banangolit

[banangolit]

Haven't been on this website in years-- a decade, maybe. I'm sure everyone I followed on here has gone elsewhere. I'm screaming into the void right now.

But my first book came out last month.

I'm really proud of it.

You can buy it here: https://bellepointpress.com/products/brazos

[banangolit]

New Issue// Call For Response Submissions

Super excited for two big things today. First, our new issue! http://banangostreet.com/issue12/ It's all essays! All of the essays! We really hope you'll check it out. A lot of hard work went into these pieces & this issue. Who's in it? Well: Eloisa Amezcua, Marty Cain, Jenny Drai, Shamala Gallagher, Savannah Ganster, Molly Gaudry, Jonathan Harper, Lily Hoang, Marlin M. Jenkins, Feagin Jones, Lisa Kwong, Rachel Charlene Lewis, Nina Sharma, Addie Tsai, Steven Underwood, & Nicole Walker. Art by Peter Oravetz. SECOND ANNOUNCEMENT: For our next issue, we want to do something a little different. Unlike our previous twelve issues, this one will be published online piece by piece as we receive submissions. The current political climate in the United States is, well, difficult. A man who promotes racism, sexism, homophobia, & xenophobia was just elected president. The rights of indigenous people are under attack by oil companies. Violence against minority groups is on the rise. We want to provide a space for people to publish creative work that responds to the current events cycle. You might be saying wait, that one journal has been doing this for a couple of years. You're right—this idea isn't something new & revolutionary. But one of our goals in putting together this issue is to provide a space where strong work that resists the status quo can exist. We aren't looking to create an issue that represents all sides. We aren't the home for your poem about how much you admire Donald Trump. We aren't interested in an essay that reinforces white supremacy or upholds the male gaze. We also don't want to restrict this to Trump or to America. We want writing—poems, essays, stories, translations—that engages with any major issues in the world. We want to root out oppression & give voice to the oppressed. We want to provide a place where the valuable voices of the future can exist, can critique. We'll be open for these submissions for as long as there is a need for them. Submissions already sent to us will be held over for a future issue. Swing by our Submittable page to send to this: http://banangostreet.submittable.com.

[banangolit]

We released the third publication on Banango Editions yesterday, Sarah Blake’s “Named After Death” poetry echap. Check out the companion workbook too for fun and games.

Sarah Blake - Named After Death

>>>>>>>NAMED AFTER DEATH PDF<<<<<<<

>>>>>>>COMPANION WORKBOOK<<<<<<<

Poetry can sometimes be challenging, and you think, “oh no, a poem, what if I read it wrong??” But Blake’s helpfully paired her poems with a thematically-related activity book, full of mazes, connect-the-dots, and colouring exercises, and I am TERRIFIC at those, so now I’m great at poetry too. Thank you Sarah!!

–Ryan North, author of Dinosaur Comics and Romeo and/or Juliet

When does a life end? Does it end with, or before, or after the self ends? In Named After Death, Sarah Blake writes—forcefully, gorgeously—her way to and through answers to these questions and other, parallel and equally impossible, questions. These poems testify to the terrible end of the self, to its bewildering continuing on beyond death, and to the difficultly of asserting one’s own selfhood when one is called upon to bear not just the memories, but to some extent the selves of the dead and of the beloved, as women are too often called upon to do. “I allow myself to think of things beyond him / and I am flooded by them,” Blake writes. Her poems think, and live.

–Shane McCrae, author of The Animal Too Big to Kill and Forgiveness Forgiveness

[banangolit]

Living Otherwise with Uyghur Poetry

We recently released Issue 11 of Banango Street, which included Uyghur translations of the modernist poet Tahir Hamut by Darren Byler and Dilmurat Mutellip. Below, Darren describes the development of Tahir’s work in the context of Uyghur poetry. We are pleased to publish this alongside two photos of the Uyghur region by Magnum/National Geographic photographer Carolyn Drake and Han photographer Tian Lin.

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Untitled by Carolyn Drake, from Wild Pigeon project

Beginning in the early 1990s Tahir Hamut brought newness to the world of Uyghur poetics by shattering traditional imagery and forms of feeling and pulling the shards of what remained together in new ways. Like other members of his modernist cohort he used language to reinvent what it meant to be a Turkic Muslim Uyghur in Northwest China. That is to say, among Uyghurs, poetry is one of the most dominant forms of cultural expression. Thousands of Uyghurs self-identify as poets; hundreds of thousands regard themselves as poetry critics. It was no small feat to radically transform the genre, yet that is precisely what Tahir and others in his group of avant-garde poets have done. They have taken the Sufi imagery that suffused conventional poetics out of formal rhythm and given the quotidian and mundane its place on the page. In doing so they are staking a claim to the modern human experience, pulling traditional knowledge forward, and demanding a space in world literature.  

Like elsewhere in the world, the life of a modernist poet is a struggle. For the past 20 years Tahir has been balancing his passion project with his job as media producer. Many times the busyness of work and fatherhood has taken center stage, yet around the end of 2014 a flurry of new poems began to appear; fragments written on an iPhone began to coalesce into fully-formed thoughts. By early 2015 he began to talk about a collection of 60 poems that brought together dozens of new poems and with an assortment of poems from the 90s and early 2000s. A fellow translator, Dilmurat Mutellip, joined in these conversations and over endless cups of coffee we talked out the lore, the friendships, the longings these poems evoke. Plans are in the works to submit this trilingual collection for publication sometime in the near future.

The poems started in Beijing where Tahir learned Chinese as an 18 year-old by reading Freud and Schopenhauer in Chinese translation. It was there that he learned that in the modern world it was impossible to see clearly and that instead the role of the poet is to shed light upon darkness. Those early poems are full of verve and concentrated awareness. Desire, depression, passion and petulance frame his early work. Over the next decade he returned increasingly to his past in rural Xinjiang and the deep history of Uyghur thought.  Songs of melancholy, survival and frustration rose to the fore. A number of these stunning poems have been published in superb translations by Joshua Freeman in places like Gulf Coast, Crazy Horse, and The Berkeley Poetry Review.

Banango Street is one of the first places to publish Tahir’s most recent work in English translation. His new work from 2015 is a reflection of him settling into his place in the world. They tell us about his ambiguous relationship with Ürümchi, convention and domestic life. We see him driving his old Buick and telling stories of pain and disorientation. His new poems are suffused with prismatic portraits of his friends, ruminations on what it means to be a living heir to Sufi Islamic and animist traditions. They tell the story of middle age, of moving past withdrawal, insulation and health scares. They are the work of a poet at the height of his powers; becoming comfortable with his roles as a father, husband, filmmaker, teacher and friend. Most importantly they bring Tahir to life as an active presence, pushing at the horizon of what can be thought.

A fellow modernist poet, Ahmatjan Osman, has written that “traditional Uyghur poetry is rooted in shamanism and animism, and poetic inspiration is understood as an actual presence, what is unseen, which speaks through the poet” (xiii). Seen in this light, the trajectory of Tahir’s poetic practice is one of circling, of dancing, with the ineffable and bringing its presence into the world; bringing light to the dark.  What go largely “unseen” are the forces that constrain Uyghur life in this contemporary moment. In Tahir’s work we feel what it is like to be in the presence of unseen powers; we hear the sounds of these silences.

There are 11 million Uyghurs in a Chinese world of 1.3 billion. Tahir’s poems tell us what that feels like, but they also make us take Uyghur thoughts seriously. We have to think with him. These are not just stories of silence and abjection; they are not just tales of subverting tradition; they are poems for living otherwise. They tell us that the poetics of Chinese Central Asia have never been more alive than they are today.  

Untitled by Tian Lin, from Yamalik project

[banangolit]

Banango Street Issue 11 has landed! Featuring poetry from Caroline Cabrera, Kamden Hilliard, Meg Wade, Iliana Rocha, Grace Shuyi Liew, Jayme Russell, Michelle Lin, Janelle DolRayne, Jason McCall, Nina Puro, Nathan Lipps, Rj Ingram, Elizabeth Schmuhl, Caleb Kaiser, Jennifer Metsker, Tahir Hamut (translated by Darren Byler and Dilmurat Mutellip), Kenan Ince, Daniel T. O’Brien; fiction by Matthew Fogarty, Kirby Johnson, Duncan B. Barlow; nonfiction by Alexis Pope, Muriel Leung, Peyton Burgess, Liz Blood, Sarina Bosco; and cover art by Emma Zurer.

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We are also excited to announce that Issue 12 will be all-creative nonfiction, edited by our own Katie Jean Shinkle and Issue 11’s Muriel Leung. Submissions are open now and close on May 17th. As always, submit through Submittable:

http://banangostreet.submittable.com/submit

The call for submissions follows:

The word essay derives from the French essayer, which means "to try." In the spirit of our upcoming all creative nonfiction issue of Banango Street, we invite you to question the essay's origins, form, and the implied failure of the attempt, as well as to live in the celebration of success, the experiment, the expansion and extrapolation, how the essay is playing and in play, how it lives and breathes and dies and resurrects.

Let us know the ways you insist and persist. We want to hear about your quietest or loudest, your most hazardous attempts and your necessary and rudest awakenings, we want your screams and your whispers. We want to see how you embody the essay, how the essay embodies you, how you fill and empty it. If the essay splinters and falls apart, so be it.

We are especially seeking work from writers who are frequently underrepresented in literary conversations. This includes people of color, women, those who identify as non-cisgender and/or non-gender conforming, queer and/or transgender perspectives/LGBTQIA voices, disabled voices, etc. We want to hear your narratives, we want to see your experiments, we intend to hold a space for you.

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Finally, we recently released our 2nd Banango Editions echap, Elinor Abbott's “Is This The Most Romantic Moment Of My Life?”, a must-read to get you in the mood for writing some gut-wrenching nonfiction of your own.

[banangolit]

“Your physical beauty has nothing to do with you. Do you hear me? I’m outside the ring of fire and I am yelling in at you.”

--Elinor Abbott with one last sadness submission in tandem with the release of Is This The Most Romantic Moment Of My Life? on Banango Editions.

sadness submission: most days I dont feel anything at all but I smile and pretend like I don’t feel the clouds

On days like today when I don’t sleep well, I get sharp at the edges, like I’ve gone animal. Every flutter in my body, every gurgle or sensation alerts me like a bell. I’m living inside something that I also am, I’m being propelled through space by it, everything is color and shape. Anything about the outside world becomes too much to bear, too loud, too bizarre to interface with. I need to calm down enough to sleep well. I used to say I could handle anything as long as I could sleep. That’s not really true, though, I learned. Up until fairly recently, what, less than six months ago? sleep was a dark companion, hurrying me up the stairs towards bed like there was a spinning needle I needed to prick with my finger. Sleep wanted conscious me to fall away, so that the non sentient aspect of my body could try and repair me. I imagine a ghost of myself standing over my sleeping body, trying to fix it, and I am coming apart in her hands like confetti.

I read this Kathy Acker quote a few weeks ago and thought of you: “I am looking for the body, my body, which exists outside its patriarchal definitions. Of course that is not possible. But who is any longer interested in the possible?”. I thought of you not feeling anything at all. I wondered where your body went, that great source of all feeling. Here’s where my body went: between 2014 and 2015, I developed or, rather, fully blossomed, a brutal thyroid condition and  gained about 65 pounds. Other things happened, the aforementioned endless sleeping, but let’s be honest that the weight is the most obvious sign of my illness. And, interestingly, the most hidden. People do not want to hear about or believe in people gaining weight because they are sick, it’s one of the most medically reviled concepts. I’m not a hundred percent sure on why this is, but it is. Maybe even someone reading this now is thinking, no way, “they” always blame it on their glands, it’s probably more like an ice cream condition. I’ve had close people in my life well aware of my medical diagnosis squint at me and be like, …but are you watching your portion sizes though? Being fat also means people don’t really notice you so much. You become invisible in public spaces. Beforehand I’d always been a traditionally attractive sort and was used to being seen, for good or for bad. I didn’t always enjoy it but it always did inform my self worth. Therapists call that an external locus of control. Maybe you have one too? Going to the inward locus is trickier, stickier. It’s not the one we’re used to.

Six or eight years ago, maybe? If someone had told me I’d get to the number on the scale to which I’ve climbed, I probably would have taken a long walk off a short pier. That was before I went through treatment for my ed, though. That was before I’d reconsidered the value of just being alive, which I now consider a complex kind of honor. And of just feeling and being with your gross or numb or painful body. I mean, if I’m honest, my experience of my body as fat is not really that different than my experience of my body at my healthiest weight or as thin or as extremely thin. It was always horror, horror front to back. It was just easier to buy clothes. And in many ways, I don’t really mind being fat as much as I minded being thin. Thin was a tiny painted square I couldn’t step outside of. Beauty was an occupation that never ended, a 90 hour a week job. Every waking minute was: how do I become more beautiful. How do I freeze myself in time. But I couldn’t stay beautiful, try as I might, and I never did freeze time, though God knows, if my obsession could’ve whittled an answer out of my body, it would have! Now, I’m outside the painted square and there’s like, a whole fucking world out here. And I feel freer now to be of my mind now, to be smart. To be as smart as I guess I always was when I was too preoccupied being beautiful to take myself seriously.

In being fat, I have no choice but to either accept or destroy my body, because I have been socialized to interpret grotesqueness as abnormal and the society I live in reinforces that interpretation. However, I’ve found that in accepting said grotesqueness, even if I can’t accept it all of the time, even if sometimes I feel so angry about it I want to condense myself into a rage ball that burns to the center of the earth, I am also allowed to have a body that is completely my own and is wholly defined by me alone. It’s been a gift in a way, because I know now the two truest things about bodies: 1.) they cannot be controlled and 2.) your physical beauty has nothing to do with you. Do you hear me? I’m outside the ring of fire and I am yelling in at you.

Is it possible to be a fat person and be ok? That’s why that Acker quote resonated with me because it’s more like, who cares. Is it possible for you to live your life smiling on the outside and feeling like shit on the inside? I guess. But why be interested in the possible? The possible is the external locus of control, where everyone else gets to define you, gets to say this is bad, this is good, this is beauty, this is filth. Beyond the possible is the internal, and, believe it or not, that’s where you really live. That’s where you get to choose.

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This Sadness Submission brought to you by Banango Editions who put out my chapbook ‘Is This The Most Romantic Moment of My Life?’. If you liked this essay, my chapbook of short essays on love, divorce, loss, romance, sex and grief, just might speak your language. Come be sad with me, it’s ok.

Other two recent sadness submissions are here: Mr. Light and Mother

@banangolit @banangoeditions

[banangolit]

Is This The Most Romantic Moment Of My Life? is now live! 

http://banangostreet.com/editions/abbott.pdf

Elinor Abbott – Is This The Most Romantic Moment of My Life?

>>>>>>>FREE PDF HERE<<<<<<<

“To read Elinor Abbott’s Is This The Most Romantic Moment Of My Life? is to be completely spellbound. Abbott is relentless in her distinctive and original account of love all the way to its conclusion, which we find out itself is love. As Abbott writes, “The best and truest and most beautiful thing I did in all those years we were together, the absolute apex of the entire thing, what I did with the most love, was leave him.” Abbott’s execution of humor, vulnerability, and poetic timing is completely flawless. Her collection of essays work together as a memoir of certain loss, but also as an original voice, center stage, speaking directly to you; giving you a wild permission to let go, to break your own heart.” –Katherine Osborne, author of Fire Sign.

“Elinor Abbott’s Is This the Most Romantic Moment of My Life? deals with the disintegration of a marriage with taut, honest, and sometimes, heartbreaking essays. It reminds you how important it is to always choose magic even when the space between magic and bullshit is the space of a sigh.” –Jesse Bradley, author of The Adventures of Jesus Christ, Boy Detective.

If you enjoyed Is This The Most Romantic Moment Of My Life?, please consider making a donation, 100% of which goes to the author. 

[banangolit]

Elinor Abbott with another crushing & uplifting Sadness Submission in advance of Is This The Most Romantic Moment of My Life?’s release tomorrow.

a sadness: I am in my thirties. My mother is sixty. This past Halloween she revealed that the man she married when I was 14--my former stepfather--was a sex offender, and that she knew that when she married him. She knowingly married a sex offender and brought a 10-year-old and a 14-year-old to live in his house. I still have not processed this. Last week she told me she has started seeing him again. I feel like an orphan. The sadness has no bottom.

Possibly the happiest memory I have of my childhood was standing on the side of a hill in Hawaii, we were at this crazy estate, I guess, of some people my parents knew? I don’t really know, we never saw them again. Everyone was inside and I wandered outside alone and spent the afternoon on that hillside, looking off into what appeared to me to be a dense rainforest. I was 8. I’d had a very bad year at school where I’d become locked in a war with a girl named Mary in my class over the friendship of two other girls who sort of swung back and forth between me and Mary like voters in a swing state. Parents had been called, swear words were used, I believe there was some kind of physical fight at some point, valuables were smashed and eventually I became so lonely and sad and afraid that every recess I would just walk around the playground with the adult attendant and talk to her the whole time instead of playing. It was the first time I remember the experience of ruminative thinking, thoughts in my head that wouldn’t stop, an endless story I couldn’t control the narrative of, playing day and night in my mind, building me up and then smashing me down again. I was already a melancholy kid who shouldered the burden of wrongness for my family (a job no one wants) which left me feeling emotionally flayed, living inside a vertigo reality in which the knowledge of the unfairness I experienced did not exempt me from being completely at fault for it. Maybe my bad third grade year was a manifestation of that frustration, idk. But after the fighting with Mary got really bad I had to check in with the school counselor who I told one day that when I saw knives I wondered what it would be like to stab myself with them.

That afternoon on the hill though, I was free of all that. It was sunny and breezy, I was in waist high grass. I was so moved by the beauty of all that spilling, lush green nature around me that I began to sing a made up song to the world around me. I just stood there singing for a very long time, all afternoon. I felt like I was in communication with nature, conversation, that I was heard, that I was seen and my song was me talking back, was me saying, I love you, I’m here, I love you. And God or nature or whatever was saying, I see you, I see you, I see you. And that was all I wanted, y’know? For somebody to see me.

I said to my boyfriend the other day that it doesn’t matter how fucked up your family is, they’re the foundation for everything inside you and even if they’ve done bad stuff to you it’s like, oh well. That’s my mom, that’s my dad. You don’t get another one. You don’t get to go back to the parent pool and pick out another set that are maybe like more thoughtful or build your self esteem instead of tear you down or who put your safety ahead of their own desires or whatever the issue may be and then start all over being like, oh, let’s just forget about that starter set of parents! You just get what you get, end of story, and you make whatever you can make with that. If they’re awful, you live with the awfulness. If they’re great then you get that windfall instead. It’s one of life’s most brutal dice rolls. And I think this idea exists that parents, or at least the vast majority of parents, always love you and do what’s right for you and care about you before themselves, etc and it’s like, that’s really not true. Or at least it’s as untrue as it is true, y’know? It’s just a random crap shoot. I hate all that shit about “family” and “unconditional love” and “motherhood” and “fatherhood” and “true love”. It’s just marketing. It’s a trick so that you will spend your time wondering what is wrong with you instead of spending your time being radical and creative. If you feel bad, society kind of limps along on the cash and obedience of your self hate and the status quo is upheld. The world of “normal” continues while the world of “abnormal” greases its wheels. But the “normal” word isn’t even real, it’s a fairy tale we all participate in.

I don’t want you to think that I’m saying like free yourself from the illusion that parents exist to take care of you and you’ll feel 100% better, what I’m trying to say to you is that you must feel like you’re on a fucking island of weird, lonely pain and nothing this fucked up has ever happened before. But you’re not alone. You’re not alone in the struggle to psychically overcome trauma inflicted on you by someone who “loves” you and in wrestling with the good memories you probably have of your mom with this horrific new information and her continuing participation in said horror. You’re not alone. The tragedy is that we have to pretend that things are “normal”. But things aren’t “normal”. People do horrible things to people they love and are supposed to protect. But by ignoring that fact, we help perpetuate the pain of the people bearing the weight of that trauma. Right now, the person with the Atlas sized load on her shoulders is you.

Sometimes at night before bed I will feel stiff with terror and profound disgust at the idea of all the fucked up shit that is happening right now to the tenderest and dearest and most innocent of things on this earth. Your trust has been betrayed by someone who was supposed to take care of you. You might be experiencing a phenomenon I call “20,000 leagues under the sea” which is how I feel when I’m processing something so psychically huge, I feel like there is nothing but water between me and the rest of the world.

What I want for you is a high sunlit place where you can be alone. A place where you can look far off into the unfathomable world and breathe until you have a beat of silence between your thoughts, a little space for yourself to be who you are both with and without all the awful shit that’s happened to you. I don’t know what you’ll do with this silence, maybe you’ll scream. It doesn’t really matter. Just please know, that somewhere far away I am looking out on the unfathomable world from my own high and sunlit place and I see you. I see you. I see you.

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This Sadness Submission brought to you by Banango Editions who are putting out my chapbook ‘Is This The Most Romantic Moment of My Life?’ on Wednesday, March 16th (tomorrow!). If you liked this essay, my forthcoming chapbook of short essays on love, divorce, loss, romance, sex and grief, just might speak your language. Come be sad with me, it’s ok.

Here’s yesterday’s Sadness Submission. They’ll be another one next week!

@banangolit @banangoeditions

[banangolit]

“I’ve learned you’re not so much ‘visited’ by grief as you are clearing out the attic for him bc he’s going to live with you for the rest of your life.” Elinor Abbott with the first Sadness Submission in advance of the publication of her echap, Is This The Most Romantic Moment of My Life?, on Wednesday.

Submit Your Sadness: Mr. Light

When my mom was in the hospital having my little sister, she had to stay longer than we thought she would. During that time my dad made up a “friend” called Mr. Light who would dart around and do wacky things that made me laugh. I fully believed in Mr. Light.  For years.  Later I found out that it was just my dad bouncing the sun off of his watch face and that realization was pretty gutting.  The context of the story is that my dad was also a pretty abusive person (physically and mentally) which became more evident as I grew older and more was directed at me.  The messed up thing is that somewhere in my father is someone who tries. Somewhere in that person that I have to make so much effort not to hate…is Mr. Light.  I don’t know, that’s always seemed really sad and really scary to me.

I want to be real that I’ve had a hard time approaching these Sadness Submissions again, and that getting myself to sit down and write to you has been difficult. Especially because I intimately understand (or believe I do) the kind of sadness you are wrestling with. When I started the Sadness Submissions, it was because grief was something I was experiencing almost with awe. It opened my eyes, in a way, and I was like, oh shit, so this is what’s happening everywhere to everyone! It was like I joined a secret society. And I wanted to know all the stories because it was like I was looking at a supernova going, how do I process this terrifying event? How are other people doing it? Now, however, I’m kind of used to grief. I’ve learned you’re not so much ‘visited’ by grief as you are clearing out the attic for him bc he’s going to live with you for the rest of your life. I’m not crippled by that fact, it’s just a fact. I can’t change it. It’s the fact that anyone who has gone through big loss will tell you.

And in many ways, I don’t want to talk about why I’m sad anymore because I’ve got too much to do. I am too busy trying to rebuild my life and fiercely guarding whatever tender and vulnerable space I’ve made for myself after those years of incredible, mind soaking loss. I don’t really want to get up in there and look at the vast, cosmic array of sorrow anymore bc it’s like, I get it. It’s with me for life like another shitty tattoo I never should have gotten, but now I have. Oh well. Wabi-sabi.

However, I cannot stop thinking about you and your sadness. I’d so much rather take you out for coffee and let you really cut loose about it then get into my own shit but here’s the thing I’ve realized while thinking about you. And maybe it’s not a ‘sadness’ per se but I hope it can be useful:

Since having my head dunked in the grief bucket during the 2012-2015 years, I’ve had the realization that grief not only came to me under the cloak of ‘major’ life losses, but that in many ways, more subtle ways, we are old friends.

It’s been there every time I see my old school reports, “Elinor is bright but angry”, “Elinor is smart but really struggling in school”. It’s there every time I have the thought that I might be a clever or funny or intelligent person, before I deposit myself back inside feeling like the human manifestation of the sensation  you get when you trip in a crowded room and I think, when did feeling like this become my baseline? It’s there when I see little kids, kids reading books especially, and I remember that the way I experience my body is not so much as a brain and body working in concert inside an adult woman, but rather as a brain detached from an adult body that is instead carrying around that little kid in it’s arms. It’s there every time I get a nice email from my dad, which always feels like getting a transmission from another dimension in which I get to experience the life of radical whole wellness that rushes in behind kids who learn how to love themselves.

In this way, grief is a thing I have always known. I don’t think everyone knows it in this way, but I think you do. So, in some ways, you are already prepared to face whatever it is causing you grief (your dad), because you already have and already are. I know from experience, as I believe you do, that long before I went through the more “sanctioned” grieving of divorce, that grief (i.e loss) can come back at any time and remind me of everything that’s gone or everything I’m never going to get or has been taken away or squandered. And I think because grief wasn’t wholly alien to me, I have been able to treat with it when it rocked into my life in a more pronounced way and turn it into something interesting and creative, my chapbook and my book I’m working on and the relationship I’m in and the trip I took to the Netherlands last summer and the time I spent in yoga teacher training and the effort and energy I spend in school instead of, y’know, walking off a building. And I think that you, as familiar as you are with sadness, probably have the ability to do something interesting with it too. Not that you can’t or won’t do something hurtful to yourself with it, but that you have options not to. You’re not a stranger in a strange land when you’re in the land of sadness. You can step back like just a tiny bit and go ‘hey, I’ve been here before, what can I do other than just purely react?’

We live because we have to be alive. We live because sometimes a bird flies between two skeletal winter trees at dusk and we get to see that. We live because as Thich Nhat Hanh says, “the miracle is to walk on the earth” which I believe is maybe the most 100% real thing anyone has ever said. Some days my grief/sadness/pain is out to sea. I don’t go up to the widow’s walk and look for it bc I know it will inevitably come back, and it always does, and when it does, I let its wave wash over me, because there is nothing I can do about the ocean. Y’know? There’s nothing I can do about the ocean. Does that make sense? Nowadays I try to do something else besides run around screaming and crying, I try to make something. I try to make something in every way I can make something bc making things keeps me alive.

Look: Mr. Light is your companion. You will have to make peace with him perpetually, like two countries who have to revisit an important treaty. But it’s not your job to understand the dichotomies that exist inside your dad, it’s only your job to understand the ones that exist within yourself. Nothing you did or didn’t do caused Mr. Light to go away or appear, no matter what anyone says or you say to yourself or he says or that you might imagine anyone says or thinks. That control was out of your hands. There is no control. Not over him or anything else. There are only the choices we make while governing the little boat of our experience, roaming over the big ocean we can do nothing about.

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This Sadness Submission brought to you by Banango Editions who are putting out my chapbook ‘Is This The Most Romantic Moment of My Life?’ on Wednesday, March 16th. If you liked this essay, my forthcoming chapbook of short essays on love, divorce, loss, romance, sex and grief, just might speak your language. Come be sad with me, it’s ok. 

Look out for another Sadness Submission tomorrow, same time, same place.

@banangolit @banangoeditions

[banangolit]

The Banango Interview: Caitlin Neely

Caitlin Neely’s “After Sappho” & “Tinder Language” appeared in the tenth issue of Banango Street. Neely’s poems also appear in DIAGRAM, Thursh, & Devil’s Lake. She’s an MFA candidate at the University of Virginia. I had a great time emailing back & forth with her for this interview. Keep reading if you want to know more about poems & MFAs & writing.

Carter: The works of other poets are integral to both of these pieces. "After Sappho" uses language from Anne Carson's Sappho translations & "Tinder Language" is a response to Brenda Hillman. I'm a big fan of work that relies on other poets, but I'm always worried, when I write these types of pieces, that they aren't doing enough to rise above merely being imitations. One reason I loved "Tinder Language" so much is that I could feel the Brenda in it, but I didn't feel overwhelmed by the Brenda. How did you find the right balance of your voice/ the other voices in the poems we published?

Neely: I constantly struggled with balancing my voice and these "other" voices. When I'm reading and engaging with a poet's language, it tends to creep up in my own. I try my best to embrace multiple voices in my first drafts. If I shut out something that's happening organically (like these voices) it's going to be that much harder to get at a poem's center. Once I begin revision I start working on balancing it out—making sure the poem sounds like "me." This usually involves playing around with individual words/phrases and punctuation. Sometimes line breaks as well. It's also a lot easier to maintain balance when I'm focused on the voice as a thematic entity. For example, I embraced Brenda's use of fire imagery and scientific names in Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire as I was writing and revising "Tinder Language."

Now I'm writing a lot of persona poems so I tend to channel the voice of whoever the language is embodying, as opposed to a specific poet.

Carter: I started a project where I was going to write my own version of one of my favorite books, but I felt, after three poems, that I couldn't sustain the project without letting too much of her voice take over the poems. It's tough. What voices are you using for the persona poems? Persona is one of the things I almost never experiment with, because I feel just--so bad at taking on the voice of someone/something else. I'm always worried that I won't be able to do those voices justice.

Neely: That sounds like an interesting project! Sorry it didn't work out. I can definitely understand the difficulty; especially when you're covering an entire book.

Mostly female voices from religion and mythology: Merope, Persephone, Undine, Eve, Mary and others. I also have a Chopin poem which fits and doesn't fit. In undergrad I was dead set on not writing persona poems. I didn't think I could do it. I was very much on the personal 'I' path with my poetry. Anything outside of that realm felt impossible. But I gradually changed my tune last fall. Maybe it was the new environment. It started with a poem called "Season" which is half addressing Sylvia Plath. Then I wrote a poem mostly from the viewpoint of Persephone (I say mostly because I don't think it's possible to write persona without injecting some of yourself into it).

And it felt really freeing. I was saying things in my poems I never would have said otherwise. I also sometimes worry I'm not doing their voices justice. At the very least I hope I'm bringing a different perspective to their stories.

Carter: That reminds me of a few things: Mary Biddinger's chapbook about St. Monica, & Caroline Crew's recent book about saints. Mythology has always been this well that all poets are supposed to draw from, but it surprises me how little that well is actually used. Good to hear you're drawing from some of those voices! So, you run a blog called The MFA Years, where MFA students blog about their experiences. Can you talk a little bit about what that entails/ what you've learned from doing it?

Neely: The MFA Years is a blog that follows first and second year creative writing students through graduate school. They blog about their experiences teaching, writing, navigating workshop and basically anything else that goes along with the MFA. We also interview graduate students and publish guest blog posts. I edit everything, manage the social media accounts, occasionally solicit people for interviews and posts, and answer any questions that come our way.

I've learned how necessary it is for students to talk about their experiences. We've received quite a few emails and tweets from people thanking us for sharing snippets of our lives. There are things happening in programs and in the creative writing world that need to be written about, discussed and, most importantly, stopped (more recently—Vanessa Place, Kenneth Goldsmith, the list goes on). I'm glad The MFA Years is contributing to some of these discussions. And I've discovered so many people outside of our blog who are talking about what the MFA is, what it does and what it perpetuates. I recommend reading VIDA's columns and features. Misty Ellingburg's MFA Confessions is great as well.

Carter: I didn't know the MFA Confessions site, so thanks for linking that! It's great that you're providing a platform for discussing the MFA-- it's a subject that so often breaks down into a fight between GET AN MFA & LOL BYE MFA, & the focus isn't as much on the variety of experiences in the MFA. Keeping on the subject of MFAs, you're at Virginia, yeah? Which is also where Lisa Russ Spaar teaches, yeah? YOU LUCKY YOU. What are a couple of big things you've learned in your first year of grad school that have helped your writing?

Neely: Lisa and everyone else in the program are the best. Seriously. Some of the books Lisa assigned in her fall course, "The Poetics of Ecstasy," really changed the way I was approaching my poetry and reminded me of how important it is to read, read, read. It's easy to forget this. Brian Teare's Pleasure gave me permission to get weird with my syntax. Lucie Brock-Broido's The Master Letters blew me away in terms of the language. I think she's partially the reason why I started writing more persona poems.

And then during my spring semester I'd walk into Rita Dove's office with a line I felt wasn't original because it wasn't weird enough. And she'd give me a funny look and tell me that wasn't the case. So I also learned I don't have to be strange all the time. It's okay to write things that "make sense" (in terms of my sense-making). I've never thought I was good at writing "straight forward" lines, but I'm incorporating them more into my poetry and it gives me a thrill when I do.

Carter: I love that Teare book. I gave a copy of it to a student to borrow last time I taught a poetry workshop, though I haven't read her work since then so I don't know how the Teare book changed any of her work. It sounds like you're getting the chance to experiment with working in different modes of poetry at once. That's something I often struggle with, & when I put my manuscript together I ended up keeping one of those modes & saving the other for some other project. Do you ever feel like you're writing poems that you can't conceive of eventually fitting together in a manuscript? If so, how do you combat that?

Neely: He's so good! And he has a new book forthcoming from Ahsahta Press. Sometimes I have poems I don't think will fit with the others but not usually. When I decide not to include poems it's normally because I don't have the creative energy/interest to revise them. Or because they're not good. I'm pretty loose when I'm compiling a manuscript. I think my different modes/styles can come together as long as they're connected on a thematic and/or emotional level.

But when I do run into that problem I'll save them for later. Maybe they will never see the light of day again or will be published in a journal but not a book (if that happens!) or become relevant five years from now. I have poems I like but have pushed aside for various reasons and no one else besides me will probably ever read them. It's a little disheartening but it's mostly oh well. There's always more.

Carter: What poets are you currently reading?

Neely: Right now I'm taking a class about sequences and series so: Nick Flynn, Mary Ann Samyn, Claudia Emerson, Bhanu Kapil, Louise Gluck, Greg Orr, among others. I've also been reading a lot of graphic novels.

Carter: Alright, here's a tough one: Why do you write?

Neely: I write because I enjoy messing up and messing with language.

[banangolit]

We are super pumped to unveil Grace Millard’s cover art for the upcoming Banango Editions echap, Elinor Abbott’s Is This The Most Romantic Moment Of My Life?  Release date March 16th.

Elinor Abbott – Is This The Most Romantic Moment of My Life?

COMING MARCH 16

“To read Elinor Abbott’s Is This The Most Romantic Moment Of My Life? is to be completely spellbound. Abbott is relentless in her distinctive and original account of love all the way to its conclusion, which we find out itself is love. As Abbott writes, “The best and truest and most beautiful thing I did in all those years we were together, the absolute apex of the entire thing, what I did with the most love, was leave him.” Abbott’s execution of humor, vulnerability, and poetic timing is completely flawless. Her collection of essays work together as a memoir of certain loss, but also as an original voice, center stage, speaking directly to you; giving you a wild permission to let go, to break your own heart.” –Katherine Osborne

“Elinor Abbott’s Is This the Most Romantic Moment of My Life? deals with the disintegration of a marriage with taut, honest, and sometimes, heartbreaking essays. It reminds you how important it is to always choose magic even when the space between magic and bullshit is the space of a sigh.” –Jesse Bradley

[banangolit]

Beach Sloth’s preview of Elinor Abbott’s “Is This the Most Romantic Moment of My Life?”, being released as an echap next month on Banango Editions.

Is This the Most Romantic Moment of My Life? By Elinor Abbott

Love remains impossible to fully understand no matter how many years pass. This is the blessing and curse of love. By trying to remain mysterious it is hoped that people will continue pouring themselves into love in the hopes of one day finding the perfect fit the perfect one. Sadly no one talks about what happens when love fails, when a marriage ends, and there is no resolution. Elinor Abbott talks about the aftermath of a divorce of exactly what goes on after it is officially over in “Is This the Most Romantic Moment of My Life?”. The questioning title is a valid one for true love is difficult to fully determine. Does love happen after a divorce when there is nothing left to give, after everything has been partitioned off, with nothing left to encourage kindness.

Elinor Abbott sees a moment of this in the midst of the divorce, when her ex states simply that he wanted to take care of her while admitting that desire created significant problems within their relationship. When she hears that she reaches that conclusion, that he literally has nothing to gain with the statement, he said it with 100% sincerity. Unlike earlier when he demanded she hide elements of herself (such as their honeymoon in Mexico) or earlier with her interactions with her bandmates (who pretty much seemed cruel) this was the most earnest he could have been. Whether or not he intended to be romantic is besides the point: he simply stated exactly what he thought, even apologizing, without any other motive.

The things that change tend to be the small things, the things that at first seem so minor. A cat doing its pawing suddenly becomes missed because it represents exactly those small sorts of in-jokes that become so popular with people living together so closely. Even the smallest details turn sad the mundane things like laundry change, these are things that help to define people because the tasks are repeated so many times that doing anything differently is shocking. Forgetting can help sort of gloss over these pieces as things change, as the routines begin to unravel to create new ways of living.

Past, present, future all have a place in relationships. Elinor Abbott states how so much of life is structured deliberately to avoid having to deal with the present, instead opting for some golden hued nostalgia courtesy of technology. High school friends are never forgotten nor do they change much. Preserved in memory online they remain the same. By living in the past one sort of avoids the present and determines a future of always looking back. Such an approach can ruin relationships. Avoiding actual genuine problems in the present can make one blind, actually ruining the present making one lose the present.

Can love ever be found? Is there a way to truly experience love, the way it has been outlined so many times by so many people? Why aren’t there more warnings not about the gigantic problems in a relationship but the minor ones, the ones that go unnoticed at first? Elinor Abbott explores the concept of love in “Is This the Most Romantic Moment of My Life?” going through her life, from the beginning to the now, offering a full view of the examined life.

[banangolit]

The Banango Interview: Jane Mead

Things have been slow around the blog & the journal for the past year. Our last issue was released way back in May, which feels like forever ago considering that in the early days of Banango Street we were putting out three issues a year.

I started a series of interviews with authors from that issue over the Summer & then life got busy & I got behind & I never finished the interviews. A couple of weeks ago I reached back out to try one more time to finally finish the. Today, I’d like to present the first of multiple interviews that will be published in the lead-up to the busy Spring we have (a couple of e-chaps & that mythical eleventh issue!). I had the pleasure of talking to Jane Mead, one of my favorite contemporary poets, about her most recent book & about writing & reading.

Jane Mead is the author of four books, most recently Money Money Money/ Water Water Water from Alice James. Her poem “Untitled” appeared in our tenth issue.

Justin: One thing I admire about your work is that it feels like there's a certain pacing to it that's missing in a lot of contemporary poets-- I think so many poets these days write poems that happen so quickly, what Tony Hoagland calls "the skittery poem of the moment." Poets who write these slower, more meditative poems often tend to, I think, overdo it though, writing poems that just don't move anywhere. Your work manages to be slower, to contain a speaker who is always thinking, while still moving great emotional spaces.

Could you speak a little about how much pacing factors into your writing process, how much the speed at which the poem moves happens naturally & how much comes about via the revision process?

Jane: For me, and I don’t think this is uncommon, writing a poem is often a kind of exploration of mind and material, self acting on subject, subject acting on self….and the hardest but most important part is staying open to the surprise such interaction might reveal. The poem’s a record of that dynamic, those fits and starts of thinking...and so it is natural that pace would shift, just as our pace shifts in thought or conversation. You get to a certain point, and skip forward. I’m impatient. Once I grasp something, I want to move on. I’m not good at explaining. I’m not good at long descriptions. A large part of my revision process involves determining the moments when shifts in pace are integral to how I’ve come to see the overall movement of the poem---and honing those moments.

Justin: When you talk about white space, I'm reminded of your new book & the way white space works there. After each poem, you have these tiny poems at the bottom of the reverse page, all this blank space floating above it. Those poems seem to exemplify this idea that you "want to move on"--they're so quick & sharp. I've wondered, though, how you envision those poems working with the other poems of the book, i.e. what's the relationship between these tiny pieces & the poems they connect to?

Jane: Those fragments more often than not represent to me a kind of pushing back, or an afterthought to the poem that precedes them. It’s different from the way white space mostly works within a poem. The way I feel it, the white space that follows any given poem in that book, and precedes the little fragment at the corner of an otherwise blank page following the poem, represents the silence preceding the arrival of a new take on the subject, and the fragment, in a sense, is a response to the poem made possible by that clearing or field. In other words, the fragments speak back from a far place, not immediately related to the poem, and the white space enables that journey. These little fragments do function in various ways in the book, but often the voice is more interior, though sometimes it is quite objective, like a quote from an Ag journal, in which case the white space is the place where the connection is made in the mind of the speaker, yours truly. Maybe the best way to generalize would be to say that white space creates space and time for some kind of shift. Space equals time, but in this book I am beginning to feel the page as field a little more too----not to just, for example, leap across space, but to regard those little fragments within the context of the whole page.

Justin: How did you ultimately arrive at the final structure for Money Money Money /Water Water Water? When did the idea to have these little fragments enter the picture--was it something that was part of the process of writing the poems or was it something that arrived later on?

Jane:   During the time that I was writing the longer poems in the book, some of these fragments began to appear. It took me some time, though, to see that they were in conversation with the longer poems I was writing. Some of the fragments were written in response to certain poems, but to a greater degree they were floating around on their own before finding their place in the scheme of the collection.  

Justin: What contemporary writers do you admire & why?

Jane: Different as they are, I love Anne Carson and Louise Gluck for their sensitivity to tonal nuance-----I find that economy, which can spark moments of perfection, mesmerizing. And some of John Taggart’s poems just set me reeling---with an opposite kind of motion, broad and sometime chant-like structures.

And recently I’ve been reading Bluets, then The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson----both of which I find, in different ways, refreshingly unhampered by formal boundaries, but which I think of as poetry even though they are officially categorized as essays and autobiography respectively. She brings us down to the bones of her thinking…..which is often quite philosophical or abstract. She refuses to jump through any hoops when it comes to conventions and the distinctions they bring into play, but what’s on the page is linguistically dense, and modulating,---to my mind it is poetry above all else.

Justin: We ask everyone to end of their interview with one of the hardest questions there is: Why do you write?

Jane: I suppose it is the way of responding to the world that feels most accurate to me.

[banangolit]

Send in yr Sadness Submissions to Elinor.

Submit Your Sadness

Reminder that the Sadness Submissions are open! Feeling blue? Tell me all about it. I will tell you a sad story in return. Submit here. Check out my blog or @banangolit for examples of past submissions. 

[banangolit]

submit your sadness: lack thereof

I’m depressed, which is a synonym for sad but this is worse. It’s my Major Depressive Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and Anorexia Nervosa.   Everything is at stake all the time(that’s the anxiety talking) and it’s do or die even though there’s no escape, there is no flight for me, only the fight.

 I was abused by hired help as a child (left in public places/ parks, with people I didn’t know, locked in their basements and out of my own “home”. It’s only a house, it isn’t a place I feel safe, secure, free or fulfilled) I tried to tell my parents they thought I was making it up. Then they neglected me and never knew what was normal or not because they intentionally isolated me. I’m broken, I’m Benjamin Button, I got to grow up backwards:  When I was young I yearned for an imaginary friend. This might seem strange to most, why would I not want someone from school or the neighbourhood? Simple, they never stayed.  Perhaps they would sing rhymes and skip rope with me on the playground or play tag at recess, but I was always tugged away at the arm, as if to tear it from my shoulder socket, in front of a couple cars at the risk of being run over while their parents picked them up in the kiss and ride.  From there, my nanny drove me in the black Saab sedan that had a flat tire she never took to the garage to get fixed, she drove us somewhere different every day where she would leave me for all hours of the afternoon. I was abandoned who-knows-where in the woods with people I had never met, public parks alone, and pushed down the steep stairs of basements I had never been in before as I heard the door lock behind me. I looked for someone to see, to listen when I tried to talk about these things and, as is common in abused children, created a whole world within my mind where I was safe, secure, free and fulfilled. There I had a family that had not abandoned me. I trained my senses to be more sensitive, if I concentrated I could feel the touch of my twin, true mother, the hug of a father, I could smell their scents, see their face, and hear the words I wanted, things had I tried to tell myself: “This is not your fault. You are O.K. You are beautiful and brilliant. You do not deserve this. We are so sorry. We love you.” This was the nurturing I needed. I self- soothed. I sustained myself from the inside.

This is my greatest gift, my human consciousness, the ability to accept others and the outside world while continuing to choose what could be considered craziness or an overly active imagination. I cannot care which reality is right.  My head is both a Heaven and a Hell and I have made myself happy here.   

That’s what I wrote in my english existential essay but I don’t believe it because I think I feel and fundamentally fall at all faiths. I am all alone.

…

i’ve been having a really hard time figuring out what to write you. probably because i also have an eating disorder, constructed so carefully out of the genetic soup of depression, anxiety, addiction and ocd i carry around inside me and given spark by, like you, events beyond my control. and i’m still working all the time on all these issues. have you ever had to untangle like seven necklaces that snagged together into an epic knot in your jewelry box? that’s what i feel like my brain is like. i loop through one chain and find another knot further down. i have to back track. unloop the loop, change hands, put the knot down, frown at it, try again. 

when i read your submission i was filled by a sense of intimacy, immediacy, like we were too close to touch, though all i know about you is this little piece, it felt like a lot. which is why it took me almost two weeks to respond from my previous submission, a submission i felt i could respond to with smiling, waving kindness, as though i was waving goodbye to a ship that had almost slipped over the horizon.

so i’m going to tell you what keeps coming up for me whenever i think about you.

when i think about you i think about this girl i’ve been in group with for a really long time, like almost two years, who is also a survivor of childhood abuse and who has made really huge strides and is literally a little bit better and more clear every week when i see her, but who gets really frustrated by her own progress. she keeps talking about fighting with her therapist. “i’m 34 years old!” she cries, “when will i be healed!”. and i wonder what she thinks healed is. if she thinks healed is a place you can get to, like ibiza. and once you get there if you can stay there forever and forget everything bad that ever happened to you. i wonder if she thinks being healed is like being reborn. if she’ll be the person she was before the abuse, if she’ll find the switchback that leads her to that alternate reality, where she can have the chance to grown up unhurt. and i can see that she can’t see the elbow room she has slowly been giving herself, that she has and is changed, and i can see that the fact that she can’t see this progress or give herself credit for it, is what is keeping her chained to these fictions of healing. 

i think she has the story about herself that so many of us do with mental illness. the story goes like this: i am sick. i am so so so so so so so so sick. the end. and the story is static. the story is dead weight. the story has nothing to do with the organic nature of the brain.

when i think about you i think about how these days every time i look down at someone’s hand and they are wearing a wedding ring, how i feel my gut turn over. i think about how i let someone put a ring on my finger, like i was a fixed point, like i was a mountain and that was my flag. i had been discovered, claimed, named. and that was the end of that story. lol. and how i believed it. how i believed all i had to do was fall in love and that love would stay forever and be forever and i would be the static place, the mountain, that’s what love was; a handshake that sealed the deal. i think that i will never wear a ring of ownership again. i think if i ever wear a ring again i will design  it myself. it will look like a nest of bones. it will be gold. it will have a black stone in place of a glimmering gem. it will have ‘she’s mad but she’s magic’ engraved on the inside so that the words press into my skin. it will remind me the only person i am obligated to love is myself. the only person whose permission i need is my own. i already have a name. and i cannot be discovered because i am not stationary.

when i think about you i think about how it’s thanksgiving and it’s my first thanksgiving alone without my exhusband in ten years. and i think about how much i wanted to be alone this year, how grateful i am for it, to have the space to feel all the dissonance inside of me without small talk, without having to cough up something i’m grateful for to a table full of smiling faces. i think about how i kept lying about it to people, my plans for today, because i noticed how sad and uncomfortable it made other people that i was going to be alone and i wanted to spare them their own discomfort. this morning in the mirror i noticed that i’m starting to get some wrinkles on my forehead. earlier this year i pulled out my first white hair. i’m getting older and i am also dying. my own body is not even a fixed space, my own love for myself cannot even be forever and it cannot be contingent upon anything because everything about me is going to change, physical, mental, emotional, and is in the process of changing right now. my only choice is to stay liquid. i would never have had any idea that i could have changed my own life this much since last year. but i had to and so i did it. i didn’t know what it was going to take or if i had it in me to do anything i did. i just tried to do it and found out what i had as i went along. that’s what i did to get out of my miserable fucking marriage. that’s what i did to get out of my miserable fucking eating disorder. and there was no evidence i could do it at any time, there was only a fear that if i continued to hold on to my tiny rock, which was not ibiza, which was not anything except some quickly dissolving ideas i had formulated about myself in my early twenties, that i was going to be swept out with the tide and into darkness. or i could just let go and go out into the darkness anyway. continuing to go, willingly go, into that darkness is all that is really possible. asking myself to accept that is the only thing i can do. and it hurts all the time. but sometimes i feel free.

when i think about you i think about someone i was friends with who asked me, over many years, based on the fact that at one point we had not been friends for a period of time, to swear to her over and over and over again that i would never, ever not want to be friends with her again. and i would promise her that would never happen because i love her and because i was treating love and life like an inert slab. our friendship and love was a pile of jello turned over onto a plate and we were going to sit there across from each other for all eternity, smiling at it. when you swear you’re going to love someone forever, that you will never hurt them, that you will never leave them, you’re lying. not because you’re a liar but because *you don’t know fucking anything about your own life*. you have no idea what will happen to you. and in the course of not knowing, anything, anything, anything, even the things that seem most fixed and stable can change or disappear or fall apart. and you have no idea what will happen inside of you so that you can survive or embrace or let go of those things. you don’t know what weird little telescope life is going to hand you and suddenly you see everything, everyone, or maybe just one thing, one person, maybe yourself, very differently. it makes me think that all you can ever say to someone you love and all you can ask for from someone who loves you, is that they love you right now. because that’s really all there is. and the idea that love will find you, save you, float you, build you an island, is the most misleading and hurtful idea any of us can ever carry. it makes us reject telescope after telescope, until we’re standing in a pile of them, wondering why the fuck we feel so blind.

when i think about you i think about this line from the book i’m reading right now called the quiet girl by pete hoeg. the line is this: “happiness,” he said, “doesn’t consist so much of what one has scraped together and gotten off the ground, but of what one has been able to let go of.”

i don’t know what it will take for you to let go of the thing that has been keeping you sustained, what has been telling you that you are sick, what has been telling you to hold on to it so you won’t drown because you will never learn to swim. but i know that you are alone. i know because i am alone too. it’s the truest thing. the only thing that is truer is that everything around you and me, including you and me, is temporary. and that you have as little of an idea about what is in store for you as i do. it could be anything. and in that feeling, that seasick, semi hopeful call of the void, the one-two-three-here we go, we are the truest of companions. 

…

are you sad? so am i. lets talk about it. you show me yours, i’ll show you mine. we can be sad together and it will be ok. submit here.

[banangolit]

Sadness Submissions Redux

In conjunction with Banango Editions, who are putting out a chapbook of short essays I wrote about divorce, grief, love and loss next month called ‘Is This The Most Romantic Moment of My Life?’, I am reopening the Sadness Submissions and will be taking submissions over the next couple of weeks.

The Sadness Submissions were a project I did in 2014, where I asked people to share a sad story with me and I would share a sad story in return. A kind of grief exchange program, if you will. I did it in hopes of helping break down some of the stigma around talking about grief and loss. It was (and is) difficult for me to understand a society that expects us to both never ask for help and privately swallow all of our grief and loss. Fuck that, is what I think. It’s part of why I wrote this chapbook, because I was desperate to have a conversation that no one was having, with the exception of cheesy, overly cheery self help books, that felt completely devoid of real human emotion.

If you have a sadness you’d like to share with me, I encourage you to do so. I hope to be able to respond to all submissions, as I was able to last time, but this time I’d like to attach the caveat that I am in school full-time so I am a bit more limited on time.

I’ve scheduled reblogs for the next week of some of my favorite Sadness Submissions I received last time around, if you’d like to read them and get a feel for what they’re about.

Otherwise, please submit! (or send an ask, if you want to be anonymous)

@banangolit

[banangolit]

Review of Carmen E. Brady’s “Eating Alone at Chipotle”

Eating Alone at Chipotle (Bottlecap Press, 2015) Carmen E. Brady

Review by: Rebecca Brown

The first time I ate at Chipotle was with my dad and I don’t really remember it so it was probably pretty ok.

The second time I ate at Chipotle was with a boy and we went to the movies after and saw his ex-girlfriend and I was uncomfortable and he bought chips and salsa and I thought I probably didn’t love him. He’s dating someone else now who he probably loves.

The third time I ate at Chipotle was with a girl who is not my girlfriend and she asked me to marry her but it was really just a joke. Most of the time I think we’re still friends but I’m not always sure.

The fourth time I ate at Chipotle was with someone I love who doesn’t want to see me anymore. We read a story about somebody else breaking up and I tried not to think it was symbolic. I guess it probably was. We saw Mad Max and I don’t think I want to see it again for a really long time.

What I’m trying to say is that I’ve never eaten alone at Chipotle. I think I would probably sit in my car. In “Eating Alone at Chipotle” Carmen E. Brady writes a lot about being alone. Even when her narrator is with other people, there is still distance. When I write about being sad I feel sad but when Carmen E. Brady writes about being sad I feel like things are softer and more manageable.

I was going to write this review months ago. I even had the first sentence written. I think it had the word melancholy in it. I don’t remember. I remember thinking it was a very smart first sentence that made me sound like I knew what I was doing. I think I talked about tone too. I remember thinking “I should probably write this down so I don’t forget” but I thought I couldn’t possibly forget it and didn’t write it down. So I forgot it.

There are a lot of things I want to say about “Eating Alone at Chipotle” but I want to sound smart when I do. I think everyone should read “Eating Alone at Chipotle” so we can talk about it and what we think about it. If I was talking to Carmen E. Brady I would ask if they were familiar with Gertrude Stein because Carmen E. Brady is very good at putting words together that sound good together. My teacher would call it consonance. Gertrude Stein was good at this too but in a different way and also I probably talk about Gertrude Stein too much. After I read “Eating Alone at Chipotle” I felt gentler and I wished it was longer so I could spend more time with the story and characters. I think that’s a good thing.

These are my favorite lines from “Eating Alone at Chipotle,”: “I can still remember what that love/felt like--dancing in your two arms, living like the bruises would never settle in.” This is something that I have felt before and I want to carry with me for a very long time.

This is probably what the first line was that I wrote before: “”Eating Alone at Chipotle” by Carmen E. Brady moves with an undercurrent of melancholy” or maybe I made that up just now. Either way it is true but also it is more than that. In “Eating Alone at Chipotle,” time flows a little slower.

A lot of the time I write next to a window where I can hear birds and children. In “Eating Alone at Chipotle” Carmen E. Brady says that it seems like children have potential. If I could, I would let her sit in my writing spot and maybe she could write something sad or not sad. I would like to read that too. /// Carmen E Brady lives and writes and does things in Wisconsin. Her writing has appeared online and in print. You can follow her on Twitter @therealcbrad or on tumblr at http://dispassiontea.tumblr.com . Rebecca Brown used to spend a lot of time sleeping on other people's couches but now mostly just writes about it. They like reading things, running away, and not talking about it. You can usually find them on twitter, @babookreader or on tumblr, musingonnapkins.tumblr.com/.