Every morning my girl says “what’s for brefkist, mommy?” I love her dyslexic revision of the word. The word that means breaking the fast or opening the sun to a new sky. The world of sugary cereals floating in milk or eggs sizzling in bacon grease. The best breakfast is always the one brought to […]
Prose
Ellen Geist: Poor Us
We were very poor. By choice, you might say. Some of us were from Scarsdale, Shaker Heights, and Georgetown, but we never talked about that. I wasn’t from any of those places. My father always said we were “lower middle class,” growing up, but we were more in the middle than he cared to admit. […]
PBQ on the Small Presses: Discussing Narrative in Collage
Second in a Series Edited by Miriam R. Haier Marion Wrenn, Jason Schneiderman and Miriam R. Haier met on July 19, 2013 to discuss recent titles from Alice James Books. MW: I wanted to talk about the way that a collage-based work still does a kind of world-making. In a narrative collection, the world […]
Casey Wiley: In Fall We Are Leaves, in Winter We Are Snow, in Spring and Summer We Are Who Knows
His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling —James Joyce When does rain way up there become snow, we ask each other as ourselves walking side by side in a snow-drifty parking lot, late evening, snow falling, our heads dropped back like our necks are fake […]
Diana Spechler: My Boyfriend, Jesus
Today is the feast day of two Catholic saints–Saint Cletus and Saint Marcellinus–so of course I’m reminiscing about a guy I dated who thought he was Jesus. I don’t mean he thought he was Jesus in the enlightened, we-are-all-one sense, in which case he would have thought he was also Buzz Aldrin, Bill Clinton, Hillary […]
PBQ on the Small Presses: Understanding the Curatorial Logic of Four Way Books, first in a series, Edited by Miriam R. Haier
PBQ “Pressay” Project Marion Wrenn, Jason Schneiderman, Lorraine Doran and Miriam R. Haier met on September 9, 2012 for an essayistic conversation about the 2011 titles from Four Way Books. What can the books published by a small press in a single year tell us about editorial logic that pulls them together, and about the […]