Epiphany | A Literary Journal

Contributors_Fall_2009_Winter_2010

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 12:15:14 -0500

Fall/Winter 2009-2010

TABARÉ ALVAREZ has an M.F.A. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His fiction has appeared in Reflection’s Edge and is forthcoming in Bewildering Stories. He lives in the Dominican Republic.

BIPIN AURORA has worked as an economist, an energy analyst, and a systems analyst. His fiction has appeared in Quarterly West and North Atlantic Review.

H.V. CHAO is delighted to be making his print début in Epiphany. He is currently at work on Guises, a collection of short stories. He has never been to Moscow, but speaks often, and longingly, of going there one day.

GEORGES-OLIVIER CHÂTEAUREYNAUD’s novel La Faculté des songes (Grasset, 1982) won the prestigious Prix Renaudot, while his most recent collection of stories, Singe Savant tabassé par deux clowns (Grasset, 2005), was awarded the Bourse Goncourt de la Nouvelle.

CASPER CLOETE has no boxing background apart from watching the occasional fight on television and taking out his frustrations on the heavy bag in his garage. He enjoys writing about the challenges that ordinary people face and is trying to sharpen up his prose in between juggling two programming jobs. He lives in Johannesburg and is previously unpublished.

GREGORY CROSBY lives and (in theory) works in New York. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Court Green, Rattle, Copper Nickel, Paradigm, Jacket, and Poem; most recently, his work was included in the 2008 anthology Literary Nevada: Writings from the Silver State (University of Nevada Press).

LAVINIA CURRIER is a filmmaker whose adaptation of Balzac’s Passion in the Desert won several picture and directing awards at film festivals in Rome, San Sebastien, Telluride, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a new feature film from an original screenplay, Oka! Amerikee.

MARGARITA DELCHEVA graduated from N.Y.U. with an M.F.A. in Poetry. She is from Sofia, Bulgaria, but she currently resides in New York. Her work has appeared in CutThroat, Oak Bend, Chronogram and the Meadow. She dances Argentine tango, practices Zen Buddhism and enjoys oil-painting in her free time.

Catalan poet ERNEST FARRÉS, born in Igualada in 1967, lives in Barcelona. A journalist who works on the cultural supplement of La Vanguardia, he has written three volumes of poems: Clavar-ne una al mall i l’altra a l’enclusa (1996), Mosquits (1998), and Edward Hopper (2006), which has been published in English by Graywolf Press.

MICHAEL FERCH recently opened his own law office in New York City, and is an Adjunct Professor at New York Law School. He holds an M.F.A. in creative writing (poetry) from Columbia University. He lives in Brooklyn with his son, his wife, and her cat. He may be reached at: michael@ferchlaw.com.

NAOKO FUJIMOTO was born in Nagoya, Japan. Her recent poems are forthcoming in Puerto del Sol, Passages North, and Gargoyle Magazine, among others. She is currently practicing to say “I do,” and she purchased a sparkling-February wedding dress last Thursday.

EDWARD GAUVIN is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. He has been an ALTA fellow and a resident at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, and this fall is participating in the Writers Residency Program at Ledig House. His collection of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s short stories is forthcoming from Small Beer Press, and other translations have appeared in AGNI, Conjunctions, Words Without Borders, The Cafe Irreal, Two Lines, Silk Road, Absinthe, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and The Brooklyn Rail.

JEFFREY GUSTAVSON is the author of Nervous Forces (Alef, 1994). More recent work has appeared in Bomb, Fence, and Just Outside the Frame: Poets from the Santa Fe Broadside (Tres Chicas, 2005). He is an alumnus of the Montana Artists Refuge.

APRIL NAOKO HECK’s poems have appeared most recently in Artful Dodge, Shenandoah, Cream City Review, and Borderlands: Texas Quarterly Review. She works as the reading series coordinator at the N.Y.U. Creative Writing Program.

KATHLEEN HEIL is originally from New Orleans. Her work recently appeared in the English and Spanish editions of The Barcelona Review and is forthcoming in the inaugural issue of Thirty First Bird Review. Kathleen also contributes to The Best American Poetry blog. Her website is kathleenheil.wordpress.com.

ASKOLD MELNYCZUK is the author of Blind Angel, Ambassador of the Dead, What Is Told, and The House of Widows. He teaches at UMass Boston and in the Graduate Writing Seminars at Bennington College.

SCOTT F. PARKER lives in Minneapolis. He received his master’s in Writing from Portland State University. “Rule-Breaking” is a chapter from a memoir-in-progress, to be called The Joy of Running qua Running. Other chapters have been published in The Ink-Filled Page and on writersdojo.org and nwrunner.com. He has contributed essays to several books on pop culture and philosophy.

DAVID RAYMOND, a painter and sculptor, exhibits in the U.S. and the U.K. and Europe. He is Professor of Fine Arts at Merrimack College in Massachusetts and is a contributing editor for Art New England Magazine. He lives in New Hampshire.

ARIELLA RUTH was an assistant editor for Letters to Poets: Conversations About Poetics, Politics, and Community, released Winter 2008 by Saturnalia Books. She has interned at Small Press Traffic, a literary arts center in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in the online journal Other Rooms Press. She received her B.A. from Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts in 2008 and is currently an M.F.A. candidate in the Writing and Poetics department at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, where she is the graduate assistant for Bombay Gin, the school’s literary journal.

ANNIE SANDLER was born and raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She attributes her love of writing to her family, the city, and her friends (those living on and off the page). She currently lives in Brooklyn. She especially thanks her mother.

JAINA SANGA received her Ph.D. in English from Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of a critical book on Salman Rushdie’s fiction and editor of two volumes on South Asian literature. She lives with her husband in Dallas.

MRIGAA SETHI was born in New Delhi and raised in Bangkok. Her work has previously appeared in Folio, Seneca Review, and The Bangkok Post. She lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., where she teaches composition to undergraduates.

FIONA SZE-LORRAIN writes and translates in English, French, and Chinese. Her new work is forthcoming in Alimentum, Cimarron Review, Louisville Review, and Poetry International. Her collection of poetry, Water the Moon, is forthcoming (Fall 2009) from Marick Press. An editor at Cerise Press (www.cerisepress.com), she also plays a Chinese zither. She lives in Paris and New York www.fionasze.com).

LARA TUPPER is a graduate of the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She teaches fiction writing at Rutgers University and lives in New York City. Harcourt published her début novel, A Thousand and One Nights, in 2007.

LAWRENCE VENUTI translates from Italian, French, and Catalan. Recent work includes Antonia Pozzi’s Breath: Poems and Letters (2002), the anthology Italy: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (2003), and Massimo Carlotto’s crime novel The Goodbye Kiss (2006). His version of Ernest Farrés’s Edward Hopper won the 2008 Robert Fagles Translation Prize.

CATE WHETZEL is a graduate of Indiana University and Kenyon College. She lives on the north side of Chicago with her husband, poet Ben Debus, and teaches poetry in the public schools through the Poetry Center of Chicago’s Hands on Stanzas program. Her book reviews have appeared in Indiana Review and The Other Journal (online); her poetry has appeared in Breakwater Review, and is forthcoming from The National Poetry Review and storySouth.

Some Answers

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 16:41:22 -0500

I don’t remember, I was in a blackout.
I don’t remember, the city was in a blackout.
I don’t like myself very much.
I don’t like your wife very much.
We climbed down forty-three flights of stairs.
We walked five miles in paper-thin sandals.
This way to the train station.
This way to the park where trees will hide us from planes.
True, the signs are confusing in that part of town.
There were X’s marked on the eyelids, that’s how I knew
the people were dead.
Because I prefer whiskey to gin.
Because the horse wasn’t close enough to the fire.
Because her ten fingers flamed blue toward heaven.
Because pomegranates, when ripe, split open easily.
Because he was an ordinary white guy.
Because they didn’t have any other medicine they used
Mercurochrome.
That’s right, they used vegetable oil.
That’s right, he took the last rice ball.
He turned the key.
He didn’t mean to.
The tomatoes didn’t help at all.
Because silk was rare.
Because the priest liked a drink.
Because the hospital was gone.
Like the clouds of ten storms gathering on the horizon.
I only thought I was in love.
The scar on her cheek, reddish-purple, continued to weep.
He told a different version of the story.
It never belonged to him anyway.
The sound of airplanes scares her now.
She has difficulty expressing her feelings.
You should be tender.
You should probably leave now.
You should look closer.
The first step is admitting defeat: the prayer goes like this.

—April Naoko Heck

Under Green

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 10:57:21 -0500

April 2006

1
April is the
first poem too
young for cruelest

time I wrote when flowers
wrote rainbows wrote birds too
young for memory then and

now is only just today my
love is well come home

first daffodils forsythia flash
the old gray world with grade
school yellow, scilla grounds
it blue, one tulip’s red with yellow
pistil stamens still the same

Down the street from the green
school where lines form the red
school waits
My love checks
his blood now, wet rubies
on his fingers
Love lives
on what is lost, draws
blood, colors us in

Hawk got dove
today. Sharp-shinned
hawk. Mourning dove. Beside
the garden pulled feathers, plucked
down, pecked at entrails wet with
blood, ate, flew low with
what was left— bird
heavy with bird

Sudden snow dusts ground,
maples red with early flowers,

snow turned rain will bring them
down, wash blood from broken

bodies, push up and out
green, out hidden leaves

Tulip closed against
the cold,
snow bent it
down, made a smooth white
egg of it,
its own heat
broke it open red

with him my love better
now each day break but
days do not begin end
break have never been
break so much with any
one break since I break
I hold will not break

Fifteen years, thousands of
days, millions of minutes
since that April summer

day when I, my own
one as-long-as-we-both-
live Love, said yes. Yes I do.

Days before, He came to the city
named for peace, where there was, where
there is, temple or mosque, no peace, riding
an ass or the colt of an ass, riding on branches
or clothes strewn in His path—
But if the city
gates with different names, gates built on top of
gates, could lift their heads, if the stones,
bombed, refused, could rise together—

In the newly discovered good
news, the disciple named betrayer

is asked to sacrifice the man
that clothes the master: flesh

shed, not risen, death the good
gate to that which is no body

New seeds, green and red, female and male on one
tree, or meeting in air, buds like the buttons
that open the body—
But papery pale
beech leaves blaze the trail that leads
to the hill where just-dug graves—

12

tree gone willow
last winter fallen
taken stump hollow
hole now

and air where last
year vertical script
wrote early spring’s
green news

Last year lambs, panicked by our
traffic, ran under their mothers, we

ate them later, we love the humble,
we eat and drink at the wooden table,

but the lamb was before the slaughter
of thousands in Egypt, and now in Eden

thousands, and bombs for the next
country, they say, war, we love that too.

Traffic halts, trees bleed
seeds beside the road,
reddened air, sudden

clouds, Behold the time
is coming, or is it come
this holy day of death?

April’s more
red than green,
when I wrote at seven
the busy maple I didn’t know what
the maple was doing,
but now I’m fixed
on magnolia: rose bullets on one side
of this tree and opening open-
ing open on the other

But would one want
one’s body, made to make more
bodies, take, eat, heavy with bodies, would
one want one’s body back?
Enough
the empty tomb, shed clothes, the lily, its open-
ing throat, broken shell, out and into
air that molds itself to all this is

Back through all that was before
I could meet you on the corner

I wrote, a second “April,” another
you, but here we are, bodies not

the bodies they were, yours
healing, mine on hold, I thought

this would be for love, Love,
but it’s body. Love’s body.

hyacinths now, follow the scent, trees
white where they will be green, but
you walk more slowly now, and in
the woods we walk on what’s
fallen, we walk on rot

Fallen we say but in the war
movies we see it’s
bodies being

felled: in air

for a moment,
where, as if toward beds,
they fall back, breathless, taken

sweet showers cruelest month
lilacs last in green endures lines

drawn between the pale green leaves
dotting trees and the brown exposed

where there was snow, mixed, he said,
what we want with what we've had

Then, beneath the green cave, the red
room paled, I had no room, I wrote,
for anyone, was early done, but

you have opened a house, young
blood flushes my skin when come
sweet thoughts of your my body

Room in mind for body while
body rests, waits,
room in deeper
mind of dream for what’s denied,
not recognized,
room if we re-
cognize, know over again each
other, for you and me, two
all day in this one house

Trout lilies shooting through
dead leaves stamens stretching
red pistil pushing yellow
up—
You lying low then sitting
standing lying down again with me
all well again you are my spring

Nothing new in this green and
red, them and us, leaves sheer

like lingerie, deeper now, trees
crotched, deeper, roots—no,

we’re not, we cannot root or
rise, we’re crouched between

creeping phlox on an old
grave, someone’s still coming up
through the stems of these rooted green
others, our distant relatives that
rise, start over and over

Touch skin to touch
muscle move blood find
bone
to make blood
rise, blood held by veins
flesh skin
to meet dear
body flesh Love not in blood
shed but in that clear
rush to see through body

Trees finding greens, coloring in
out to the edges, skeletal shadows
becoming shade, landscape painting
as it erases itself—
our lessened
bodies learning each day to be
what they are becoming

Out, or coming out,
dogwood, white and pink lace,
bride and her maid, lilacs breaking
their dark knots—

We are out on this
safe street, while a war, not broken out
but being made, is making more wars

still blue through half-
green trees and you
beside me now
safe, but

what are those
pale bee-y things
paused hawk-
like in our path?

Heavy with memory, this, old
Aprils, self with self, my,

it, lilac with lilac
will not fly—

But body still moves
to body, like to like or almost

like, even now I am learning
love in the school of desire

City of Lights

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 06:33:27 -0500

One night when I was perhaps two, I stood up in my crib when my parents came in to say goodnight and announced to them, "I'm all alone."

"No, no," my father explained, "you're not alone. You have us."

"No. You have each other," I told him, "but I'm all alone."

Apparently my father sat down in a chair and burst into tears. My mother used to say that these words of mine were what convinced them to adopt my brother.

What was it about my statement that made my father cry? Perhaps this is only wishful thinking on my part, but I hope that on some unconscious level, he knew my words were true.

When I was little my mother often told me, "If I had to pick between having your father or having you, I would pick your father." This seemed to me a perfectly reasonable and honest statement because, given the choice, I also would have picked my father.

In 1958, James Jones decided he wanted to live in Paris for a few years, and so my parents, newlyweds still, moved there, neither one of them speaking a word of French. This was seven years after the publication of From Here to Eternity, a novel based entirely on my father's experiences in the peacetime, pre-World War II army. The book, which won the National Book Award in 1951, was published worldwide, and sold over three million copies in the U.S. alone. The film, starring Montgomery Clift, Frank Sinatra, Deborah Kerr, and Burt Lancaster, won eight Academy Awards in 1953.

By the time they moved to Paris, he'd written two other novels, Some Came Running and The Pistol. All three were best-sellers, and Some Came Running was made into a Vincente Minelli film starring Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine, and Dean Martin.

They moved into a little one-bedroom apartment on the quai aux Fleurs, a block from Notre-Dame. Over the course of a year, my mother suffered several miscarriages, but eventually she became pregnant with me. Five months into the pregnancy, she had some complications, and total bed rest was recommended. My mother, for the next four months, was confined from the nightlife she loved.

At the time, my father was writing The Thin Red Line, his Guadalcanal combat novel, and my mother lay flat on her back in the bed, listening to him clacking away on the typewriter in the next room. One day, the laundry man arrived just as my father was writing one of the saddest scenes in the book. Sergeant Keck, a die-hard, solemn, no-bullshit veteran, during an attack, in a moment of foolish excitement, pulls a hand grenade out of his back pants pocket by the pin. Sergeant Keck makes this terrible mistake, and, realizing it, in the three or four seconds he has left, goes off by himself to die.

My father got up and opened the door and there stood the old laundry man, carrying their clothes. My father was shaking, his face twisted up, tears flowing, and the laundry man could see my mother through the door, lying hugely pregnant in the bed. As my father reached for his wallet, the laundry man threw up his hands and said, "Ne vous inquiétez pas, Monsieur! Pas de problème!" Don't worry, Sir, no problem! And he refused to take my father's money. "You pay me next time!" My father, with his very limited French, couldn't convince the kind man to take his money.

Countdown

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 06:31:51 -0500

Three old rowboats
tethered to the dock:
Three old mongrels
lapping at the trough.

Two young saplings
swooning in the breeze:
Two, yes, maidens,
lovelier than trees.

One white marble
lost along the road:
Countless stars and planets,
spilled as if in code.

Cobble Lane

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 05:40:25 -0500

Contributors Spring 2009

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 04:53:18 -0500

ADAM L. DRESSLER serves as the assistant editor at Parnassus: Poetry in Review and as the review editor of Perihelion. He lives with his wife in Brooklyn.

ANNA KUSHNER was born in Philadelphia and first traveled to Cuba in 1999. Her current projects include a memoir about a family divided by divorce, exile, death, and politics, a translation of Guillermo Rosales' The Halfway House (forthcoming from New Directions), and a translation of The Autobiography of Fidel Castro (forthcoming from W.W. Norton). She was a finalist for the John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize in 2007. Her essays have appeared in The Bucks County Writer, Crab Orchard Review, and Wild River Review, and her translations have appeared in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Words Without Borders, and the anthologies Writers Under Siege (New York University Press) and The Global Game: Writers on Soccer (Bison Books). "Olor a Cuba," originally published in Epiphany's online edition, was included in The Best of the Web 2008 (Dzanc Books).

GEORGE FRANKLIN's poetry collection, The Fall of Miss Alaska, was published last year by Six Gallery Press.

KAYLIE JONES is the author of five novels, including A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries. "City of Lights" is an excerpt from her upcoming memoir, to be published by William Morrow in the fall of 2009. Her Web site is kayliejones.com.

KEITH HENDERSHOT was born in Tennessee, educated at Bennington, and now lives in Brooklyn.

KIMBERLY FELTES has written several teen advice books. Her fiction has appeared in The Girls' Life Big Book of Short Stories. She works as a freelance writer and editor and lives in Minneapolis and New York City.

MARK O'DONNELL's plays include "That's It, Folks!," "Fables for Friends," and "The Nice and the Nasty" (all produced at Playwrights Horizons), and "Strangers on Earth" and "Vertigo Park" (both produced by Zena Group Theatre). He wrote the book and lyrics for the musicals "Tots in Tinseltown," "Hairspray" (with Thomas Meehan, for which they received a Tony), and "Cry-Baby." He collaborated with Bill Irwin on an adaptation of Molière's "Scapin," and co-authored a translation of Feydeau's "A Flea in Her Ear," both for the Roundabout. For Manhattan Theatre Club, he translated Jean-Claude Carrière's "La Terrasse." He has published two collections of comic stories, Elementary Education and Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales (both Knopf) as well as two novels, Getting Over Homer and Let Nothing You Dismay (both now in Vintage paperback). His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Canto, The Gay and Lesbian Review, and Harvard Magazine. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lecomte du Nuoy Prize, and the George S. Kaufman Award.

MARTHA TENNENT was born in the U.S. but has lived most of her life in Barcelona, receiving her B.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Barcelona, and serving as the founding dean of the School of Translation and Interpreting at the University of Vic. She has regularly translated between Catalan, Spanish, and English, and recently edited Training for the New Millennium: Pedagogies for Translating and Interpreting. Her translations have appeared in Two Lives, Words Without Borders, eXchanges, and Review of Contemporary Fiction.

MARTIN EDMUNDS is the author of The High Road to Taos and co-wrote, with Lavinia Currier, the screenplay for "Passion in the Desert" (1997). New poems recently appeared in A Public Space.

MERCÈ RODOREDA (1908-1983) is one of the most important Catalan writers of the twentieth century. Exiled in France and Switzerland after the Spanish Civil War, she worked as a seamstress while writing the novels and stories—Camellia Street, The Time of the Doves—that would bring her international fame. In the mid-sixties, she returned to Catalonia, where she continued to write.

MIRA PTACIN is editor of LUMINA, Sarah Lawrence College's M.F.A. literary magazine. She lives in Manhattan with her husband Andrew and their little dog Maybe and is writing a book about the uterus and the American Dream.

NORMAN FILZMAN writes: "Ten years of serving...no stories to tell...none to fabricate...only scenes remembered I used words to bring to life."

PAMELA BROWN lives in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, and teaches Shakespeare, poetry, and drama at the University of Connecticut. Her poetry chapbooks include Small Daughter Also Buried Here, Letter Poem, and East Main, and her poems have appeared in Public, Frontier, and P/rose and Introductions. Her play "The Ice House" was chosen by the Boston Directors' Lab for production in 2003, and in 2008 her plays "As We Like It" and "Annunciation Shikaku" (co-authored with William Owen) were staged at UConn Stamford and Dixon Place.

PETER GOODALE was a painter who exhibited at the Jack Tilton Gallery, in New York, and at the Nielsen Gallery, in Boston, among other places. In 2001, a show of his wooden sculptures on religious themes was held at St. Peter's church, in Manhattan. A book of his poems, More Bounded Air, will be printed by the Woodside Press later this year.

SALLIE BINGHAM's books include After Such Knowledge, The Touching Hand, The Way It Is Now, Passion and Prejudice (a memoir), Small Victories, Upstate: A Novel, Matron of Honor, Straight Man, Transgressions: Stories, Cory's Feast, Nick of Time, and, last year, the short-story collection Red Car. She has also written and produced many plays, and in 1994 founded Santa Fe Stages.

SUSAN RUEL is a writer and fiddler in New York City. As an undergraduate, she took Monroe Engel's writing classes at Harvard, and she studied with John Williams in a doctoral writing program at the University of Denver. Her publications range from short stories and poems to newspaper and magazine articles on global affairs, music, travel, and other topics. With Sorbonne professor emeritus Daniel Royot, she co-authored two books on U.S. media history that were published in France by Ophrys and Didier-Èrudition.

RON SAVAGE has published more than eighty stories worldwide. Some recent publications include Glimmer Train, Shenandoah, Film Comment, and Mercury in Israel. Ron has a B.A. and an M.A. in psychology and a doctorate in counseling from the College of William and Mary. He has worked as an actor, a broadcaster, a newspaper editor, and for twenty-something years as Psychologist Senior at Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Elizabeth McElrath

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 04:18:08 -0500

Elizabeth McElrath grew up in Virginia, and she is currently attending Old Dominion University. She is studying creative writing, and is hoping to eventually write for a living. However, understanding that she needs to support her habit of writing, she plans to possibly teach after she gets her degree. "Pocketed Coins" is currently her first story that has been published.

Katherine Riegel

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 04:14:54 -0500

Katherine Riegel's poetry has appeared in Crazyhorse, the Gettysburg Review, failbetter.com, West Branch, and other magazines. She recently moved to Florida, where her dogs have discovered the sport of gecko-chasing. She teaches creative writing at the University of South Florida.

Tony Perrottet

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 04:12:36 -0500

The need for perpetual motion has always been Tony Perrottet's most obvious personality disorder. While studying history at Sydney University, the Australian-born Perrottet regularly disappeared hitch-hiking through the Outback, sailing the coast of Sumatra or traveling through rural India (enjoying a brief and inglorious career as a film extra in Rajasthan). After graduation, he moved to South America to work as a "roving correspondent," where he covered the Shining Path war in Peru, drug running in Colombia and several military rebellions in Argentina. A brief visit to Manhattan 17 years ago convinced him that New York was the ideal place for a rootless wanderer to be based. From his current home in the East Village of Manhattan, he has continued to commute to Iceland, Tierra del Fuego, Montana, Tasmania and Zanzibar, while contributing to Smithsonian Magazine, The New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler, Esquire, Outside, National Geographic Adventure, The Believer and The Village Voice. Perrottet is the author of four books – Off the Deep End: Travels in Forgotten Frontiers (1997); Pagan Holiday: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists (2002); The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Greek Games (2004) and the literary equivalent of a Cabinet of Curiosities, Napoleon's Privates: 2500 Years of History Unzipped (2008). "Why Castrati Made Better Lovers" is an excerpt from Napoleon's Privates. His travel stories have been widely anthologized and have been selected three times for the Best American Travel Writing series. He is also a regular television guest on NPR radio, network television and the History Channel, where he has spoken about everything from the Crusades to the birth of disco.

Why Castrati Made Better Lovers (AD 1720)

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 02:37:23 -0500

"Long live the knife, the blessed knife!" screamed ecstatic female fans at opera houses as the craze for Italian castrati reached its peak in the eighteenth century — a cry that was supposedly echoed in the bedrooms of Europe's most fashionable women.

The brainwave to create castrati had first occurred two centuries earlier in Rome, where the pope had banned women singing in churches or on the stage. The voices of castrati became revered for the unnatural combination of pitch and power, with the high notes of a prepubescent boy wafting from the lungs of an adult; the result, contemporaries said, was magical, ethereal, and strangely disembodied. But it was the sudden popularity of Italian opera throughout 1600s Europe that created the international surge in demand. Italian boys with promising voices would be taken to a backstreet barber-surgeon, drugged with opium, and placed in a hot bath. The expert would snip the ducts leading to testicles, which would wither over time. By the early 1700s, it is estimated that around four thousand boys a year were getting the operation; the Santa Maria Nova hospital in Florence, for example, ran a production line under one Antonio Santarelli, gelding eight boys at once.

Only a lucky few hit the big time. But these top castrati had careers like modern rock stars, touring the opera houses of Europe from Madrid to Moscow and commanding fabulous fees. They were true divas, famous for their tantrums, their insufferable vanity, their emotional obsessions, their extravagant excesses, their bitchy in-feuding — and, surprisingly, their sexual prowess. Hysterical female admirers deluged them with love letters and fainted in the audience clutching wax figurines of their favorite performers.

This may seem to anticipate the safe, sexless allure of 1950s teen idols like Frankie Avalon. But congress with castrati was not at all physically impossible. The effects of castration on physical development were notoriously erratic, as the Ottoman eunuchs in the Seraglio of Constantinople knew. Much depended on the timing of the operation: boys pruned before the age of ten or so very often grew up with feminine features; smooth, hairless bodies; incipient breasts; "infantile penis" ; and a complete lack of sex drive. (The only castrato to ever write an autobiography, Filippo Balatri, joked that he had never married because his wife, "after loving me for a little would have started screaming at me." ) But those castrated after age ten, as puberty encroached, could continue to develop physically and often sustain erections. While most Italian boys went under the knife at age eight, the operation was performed as late as age twelve.

For Europe's high society women, the obvious benefit of built-in contraception made castrati ideal targets for discreet affairs. Soon popular songs and pamphlets began suggesting that castration actually enhanced a man's sexual performance, as the lack of sensation ensured extra endurance; stories spread of the castrati as considerate lovers, whose attention was entirely focused on the woman. As one groupie eagerly put it, the best of the singers enjoyed "a spirit in nowise dulled, and a growth of hair that differs not from other men." When the most handsome castrato of all, Farinelli, visited London in 1734, a poem written by an anonymous female admirer derided local men as "Bragging Boasters" whose enthusiasm expires too fast, while F—lli stands it to the last.

English women seemed particularly susceptible to Italian eunuchs. Another castrato, Consolino, made clever use of his delicate, feminine features in London. He would arrive at trysts disguised in a dress, then conduct a torrid affair right under the husband's nose. The beautiful, fifteen-year-old Irish heiress Dorothy Maunsell eloped with castrato Giusto Tenducci in 1766, although he was hunted down and thrown into prison by her enraged father. Marriage with castrati was normally forbidden by the church, but two singers in Germany did acquire special legal dispensation to remain in wedlock. Male opera fans, meanwhile, sought out castrati for their androgynous qualities. Travelers report how coquettish young castrati in Rome would tie their plump bosoms in alluring brassieres and offer "to serve . . . equally well as a woman or as a man."

Even Casanova was tempted. ("Rome forces every man to become a pederast," he sighed in his memoirs.) His most confusing moment came when he met a particularly lovely teenage castrato named Bellino in an inn. Casanova was bewitched, going so far as to offer a gold dubloon to see the boy's genitals. In an improbable twist, when Casanova grabbed Bellino in a fit of passion, he discovered a false penis: it turned out that the castrato was a girl, who historians have identified as Teresa Lanti. She had taken up the disguise to circumvent the ban on female singers in Italy. The pair became lovers, but Casanova dumped her in Venice; after bearing a son that may or may not have been his, Lanti "came out" as a female and went on to become a successful singer in more progressive opera houses of Europe, where women were allowed on stage.

An excerpt from Napoleon's Privates: 2500 Years of History Unzipped (HarperCollins)

WHAT I KNEW

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 02:18:28 -0500

Cross country skiing with my mother and sister
took me down wooded paths
I knew from the humid
summer, long stretches beside the river
somnolent and half-frozen, through gardens
of ice like glass sculptures.
We breathed through our scarves,
the air smelling of damp wool.
Sometimes I found a small hill
and took it again and again. Once we got lost,
turned around in the big park, and as dusk
came on we watched deer
like ghosts pass us on
both sides, silent, and moving fast without
looking like they were making
any effort. I was eleven, my sister eighteen,
my mother that indeterminate age
kids always assign to parents.
We stopped, breathed. We were not
afraid. We had only just moved
to town; what we still thought of
as our home had been a farm,
with plenty of winter nights outside
in the snowy dark. My mother
hesitated, unsure. My sister had little
sense of direction. I looked around
at the snow-quiet woods, the orange
of the Illinois sunset, the soothing
lack of human signs. I knew what
we were trying to get back to.
“This way,” I said.

Pocketed Coins

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 13:58:17 -0500

The children played at the top of the stairs. They laughed as the coin bounced down each step, and finally it landed heads up at the bottom. One of the children raced down, plucked the coin from the floor, and ran back up the stairs two at a time.

The cycle started again.

One tossed the coin, and they both delighted in its clinking. The other child then popped up, jumped down each step giggling every time her sandals slapped against the platform to retrieve the coin. Though the game was simple, the children enjoyed it.

"Do it again!" squealed the younger child. The coin rolled down the stairs catching the sunlight. The child clapped, and started down after it holding firmly to the rough banister.

As the child reached down for the shiny coin, he looked up to see a man standing over him.

The man had very dark skin, not much darker than the little boy's. His nose was huge and flat. The boy was sure he'd have to use both hands to grasp it. Running his tongue over his fat pink lips, the man then smiled down at the child.

The older child made her way down the steps, and stood next to the little boy. She looked up at the man noting his fancy clothes and gold rings.

"I'm the new pastor," the man said slowly to the children, "Pastor Brown."

The name was plain, and the girl had hoped the man's name would be as fancy as his clothes. She frowned, a small downturn of the corner of her lips as her gaze fell to the man's fine leather shoes.

"Hello Pastor Brown," the children murmured in unison.

Pastor Brown flicked a comb out of his breast pocket, and raked it through his thick curly hair. Then, kneeling towards the two, his smile so wide it was going to split, he scooped up the shiny silver coin, and dropped it into his pocket.

The children stared up at him, and he placed a dingy brown coin in each of their hands. Giving the two a wink, Pastor Brown sauntered away as the children glanced from each other to their dull pennies, frowning.

Contributors_Summer_2008

Thu, 22 May 2008 14:26:19 -0500

NICK ADMUSSEN's poems have appeared in the Boston Review, Seneca Review, at DIAGRAM, and in the Pebble Lake Review. He is a graduate of the M.F.A. program at Washington University in St. Louis and currently studies modern Chinese literature at Princeton University.

DUNCAN BOCK the editor in chief at Melcher Media, a New Yorkbased book packager. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.

THOMAS BOLT writes poetry and fiction. Yale University Press published his first book, Out of the Woods, in 1989, and he was awarded the Rome Prize for Literature in 1993. More of his writing can be found at tbolt.com.

BRADFORD BROOKS works episodically in war-torn countries throughout Latin America and Africa. Mostly, though, he lives in Coyote, New Mexico, where he has a forge and is an American Bladesmithing Society apprentice.

GEORGES-OLIVIER CHÂTEAUREYNAUD's faithful pursuit of his fabulist muse outside the fashions of contemporary French fiction has not gone unnoticed: his novel La Faculté des songes (Grasset, 1982) won the prestigious Prix Renaudot, while his most recent collection of stories, Singe Savant tabassé par deux clowns (Grasset, 2005), was awarded the Bourse Goncourt de la nouvelle. The author of eight novels, he has founded his reputation on more than ninety-five short stories, translations of which have been published in Germany, Norway, Denmark, Poland, Bulgaria, Greece, China, Russia, Mexico, Venezuela, Slovenia, Hungary, and Croatia.

MARTHA COLLINS is the author of the book-length poem Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006), which won an Anisfield-Wolf Award and was chosen as one of "25 Books to Remember from 2006" by the New York Public Library. Collins has also published four collections of poems, two collections of co-translations of Vietnamese poetry, and two chapbooks of poems. Editor-at-large for FIELD magazine, and an editor of the Oberlin College Press, she currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

JENNIFER COOKE lives and writes in New York City. She was an English major at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1985. In New York, she studied under Phil Schultz at The Writers Studio. She has been published in a handful of literary magazines and newspapers. When she's not writing, she is taking care of her husband and two children.

KAREN CROOKS grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and now resides in southern Wisconsin. She studied studio art and continues to paint in her free time. Her experience is in working backstage in musical theater and showing her paintings in art exhibits. Her first book, Chronic Limbo, was completed in early 2008.

VICTORIA DAVIS was born and resides in Maine. She currently works at Starbucks as a barista and plans to complete her B.A. in Secondary Education with a focus in English. She has always been passionate about reading and writing poetry. This is her first publication.

ISABELLE DECONINCK writes in both English and French, depending on which side of the bed she wakes up. Although French is undeniably part of her biological makeup, she is thankful to English for letting her say things she might never say in French. She is the recipient of a 2004 and 2006 Writing Residency from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. Her fiction has appeared in KGB Bar Lit and her non-fiction in World Literature Today, The Villager, and Ear magazine. Isabelle lives in New York, where she works as a press agent for performing artists, and is a member of the Writers Studio.

D. E. FREDD lives in Townsend, Massachusetts. He has had fiction, poetry, and essays published in several journals and reviews. He received the Theodore Hoepfner Award given by the Southern Humanities Review for the best short fiction of 2005 and was a 2006 Ontario Award finalist. He won the 2006 Black River Chapbook Competition and received a 2007 Pushcart Special Mention Award. A novel, Exiled to Moab, will be published by Six Gallery Press later this year.

EDWARD GAUVIN was a 2007 Fellow at the American Literary Translators Association conference. His work has appeared in Words Without Borders and AGNI Online, where his translations of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud were the author's first to appear in English. He also translates graphic novels for First Second Books and three ongoing bimonthly comics series for Archaia Studios Press.

ROBERT LAMB teaches writing at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, and is the author of two novels: Striking Out, a PEN/Hemingway Award nominee, and Atlanta Blues, nominated for the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. He is a graduate of the University of Georgia and is a free-lance reporter for the New York Times. He may be reached at robertlamb@myway.com.

MARGE LURIE lives in Chelsea, in New York City. She has studied writing at both the Writers Studio and the New School, where she earned her M.F.A. Her fiction has appeared online at ducts.org, Pindeldyboz.com, fictionwarehouse.com, and onelastcarcrash.net.

DANIELLE MAILER has a B.A. from Bowdoin College and studied painting at the New York Studio School and the School of Visual Arts, in New York City. She has shown her work in numerous galleries in Connecticut (Beaux Arts Gallery, in Woodbury; Bachelor Cardinsky Gallery, in Kent; the Silo and the Washington Art Association, in Washington; the New Arts Gallery and the Wisdom House Gallery, in Litchfield; the Norfolk Library, in Norfolk; and the Mattatuck Museum, in Waterbury), New York City (the Blue Mountain Gallery, the Roger Smith Lab Gallery, Columbia Teachers College, and the Bodell/Fahey Gallery), and Provincetown, Massachusetts (Berta Walker Gallery and Little Gorgeous Things Gallery). The Norfolk Library purchased two of her outdoor sculptures, where they remain on permanent display. She lives in Connecticut with her husband, musician Peter McEachern, and their three children, two cockatiels, and a Jack Russell terrier, Simon. She is chairman of the Art Department at Indian Mountain School in Lakeville, Connecticut.

MARK MATOUSEK is the author of two best-selling memoirs, Sex Death Enlightenment: A True Story and The Boy He Left Behind: A Man's Search for His Lost Father, as well as contributing editor to O, The Oprah Magazine and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. His new book, When You're Falling, Dive, will be published this spring.

ANDREW McCORD, a contributing editor to Fulcrum, is currently collaborating with the Pakistani rock guitarist Salman Ahmad on the lyrics for a set of English songs. He lives in New York City.

WILLIAM OLSEN is the author of four collections of poetry, The Hand of God and a Few Bright Flowers (Illinois, 1988), Vision of a Storm Cloud (Triquarterly, 1996), Trouble Lights (Triquarterly, 2002), and Avenue of Vanishing (Triquarterly, 2007). He teaches creative writing and literature at Western Michigan University and at Vermont College, and is editor of New Issues Press.

STEPHANOS PAPADOPOLOUS was born in North Carolina and raised in Paris and Athens. He is the author of Lost Days, published by Leviathan Press in London and Rattapallax in New York. His work has appeared in The New Republic, The Yale Review, Poetry Review, Stand, and numerous international journals and anthologies. He has translated the Greek poets Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Yiannis Ritsos, and Kostas Karyotakis. Selections of his own work have been published in Greek, French, Italian, and Spanish. He is the editor and co-translator of Derek Walcott's Selected Poems, published in Greek by Kastaniotis Editions in 2007. His second collection is entitled Hôtel-Dieu, and he is at present completing a collection of poems about the Black Sea Greeks.

ROXANA ROBINSON is the author of the three novels, Sweetwater (2003), This Is My Daughter (1998), and Summer Light (1988); the three short-story collections A Perfect Stranger (2005), Asking for Love (1996), and A Glimpse of Scarlet (1991); and the biography Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life (1989). Four of these were named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times. She has received fellowships from the N.E.A., the MacDowell Colony, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

VIJAY SESHADRI is the author of Wild Kingdom and The Long Meadow, both from Graywolf Press. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

RONALD STEWART has an M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. He has been published in Perceptions, Harvest, Creek, Strange Tales of an Unreal West, agumsfa, and Elephants of Style. He lives and works in Los Angeles. His writing can be found at www.irradiatedpoets.com, www.poetsagainstthewar.org, www.writerscafe.org, and www.writershaunt.com.

DAVID UPDIKE, author of the story collection Out on the Marsh and of several books for children and young adults, is a professor of English at Roxbury Community College, in Boston.

Vocabulary

Wed, 21 May 2008 16:36:23 -0500

My mother sits on the bottom step
of her ranch-style home
where she has lived for the past thirty years.

She is asking me what exactly does the word “prick”
mean.

She wears a pair of white Tretorns
turned grey from wear in a garden that,
although tended with hours of care,
looks no better than if left alone.

I want to tell her to look it up.
The directive given me when I was a child
and stumbling across words
I did not understand.

But those words were often adjectives
that if ignored did not disturb the story.
I did not realize that their purpose was to
deepen, enrich, provide nuance
so that I might gain a better understanding
of what was really going on.

My mother, though, is asking about a noun.
One that she called my father two days ago.
He has not spoken to her since.