that I love every person in this room. I mean it. We’ve traveled from all over to be here, and I love each of you, all of you, every last one of you, except Harold, but the rest of you I love fervently and without limitation. It’s important that you believe this is a boundless love, rhapsodic, without timidity or hesitation, because everyone is deserving of compassion, absolutely everyone, just not Harold, but for the rest of you, this affection is perfect, unconditional and free. Not “unconditional” with air quotes around it, not unconditional like a gatekeeper in the garden saying, Look at the fruit but do not shovel it into thy weird little face, saying, Love me and none other, saying, The first born, the locust, the welt of grief I’ve pressed upon your back; it is a truly unstoppable wave of tenderness that doesn’t traffic in punishment or retribution.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-01-21 19:21:002022-02-25 17:18:07“Before We Go, I Want to Publicly Acknowledge,” by Matthew Olzmann
JC: You’ve noted that once you told a former writing instructor you were writing about “People held hostage by the circumstances of their lives.” Are you still inspired by that perspective?
CH: I suppose I am, but the more I’ve thought about the line, the more meaningless it is. I mean, who isn’t held hostage by the circumstances of their lives? Even when those circumstances are favorable, we’re so shaped by them that they affect our sense of what is and isn’t possible or desirable in life. Even when someone’s material circumstances would allow them to safely pursue a different kind of life, their circumstances might keep them from recognizing that or wanting to.
As a parent, I’m terrifyingly aware of how responsible I am for shaping my child’s sense of what is normal, or desirable, or achievable. Maybe one difference between the stories I was writing when I first said that, and more recent stories, is that those earlier protagonists were struggling to survive, to jump to the next rock in the river and not drown. Currently I’m interested in how people decide what direction to leap in, what blend of imagination or desperation prompts someone to either try to cross the river, or to stay put. Do we stay or go, and how do we imagine what might come next?
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-01-18 19:12:002022-02-25 17:18:07“The Menu Options Have Changed,” by Mike Puican (Poetry ’09)
We invited them over, from their fields to ours. To join us naked and playful, to give them Hope. To watch us joyfully trample our own lands— And witness the greening anew overnight. Our fields. Paid for, no mortgages— To join us in and outside of our tents of celebration, And share our jungles and waterfalls.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-01-06 23:50:002022-02-25 17:18:04“Field Dress Portal,” by Sarah Audsley (Poetry ’19)
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-01-05 23:37:002022-02-25 17:18:03“Hang Man (Woman),” by Glenis Redmond (Poetry ’11)
he day before her son eloped, the rains came and the river increased. She recalls the immense, confused sound in the woods behind their home. All day, dense endless thunder. In the evening hailstones gathered in strings along the iron lip of the gutter.
By then she’d forgotten the romantic overtones—eloped—word for lovers. She hears it still. The palm-warmed pebble tossed against the upstairs window, the trestle descent—but not for her child, her boy. Autistic children do not run away with lovers, they just run off with themselves. What must it be like to have such a slack sense of home, or attachment? “Elopement,” as the clinicians say, a behavior half of all autistic children engage in. Another form of wandering, of withdrawing, from her, from her love, her need of him, which grew stronger only as he grew older and more independent of her, more willing to shrug her off—to shrug the world off too, water off a duck’s back.
▴ ▴ ▴
If her son had shoes on when he left that morning, the river took them. The river took everything but his bicycle helmet. The bright orange one, perhaps the only reason the body was found at all, the parents were told, as though they should be grateful he had been wearing it.
▴ ▴ ▴
At night, the mother sees the orange helmet winking out from behind the stilt grass, flashes of it in the corner of her eyes, and when she turns she sees him, under the bright cap, the pale stamen of her son drifting, naked boy with his long hair—surely they thought he was a girl when they first came up on him—her darling in the bulrushes.
▴ ▴ ▴
Her son of so many shades. A gelding changing color. Their nonverbal son; their distant, open-mouthed son; their angry, self-absorbed son; their beauty queen son; their supple, warm-skinned son with the long fragrant hair; their stubborn son, barnacled to the steel pole in the supermarket; their ecstatic son, limbs outstretched on a bright fall day outside his grandparent’s house, dancing; all of their sons, all gone, all flown out like swallows into an aperture of severe self-light.
▴ ▴ ▴
He was diagnosed officially by four, suddenly stopped speaking at three-and-a-half, all in a few weeks, a month perhaps, from compound sentences, to phrases, then a few last words, like a good-bye. After that it was only gestures, if anything.
▴ ▴ ▴
Anything, that is how the mother remembers feeling, how acute her anger could become. She would take anything from him. She had never wanted to shake her child, but in those first months of regressive onset, she could not stop herself from asking him, “Thomas? Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay?” and how she hated her reliance on that question, how she never said anything else to him those days, only asking, pleading, was he okay in there, was he hurting in there, was he scared in there? Was he okay? Because he seemed in pain, or hurt, the way he scrunched his face, closed so tightly his eyes. And his silence was so awful, and sudden. Are you okay? Are you okay?
▴ ▴ ▴
How she wanted to hurt him, she admits this now, how she wanted to make his agonized gestures correspond to something real, to make his clinched eyes correspond to the world as it was. She wanted to place something hot in his hand and see him do something about it, to see him hurting because of something outside. Something she could then remove, and say, all better, all better. She is not ashamed.
They tickled him, but instead of the normal squeal, the look in the eyes that before had pleaded with delight, “no more,” he would instead go stiff, eyes wide as though listening to something far off.
In the mornings, she would go in to find him manipulating his tongue in his mouth, his eyes clamped shut as though focusing very hard on something. It reminded her of someone trying to tie a cherry stem into a knot, though more involved. Each time she found him this way she would pry the mouth open, convinced and scared he actually had something in there. And it was always empty. Empty and empty and empty. This lovely mouth with its full lips, mouth that had before held songs, and laughter, and such precise little demands.
▴ ▴ ▴
This is autism, she is told, over and over again. This and this and this. The word alone, whenever she hears it or is forced to use it, like a door getting slammed upstairs in a big drafty house, a house growing ever bigger now, big enough to contain all the new things she is fearful of.
The word itself was first used to describe a particular kind of self-absorption noted in schizophrenic patients in 1908. Auto. Self. Selfism. It sounds judgmental to her. Why would you do this to yourself? And then, in the forties, child psychologists decided it was not a form of schizophrenia at all, but something else, some other wilderness of the mind. That’s about as far as they have gotten. And yet, they kept Eugen Bleuler’s troubled word. Autism.
▴ ▴ ▴
His arms swung over his drawn-up knees again, his hands together, his whole body rocking, not wildly rocking, but gracefully, rhythmically, his long fingers interlaced and bumping up and down just so on his shins. His eyes remain fixed to the side, into an empty corner. The eyes are moving as though someone is there, dancing.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-01-04 23:33:002022-02-25 17:18:03“Now There Is Only You,” by Nathan Poole (Fiction ’11)
Delivery
Swimming away from the green horizon
I foresaw hot light and desiccation
sweetened by a swirl of apricot and apple
that would soon enough sour.
Birds stirred, fluttered my belly.
Scenting life, I gave way to gravity.
The amber world heaved in a way
that was terrible and fun.
I was too new to understand paradox—
the seasick fish, the cascade of sand.
Some tremendous force of love
pressed down on my sun-shaped face.
I came to know what the amputee knows,
leaving behind my perfect self forever.
What I didn’t expect was the havoc,
the calipers tipped with fire,
the rigid god who hung me in air,
an aborted sacrifice.
The new world closed
its rubber hand around me
like a tourniquet, dandling me,
inverted and wrauling,
before the crowd, its roar
rasping my brand new skin.
HOUR OF THE GREEN LIGHT is published on January 4th by Future Cycle Press.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-01-04 13:09:002022-02-25 17:18:02“Delivery,” a Poem from HOUR OF THE GREEN LIGHT, a New Collection from David Ruekburg (poetry ’04)
Helena Fox’s novel HOW IT FEELS TO FLOAT was selected as the winner in the Young Adult Fiction category for the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award. The awards celebrate outstanding literary talent in Australia and the valuable contribution Australian writing makes to the nation’s cultural and intellectual life.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2020-12-30 12:42:002022-02-25 17:18:01Helena Fox (fiction ’99) Wins Australian Prime Minister Literary Award
Look at Pictures, Illustrations, Charts, and Graphs
1
Projected on the wall, a map,
each school a dot. Colored
in codes of the standardized test:
there’s basic, taxi-yellowed;
proficient, advanced, the colors
of wealth. But not my school
nor each nearby. In our neighbor-
hoods, fire burns, blood pools:
below basic, far below basic.
2
At year’s start, the principal talks
of who we serve, and who
we fail. As always, numbers: farbelow basic, below,
below the tip of the iceberg,
metaphorical, blue,
in her PowerPoint. This is not,
unlike half our staff, new.
But then she tapes up photographs
on a blank, white board. Shows:
This boy, jail. This, expelled. This boy
just gone, to where, don’t know.
So by the end, it’s nearly half
our Black male students. They
gaze at us from shadowed portraits,
flattened to grainy gray.
3
The young white man presenting has
a passion I could squeeze
into a drinking glass. He says,
For Black students, this is the worst place in the state to getan education. Now
I need that drink, its sunshine wedge,
to squeeze into the low
and fizzing whisper of a G
& T, to touch, to eye
nothing but glass between my hands,
here, where color decides.
4
Some smile, but most practice the shape
of hardened mouths and eyes.
These boys are gone. We let them down.
It’s quick: I start to cry
and by the end, I’m shaking, sobs
while paisley tissue packs
pass round to my sweating hands. How
deep, I wonder (don’t ask),
will this water get? Far below
the iceberg’s metaphor,
far past the clink of ice, I see
films of the ocean floor
I showed my kids, who tried to love
nothing, but loved the glow
of creatures alive at ocean’s depths.
The water’s color, though
really none, can reflect blue, brown,
or green. If you go deep,
its hue looks black. In science, they
learn black’s no color. Seep
of color’s absence. These boys, lost,
are failed and failing. What
shade is this disaster, then, what
color our failure’s cost?
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2020-12-29 13:28:002022-02-25 17:17:59A Poem From Caroline M. Mar’s (poetry ’13) New Collection SPECIAL EDUCATION