our writers to grow and thrive is the crux of our mission with Orange Quarterly and Nothing Press. However, we understand too that there are many writers who would gladly contribute a $3 reading fee in exchange for a magazine that can reach its own fathomed goals, support the emergent achievement of its contributors, and communicate something dear to a new age of media and a growing audience of inspired readers. We will always be transparent about our reading fee and will always post notices about free weeks directly on our website and on social media.

Juicy Dates

• Submissions open for "time" theme issue: November 1, 2012
• Submit for free! November 1 - 8, 2012
• Bonus free week will happen November 20-27, 2012 (Happy Thanksgiving!)
• Submissions close for "time" theme issue: December 1, 2012

Support the Making of Anthology Orange!

For every year's worth of online issues of Orange Quarterly, we want to curate and publish an expansive print anthology for our readers. In an effort to afford the initial printing costs for Anthology Orange (which contains 120+ pages per anthology of contemporary poetry, literature and visual art by emerging writers and artists from around the world), we are asking for your generous donations of $10.

The Anthology Orange reading experience will be unlike any Orange Quarterly that came before. We know our readers will love the anthology, so we would love to be able to afford to make it! Please donate using Submittable. Thank you so much for your readership, encouragement and support.

ORANGE QUARTERLY: Why poetry? How did you come to it, why did you stay?
STEVIE EDWARDS: I came to poetry when I was twelve or thirteen. I found an anthology of poetry on my parents' bookshelves from one of their failed attempts at college. At first, I was really drawn to the musicality in poetry; I remember reading poems by Longfellow and Poe over and over and over. I also became really drawn to writers like Sylvia Plath and Edna St. Vincent Millay because of their emotional honesty. As a fairly troubled teenage girl, their words and stories made me feel like less of a freak. Soon after I started reading poetry, I started reading poetry, I started writing prolifically. I still have about a half dozen notebooks from my teens of horrible, emo, heartfelt poems, which I can't bring myself to throw away, probably out of narcissism. At this point, I'm not really sure how to process life without poetry. It's been the mechanism I've used to deal with the world around me for the past decade or so.

OQ: Who have you been reading and enjoying recently?
EDWARDS: Today, on the bus to New York City, I am reading and enjoying Pink Elephant by Rachel McKibbens. Lately, the books I keep re-reading when I'm stuck are Ideal Cities by Erika Meitner, Crush by Richard Siken, and Open Interval by Lyrae Van CliefStefanon. I also love and constantly return to James Wright, Philip Levine, Yusef Komunyakaa, Lynda Hull, and Terrance Hayes.

OQ: So, not only are you a poet and a graduate student, but you also edit a (wonderful!) journal, MUZZLE Magazine. What's that like? Do you find any overlap between these various roles?
EDWARDS: Starting Muzzle taught me a lot about who I am as a writer and what I love in poetry. I think coming into graduate school with a strong sense of what my own aesthetic is has been very valuable to me; it helps me a lot when evaluating criticism in workshops. I think it's important to stop and think, is this criticism trying to help my poem be the best it can be in my voice and style, or is this criticism trying to push me to write in another aesthetic? This isn't to say my aesthetic can't be a fluid and changing thing, but I think you can't please every person in a workshop all the time. I also am now an assistant editor at Epoch, Cornell's literary magazine, and seeing how a very successful magazine is run and managed has been helping me think about how to streamline things at Muzzle and hopefully make it a lasting endeavor.

OQ: One of the most powerful things about these poems is their quick and frequent surprises. "For My Brother on His Sixteenth Birthday," for example: the speaker's brother is a boy and then ash and then a boy, he gets beer instead of cake, etc. I find many surprises as a reader. Do these poems, or did they, surprise you as a writer? How?
EDWARDS: Usually when my poems seem "successful" to me, they have surprised me at some point in the process of writing them. I'll often start with an idea of what I'm going to write about (maybe a specific event in my day, an old story, or a mood) and then I start to hear the lines in my head, and sometimes they go in a different direction than what I originally intended. I think that's the magic of poetry—when your idea for the poem transforms into something unexpected that reveals new meaning.

OQ: The contrasts and convergences between the three Rachels (in "Three Rachels") are interesting, and suggest (to me) both the interchangeability and complete uniqueness of the individual in matters of love. If there were three Stevies, what would be the main difference between them?
EDWARDS: Well, in a lot of ways, I think the "Three Rachels" are probably projections of my own attitudes about love. I suppose if there were three Stevies, one would be quite bitter about how past loves have thought it was appropriate to treat me, one would be apologetic for the bullshit I've put some past loves through, and one would be hopeful for the prospect of the next love. Maybe I should take that as a writing prompt and try to come up with a less cheesy answer.

OQ: If you were a Transformer, what would you become?
EDWARDS: Today, I would want to become a plane because I'm a little homesick for Chicago and wish it were easier to get there.

OQ: Your poems masquerade as confessional poems, but their surrealism and magic and strangeness make me feel like there's something besides confession, here. What's the relationship between confession and poetry, for you?
EDWARDS: I personally have always been drawn to confessional poetry. When I read poetry (or even fiction), it's important to me that something is at stake, something I can get emotionally invested in. I think poetry can certainly have emotional weight without confession, but I think it’s a very powerful avenue that often gets a bad rap in academia. My poems aren't always literally confessional. For instance, I have never set my brother on fire (as is suggested in "For My Brother on His Sixteenth Birthday"). However, I think there is usually a very honest emotion in my poems that is confessional of what I'm feeling at the time I'm writing them. I think poems often get away from the original intention I have for them, but usually when I follow the strangeness that comes out when I'm trying to write, I think the poems become more interesting and complex.

OQ: You've got a book coming out. Congratulations! Want to talk about that for a moment?
EDWARDS: I do indeed have a book coming out—which still sounds wierd to say! My first book, Good Grief, will be coming out at Write Bloody Press in Spring 2012. Write Bloody is doing really great things right now in the publishing world, and I am extremely excited to be a part of their talented and daring family of writers. I'm currently working on continuing to revise the poems in that book, along with starting the manuscript for my second book and my MFA thesis project.

OQ: Orange juice—pulp or no pulp?
EDWARDS: I’ve recently become a fan of pulp. It just feels more wholesome to me for some reason. Although, as long as it isn’t from concentrate, I’ll drink either. I probably love orange juice an abnormal amount, actually.

ORANGE QUARTERLY: When did you get started writing?
MOSHE SCHULMAN: I started writing horrible songs and poems as a freshman in yeshiva high school. I had recently discovered non-Jewish music and was fascinated that people made their livings by expressing their raw emotions. I wanted to do that. Plus, I thought I could become a rock star and escape from the community.

OQ: How did you get interested in writing nonfiction
SCHULMAN: My junior year of high school, when I switched from yeshiva to public school, I started writing prose, but I don't think I even understood the difference between fiction and nonfiction. I just started writing about growing up in the community and never stopped.

OQ: What is your writing routine?
SCHULMAN: I write every morning for a few hours before I head out to wait tables. I also run a lot to clear my head.

OQ: What are you reading right now?
SCHULMAN: The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard.

OQ: What (or who) inspires your writing?
SCHULMAN: Curiosity. Discovery. People. Knowing that somehow through writing I'll make sense of the world I came from and the world I'm a part of now.

OQ: What do you like to do when you're not writing?
SCHULMAN: When I'm not writing, I'm working. Rent is high in New York City. When I'm not working, I'm in my therapist's office, complaining too much and can't catch a break.

OQ: How did you choose the topic for "The Wise One"?
SCHULMAN: "The Wise One" is a condensed chapter from my memoir-in-progress about leaving the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Monsey, New York. Throughout my childhood, my father reminded me of my blessing to become the next great rabbi of my time. Still today, in the secular world, that pressure to excel weighs on me. The memoir is my attempt to reconcile those expectations, especially since realizing that I can't live up to them.

OQ: How did you choose the opening image for this story?
SCHULMAN: As a child, I always stood as close as I could get to bris ceremonies. It fascinated and haunted me that an eight-day-old baby was stuck on a pillow while some strange man stood over him with a knife. I couldn't believe that it had happened to me, and that congregants had looked on like spectators at a ballgame. With that scene, I want to convey the nonchalant, "here we go again" attitude that accompanies such a barbaric ritual, and to show my frustration about having joined the covenant when I was too young to have a say in the matter.

OQ: One of my favorite parts of "The Wise One" is your list of instructions for "how to become the next great rabbi." Could you talk about this section and why you decided to present it as a "manual"?
SCHULMAN: I hope to show how rote the grooming process was in my community, the message being, "Follow this manual and even your son can become the next great rabbi. As long as you pay him with jellybeans, lollipops, and chocolate donuts with custard inside."

OQ: Your family plays an important role in "The Wise One." How do they feel about your writing?
SCHULMAN: My family knows that I write about them. I don't hide it. My parents, particularly my father, aren't thrilled, but when I show them my work, I always ask them, "Is anything I've written untrue?" So far, they haven't been able to say, "Yes."

OQ: "The Wise One" centers on your childhood in an Orthodox Jewish community, but it resonates with a much larger audience that may not have had the same upbringing. How did you make your story accessible to this wider audience?
SCHULMAN: Thank you. I'm glad it resonates. I think the struggle of longing for a life that's better, or even just different, is universal.

OQ: What is your favorite quote?
SCHULMAN: It changes from day to day, but here’s a recent favorite by David Foster Wallace: We're existentially alone on the planet. I can't know what you're thinking and feeling and you can't know what I'm thinking and feeling. And the very best works construct a bridge across that abyss of human loneliness.

OQ: Cake or pie?
SCHULMAN: Both. All that candy I got for studying Torah left me with a life-long sweet tooth.

Dear Reader,

You know that feeling...? That’s what this is all about: the feeling; the incomplete sentence getting the essence of closure; life in overalls waking up numb words dressed in party dresses — a wild ride through the mind, if you’ll take my hand...

Dear Reader,

This issue's theme is disposable. Do with Orange Quarterly what you will — dispose of it if you find it fitting or ironic or neither. Of course, we really quite like it.

Dear Reader,

"Disposable" could be a commentary on contemporary society. That could be exactly what it is, if you want it to be. But there's always room for more meaning.

Dear Reader,

We don't dispose of our memories. (Remember?) Maybe we dispose of the extra things, the pointlessly obnoxious things; maybe little by little over time our memories erode and collapse in a stunning landscape of grandeur in our dreams, but we don't dispose of the art in our brains. I want this issue of Orange Quarterly to represent the art in our brains, the breathing dream, the memories we'll never dare throw out.

The theme may be disposable, but this issue is anything but.

I hope you like what you read.

Dear Readers,

How can you relate the tangibility of personal experience to the masses? Through art, perhaps — through the artifice of (as Toni Morrison would call it) "rememory."

With our face themed issue — the third installment of Orange Quarterly — we sought out submissions responding to how art, poetry, and literature can reshape the personal and pull back the veil that separates art and reality.

The creative work you'll see in this issue performs two mysterious functions: it reveals and it conceals. These poems, paintings, nonfiction stories, collages, etc. — they are as private and distinguishable as age lines and freckles, yet zoomed out they expose a universal flesh, a grander image or narrative that speaks to mortal determination, common understanding, and the contemporary moment.

The human need to share and touch — to connect with our fellow man — is vital to our growth as individuals and within humanity as a whole.

According to Freudian psychoanalysis, the ego is the part of the mind that mediates between the conscious and the unconscious, and it's responsible for "reality testing" and a "sense of personal identity." Is not art, then, the language of the ego? It mediates the arguments, perils, and explorations between one’s consciousness of social reality (the superego) and one's organic state of pure being (the id).

Through art we communicate the essence of our most precious, inherent selves to an audience. Every artist has his ego, just as he has a past, a present, and a future — a timeline that’s as one-of-a-kind (and as revealing and concealing) as the image of his face.

Enjoy this, our most memorable, most personal issue yet.

Charmed regards,

As an artist who has a Ph.D., you must have some perspective on the role of academia in the art world (and vice versa). What are your thoughts?

Having a Ph.D. in Higher Education Leadership is a stark indication of academic discipline and expertise that has opened many doors for me outside of the art world and since education is an art and a science, academic and creative freedoms converge and will converge even more so, nicely.

What is your creative process like?

I must paint while listening to classical or Old School R&B music. I paint chaotically at first, then I study the "mess" and situate it based on what I see in the "mess."

How and where do your artistic and academic spheres intersect, if they do?

I am, first and foremost, an artist. Nothing can or will change that reality; my father is a noted musician and my brother is also a noted composer and musician; it runs in the family. Nevertheless, studying higher education and learning about topics such as academic disidentification, the globalization of higher education, qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, etc., has greatly expanded my appreciation of science and the necessity of constructing theoretical frameworks for my creative endeavors.

The people you paint, although abstract, harness a great deal of personality. Are they derived from real people in your life? Or are they strictly fictional?

The individuals are mostly fictional; sometimes I abstract the human forms of people I know or have known.

Something about the face to background ratio and the colors you use in your portraits I find reminiscent of Gustav Klimt. Do you draw any inspiration from his work in your own?

No, I rarely look at the artwork of other artists nowadays; I want to be oblivious to what has been done; my main concern is own work, to my dismay or continued to success.

What would you like people to take away from your work?

I would like viewers to experience intrigue and a sense of passionate novelty.

Is there a certain detail in your work that you'd like your viewer to recognize?

The multiplicity of perspective.

You have an impressive collection of work. Ten galleries! How long have you been using this stylized approach to portraiture?

Seventeen years.

Then you've been making art for quite some time. Is there anything you know now that you wish you'd have known back then?

I am beginning to appreciate the depth of admiration other individuals have for my work. Initially, when I began painting, I never knew how important it was to take both positive and negative criticisms extremely seriously and to persistently strive for perfection in my artwork.

Do you have anything up-and-coming that we should know about?

I'm thinking about pursuing another doctorate at Drew University; I may be applying for the Doctor of Letters program in the upcoming weeks; and as always I will be creating art, music, poetry, and love as much as possible.

You've been a visual artist since 1990. Is there anything you know now that you wish you'd known back then?

The use of my mind. It's easier to state, "I let my fantasy run free," than it is to put it into practice. I'm still learning.

I couldn't help but notice that you live in Italy. Were you born there?

Yep, I'm Italian, born and raised in the boot-shaped country.

Working with American publishers (like Orange Quarterly and Madswirl), do you find your art is interpreted differently overseas?

Yes, definitely, yes. The American publishers are more open-minded to the self-taught artists like me and to the weirdness in art.

With that in mind, do you create work that is directed more toward an Italian audience or an American audience? Or do you decide the appropriate audience once your piece is complete?

No, I don't make difference among potential audiences; I just work following the mood of the moment.

What is your creative process like?

My creative process starts from an idea born through reading the news, surfing the internet, browsing through my patterns — or all the three things together. Sometimes I start with a title that can be a word game or have weird assonance. The goal is to create an unusual or surreal composition. Often I think about new subjects while cycling.

"outerspace elvis" is a quirky piece. Is there a story behind it?

I wanted to pay homage to the King in a weird way. So I mixed what is stated in a book called Alien Rock: The Rock and Roll Extraterrestrial Connection, by Michael Luckman, which says that Elvis was a firm believer in UFO visitations.

You mention that the news inspires you for some of your pieces. Are there any world events inspiring you at the moment?

I made a collection inspired by the crisis that's still in progress, but I'm also concerned about environmental issues.

Could you expand on the "crisis still in progress"?

Unfortunately, yes: the crisis that's still in progress, at least in Europe, is in Greece, Italy, and Spain right now, with different degrees of gravity. Our governments are raising taxes very quickly but are so slow in reducing their expenses and benefits.

What would you like people to take away from your work?

A good mix of colors and ideas.

Is there a certain detail in your work you'd like your viewers to recognize?

The small drops of acrylic paint.

Do you have a favorite method of printing?

I mostly use the stencil technique with spray paint acrylic, but sometimes I mix it with rubberstamping.

What does your work environment look and feel like?

A big room full of stuff, spray cans, patterns, leaflets, books, notes, etc. Disorderly.

Is there any up-and-coming stuff we should know about?

I'm working on some series made with circles and lines using wire cables, rubber gaskets, and rubber bands.

What brought you from Australia to New York?

I came after college; most of my friends were moving here. I didn't have any clear direction, and it seemed like the best place to go.

Do you recognize any major differences between the art communities here in the States and there, down under?

I left Australia when I was fifteen, so I can't comment too much on the art community there. New York is obviously a center of the art world, with many art schools, galleries, auction houses, and museums. There's so much to see here — too much for anyone with a demanding job and a family like myself. But it's comforting to know it's there, even if I don't make it out to see it.

In which category did you receive your New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship? That must have been memorable. What was it like, winning?

I won the NYFA fellowship in nonfiction literature for a piece about a Turkish painter and archaeologist. That piece, like much of my writing, made use a blend of words and visual elements to tell the story. It came at a great time for me — I was discouraged and felt that a lot of my work wasn't going anywhere. My salary as a museum guard wasn't exactly generous given the cost of living in NYC, so the money that came along with the NYFA award made a huge difference.

Your collages are impressive. What inspired you to alter classical pieces in such a quirky way? Did working as a museum security guard play a part in your creative process?

Thank you. My time as a museum guard definitely inspired this work. No matter how many times I patrolled the same carefully curated spaces along the same proscribed route, I was always struck by an odd detail in an artwork I'd never noticed before or never seen in quite the same way. At the end of a shift I'd end up with a jumble of images that would blend together in my memory. The juxtaposition inherent in collage seemed an ideal way to capture this experience.

Do you have any favorite stories behind any of your pieces?

I got into making these collages in kind of a quirky way. I've always used visual elements in my fiction and nonfiction writing, but until a few years ago I'd never taken the leap to create purely visual work. I was taking a class as part of my education degree on using art to work with special needs students. For our final project we were given a sketchbook and told to fill it. I blanked on the assignment — I really had no idea how to move forward. The teacher had offered us a bunch of art supplies — pastels, charcoal, fabrics, watercolors, and magazines. I noticed a Sotheby's catalog in with all the magazines, and I started flipping through it. Eventually I figured I should start cutting things out. I liked what I'd done; some of the pieces are still up on the blog. Once the class was behind me I headed down to the Strand bookstore and picked up a bunch of used auction catalogs for a few dollars a piece. The catalogs themselves are quite beautiful — they're about trying to convince people to buy something — and so they're the perfect source material. Since it's become a habit, and I go fairly regularly to the Strand to get new catalogs.

Is there a certain detail in your work you'd like your viewer to recognize?

The work isn't so much about details standing on their own as it is a celebration of unexpected combinations, of moments of intersection. I break a piece into fragments and recombine these into something new that's unexpected but feels right.

What would you like people to take away from your work?

I like to indulge in certain big ideas about my work. I like to think that I'm in some way reclaiming the high-priced, inaccessible commodities these works of art have become — they're mostly being sold from one private collector to another via auction houses. In the catalogs each piece has been carefully assessed and categorized, with its measurements, dates, and provenances all carefully presented to the potential buyer. But the best art has a sense of mystery and strangeness that defies this meticulous classification. You might say these collages are about reclaiming this mystery from the certainty of the market and the auctioneer's hammer. But I'm not too attached to this way of thinking; I'm happy enough for people to find some beauty in these pieces.

What does your work environment look and feel like?

It's my living room. Under the coffee table you'll find a heap of auction catalogs: Sotheby's, Christies, Phillips de Pury. Dorotheum out of Vienna is a particular favorite. Exacto knives and glue sticks. A cutting pad and sketchpads. Easy to unpack and start working, easy to pack away.

Is there any up and coming stuff we should know about?

I just had a show at Spattered Columns gallery in New York with Swipe Magazine — a magazine devoted to the work of museum guards. Also, I'll be in a group show at Five Myles Gallery in Brooklyn in June.

The first boy I was ever in love with once told me that I didn’t know how to end a story. At first I dismissed this as him being an ass who thought I talked for too long, trailing along without purpose. Then my first creative writing professor said the same thing. Except she phrased it by saying the problem I had stemmed from a deeper problem of erasing. “Sometimes,” she told me, “you will find that your ending is really in the middle and you just have to excavate your way back to it.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. Being in the middle of finals and desperately trying to hand in all of my exams, I had no time or energy to really figure it out and thought that perhaps it was an obscure reference to me not having spent enough time in the middle of the semester on my stories, or the fact that I had turned in a hand-drawn comic for an assignment rather than a “proper” nonfiction piece. So, in my frenzied end-of-the-semester rush, I handed in my body of work with too-long endings that somehow still seemed to be unsatisfying.

The next semester I enrolled in two nonfiction classes called “Lyricism and Lucidity” and “Essays without Borders.” On my first day in these classes, my professors asked their students to identify our strengths as writers. One of my professors said that we would write to our strengths and further hone our skills. The other said we would write in our weaknesses to break them. They both assigned us Jenny Boully.

Through these classes I began to answer one of the problems I found in writing: the tension of fact in nonfiction. I found the answer in what John D’Agata classifies as the “Lyrical Essay,” or, writing in “The Fifth Genre,” as one that places art above facts and “asks what happens when an essay begins to act less like an essay and more like a poem.”[1] I found myself incredibly comfortable in this genre of writing, which I had never been able to completely feel in the other genres that I had been writing in — namely poetry, nonfiction, and playwriting. For me it was the solution to working with different narrative forms, because I always felt like my writing had an in-betweeness about it that I couldn’t quite classify, and often it made me too preoccupied with what genre I fit in rather than the art of it. The lyrical essay gave me the freedom to write in a way that I felt best mimicked my thought process.

I began to find my answer to endings and erasing in Jenny Boully’s The Book of Beginnings and Endings, which is exactly what it sounds like, a book composed completely of beginnings and endings.

In this text — along with another of her texts called “The Body,” a lyrical essay composed of footnotes — Boully plays with the idea of “erasing” in literature, using silence just as much as she uses language to create a world and describe it. What we have then is a series of fragments: seemingly disconnected starts and stops that can be classified neither as strict “nonfiction” nor “poetry,” but as carving out a space between the two. Similarly, Boully carves out her text against the silence of the page, which becomes equally as important as the marks she leaves behind. Therefore, her book is performative in that the way she chooses to carve her text is just as much of the project as her writing. Through the form of the book, Boully raises fundamental questions about beginning and ending stories. Attempting to create some type of closure between the different series of starts and stops, our mind guesses at the connective tissue between the threads, therefore creating our own middle, and our own logic, as we read. In doing this, Boully playfully subverts traditional notions of “beginnings” and “endings”: How do you make sense of finding a beginning in the middle of a piece? How about three-quarters of the way in? And, as my professor once told me, what if your ending is in the middle? How do you excavate back? Most of the book is not a “beginning” or an “end,” but, by conventional definitions, a middle without any of the properties of middles.

Each ending and beginning is skillfully written and provides a hook for engagement amid the unfamiliarity with the form. While every beginning and every ending is its own separate story, there are enough overlapping themes, characters, and symbols among the works to view them together as an extended lyrical essay and advance an argument about the fleetingness of writing and how we construct stories. Much of Boully’s writing in the text explores themes of abandonment, loneliness, self-reflection, love, death, life, and fear. Many of the themes, such as abandonment and death, reinforce the stop and start form of the book because the abrupt ends in the form mimic the feelings which she is describing and further question what really constitutes a story and if the act of beginning, middle, and ending are really worthy structures for writing.

The fleetingness of narrative is a frequent theme. Much of Boully’s writing deals with distance, with slipping away. In a particularly short ending she writes, “If you ask my mother what her name means, she will say that it is a sad name, the name of something that has already gone away; it means a goodbye that happened a long time ago; it means that as you speak it is already gone.”[2] The essay ends soon after that line, leaving behind the aftertaste of a goodbye, of heartbreak. Due to the length and abruptness of the form, many of the pieces hold that same aftertaste — as if you are saying goodbye to something just as it begins to present itself to you. Boully writes:

“The poet then is always both vain and aimless in her attempts to capture, like butterflies in a field, the fleeting nature of lives and moments; try to pin down the darkness between the frames in a movie — our eyes and neurons tell us this is impossible, yet this is the task of the poet. The poet will often call on the form of verse insofar that verse mirrors this fleetingness; the line functions as frames of light projected onto the screen of a blank page; the breaks serve as moments of disorientation.”[3]

The breaks in the book sometimes serve as moments of disorientation, as do most real-life endings. In fact, the whole book is disorienting due to the constant goodbye and hellos, the skillful writing and the heavy themes discussed. However, it is a great disorienting feeling, full of fragmented aftertastes and enough erasing for readers to write themselves into.

---

[1] D’Agata, John. “The Next American Essay.” Graywolf Press. St Paul, MN. 2003. Pg 435.

[2] Boully, Jenny. The Book of Beginnings and Endings. Sarabande Books. Louisville, KY. 2007. Pg 18.

[3] Ibid. 34.

Before I started working as the Fiction Editor of Orange Quarterly and as a Fiction Intern at the Michigan Quarterly Review, I wondered if editors, interns, or admissions officers actually read manuscripts fully. Well, I can’t speak for all editors, interns, or admissions officers, but I know generally that I only need to read three pages to know whether I should read more of a writer’s sample.

Now, I’m not saying I don’t read manuscripts past three pages — I do — but I am proven right a lot of times. It doesn’t matter how long the story is — 10 pages or 17 or 42. Three pages generally gives the reader a good indication of where the story’s going and what might be special or strong about the writer’s voice. Most stories don’t get going until seven, eight pages in, or worse until the end. Sometimes, I’ve given a story to the MQR’s Editor to read simply because I finished the manuscript amicably.

Here are some tips for submitting that might help a reader get past those first three pages with anticipation:

1. Computers generally do grammar and spell check for us nowadays, but still errors happen, and they can distract a reader. They’re not a deal breaker, but they can definitely put the reader in a prejudicial state.

2. Within those first three pages, make sure you’ve given the reader a good idea of where that story’s going to go. You’re not creating suspense — or a good story, for that matter — by delaying details. Give the reader a clear sense of purpose, situation, person and place. I’m not suggesting tell the reader the whole story right at the beginning, and I’m not suggesting all great stories must give a sense of purpose. A lot of writers can rely on the effectiveness of their prose and intentionally avoid giving a story a purpose (or person or place). Perhaps you might be one of them, and if so disregard this.

3. Dialogue can definitely work as a first sentence, but oftentimes it doesn’t. During the first page or two you want to situate the reader in the world of your story. Oftentimes, conversations rob a reader of that. If a story starts with dialogue, significant character details might be relayed through dialogue tags, which can become annoying or lengthy. If you’re not using dialogue tags then you also risk starting the story with “talking heads.” Also not that effective.

4. If you’re submitting to a place with a cover letter, try your best to make sure you’ve addressed the letter to the right person. Try to make the cover letter clear, and keep it simple. Don’t tell the reader what your story’s about, because that suggests two things: you don’t trust your reader and you don’t trust yourself. Listing awards or MFA programs definitely can’t hurt, but I’ve rejected authors who have attended Iowa’s Writers' Workshop, written novels, and had short stories in The New Yorker. None of those credentials mattered if the story wasn’t good. Similarly, don’t go crazy listing every magazine or journal that has published your story. Once a person attached over fifty publications, which irritated me more than it impressed me. Why not note the top 10 of those publications so I get the gist that you’re a published author?

There are many more elements that go into creating a good story. Even if you accomplish that basic list there’s no guarantee you’ll get an acceptance, but these are great to focus on! Good luck, and happy submitting!

Submit your work to Orange Quarterly.