Fringe, the Noun that Verbs Your World

(Each Tuesday during Occupy Fringe, Jeff Questad will bring us a roundup of the latest Occupy news.)

– — This week Occupy groups in major cities celebrated Thanksgiving by serving meals for protestors and the homeless. Let’s give thanks for what at least seems like a de-escalation of the violence of last week. After New York, Oakland, Seattle, Portland, Berkeley and U.C. Davis, the week seemed relatively serene.

– — Our usual way of thinking about these things is that the perpetrators of police violence are rogue officers, individuals who respond with a little too much zeal in a situation where everyone is tense. The police definitely want us to believe that their violence amounts to isolated events, mistakes happening when police are pushed too far.

But Naomi Wolf suggests something far more sinister in the most talked about Occupy media story of the week. Wolf looks at the madness of last week, from Zuccotti to California, then traces the command chain from local police up to the U.S. Congress. She says last week was “the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence.” She says protestors are threatening a symbiotic relationship between... more »

On Monday we featured three poems by Aneesa Davenport, “A Prayer Toward Sleep,” “Application for Remembrance,” and “Lover’s Complaint.” Here Aneesa talks about how she made them:

These poems came from a prompt given to me in school (either by Gabrielle Calvocoressi or Brian Teare) to write a poem reclaiming or repurposing language from your past, be it from church services, playground taunts, or a parent’s foreign tongue. Certain words, particularly in the first poem, such as “worrywart,” “backbiter,” and “watchword,” are terms I closely associate with my upbringing (in my family, two of the worst things you could do were worry needlessly and talk behind others’ backs), as is “sustainer,” which is from the grace we said nightly before dinner. Others, such as “tincture,” “toddy,” and “simple syrup,” remind me of the Southern influence my mother brought with her when she moved to California, where I was born.

I coupled the original prompt with two others: Write a prayer and Write a direct address, and from this combination a form naturally emerged which informed the other two poems. Self-imposed constraints like these—and those which arise simply by writing in series, or which are based on meter or rhyme or sound—are incredibly generative, because they... more »

(Each Tuesday during Occupy Fringe, Jeff Questad will bring us a roundup of the latest Occupy news.)

—— In the early morning hours of Tuesday, November 15, police in Manhattan raided the tent city in Zuccotti Park, arresting hundreds of protestors and dozens of journalists.  It was two days before the two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street and a Day Of Action planned to commemorate the day.

The park was dirty, says the City Of New York. Have you ever been to New York? The city is filthy. But Wall Street is clearly a very special street; cleaning it requires pepper spray, batons and hundreds of armored police officers descending on sleeping people in the middle of the night.

If New York is a city of stories, the Zuccotti Park evictions, their aftermath and the Day Of Action on Thursday are the source of most of them this week. Here are a just a few:

• New York City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez was knocked around and arrested.
• The Daily News editorially endorsed the raid; before one of their reporters was arrested, which they found it “alarming.” (Welcome to the 99%)
• Churches in New York have given refuge to protestors. The NYPD is now watching those churches:
• When they’re not protecting and serving... more »

This week, Fringe features poems by Aneesa Davenport. In “A Prayer Toward Sleep,” whose first line is quoted above, she writes, “You swell and gush, / you prompt, / you hush, / you lull, / you lust….”

God is not the only prompter here, though: on her blog, paragraphed.wordpress.com, Aneesa posts writing prompts and her own responses to them. It’s good reading, especially if you’re balanced at that spot where you could fall toward your writing or away from it into distraction, and wish to be tipped toward the desk.

Do survey these three poems, and check out Aneesa’s notes on how she made them.

When I first heard about the Occupy Wall Street movement, I regarded it with the same attitude I reserve for my fantasies about other important moments in history; it felt distant and impenetrable—a story available only for my passive, albeit passionate, consumption. So, when I learned that Austin was about to begin its very own occupation, I eagerly took an inventory of which of my skills and interests I could contribute to the cause.  I went to a few preliminary general assemblies and sat quietly in the back, understanding that my presence mattered, but feeling nonetheless like dead weight.  Here were energetic people who collected donations, organized childcare, and drafted mission statements, but, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t envision myself filling any of these roles.

Then, during one meeting, my mind wandered to a text I had recently taught to a group of college students.  In the first book of Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift maroons his titular character on an island full of tiny people (called Lilliputians), who signify their political affiliations by modifying the height of their shoe heels—a difference that, imperceptible to the comparably gigantic Gulliver, limits each Lilliputian to choosing either one or the other political party,... more »

How We Got Peace At Last

Three hundred angels sang Hallelujah
While the birds ate porridge.
Never have I seen such a songfest
Said the King to the Queen.
Put a humble blackbird first
And we shall have plums
Said the Prince.

Chaos reigned among the land
In the US-Libya decision room.
Send planes missiles bombs
The priest cried.

And sure enough,
Just like that
Planes soared!
Missiles slammed buildings!
Bombs exploded bridges and heads!
And chaos reigned among the land
And here at home as well
Here at home as well.

(Editor’s note: For as long as it takes, Fringe is giving over its blog to original work inspired by the Occupy protests. Send your essays, poetry, short stories, artwork, photography and whatever else you’ve got, including questions, to FringeTheMagazine@gmail.com. See guidelines here, and catch up with previous posts.)

This week we’re pleased to offer “Spoon,“ inventive new flash fiction from Emily Sandberg. Below, Emily talks about the story’s inception, her mother’s reaction, and what is lost as spoon-pens become a thing of the past.

I don’t know who first came up with the idea of taping a piece of plastic cutlery to a pen, but I suppose I should thank him or her or them—if it was a group effort—for making this story possible. It’s such a great low-tech solution that I spent longer than I’m willing to admit wondering what else it could be applied to; what else might someone not want to part with?

A plastic spoon taped to a pen may soon become a thing of the past. They now have those machines at many check-outs where you sign on a screen with a stylus. I don’t like those machines. Too often the screen is scratched or not as responsive as paper is to pen so that my name doesn’t look right when I sign it but instead looks misspelled or as if someone else wrote it, which is disturbing since my name is the one thing I can always, or at least usually, count on getting right... more »

Photo from Reason.com

When Scott Olsen was critically injured in an October 25 police clash with Occupy Oakland protestors, Americans wondered how a citizen, a Marine, could suffer such traumatic injuries in a protest setting. Olsen’s skull was fractured by a police weapon fired at close range.

There’s no meaningful timeline for when or how Oakland will fully answer questions about what happened that day. American media seems to lack the attention span to stick with the story. We might look to Europe. The Guardian UK, diligent in its coverage of the Olsen story, offered 10 questions the police and the City of Oakland must answer. Some were basic. What exactly was Mr. Olsen shot with?

Police claim to use “non-lethal” weapons. This can mean bean bag projectiles or rubber bullets. Video taken on the ground seems to show something much less innocuous; an OPD officer, in heavy gear, takes aim directly at Olsen. The young protestor is standing still, his back to the police. When he goes down, the same officer appears to throw an explosive at people trying to help him.

It’s no wonder the city wants to take its time and choose its response carefully.

Now another young man has gone down. Incredibly, he... more »

(For as long as it takes, Fringe is giving over its blog to original work inspired by the Occupy protests. Send your essays, poetry, short stories, artwork, photography and whatever else you’ve got, including questions, to FringeTheMagazine@gmail.com. See our full Occupy submission call here.)

In These Fluorescent Times

Buy shades, rose colored to return to some balance of light. Glare and flicker, reddened hands as though work were more than something we’ve outsourced. Fungible labor force, that’s what the brother-in-law said, as though it were something lovely, like ganache, or the moment you turn the lights out on a day that’s lasted far too long. How much carbon equals one candle-power? Hands out, the fungible wait beside the supermarket; but this is far from the one where the brother-in-law shops; he believes in keeping up, once put his mother’s old furniture out on the street when he moved her to the Cosmopolitan.

Occupation

Capitalism. Don’t be afraid of the word. Try it over
and over, until you no longer need to pass the cap
to pay for the beer and pizza. Consider orthography.

Preoccupation, the antonym of action, how many ants
trail through the kitchen. Get out, take a walk, look
at the action of trees in the afternoon breeze.

Each... more »

Poetry editor Anna Lena Phillips writes about the tactile joy of broadsides, and their value as objects for trade, for sale, and for friends in today’s Fringe feature.

Are you convinced? Will you be zooming out to buy broadsides or put your own work on cards?

Protestors, and protest-watchers: We invite you to occupy the Fringe blog for the next week or two. Send us reflections on and documentation of your local Occupy movement. We’d love to see work in many different mediums and formats.

Send us:

scenic descriptions
poetry
stories
personal essays
photography and visual art
other odds and ends

If you need inspiration, you might check out the excellent Occupy Writers, or read some of Fringe’s greatest civil disobedience hits:

• Someone Else’s Ivy by Amy L. Clark — about a worker’s revolt led in a Harvard tea shop
• Mississippi Freedom Summer in Eight Vignettes by Michael Royce — A firsthand account of the summer of 1968 written by the only white guy on Stokley Charmichael’s jailhouse sock-football team.
• Inside the World of ‘Unskilled’ Labor by Anna Lena Phillips — a review of Gabriel Thompson’s Working in the Shadows, a nonfiction book about the time he spent doing ‘unskilled’ labor.
• Other stuff from last year’s Working issue.

Submit original work to FringeTheMagazine@gmail.com. In the coming days we’ll post selections on our blog as part of the Occupy Fringe series. Please include a brief bio, and the location of the Occupy movement you’re reflecting on.

Best,

The Editors of Fringe
www.fringemagazine.org

This week we’re pleased to offer “Ringlet” from Russell Hehn. Below, Russell fills us in on the story’s inception. Did you enjoy “Ringlet?” Any questions or comments about the piece? Have your say below.

I heard a story on the radio a while back about Amelia Earhart’s last radio transmission before she disappeared off the face of the earth forever. It’s sad enough to think that people die and lose their voices, but it’s another thing when people just plain evaporate. They could be out there doing all sorts of things that we’d never ever know about. Perhaps they’re doing math in the desert sand with their fingers, or living in the black pools of a cave among sightless fish, or naked in a hut with a cadmium halo whizzing about over their heads that connects them to people who are very good at and earnest with their prayers. It stands to reason that Amelia Earhart was doing one of those things if she did not immediately die. Being that I have some strange fixation with monks, the third option seemed most suited to my sensibilities. Had I gone with either of the other two I would not have been so interested... more »

Fringe seeks submissions for its sixth-anniversary theme issue: REMNANTS.

Remnants are fragments, scraps, traces of what came before. Remnants are the slivers of soap left in the dish and mashed into a ball. They’re Sappho’s poems, incomplete, but evocative; the crumbling, Gilded Age mansions of Detroit, vestiges of better times; the still-burning bits of rig from the Deepwater Horizon spill; the vacation train ticket found stashed in your wallet, half a decade later; and the love letters scattered by the Joplin tornado. Remnants—the remainders of our lives—speak to the whole that has vanished.

As always, we invite you submit work that engages the theme topically and/or formally.

Submissions for art close February 15, 2012. All other submissions close March 15, 2012. Please follow our guidelines, and add “Remnants” to your subject line.

Here are some Remnant-themed possibilities to get your mind going:

From the Fever-World, by Jehanne Dubrow
Y: The Last Man, by Brian Vaughn and Pia Guerra
Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood
The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien
Found Magazine
Blood Dazzler, by Patricia Smith

Fringe Magazine was founded in 2005 by an all-women group of editors dedicated to political and experimental literature. The quarterly online journal has published work by more than 120 writers and artists since its first issue in February... more »

Roxane Gay shares with us the inspiration for this week’s story:

“Begin Chest Compressions” started with Olive Garden. I live in a town where there is no Olive Garden but we see the commercials for the restaurant all the time. The rhetoric of Olive Garden commercials drives me insane because it’s more reheating station with wait service than an actual restaurant. When they say things like, “When you’re here, you’re with family,” they’re just so full of crap. I started to think about the kind of person who would enjoy eating at the Olive Garden (not that there is anything wrong with that, their salad is awesome). I imagined the kind of person who would consider a meal at such a restaurant a culinary experience and how sad that would be but I didn’t want to make that person square or cheesy. When I first started writing the story, it was just about Chad as this average guy who loves nothing more than going to Olive Garden for date night with his girlfriend, a woman who is far less enamored with the restaurant. I believe in the attraction of opposites so I started to wonder what a woman like Sarah would be... more »

Before I made my first trip there, Texas seemed a state of mythic proportions. Huge expanses of open land, football games that were played to the death, and heavy laden gun racks on the back of every pick-up truck. And while I visited Austin (which was satisfyingly weird) the bigger-than-life impression of Texas remained, because above everything, it was state pride that loomed large.

In Lone Star Love, Andy Ross examines the folks that take this pride to the extreme: the secessionists. Just cocky or off their rocker, they treat Ross to a show he’ll not soon forget.

This week in Fringe, we’ve got three poems from Nathaniel Perry, from a longer series called “An Invitation to Rache.” Perry’s first book, Nine Acres, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Award, is just out from Copper Canyon Press. Here he answers some questions about both, starting with how he came upon the structure for the book.

My book, Nine Acres, came about through a chance encounter with an older, better, book.  I have been interested for quite some time in growing vegetables, canning, raising chickens, etc. Basically trying to take care of myself and my family by taking care of the place I live as best I can. Of course backyard homesteading and organic growing and local eating is all embarrassingly (and wonderfully, I suppose) hip these days, but it is nothing new. There was the back-to-the-land movement in the 1960s and 70s, which brought us the Nearings and their Good Life, the organic growing philosophies of Eliot Coleman, the Whole Earth Catalog, etc., and this was preceded by a similar “flight from the city” in the 1930s (and I might add that Gary Snyder has rightly pointed out that these sorts of movements, returns to the land, have occurred regularly... more »

Texas author Stefan Merrill Block explores the space between fact and history, memory and truth in his second novel, The Storm at the Door.  The fact is that Block’s grandfather, Frederick Merrill, was sent to an insane asylum in the early 1960s. The history, passed down through generations, is that Block’s grandmother, Katharine Mead Merrill, sent Frederick there and was forced to raise their four young daughters on her own. The memories are sparse and varied, and the truth, well, the truth may be what Block’s fictionalized account approaches.

The novel is part biography and part fiction, with Block himself appearing as narrator during the biographical passages. In one such passage, Block introduces Katharine at Echo Cottage, the family’s summer home, over twenty years after her choice to send Frederick to Mayflower (based on the famous McLean mental hospital outside of Boston). From the beginning, Block acknowledges how little he actually knows about his grandparents’ lives. About Katharine, Block wonders, “What do I know of her? That she was so often in that chair. That in the afternoons, she often slept. That, one afternoon, in the summer of 1989, she woke from a nap to make the vexing decision that she... more »

Victoria Horkan’s pieces are featured in Fringe Issue 28.

Artist Statement

Victoria Horkan’s work offers a bold, vibrant and expressive milieu of forms and colours that falls somewhere between the realms of impressionism, abstraction and expressionism. She conveys and engages with scale and perspective, making large what is typically small but her central focus is on colour, and movement. As a child she recalls experiencing the somewhat exhilarating sense when for instance an aeroplane would appear too close to the ground. Seeing sculptures that would appear overpowering in their scale, this would both offer to excite and cause an indescribable sense of oppression that to date she seeks to explore.

Pure, bright colours that are set in contrasts of light and dark, combined with loose, distinct brushstrokes that resonate strongly with the impressionist movement. This buoyant mark marking is the sign of an assured and mature artist and the manner in which they are applied creates a sense of fluidity giving the work an energetic, flickering quality that is particularly evident in her Butterfly work. Horkan is indeed fascinated by the idea of interpreting motion and used to sit in the dance studios at Bretton Hall College in order to try and capture the... more »

This week we’re pleased to publish “Gringa,” new fiction from Carmen Adamucci. Below, Carmen shares with us the story’s inception and some of his own experiences in the peach orchards.

I’ve met some really cool migrant workers in my life.

On our farm in southern New Jersey they arrive each spring, in compact cars and pickup trucks, in mini vans, cargo vans, retired school buses–FARM LABOR TRANSPORT stenciled on the side. Picking peaches is tough, even when compared to other types of farm work, and it’s not uncommon for a greenhorn to leave after his first day in the orchard, maybe before his first lunch break: there’s the picking-bag strapped to his chest, the ladder, the pressure from anxious farmers, squeezing peaches every ten minutes, hollering every five, worried they might lose the block because a stubborn heat wave has slowed the crew down while ramping the maturating process up.

And of course, there’s also the fuzz.

Seriously. I’ve seen some tough-ass men annoyed into submission by peach fuzz, trudging out of the orchard cursing the stuff, scratching the back of their necks so hard you’d expect trickles of blood. And I never blamed these deserters either (well almost never), for minimum wage is... more »