A Discussion on the Art of Publishing

Wednesday, November 9, 7 pm
The Hook & Ladder Theater
3010 Minnehaha Ave, Minneapolis

Co-presented by Rain Taxi and the Walker Art Center

Join us as we welcome celebrated artist Paul Chan for a conversation on the art of publishing, in all its messy social practice! This event is free.

Born in Hong Kong in 1973, New York-based artist, writer, and publisher Paul Chan came to prominence in the early 2000s with vibrant moving image works that touched upon aspects of war, religion, pleasure, and politics. In 2009, following a decade of art-making, Chan embarked on a self-imposed break, turning his attention to publishing and the economics of information by founding the press Badlands Unlimited, which experiments with a range of conceptual and material publishing practices. 

At this special Twin Cities event, Paul Chan joins Rain Taxi editor Eric Lorberer for a conversation in the spirit of Badlands about the artistry of independent publishing.  Also sure to be discussed will be Chan's new book Above All Waves: Wisdom from Tominaga Nakamoto, the Philosopher Rumored to Have Inspired Bitcoin, and local independent writers, artists, publishers, and booksellers will be part of the mix too. It’s a meeting of the minds not to be missed!

Copies of Breathers, Above All Waves, and a selection of other books (by Paul Chan, by Badlands, by Rain Taxi, and by innovative Twin Cities publishers) will be available for purchase, and a book signing and reception will follow the talk. 

Note: For the opening of the Walker Art Center exhibition Paul Chan: Breathers, curated by Pavel S. Pyś with Matthew Villar Miranda, Paul Chan will be in conversation with writer Aruna D'Souza on Thursday, November 17 at 6 pm—also highly recommended!  For more details about this event, see here.

To purchase issue #107 using Paypal, click here.

INTERVIEWS

Ryan Blacketter: His Own Private Idaho  |  interviewed by Arthur Shattuck O’Keefe
Hillary Leftwich: The Power of Intention  |  interviewed by Zack Kopp

FEATURES

Elements of the Icelandic Saga  |  by Emil Siekkinen
The New Life  |  a comic by Gary Sullivan
On Writing in Public and Helping the Public Write  |  by Eric Elshtain

Plus: cover art by Kameron White

FICTION REVIEWS:

Manywhere  |  Morgan Thomas  |  by Madison Brown
Dreamland Court  |  Dale Herd  |  by Joe Safdie
Night Train  |  A.L. Snijders  |  by Joel Tomfohr
Morning Star  |  Ada Negri  |  by Erik Noonan
The Suffering of Lesser Mammals  |  Greg Sanders   |  by Justin Courter
I Who Have Never Known Men  |  Jacqueline Harpman  |  by Daniel Byronson
The Hospice Singer  |  Larry Duberstein  |  by George Longenecker
Movieland  |  Ramón Gómez de la Serna  |  by Richard Kostelanetz

NONFICTION / MIXED GENRE REVIEWS:

Late Fragments: Flares, My Heart Laid Bare, Prose Poems, Belgium Disrobed  |  Charles Baudelaire  |  by Patrick James Dunagan
The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened  |  Bill McKibben  |  by James Lenfestey
Ways of Walking  |  Ann de Forest, ed.  |  by Joe Samuel Starnes
What’s Good: Notes on Rap and Language  |  Daniel Levin Becker  |  by Grace Utomo
Becoming Story: A Journey among Seasons, Places, Trees, and Ancestors  |  Greg Sarris  |  by Dustin Michael
The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History  |  Elizabeth Sewell  |  by Patrick James Dunagan
The Clean Daughter: A Cross-Continental Memoir  |  Jill Kandel  |  by Sandra Eliason
The Naked Don’t Fear the Water: An Underground Journey with Afghan Refugees  |  Matthieu Aikins  |  by Jonathan Shipley

POETRY REVIEWS:

Punks: New & Selected Poems  |  John Keene  |  by Walter Holland
Madness  |  Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué  |  by Eric Aldrich
Opera Buffa  |  Tomaz Salamun  |  by John Bradley
Drive  |  Elaine Sexton  |  by Greg Bem
Of Being Neighbors  |  Daniel Biegelson  |  by Abbi Adest
Out of Order  |  Alexis Sears  |  by Gale Hemmann

COMICS REVIEWS:

Flung Out Of Space: Inspired by the Indecent Adventures of Patricia Highsmith  |  Grace Ellis and Hannah Templer  |  by Greg Baldino

Kameron White is a comic artist, illustrator, and designer that specializes in fantasy, superhero, and slice-of-life comics while also illustrating stylized depictions of diverse groups and putting out bold and colorful pieces. He’s worked on horror anthologies, LGBTQ+ anthologies, and Indie comics. Learn more on his website at spacejamkam.com.

Kjersti A. Skomsvold
Translated by Martin Aitken
Open Letter ($15.95)

by J. Ahana-Laba

Although often sentimentalized, motherhood can be a distinctly jarring experience, one rife with resurfaced pains, tender loves, and the echo of long-lost memories. In The Child, Kjersti A. Skomsvold does not shy away from the brutal truth of the matter; she exposes us to a luminous, impassioned chronicle in which the tragedies and ecstasies of motherhood will trample and simultaneously renew the heart of the reader with unbridled force.

With lines like “I thought about the deepest darkness in which the child lay, and there I was, making it even darker with all my miserable thoughts,” Skomsvold breathes life to depression; deep-set anguish is laced in prose-poetic language, and a shot of raw intensity penetrates its pith. Recollection of this darkness that sweeps through the psyche and stalks it with infirmity, self-loathing, and sorrow is juxtaposed with vignettes regaling the euphoria of life in the form of a budding relationship with the narrator’s husband Bo — and a palpable being budding into existence.

Life is chock-full of regrets and woe. The narrator has an old lover too, one with whom she has a powerful but tumultuous bond — and she witnesses first-hand the decay of this lover, as he slips into bleak pitfalls, alcoholism, and numbness to life without her. As he plummets further and further into despair, she realizes she must sever the bond. Not long after, however, the lover commits suicide. “I think he wanted to live, but that it was too difficult for him.”

In the process of burgeoning motherhood, all these memories come surging back to her, though she wonders “if the guilt I feel means that I’m guilty.” She is frightened by her memories; she believes they may poison her forthcoming children and her relationship with Bo, and that she may be too broken to live a life of her own. Untamed ripples of pain divorce her from rationality, engulf every ounce of her vitality. But when she first bonded with the man, she learned to untangle the mass of her unresolved traumas and, for the first time, discovered the freedom of vulnerability. It is a gradual process. She must write, she must declare love, because in doing so, she lays herself bare for others to see, and more importantly, for herself. When she says, “I felt life streaming into me,” she persuades us that our life, too, may be worth preserving.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2022 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2022

by Rasoul Sorkhabi

As Anglophile readers and art lovers already know, the Bloomsbury Group included several British writers, artists, and intellectuals who lived, studied, or worked together in or near London’s historical Bloomsbury district in the first half of the twentieth century. Many of these figures are little known today, but some, like Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, are still household names. Two recent books, both profusely illustrated and written by authorities in the field, rejuvenate the memory and legacy of the Bloomsbury men and women who, even though they did not consider themselves an official organization, ushered in new waves of artistic expression.

The Bloomsbury Group began in 1904 when Vanessa Stephen (aged 25) and her siblings Thoby (24), Virginia (23), and Adrian (21) moved from their parental home to a new one in Bloomsbury. Their father, the prominent literary critic Sir Leslie Stephen, had died in February that year, and their mother Julia had passed in 1895, after which the family lived in grief. The four siblings, all intellectuals, wished to leave their conservative, patriarchal, gloomy Victorian background behind and create a “house of their own.” As Virginia recalled after she married Leonard Woolf in her account titled “Old Bloomsbury,” “We were full of experiments and reforms. We were going to do without table napkins . . . we were going to paint; to write; to have coffee after dinner instead of tea at nine o’clock. Everything was going to be new . . .”

Thoby Stephen, a Cambridge graduate, invited his circle of friends to join the Stephens’ Thursday evening “at home” gatherings; known as the Cambridge Apostles, this group included Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes, and E.M. Forster. The Cambridge contingent was greatly influenced by the English philosopher George Edward Moore, author of Principia Ethica (1903), who believed in the importance of physical beauty, pleasure, and personal relationships in life, rather than the abstract, metaphysical, or idealistic views of the nineteenth century—an idea which the Stephens siblings adopted wholeheartedly as well.

Frances Spalding’s The Bloomsbury Group (National Portrait Gallery, $24.95) is published by the National Portrait Gallery in London, which houses many photographs and paintings of Bloomsbury Group members. Spalding (who has previously written biographies of Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant) touches on the life stories of nineteen Bloomsbury writers, painters, and intellectuals. Vanessa and Virginia Stephen, who did the most to hold the group together, are justifiably pivotal figures in the book; missing from the list, however, are their brothers Thoby and Adrian. Although Thoby died in 1906 (an untimely death from typhoid fever he contracted during a trip to Greece), his death brought the Cambridge Apostles and the Stephens closer. Adrian introduced not only his gay friends Duncan Grant and David Garnett but also Freudian psychology to the group, becoming (along with his wife Karin) one of the first British psychoanalysts. Vanessa, shortly after the death of Thoby, married Clive Bell, and the couple had an open marriage; indeed, open marriages, triangle relationships, homosexuality, and bisexuality were common among the many members of Bloomsbury.

Reading through Spalding’s book, it becomes apparent how close-knit the Bloomsbury Group was. For instance, Freud’s Complete Psychological Works—published by the Woolf’s Hogarth Press, which also released books by T. S. Eliot, Vita Sackville-West, and Virginia Woolf  herself—was translated and edited by James Strachey (Lytton’s younger brother). The index for the entire twenty-four volumes was compiled by Frances Partridge, the wife of Rex (“Ralph”) Partridge, who was previously married to Dora Carrington (Lytton Strachey’s partner).

Wendy Hitchmough’s The Bloomsbury Look (Yale University Press, $45) uses nearly 180 archived photographs, paintings, and cultural materials to visualize the lives and works of the Bloomsbury Group. Hitchmough is well positioned to write this fascinating book: She was curator for more than a decade at Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, where the Bloomsbury painters lived and created art works beginning in 1916 (Duncan Grant continued to live there until his death in 1978).  The Bloomsbury Look begins with an informative introduction to the group’s imagery and identity, followed by chapters analyzing the group’s photographs, fashions, and their decorative arts and paintings—all a big part of the group’s activities.

Perhaps at no point in history had literary and visual artists so closely interacted with each other as happened in Bloomsbury. Virginia Woolf, in search of a modern literary style, was so impressed by the post-impressionist works of her painter friends that she set aside the rigid rules of plot and characters, and created novels based on “stream of consciousness” and “inner dialogue,” as evident in Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando. Paintings of humans with no facial features found their equivalence in Woolf’s novels as non-articulated feelings and meanings. The Bloomsbury artists were not interested in big-picture politics or historical heroes; they were more concerned with ordinary people and small things of daily life.  Not surprisingly, the members inspired and supported each other in many ways; they read and critiqued each other’s works; they painted each other’s portraits; they wrote thousands of letters to each other and wrote about each other in diaries as well as books (Virginia Woolf’s biography of Roger Fry was published in 1940, and E.M. Forster’s biography of Virginia Woolf was published in 1942, only a year after Woolf drowned herself).

The sheer quantity of writings, paintings, and cultural materials that the Bloomsbury Group produced is staggering. The group was active, on and off, for six decades, from 1904 until the death of Vanessa and Clive Bell and Leonard Woolf in the 1960s. Interestingly, as the Bloomsbury leaders were fading away, their legacy was starting to be rediscovered by a new generation of free spirits, hippies, and feminists. The Bloomsbury Group came mostly from upper-class families; they, however, rejected bourgeoise mentality, and created their own sort of fashionable Bohemian lifestyle. Centennial celebrations of the Bloomsbury Group in 2004 coincided with the death of Francis Partridge, aged 103, the last surviving member of the group.

As the bibliography at the end of Hitchmough’s book shows, a large number of books have been published on the Bloomsbury Group: There are individual biographies as well as coffee-table books, encyclopedic handbooks, and detailed histories of the entire group (one of the earliest ones was written by Quentin Bell, Vanessa Bell’s son). Nevertheless, these two new illustrated works by Spalding and Hitchmough bring a fresh breeze to the life stories and legacy of the Bloomsbury Group, which has exerted a huge impact on literature, art, thought, and even fashion in our age.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2022 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2022

Pamela Uschuk
Red Hen Press ($16.95)

by Tara Ballard

“So you think that you can live remote / from city streets paved with bullet casings, / mass shootings in churches, refugee mothers in cages,” Pamela Uschuk questions in “A History of Morning Clouds and Contrails,” challenging both herself and the reader. Fortunately, it’s a challenge well met; Refugee reveals itself through a tapestry of well-crafted poems of urgency and the hope for meaningful change. Uschuk, winner of an American Book Award, here rejects the assumption that nature poetry is apolitical or unengaged with the social realm, instead asserting that climate crisis is inseparable from human crisis, domestic and international. She also rejects the myth of the solitary poet and draws on community, which she defines as an ecosystem of people, flora, and fauna. Through poems that powerfully render a world where individual action holds value and every life is one that matters, Refugee chronicles the many ways in which environmental and political disaster, cancer, and racism affect our ability to exist, live, and thrive. Through the literal and the metaphorical, the sensory and the narrative, Uschuk urges this recognition: “The mountains are burning and we cannot sleep.”

Uschuk begins Refugee with two epigraphs that serve as an anchor, pulling the reader into a bardic relationship in which the poems become messengers; they ask for writer, speaker, and reader to address their own obligations to the content and how it relates to the wellness of the world. Uschuk offers first Audre Lorde’s powerful acknowledgment that “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.” She follows this with an excerpt from Adam Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” a poem that riveted the world in the wake of 9/11. With these epigraphs, Uschuk sets the tone and the expectations for the collection ahead, as if warning: Yes, reader, I implicate myself, I implicate my country, and you, too, must join the work for social, political, and environmental justice.

Refugee is divided into four sections, titled “Skull Song,” “Axis,” “Liquid Book of the Dead,” and “Speaking of Angels and Ghosts,” respectively.  The sections grow in length, from seven poems to eleven to fifteen to nineteen, creating a crescendo-like accumulation, of story, tension, and the sensory as a place for healing and discourse.  Throughout, images are interwoven with specific political moments from 2016 to 2021, harrowing occasions that highlight the need for greater understanding and action.

In poems such as “Solar Eclipse in the Land of Sandstone Hoodoos and Cranes,” the collection highlights the speaker’s varied interactions with her environments, including beautiful (but not romanticized) depictions of Arizona, Florida, and the Himalayas. In many instances, Uschuk weaves resonance between these locales and the resilience needed to overcome cancer: “I have to make you sick to make you well, / the oncologist says, five months / we’ll scour each cell of your abdomen clean.” In doing so, Uschuk departs from the taught hierarchy of worth and recognizes how survival and death equalize us all, from the human to the hummingbird. In the sonnet “Green Flame,” the speaker portrays one such hummingbird and its death after hitting the poet’s window: “Too weak from chemo not to cry / . . . / I lifted her weightlessness into my palm.” The poem ends: “Mourning doves moaned, who, who / oh who while her wings closed against the tiny body / sky would quick forget as soon as it would forget mine.” Through poems like this, Uschuk cultivates a position of empathy and reflection, understanding that both are required for forward motion.

Throughout Refugee, Uschuk does not shy away from the difficult, and she uses particular species as entry points into much-need conversations about human rights. In “Cracking One Hundred,” Uschuk narrates a scene where “preschoolers worry about butterflies” being able to fly over the U.S.-made border wall along Mexico; by conjuring this image, Uschuk addresses the camps where children and parents seeking asylum are separated and held under inhumane conditions. The poem closes with a reference to the president’s declarations from “across the lush White House lawn where Monarch butterflies, / who’ve migrated all the way from Mexico, land / on bright rose petals.” Likewise, in “Talking Crow,” Uschuk immerses the reader in our nation’s history of violence, from lynch mobs to continued police brutality: “Here bullet holes chip downtown streets, / alternative facts to ropes slung over oak / branches that still remember”; the poem builds to the sonic echo of crows imitating the words of “mothers, wives” and “a child’s witness face”: “Don’t shoot. Don’t / shoot”—an irrefutable exposure of the oppressive systems that pervade American society.

Reaching the final poem of Refugee, “Gardenias at Easter,” one is compelled to start again at the beginning; the realizations she has offered permeate like “the gardenias that resurrect us, . . . call us back // ecstatic to the forgotten.” In this powerful collection grounded in the now, Uschuk calls for the re-membering and reconstructing of perceptions between place, animal, plant, and human.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2022 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2022

A.E. Copenhaver
Ashland Creek Press ($19.95)

by Garin Cycholl

The lost subtext of climate change is not in the mounds of data or winnowed diversity of lost species and habitats, the redrawn frost lines or earlier arrivals of “spring”—it’s in how denial has disfigured humanity. Is there even language for the uncanny shapes taken by time and space in this moment? Deep into A.E. Copenhaver’s novel My Days of Dark Green Euphoria, her protagonist Cara pokes the news buttons of her vehicle’s radio, thinking, “What fun to ponder the vocabulary of climate change with a reporter . . . whether climate breakdown, crisis, or emergency was more appropriate . . . while roaring down the freeway at seventy-seven miles per hour, getting fourteen miles per gallon.”

Winner of the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature, My Days of Dark Green Euphoria travels at that velocity. Cara, who seeks to maintain a negative carbon footprint, works at a nonprofit that advocates for more ecologically responsible choices and daily sorts through the Whole Foods dumpster for her breakfast on her way to work. She refuses to establish a permanent address; rather, she only housesits, shrinking into the lives of others. Stung with perpetual self- (and species-) awareness, she journeys within a “small, sad self.” From the moment that she was appointed as the “primary outhouse coordinator” in a school internship, this cursed insight has led her into an “eerie kind of evolutionary exile.” Her tolerance for other human beings has almost disappeared, although she realizes that solitude is not sustaining. Locating herself somewhere between the prophet Jonah’s Nineveh and Thoreau’s Walden, she has reached the recognition that there is “nothing noble anymore in living isolated from society.”

Through a housesitting gig, Cara meets Dan. Their relationship “works” through mutually satisfying sex and heightened “alone time” due to Dan’s intense travel schedule for his job, but Cara tries to imagine stitching her life further into his. One night, she puts him through an unknowing test as she watches him deal with a spider in the bathroom. Will he simply kill it? She furtively observes him in this eco-moral dilemma, then celebrates that he has to leave on business immediately thereafter, joyful “lest I allow my disappointment in him to fester into passive-aggressive reality.” The next weekend at brunch she meets Dan’s mother, Millie, who takes an entranced Cara out for a pedicure, street tacos, and a memorable trip down the liquor aisle in Target. Fascinated by the depth of Millie’s unthinking consumption, Cara crashes somewhere between the cosmetics counter and the drive home, having been derailed by their pilgrimage for fun.

The anxieties of finding an impossible balance that most of us feel ring deeply and physically from the outset of this novel. A wounded creature on a wounded planet, Cara seeks “some kind of sublimation . . . so [her] entire being disappears into ecological harmlessness.” Numbed and enraged, she follows cycles of self-denial and hopelessness; neuro-prophet and YouTube viewer, she recognizes that the necessary remedy is somewhere “deeper than molecular repair.” In COVID-tide, where so many of us feel spun between guilty binges of junk TV while also being laid open to the ugly realities at hand, Copenhaver’s insights strike a chord. Cara laments, “This was not the land of freedom; this was the land of dependency and disconnect,” and she realizes that everything is “bought and paid for . . . with the very fabric of our existence.” Against and within this insight, Cara works to come to terms with being alive in an increasingly broken world. With language that both makes the reader laugh out loud and awakens a cutting empathy, the novel follows her embodied journey splendidly.

Given its humor, sharp voice, and playful tone, readers might be tempted to label My Days of Dark Green Euphoria as Sex in the City turned inside out, with fewer characters and fuller ecological angst. Copenhaver, though, reaches much deeper into our consciousness of the shifts around and within us. This is a tough novel, replete with Cara’s consumption of graphic videos of the food-industrial complex and intense moments of personal disintegration. At the opening of the novel, she notes, “It’s almost a talent, to read the subtext of the world.” Copenhaver has brought that story into the light of our eerie present, recognizing the force of denial and how deeply planetary crisis has been a part of ourselves and our days.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2022 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2022

How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

Matt Bell
Soho Press ($15.95)

by Matthew Duffus

Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done is destined to join the upper echelons of the pantheon of craft books. Like Peter Ho Davies’s The Art of Revision (Graywolf Press, 2021), the book focuses on an oft-neglected aspect of fiction writing: revision. What’s more, he provides useful advice specific to novel writing, another underrepresented aspect. Bell’s three-draft approach begins not with a rough draft but with a “generative revision.” The emphasis here is on “an exploratory, organic, and above all playful approach” that will get words on the page and provide fodder for subsequent drafts.

As revision is recursive, Bell notes that these are better referred to as “stages,” which require moving both forward and backward, rather than drafts. No matter where one is in this process, Bell’s guidance will assist and encourage. Each chapter contains useful subheadings that allow readers to dip in and out as needed. For instance, “First Draft: Forward Progress, Generative Revision” includes sections such as “Learn What Book You’re Not Writing” (addressing the need to narrow one’s focus) and “Feed Your Imagination” (which includes a discussion of art versus life: “You’ll need to draw upon the art/life experience you already have, while replenishing and enlarging your experiential stockpile whenever you find your supply of inspiration wearing down.”) Bell provides one of the most useful explanations of these aspects around, in down-to-earth language that will help writers achieve these aspirations.

While “First Draft” is the longest chapter, its generative approach prepares writers for the work to come. For as much time as it takes most writers to get the first draft on paper, Bell views it as “not the novel itself but an idea of what a novel could be.” Moving from this “scale model” to the novel it will become requires new strategies, including what Bell calls a “narrative outline,” drawing on work from Anna Kesey and Jim Shepard, both of whom address pacing and what the latter refers to as “the rate of revelation.” Bell uses this outline to create a plan to “better take advantage of the inherent qualities in the structure you’ve chosen.” Following this, he recommends rewriting the book, beginning to end. This is time-consuming, but he argues that “the raw confusion of what book am I writing? will recede as you become surer and surer of what it is you’re making.”

This increased confidence will propel writers into the third draft, which supplies the book’s subtitle. Bell preaches patience throughout this process, recommending shifting editing between screen and paper, reading aloud, and “break[ing] the prose into manageable chunks.” These are in service to “figuring out less what happens and more the best way to show it happening.” Refuse to Be Done’s three-draft approach may not be able to provide the what of a novel’s plot, but it will help in virtually every other aspect of the process. All writers, whether first-time or experienced, will benefit from allowing Matt Bell to serve as their novel-writing guide.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2022 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2022