#Charlene Elsby

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HELL by Charlene Elsby

There exists [sic] a dichotomy of eternity and temporality.

Where temporality connotes materiality.

And materiality implies movement.

And time is the measure of movement [kinesis].

Such that if only there were not this materiality with which to contend, eternality would be the consequence.

But we’ve already made a mistake.

There’s an error above and always has been.

What happens to movement if materiality didn’t implicate.

The paralysis of reality.

The great end.

In consciousness the revolutions of thought mimic the divine and through the repetition of orbital motion imitate eternality.

And in the deviation is implicated the punishment.

Death.

Death and death and death.

Void is something other than the heavens.

The space in which what could be isn’t.

The negative of potentiality.

Not all that couldn’t be is actuality.

So wakes the dreamer from the thought of what could be into a corpse incapable of motion cognizant of the destructive force whose potency is to enact a negative timelessness.

Torn from materiality the other way.

Not anything to live through.

Acts of the divine in nature.

And then there are its monstrosities.

The pathological recognition of dark matter.

I felt it, and I know you felt it too.

Intuition but dreadful.

A lack and all its wants.

A hole for us to fall into.

I see the edge, and I want to go over.

Go over go over go over.

What’s down there?

What could be but what isn’t.

What isn’t and cannot be.

What your mother warned you about.

Whatever faith is the medication for.

It’s down there.

It’s in the corner waiting for your heart to stop.

The beats are too much like its heavens.

On the way down to where nothing circulates.

It comes in through the seams between the walls where they meet ninety degrees and warmer.

It’s why sleepwalkers open doors.

And run back inside.

The fact remains we’ve seen this thing, and we were not asleep for it.

God in a child’s laughter.

Hell in its expunged entrails.

What was holding it together was participation in a form that mimics the eternal but there’s something, something else that tears it apart and that’s so much closer…

Matter tends that way already.

Toward what?

Not the eternal.

To the negative schematized timelessness you can only see in the dark.

Eternality as the rationalization of that which dissipates.

Oh fuck, that’s me.

The contradiction of becoming isn’t being, it’s not being.

Take it from the inexistent.

There’s a time outside of time where your God lives.

And a timelessness on the other side where nothing.

I didn’t see it when I got up in the night.

Perception is a function of the animal.

You know it by the fact that you can’t tell.

There it is, though.

There it isn’t.

It’ll stop your heart, just because it hates its rhythm.

Now there are fits and starts to rationality.

It isn’t clear what’s waking and what’s dead and what’s left over.

Every limb useless.

Tendency after tendency run screaming from its end toward the other.

Everything tends toward the good, until it doesn’t.

Gravitation as materiality gone wrong.

The nature that drags you down. 

The light that wants you with it isn’t strong enough to overcome the fundamental pull of matter towards matter towards mass towards the one.

Singularity not as everything not as unity not as weightlessness but heavy, dark, and putrid, all that’s torn apart together, condemned to voidlessness, where there isn’t space to be and nevertheless, there you are.

I see it in the extended devil’s now.

The present that’s necessity by force of its endurance.

The endless end.

[scumgristle]

"serious trigger warning"?

ps: book is neat you should read it.

[kithj]

also i've been reading a lot lately this month i read

apparitions by adam pottle 5/5

hijab butch blues by lamya h (audio & physical) 5/5

lighthousekeeping by jeanette winterson 5/5

the devil thinks i'm pretty by charlene elsby 4/5

i shudder at your touch edited by michele slung 2/5

what feasts at night by t. kingfisher 4/5

the salt grows heavy by cassandra khaw 4/5

dehiscent by ashley deng 3/5

the corpse exhibition and other stories of iraq by hassan blasim 3/5

kitchen confidential by anthony bourdain (audiobook) 4/5

whipping girl by julia serano 3/5

freshwater by akwaeke emezi 5/5

blood orange by yaffa as 4/5

things have gotten worse since we last spoke and other misfortunes by eric larocca 2/5

a lot of good reads only a few bad ones.... i'm officially giving up on eric larocca i just cannot get into his work it is so overhyped which i think is part of the problem, both books i've read from them have been hugely disappointing.... i shudder at your touch was also really disappointing and really fucking dull, with a title like that i was really expecting a lot.... but it was just really boring. also i had some conflicting feelings about whipping girl i just fundamentally disagreed with some of her ideas and found the book to be really shallow (which does make sense considering it's over 15 years old and one of the First) but overall i really enjoyed the essays where she talked about her personal experiences as well as some of the history around the pathologizing of gender and transsexuality, and i can appreciate her work and the book itself and what it meant at the time it was originally published. i'm hoping to read a short history of trans misogyny by jules gill-peterson and who's afraid of gender? by judith butler soonish as well not necessarily to compare but just to absorb More.

apparitions was probably my favorite and hijab butch blues, too... i'm also really looking forward to reading more stuff by akwaeke emezi they have a new book coming out called little rot and i'm 👀

currently i'm reading:

into the drowning deep by mira grant - not sure what i'm feeling about this one yet, it's been very repetitive through the first part so i'm hoping things pick up going into part 2.

mrs. s by k. patrick - loving this i'm obsessed with it i'm nearly 50% through. definitely not going to be for everyone, they write in a very clipped style and kind of stream of consciousness as well as no dialogue markers (which i know some people get really pissy about lol)

written in bone by sue black - i'm listening on audiobook and almost done i'm hoping to finish it today while playing stardew. i love an audiobook narrated by the author and she has such a lovely voice. she fucking loves her job and has so much passion for bones and people and their stories sometimes i almost get weepy just listening to her talk about it

also i think i'm going to start crying in h mart next after written in bone... i have the physical as well so i'll probably jump between listening and reading like i did with hijab butch blues. anyways thanks for reading this post and you should tell me if you've read any good books recently 🥺👉👈

[germansierra]

:::hiperanotación

introducción: Steven Craig Hickman… 4

INFIERNO: Charlene Elsby… 10

GANGLIOS SÍNODICOS: N. Casio Poe… 12

Parámetro "3:3871": Thomas Huntington… 16

Desvalido sol que solo pone sombras: Francisco Jota-Pérez… 24

Zigzag: Germán Sierra… 38

SALPICADURAS DEL ESCÁNER: David Roden… 50

Pornografía Posthumana: Kenji Siratori… 56

[tussive]

Oh yeah I forgot someone said this about Derek Fisher's Night Life.

"Tense and frenetic, a self-propelled literary experience from dissonance all the way through to desolation. Ultra-violent and just fucking lonely, I couldn’t stop wanting to hurt myself with this book." - Charlene Elsby

Gotta read that one first. :)

[tlbodine]

Books Read in August

Oops, I kind of fell off the map with reading there for a while. Ahem. 

My Best Friend’s Exorcism - Grady Hendrix 

I was in a reading slump and thought a Hendrix book would perk me up, and it sure did. He’s never steered me wrong yet. This book is a gem. Set in the 1980s, it details the friendship of a group of girls who grow up together, and the challenge that faces that group when one of them starts acting bizarre after encountering an unspeakable terror in the woods. It’s absolutely a book about demonic possession, but it’s also about friendship, music, classism, growing up (and growing apart). Absolutely read this side-by-side with The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires because they’re set in very much the same world -- Book Club is just about the parent generation of the girls in this book. Anyway, 10/10, heartily recommend. 

Hexis - Charlene Elsby

A slender little novella clocking in barely over 100 pages, this took me almost a week to get through because it’s....a lot. But it’s very good. A more literary horror, it’s a stream-of-consciousness story about an unnamed narrator who repeatedly encounters and kills the same man. Each chapter resets the clock to provide a new encounter, and along the way there are multiple philosophical diversions and contemplations, but the end result is always the same. You catch some glimpses of the history between the narrator and Him, enough to form your own opinions about what’s happening in reality. There are a lot of ways to read this book, and I don’t know that any one is necessarily more correct than others, but to my mind it was a really good exploration of the way we re-live traumas, experiencing them again and again and trying somehow to change the outcome but never being satisfied with it. I will give a big sparkling TRIGGER WARNING on this one because there are depictions of abuse tactics that will hit very close to home. But it’s not...maybe not quite what you think. This is not an over-the-top, brutal abuse. This is the way a mundane, shitty relationship can still manage to be devastating. There are many relatable passages in there, or at least I thought there were. 

[cambridgewritersworkshop]

For those writers, editors, and lit fans traveling to the 2020 AWP Conference (March 4-7) in San Antonio, TX this week, come stop by the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop’s AWP Bookfair Table at T2164! Also, check our CWW Creative Director Rita Banerjee’s panel “Dismantling the White Imagination: On Intimacy in Creative Nonfiction” featuring our Summer in Paris Nonfiction Faculty David Shields on Saturday, March 7 from 9-10:15 am in Room 205, Henry B. González Convention Center, Meeting Room Level (San Antonio, TX).

Course registration for our 2020 Spring in New Orleans Writing Retreat (March 19-22) and Summer in Paris Writing Retreat (July 16-21) is now live! Apply by March 10 for our NOLA Retreat and May 30 for our Paris Retreat on cww.submittable.com.

Our 2020 award-winning faculty includes essayist David Shields, playwright Stephen Aubrey, poet Diana Norma Szokolyai, and poet and essayist Rita Banerjee. 

Join the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop for our offsite reading at Rosella Coffee House (203 E Jones Ave, Suite 101) in San Antonio, TX! Featured readers include Rita Banerjee, Madeleine Barnes, Alex Carrigan, Kristina Marie Darling, Charlene Elsby, Adilene Hernandez, Tim Horvath, Samuel Kóláwọlé, Rachel Kurasz, and Mari Pack! Come celebrate with a gorgeous night of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and speculative writing!  More info on the reading & featured authors below!

  Featured Readers:

Rita Banerjee is the Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop and editor of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (C&R Press, May 2018).   She is the author of the poetry collection Echo in Four Beats (Finishing Line Press, March 2018), which was nominated for the 2019 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize at the Academy of American Poets, featured on the Ruth Stone Foundation podcast, and named one of Book Riot’s “Must-Read Poetic Voices of Split This Rock 2018”, and was selected by Finishing Line Press as their 2018 nominee for the National Book Award in Poetry.  Banerjee is also the author of the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps (Spider Road Press, 2016), and the poetry chapbook Cracklers at Night (Finishing Line Press, 2010).  She is the co-writer and co-director of Burning Down the Louvre (2020), a documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France.  She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, and she is a recipient of a Vermont Studio Center Artist’s Grant, the Tom and Laurel Nebel Fellowship, and South Asia Initiative and Tata Grants.  Her writing appears in the Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, PANK, Nat. Brut., The Scofield, The Rumpus, Painted Bride Quarterly, Mass Poetry, Hyphen Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, AWP WC&C Quarterly, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Riot Grrrl Magazine, The Fiction Project, Objet d’Art, KBOO Radio’s APA Compass, and elsewhere. She is the Director of the MFA in Writing & Publishing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and an Associate Scholar of Comparative Literature at Harvard.  She is currently working on a novel, a book on South Asian literary modernisms, and a collection of lyric essays on race, sex, politics, and everything cool.  Her writing is represented by agents Jeff Kleinman and Jamie Chambliss of Folio Literary Management.

Madeleine Barnes is a poet and visual artist from Pittsburgh living in Brooklyn. She is a doctoral fellow at CUNY’s Ph.D. Program in English, and the recipient of a New York State Summer Writers Institute Fellowship, two Academy of American Poets prizes, and the Princeton Poetry Prize. Her second chapbook, Light Experiments, is forthcoming from Porkbelly Press this year, and her protest embroideries were recently featured in Boston Accent Lit. She serves as Poetry Editor at Cordella Magazine.

Alex Carrigan is an associate editor with the American Correctional Association. He has edited and proofed the anthologies CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (C&R Press, 2018) and Her Plumage: An Anthology of Women’s Writings from Quail Bell Magazine (2019). He has had fiction, poetry, and media reviews published in Quail Bell Magazine, Life in 10 Minutes, Realms YA Fantasy Literary Magazine, Mercurial Stories, Lambda Literary Review, Stories About Penises (Guts Publishing, 2019) and the forthcoming anthologies Closet Cases: Queers on What We Wear (Et Alia Press, 2020) and Whale Road Review (Summer 2020). He currently lives in Alexandria, VA.  

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of thirty books, including Look to Your Left: The Poetics of Spectacle (University of Akron Press, 2020); Je Suis L’Autre: Essays & Interrogations (C&R Press, 2017), which was named one of the “Best Books of 2017” by The Brooklyn Rail; and DARK HORSE: Poems (C&R Press, 2018). Her work has been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held both the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry; a Fundación Valparaíso fellowship; a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, funded by the Heinz Foundation; an artist-in-residence position at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris; three residencies at the American Academy in Rome; two grants from the Whiting Foundation; a Morris Fellowship in the Arts; and the Dan Liberthson Prize from the Academy of American Poets, among many other awards and honors. Her poems appear in The Harvard Review, Poetry International, New American Writing, Nimrod, Passages North, The Mid-American Review, and on the Academy of American Poets’ website, Poets.org. She has published essays in The Kenyon Review, Agni, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, and numerous other magazines. Kristina currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press and Tupelo Quarterly, an opinion columnist at The Los Angeles Review of Books, and a contributing writer at Publishers Weekly.

Charlene Elsby, Ph.D., is the Philosophy Program Director at Purdue University Fort Wayne. Her first novel, HEXIS, was published by CLASH Books. Her second novel, AFFECT, is forthcoming with The Porcupine’s Quill.

    Adilene Hernández is a queer, Latina writer and educator with roots in Atlanta, GA. She earned her B.A. in Creative Writing from Knox College, and she aspires to continue her studies through an M.F.A. program. She is an alumna of the Winter Tangerine Workshop and Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. She is currently at work on her first two novels, both of which focus on family ties and identity in the Latinx culture.

              Samuel Kọ́láwọlé was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria. His work has appeared in AGNI, Gulf Coast, Washington Square Review and Consequence amongst other literary journals. Samuel was a finalist for the 2018 Graywolf Prize for Africa and winner of the 2019 Editor-Writer Mentorship Program for Diverse Writers. His fiction has been supported with fellowships, residencies, and scholarships from the Norman Mailer Centre, International Writing Program at the University of Iowa,  Columbus State University’s Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, Clarion West Writers Workshop, Wellstone Centre in the Redwoods California, and Island Institute. Samuel was educated at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria and holds a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing with distinction from Rhodes University, South Africa and an MFA in Writing and Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, USA. His debut novel The Road to Salt Sea is forthcoming from Amistad/Harper Collins.

        Rachel Kurasz is a PhD student at Northern Illinois University where she is studying rhetoric/composition and Graphic Novels/Comic Books.  Rachel earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Roosevelt University under the guidance of Christian TeBordo and Kyle Beachy. Rachel also was a Fall 2017 AWP writer to writer under mentor Laura Creedle.  Rachel is currently querying and writing her first graphic novel series entitled “weirdos”.

  Mari Pack is a poet and writer from the suburbs of Washington, D.C. She has an MA from the University of Toronto, and is a current MFA candidate at Hunter College.

        We look forward to seeing you at AWP 2020!

Join the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop at AWP 2020!! For those writers, editors, and lit fans traveling to the 2020 AWP Conference (March 4-7) in San Antonio, TX this week, come stop by the…

[thefaeriereview]

  The Parasite From Proto Space & Other Stories by Brett Petersen 

Sci-Fi/Horror

A parasite from Proto Space, summoning memory eaters, funeral machines eating teenagers, space rides to Pleroma, and a frog baby that transcends time and space. These are just some of the stories that will warp your sense of reality until you're living in Brett Petersen's mind and you won't want to leave.

5 out of 5 fairies

The Parasite From Proto Space is cheeky, hilarious and trippy. I knew from the first page I was going to love this book. I found Petersen's writing style to be a bit reminiscent of Douglas Adams and Mike Russel but with a unique twist. If you're a fan of strange fiction, or things that will make you wonder if you aren't actually on an acid trip, you're going to love this book. If you're not, it might not be your cup of tea, but might want to give it a try anyway.

Where to buy: Amazon

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Add to your TBR list

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"A Confusion Wave beaming in from the farthest-out Far Out, scrambling up to unscramble our partially-scrambled minds." --Ben Loory, author of Tales of Falling and Flying

"Petersen's stories are an acid-drenched, kaleidoscopic blend of genres reminiscent of Dick and Burroughs, but with their own unique breed of genius. The experience of reading The Parasite from Proto-Space and Other Stories is not unlike ingesting a powerful psychedelic--one that will leave a lasting impression of your psyche." --Brendan Vidito, author of Nightmares in Ecstasy

"Reading The Parasite from Proto Space feels like you're on a footchase pursued by Mad Mr. Petersen himself. He's got a messenger bag full of creatures he spliced together in his basement workshop, and every time you think you're getting ahead, you turn around to check if he's still behind you and get smacked in the face by a 50-pound alien memory worm that needs you to validate its childhood trauma." --Charlene Elsby, author of Hexis

"If George Bataille and Ray Bradbury had a baby, and that baby was GG Allin, and that GG Allin baby read Ursula Le Guin and Charles Bukowski in equal measure, and that now grown-up baby watched Beavis and Butt-Head reruns on summer afternoons, then we might approach describing the phantasmagoric mise-en-scènes Brett Peterson has put together here in this collection. The contact high one gets is contagious." --Daniel Nester, author of How to Be Inappropriate

About the Author: Brett Petersen is a writer, musician and artist from Albany, New York, whose high-functioning autism only enhances his creativity. He earned his B.A. in English from the College of Saint Rose in 2011, and since then, his stories and poems have appeared in over a dozen print and online publications. "The Parasite From Proto Space & Other Stories" is his first book, and unless he is apprehended by the Trump Regime for being an outspoken autistic, will certainly not be his last. Academic critics should note that the subject matter of his stories and his taste in literature in general was heavily inspired by Japanese role-playing video games such as Xenogears, Chrono Trigger, and Shin Megami Tensei. Aside from his writing career, he is the rhythm guitarist and vocalist for sludge rock band Raziel’s Tree, a competent visual artist, Tarot reader, and would-be Kabbalist. All things Brett Petersen can be found at http://www.jellyfishentity.wordpress.com. 

 Check It Out: The Parasite From Proto Space https://ift.tt/2UJw2TM

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"Kenji Siratori’s work is an impudent affront to literature" - Charlene Elsby, author of Violent Faculties and The Devil Thinks I'm Pretty

[scifiandscary]

Hexis by Charlene Elsby #BookReview

Hexis by Charlene Elsby ~ a #SpeculativeFiction #BookReview by Tracy ~ "Give this book a try. Let go of the need to understand everything with exacting detail." - @tracy_reads79

I’m not relentless. “Relentless” makes it sound like there’s something called “relent” and that I’m lacking it. In that sense, I’m not relentless, but perhaps I’m unrelenting. I could relent if I wanted to. But he always has to die. I mean “always” in two senses: at all times and all of the time. I can’t kill him all of the time.

That would take too long. But all of the times I did, I did.…

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