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Hanna Neuschwander is a Portland writer and editor with roots that extend to the Northwest, Southwest, Northeast, and Canada. Her non-fiction articles about Portland’s artisan coffee and food world have been published in Willamette Week, Barista Magazine, and Portland Monthly. She works at Lewis & Clark, where she is the editorial director of Democracy & Education, a journal for people who can’t think of two more important things.
HOW UNWORRIED I AM ABOUT NEXT WEEK
Skip a rock across the meridian
Fold the state of California in half, and this day
By nightfall I’ll have crossed over
Drinking whiskey at the Coronado
Watching pelicans teach their young
to slide into the envelope of a wave
There will be sun in San Diego
And my brother’s newest pair of $400 shoes
I wasn’t familiar with Henry Hughes’ work until a local poet, Celeste Thompson, introduced us. His second full-length collection, Moist Meridian (© 2009, Mammoth Books) arrived shortly thereafter, and I was quickly wrapped up in Hughes’ use of language, as well as the clever and playful way his poems approached topics around intimacy and human relationships. A professor of English and Creative Writing at Western Oregon University, Hughes and I met briefly at Wordstock, then got together at a Portland coffee house were we sat under the front awning and watched the rain come and go. Our conversation started with Hughes’ role as a poetry critic and reviewer for Harvard Book Review, then circled back to his own work.
HH: I feel dead about some current poetry.
DJ: How so?
HH: A lot of it feels like it’s just been ground out of the poetry machine. And poets will speculate. I’m not particularly curmudgeonly about “the death of American poetry.” Some people blame workshops, or just the overly democratic poem, or the overly accessible poem, or even the overly inaccessible poem.
DJ: When you’re doing a review, do you have to jump out of your sensibilities of “This is how I write, this is not how I write?”
HH: Sometimes it’s about wearing the intellectual cap and being the more objective critic. Sometimes it’s just about being open-minded to different styles. Like in music or the visual arts, which I pay a lot of attention to, I like a lot of different things. I’m not someone who has to have this certain kind of thing, this certain kind of genre or style, or else I get turned off. I tend to have very broad tastes, which is helpful in writing reviews. Sure, in the end, who I am as a writer, and what I think is really great, or what I really love, is going to play into a review. I think we expect that out of our critics and editorialists. We want to hear their opinions.
I like writing reviews. They break me out of….you know, when you’re writing a poem, you have to really believe that you’re writing the most beautiful thing in the world. I really think that. You should love the stuff you’re writing. Otherwise you should change it, because obviously it’s not really and completely you. When you write a poem, you should say, “This f—ing poem is great.” At least in that moment. And the next day, if you still think it’s great, then you got something. In reviewing, you really have to back off from that love of your work.
DJ: Backing off from that, even if the poem you’re reading doesn’t come across as a great poem, you still have to do…what?
HH: You have to look for what is admirable in the work. Is it doing something that you can’t do? Is it doing something well? Is it making you think about something? Is it handling syntax in a way that’s very athletic and inventive, yet is still intelligible?
If this were a scientific evaluation, you could apply different tests and apparati and get interesting readings. So I try to think of it from these other angles.
DJ: Have you ever gotten any backlash on a review?
HH: I don’t really pan anybody. If I really dislike a book, I pass on it. You know how it goes…in the world of journalism, if you don’t like something, then the thought is that you should just trash it. They certainly do in reviews of theater in the NY Times, and occasionally in the book reviews.
Not often, but once in a while you’ll see someone really really trash a book. I don’t do that. Let someone else do that. I don’t know…maybe I’m a coward.
DJ: Or you’re being fair.
HH: Well, if I can’t say something more sophisticated than, “I hate this book,” then I don’t really need to say anything.
DJ: And you get positive response.
HH: I get a few emails from time to time. Most of the time I don’t hear back. I’m not really networked, I suppose. I have reviewed a number of major poets. Merwin most recently. I’d love to get a note from W.S. Merwin that says, “I read your review and you had some insightful things to say.” That’s my ego, too. But also, maybe it would be sustaining. Like anything with poetry, we don’t get paid much.
I hear back from people who read the reviews…students and people doing dissertations. So I do get follow-up questions. It’s nice to know that I may be part of the dialogue. That’s why I like reviewing. You’re part of the conversation. It’s nice to be there.
DJ: To be there…there’s also the passion of being part of it all. You mentioned ego; it’s nice to be acknowledged for what it is, but there’s also that simple desire to be in the pool, so to say, just because you like how the water feels.
HH: That’s right.
DJ: I think that drives a lot of the interconnectedness of being associated with poetry on any number of levels. As a reviewer, a writer, a networker.
What are your writing funks like?
HH: My only problem with writing is finding the time. The world would love for you not to write. The world would love for you to take out the garbage, mow the lawn, do more service at the university, be better prepared for your classes, paint your house, call your father, write that letter to your friend who you haven’t returned the letter to in three years. The world always demands those things of you, and you have to say “No.” That’s my biggest battle.
DJ: Saying no?
HH: Saying no and finding the time to work consistently. Right now I have about two mornings a week. I have one full day. I go out to my house in Falls City on a Tuesday afternoon. I have Wednesday morning, all day Wednesday and maybe Thursday morning where I’m not disturbed. I don’t even have email out there. No student stuff, no family stuff even. Although if something comes up, I have to be there for my wife and step-sons.
Most people don’t live that way. Most people are not artists. For a long time, I was embarrassed to even say I was an artist. It sounded egotistical. It sounded pretentious. . . “Oh, I’m an arteest.” I didn’t like that, but I’ve learned I actually have to think that way.
DJ: Do you ever have any trouble calling yourself a poet?
HH: I used to be embarrassed by that. Now I say it. But I’m careful. I still don’t have cards that say, “Henry Hughes, Writer.” Some people do. Or stationary, or web sites full of their enchanted gardens.
Being an artist in busy America, or anywhere, is challenging. That’s my biggest obstacle. I’ve always loved to write. What are your funks?
DJ: I was trying to get the last layer on a poem that involves a firewalk. Earlier drafts would get to the firewalk…the poem would resolve after the firewalk, but I was skipping the walk itself. I’ve never done a firewalk.
The poem is highly imaginative, but I kept getting to that same place. It was one of the few occasions where I actually knew what I was avoiding. So I took a day off…and this is a meaningful poem to me. I was grinding on it. I took a day off and went to hang out at an artist friend’s studio. I was hanging out with her and another friend of hers. I was just sort of soaking up this feminine energy, I guess. I told them about the poem and they said, “Just shut up and write it.”
HH: Best advice I’ve ever heard.
DJ: The next day I went for a hike, just kept staying away from it, then I came home and wrote out the firewalk. The funk there, I guess, was that I kept grinding and getting to the same place, knowing exactly what I had to do but not knowing my way through it.
HH: Most people would stop at that grind, and they would finish the poem and that would be it, or they’d never finish it. A real writer goes back to it again and again. After a long hike…after a number of years. I don’t think you were in a funk. I think you were in a place that required another full flight of stairs, another few swings of the pick, another hundred miles. I know that place well. Even people who write every day get to those places. They probably get to them more often. That’s where, you know, we need time to work.
DJ: How long were you in Asia?
HH: I was in Japan for three years and China for two years.
DJ: Is there a carryover of that Asian aesthetic into your work?
HH: To some degree. The East Asian aesthetic, which I’ve always admired, has found its way into some of my writing, and certainly into the way I just, you know, keep my room a little more stark and simple, the way I look at painting. There’s a certain austerity, especially of Japanese forms and of some Chinese too, that certainly is present.
I’m very interested in East Asian history and culture. It really woke me up to the world. Prior to that I had never really traveled, except for drunken exploits in Mexico or to Canada for fishing. This really woke me up to a whole other world, and politics, and poverty, and beauty, and time, and history. That changed my writing, and made me, I feel, a much better human being.
DJ: That was before Men Holding Eggs?
HH: Yes. There are Japan and China poems in there, and there are many poems in that collection that were informed by the experience.
DJ: I wanted to ask about what seems like a uniqueness I’ve seen in your work, and “Parking Lot in Portland” is a great example. Sometimes your lines go way out in this fanning sort of way. Can you tell me a little bit about that? What are you hoping for with that style, whether you’re looking for something more from the story itself or something else, and if this was something you were doing in Men Holding Eggs.
HH: Less so in the first book. I think Moist Meridian is a more mature book, and I feel a deeper sense of rhythm and the mind’s music, as I call it.
Many of my poems are stories. An easy way to tell a story in a poem is to write a narrative poem. Good old William Stafford, “Traveling Through the Dark,” or Donald Hall, take you out to grandpa’s farm sort of stuff. I do a lot of that in Men Holding Eggs. I like the narrative poem. I grew up with James Dickey and Dick Hugo. I just wanted to tell stories in cool sounding language that did some funky things, that transformed in places I wasn’t expecting. I couldn’t write fiction all that well. It wasn’t that interesting somehow. People didn’t really like it.
If I’m going to write stories in poems, then what can I do? One thing I do is I start of kind of slow, kind of tentative. I start reaching…reaching…reaching. The line seems to reach. I find that that’s kind of the way I read them too. I gain momentum and kind of stretch out to the margin. I guess I’m approaching prose, at least in the spirit, not so much in the rhythmic motions, but in the spirit of wanting to tell a complete story.
Then I kind of come back. I’m going to close it off. I’m not going to write a novel. I’m going out to tell you something and I’m going to come back.
It feels natural. I’m not the kind of poet that sits down and says, “I’m going to write a sonnet, or I’m going to write a villanelle,” or God forbid a pantoum or something. I really write what I want to say, and then end up looking at the lines after. It seems to me that I’ve found this motion naturally. I say this unpretentiously. I wasn’t taught to do it. I’m not trying to emulate someone or some style. I’m sure critics can look at it and say, “Oh, well, that’s a C.K. Williams line that’s been truncated front and back.” That’s for critics to do. To me, it just feels right.
DJ: You used the word ‘motion’. There is that motion to it, from what I’ve noticed. The book as a whole…there’s a lot of sailing in there.
HH: Yes, yes.
DJ: So going from the title then inward, there’s a water quality to a lot of what’s happening in the collection.
HH: I love water.
DJ: The poems feel as if they go out like waves and then come back. When you first started to write in that form, did you try to stop it at all, or find yourself saying, “What the hell is this?”
HH: No. I just rode the wave.
I’m not very resistant to a lot of things in my life. I tend to go with things. I’m a very flexible person. If a group of us is going out for dinner, I’m pretty easy. I’ll walk pretty far. It doesn’t bother me. Or I’ll stop right here. I’ll eat Mexican, I’ll eat Chinese, I’ll go to a gay bar, I’ll go to a straight bar. It doesn’t bother me.
I feel that way about certain motions in my writing too. I don’t really resist them.
When you edit, you have to cut things back, because there’s a lot of bullshit and clunky exposition in there. Then you have to be tough with yourself. It’s like cleaning out the closet.
But in terms of my original creative process, if it feels right, I just kind of go with it.
As for others…I can see sort of the neo-formalists saying, “Henry Hughes is rather undisciplined,” or, “Just more free verse. Where’s the rhyme, where are the metrics?”
I don’t care. Clem Starck, with whom I read at Wordstock, he said something wonderful at one of our readings. He’s a great and interesting man.
He said, in response to a question about formalism, “It’s fine if you want to write formal poetry, and I admire form. But it’s hard enough just to write in very spare language, in a minimal number of lines, something meaningful and still sound human.” That’s a paraphrase, but he said it at one of our readings when someone asked a question, and it makes so much sense to me.
I want to say something meaningful, I want to say it in as few lines as possible, and I want to sound human. If I have any artistic agenda, it’s to sound human but not careless.
–
Read five poems from Moist Meridian, as well as a review of the collection. Watch Henry Hughes and Clem Stark read at Wordstock 2009.
Henry Hughes grew up in Long Island, and has lived in Oregon since 2002. He currently teaches at Western Oregon University. The poems in his most recent book, Moist Meridian (© 2009, Mammoth Books), come to life on the page through Hughes’ ecstatic voice and willingness to be both playful and sublime. His first collection, Men Holding Eggs (© 2004; Mammoth) won the 2004 Oregon Book Award for poetry. Hughes’ commentary on new poetry appears regularly in Harvard Review. The following poems from Moist Meridian appear here with his permission.
SKELETON PIRATES OF AMERICA
Oil drunk,
masts gnawed away,
we burn black slicks
for a Chinese cargo of toys.
Never dead enough, juggling
cannonballs and Arabs,
brown galley boys
fry fat
to fill our clothes.
Unpaid women pinch
note-wrapped rats between the planks,
and the sun
burns so hot
even sharks
can’t digest the shimmering curse.
I’m George, says the air-conditioned captain.
See all the blue
for my eyes.
DEVIL KNOWS DIFFERENT
Watching them gulp
garbage and skinny eels–two gaunt sharks,
open-mouthed in appeal–I nod,
they pass.
Now, you. You come back with me.
Smell the salt, the oily churn of a twin-screw cruiser,
drunk and wide as the Fifties.
See your parents, the sandy woman
and sable rodded man, telling you to feel the bite,
feel it.
Feel the flounder’s deck-flutter,
taste its whiteness. All the baked clams,
boiled lobsters and barbecued bass
they’ve eaten and served
to fuel the business of living,
of making you.
Parents gone now. It’s your chance
to feed your teenage daughter
more than money. Umbrella beach days without her mom.
Your lectures still too hot to bear.
She wades the blonde bar, waving to a yacht. Sharp sharks
shilling into the scent
between her legs. People say, What we eat
can’t imagine being eaten
Devil knows different.
NEW YEAR’S WITH CHRISTINE
Transmission busted. It’s late
and I have to drive home alone, in reverse,
from Saint Mary’s singles dance,
Bing’s White Christmas on AM.
I see the first small snow
in my taillights, and in ten minutes
the defrost sweats off a storm.
Flakes blow up
finding clouds again.
What if I kept rolling,
New Year’s Day, 1982. Driving us
in love, silly, still drunk
down that terrible hill to your house,
sliding in crystal terror
over the curb
into Neil Cohen’s handsome snowman.
His bottom sphere smushed gray
and that broom jammed in our bumper.
I held his crunchy head,
lifted that gold pipe
and said, Here, have a smoke. And you knelt,
suddenly knowing
to wear that hat meant change.
And you put it on.
HOW I FOUND THE SKY
It was the only time
my father asked me for anything.
Why don’t ya make me a duck for da office?
It was the only time I went to the library
for a book: Waterfowl of North America.
And it was the only time moribund Mr. Brown
gave me a decent piece
of unknotted pine, and put his coffee down
to show me how to bandsaw
without losing a finger.
I cut those penciled lines,
shaped the block, hollowed the center,
glued the body, shaved the head’s fragile bill
and narrow crest, leaving those buffed cheeks–
some ruddy joy
a lonely bird might fly to on a cold morning.
Joy? I don’t know.
I was rasping through recessed confusion,
burning in feathers, drilling shallow sockets
for the glassy red eyes of high school.
And when I carried that blond mallard
through the halls, it was the only time
beautiful Miss Herman, the art teacher
I loved and failed for three terms, spoke to me
of colors: burnt umber, raw sienna, cobalt blue
brushed across the folded wings.
MOVING
We were friends
years before
the night among the boxes,
unlabeled for fast stacking in the old pickup.
We’re not finished, I said.
There’s wine, and I’m not taking it with me.
Tipping that last ocean view,
you said, I’ll miss you so much, before that half-light kiss
pressed a bloom
straight through the island. Our hands
sands a wave makes
without music, without a bed. A motion
awaited, undressing like a storm
just ahead. So close
without my glasses. Can you see? you smiled,
one hand touching my face, the other driving
the dented guardrail
over the bridge.
–
A review of Moist Meridian will appear Thursday, December 3. Our complete interview will be live on Friday, December 4.
Ed Skoog has one of those minds that always seem to be working, whether he is actively crafting a poem, talking poetry with a student or another writer, or simply reflecting on the place where he currently finds himself. I caught up with him on the day of his 38th birthday. He was back home in Topeka, Kansas, getting ready for his 20th high school reunion, taking it easy in his father’s house. He was kind enough to take a few hours out of his home coming to talk about his first full-length collection, Mister Skylight (© 2009, Copper Canyon Press), to discuss craft, and to talk about the way that place and imagination coalesce to create poetry. Part 1 of our interview is below.
DJ: How’s Topeka?
ES: It’s beautiful. They’ve had a really mild summer so things are still really green. Usually by this time of year everything’s been blasted by the heat and drought. It feels like the way I like to remember it.
DJ: What does the idea of Topeka usually bring up for you?
ES: It has four pretty distinctive seasons, and two of them can be pretty rough. Summer is usually very hot. Winter is usually very cold and miserable. The nice part is usually spring, and apparently it’s felt like spring all summer.
I grew up near the middle of the city in an old leafy neighborhood. It doesn’t look like it’s in the Plains. It looks very comfortable, especially compared to my more urban and country wanderings. It’s sort of like the Shire right now.
DJ: Let’s get to your urban and country wanderings. One of the things that sticks out in Mister Skylight is that the language seems really tied to place, though at times it seems to be a number of places. At other times it seems to be a place that may not truly exist. Maybe an amalgamation of different places where you’ve lived or traveled.
When you go back to place in your process, do you find yourself going back to one place more than the other, or do things turn into a bit of a stew?
ES: I think you’re right. Even when the places have names that are accurate details, the poetry takes place in the imagination. If I say, “Topeka”, it’s different than saying “Topeka” in an essay, or than taking a picture and saying, “This is Topeka.”
There are a lot of places in the book. Some are places where I’ve lived or visited. Some of them, like the Skeleton Coast of Namibia, are places I’ve never been to. They’re all imaginary places as far as the poems go. The people in the poems are real people, the family and friends, but they become imaginary through the process of poetry.
The places mean different things to me, and have a lot of associations that, once you put them into poems, become art associations. They become aestheticize Topeka, aestheticize New Orleans, aestheticize California.
One of the animating conflicts for me in putting the book together was the struggle between looking at the place as real vs. as the poetic. Then there was the very real need to try to say something meaningful and true and honest in a social and political way about what happened in New Orleans, about what happened to my friends and the city I love and very nearly me. That was not imaginary. People died, lives were changed.
DJ: You’re referring to Katrina?
ES: Yes. The flooding and the aftermath, which made me very angry because it wasn’t an act of nature or an act of God. The levees failed because they weren’t built to spec by the Corps of Engineers. And the rescue operation was botched because of human failings and lack of courage. Suddenly that doesn’t become just an imaginary thing to play with, like my memories of Topeka. Instead, it’s something that changed my life and my way of looking at the world. At the same time, I didn’t want the book to be…I didn’t know how to write just about that. What results in the New Orleans poems, even some of the ones that I wrote before the storm, is a sort of struggle between us and the media, which doesn’t have any answers but hopefully creates interesting lines.
DJ: You said a second ago that the botched efforts and the botched recovery related to human failings and lack of courage. There’s an underlying quality in a number of your poems where it seems to be an unwavering spirit in the face of things like despair or disaster. These are the exact opposites of human failings. What does that say about you, and is that itself a comment, without being a direct comment to things?
ES: That spirit is hopefully the heart breaking impulse, the storytelling impulse and the lyric impulse to respond internally and to want to communicate that to somebody. The alternative is silence, which may be the most proper response to things, but doesn’t capture that spirit of looking back and looking around at the present, and wanting to communicate to people you are around or you wish were around. Perhaps that’s the spirit you’re finding in these poems. The impulse to dance. The impulse to draw. The impulse to do whatever it is that poems do. Whatever you’re doing in poetry…that need to be reaching out, to be expressing the joy and anxiety and imagination, and wanting or needing to share that.
Read the rest of this entry »
Ed Skoog’s poetry has appeared in many magazines, including American Poetry Review, The New Republic, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and NO: a journal of the arts. Born in Topeka, Kansas, Skoog graduated from Kansas State University, and holds his MFA from the University of Montana. Currently, Skoog is the Jennie McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington Fellow at George Washington University, and splits his time between D.C. and Seattle. Previous to that, he was the writer-in-residence at Richard Hugo House. The following five poems are from his first full-length collection, Mister Skylight © 2009, Copper Canyon Press, and appear here with his and the press’ permission.
RECENT CHANGES AT CANTER’S DELI
The telephone is no longer upstairs.
Cut fruit in a cold cup will never be whole.
Nothing is where it was. The plate
is beside the bowl. My mind’s all fucked up,
distorted, pale light reflected on stainless steel
of the walk-in-cooler. It is not where it was.
Here’s the spike to build a body of receipt.
Sweat collects on the waterpitcher lip
like the goodbye of a woman I loved.
The clerk bends his body to pray the miracle
of the handwashing station, turns knife to loaf.
The present pours into the pepper shaker.
It settles on the silk ivy of the now. Odds fade
in the sports section fallen between the counter,
where paying my bill I orphan a dime
for a silver mint, and the window snows sun
brilliant on Fairfax, demanding the commute.
They are not letting me drive anymore
and turning onto Melrose on the bus,
the driver, I overhear, has another job,
one he doesn’t know the name for.
Up in the haze some undiscovered animal
watches us, its plan mapped out, fire
swinging up the canyons, unfolding
until flame may flicker tip of sabertooth fang
in the museum where rare finds are hidden.
I, too, am a dinosaur. Rawr. My little claws.
I’m the dredge flopping for tar from the pits.
Click. I am a kind of David Bowie
in the Amoeba everything’s-a-dollar-bin.
I have four fingers and a thumb on my right hand,
equal representation on the left, and fourteen
billion toes. I’m a windup rooster. Who I am
and what I feel are irrelevant enough to be central
to the project of contemporary American poetry.
Or perhaps any art. Poetry’s just the form
of unimportance I teach teenagers above L.A.
under slanted windows that kill, by surprise,
the birds we then write about, gathering bonfire
around the small corpses, because it’s cold here.
THE CAROLERS
in scarf and boot turn
around our neighbor’s pine,
spill grog into snow,
approaching our porch with
“O Come All Ye Faithful.”
A few stumble or sing wrong,
open the door, Jim for
come let us adore him.
Annual Christian, pipered
by their pied joy, I lean
to follow when they go.
A hand holds me back.
The lead caroler, encountering
our Ford glazed with ice,
undeterred, opens the door
and crawls right through,
knees on the seat, gloves
on the dash and headrest.
The rest follow, pulling
“I Saw Three Ships”
through the car like a rope.
Soon I am falling asleep
in vast winter bedroom silence,
and I am singing with them
through local traffic
houses towns lives
exile and years of night.
EARLY KANSAS IMPRESSIONISTS
Silly now, when she visits
dreams, or I visit her, my mother,
in new condos at brief’s edge
where the neon restaurant’s lawn
shallows with winter. She laughs
in the expanse, wordless, collapsing
into snow to wave arms and legs,
craft a figure. I do the same,
like an infant learning its body.
Dusting off, I rise and she’s gone
every time. I see our shapes
then, mine a mimicry of myself,
hers a rectangular silence,
inhuman, without room
for rage shame guilt or scold,
the curves that let us recognize
each other in the air, O,
in our dynamic world today.
SEASON FINALE
My last look around the house
took so long that the vine
climbing the rosebush climbed
into my eyes, and a lizard
climbed, too, mouthfirst from grass,
its skin changing color
from grass green to a green
almost without green,
the color of dust on feather.
How changed from last winter’s
midnight when I let the dog out
and rats ran from the mimosa
to the fence while shingles
sparkled on the lawnmower shed
and in the grass, a cold lizard
raised a claw. How changed
from next week’s water
writing its black line across plaster
I cannot read in California,
where I hold the cellphone hot
while Lofstead, early returner,
kicks the back door in
to tell me of the damage.
Images come fast to the small,
impersonal screen,
linoleum sandy and streaked,
walls dice-dotted with mold,
and through a broken window,
the rosebush ash-gray, the yard
ash-gray and without lizard.
MISTER SKYLIGHT (excerpt)
When you enter the city of riots, confess
what turns your life has taken,
what is hard-on and what is mineral. Confess
until the wind catches itself by the tail.
Or find some solace. Mr. Skylight captains
a houseboat downstream like a vitamin.
I can only just begin to bear the chain-link fence.
Reflected in a puddle, the image trembles
as I tremble. The image freezes, I shiver.
It is like the enormity Gregor Samsa
is hoping to sleep through, but, well, can’t.
The woman playing Atari in public has, has…
Everything’s hauled away. In buckets.
These peaches, for example. I have heard
of you, yes, the monkey says. The moon
offers its offensive and ridiculous bulge.
Out in the salvage yard the snowy drifts
are not snow. White paint on frames,
they lean against front doors that won’t open in.
Mr. Skylight, stumbling through, asks
“Didn’t we just finish painting this wall?
Aren’t the brushes still drying on the sill?”
When the moment opens again,
remember to feel the immense province
pulling in, a hand here and here,
remember to smell what first was sweet,
apricots just sliced, one half-globe still rolling.
His wife ran upstairs to call police
as the “assailant took the victim’s own
paring knife from the counter.”
We show this on the snowy channels
most sets veil, between the black and white:
how they dragged Mr. Skylight inside and made
demands, then went deeper into his building,
and the iron gate lifted off its spindle.
Hill of stubble in moonlight, the hog
bristles across the lawn,
eats whole bouquets, eats bouquets whole,
plowing tusk through silk rose, a fresh lily.
Our headstones surrender their salt.
Wilder animals would not perturb us.
Worse hogs will cross and sand
down names. This one, at least, grunts life.
He would eat hog, could he make one die.
If there is a man inside the hog costume,
wanting to feel unchanged, so there is a hog
wearing an inferior fake man.
–
Read a review of MISTER SKYLIGHT here.
–
Viva Las Vegas is many things at once. She’s Liv (pronounced “leave”) Osthus, a 35-year-old Minnesotan and graduate of Williams College, a prestigious liberal arts college in Williamstown, Mass. She’s Coco Cobra, the sexually charged lead singer for Portland rockers Coco Cobra and the Killers. She’s a writer, an actress, a dancer, a spokesperson for the Portland stripping industry, a breast cancer survivor, and most recently, a published author – her first book, a memoir entitled MAGIC GARDENS, from Dame Rocket Press, has just been released. I first saw her perform — fully clothed — as part of a Back Fence PDX storytellers event. We met a few weeks before the book’s publishing date to talk about performing, writing, and dancing to Dylan.
DJ: How are you spending your days?
VL: Frantically juggling a lot of freelance writing. Plus I just started dancing again. And I tend bar two-days a week in a rock ‘n roll bar. That’s my passion. Rock ‘n roll.
DJ: You’re in a band.
VL: If I could quit everything else and just write music, I think I’d be more successful and happier.
DJ: Where are you dancing? Magic Gardens?
VL: Mary’s Club. I don’t really get along with the management at Magic Gardens.
DJ: Because of the book?
VL: No. When the book comes out maybe they’ll try to kill me. When you read the book, the manager is kind of the villain.
DJ: And now you’re doing the run-up on the press end?
VL: We’re planning a couple of parties, one here, one in Seattle. Then we’re doing a four-date tour out East. It’s a small press.
DJ: Do you write as Viva?
VL: Viva is my public character, so I do a lot of writing as Viva Las Vegas.
DJ: When I was looking for stuff, I found Liv , I found Liv Osthus, I found this New York Times piece…
VL: Ahh…
DJ: The name connects with Viva somehow.
VL: It’s Norwegian for Viva, but people always screw it up. By default I’ve become Viva everywhere.
DJ: Do you ever feel there’s a time when it all has to be packaged as, ‘Here’s me…here’s what I do’?
VL: I do. And I struggle with that. We all think about our careers. I think that Viva Las Vegas has been good for my career, but the only way to take it further is with more notoriety. I don’t know if I want that, per say. I certainly don’t like how you pursue it. I’m very happy with the friends and notoriety and fame right now. The writing that Viva gets is a lot more interesting than the writing that Liv Osthus gets.
Right now, my extra energy is going into my book, which won’t earn that money. And my band is a hobby.
DJ: The book won’t earn money?
VL: Yeah, I mean, it’s a book. Books don’t earn money.
DJ: Do you think that’s the legacy of the book, just being a book. Do you think it could become a screenplay?
VL: A lot of people have been interested in screenplay rights. We actually wrote one for Sundance in February. It got through the first round of competition. It didn’t get accepted for the final. My friend and I were commissioned to turn it into a screenplay in five days. No one expected to get it through the first round.
DJ: Did you get commissioned to do the book around the time you found out about your cancer?
VL: I found a publisher around the time it was diagnosed, but the book has nothing to do with the cancer. It’s interesting…there’s more money in that industry for writing, if you can call writing about cancer an industry.
DJ: So you’d written it before you found a publisher.
VL: I’d been writing it for four or five years.
DJ: And the cancer’s become more of a back story thing?
VL: That’s my publicist’s idea, that you need five words, or whatever, that will come up on Google search. “Ah, the girl with breast cancer who has a book…how do I find her?” Breast cancer. Stripper. Book. Search..
I wrote an article for Portland Monthly about the cancer. It had a lot of readership.
DJ: What about dancing now?
VL: Well, I’ve been doing it for three weeks again. The first week was terrifying. I haven’t come out, put out a press release and said, “Look, I’m back.”
I’m still feeling it out. I find myself watching the customers thinking, “OK, what do you see? Are you noticing anything different?” Some of my old customers come in…they’re thrilled that I’m back. They know what’s happened. They think it’s great. But most of these guys have never seen me before. They don’t bring that to Mary’s Club with them. I certainly don’t bring it with me. This is my body now. It’s been through stuff. Bodies always go through stuff. There are scars here. The first time, last week, I heard somebody whispering to his friend, “Look, those are fake.”
I wasn’t about to be like, “Yeah, fuck you, I had surgery ’cause I had cancer.” You know? But it’s interesting.
Nora Robertson writes fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays, which have appeared in such publications as Redactions, Alimentum, Monkeybicycle, Citadel of the Spirit: Oregon’s Sesquicentennial Anthology, Plazm and Portland Monthly. She is a contributing editor to the New Oregon Arts & Letters webjournal and is the producer and writer of the New Oregon Interview Series. Her recipe poem, “How to Boil an Egg” (below), was nominated by Redactions for the 2007 Pushcart Prize. Her performance work has been showcased in Portland in the Enteractive Language Festival, the Public Works series curated by 2 Gyrlz Performative Art, Phase One: Words + Music; Performance Works Northwest’s Alembic Series in the five-woman show Housebound, and in Tiffany Lee Brown’s site-based installation Play Me at JAW 2008 at Portland Center Stage. She lives in Portland, Oregon and works for the Portland Public Schools.
© by Nora Robertson. All rights reserved.
HOW TO BOIL AN EGG
Targhaz Interiors
2. The kind of pan with the special core that conducts heat all over is best. Allow the tap to rush frigid and breathless. The water will need salt. Have you heard about the slaves of Targhaz who dug out chunks of grey-white salt in sub-Saharan holes, dry as their salt-block homes sucking water from their bones as they slept? Foremen only lasted two weeks. Faces rotated through like the burning yolk-yellow round of sun overhead. And what about that snake god of Ghana asking for lovely virgin bottoms, rigid and headless? I imagine I am that girl, pinioned, winner of a local beauty contest. While I’m waiting, it happens that blood drips down my inner thigh, red as hibiscus, spoiling the meat. There’s no warrior to rescue me. I have to rescue myself through biology.
3. Boil all this with the egg, seven minutes at least. If you’re hard-boiled, you’ll like it plain with a little salt and pepper. Sometimes, it’s easier that way. There are many ways to devil your egg, with blood-flecks of pimiento or the rendered fat of a hen. My grandmother used to make hundreds of these in the late 60’s for what they called entertaining. In a bone-white house with tilework shimmering milky light off the walls, she laid them out in rows on gleaming platters. My mother came into the kitchen once in the middle of the night and found her peeling eggs. Her body was bent over as she was sobbing. My mother remembers the feel of her shuddering when she rushed to hug her, the streams of salt water running down between their faces.
(previously published in Redactions)
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MY HUSBAND AS SENSITIVE INSTRUMENT
2. When two of our good friends decided to sleep with another two of our good friends and the one who was my old girlhood pal like hips rotating out of the same socket bucked up the nerve to tell me about it, he already knew. You can keep the jumile alive almost indefinitely in the crevices of a leather bag as long as you feed it the right mixture of leaves and grass. The Maya would strip the god costume off the carcass and prepare the honored sacrificed one for the coals. They thought each moment had a personality and that by careful observation, you could know which way the wind was blowing, what was dangerous and safe.
3. When it is the right time, crush the jumiles in a stone mortar, volcanic. Grind in a little chile, salt, tomatoe. The mixture will become soupy, corpuscular, time to fleck it with green of chopped cilantro and punch it with lime. The summer I drove in circles across the hot body of the country like an arrow returning to its bow, my husband already knew why. But it’s easy to tell when you’re lying, he said. Maybe no one was ever paying attention before.
4. Ladle the jumile mixture across just-made tortillas sent from a cupped kneading hand onto the griddle to the plate. It goes well with strips of meat leftover from barbeque, with fermented maize. I had allowed someone else to run the flat of his hand across my back the same way I later ran it across my husband’s, like brushing fingertips across a harp, across the steely inner strings of a piano. Rib stacked above rib, shuddering with wet.
(previously published in Alimentum Journal)
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Jeff Selin, along with his wife, Rachel, founded Writers’ Dojo in the hopes of creating an incubator for evolving literary projects and a space that would attract amazing authors from around the world. The Dojo sits in the heart of Portland’s St. John’s area, along with Selin’s brother’s martial arts school. Since its founding in January, 2008, the Dojo has grown to include a thriving online journal, and has become a frequent gathering place for Portland’s literary and creative communities. Beyond his endeavors with the Dojo, Selin has worked as a copywriter, an advertising and branding professional, and is presently at work on a novel. We met at the end of February, 2009, to discuss online publishing, the Dojo, and his life as a writer.
DJ: At a time when people seem to going to poetry as a way to reflect and take solace in the world, there’s the question of how small presses and online journals continue to put it out there for the public to consume while also making it financially viable on their end. You must see this with WritersDojo.org.
JS: What’s interesting is it’s not an issue in Portland. The community here is incredible. It blows me away. We hear time and time again where big name poets come to town and they’re shocked. Literary Arts puts on an event and the place is sold out. The poets can’t believe it. How are we selling out the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall for poetry? It’s unbelievable.
For WritersDojo.org, we’ve never had an issue finding and publishing amazing poetry. And our readership for poetry is off the charts. I know publishers in other states and other cities are struggling to find the amazing submissions and to find the readership for it. In Portland it’s not an issue. We’re something of an anomaly.
DJ: So we should change the name to Poetland?
JS: Along with all the other names…Stumptown, all the others.
We just published a podcast not too long ago by Diana Abu-Jaber. She was saying in the Middle East, people look at poets as the serious authors. For years and years, it didn’t matter if you were a professor or what genre you were in, if you were an intellectual, you wrote poetry. In Middle Eastern culture, in a lot of places, the poet is a very serious person, a person a letters, the elder statesmen of literary folk. And the novelists…the idea is, who can take a novelist seriously? You’re writing fiction.
DJ: Whereas here it’s the opposite.
JS: I think many people look to the poets here as…well, you’re a poet. It certainly puts an assumption on your politics, for example.
DJ: I mentioned to some of my workshop students that I write poetry, and the kids were beside themselves. “You write poetry?” And I said, “Yeah.” And they said, “Well, you don’t look like a poet. You don’t act like a poet.” These are 10-year-old kids. We went around the room and each kid described what a poet should look like. They had the weirdest impressions that involved everything from wearing moth-riddled sweaters to smelling like cats to walking around with your nose in the air.
JS: I think the idea of the poet, and what a poet is is changing all the time. And obviously poetry itself keeps changing. More and more, the younger crowd is looking toward spoken word poetry. Or kids realize that rap music is poetry. Somebody, maybe it was Rod Stewart or someone like that, back in the 80s was asked where all the great poets have gone. He said, “They’ve become musicians.”
DJ: I saw a Dylan quote recently where he said, “If I can put music to it, it’s a song. If I can’t, it’s a poem.”
JS: Exactly.
DJ: Jumping to your own work, outside the Dojo, how is the balance for your own writing right now?
JS: For the last 15-years I always had one foot in advertising and also in journalism. Every creative professional I know, whether they’re a copywriter or a graphic designer, has this balancing act. Everyone wants to just do their creative work, but they have to put food on the table. Obviously, with the economy the way it is, it’s even more of an issue.
Lately I’ve been able to step away for the most part from advertising and work on my fiction most days. We’re very fortunate, and not a day goes by that I’m not happy for it. But I’m also looking at freelance work again because I have to. For me, it’s about prioritizing and keeping my creative work as a priority. What works for me…this idea that financial advisors have of paying yourself first. So every morning I pay myself first with my creative work. It’s when I feel most connected to the page. I spend the morning hours with my creative writing. Regardless of what happens with my professional life, I’m not going to let that go. I think that’s what happens with many professionals. They feel like they need to focus on whatever it is…writing for newspapers or magazines, or working with editors who might change their stuff too much but they feel like they need to take the gig. Or maybe they’re in advertising or PR and they let the creative stuff slide. And as the days and weeks and months go by, it’s harder and harder to get back to the page.
DJ: It is a challenge.
JS: I’ve been working on a novel for quite some time, and I’m getting close to finishing. The times that I’ve stepped away from it for something else, whether it’s a short story, or life happens, or whatever’s going on, it’s much harder to get back into it. Where am I, where’s the story arch, who are these characters? When I’m working on it every day, or I’m thinking about the story every day…if I step away for a month and try to go back, it’s challenging.
DJ: Everything becomes frozen in that spot where you’ve left it. I’m wondering if there’s ever any crossover between this work and that, or where this work (professional ) informs that work (the creative), where one begins to seep into the other?
JS: In the advertising world I’ve always been more of the brand, headline, creative type of copywriter. The concept of what is creativity and how do you access it on command – mood has nothing to do with it. As a professional, you need to wake up and have creativity on tap. What does that mean exactly? When do I feel more creative? It’s an idea I’ve been thinking about for some time, so in that sense it overlaps. And when I was working in advertising full-time, I would write and do the marketing stuff sometimes for 12-hours a day, then come home and still have to find time to write. That’s where I developed my morning writing habit. Before I go give my creative energy to sell some widget, I’m going to write for myself.
Finding that creative juice, regardless of what you’re doing – my brother is an entrepreneur and a martial artist. Artist is right there in the title. For the Dojo, we’ve adopted the metaphor- and this concept connects to the martial arts, this idea of being a center for excellence. In business you’ll find it takes a lot of creativity to generate the energy of creating new business.
In advertising, I worked with designers, photographers, producers, web developers, etc., in creating this bigger brand concept. I always thought of it as creative. So the question wasn’t, “How do I stop doing this dry, boring stuff?” Because the energy and the project was always creative. The question was, “How do I stop focusing on selling products and services that I don’t really have a passion for?” Does the world need another BMW? I don’t think it does.
But there’s a mixed feeling in me about that. On one hand, products bring a lot of value, because they brings jobs, and the list goes on and on for how things play into the community and the economy. But if my passion isn’t 100% there, am I doing a disservice for my clients?
DJ: That’s a good point about the work itself being creative, because the work IS creative. The challenge is that idea of whether or not I want to support this, or if I’d rather be doing something else all together different.
JS: And on the other side of it, the fiction writing, I’m trying to be a professional writer. To me that means two big things. First, thick skin. I’m going to send things out, and they’re going to be rejected. Second is the showing up every day aspect. I’m going to write from this time to this time everyday, just like a full-time job. Where does mood come into it?
Having the discipline to come to the page every day…in the marketing world, it’s obvious. You’re going to sit in your cube, or wherever, and do stuff that you don’t want to do. That’s part of the distinction between the serious, professional writer, and someone who loves to write as a hobby.
The Dojo has a lot of members. Everyone’s serious about writing. When they come through the door they focus on their writing, and that’s what they’re here for. Many of those folks have other jobs or do other things, and there’s this sense of solace and community with other writers. The core members are professional writers. They use the space as their office. They’re here working.
When you see the amount of work they do, and the amount of daily effort that’s required to show up and keep plugging away every day, it’s a huge inspiration. The folks that are well published, the ones whose names are well recognized – they’re the quietest about what they’re doing. They’re here, their white earbuds go in, and they’re in their zone every single day, just writing, writing, writing, writing, writing. The level of prolificacy is phenomenal. For me, since I’ve been working on the same novel for four or five years, it’s especially interesting and inspiring.
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Dana Guthrie Martin lives in the Seattle area and writes wherever writing will have her. She shares her home with her husband, her pet hamster and her robot, Feldman. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, including Blossombones, Blue Fifth Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, Coconut Poetry, Failbetter, Fence, Juked and Knockout Literary Magazine. In May, Martin will enter Converse College’s low residency MFA program, and in July, Blood Pudding Press will publish her chapbook, The Spare Room. You can read some of her collaborative work with poet Nathan Moore at Mutating the Signature.
ROBOT WORKERS
— after John Donne
For every robot that goes down fighting
There are two or
Three or legions who turn away, trying to
Blend in with suits and satchels, going to
Jobs they don’t want so they can feel useful.
They’ve learned this is what it means to be real —
To leave the fallen, as if each day were
A war, the lawns
Of their suburbs littered with mines:
The dog catcher
Who lets frothing dogs chase robots down streets
While driving alongside in his truck, laughing
And bellowing “Bot!” in accusation;
The children who kick and spit and slap wads
Of gum on their metal behinds so they can’t
Sit on benches
Without sticking to them; the housewives who
Draw their curtains
Because they can’t stand the sight of one more
Damn robot. Meanwhile in factories, work
Drones on and the robots bemoan nothing.
They move just as they’ve been programmed to move,
Fingers trilling like a dance, placing things
In their places.
ROBOT LOVER
— after John Donne
Why not me? Why not my human-
Like fingers and other hard parts? How would
That differ from licking a fork
Clean or having a mouth full of braces?
You know how I charge your skin when
You come close, the hairs on your arms rising to
Meet me: allegiant soldiers
Who listen to your body’s mute desires.
Your electrical wires, woven into
Every inch of who you are, brought
You here. And the blood that moves inside me
Could warm you until your devices
Soften, then melt, if only you’d give me
One free download. How easy that
Would be. So slide over here like
A well-lubricated cog, and add your
Piece to my machine. What I mean is this:
You complete my design; you’re what
My creator had in mind. My circuits
Are heavy with you every night.
If I had been built to dream, my dreams would
Be viscous as crude oil, pungent
As electrical fires. You would be there
With your flawless architecture —
Our world as small and flat as a diskette —
Calling me through caustic smoke and liquid.
HALLUCINATION #1
For weeks, ghosts
have made their way
down the long hall
that leads to your bedroom.
They handle the doorknob
of the closed door as
you lie in bed and watch
moonlight glint off
the knob’s imperfections.
More ghosts stand
in the middle of the lawn,
cast shadows onto the room’s
far walls. Once, you heard them
ease open the window
above your bed, felt their
dry breath on your forehead.
What was it they whispered
just before they disappeared like
invisible ink? Something akin to
talking in tongues, a message
that drives you to wait
for their return wearing
your best nightgown,
with your face made up,
the covers thrown clean
off your body.
NOTE: The poems ROBOT WORKERS and ROBOT LOVER are from a series that follows the line syllable count and overall structure of John Donne’s love poems.
Shaindel Beers’ poetry feels like the Midwest itself – open, rolling, as if a dust storm could blow through any moment. Her first full-length collection, A Brief History of Time, captures the sadness and longing of a never-ending landscape in rich language that evokes loss, flight, grace and humility. We spoke a few weeks ago, and discussed the concept of “mental crafting” (Beers holds onto ideas for months and even years before writing them), teaching (she is a professor of English at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, OR), rural life (she grew up in Argos, Indiana), online publishing (she’s been poetry editor at Contrary Magazine since its founding in 2003), “short-shorts” night (as referenced in the poem A MAN WALKS INTO A BAR), and how memory and reflection lead her into verse.
DJ: You definitely have a lot going on, between your own work, your work with Contrary, what you’re doing at “the school” and your radio program (blog talk radio). Is there one area where you get greater pleasure or satisfaction?
SB: I guess everything feeds into more material to write about. It would be nice to have more free time to write. Still, I learn a lot from my students and from my other part-time jobs. They give me more time to think about writing.
DJ: A lot of your work reads in a way as if it arrived on paper exactly how it happened, almost in a “channeled” sense. I don’t mean “channeling” in a new age way, but more so like the poem came out of you in one long gush. I’m trying to get a picture of you working when suddenly you’re hit with this wave…
SB: I work a lot in my head, more than I ever write down. I wish I were one of those writers that carries a notebook and pen everywhere. I go through phases where I try to make myself do that. Sometimes something will stay in my head for months or even years before I write it down.
DJ: What finally gets you to write it down? Why does it stay so long, and what gets you to say, “I have to get this thing out?”
SB: Sometimes because it doesn’t feel finished. I’m not saying it’s a finished product in my head and then makes its way to paper. It’s like a seed. It has to germinate for a certain amount of time. Sometimes I write it down because it feels like it’s almost done, and sometimes I write it down because I’m afraid of forgetting either a part of it or the whole thing.
DJ: Would you say you’re mentally crafting pieces?
SB: I always feel like there’s a frame around things. When it feels like I have enough to build on it, that’s when it goes on paper.
DJ: So you’re never too worried that you’ll actually forget something?
SB: There are things I think I’ve forgotten.
DJ: Looking at the poem, ELEGY FOR A PAST LIFE, you mention in the second stanza:
“Back then at sixteen
I thought we’d make it out together,
and become writers.”
How long has this been going on for you, getting these lines coming to you, and at what point did writing enter your life?
SB: I probably wrote before I could physically write. When I was little, I would tell my mom stories, make her write them down then read them back to me. I was sort of a writer before I knew letters or the alphabet.
I think it was either high school or undergrad when I made that leap between wanting to be a reader and being a writer. I don’t know if I felt confident about my own work until I started having things published, first in the undergrad literary journal, then later in places right out of college.
DJ: It’s interesting that you showed up in the world as an oral storyteller, because there’s a wonderful diversity in the language of your poetry. Did you make your way to poetry from other places, or has poetry always been a place where you found a home and a voice?
SB: Some of it might be that poetry requires a shorter attention span. When I was an early teen, I remember reading my mom’s old poetry books and feeling like I could read a lot in one sitting, because mostly they were just stripes down the middles of pages. So I could read much more poetry in a short amount of time than I could, say, fiction. I feel this way about writing it also.
I’m trying to get better about spending more time at poems and fiction. I think poetry is my natural progression as a writer, then eventually I’ll move onto fiction. A lot of writers move in the same way.
DJ: So you’re actively writing things other than poetry?
SB: I have about half of a short story collection done. I need three to six more stories to be long enough to send out.
DJ: When you mention that poetry requires something of a shorter attention span, how do you say this is a benefit when it comes to online publishing? Especially when you consider the fact that there are well-regarded online literary sites and opportunities popping up all the time.
SB: I’ll sit down and read a 500-page novel in hard copy but I’d never do that on screen. I don’t know if it’s a physical issue, where staring at a screen that long isn’t good for your eyes, or if it’s a psychological issue, where we feel that things online should be short. There’s definitely something to the fact that people will only spend so long reading something online. You expect it to be no more than three screens if you’re scrolling, as if there’s an intuitive link between how long something is and how much we’re willing to read. Which is a good thing for poetry.
In general, I think people are in the mode of reading shorter fiction when they’re online. They’re more likely to read a 2,000 word story online than a 10,000 story.
DJ: Is that sort of shift completely positive?
SB: I don’t think it’s positive. It might just be one of the necessary evils that happen. I don’t want to think that we’ll be like Japan, where our literature turns into text message novels, or whatever the craze is. I hope it doesn’t go that far, but I think we have to be realistic that, if we’re sending things to an online venue, people are only going to read a poem that’s one screen, or a story of about 2,000 words.
DJ: As you’ve edited and been a reader for print and online places, could you speak to whether or not you see a different caliber of writing coming in?
SB: With Contrary, at least right now, I’m the final poetry editor. Of the 1,000 or so submissions a month, I only see the top 20 – which makes it really hard to choose. I’ve gotten things sent to me directly where I’ve felt people didn’t even look at the literary journal, but I haven’t seen any differences in quality from when I was a first reader for print to now.
DJ: Do you have any sense of shifts going on as it relates to the financial viability of small press publishers vs. online journals?
SB: I just know it’s expensive going to print. Just look at the big newspapers that are shutting down or selling right now. Print no longer seems to be where people are getting either their news or reading material, and I think we’re moving more to the online end of the spectrum.
In one issue of Contrary, we had nearly 100,000 page views – there’s no way we could afford to print 100,000 issues, or even 20,000 issues for that matter. I think a lot of it is the economy, but some of it is environmentalism – we’ve all seen journals give thousands of back issues away for free. It’s sad because there is something to the hardcopy print world and the tactile feeling of a book, magazine or journal. Unfortunately it’s expensive to do these days.
DJ: A hundred-thousand views is huge. When you think about a journal like Contrary, if it was exclusively in print as opposed to online, it would probably be a regional-type press.
SB: Definitely. And if anyone weren’t from the University of Chicago, or around the South Side, it would just be word-of-mouth subscriptions. People would read their classmates who were published in there, and that’s how it would spread cross country.
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