Iron
Horse Literary Review
Commentary
& Contributors: Spring
2000
On
this page we provide author commentary and biographical notes for our Spring 2000
contributors. If you wish to
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Fiction
Frederick
Busch, Commentary on A Handbook for Spies
About
A Handbook for Spies, Busch writes, “I’d been trying to write
about the loyalty oath and the Vietnam protests, and about certain matters
of campus politics, for maybe thirty years. I think that my efforts to write
those times were bound to be mutations—wingless herons, one-legged
starfish—until I was able to see, to feel, those matters in the context of
my other, ongoing writing concerns: the sorrows of our family silences; the
impinging of the past on the present; the stupid sagacity we feel as lust
takes us over; the need to make a language sufficient to the stories of our
lives. I thought that this story would be a couple of dozen pages long. Then
it threatened to become a novel, and I worried that its material was somehow
too small for that kind of length. The novella it became feels right, in
terms of heft, and of the distance it travels. The title comes not only from
the publishing stylebook mentioned in the second section, but from the
proliferation of handbooks used in teaching composition in the late 60s. The
most powerful part of the writing—as well as the rereading—of Handbook
for me remains the names of those Americans killed in Vietnam. They are
actual. I took them from the Congressional Register. Their absence from this
world as men in their middle age, because of the exigencies felt by
politicians and officers and editorialists and draft board commisars, is the
skull beneath my story’s skin.”
Biographical Note
Frederick
Busch’s works include Closing Arguments, The Children in the
Woods, The Night Inspector, and Girls, a novel based on
his widely anthologized story, “Ralph the Duck.” W.W. Norton will
publish his next collection of stories, Don’t Tell Anyone, which
will contain the novella, A Handbook for Spies, in its entirety. His
awards include the PEN/Malamud Award and the National Jewish Book Award. Mr.
Busch teaches at Colgate University where he is the Edgar Fairchild
Professor of Literature.
Kent Nelson, Commentary on “This
Light Mending” (Part Two)
About
“This Light Mending,” which is concluded in this issue of Iron Horse,
Nelson says, “This was an odd story to write because it arose from
imagining what my 23-year-old daughter must think of me—what she’s
observed of my crazy marital history, what she’s thought of my not having
had money or a steady job over the years, what she’s made of my driving
long hours from place to place, camping, and looking for birds. I needed a
way for her character to investigate her father’s past, so I invented the
circumstance of looking for the first wife. Everything else in the story is,
of course, fictional.”
Biographical
Note
Kent
Nelson has published three novels, four collections of short fiction, and
over ninety stories in fine literary journals. His novel, Language in the
Blood, won the Edward Abbey Prize for Ecofiction, and many of his
stories have been included in Best American Short Stories, Pushcart,
O. Henry, and other anthologies. He is an avid birder and has
traveled to enough remote places in North America to accumulate a life-bird
list of 707 species.
Gina Ochsner, Commentary on “The
Zoo After the Fire: A Love Story”
“‘Zoo
After the Fire,’” she writes, “takes its inspiration from Peter
LaSalle’s short piece, ‘The Museum After the Bombing.’ I’m
constantly looking for different structures in storytelling, looking for
ways in which form challenges and also enhances story. I liked the idea of
describing some kind of catastrophe that somehow forces the narrator to
reveal his own agonies which, at first flush, seem to have nothing to do
with the larger story of a fire.”
Biographical
Note
Gina
Ochsner is a graduate of University of Oregon’s MFA Program. She was last
year’s recipient of the Jack Dyer Prize from Crab Orchard Review
and has work forthcoming in Prairie Schooner. Currently, she is
working on a lexicon-style novella and a collection of short stories.
Jim Sanderson, Commentary on “The
Golden State” (Part One)
Sanderson
says that he thought of “The Golden State” as “one in a series of
interlocking stories. In other words, I thought of it first as a part of a
collection rather than as an individual story. These stories trace a series
of lovers and the failures of their love lives. Thus, the reader would get
different views of the failures but see the logic or inevitability of the
failures. Second, I had several
characters who had appeared as supporting characters in previous stories. I
wanted to give them a love life.” Harry, Stacy, and Lee appear in
“Don’t Empty Houses Ring?” published last summer in Pleiades.
Biographical
Note
Jim
Sanderson’s collection of short stories, Semi-Private Rooms, won
the Kenneth Patchen Prize for fiction in 1992, and his novel, El Camino
del Rio, won the 1997 Frank Waters Prize and was published by University
of New Mexico Press in 1998. His next novel, Safe Delivery, will be
released by University of New Mexico Press in 2000. His stories, essays, and
scholarly articles have appeared in numerous journals, including Chariton
Review, The Cimarron Review, The New Mexico Humanities Review,
The High Plains Literary Review, and The Journal of American
Culture.
Christa
Albrecht Vegas, Commentary on “Hope and Carnage”
About
“Hope and Carnage,” Vegas says, “The story flows in a vein of stories
I have written about characters’ attempts to reconcile the random horror
and violence that saturates the life experience.
Animals often figure in as vessels of pain, filled to the brim with
suffering by an apathetic God. The protagonist in ‘Hope and Carnage’
walks a thin line between life and death. Her impetus to live and act is
weak, but she manages to channel what little she’s got into an altruistic,
ritualized lifestyle, granting recognition to and accounting for creatures
who have been cosmically abandoned.”
Biographical
Note
Christa
Albrecht Vegas is a graduate of Rhode Island College with a double major in
English and Film Studies. For four years, she worked as an animal care
technician and administrative assistant at The Potter League for Animals, a
full-service animal shelter in Middletown, Rhode Island. Her work has
appeared in Playgirl, Shoreline, and The Newport Review.
A companion piece to “Hope and Carnage,” entitled “Frequent
Encounters,” is forthcoming in Kimera.
Poetry
Bruce Beasley, Commentary on “Admission,” “Conditional” and “Pilgrims”
Beasley
writes that his three poems are from “a 33-poem sequence called
‘Aleatory Hymnal’ (aleatory, from the Latin alea for dice, means
‘dependent on chance or luck’ or ‘of or relating to gambling’). I
wrote each of the poems by casting dice to determine at random a page from a
dictionary: a three, a four, and a seven, for example, would lead me to
page 347, and I approached the poems by submitting myself to whatever
language, ideas, images, and wordplays were suggested by the particular page
on which I had fallen. Together the poems form a kind of hermetic diary
(Hermes being the god of both gambling and poetry) of the period during
which they were written: ‘Admission,’ for example, was suggested by the
premature birth of the daughter of good friends of mine. I intended the
aleatory process (suggested by John Cage’s experiments with chance-driven
musical composition) to force the language rather than the subject into
primacy, so that the autobiographical occasions of the poems remain
hermetically sealed, in a way, underneath the given language.”
Biographical
Note
Bruce Beasley’s fourth collection of poems, Signs and
Abominations, is forthcoming this fall from Wesleyan University Press.
He won the 1993 Ohio State University Press/Journal Award for The
Creation and the 1996 Colorado Prize for Summer Mystagogia.
He teaches at Western Washington University.
Robert Cooperman, Commentary on
“John Hudson, After His Father and Auliqaq Have Set Off in a Makeshift
Kayak for the Northwest Passage, 1612”
About
his poem, Cooperman says: “Some time ago, I became interested in the
17th-century British explorer Henry Hudson. By all accounts he was a
failure, attempting four voyages to find a sea passage to spice-rich Asia
and never coming close. His last voyage ended in a mutiny in which he, his
son John, and his few loyal crewmen were forced into the ship’s shallop
while the mutinous crew sailed The Discovery back to England. It is presumed
that Hudson and his followers all perished in what is now Hudson Bay. Since
no one knows for certain, I thought it was fair game to speculate that he
and his crew made landfall and met up with a banished Inuit, and that, while
the rest of the crew (with the exception of his son, John) died off, Henry,
still possessed to find a sea passage, set out with the Inuit, Auliqaq, in a
kayak for one more crazed and futile attempt that ended in his death.”
Biographical
Note
Robert
Cooperman’s books of poetry include: In The Household of Percy Bysshe
Shelley (University Press of Florida) and the just published In The
Colorado Gold Fever Mountains (Western Reflections). He has had recent
work in The Paterson Literary Review and The Midwest Review.
His latest chapbook is called A Tale of the Grateful Dead.
James Doyle, Commentary on “An
Old Woman Cooking Eggs”
His
poem, “An Old Woman Cooking Eggs,” is “an attempt at a portrait of my
grandmother who, after a stroke, could not speak with any articulation and
continually went through a series of compulsive, repetitive motions with her
arms and hands. I had to imagine these motions represented internally a
happy world to which she still belonged and in which she participated
fully.”
Biographical
Note
James Doyle is retired and living in Colorado where he enjoys
spending time with and indulging his grandchildren. His poetry will appear
in future issues of The Ohio Review, The Literary Review, Chelsea,
Natural Bridge, and a number of other journals. His more recent book
of poetry, The Silk at Her Throat, was published in 1999 by Cedar
Hill Publications.
Jeffrey Harrison, Commentary on
“Three Wishes” and “Another Story”
He
says, “‘Another Story’ is a poem that went through dozens of
revisions—so many that even a large paper clip was not enough to hold them
all together. With each version I had the sense that I was wrestling with
the material, probing deeper emotionally, intensifying, and creating a more
densely packed poem. The last version (I hesitate to use the word
‘finished’) bears very little resemblance to the early versions.
“‘Three
Wishes’ is an entirely different kind of poem: more natural in its
genesis, less ‘worked.’ It went through half a dozen revisions, but
these mainly involved tinkering with phrases and lines. The poem’s general
structure remained very close to the first version, which I wrote out by
hand while on a domestic flight.
Biographical
Note
Jeffrey
Harrison is the author of two books of poetry, The Singing Underneath
(a 1988 National Poetry Series selection) and Signs of Arrival. He is
a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his poems have appeared
recently or are forthcoming in The Yale Review, The Paris Review,
Poetry, The Kenyon Review, DoubleTake, Ploughshares,
The Hudson Review, Shenandoah, and other magazines.
Kathleen Hart, Commentary on “Irrational Acts”
“Irrational Acts” is based on events, she explains, “surrounding the
‘real’ tornado which struck Jarrell, Texas, a few years ago. Virtually
everything in the poem originates from ‘real’ reports I heard over the
radio or in commercials I saw on TV.”
Biographical
Note
Kathleen
Hart lives and works in Bryan/College Station, Texas. Her book-length
manuscript, The Country That Is Everywhere, is circulating among
publishers. She is currently working on a new manuscript, Your Texas Is
What You Make It.
Roger Jones, Commentary on “Gravestones”
According
to Jones, “‘Gravestones Without Names’ is a pretty straightforward
descriptive poem. I used to pass a tombstone sales place each day on my way
to school, and I would always notice the empty squares in the middle where
the name would soon go. The stones would always look so nice, shining in the
bright sunlight.”
Biographical
Note
Roger
Jones currently teaches at Southwest Texas State University.
He has published one book of poetry, Strata, and several
individual poems in various journals, including Hawaii Review, Poet
Lore, Hawaii Pacific Review, Poem, Baltimore Review,
and others.
Barbara Lau, Commentary “On
Hearing Robert Creeley Read, 1994”
Lau’s
poem is the first poem she wrote after moving to the Iowa City/Cedar Rapids
area from her long-time home of Austin: “One advantage [to moving] was
getting to attend poetry readings by visiting poets, such as Creeley, at the
University of Iowa. It was late October, and the blaze of autumn was
abruptly fading into grays and browns. When I saw Creeley, despite the
assertiveness and wry humor in his verse, he made various references to
becoming old. This put me on the defensive somehow, both for his sake and
mine. I composed the bulk of this poem on my drive home in the moonlight.”
Biographical
Note
Barbara
Lau’s first manuscript of poetry is titled The Long Surprise. A
transplanted Texan, she teaches college composition and literature amid the
corn and soy fields of eastern Iowa. She earned a MFA in poetry from Warren
Wilson College, and her works have appeared in Field, Borderlands:
Texas Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, Spoon River
Poetry Review, College English, Confluence, Iowa Woman,
and other journals.
Sydney Lea, “Ars Longa, Vita
Brevis” and “Publishing Project”
Biographical Note
Sydney
Lea is the author of seven collections of poems. The most recent, Pursuit
of a Wound, was just released by University of Indiana. His prior
collection, To the Bone: New and Selected Poems, was awarded the 1998
Poets’ Prize. Lea has also published a novel, A Place in Mind, and
a collection of naturalist essays, Hunting the Whole Way Home. Lea
founded and, for thirteen years, edited New England Review. Two of
his poems appeared in the Fall 1999 issue of Iron Horse Literary Review.
Randy Phillis, “Jason Calms Down
After the Argument”
Biographical
Note
Randy
Phillis is Department Chair of Languages, Literature and Communications at
Mesa State College in Grand Junction, Colorado. He has published one book, A
Man Explains His Posture, and another book, Kismet, Colorado is
forthcoming. His work has most recently appeared in Passages North
and South Carolina Review. He serves as editor for Pinyon Poetry
as well as for Pinyon Press and Frank Cat Press. Most recently, he has been
experimenting with fragmenting both voice and narrative.
Judith Skillman, Commentary on “An Eglantine Rose”
In
her poems over the last few years, Skillman explains that she has been
writing and revising “formal stanzas of four and five lines (without
rhyme) to capture a kind of pre-memory and related image. In honeysuckle, I
found my father’s death by cancer, and in cottonwood snow, his life. ‘An
Eglantine Rose’ also deals with my father’s death. I don’t view these
poems as confessional, although they are certainly personal.”
Biographical
Note
Judith
Skillman teaches for City University in the College of Business, Arts and
Humanities. Her books include Worship of the Visible Spectrum,
Beethoven and the Birds, and Storm, which received the Eric Mathieu
King Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her collection, Red Town,
is forthcoming in 2001 from Silverfish Review Press. Her poems have appeared
in Poetry, Southern Review, Iowa Review, Prairie
Schooner, Yellow Silk, and other journals.
Richard Shelton, “Destination”
Biographical
Note
Richard
Shelton is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Selected
Poems: 1969-1981 (University of Pittsburgh Press) and Hohokam
(Sun/Gemini Press). His memoir, Going Back to Bisbee (University of
Arizona Press), won the Western States Award for Creative Nonfiction in
1992. He is a Regents Professor of English at the University of Arizona in
Tucson.
Virgil Suarez, “Temporalis,” “The
Alcohol Component at El Centro del Pueblo, East Los Angeles” and “River
Fable”
Biographical
Note
Virgil
Suarez was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1962. He is the author of four published
novels—Latin Jazz, The Cutter, Havana Thursdays, and Going
Under—and of a collection of short stories, Welcome to the Oasis.
His poetry, stories, translations, and essays continue to be published in
various journals, including TriQuarterly, The Ohio Review, Salmagundi,
New England Review, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review,
and Prairie Schooner. In The Republic of Longing, a new
collection of poetry, will be released in Spring 2000 by Bilingual Review
Press/Arizona State University.
Henry Taylor, Commentary on
“Encounter with a Soccer Ball” and “Valentine’s Daffodils”
Taylor
says that his two poems, “Encounter with a Soccer Ball” and
“Valentine’s Daffodils” represent “two slightly different ways of
arriving at a poem. ‘Encounter,’ like many short poems, is a single
response to a complex meeting between a certain state of mind and a certain
set of circumstances. The
quadrangle is that of Bowdoin College; I spend as much time as I can in
Brunswick, Maine, where my wife lives all year.
“‘Valentine’s
Daffodils’ is part of a larger project called Crooked Run. Early in
1999, I began writing in what felt like a new way about the wealth of
anecdote and scene amidst which I grew up, in rural northern Virginia. I
have drawn on that material since I started writing poems, but now I’m
working on a book whose geographical boundaries are the watershed of Crooked
Run, a small stream in west-central Loudoun County that drains an area of
maybe fifty square miles. Most of the poems so far are longer than a page or
two, and play with the tensions between unity and digression. Other poems
from the group are in the fall issues of Antioch Review, Georgia
Review, and Missouri Review.”
Biographical
Note
Henry
Taylor is Professor of Literature and Co-Director of the MFA Program in
Creative Writing at American University. His books of poems include The
Flying Change, winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize, and Understanding
Fiction: Poems 1986-1996. In the spring of 2000, Louisiana State
University Press will publish his Brief Candles: 101 Clerihews. His
essays and translations are also widely published.
Patricia Waters, Commentary on “On a Frosty Morn”
Waters
says that “On a Frosty Morn” originated in the dreams that followed her
father’s death: “My mother had died some years before; because I had my
father and my young growing family, things—the structure of my
life—seemed intact. But with my father’s death, it was as if a process
of dissolution began, my life unmoored. The man I married was a stranger;
our twenty years together, like sugar dissolving. And then the dreams
came—dreams of place and presence. They were a great solace. Not only
that, they created a continuum, a kind of thread between the past, that
childhood gone, and the unfolding present.”
Biographical
Note
Patricia
Waters has published poetry in Southern Humanities Review, Chattahoochee
Review, Louisville Review, and many other journals. Twice
nominated for a Pushcart Prize, she has attended various writers’
conferences, including Mt. Holyoke and Squaw Valley, but she has
consistently returned to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference where Donald
Justice has been her teacher for several years.
Interview
Bobbie Ann
Mason
Biographical
Note
Bobbie
Ann Mason lives in Kentucky and is the author of several books, including In
Country, Midnight Magic, Clear Springs: A Memoir, and Spence
+ Lila. Her first collection of short stories, “Shiloh” and Other
Stories, won the Ernest Hemingway Award in 1983.
Photography
Cade White, “The Minors: Battling for the Future”
Biographical Note
Cade
White directs the photojournalism sequence at Abilene Christian University
where he is an instructor in the Department of Journalism and Mass
Communication. He has worked as a photographer for the Temple Telegram,
the Abilene Reporter-News, and most recently, the San Angelo
Standard-Times.