Ten thousand jasmine flowers and twenty eight dozen roses are required to make a single vial of this landmark perfume — to it they add essence from the tropical ylang ylang tree along with the michelia magnolia mixed in with the white star-shaped petals of the tuberose: a concoction of not one particular earthly manifestation, but an achievement of the platonic ideal of a flower…
A Conversation with ‘Best Debut Short Stories 2021’ Author Alberto Reyes Morgan
What is the best or worse writing advice you’ve received, and why?
When I was dipping my toes into the writing game I had this piece about a kid climbing a tree to grab something his friend threw up there. The tree starts bleeding, then drowns the world in its blood, including the friend. I had this line, “bright horrific beauty,” in it. When I showed the story to the writer Peter Orner, he just said, his eyes looking down at my piece of paper, “What’s ‘bright horrific beauty?’” I remember feeling embarrassed because, yeah, what the fuck did that even mean? He told me to beware of adjectives.
Finally, where do you discover new writing?
Every year, I make sure to buy the Best Debut Short Stories anthology and read the fantastic writers within its pages (wink, wink). Well don’t write in the part where I winked at you, otherwise . . . Are you writing this down? I don’t—
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-11-01 18:29:002022-02-25 17:20:12An interview with Alberto Reyes Morgan (Fiction ’20)
You are here: abject, bereft, clear (all-seeing, also see-through); disheveled. Euphoric, enervated, flushed, faint, fierce, and also, generous, gushing milk and patience, goddess-like, even while grieving—what?—your good, distant self. Heavy, heaving. Helper; holder of hands or heads. You’ll appear, to some idiots, indignant, indigent, icky.
You’ll ignore cries, which is not to say you won’t hear them, no, your rabbit ears will make you jumpy, jealous of the free world. Animaled, you’ll grow keen, willing to kill, almost, kept in the kennel of loving a small helpless thing so helplessly that you’d carry your cub, kindred, kinder through the streets in your very teeth…
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Buckle & Swash: Heather McHugh interviewed by Kary Wayson
I’d love it if you started out by locating us—where are you?
I am living (of late) in a rural area south of Port Townsend on the Olympic Peninsula. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for my fair-play attempt to triangulate with my late-life passion (it’s a man). We both are wedded to some origin and independence stories—his centering on Washington State, mine on British Columbia; but at the moment we’re fair-smitten with each other, and at seventy and up, I tell you that’s a sweetness you don’t want to jeopardize.
Muddy Matterhorn is your first book in ten years. You’ve spoken elsewhere about a time after winning the MacArthur when you stopped making poems. I remember asking you at that time if the stoppage made you anxious or fearful—and, memorably, you replied that you felt no anxiety about your artistic output because your senses of curiosity and wonder were alive and well. Have there been times when you have worried over such things?
Not really. There were always so many forms of play to work at! Poems are only passages, and all art forms remind you passages are openings. I’m promiscuous about the arts. I was writing jingly verse when I was four, but I also always loved visual design and architecture; as a teen I painted and sculpted; recently I played around a bit with sound files and spoken word. I took time out from teaching, too, for the caregiver-respite project. That benevolence itself changed me, taught me plenty, changed its own forms. (Nonprofits seem to need more gifted profiteers than I.) In any case, after times away, I seem to home to poems.
So what do you worry about?
I worry when I write, not when I don’t.
I hate being visible but wind up being seen—I neither dazzle nor boggle (indeed nowadays I waddle, what with the weight and the bad knee). Stuff like that would have worried me, in my teens, but not so much since I started, around age eighteen, to pay for my own Twinkies. (Well, in all good taste, let’s call it baklava.)
As for rent (or its garments and garnishments), god knows I won’t let anybody else make me a living, or make me a mannequin. I’ve been lucky to have choices, especially in the form of jobs without dress codes, jobs without punch cards. I have cut back on some fancies: Fancy dress and fancy fender I can live without. I do have a surfeit of sensory alertness: the senses are freedom’s luxuries.
Senses I can exercise, senses I can move and be moved by, keep me fond of life. I do adore the STIR of sights and sounds and the break from my own self-cycling mind. Given an open door I can revisit the world, revise myself.
From the start instinctively I was attracted to the word-musicians and poets who reminded me how much was outside ordinary frames of our control: Stein for the neurolinguistic networks of “Tender Buttons”; Stevens for giving over aesthetic mastery to the ultimate independence of artistic occasion (see “So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch”); or take a look at Robert Creeley’s “The Window,” where responsiveness is sensory responsibility, and where every line gets its due.
Miss you. Would like to grab that chilled tofu we love.
Do not care if you bring only your light body. Would just be so happy to sit at the table and talk about the menu. Miss you. Wish we could bet which chilis they’ll put on the cubes of tofu. Our favorite. Sometimes green. Sometimes red. Roasted we always thought. But so cold and fresh. How did they do it? Wish you could be here to talk about it like it was so important.
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There is the field I imagine & then the field I step into. This bright study is more or less self-explanatory. If the cave painters knew viewers would wait in long lines, or that digital representations would be gazed upon from the comfort of sofas on tablets & devices, would they have amplified tones of ochre, red & yellow? Or drawn the black lines thicker with a steadier hand? Without society, without culture, there are no neatly outlined, named, categorized colors; there are only infinite colorations forming an improbable continuum. Or made portraits of themselves instead of animals leaping across stonewalls; or painted them pornographic to shock & excite?
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That year all elective surgeries were cancelled, and I was the only patient. Once my appendix was gone, my abdomen cleared of the spill, I was neither sick nor well. Recovering, but alone.
Because we are all in danger of what we cannot see: no visitors. A nurse to help me shower, to check bandages when I pressed the button to be seen.
I can move these days without fear in the company of scars.
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Sweet Fears don’t worry the windshield wipers work see those flakes in the air don’t worry they’re going somewhere melted melting and our view will be clear Look at this exit before us we don’t have to stay on this grief highway forever look turn just slightly and we can pull over for snacks…
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