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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 18 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! |
Richard Hedderman
"The Art of Writing"
This poem started, as many of my poems do, with the last line: “the thunderheads.” I came across that word in a poem some years ago, and kept it tucked it away, thinking it would make a dramatic finish for a poem someday. I then started thinking of all the things one does to avoid writing, the many sad and foolish tasks we assign ourselves to keep us from doing the real work of it. I began to build the poem backward from there.
I made a list of hypothetical procrastinations, but maybe a little less pedestrian and more quirky than the typical daily tasks like washing the dishes or doing laundry: sorting the paint cans in the basement, checking the opera schedule, looking up used bookstores, etc. I wanted the tasks to be just a little off-kilter, a bit left of center so they’d sustain the reader’s imagination. Truth be told, most people today would likely perform the searches on the web. But web searches don’t have that kind of sorry, hang-dog, pathetic-ness I wanted in the poem.
I had the idea that if I wrote about the difficulty of the writing process, the challenge of sustaining creative attention, I’d loosen its grip a notch or two. For me, it was a way of thumbing my nose at the whole dismal process. (Take that writer’s block. Pow—right in the kisser!)
The middle passages of the poem that lead the reader on a walking tour of the anatomy of the human hand, are a dumb show of absorption in the preconscious work of poetic exploration. This is really what the poem is about. That and the regeneration of the artistic impulse, as suggested by the thunderheads. Ted Kooser writes in one of his poems: "Some part of art is the art/of waiting" (Ted Kooser, “Four Civil War Paintings by Winslow Homer,” from Delights and Shadows, Copper Canyon Press, 2004). That’s what this poem embraces and hopefully illuminates so that the waiting is cast as less of a burden, and more functionally generative.
I deliberately avoided in the poem any detailing of the actual writing process. There’s a sprawling gap in the time-frame seen in the second line of the fourth stanza between the words “fever,” and “what.” The poem skips what is suggested to be several hours of writing. Good. I want the focus to remain on the imperative of poetic consciousness, and how one may feel an ecstatic enlightenment that arises after it’s lifted. That’s a poetic leap I’m asking the reader to take with me.
A similar chasm spans the precipitous shift in scale (emphasized by the stanza break) from the spike weed—a small, earthly thing with spikes or spines of some kind—to the mass of black cloud roiling on the horizon—something bearing cooling rain, a curative darkness, and maybe a tremor of voltage to once again animate the whole dead-beast-Frankenstein thing of the poetic drive.
It doesn’t bother me, by the way, that there’s no such thing as spikeweed. It at least sounds like an authentic plant, one of those pernicious, indomitable things that overtake vacant inner city lots. I didn’t find any references to it on the web, nor in any dictionaries (though I did discover that “spiked” weed has cannabis implications . . .). I asked a botanist about spike weed, and he’d never heard of it.
For me, the point is that it evokes an image of a nasty, tough, thorny plant that, with the clarity of mind that attends the backside of an intense writing session, suddenly appears glorious as if the imagination has been purified, having passed through fire or some kind of healing immersion. And I like that the reader is investing his imagination in the image. It compels him to embrace it, hopefully before he has a chance to figure out that maybe spike weed isn’t real. It sounds real and, here, that’s good enough.
I expect that the reader will join me in yoking the weed and the writer as doppelgangers; both obdurate and tenacious.
I made a list of hypothetical procrastinations, but maybe a little less pedestrian and more quirky than the typical daily tasks like washing the dishes or doing laundry: sorting the paint cans in the basement, checking the opera schedule, looking up used bookstores, etc. I wanted the tasks to be just a little off-kilter, a bit left of center so they’d sustain the reader’s imagination. Truth be told, most people today would likely perform the searches on the web. But web searches don’t have that kind of sorry, hang-dog, pathetic-ness I wanted in the poem.
I had the idea that if I wrote about the difficulty of the writing process, the challenge of sustaining creative attention, I’d loosen its grip a notch or two. For me, it was a way of thumbing my nose at the whole dismal process. (Take that writer’s block. Pow—right in the kisser!)
The middle passages of the poem that lead the reader on a walking tour of the anatomy of the human hand, are a dumb show of absorption in the preconscious work of poetic exploration. This is really what the poem is about. That and the regeneration of the artistic impulse, as suggested by the thunderheads. Ted Kooser writes in one of his poems: "Some part of art is the art/of waiting" (Ted Kooser, “Four Civil War Paintings by Winslow Homer,” from Delights and Shadows, Copper Canyon Press, 2004). That’s what this poem embraces and hopefully illuminates so that the waiting is cast as less of a burden, and more functionally generative.
I deliberately avoided in the poem any detailing of the actual writing process. There’s a sprawling gap in the time-frame seen in the second line of the fourth stanza between the words “fever,” and “what.” The poem skips what is suggested to be several hours of writing. Good. I want the focus to remain on the imperative of poetic consciousness, and how one may feel an ecstatic enlightenment that arises after it’s lifted. That’s a poetic leap I’m asking the reader to take with me.
A similar chasm spans the precipitous shift in scale (emphasized by the stanza break) from the spike weed—a small, earthly thing with spikes or spines of some kind—to the mass of black cloud roiling on the horizon—something bearing cooling rain, a curative darkness, and maybe a tremor of voltage to once again animate the whole dead-beast-Frankenstein thing of the poetic drive.
It doesn’t bother me, by the way, that there’s no such thing as spikeweed. It at least sounds like an authentic plant, one of those pernicious, indomitable things that overtake vacant inner city lots. I didn’t find any references to it on the web, nor in any dictionaries (though I did discover that “spiked” weed has cannabis implications . . .). I asked a botanist about spike weed, and he’d never heard of it.
For me, the point is that it evokes an image of a nasty, tough, thorny plant that, with the clarity of mind that attends the backside of an intense writing session, suddenly appears glorious as if the imagination has been purified, having passed through fire or some kind of healing immersion. And I like that the reader is investing his imagination in the image. It compels him to embrace it, hopefully before he has a chance to figure out that maybe spike weed isn’t real. It sounds real and, here, that’s good enough.
I expect that the reader will join me in yoking the weed and the writer as doppelgangers; both obdurate and tenacious.
David M. Alper
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Marne Wilson
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Alice Hatcher
"Laughing Meditation"
I felt conflicted, very conflicted, when I began writing “Laughing Meditation,” the most directly autobiographical piece I have ever penned. I worried I was being cruel airing my family’s dirty laundry, even though I’m estranged from my family and write under a pseudonym. I feared, too, that I was subconsciously seeking pity and competing against my better judgment in the memoir genre’s occasional Olympics of Human Misery, making false claims to uniqueness and grasping at a medal fashioned from fool’s gold. Truth be told, I would be disingenuous saying I didn’t start writing “Laughing Meditation” in a moment of self-pity, as well as anger toward people who have never accepted responsibility for their past actions.
However, by the time I submitted “Laughing Meditation,” I had come to terms with the piece, having assured myself that the essay ultimately celebrates survival, and that it might offer inspiration to individuals who, as children, were routinely exposed to mental illness and its terrifying manifestations. My intention was never to hurt those who suffered, even as they inflicted pain, and continue to suffer. To protect others, and to gain safe authorial distance from fraught material, I avoided naming or discussing individuals in specific terms, mediating events with dark humor and keeping the emphasis on my own bungling attempts at healing. In ways I never intended or expected, I wrote myself into a place of forgiveness. Forgiveness is a difficult concept that means different things to different people. In “Laughing Meditation,” forgiveness has everything to do with gaining perspective on past injuries and finding a way forward, away from places of ruminating on (and often reliving) specific incidents.
A friend of mine once discussed forgiveness in terms of freeing oneself of debilitating obsessions with past injuries. She asked me to imagine lending someone twenty dollars, reminding that person of their debt every few days, and then becoming enraged each time that person offered an excuse for nonpayment. She urged me to consider the possibility that days could add up to years, decades, and then a lifetime spent mired in anger. She argued it would be wiser to forego the debt, to surrender fantasies of regaining what has been gambled away or squandered, than to spend my life obsessing over twenty dollars. I lost a great deal more than twenty dollars as a result of my childhood. Still, my friend had a point. My husband has similarly said that walking away from a bad situation, say, a high-stakes poker game run by heavily armed drunks, often means leaving something big on the table. Writing “Laughing Meditation” was about accepting loss—years lost to battling demons and salving wounds—and dissolving debts. It was about walking away with no expectations of redress or revenge and embracing the possibilities of the present. By the time I finished the essay, I felt overcome by gratitude for my husband, and for all the friends who have eased me from waking nightmares over the years. I completed “Laughing Meditation” in the spirit of love, wherever and whenever we might find it.
JOE COSTAL
"PUNCHER, AMERICA, AND FAKE-ASS JORDANS"
My friend and mentor Peter Murphy always says, good fiction is "telling a lie, telling a truth, telling a secret, and never telling which is which." I will attempt to tell the story of Puncher, America and the Fake-Ass Jordans without completely violating this rule.
Here are some truths. I grew up in West New York, NJ, on the Hudson River, in the shadow of the Manhattan skyline. An urban enclave notorious for being one of the most densely populated towns in all of America, possibly the world. 50,000 people live within the town's one square mile, literally on top of one another. Up into high-rise buildings dwarfed only by their proximity to our country's most iconic skyline.
I, myself, am a protypical West New Yorker: first-generation American, the son of a Cuban immigrant who fled his country when Communism invaded. My family's story, a novelty in my current, South Jersey life, was unremarkable, even mundane, by West New York's standards. There, Latinos were the overwhelming majority--eighty percent of the town's ethnic make-up at last census.
When I was growing up, the majority of this majority were Cubans like me. Families coaxed away from the warmth of immigrant-saturated Miami. Lured to the North Jersey embroidery factories, and the promise of jobs and housing. My father has this awesome picture of him in front of a South Florida billboard that reads: "Hudson County, New Jersey Welcomes All Cuban Immigrants." It's adorable, but also crazy to imagine the purposeful nature of social planning. My parents, sister and I shared our home, in true Latin style, with our abuelos, speaking Spanglish, feeling cold, distrusting anyone who wasn't Cuban, double-checking locks, second-hand smoking unfiltered Pall Malls and eating rice and beans with tuna fish sandwiches.
Coming to Glassboro in the Fall of 1995 was major culture shock for me. My friends still remind me about how I saw a wild bunny running in front of Chestnut during orientation and screamed about how it "must have gotten loose." I assumed it was a pet. There are no wild bunnies in West New York, in my defense. I remember having a hard time sleeping in the cricket quiet of Rowan, as well. No salsa/merengue, no soothing sounds of constant traffic down my narrow, one-way street. The other thing that Rowan gave me was a new sense of identity. Suddenly my Cuban-ness separated me. It made me unique. My fraternity brothers yelled "Cuba Libre" whenever I entered a room. They confused me with the other Latin identities that seemed so foreign to me in my youth in West New York.
As I closed in on graduation from Rowan, I was surprised to hear about all my South Jersey peers looking to move to Hudson County. On return visits home, I watched multi-million dollar condos develop on the cliffs where movie theaters and public parks once stood. I wrote the first drafts of this story as love letter to the old neighborhood, condemnation of gentrification and homage to the uniqueness of my experiences there.
But through the years, I abandoned and rediscovered the piece time and again. There was a narrative quality that seemed to fit prose better than verse, so I converted the poetic lines into a story and wrote a dozen versions. In the end, for years, I always felt something was off. I have always struggled to write my family truthfully. Though they are vibrant characters in reality. It is so much easier to pick and choose real traits and marry it to the West New York of my imagination. I do not name my hometown by name for that reason. The setting in my story is a composite. As the characters themselves are composites of people I have known, loved, feared and admired.
Christmas 2017, I found myself reminiscing about my abuela's well-intended off brand shopping. Going into my freshman year of high school, she once bought me a Jason Priestly Trapper Keeper with pink hearts on it and got extremely upset when I didn't want to use it. I didn't have fake Jordans, but I also never had real ones. And I got bullied more than once, but only once by the two kids I describe in my story. Though I never had a moment of redemption and escape like my narrator, I definitely have hit myself in the face with many objects meant to do other things. Things other than hit me in the face.
Here are some truths. I grew up in West New York, NJ, on the Hudson River, in the shadow of the Manhattan skyline. An urban enclave notorious for being one of the most densely populated towns in all of America, possibly the world. 50,000 people live within the town's one square mile, literally on top of one another. Up into high-rise buildings dwarfed only by their proximity to our country's most iconic skyline.
I, myself, am a protypical West New Yorker: first-generation American, the son of a Cuban immigrant who fled his country when Communism invaded. My family's story, a novelty in my current, South Jersey life, was unremarkable, even mundane, by West New York's standards. There, Latinos were the overwhelming majority--eighty percent of the town's ethnic make-up at last census.
When I was growing up, the majority of this majority were Cubans like me. Families coaxed away from the warmth of immigrant-saturated Miami. Lured to the North Jersey embroidery factories, and the promise of jobs and housing. My father has this awesome picture of him in front of a South Florida billboard that reads: "Hudson County, New Jersey Welcomes All Cuban Immigrants." It's adorable, but also crazy to imagine the purposeful nature of social planning. My parents, sister and I shared our home, in true Latin style, with our abuelos, speaking Spanglish, feeling cold, distrusting anyone who wasn't Cuban, double-checking locks, second-hand smoking unfiltered Pall Malls and eating rice and beans with tuna fish sandwiches.
Coming to Glassboro in the Fall of 1995 was major culture shock for me. My friends still remind me about how I saw a wild bunny running in front of Chestnut during orientation and screamed about how it "must have gotten loose." I assumed it was a pet. There are no wild bunnies in West New York, in my defense. I remember having a hard time sleeping in the cricket quiet of Rowan, as well. No salsa/merengue, no soothing sounds of constant traffic down my narrow, one-way street. The other thing that Rowan gave me was a new sense of identity. Suddenly my Cuban-ness separated me. It made me unique. My fraternity brothers yelled "Cuba Libre" whenever I entered a room. They confused me with the other Latin identities that seemed so foreign to me in my youth in West New York.
As I closed in on graduation from Rowan, I was surprised to hear about all my South Jersey peers looking to move to Hudson County. On return visits home, I watched multi-million dollar condos develop on the cliffs where movie theaters and public parks once stood. I wrote the first drafts of this story as love letter to the old neighborhood, condemnation of gentrification and homage to the uniqueness of my experiences there.
But through the years, I abandoned and rediscovered the piece time and again. There was a narrative quality that seemed to fit prose better than verse, so I converted the poetic lines into a story and wrote a dozen versions. In the end, for years, I always felt something was off. I have always struggled to write my family truthfully. Though they are vibrant characters in reality. It is so much easier to pick and choose real traits and marry it to the West New York of my imagination. I do not name my hometown by name for that reason. The setting in my story is a composite. As the characters themselves are composites of people I have known, loved, feared and admired.
Christmas 2017, I found myself reminiscing about my abuela's well-intended off brand shopping. Going into my freshman year of high school, she once bought me a Jason Priestly Trapper Keeper with pink hearts on it and got extremely upset when I didn't want to use it. I didn't have fake Jordans, but I also never had real ones. And I got bullied more than once, but only once by the two kids I describe in my story. Though I never had a moment of redemption and escape like my narrator, I definitely have hit myself in the face with many objects meant to do other things. Things other than hit me in the face.
