from True Confessions (and brief dreams) in a Time of Pandemic
Missionaries (1962) The doorbell would ring, and my mother and I would slink into the living room trying to muffle our giggles until, peeking out the kitchen window, we’d see the backs of their white short-sleeved shirts as they walked toward the street and their next stop. We’d been on their list my whole life, […]
Four Stories
The following stories were originally published in Fence #20, Winter 2008-2009. You can purchase this issue as an ebook here. —translated by Martin Brady & Helen Hughes The Blind Director Often he would sit there in the country’s penetrating sunlight under the merciful protection, so to speak, of his physical handicap. He allowed the […]
Post Vision©
Screen Shot is a space for writers to investigate the relationship between language and film, from narrative viewing experiences to Zoom meetings and Instagram stories. We are committed to discovering writers who use words as a tool for exploring the event of cinema, video, and the spectacle of our lives. To submit, email screenshotfence@gmail.com This […]
Excerpt from Whorl
The headache is the limit, the circle, the disk. The black horizon. Sometimes it’s a dull, red glow, soft latitudes of pain. Or a field of searing, orange craters. They burst open through the dark. Or, with a gentler hurt: tall, blowing vanes of magnetized color. Sometimes it’s still. Maybe then, it sleeps. When it […]
27 Essays I’m Not Writing about Elizabeth Koch
1 In April everyone involved in, or touched by, independent publishing saw a flare go up: Small Press Distribution launched a GoFundMe. SPD is looking for $100,000 to help cover its losses during the covid-19 crisis. To state the obvious, the crisis has profoundly disrupted bookselling nationwide—even and especially by Amazon.com, which has suspended and/or […]
Sixty-six Dresses I Have Read
“It is not tiring to count dresses.” GERTRUDE STEIN 1 This dress I am wearing in this black-and-white photograph, taken when I was two years old, was a yellow dress made of cotton poplin (a fabric with a slightly unsmooth texture first manufactured in the French town of Avignon and brought to England by the […]
Excerpt from BIOCEREMONIALS
Oonseentia. I go out into the city and find a tulip tree, the tallest tree I can find, the tree called oonseentia by the peoples native to this land, the tree these native peoples use to build their canoes. I intend to build a canoe of my own. I wait for lightning to strike and […]
THE MOMENT I SAW THE SEA NOT THE LAND (AFTER ETEL ADNAN)
Daily, I remind myself: the future is not dependent on your inability to describe your undoing. 〇 In the red notebook I carry always: a blank twenty-five-cent postcard of Silver Rock, Cannon Beach, Oregon; a small black-and-white photograph of a cattle crossing taken from behind the dashboard of a car facing the oncoming cattle caravan; […]
Dictionary under Quarantine/Alphabet for a Pandemic
Unprecedented times call for new forms, which is why I suggested to Greek writer Amanda Michalopoulou that we format our “interview” as a “dictionary.” I learned this from the writer Hilary Plum a decade ago when she interviewed me in this form. I supplied the words, Michalopoulou filled in the definitions. My hope was to […]
“The Sunlight Almost Touched Me”: Tactile Horrors in E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops
He touched me, so I live to know That such a day, permitted so, I groped upon his breast. —Emily Dickinson[1] One of the first texts I had assigned for my 2020 spring environmental literarture course, Climate Emergencies, was E.M. Forster’s shocking visionary tale “The Machine Stops.” The story is set on a future […]
