Leland Quarterly, Vol. 4 Issue 2, Winter 2010

1 Leland Quarterly Winter 2010

kate

erickson

Joy

Henry

cHarlie

Mintz

kendra

Peterson

caroline

sHen

Winter 2010

U A R T E R L YlelandQ


Editors-in-ChiefMiles Osgood, Lindsay Sellers

Senior EditorsJaslyn Law, Max McClure, Graham Todd, Nathalie Trepagnier

Associate EditorsStephanie Caro, Grace DeVoll, Ellie Green, Lihe Han, Katie Wu

Art EditorJohaina Chrisostomo

Financial EditorNathalie Trepagnier

Design and Layout EditorJin Yu

Associate Design and Layout EditorsJohaina Crisostomo, Katie Wu

Web ManagerJin Yu

Copyright 2010 by Leland Quarterly, Stanford University.All Rights Reserved.Giant Horse Printing, San Francisco

Leland Quarterly: A Statement on Literature, Culture, Art, and Politics is a general interest magazine that showcases the very best in Stanford University undergraduate art and writing.

Editorial Board, Winter 2010

VOLUME 4, ISSUE 2

lelandQ U A R T E R L Y

Leland Quarterly Winter 2010 3

– Miles OsgOOdand the editors of leland

Editor’s LEttEr

Literary quotation is not like raisin cake. This, at least, is what Herman Meyer would have us believe, although it should be noted up front that he operates on a significant bias. If literary quotation were the same as raisin cake, his two-hundred-and-seventy-two-page work, The Poetics of Quotation in the European Novel, would come to a halt after a two-page introduction—following, I would imagine, a new, more appropriate title page: The Poetics of Raisin-Cake Metaphors in Herman Meyer’s Interrupted Criticism.

To be precise, Meyer’s raisin-cake claim is really, at first, a question: he asks whether quotations are anything more than simply the raisins in the cake, and whether their aesthetic effect can go beyond the momentary delight that the raisins offer the palate.

Sorry. To be precise, Meyer asks:“Are quotations anything more than simply the

raisins in the cake, and can their aesthetic effect go beyond the momentary delight that the raisins offer the palate?”

Two-hundred and seventy pages of argument notwithstanding, I remain

unconvinced of Meyer’s final stance. I would maintain that literary quotation is actually quite a bit like raisin cake. Let me count the ways.

Affectation. Surely I’m not the only one to wonder whether literary quotation is not simply plagiarism under another name. If I know the batter to my cake is going to taste really boring, you bet I’m going to put some raisins in it. Put in enough and I might get requests for the recipe. From professors.

Depth. To be fair, I don’t think Virgil and Dante and Milton were just cheating. For those who chew slowly, the taste of a raisin recalls the image of the vine. Levels of meaning. Layer-cake.

Tradition. Ah, but what if the vine looks different now from how you remember it? After you eat the raisins T.S. Eliot has had dried, do you ever think of grapes the same way?

Suspense. A largely untapped potential for quotation, I feel. If there are raisins in the opening

slices, you expect the same number in each slice as you progress. How do you account, then, for the fifth slice of Joyce’s Portrait? Where are the raisins of Augustine’s Ostia, after the forbidden fruits of Carthage and Dublin?

(All bets are off if you’re baking in a Bundt pan, or reading Finnegans Wake.)

Breadth. If literature is the dessert to the dinner-party of philosophy, then even a postmodern host will save a slice for each of his guests. I made two loaves, just in case.

Intention. Actually, is raisin cake meant as a dessert course, or am I supposed to serve it as an hors-d’œuvre? It’s not in the book. Does it have something to do with using golden raisins instead of red?

Juxtaposition. I’m also replacing the walnuts with

dried apricots. I forgot to go to the store.

Intertextuality. Maybe if I garnish the pork-roast with raisins and apricots as well, the cake won’t seem as weird. Yeah, I’d better do that.

Intratextuality. If I had time to make an icing I’d put

raisins in that too. Revision. Damn. Always keep an eye on the

oven. What if I scrape… no, the inside is tearing off. This is why I hate baking. Maybe I can just serve the raisins. Yeah. I’ll dip them in chocolate or something.


c o n T E n T s

editOrial stateMent 3

AmsterdamJoy Henry

Interregnum of SkinskyCharlie Mintz

SheldonJaslyn Law

Fiction

6

16

27

DRAWinG

HeleneJackie Basu

LifeSam Julian

23

42

inteRvieW

William F. Gilly

Molly Antopol

12

34

ARtiSt PRoFiLe

Caroline Shen

Kate Erickson

10

36


PHotoGRAPHY

VeneziaCaroline Shen

SchoolyardJin Zhu

Explosion in the SkyDerek Ouyang

WoodsJin Zhu

HidingDerek Ouyang

GenerationDerek Ouyang

PoetRY

WatermarkedNathalie Trepagnier

Home Life of SalingerFrank Rodriguez

BitchKarmia Chan Cao

To Jack...Kendra Peterson

The PromenadeWyatt Hong

9

15

23

30

41

Cover

19

24

25

32

33


JOy Henry

He knew I needed him to talk, so he wasn’t saying anything. I stared straight ahead at signs written in Dutch, with drawings of happy people washing hands for safety.

The doctor came in. He was tall and pale with rusty hair. I imagined him building a windmill with his bare hands, sawing the wood, standing nobly underneath. I kept

crying even after he told me it was just a bacterial infection, and he looked at me strangely, as if I hadn’t understood.

It will be cured in two days, with cream,” he said again, in a heavy accent. I had these lesions on my right arm, quarter-size spots secreting pale pink water. I had gotten a cut and been unlucky.

The tourist hospital was outside the city. We rode the train back, past dying mid-rises and fences diseased with graffiti. In the reflection of the window, I watched

myself pop a white pill into my mouth. I was self-medicating, looking past the pale outline of two mute people on orange plastic seats. The buildings were derelict, sinking ships. They were going down, down.

I see you,” I said, talking to him in our reflection. I was holding up my arm. The top two sores looked like eyes.

At the hostel we moved up return tickets, counted out hundreds of dollars. He said obvious things, “this cost so much” or “the money we could’ve saved.” By now that white powder was all dispersed through me, and his words were slippery things. They struck me and fell off

without effect. I tried to grasp them, rolling a joint on the twin bed, when the Romanian tourists came in. They were sharing this room, and they stank and spoke in broken English.

You want to come with us to erotic massage?” they asked, snickering. I stopped rolling and held out the inside of my arm for them.

“Here,” I said. “Let’s go.” Their faces soured, and they left.

I struck a match and walked to the

window. It had no screen, so I stuck my head out into the world. A drizzle seeped out of the sky. I wondered if it was always grey here. I sort of liked it, because there weren’t any lies in it.

Down below were bicycles and canals and all manner of other offensive things. There was the little park and the apricot tree where I had cut my arm a week ago, on the day we arrived. My body had still been clotted with sleep, but I ran up to it, dropping my suitcase in the grass. My eyes had clamored for good omens, searching for something lost. A long time ago, he and I had wanted a garden.

“Where we could feed each other fresh fruit. And lie naked,” he’d said.

I had climbed up the trunk, ignoring the scraping shards of bark. The apricots hung in fat clumps, and I took one between my thumb and forefinger. There was an obscene tautness to it, like smooth skin. It looked a little young, so I tested its flesh in my teeth. It wasn’t bitter. With my pockets full, we sat in the grass. Hours ago we had been in a dried-up place with the goodness slowly leaking out of us, almost gone. Now we had sweet water sticking to our hands and faces, and we looked around, waiting for our restoration. He palmed apricots absentmindedly, pulp running between his fingers, and I spat seeds onto the ground.

I was self-medicating, looking past the pale outline of two mute people on

orange plastic seats. The buildings were derelict, sinking ships.

They were going down, down.


“Berlin,” Kate erickson


“amsterdam”Kate erickson


My mother called it “God’s country,” as ifHe were a cloud spread only overSouthern Delaware. Southern Delaware –gossiping fruit stands; fish-divingosprey on the Nanticoke River; nylonplants now closed; milk jugs bobbing in the bay,marking crab traps and silt-sunken sails.

Southern Delaware was underwaternot long ago. And the dirt is sand,and the air is salt, and birds fly overseeking the sea, but the lush blue-greenis just peach trees, so I bid them east to shorewhere they’ll find vinegar fries for dinner.

My mother was born here. My grandmotherdies here. Tourists come with the drought.The town Hardscrabble is near the townLittle Heaven, named for baked roadsand July handing you a ripened-red tomato.

Watermarked

- natHalie trepagnier


Caroline Shen

Year: Sophomore

Images created in the artist’s studio as part of her technical training.


“Untitled”


What was the idea behind the original Sea of Cortez expedition?

As they say themselves, on the surface it was justifiable as a traditional scientific mission with a set of specific aims. But in reality, they both wanted to leave behind some major distractions and personal crises in Monterey and to escape into the joy of exploring something entirely new – to see all that their eyes could accommodate, as they put it. They loved the word ALL.

What sorts of discoveries have resulted from your following in Steinbeck’s footsteps?

There are scientific ‘discoveries’ or new results, and there are personal realizations. The former are written up in peer-reviewed journals and lead to additional work by you or others. The latter can change the way you think about everything. Usually in retrospect, such things seem obvious, perhaps bordering on trivial. But sometimes they need to be freed from the unconscious before we ‘realize’ them.

For example, it was naïve to expect to go back to all the sites visited by Steinbeck and Ricketts more than 60 years later and be able to make sense of all that has changed — even if we could identify all that has changed. What really is necessary to see change is to examine something

An IntervIew wIth

wIllIam f. GIlly

william f. Gilly, a professor of biology at Stanford’s Hopkins marine Station, has an extensive research history: his work, con-ducted both in the lab and onboard research vessels, ranges from studies of neuronal bio-physics to observations of Humboldt squid behavior. Every other spring, Gilly leaves monterey for Baja in a refurbished fishing boat to lead a course called Holistic Biology. There, he retraces a route taken in 1940 by the novelist John Steinbeck and his friend Ed Ricketts – one of the first holistic ecologists, and the model for the character of “Doc” in Cannery Row. The Log from the Sea of Cortez, an account of the trip coauthored by the pair, was a melding of Steinbeck’s aesthet-ics and Ricketts’s naturalist approach, and re-mains a seminal example of interdisciplinary thought.


over and over again at close time intervals, so ongoing variation doesn’t obscure long-term change. The global warming controversy is teaching us this very well. But sometimes you just need a more visceral example.

Another example that hit home during the trip was the realization that by following the path of Steinbeck and Ricketts – visiting the same places at the same time of year, etc. – that we were putting blinders on our own eyes, and preventing them from discovering what was really out there. This epiphany came after we were done with our intertidal work and had embarked on a week of squid studies out of sight of the shoreline. We were in the middle of the Gulf, in a dense fog bank caused by an upwelling event, when we found the first tiny larvae of Humboldt squid ever described in this area, thereby demonstrating that spawning was taking place. But this scientific finding (which we later published) did not resonate like the realization that it took leaving the path of Steinbeck and Ricketts for us to find the sense of discovery that they must have experienced. This is real discovery and it changes you.

Do you feel that the holistic, inter-disciplinary approach that Ricketts and Steinbeck took in The Log from the Sea of Cortez still has relevance to today’s scientists?

Absolutely YES. Ricketts and Steinbeck both told us how everything in nature is connected to everything else, that man is part of nature, and that even the most familiar things should be periodically examined from a variety of angles under a jeweler’s loupe. The big issues in ecological sciences today involving climate change, health of the oceans, rising human populations, shortages of fresh water (and the list goes

on and on) are all extremely complex issues that will never be understood (let alone ‘solved’) from a single perspective. We need to not only bring collaborators from different disciplines together but to also develop a fundamentally more holistic way

of thinking by these collaborators. How do you do this? By reading the poetry of Robinson Jeffers in conjunction with a geology class? There are many ways,

but bridging the gap between science and humanities is essential.

Why do you think it’s traditionally been easier for writers to poeticize fieldwork than labwork?

Probably fieldwork is naturally more appealing to most people, and it may lend itself more readily to an adventure-type story. In some cases (including my own – electrophysiology), there is a difficult language problem that needs to be resolved. But this is not impossible, even for fields

that are far removed from the backgrounds of most people. There are some extremely compelling, beautiful, and philosophically deep tales of lab and theoretical work – Freeman Dyson’s Disturbing the Universe and Steven Weinberg’s Dreams of a Final Theory come to mind.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal, godfa-ther of modern neurobiology, once wrote that a major “disease of the will” for scientists is bibliophilia, and the desire to be “cultured.” Do you think that the works of Stein-beck or other literary authors can have a positive effect on the modern scientist?

Of course they can – and any scientist that dismisses what the humanities have to teach us is probably a charlatan. Faulkner’s novella The Bear is a great story of both personal and ecological awareness – the two cannot be separated. These works show us the way of putting science into a humanistic perspective. And of course there is Moby Dick. Students of science should read these works not to be cultured, but to be human.

Conversely, how has your scientific background, both as a neurobi-ologist and ecologist, affected your own reading of Steinbeck? Are there aspects of his work that you think are best appreciated with some bio-logical knowledge?

I suspect that Log from the Sea of Cortez is more appreciated by those with a bit of biological knowledge, but it is written in a way that does not demand it. It teaches you the biology as you go along with the voyage. Perhaps that is what really appeals to me, because it also has defined the journey that

brought me to this interview. As an electrical engineering student going into physiology in graduate school, I was scared. I had essentially no formal biological background other than ninth grade biology, which as far as I can recall was entirely devoted to dissections. I had far more background in electronic instrumentation, but even that was more from a long-time interest in ham radio than courses in college. But biology, like any science, is about seeing the familiar, asking new questions, and finding unexpected answers. That is the primary joy of discovery. Background is just that, and it will grow on its own as you continue the voyage.

“Students of science should read these works not to be cultured, but to be human.”

“It took leaving the path of Steinbeck and Ricketts for us to find the sense of discovery

that they must have experienced.”


“pears,” Caroline shen, Charcoal


It’s morning in New Hampshire, and she wakes up J.D.

for his papers, toast and tea.

He starts with the local rag, the Union Leader.

What do you think about the gays getting married, Mr. S?

There’s no answer until he finishes reading, he’s a careful reader.

I don’t really care, he says.

Home Life of SaLinger

- FranK rOdrigUez


Skinsky in his backyard in June. Skinsky in socks and shorts, aureolas flaring, squeaking across

the grass to his trampoline and beginning a bounce. Skinsky working hard, curling his toes as he lands and gaining elevation. Skinsky at the height of the low branches on the big tree and rising. Skinsky landing, rebounding and flinging himself up to the summit of his bounce. Skinsky with a Skinsky’s-eye view of everything: roofs, trees, his backyard and his audience in it. Skinsky in back flip. Skinsky in front flip. Skinsky announcing he has one last trick and then Skinsky in descent, unfurling, making an X of his body and colliding cheek first with the trampoline’s fabric slap. Skinsky grunting one short syllable, “Ah!”, as he’s hurled up by the hiccup of springs. Skinsky bouncing to a standstill, dismounting and masking his face with both forearms. Skinsky on haunches in the shadows of friends as they crowd to see Skinsky in damage.

The crowd, from its depths, presses in, draping itself onto shoulders and backs. Skinsky whimpers but they ignore it. They bat aside his arm to touch him—his hands, his hair, the exposed parts of his neck. “Should I get some water?” someone says. “One of our fathers?” “Want to sit? Want to lie down?” Skinsky stares through the slit in his forearms at their faces. Some, deep in their features, look pleased. He whimpers once more to check. The friends nearest him frown and crunch their eyebrows. But

“Boy,”Caroline shen,

digital

Interregnum of

skinskySkinsky in locked places. Skinsky in hiding, but never caught. Skinsky in feats of falling, feats of fighting, feats of risk.

CHarlie Mintz


towards the back, on the faces of the draped ones, the pleased look seems only to float nearer to the surface of their features, like something held under water and then freed.

Seeing this, Skinsky snorts, snotting on his forearms. He starts to guffaw. Then he stops guffawing to throw open the mask of his arms. And there’s his face-freckled, smooth, blotchy pink but unscraped. “No worries,” he says. “I practiced that shit.” Up go his shoulders, eyebrows and hands. Up goes his upper lip into a smile.

His friends back away, stepping off the grass onto pebbly cement as Skinsky makes his appeasing motion. From where they are they hear a new sound, a low drone from near the pool. Also a churning sound, a filter maybe, and the sound of insects—only a dozen or so of them, but suddenly everywhere, in everyone’s face. They swat and swat. They are parted suddenly by Skinsky who runs through them to dive into the pool. He rises and begins taking laps back and forth across the water.

Slowly, the friends of Skinsky begin to applaud. They whistle. The boy who, when Skinsky hit, turned to his neighbor and went “Oh snap!” notices a wetness in his eyes and shoulder-dabs it. A girl with late braces claps until her hands sting.

They clap, because Skinsky never fails.“Fucking A,” someone says, “Skinsky, my heart.”A girl holds her arms out in zombie posture. “Look at my

hands. I can’t steady my hands.”Skinsky’s friends feign concern: chests clutched, sighs noisy

and significant. They pretend that relief is the reason their arms won’t stop trembling—a relief so heavy it makes them tired. That momentary feeling of world-balancing, score-settling—that was meant for someone else. They shoosh their giddy blood.

Gluck Auditorium, the first day of eighth grade. The beginning. Skinsky is up in the wires and hot lights while the principal paces the hardwood. He speaks of metaphorical mountains, the need to surmount them. Four hundred pairs of eyes roam upward to the hidden and burning Skinsky. Skinsky makes a name for himself this way. Ninth grade: Skinsky scaling the side of his house, ascending from door to window to balcony to gutter to satellite dish, standing triumphantly among the signals.

Skinsky in locked places. Skinsky in hiding, but never caught. Skinsky in feats of falling, feats of fighting, feats of risk. Skinsky in feats of fucking, they had heard—sensational, unimaginable acts. Skinsky at fifteen, kicking off from the cliff, splashing between the reef and the rocks and swimming to shore with no injury but a seashell cut on his pinky toe, trickling red. At sixteen, the trampoline, a birthday present from all of them, and Skinsky in flight.

A girl watches a dripping Skinsky cross the yard. She says, “You think he’s concussed?”

“No,” says a boy. He watches Skinsky, and his eyes, for half a

second, go shiny. Skinsky waves and his smile disappears. “A concussion?” says a third. “I don’t know about that. Maybe.”They watch Skinsky bait his dog with a tennis ball, the dog

barking rhythmically and pitiably from the ledge. He chucks the ball deep into his backyard and dives under water again. He skims the bottom of the pool, his reflection rippling up. All around him, the friends of Skinsky see shimmering swaths of blue—the color of his aura, according to one girl, whose own is a buttery yellow. Prompted, they can feel it too, Skinsky’s blue aura. It feels light and misty, like dry ice. They have to wave their hands through it to see him.

He comes up for air. “Two minutes, twenty-six seconds” he yells, over the lapping of water. “Swear to God.” He pulls himself up onto the ledge and then kicks off backward, letting the force of his words hit while he’s submerged.

From above, the silence of watching. Skinsky breast strokes back and forth across the bottom of the pool. He reminds one girl, who stores the comment, of a pale and frantic frog. Frog-

Skinsky jerks his torso suddenly up and heads for the surface. He breaches, and with him, out of the reverse

splash, a long gasp of inhalation. He paddles furiously to the ledge and grabs it. “Three minutes!” His voice breaks, and he shouts again: “Three minutes. Swear

on my grave. Swear on all our graves.”“We believe you,” says one, after a long silence filled

with lapping. “But do it again.” Skinsky pinches his nose and plunges back under. He counts one Mississippi, two Mississippi, until he reaches one hundred and eighty Mississippi, but when he surfaces to shout this, they are all gone.

July. Skinsky finds himself tanning in the sun for hours, sweating through different hats as he contemplates his burnish. At night he slathers aloe vera and sends e-mails. Mostly he is alone.

Sometimes he is joined by friends, grouped in threes and sixes. They hang out by his pool, eating snacks and saying little. They follow Skinsky into his house and in spasms of shivering browse his refrigerator. Some remember where the plates and cups and silverware are kept; some need reminding. His father brings lemonade and chips outside, silently wondering at the multitude of his son’s pack.

After an hour, the pack will become bored, and Skinsky will feel its attention on him, like a wet hand on his neck. The first time this happens, he will grab a foam surfboard from his garage, toss it onto the water and leap onto it. He will balance, perform a handstand as it sinks and water floods up his nose. The next time he feels the silence he will go for the board again, but something will stop him. He will go back to his chair and sit, his skin turning red and painful. Eventually he is alone again for his afternoons in the sun, which become afternoons in front of the TV, and his burned skin turns pale again.

One night Skinsky’s friends invite him to a party. They tell him to be ready at 9:30. At 9:00 they arrive. He is still in shorts and a t-shirt soaked with sweat from push-ups, but they pull him out anyway, tugging him down the stairs and out to the car, into

“we believe you,” says one, after a long silence

filled with lapping. “But do it again.”


which they squish, asses and laps and thighs all mashed together. The driver puts in a CD and plays it loud. Skinsky feels a finger drum on his hip, but he can’t tell who it belongs to.

They arrive at a wood, one-story house, with yellow blaring through the windows and bass rumbling the lawn. Skinsky has never been to this house before. When he comes through the front door he’s greeted by the lifted eyes of twenty or so familiar strangers. He readies himself to remember names. Tiny, all-colored bits of tissue paper drip from the walls, adhered with still wet glue. For a conversation starter, he considers asking if the party decorations are maliciously ruinous or merely accidentally so. When he finishes eyeing the room Skinsky notices that his friends have disappeared.

There is the sound of laughter from behind a closed door. He hears someone say, “I don’t know man, I

don’t know,” and then, “Alright, alright, alright, alright. We’ll ask him.”

Skinsky dances. He feels people watching him and tries not to let it affect his dancing. As he’s dancing, his elbow knocks into something that feels like an arm covered in shirt. He opens his eyes. A girl in pink flashes the most astoundingly white and symmetrical smile Skinsky has ever seen. He is paralyzed with indecision until the girl glides away and into another room. Skinsky feels a red cup pressed into his hands.

“This is blood,” a friend of Skinsky says, “You are a thirsty vampire. Scratch that, the thirstiest.”

Skinsky tries to bare his fangs. He drinks up.“Skinsky, I bet you can’t drink all this alcohol,” another says,

waggling a red cup at him. Skinsky bets he can. Soon the room is wobbly and Skinsky feels like a sickly vampire.

A heart-shaped face calls out to him from across the room. He goes to it.

“You’re familiar,” Skinsky says. Through the backdoor he can see colored blotches, bodies in shiny, plastic coats.

The girl smiles her astounding smile. “Want to come outside?” she says. Skinsky does. Suddenly he is cold, and he is pulling his shorts down over his knees. He can hear voices but is unable to put a face to a voice. Indecipherable sentences pass back and forth over his head. When his stomach feels partially settled, he tries looking around. Faces of his friends are intermingled with the faces of the familiar strangers. Eyes dart to his and look away. Past the clustering of fabric Skinsky sees a rope ladder dangling down from the roof. He follows it to where it’s tied to a rain gutter. Propped or resting around the patio, other strange objects: a hula-hoop, ski boots, a pellet gun, boxing gloves, juice boxes, band-aids.

He hears someone say, “You know how a cat always lands on its feet?”

Skinsky feels anxiety pulse in his stomach. Someone says, “I feel like I have some idea, but I would like to

see.”“Call me...Catman,” says Skinsky. He takes a giant step to the

rope ladder, but then he feels woozy and stumbles, the ground rushing up at him. A hand takes his shoulder, steadying him. Another, arriving after the point is moot, grabs his elbow. They “Woaahh,” like he’s a horse that needs slowing.

Someone says “I think we overshot it. Let’s put him away.”When Skinsky wakes up he’s on a couch. His face is stuck to the

leather. When he pulls free he sees that it’s morning. Two boys he doesn’t recognize are drinking orange juice at a table behind him.

“You’re Skinsky?” one says, wiping his lips.“I’m me,” Skinsky says.The boy makes a thumbs-up sign and then inverts it. “You,” he says, “are lame.” Skinsky waits on the driveway for his father to pick him up.

“Friend’s forgot about you?” his father says.Skinsky says nothing. His father changes the topic to a movie neither of them has seen. Just

before they pull into the driveway, Skinsky decides to call it quits.

His presence, over the next week, dries up. He becomes scarce, a rare metal.

He is seen at the drive-thru, driving off. He is misidentified at restaurants, at shoe stores—even in the mountains once,

which turned out to be nothing but the shadow of a deer eating some

leaves. An alleged Skinsky at the movie theatre proves to be a thirteen-year-old, freakishly tall and hormone-addled, leaping from seat to seat during a matinee. Skinsky is at no one’s house, in no one’s backyard, in no one’s photographs. But the friends of Skinsky have summer school, secret projects, brothers and sisters to care for. They have parents and occasionally grandparents to appease.

More weeks pass. It is still July—a hot, wide-open July they have to squint at. The friends of Skinsky feel summer passing from them, over them, diverting around them like redirected water. Their lives, they notice, have become flat and risk-less. Their bodies, sensitive and underused. They investigate various ways of undoing this. They are slightly less careful when crossing the street. They dream plans of visiting travel advisory countries. One night they all play the fainting game. They awake, dizzy and elated, but the feeling fades.

They make a pilgrimage to the roll-over bump at the intersection across from the movie theatre. They are piled into two cars. One will go first and drive over the spot of pavement that triggers the green light. The next will come hurtling down the street and hit the bump, go off the bump into the air. From this will come something definitive: a rope snap, the sudden sound of breaking free. They will feel, in their stomachs, the hard lump of anxiety dissolving into liquid. They will exorcize the spirit of Skinsky.

But they flub it—the red light turning green before they expect and the lead driver making a sudden, confused right turn; the hind car braking abruptly and careening up onto the sidewalk, where it sits, panic lights blinking, as the friends of Skinsky unload.

“What the fuck was that?” says the driver of the lead car. “I

He hears someone say, “you know how a cat always

lands on its feet?”

Skinsky feels anxiety pulse in his stomach.


“schoolyard,” Jin zhu


trigger it. I trigger it.”“Already triggered,” say two or three of the passengers. “Where’s Skinsky?” says a boy nursing a bloody nose. “Where is

that guy?”He’s at home. They find him there. They knock on his front door

and are let in by his mother, who intuits their purpose and tells them that he is in the den, “doing his thing.” In walks one. In walks another. Some claim the lead. The leaders lead on into the den. He’s on the couch, watching TV. He has a blanket pulled up to his chin and he’s putting his lips out for a straw.

They stare at Skinsky, reduced, looking saturated, puffy, funneling kernels of popcorn into his mouth with one hand. He’s watching Japanese cartoons. The characters have spiky hair and big, elliptical eyes filled nearly entirely with white. The subtitles are in English. The story involves a mythical sword split into pieces and the good and evil warriors in search of it.

The foremost leader finds the illuminated power button and shuts off the TV. He looks back to the group, suddenly unsure. Skinsky turns the TV back on with the remote. He slides his arm back under the blanket. He draws the edge over his nose so just his eyes peek out.

“Are you depressed?” someone asks.“I don’t think so,” he says, the sound

muffled by knitted wool. “Are you sure?”He pulls the blanket away to

sip his soda. “No,” he says. “No I’m not sure.”

There is a silence. “You’re fine,” someone says,

elongating the vowel in fine. “Skinsky,” someone else says,

“Today we took the bump at seventy-five. We took it. Have you ever seen anyone do that?”

“No, never,” he says. “That’s idiotic. Did you really?”

“No,” someone else says. “But nearly.”

His mom appears in the kitchen, parting the crowd to remove from the oven a tray of something covered in thick, white sauce. The smell of garlic fills the room and everyone momentarily loses his or her train of thought.

His mom goes “Mmm, doesn’t that smell amazing?” and the ones who know her first name nod politely. She bustles around the kitchen, running water in the sink, lining up the silverware in the drawers, sponging oven racks.

“I wish I could stay for dinner,” one says.

Skinsky’s mom clasps her hands and beams at him and he looks away.

“Do you guys want to stay for dinner?” says Skinsky.“Um,” he says.“We shouldn’t,” say the rest. “Well, okay,” she says, over-agreeably. “Well me and this one here

will just have to have it all for ourselves. And plus the mister of course. He’ll want some too.” She laughs intensely. She leaves.

“We’re sorry if your mom heard any of that,” someone says. “By the way.”

He stares at the cartoon. The battles rages. Pieces of the sword are everywhere, and hopes of reconstructing it look slim. Skinsky turns on his side, touching his nose to the cushion.

July. Endless July. Claustrophobia. Undirected longings. Within a week six of

them are in Prague, staying with someone or other’s cousins. They send group

e-mails littered with exclamation points. They return, listless. There is talk of jet lag. Two enroll in a German philosophy class at the junior college and abandon

themselves to unfathomable texts. Three fall sick with something, possibly

mono. Another almost chokes to death on a fruit cup, and they stop hanging out with a group of four, whom they never liked to begin with.

The group reels, recovers, finds itself on a peeling balcony one warm

night. There is a moon halo, piercing the clouds. Several nod up at the sky

occasionally, reaffirming the existence of the perfectly round light. Others talk, listen, or

remain silent, doing neither. One, who is usually silent, tonight is talkative. Unsure where one goes once on a train of thought, he gets the idea to reminisce.

“Oh, Skinsky,” he says. “Oh how we miss a Skinsky. Oh how we miss a Skinsky missing a Skinsky. Oh how we miss. What

was best about him? Was it his grace? His balance? I think it was his grace. But others will say his balance. I’m

not sure it shall ever be settled. Did we take him for granted? Maybe. Did we abuse his trust?

Perhaps.”He goes on like this. He finds

himself very far from his point. He decides to perform a feat. Then he is

on the railing, a killing distance above the ground. The group turns to take him in. They take turns, taking him in. They say “What are you doing?” and “Are you drunk?” and “Do you know how high that is?”

Up on the railing, he looks for some way to extend his quest. A tree

branch. A branch whose bristles he can barely see, bouncing in wind. This is a branch he could reach. Would Skinsky come this far and

The leaders lead on into the den.

He’s on the couch, watching TV. He has a blanket pulled up to his chin

and he’s putting his lips out for a straw.


quit? Hasn’t he seen him the very same way, knees flexed, center of gravity hovering out over the fall? He tries to interpret the outward appearance of a Skinsky, and by this he hopes to draw inward the actions that certain postures imply.

He crouches, knees up by his face, arms straight out behind him gripping the railing. He lets himself pull against the tension in his arms. He sights the tree branch. There is a silence that sounds like waiting, and he leans out past the point of return, reaching for it.

August. They no longer talk, merely vocalize and wait. Physically, they are in peak health. But all day they brood. At night they sleep like lions, dreaming of elusive things. They talk only when moving between places of sitting or standing, on trips to the refrigerator or to retrieve an item, a bong, a board game, a toothbrush from someone’s car. And even then, to no response. Their statements shrivel in the air and slough downward like dead skin.

From nothing, one night, someone says, “What is it about that phrase?” He studies the ceiling. “Why is it the first phrase I want to say?”

Later another says, “I think it’s, you know, kitsch. It’s sap, it’s Hollywood. We’re indulging ourselves. We’re getting fat and stupid on this crap. I think we should get off this.”

“Death defying?” says the first, “Defying death? Is that the phrase? Or is it just the alliteration? Death ignoring? Death avoiding?”

Much, much later, as he is being dropped off at his house, a third remarks, “This, this, this, this, this, is ending.”

They think of June. They think of school. They think of classes. They think of tests. They think of secret beer. They think of hallucinated sunsets. They think of homeroom. A word, a smell, the arrangement of food on a plate will tug them involuntarily among distant moments. They need a Skinsky to return them to the present. Never are they more fully where they are than when their hearts are out on a ledge with Skinsky. During sex, maybe. But no other time. Not discussing the day’s events with family. Not alone, scheming, or just sitting. Not with each other. Though sometimes, in glimpses—no, still no.

They visit Skinsky again. His mother watches them move through the house and into the backyard. Skinsky is sitting in a plastic chair, drinking from a red cup. The friends of Skinsky approach until they are arced around him in rows, like shark teeth.

“What?” he says. Behind him the fence separates his house from his neighbor’s.

Skinsky looks over his shoulder, then back at his friends, instinctually looking for an escape route. Skinsky stands, chair legs scraping, sending his dog hustling off.

“Forget if you think I’m doing any more tricks.” he says. “Forget it. I’m not your trick guy.”

“But Skinsky,” they say.Skinsky shuts his eyes, holds them shut, and then opens them.

“What?” he says. A boy puts his hand on Skinsky’s shoulder. “You are our guy,” he says. “You’re our guy.” Skinsky sits down in his chair. He puts his palms on his knees,

leans forward, and begins drawing deep breaths. He rubs his face

with his hands. A few friends come forward and begin massaging his shoulders. He sits stiffly for a while, and then leans back into their grips. A girl comes forward and begins scratching his head with her nails. The others sit, or stand, staring out over the backyard.

“You’re the king,” they tell him. “The king of feats.”They wait until dark in his living room, and then they go out

to the trampoline carrying flashlights. Skinsky had no idea he had so many flashlights, so many D batteries. He sits on the lip

of the trampoline, untying his shoes. The flashlights illuminate his hands, the laces, the spot of

ground a few feet away where he tosses his keys. Some lights fragment off to hit distant trees, corners of darkness in his yard. But soon they move in unison.

Skinsky begins to bounce.A girl in flower socks thinks it’s a little

sad, bringing Skinsky back to this. But then she begins tracking him with her flashlight, the

beam making him stand out big and only against the black. A boy shivering beneath two sweaters follows Skinsky with a flashlight heavy in his hand and begins matching his breaths to the squeak of the trampoline.

Skinsky throws his arms into the air, urging up his height. He comes down, the flashlights follow, and he rises again.

They watch him rapturously, lifting the faces of their flashlights to illuminate his body in concentric circles of dull yellow. His arms and shoulders are completely slack. His knees bend slightly as he hits and returns to the air. Some of them begin to jut their chins involuntarily as he lands in expectation of the leap.

Skinsky at the summit of his bounce. Skinsky imagining the swipe of lights across his chest and up and down his body as he bounces. Skinsky looking out to the pool, measuring the jump, feeling himself hitting the water and sinking, the sudden chill of it. Skinsky all smiles, falling through the air, landing and propelling himself out. Skinsky sailing through the air, raising his legs in front of him and urging his body out. Skinsky in the air crossing the space above their heads, when the flashlights go off.

The friends of Skinsky hear a sound of soft against hard, and the sound of pain following it, a wordless, guttural revving of the lower throat. The revving opens up to a roar, a single sustained syllable that crests and then breaks over them, and gathers strength again. It is the sound of Skinsky in pain and they grit their teeth against it. They stand in the near black, backlit blue by the hue of the pool, staring at the fuzzy spot of night where Skinsky hit. It is impossible to make out anything but a faintly moving shape, a shape that could be a trick of their eyes, and a sound of their own struggles up from within them.

Still making the sound, they grip the grips of their flashlights, thumbs probing the rubbery buckle of each on-button. There is a click, and then another. And then, like a tiny city at dusk, the whole of them is illuminated from within. Their flashlights brighten a span of air above them, casting weak light on the trunk of a lemon tree some fifty feet back and the white tips of fence at the edge of the property. They move their lights along the top of the fence, and then pull their massive spotlight down over wet blades of grass, towards the spot of cement where Skinsky fell. The light passes over him, and he turns up his face to meet it.

“you’re the king,” they tell him.

“The king of feats.”

22 Leland Quarterly Winter 2010“architecture”derek Ouyang


Half terrier, half greyhound, fished out of a pitbull’s throat at the pound, a shivering shaman—ordained to exorcize my ex-husband’s obesityand the new wife’s depression. She was reserved. Never yapped. Never dove for crumbs in the carpet.Sat by her bowl at the appointed hour like a secretary by some damn bar fluent in the syntax of waiting. Or so they tell me, as I sink into a new couch in their new den. She’s not a real pet. Can’t possibly be. She won’t run. She doesn’t fetch. Bounds off the bed at his touch. Honey, he calls her. Silence. See? What should we do? He’s not losing weight. She’s not much happier. The couple excuse themselvesto the kitchen, one after the other.I turn to Honey by the wall, sitting unbearably straight, staring out the glass panel doors, beyond the childless swing, above the birch line— the black patch where a moon should be.

bitch

- KarMia CHan CaO

“Helene,” Jackie Basu, pen


“explosion in the sky,” derek Ouyang


“Woods,” Jin zhu


“Bridge series, 1900,” Caroline shen, Charcoal


Fifteen years old—old enough to be pulled to the door by the cosmic tug of Friday nights, but too young and scared to be able to go out and do anything. Hong Kong is no city for boys who haven’t learned how to make bad decisions. If I wasn’t going out tonight—or any Friday in the foreseeable future—I could at least grab a jacket and leave home.

A monsoon was coming and I bent into the hot wind as trees bent away from it. Buses and taxis and chauffeured black cars whined and putted past, their lights coloring the water that pooled and stank wherever the pavement dipped. The top of my head lead my progress up the hill, so I didn’t see the woman crossing my path until she was on the ground, the contents of her handbag rolling down the sidewalk.

I tripped over my feet and my apologies as I scrambled to retrieve the fallen items, trying to avoid looking at her long legs.

“Shit, my brand new Prada,” the woman cursed. “I’ll never get the stains out.”

I offered her a hand up and saw her face clearly for the first time. “Is it—Auntie Angela?” I spoke in English: I knew it was Auntie Angela—Auntie Angela who had always insisted I speak

to her in English because that was the only language of any value, literally. She looked the same, even after eight years. My impressions of her had always been tinted by the red of her spiky hair, her dark eyeliner, her protruding collarbones. My mother coined her in an acerbic three-word explanation—“She’s a socialite.” I had never heard the word before, but when my mother said that—“She’s a socialite”—I knew exactly what it meant, and I knew we did not approve.

Auntie Angela staggered to her feet and swayed on her stilettos, grabbing my shoulder for support. I caught whiffs of cigarette smoke, perfume, and what could only be alcohol. “Is that Miriam’s boy back from Eton? John? Haven’t I always told you it makes me feel old when you call me Auntie?” she peered into my face.

“No—it’s Sheldon—it’s Patricia’s son.”“Oh, my actual nephew. I suppose you have to call me Auntie.

And I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to see Patricia didn’t teach you any better than to run people over.”

I felt I’d betrayed my mother.“I’m going to be sick,” she said, and she was, all over the

sidewalk. I breathed through my mouth only and stared only at the

SheldonJaslyn laW


apartment building before me. It stretched higher into the sky than any of the surrounding skyscrapers.

“As long as you’ve caught me in a situation of utter indignity, you might as well help me up to my apartment. I live here.”

I had no idea how my classmates managed to get into clubs or buy bottles of booze, much less how to deal with people once they’d consumed significant quantities of alcohol. Even if Auntie Angela had been sober, I would have had zero idea about how to deal with her. I hovered a hand over her shoulder and held her oversized red handbag in my other. Together we stumbled into the building’s lobby in a caricature of a pas de deux.

All ritzy apartment buildings place a uniformed concierge inside the front doors, ready to call a taxi for a tenant or eject suspicious looking persons. I prepared to explain my identity, but the concierge didn’t flatter me with a second glance. He turned to press the button for the lift.

Propped up against the elevator wall, Auntie Angela considered me. “Sheldon. God, what a truly terrible name. I told Patricia so, but she’s always had just the worst taste—names, clothes, men.” The scent of alcohol mixed with expensive perfume was exotic and surprisingly light. I imagined it moving through the air like smoke from the long cigarettes she always used to carry.

I abhor my name. “It’s not too bad,” I said, my defensiveness surprising me. The elevator passed from the twelfth to the fourteenth floor, propelling us to the thirty-third floor, into the urban canopy of Hong Kong, where all the city’s dramas unfold.

“How about Shel,” said Auntie Angela. “Shel. That’s a name that you could work. Feminine enough to be unthreatening, but the one-syllable nickname is always sexy. Sheldon, I christen you Shel.”

If I hadn’t roused any suspicion as an adolescent male accompanying an obviously intoxicated tenant clad in stockings with garter straps, I didn’t have a hope of working the name Shel.

The elevator doors opened and we spilled onto the landing. “Don’t you dare touch the walls,” she warned, fumbling with the keys. “They’re silk-paneled and water stains silk. I had Justin bring me all this silk from Bangkok.”

I supposed vomit would stain silk as well and that I was implicitly not supposed to let her touch the silk walls either, but she staggered down the passage to the bathroom before me and left some on the second panel.

“It’s been ages since I last saw you—I feel so old.” She threw herself before the toilet. I busied my eyes with the shadowed splendor of the apartment’s interior decorating and tried—unsuccessfully—to plug my ears with the distant sound of traffic.

“Eight years now, isn’t it?” She looked up from the toilet bowl. “It’s not that I have anything against you, Shel. Of course it’s not you, not really.”

“No—I mean… I know.” I felt a little bit sick myself and I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the little chunk of vomit clinging to the imported silk, silk that had come from Thailand just to impractically panel a passage to Auntie Angela’s bathroom. All I knew about Bangkok I knew from my mother: it was dirty, there

were a lot of forward whores with venereal diseases, and the looms there spun the most beautiful silk.

“What do you know?” Her voice narrowed to a dangerous point; she held it, threatening, between my ribs. “Tell me what you know.”

I knew my mother looking like she’d just stopped crying, and from behind walls my father’s sharp, “Patricia, can’t you just deal with the fact that she doesn’t care about you at all? You know she only cares about clawing her way to the top.” I remembered the last time I saw Auntie Angela: it was eight years ago and she took me to high noon tea at the Shangri-La as she did every week. She didn’t get me a bag of chocolates from the waitresses she knew by name, but sat tapping her foot, ignoring me completely. I sat as still and as quietly as possible, waiting for her to notice my goodness—or at least to notice me enough to launch into a monologue the importance of improving my English. She didn’t speak at all until my mother came to pick me up. She sprang to her feet and pulled her away and whispered furiously with her before clattering down the stairs, yanking a box of cigarettes out of her handbag as she pushed through the doors. She left her umbrella.

“No—I don’t know anything—I just know it’s none of my business—it has nothing to do with me.”

“That’s right,” she said forcefully. “It’s everything to do with your mom and your dad and this dysfunctional, dysfuctional family.”

I thought my immediate family seemed pretty functional, on the whole.

“Shel.” She sat cross-legged in the middle of her expensive tile, in her expensive clothes, looking like a ravaged movie star—still glamorous, despite the

vomit. Her gaze was clearer and steadier now. “A sweet kid, really. Don’t worry. Girls will start to like you soon. You have very serious eyes. You have my father’s eyes; deep, intelligent eyes. I have those eyes. Margaret does too. Patricia never did. You won’t tell Patricia you saw me.”

“Of course not.” She didn’t have to tell me.“Good boy. And I suppose the thing to do now as the rich aunt

is to hand you an obscene stack of money and send you on your way.” Her eyes focused on my face again. “But you look an awful lot like Patricia, aside from the eyes, and I won’t give her anything, nothing at all.”

She played a rhythm on the toilet bowl with her fingernails.“There’s—I think a spot—on the wall,” I said.“I’ll have to repanel them. Ochre would be nice. I’ll have to tell

Justin.”

I prepared to explain my identity, but the concierge didn’t flatter me

with a second glance.

Hong Kong is no city for boys who haven’t learned how to

make bad decisions.


“Well—goodbye, Auntie,” I said, hovering at the end of the hall.“Goodbye, Shel,” she said from the floor.The elevator dropped through storeys and storeys of blinking,

flashing city. Shel. I christen you Shel. I passed the concierge, who didn’t bother to look up from his paperback. I thought I might like it if I were able to come back. I thought I’d like to learn more about Shel and my intelligent eyes and the girls who would like me and silk walls all the way from Bangkok. I thought I’d like to know what bad decisions people made on Friday nights, only I looked like my mother.

I wanted to go back eight years to the Shangri-La and pitch a tantrum.

Thirty-three floors up, the lights were on in just the one unit. “Oh, it was no problem taking care of you.” My voice shrilled, high and sarcastic. “No thanks needed, really.” My friends would tell me I was acting like a girl if they could hear me, and anybody else would think I was insane if they saw me. I stuffed my balled fists back in my pockets for the walk home, hoping the occupants of the looming glass high-rises around me were looking up at the

ominous, moonlit cloud cover instead of down at the street.“Where were you?” My mother asked this every time I walked

in, automatically, tonelessly, without expectation—knowing full well I didn’t have the courage to make bad decisions.

I looked her in the eyes, noticed how they were not like mine, how they were flatter, how they were smaller, how common and bland they were. My hands were shaking with a strange energy; I trembled with it.

“Nowhere.” The belligerence of the word felt dangerous, powerful on my tongue.

My mother lowered her magazine and stared at me. “Shel—” How could she know, she couldn’t know, I was overexcited, it was only her stammer—“Sh—Sheldon. You do not speak to me in that tone. I don’t care where you were; you are grounded.”

As my voice rose in practiced incredulity, as it began complaining about the unfairness, as her voice and mine competed for volume, I grasped for comfort in the argument I knew she would win, in my mother assuring me—I was Sheldon, and I was grounded.

“still life,” Caroline shen, Charcoal


to Jack,

“Profile Study,” Caroline Shen, Graphite

I hear you lost your eye in The War,though that is like sayingyou lost your eye playing Scrabble orwrestling wild beasts in the Serengeti.We, perched on wooden stools inside,licking foam from four dollar nonfat Chais,are far removed from any of “The Wars.”It is easier for us to imagine youbent over a battlefield of cardboardscrutinizing letters. So let’s say that you lost your eyeplaying Scrabble. It must have beenone hell of a game. Having not yetsurrendered to the advancing gray orabandoned your razor to rust, you would still not be handsome but perhapsstronger, your eyes secureand unremarkable. You must have noticed, then, only sight — perfect, seemingly independentfrom the rods and cones, the lens and vitreous.You would have scouted the board easily.You would have picked sleepfrom the corners of your eyesto buy time. You would not have wonderedif an eyeball squashes like a grape.


or Perhaps Ben, who Sits Outside Lulu’s Cafe on Pacific Avenue, and whose real name we Do not Know.

I like you as a Scrabble playermore than as a soldier. Besides, you look harmless enough, now, with your black coffee and croissant, an old novel, Conrad, resting open and stained, to your right.Your opponent must have been petty,the kind of man who talks through his teeth. Maybe he had a mustache that curled upat the ends like fishhooks that you wishedwould just once cut through his cheek.You imagined he would get bywithout a tongue as you reachedinto the black bag, passing over squares.You’d write soldier into oxenand caress a W like something illicit. Oxenwould lead into grenade, soldierinto nostril, nostril into swan. I don’t know what weaponyour opponent used, or what,provoked him — jealousy,blood lust, pride, some arrangement of events causing his bloodto move faster, his ribs to constrict, his breath to catch — but I imagine he first threw the board onto your lap and that your left eye held on to the image of all those letterstossed up and frozen in the air as thoughhanging by an umbilical cord.

My question is this: How longbefore your left eye surrendered to the pulland became, simply, something other than itself — no longer your left eye buttissue, debris, shrapnel — andcould you hear the optic nerve snap? I hear you lost your eye in The War, butI hear other things too, like that you used to tell people their futures, yourglass eye secretly a crystal ball, thatyou’re a poet and that you were onceyoung and worked for the circus. Between sips I imagine that young you and thenthe you, now, getting up from your corner table.You would tuck Conrad into your jacket and ground yourself with your good eye,calculating the contour of the sidewalkwhile, in your glass eye, in the pocketat the edge of sight, you would catch letterssprouting wings or the roadblooming into rhododendrons orthe whole damn town explodinginto triple word scores.

to Jack,

- Kendra petersOn


“Hiding,” derek Ouyang


“generation,” derek Ouyang


How did you decide to become a writer?

I don’t remember it being a conscious decision. I was always a big reader, and a really nerdy kid—I had all sorts of imaginary friends and my mom says on camping trips I’d sit in my tent all day and write myself into whatever book I was reading. But I didn’t see writing as something I could actually do as a career—growing up, I didn’t know any writers and it felt to me like a pie-in-the-sky profession. I figured I’d sneak in time to write when I wasn’t working—when I was a kid I wanted to be a psychologist. It was in graduate school that I started trying to figure out a feasible way to make a life of it. The Stegner Fel-lowship has been more important to my fiction than anything else—it was the first time I felt comfortable calling myself a writer without using air quotes.

What literature has been important to you?

Grace Paley and James Baldwin have had, without a doubt, the biggest impact on me. When I started writing, I was really worried about seeming sappy or sentimental, so I wrote these very lean and tightly controlled stories, though it went against what came naturally to me. It was only when I read Paley and Baldwin that I saw how emotionally direct stories can be with-out seeming manipulative or corny. I get the feeling that every one of their stories is something they felt they needed to write, that they were more interested in being straightforward and honest than wowing the reader with their cleverness. They also write such character- and voice-driven stories while still giving us a grand sense of the larger events happening around them—the politics of their fiction extend so naturally from their characters that I never feel they’re forcing their opinions down my throat. Their stories can also be so angry, without ever resorting to meanness—they’re two of the most generous writers I’ve read. And they both write such gorgeous prose without ever being arty or flashy. I could go on and on. My other favorites are Knut Hamsun, Isaac Babel, Alice Munro,

an intErviEw with MoLLy antopoL

molly antopol is a Jones lecturer in fiction. She received an m.f.a. from Columbia University, and her fiction and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in One Story, american Short fic-tion, The mississippi Review Prize Stories of the year, Nimrod’s Prize Stories of the year, Esquire.com, on NPR’s This american life, New york Public Radio and elsewhere. She chats with leland about her favorite writers, how to move past the first paragraph, and why she resists the myth of the starving artist.


Bernard Malamud, William Trevor, Vasilly Aksyonov, Leonard Michaels, Ivan Bunin, Edward P. Jones, Raymond Carver, Debo-rah Eisenberg, Mavis Gallant, Joan Didion, Nadine Gordimer, George Orwell, Chek-hov and, like everybody else, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy—The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina are probably the most im-portant novels to me, along with American Pastoral and Housekeeping. I also like a lot of younger contemporary writers—Alek-

sander Hemon, Charles D’Ambrosio, Susan Choi, Chris Offutt, Sam Lipsyte and Dan Chaon, to name a few. And of course I was lucky enough to study with some of the best writers around while here at Stanford: Eliz-abeth Tallent, John L’Heureux, and Tobias Wolff.

How often do you write and what is your typical writing process?

I write on all the days I don’t teach. I write best in the mornings, before my day gets cluttered or stressful. My new plan is to turn off my phone and email—I’m horri-bly addicted to the Internet and can begin by researching one small (yet seemingly so necessary!) detail for a story and the next time I look up from my computer I realize I’ve just wasted three hours reading Gawk-er, or that I’ve gotten into a bidding war on eBay over vintage patio furniture, both of which I did this week.

I don’t have a special desk or a lucky pen or anything like that. If I can sit down and get something done, it doesn’t matter if I’m dressed or still in my pajamas, or have my music on or off. Sometimes I write in my apartment or in coffee shops nearby, and I’m also part of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, which is great—I share an office with a couple friends in a larger building of

writers, and at lunch we all come out and eat together.

What issues do you struggle with in your own writing?

I have a hard time with middles. Before I start a story I usually have the opening scene, or at least the first paragraph, worked out in my mind, and soon after comes the

ending. But middles have to achieve so much—they need to simultaneously sustain the tension I set up in the open-ing scene while raising the stakes, they need to be surprising and not make the reader feel

like I’m dragging them directly toward an ending I refuse to budge on, even when it’s painfully obvious where the story is head-ed. That’s something I’m always wrestling with—I’m a stubborn writer and often fall in love with my endings, and once I’m ac-tively writing toward them, my stories can lose steam or collapse altogether. I always tell my students to shoot through an entire first draft before revising so they don’t be-come married to phrases they’ll have to cut once the piece is done, and of all the advice I give in the classroom, this is the hardest to take for myself. It just feels so demoral-izing to wake up and turn on my computer and try to make sense out of a pile of rubble—I need at least one solidly written section to tinker with just to get in the mode of writing, even if it doesn’t end up in the fin-ished piece.

How has your writing changed since you began your career?

When I first started writing, I read the same stories over and over, trying to understand how they were put together. I didn’t know how to do anything, and certain writers—Denis Johnson, Raymond Carver and Lor-

rie Moore especially—served as models for everything from how to start a scene to how to use white space. Lately I’ve been finding that I trust my own instincts when starting stories, and though I know that has a lot to do with writing consistently over the past few years, I think it has more to do with having studied those stories for so long. And one of the amazing things about these writers is that when, for example, I teach Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” I still feel like the wind’s being knocked out of me every time I get to the moment where Rob-ert puts his hand over the narrator’s and tells him to draw. I feel the same way when I teach Richard Ford’s “Communist”—I know I should see it coming, but it sur-prises me every time I get to the part where Glen Baxter shoots those geese.

Do you think it’s possible for an au-thor to truly extract her own history and personality from the stories she creates?

That’s something I think about a lot. I’m almost finished with my story collection, and half of the narrators are men and some of the stories are set abroad or in the past. But no matter how different they are (and how different I tried to make them from each other), they all circle back to the same themes and are very obviously written by the same person. Grace Paley has this great quote, not to write what you know but to

write what you don’t know about what you know. That’s what it feels like for me. I read a lot of nonfiction, and I love the feeling of trying to understand what it would have been like to live in another place or during a different time, or even to live here in the present day, but as a man, or a person much older than I am—I often find that I’m able to access certain emotional truths about my own life by not exploring things head-on. I

“I feel the same way when I teach Richard ford’s “Communist” —I know

I should see it coming, but it surprises me every time I get to the part where Glen

Baxter shoots those geese.”

“I never really got the starving artist thing - what’s so romantic about it if

you don’t have any time to make art?”


don’t have any stories about young female writers living in San Francisco and teaching at Stanford, but I do feel that my collection accurately captures what I cared about, questioned and obsessed over during the time in my life I was writing it.

What do you think a short story can achieve that other forms of writing can-not?

Some might say a story can have a more fully devel-oped narrative arc than a poem—but what about Philip Levine, whose poems are so character- and narrative-based? Others might say that while short stories can be novelistic in scope, their brevity de-mands that every word count—but what about po-etically compressed novelists like Christine Schutt and Carole Maso? And then there are longer sto-ries that I admire precisely because of the way the writers work with dead time and slower, more idle moments—I liked Jhumpa Lahiri’s newest collec-tion of longer stories (Unaccustomed Earth) even more than her first because they felt so lived-in; the unhurried pacing of the stories made the endings even more shocking and resonant for me.

What advice would you give to under-graduates who have studied creative writ-ing, but don’t know how to carry that in-terest into life after college?

Move somewhere cheap where you have time not only to write but to read. After college I lived in expensive places (Bay Area, Tel Aviv, New York), and was always piling on job after job to pay rent—I wouldn’t use my computer to write, I’d use it to search Craigslist for jobs. Before the Stegner I was living in Brooklyn and working three, sometimes four, jobs at a time. I was barely writing at all, though it was what I wanted to do most. It was a fun time, but also unnecessarily anxious and frus-trating. I never really got the starving artist thing—what’s so romantic about it if you don’t have any time to make art?

And once you’re in that cheap place, find other people who like to talk about books, and a few who are interested in swapping work. But be careful about choosing your readers, especially with new writing—I heard Philip Roth talk once and he said something that really stuck with me: never let any-body read your early drafts if they aren’t on your side.

Kate Erickson

Major: Art History

Year: Sophomore

Series is the result of a month-long solo backpacking trip across Northern Europe in December 2007.


“Vienna”


“Brugge”


“Vienna ii”


“Vienna iV”


He watched her growsmaller, a lost balloon. He had heard that when balloons fallupon the ocean, whaleseat them and die.He imagined ripplesbreaking upon the waterlike fireworks.He watched her untilshe disappeared,and wondered whetherthere were enough whalesto save all the balloonsthat he had lost.

THE PROMENADE, MArC CHAgAll, 1918.

- Wyatt HOng

“promenade,” Marc Chagall, 1988. image courtesy artinthepicture.com


“life,” sam Julian, pen & ink


COntriBUtOrs

• leland publishes three times per year. We accept submissions on a rolling basis throughout the year.

• all submissions to leland must be original, unpublished work.

• leland accepts and encourages submissions in a wide range of disciplines, including fiction, poetry, art, creative nonfiction (e.g., memoir, campus culture, student life), reviews (books, movies, music) and political essays (full-length investigative pieces).

• The editors of Leland are concerned first and foremost with the quality of expression exhibited in a work, and not in the genre of work itself. Our goal is to have quality content across a breadth of disciplines, so please do not be afraid to innovate in your submissions.

• there is no expectation in terms of length of essays, poems, or fiction. We request, however, that you send in no more than six poems at a time and a maximum of four longer pieces.

• Leland accepts submissions exclusively from current stanford undergraduates.

• all submissions are judged anonymously by the editors. submissions can be sent to [email protected] with “name, genre” in the subject line. Check out lelandquarterly.com for more details.

HOW Can i sUBMit tO leland?

JACKIE BASU is a junior from Palos Verdes, CA.KArMIA CHAN CAo is a junior from Urumqi, ChinaKATE ErICKSoN is a sophomore from Carlisle, MAJoY HENrY is a senior from Inglis, FlWYATT HoNg is a sophomore from Seoul, KoreaSAM JUlIAN is a senior from San Diego, CAJASlYN lAW is a junior from San rafael, CACHArlIE MINTz is a senior from San Diego, CADErEK oUYANg is a freshman from Arcadia, CAKENDrA PETErSoN is a junior from Santa Cruz, CAFrANK roDrIgUEz is a sophomore from Bronx, NYCArolINE SHEN is a sophomore from Palo Alto, CANATHAlIE TrEPAgNIEr is a junior from limeport, PAJIN zHU is a senior from Mission Viejo, CA

Volume 4, Issue 2 Copyright © 2010 by leland Quarterly

Stanford Universitylelandquarterly.com

Q

Documents

Leland Quarterly, Vol. 4 Issue 2, Winter 2010