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  • home
  • about
    • history
    • staff bios
    • community outreach
    • affiliations
    • contact
  • current issue
    • read Issue 25
    • letter from the editor
    • looking glass fall 2022
    • interview with Yuvi Zalkow
  • submit
    • submission guidelines
  • looking glass
    • through the looking glass
  • editorial content
    • book reviews
    • opinion
    • interviews
  • flash glass
    • flash glass 2023
    • flash glass 2022
    • flash glass 2021
    • flash glass 2020
    • flash glass 2019
    • flash glass 2018
    • flash glass 2017
    • flash glass 2016
    • flash glass 2015
  • media
    • art
    • audio
    • video
  • archive
    • award nominees
    • read and order back issues
  • Master of Arts in Writing program
    • about Writing Arts at Rowan University
    • application and requirements
  • newsletter
Glassworks
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lookingglass
Through the "Looking Glass," readers are invited to dig deeper into our issues as contributors share reflections on their work. Specifically, "Looking Glass" provides a sort of parlor where authors and artists reveal the genesis of their pieces, as well as provide meta-discursive insight into their textual and visual creative works. 
Issue 8 Reflections
Read on for reflections by select authors and artists
on the genesis and craft of their pieces in Glassworks
​
and then read the full issue online!
Read Issue 8

Brendan Lynaugh
"The Turtle"

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I’d always found something powerful and magical about the Christmas dinner my parents hosted with close family friends. None of us were Christian, in fact the other couples were Jewish, hence their reliable availability that time of year, but we found a benediction in gift giving and sharing a meal.

When I lost my father to cancer in November of my sophomore year of college, I knew the upcoming holidays would be difficult, but took solace in knowing the same couples would be joining my mom and brother and me for dinner.

In this quiet story, I wanted to capture the fortitude of a family, which has recently suffered a great loss. They take joy and strength in continuing a tradition that despite the memories, is dear to them. The action, the death of the father, has already occurred, the story lies in the aftermath.


Jeffrey Alfier
"Reward Sign on a Utility Pole for a Missing Guitar"

In my poetry I always hope to express the love affair I have with the imagistic capability and power of language. I express an invented presence: what my mind determines as the emotional resonance of a place. This includes vividness of local detail, and imaginative coherence. I like to see how an image may paint the world at large, hence the wider imaginative enactments in “Reward Sign on a Utility Pole for a Missing Guitar.” Usually we only see such signs for missing pets. It’s an unusual poem for me in that it has a slight fantasy bent to it. I can’t think of another poem of mine of that nature; as primarily a poet of Place – a regionalist, if you will – I stick very close to concrete elements. But for this poem, the fantasy element – for lack of a better term – enhances its overall imagery, and my imaginative solicitude of the man looking for the guitar’s return, thus turning the last line – normally a cliché – on its head.


Jennifer Robinette
"Never Lie to a Ghost"

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“Never Lie to a Ghost” began as a kind of dialogue with the more traditional, realistic fiction I’d been writing for some time. It occurred to me that I consistently create characters who are obsessed with and trapped by their pasts, so I began toying with the idea that I could transform that overall mood of claustrophobia and stasis into something resembling an actual haunting. I’d never even considered writing a ghost story before, but I’ve always admired thrillers like The Turn of the Screw that function on both literal and psychological levels. I wanted to write a story that would keep readers guessing and allow them to arrive at their own conclusions.

Carol Guess & Kelly Magee
"Struck"

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Collaboration reminds me of the joy and playfulness inherent in building stories with words. For the past year, Kelly Magee and I have been co-writing short stories together, each writing half a story, then passing it along for our collaborator to finish. With Animal, a collection of our work, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2015. The story "Struck" is special to us, because it represents the start of a second collection of short stories focused on the theme of illness and body memory. We're happy to be included in Glassworks.


Michael Hess
"Robot Cormorant"

"Robot Cormorant" is just one piece from a collection of essays I have been working on called A Man without a Camera.  I began this collection just after I had moved up to Toronto with my partner.  I was biking around the inner and outer edges of the city collecting footage with my camera.  A filmmaker, I was trying to get a feel for what was out there in my new environment.  I was taking shots of the shorelines, the ravines, the birds, especially the Double-crested Cormorant—anything that caught my eye.  The shots were what might be described as "nice" but I felt, perhaps not for the first time, that the camera was getting in they way of my experience.  As I observe in the title essay of the book:

“There is more than just capturing and watching scenes like this.  There is a way—there must be a way—to underline the moments at the shore, in the ravines, and on the trails like an eager student marking up a text because he cares about what he is learning and wants to remember it forever, wants to highlight it, hold on to it, get it.  With the camera in front of my eye, I am there and not there.  Focused on the framing, the lighting, and the capturing of action, the immediate experience of those moments in those places gets lost, or dilutes.  That’s why on a mild day in mid-October, I shut off the camera.  Not only did I shut off the camera on that day, but I was to keep the camera shut off for one full year.  There is a difference between piling up images on drives versus building a monument to the moments with words.” 

I was excited to get back to using the camera after the year was over.  I quickly developed a series of reflective video essays called “On the Trail.”  These pieces dovetail with some of the pieces in my collection; one piece echoes some of the sentiment of “Robot Cormorant.”  Please take a moment to view “Showstoppers,” which documents these incredible blackish birds on the Leslie Street Spit and offers that the shows in nature are equal to, or better than, those produced by man.   You can view the video by clicking here.

Kathie Giorgio
"Petit Poissons"

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As a part of her entry into middle school, my daughter Olivia had to take what were called “wheel classes:” six-week classes introducing a topic, and then hustling the students onto the next spoke.  This barely gave the kids time to do much of anything with the subject, other than memorizing what amounted to a few random facts.  Or in the case of her introduction to French class, a song.

Petit Poissons is a monotonous ditty and a standard part of the curriculum taught in many introductory French classes over the years.  My older kids, now adults, sang it when they took French in middle school.  The song has, conveniently, four verses.  In Olivia’s six-week intro class, weeks 2 – 5 were spent learning a verse of the song. By week 6, the students all sang the song lustily together, like the French folk they were trying so hard to be.

On the first day of Week 2, that song came home with my daughter and was sung around the house with gusto.  “Petit Poissons, Petit Poissons, nage, nage, nage!” complete with hands pressed together and swimming through the air.  Little fish, little fish, swim, swim, swim. And in my case, swim right smack into my ears and stay there for the entirety of the introductory course.

The song would not leave me alone. I sang it in the shower, I sang it in the car.  I heard it first thing in the morning and I hummed myself to sleep at night.  I even posted the darn thing as a status on Facebook, and my followers and fans immediately lambasted me with YouTube videos of cute children from all over the globe, singing the French little fish song.  Multicolored hands swam in the air.  No matter what I did, the song would not go away.  I was…well, hooked.

Simultaneously as I sang this song for several weeks, and so did my daughter, several domestic crimes happened way too close to our home.  In the next town over, an estranged husband walked into a spa/salon and shot his ex-wife point blank in the face as she sat at her work behind the reception desk.  A few days later and a few blocks away from my house, a man with a rifle forced his way into his ex-wife’s apartment and held her and another woman hostage after breaking the ex-wife’s arm.  A police officer was shot in this incident.  And a couple weeks after that, a few blocks in the opposite direction , a man stood on the sidewalk at a very busy intersection and shot his girlfriend, blazed her life out just like that, in front of all the end-of-workday traffic.

Petit Poissons, Petit Poissons, nage, nage, nage!

I sang and I was troubled.  Little fish, little fish, swim, swim, swim. Man kills woman, man hurts woman, man kills woman.  Neither the song nor the news would leave me alone.  The song was an internal constant.  The news, an external constant.  The headlines and commentary were everywhere.

In all the crimes, the facts came tumbling out like stones tossed in a river.  All the men had restraining orders.  All of them had orders to not have guns.  In one case, the final case, the man had only been out of prison for a month and already had new restraining orders against him by two different women, one of whom he killed.

All three men had priors. Most dating back for years, to when they were youths. So many women were hurt.

As I ruminated over the crimes, I kept singing.  In Petit Poissons, each verse leads to a larger fish eating a smaller one.  First the little fish swim. Then a barracuda eats them.  Then the barracuda swims.  He gets eaten by a shark.  The shark swims until he gets eaten by a great big whale. And finally, something eats the whale and there are no more fish. 

No more fish at all.  Non.  

As we approached the end of the French class’s six-week cycle, my daughter was singing the entire song, and so was I.  The song went in a circle, around and around and around, just like the spoke in Olivia’s wheel classes.  It was relentless.  In Petit Poissons desperation one day, I sat down at my computer and just wrote out the entire song, hoping that if I typed it, if I physically put the words onto the paper, I could land the horrible little ear worm there and I could hear other music again.

It didn’t work.

“Petit Poissons, Petit Poissons, nage, nage, nage!” I sang, visualizing all the videos of little children singing and swimming their hands in the air.  Very little children.  Preschoolers, kindergarteners.  In my mind, I saw a blonde kindergarten girl, wearing a sweet dress, sitting in a circle in music class, singing the song, swimming her hands, her fingernails pink as oyster shells.  As I pictured her, and as she and I sang, she turned in her circle and looked directly at me.  Such blue eyes.   

And so I wrote a scene where this kindergarten girl sang the song.  Behind her, a boy appeared, sitting cross-legged, criss-cross applesauce, as they say in schools now.  He wore a red and white striped polo shirt.  Jeans.  He smiled and sang too. But the whole time he did, he also poked and jabbed her with his pressed fish hands.  He poked her to distraction. Then to bruises.  And no one could stop it.  Not the teacher, not the principal, not the parents. 

Swim, swim, swim.  Poke, poke, poke.

“Barracuda, Barracuda, nage, nage, nage!” I sang.  I thought of my daughter, just entering middle school, her lengthening fingers forming fish fins in the air.  Middle school is only three years here in my town, and high school was looming on a not-so-distant horizon.  Those long-fingered hands swam in my mind, and then dove, instead of into air, into silk.  A young girl, getting ready for a homecoming dance, wearing a dress as blue as the sea, a dress that made her feel beautiful.  And then the same boy, the kindergarten jabber, but older now, appeared at her side.  He enticed her and brought her to his house.  Where the word no had no importance whatsoever.

Non.

Nage, nage, nage.


I wrote it all down, humming.

The shark swam next and I sang next, and on the page, a woman appeared at work, a single mother, bullied into doing unspeakable things for her boss just to keep her job.  The boss, the same boy who jabbed in kindergarten, now grown into a shark.

Poke, poke, poke.

The fish grew larger and ate the smaller, ate them all up, until…there were no more fish.

Oh, non!  Elle a mangé tous les poissons!

In my mind, with that last ultimate swallow, and with the imagined crack of a gunshot, the song stilled, then swam away.  In its place, I had a story. The events in the news still left me troubled, but I was soothed.  I saw how these awful events could happen, and now, so could readers.  Maybe the circle-round of the song, of the crimes, could be stopped.  Once a rhythm is established, once you are aware of it, like the nervous tapping of your foot, you can stop it.  I felt the rhythm of the song, then halted it.  And I hoped that if I left my readers with an awareness of that rhythm that led to all the fish being eaten, all the women being hurt and killed, my readers would help to stop it too.



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