Happy August! Enjoy this poem from our author of the month, the talented David Ebenbach.
HFR: What responsibility do you feel in presenting these flawed but very empathetic characters in the form of a poem?
DE: I'm glad you asked about responsibility. I think we writers could talk more about the issue of responsibility in our work---responsibility to our readers, to our loved ones, to our characters. In all those cases I think we need to approach the people with empathy and a readiness for compassion, an expectation that people become more complicated the more we know them, and an awareness that our writing can affect people for better or for worse.
We received over 200 submissions to the 500 for 500: Flash-Prose Contest this spring. We were overwhelmed by the level of quality and creativity in these small stories, prose-poems, and "others." Thank you so much to everyone who shared their work.
Unfortunately, we could only choose three.
Our judge Catherine Zobal Dent commented on the abundance of talent in the submissions. In the end, she chose these three winners... >drumroll<
HFR is pleased to introduce Mark Dostert and his essay, "The Saint of 3F." This is the first installment of The Dock. Look for new online content next month.
HFR: Who has had the greatest influence on your writing?
MD: I was finishing the first draft of Up in Here: Jailing Kids on Chicago’s Other Side about the time that Anthony Swofford published Jarhead, his marine sniper’s account of the Persian Gulf War. In revising my manuscript and starting various adapted personal essays like “The Saint of 3F,” an interview comment of Swofford’s proved instructive.
Read MoreA year ago today, the US government revoked Edward Snowden’s passport as he attempted to flee the country. Snowden, as we all know, had just leaked thousands of classified documents detailing the existence of global surveillance programs far more intrusive than previously thought.
As writers of poetry and fiction, how do we address current events without sounding too heavy-handed? Without losing our claims to art?
Daniel Hornsby’s short story “Metadata,” is one example of a successful crossover. Published in issue 54 of Hayden’s Ferry Review, the piece comments on global surveillance, even as it aestheticizes it.
Introducing this poem, I’m reminded of a quandary that ghosts through my mind before a reading. I think: “This is obviously about the consequences of sexual abuse (or something like it), so why preface it? Do I need to?”
Well, it depends. Though I admire the way Sharon Olds, for example, doesn’t explain anything—the audience by now knows what to expect and so nothing extraneous needs to be said—I still spell it out at times. The main reason is to combat shame. The other reason I do it is more public. It isn’t that the poems can’t speak for themselves. It’s because I’m thinking of victims or survivors who are silent. But when I introduce a poem in this way, with words that appear in newspapers or courtrooms, there’s another danger: official terminology could establish a mask that’s hard to see past. That’s another reason why I sometimes prefer to let a poem speak for itself. I do this because one of my goals in my poems is to go beyond the official language to the experience itself.
Read MoreFirst there was Chaos, the vast immeasurable abyss,
Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild.
[John Milton, Paradise Lost]
Chaos has many meanings. The ancient Greeks saw Chaos as the dark abyss from which life sprung. Mathematicians use Chaos theory to explain how small decisions can give rise to unexpectedly grave consequences. For parents, Chaos is their child’s bedroom, their busy work schedule. Most of us spend our lives trying to ward off Chaos and keep order. But what happens when we no longer avoid Chaos, and instead embrace it?
Read MoreThe highlight of my two years in UNC-Greensboro’s MFA program was the workshop led by visiting writer Richard Bausch. He inspired the class with his practical advice and his obvious love of the written word. I was encouraged by this man who made himself into a writer by sheer will, who, despite having a wife and children and a full time job, despite not being gifted with the innate brilliance of a Hemingway, say, or an Updike, was unflagging in his determination to turn himself into an accomplished writer. Bausch’s workshop boiled down to one particular piece of advice: “Just show up every morning. Something will happen.”
Read MoreHere are five notes on two poems (“first son” & “sixth son”) from my short project, The Seven Sons of Golden, featured in Hayden’s Ferry Review #54…
1. I had an idea for a story: A young woman’s scandalous, unwanted pregnancy is unfortunately revealed when her belly begins to glow and change colors: an absurd exaggeration of a very real skin-pigmentation phenomenon that sometimes occurs during pregnancy. How do our bodies betray our secrets? The story, of course, never materialized; I’m not a very good writer. But the seed of the idea gestated and transformed into the short poetic sequence from which these two poems (“first son” & “sixth son”) are taken. The mother’s physical discoloration became, in the poems, something allegorical via her naming, i.e. “Golden.” Instead of only one pregnancy, she becomes a sort of grotesque baby-factory – churning out son after (figurative) son.
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