Guernica Inside & Out: A talk with Guernica Editors on How to Start a Magazine. With readings by writer Matt Bell & Fordham's Rebecca Bates.
   
February 15th, 7 pm
Fordham University-Lincoln Center
113 W. 60th Street (at Columbus)
 
When writer William Saroyan told H.L. Mencken he wanted to be an editor, Mencken sent this letter to Saroyan:
 
"I note what you say about your aspiration to edit a magazine. I am sending you by this mail a six-chambered revolver. Load it and fire every one into your head. You will thank me after you get to hell and learn from other editors there how dreadful their job was on earth."
 
But if you insist, we’ll help. Writer Matt Bell (also an editor at Dzanc and The Collagist) will read and participate. Guernica Daily Blog Editor Rebecca Bates will read nonfiction selections from the magazine and talk about editing the stories. Other editors will be in attendance.

I'll be reading from Cataclysm Baby, as Guernica previously published one section of that book, and I'm looking forward to the lit mag discussion afterward. If you're in the city and free next Wednesday, I hope I'll see you there!

Please forgive our confusion and our failures. We make our petitions—say our prayers. It’s like our falling against a wall, in a sense.

—Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty by Diane Williams

She moved slowly away from me and started up to her bedroom. The tangy perfume covered me like a veil. I waited until she reached the upper landing and shut her bedroom door, then went up to my room. In the dusk, I put a desk chair in front of the bedroom door to keep anyone from coming in and held my new stockings high, dangling the silky legs like puppets. I tried them on and walked in grand arcs back and forth around my room. My legs felt cool and delicious and daring. I wondered what Anthony would think.

The sun slid below the edge of the earth leaving a sky layered in purple and brown outside my bedroom window. The weeping birch tree in our driveway had dropped its leaves early. Vine-like threads hung straight down to the blacktop. I imagined Anthony standing in the driveway calling to me. I went down to him in my sheer stockings, feeling light and beautiful, and together we walked into the darkness like bathers wading in a warm sea.

—Night Swim by Jessica Keener

Anaphora for me is the counterbalance to the pivoting sounds in the poem. It's almost like the poem has two hands—one hand is doing the twisty-turny sound thing, while the other hand is the stable, rhythmic refrain. I find refrains like this "reboot" the sound of the poem, the way you use the smell of coffee beans to "clear" the scent of cologne from your nose when trying to figure out which one to buy.

—Charles Jensen

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

—Bleak House by Charles Dickens

On a night too lonely for color, you find blood
in places where blood should not be. Your tears
are a muted computer screen. Your dysentery is my dysentery.
I hold your hand and your eyes are milk. I tell you Soon.
Soon zombies will walk the earth, pouring salt
on open wounds. Today my fever kills my appetite,
and the bear I shot is rotting the end of the world.

—The Oregon Trail is the Oregon Trail by Gregory Sherl

‎So even if you hope to find some lasting security inside language, and believe that your powers are at their peak there, if nowhere else, despair and disappointment will dog you still; for neither you nor your weaknesses, nor the world and its villains, will have been vanquished just because now it is in syllables and sentences where they hide; since, oddly enough, while you can confront and denounce a colleague or a spouse, run from an angry dog, or jump bail and flee your country, you can’t argue with an image; in as much as a badly made sentence is a judgment pronounced upon its perpetrator, and even one poor paragraph indelibly stains the soul. The unpleasant consequence of every such botch is that your life, as you register your writing, looks back at you as from a dirty mirror, and there you perceive a record of ineptitude, compromise, and failure.

—Finding a Form by William Gass

Advance reader copies of Cataclysm Baby are out in the world! The one above arrived here this weekend, and is pictured visiting some of its MLP brethren.

Here's the novella's jacket copy:

Beset with environmental disaster, animal-like children, and the failure of traditional roles, the twenty-six fathers of Cataclysm Baby raise their desperate voices to reveal the strange stations of frustrated parenthood, to proclaim familial thrashings against the fading light of our exhausted planet, its glory grown wild again. As the known world disappears, these beleaguered and all-too-breakable men cling ever tighter to the duties of an unrecoverable past, even as their children rush ahead, evolve away. Unflinching in the face of apocalypse and unblinking before the complicated gaze of parental love, Matt Bell's Cataclysm Baby is a powerful chronicle of our last days, and of the tentative graces that might fill the hours of our dusk.

Cataclysm Baby will be released on April 15, 2012: If you'd like a print or digital ARC for review or other promotional purposes, send Mud Luscious Press's J.A. Tyler an email at jatyler@mudlusciouspress.com. I'd also be happy to answer any questions about the book that I can: you can reach me at mdbell79@gmail.com. Thank you!

"Folks, please pay attention to this announcement. This is not a weather report." He imagined his voice echoing in stadiums, in dark rooms, interrupting jellyhead workers. "My friend here is Shelp. My name is Moldenke, out of Texaco City. It's time we ended our backward ways. Don't be pinned like a flutterby in a camphor box. Get up, go out and mill in the street. What can they do, occupy the rooms? Everybody turn on the faucets. Open the lookouts and turn on the heaters. Heat the city. Protcher a friend in a tender place. Be good. Be sensitive to the flow, listen to the hum. As I said, this is not a weather report. This is Moldenke of Texaco City. Bloodboy, mock soldier, banana man, shrimper—I've done my share of swallowing chuff... Turn the volume up, folks. The weather is improving in spurts. Remember the old sun? The old moon? The old songs we used to sing about them? The government sent Eagleman and his moon to wane in the country, sent up its own moons. Up they went, a new mock moon every paper month, confusing the issue of tides. At least with Eagleman's moon we could get to see a sky movie every month. Now, what now? The g-boys give us gauze and goggles, encouraging indoor play. They send out a herd of jellyheads to do the mock work and the rest of us hole up in our rooms."

—Motorman by David Ohle

Being more precise would be less dramatic. I don't think readers will care whether the events that I'm discussing happened on the same day, a few days apart, or a few months apart. What most readers will care about, I think, is the meaning that's suggested in the confluence of these events—no matter how far apart they occurred. The facts that are being employed here aren’t meant to function baldly as "facts." Nobody is going to read this, in other words, in order to get a survey of the demographics of Las Vegas or what's scheduled on the community calendar. Readers can get that kind of information elsewhere.

—John D'Agata