#APSeverywhere

June 15, 2015

Throughout the summer and into the fall, we will be distributing postcards at various bookstores, performance venues, and cultural institutions around Brooklyn asking people to document a public space in the borough on a 4" x 6" canvas. Here is what we've received so far.

Reviving Maria d’Arezzo, Presidentessa Dada

Olivia E. Sears • April 23, 2015

Translation may be the invisible art, but the translator's mission is precisely to bring visibility to a work of literature, and at times to rescue an author from obscurity. This is especially true when translating Italian women writers of the past who struggled for visibility even within their own culture.

On Colin Barrett’s “Stand Your Skin”

Belinda McKeon • March 31, 2015

Let’s start the morning and kill the day, says one of the teenage characters in Colin Barrett’s “Stand Your Skin.” The drink doesn’t help, thinks his central character, an anxious, life-ravaged young man nicknamed Bat, but it does help.

I wish it were otherwise, but if there are two lines that get more precisely at the grim reality of what life is like for large swathes of young people in present-day, recession-pulverized small-town Ireland, I’ve yet to read them. Bat spends his days working in a service station on the outskirts of Glanbeigh, the fictional town in which all of Barrett’s stories are set (his debut collection, Young Skins, has just been published), and the bearable minutes of those days are spent on break in the station’s rest area, a concrete enclosure “done up to suggest a picnic area” in which all possibility of the pastoral has been soundly stamped to gray; the playground is an “aluminum wreck,” obscenities are carved into every surface, and weeds “have grown up and died in the fistulas along the crumbling perimeter.”

Look at that word. Fistulas. I had to Google it, and then I image-searched it, and then I closed the window and tried to forget the things I’d seen. Take it from me: it’s an abnormal connection that grows between parts of the body between which there should be no connection, and it takes hold, and it makes sure that nothing can be the same way again.

Bat, who earned his moniker partly because of the extreme myopia that went undiagnosed all through his schooling, knows only too well how fistulas physical and psychological can force themselves onto the parts of a life. Disfigured and traumatized by a long-ago act of violence as terrible in its randomness as in its savagery, he is a damaged boy, his face put back together messily, his head pounding always, and tinnitus droning like constant fluid in his ears.

Years later, he is still nervous around people; touch his shoulder in a bar and his hand will close around a phantom pint, needing the reassurance of it, needing to be weighted. He is not violent, but something that is worse, maybe, in a certain small-town setup: he is sensitive, and determined to practice a kind of mindfulness, and determined to try and keep himself clear of the trouble that is always festering between his townspeople, always looking for its way to snake out of suggestion and into something visceral and real. At the service station, Bat works with two others: Heg, who is eighteen and soon to go back to college now that the summer is ending—"The brain boxes are off to brain box land,” mutters another local lad at Heg’s leaving party—and Tain, whose name seems a nod towards the ancient Irish epic in which a woman wages war on a province of men. Barrett’s Tain, fifteen and fragile with borrowed bravado, has no such option, and Bat worries for her, but as Bat well knows by now, worry makes nothing happen. In a town in which youth seems valuable only for the energy with which it allows people to destroy themselves, in which beauty is a thing either to be feared or to be badly fucked—and afterwards deeply resented in either case—in a town like this, Bat would do well to keep his thoughts on the lives of others to himself.

But Barrett’s writing makes the bleakness of all of this somehow beautiful. He evokes Bat, the physical state of him, with the care of an art historian poring over a Pre-Raphaelite form; the “scuzzy cascade” of hair, its “nest of flubs, snarls and knots”, the kraken tattoo on his forearm, the “balky hydraulics” of his permanently wrecked jaw. The details of Bat’s nervy solicitude are marvelous; his guilty use of Tain’s underarm deodorant in the service station restroom, his earnest library Internet research into just how wrong the wrongness between Heg and Tain may be, the joy of his nighttime motorbike rides “deep into the countryside’s emptinesses,” deep into his own desire to come roaring out of his own ravaged hide. In his dreams, he cries, and his mother asks him about his medication, perhaps because those are things which the caution and pretending of the daytime will not allow; at night he goes to his mother’s roof to drink a six-pack of beer which will slice agony into his eye sockets come the morning. Bat doesn’t want to kill the days, not the way Heg does. But around here, the days get on with a killing all their own.

Read "Stand Your Skin" by Colin Barrett in APS 20.

The 2015 Emerging Writer Fellows

February 10, 2015

We are thrilled to announce our 2015 Emerging Writer Fellows: Jai Chakrabarti, Cornelius FitzPatrick, and Arinze Ifeakandu. We would also like to thank all of the writers who submitted manuscripts, the readers who spent the past eight weeks evaluating, debating, and championing applications, and the National Endowment for the Arts for its generous support of the program.

Supporting new writers has been an essential part of A Public Space since our debut issue—Leslie Jamison, Nam Le, and Jesmyn Ward published their first stories in the magazine—and with the Emerging Writer Fellowships, which are now in their second year, we look to continue this tradition by seeking out writers who have not yet published a book-length work but whose writing shows exceptional talent.

On Charles D’Ambrosio’s “The Dead Fish Museum”

Leslie Jamison • November 12, 2014

“The Dead Fish Museum” starts with a key that doesn’t work, presented to a motel clerk whose face is visible “through a circle in the slab of glass, cut like a hole in ice.” It’s a story full of people trapped—trapped by need or trauma or loneliness, trapped inside the stifling confines of a hastily erected porn set: “They’d boarded shut the windows and now, with fumes of fresh paint filling the warehouse, Ramage felt woozy.” Ramage is the guy who runs the carpentry crew. He builds a world he doesn’t want to be inside of. He builds a world where a woman gets paid to get fucked between walls he’s painted such a glossy black he can see his own face reflected in their darkness: “his reflection floated as if submerged in dark water."

But even this vision is partial. This is a world in which one can only partially exist, in which only certain parts of a person can reside: “The wall did not reflect the crews’ eyes or mouths; black hollows bloomed in their heads like the holes in a skull.” Submerged in water, peering out from ice-holes cut in plastic, woozy from paint fumes and blooming dark hollows where they might otherwise be speaking or seeing: these are characters looking for an outside and finding only motel bathtubs that go grimy with the dirt from their days: “Outside, there was nothing but the separateness of feeling used and spent, of rundown bones and sore muscles and another day, and at the narrow end of it a tub of tepid water that would instantly turn tea-brown and drain away, leaving a ring of crud around the porcelain.”

This is stunning language—in its rhythms and its precision, its surprise (the narrow end, the rundown bones), its sensitivity to the residue of despair, that ring of crud—and it haunts me after I’ve read it, it keeps summoning characters haunted by what they’ve already survived: a mental hospital, a civil war. They have survived these things for this compromised half-life, for their partial faces visible in overwhelming darkness, for motel rooms in this off-season seaside town, with a spice factory filling the air with its daily business (basil, oregano) and litter skittering across the boardwalk, bits of popcorn and empty cotton candy cones; for the blank faces and daily shit of co-workers, for trysts that never quite happen and veins of loneliness that never become anything more than the sum of their separate parts.

Ramage drives a porn actress away from his room one night by putting on a puppet show with his gun and a bullet: “’Let’s have a baby,’ the bullet said. / ‘Fill me with your seed,’ the gun said.” These are the possibilities of sex: it’s something to sell or else it’s a way of talking about how you want to die. The only relief is the relief of getting fucked up: drunkenness like a momentary ocean leading beyond, finally beyond, to some outside—“Ramage drank with the image of blue water, of open sea, before him”—but this vista only lasts a little while, until he wakes up to the world again.

The story closes with the same motel clerk who opened it, still reading her Harlequin novel behind the plastic, “the white waste of her face set to the romance,” and this story is something else: not the hollow consolation of romance but the deeper company of waste; the refusal to turn away from our own faces submerged in darkness.

Read "The Dead Fish Museum" in APS 01. "The Dead Fish Museum" also appears in the eponymous collection published by Knopf in 2006.

A Letter from Leslie Jamison

Leslie Jamison • October 23, 2014

Hello Readers,

I’m sitting in Slottsparken, in Oslo—on the stone steps in front of the Royal Palace, in the shadow of a looming bronze king on his looming bronze horse—and I’m thinking about public spaces, how they summon an inadvertent gathering stripped of intention or annotation: a young artist in Converse high-tops holds a baguette in one hand and a splattered canvas in the other; an elderly couple strides by in matching sunglasses, still holding hands after however-many years; a group of children convulses collectively around the fact of a tiny toffee-colored dog; a woman bends over to reach her arm down into a garbage can.

Public spaces gather individual stories into passing relation, and A Public Space gives us glimpses into these private infinities, the engines of desire and fear that might drive them. A Public Space notices the world—in all of its particulars, their odd collection—and delivers this world to us. It makes room for joy—that little toffee dog!—and perpetuity—those sunglasses, those gripping hands. It makes room for strangers and mysteries and necessity; it’s not afraid to include the woman who sticks her hand into the trash. In one recent issue, Ander Monson speculates: “perhaps it’s not too late to rehabilitate your heart, the echo chamber of your voice,” and I think it’s fair to say A Public Space has become a recurring echo chamber: each issue conducting a collection of voices into chorus.

It feels right to write about A Public Space far away from its home on Dean Street, in Brooklyn, because it has always loved roaming far and wide. In its pages you’ll find a Zimbabwean coffin maker and a makeshift outdoor gym in Beijing, a Buenos Aires neighborhood with streets named after famous women, and a glossary of Antarctica slang. (Degomble: to shake the hardened snow from one’s hair).

My own history with A Public Space began in 2006, when I was temping at a large bank in midtown Manhattan—a windowless room full of cubicles, a decidedly un-public space—and the magazine decided to publish one of my stories. It was my first publication anywhere. Hearing that someone actually liked my writing enough to publish it was like a sudden swell of wind. It gave me faith in something beyond the cubicle.

One of the most singular and spectacular things about A Public Space has always its commitment to unknown authors: almost every issue introduces someone who has never been in print. It’s a magazine committed to discovery: to discovering new voices, new places, new layers of feeling and experience.

Years later, under the northern sun of Oslo, far from those dim Midtown cubicles, I’m writing these words to you—you, who are probably a stranger to me, unless you are my mother, who has been a faithful subscriber to A Public Space since 2006 (hi mom!). I’m sitting in a park full of infinite human lives and thinking about communities of readers and writers as public spaces of another kind, and I’m thinking that perhaps, if you have read some of the same words as I, you are not entirely a stranger after all.

It’s precisely this kinship—faceless but not soulless, this kinship of bodies turning the pages and hearts receiving them—that A Public Space has made possible for the past eight years.

With your support, we can keep dwelling in this kind of public space for years to come. Please think about helping to make it possible.

Thank you,

Leslie Jamison


P.S. Contributions at any level help to make A Public Space possible, but if you’re able to make a donation at the $100 level, you’ll receive a signed copy of Issue 3, with Leslie Jamison’s debut story, “Quiet Men.” Donors at the $250 level will also receive a signed copy of her essay collection, The Empathy Exams, which received the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and was a New York Times best seller this year. CLICK HERE TO DONATE.

Thank you for being a part of A Public Space.

On Dorthe Nors’s “Karate Chop”

Daniel Woodrell • October 22, 2014

To read a Dorthe Nors story is to enter a dream and become subject to its logic. Though her voice is subtly modulated, even cool, cerebral, you immediately feel pulled into a consciousness that is somehow off-kilter and quietly, darkly disturbed. Sometimes her characters seem merely odd, but somewhere along the way the merely is lost and the odd quality becomes stunningly human. Her wonderful collection, Karate Chop, is an exemplar of this compact artistry. You pass through her narrative, often not quite sure of what is really happening, confusion that builds internal tension, and even mystery in the sense of the mystery of existence, the hidden realms to be found within one life. The writer’s voice is bracingly candid, stoic, and yet, like a dream, the forward movement of paragraphs is broken up by perceptions and memories that seem nearly to be non sequiturs, sidebars to the narrative, but that actually hurl the story forward in surprising ways. Ideas and emotions are quick in arriving, equally quick to shift meaning as we read forward. This technique has much in common with aspects of karate; when one arm strikes forward the other draws back, and the arm drawing back is equal in importance to the arm striking forward. Nors knows and understands so much about us; her perceptions frequently shock with their acuity, though within seconds you recognize them as, yes, true.

Read "The Winter Garden" by Dorthe Nors in APS 12 and "Karate Chop" in APS 14.

On Robyn Schiff’s “De La Rue’s Envelope Machine”

Patricia Lockwood • September 15, 2014

I'll read any poem about a machine. I honestly would read a poem about a toaster, or an ATM, or Rosie from The Jetsons. A poem about the first machine that folded envelopes? Why not just put a chocolate bonbon directly into my mouth; it is so completely my weakness. How does Robyn Schiff know me so well?

The first thing I do, of course, is look up what the hell any of this is—and I find the Wikipedia entry to be a stunning verbal innovation. Listen:

The "envelopes" produced by the Hill/De La Rue machine were not as we know them today. They were flat diamond, lozenge (or rhombus)-shaped sheets or "blanks" which had been precut to shape before being fed to the machine for creasing and made ready for folding to form a rectangular enclosure.

I didn't know any of this because I "know" very little, especially about things that nerds did in the past. What kind of man decides that paper needs to go inside other paper? I look up Warren De la Rue and he has the most hilarious beard I've ever seen. Trust me. Go Google him, I'll wait till you come back. It’s like a bat signal on his chin—no wonder he could see into the future. Already my life has been enriched, and the poem hasn't even started yet.

Now to the poem itself, which is fed to the machine for creasing. The grammar folds over on itself. The line breaks fold the poem once, and then again, and then again, into a diamond. I think of Schiff's sound as having a sort of angular fluency, like water traveling down steps, or a game of Mouse Trap. Her trick is to set up a rigorous scaffolding and then let the poem itself flow down it. That fluid, hitched, staggering sound is instantly identifiable—it’s a meeting of the constructed and the elemental. You have to work hard reading it, but that is what you were built to do. You were even built to contain things, things like this.

This is a lost, legendary episode of How It's Made. The workings of a machine are a mystery, so we just watch what flies out of its mouth. Down the conveyor belt passes a parade of transformations: cards for wedding and mourning, swords, white cranes, copies, dollar bills. A book written by Houdini, to imply we might get out in the end. At long last a person comes down the conveyor, eyes closed and arms crossed over her chest. The hands fold up in death, then open up to reveal yes no yes no, or reveal nothing.

Every poem is a poem about what paper can do—if a poet’s not interested in paper, she’s not interested in life. Does it matter how the language is folded if no one reads it? But look, they do read it. It reaches you. 27,000 envelopes an hour can't hold it.

Read Robyn Schiff's "De La Rue's Envelope Machine" in Issue 5.

The 2015 APS Emerging Writer Fellowships

September 15, 2014

We are pleased to announce that applications are now open for ​the 2015 Emerging Writer ​F​ellowships. Under this project, three emerging writers will ​be selected for six-month fellowships, which will include:

– A ​mentorship from an established author who has previously contributed to A Public Space;
– Publication in the magazine;
– ​A contributor's payment of $1,000;
– ​Free workspace in our Brooklyn offices​ (optional)​.

Please note that applicants from all across the world are encouraged to apply for these fellowships, and that the residency in our offices is an optional element. We are only able to consider submissions in English.

​Leslie Jamison, Jack Livings, Amy Leach, Michael Thomas, and Jesmyn Ward were all emerging writers (and in some cases unpublished) when their work first appeared in A Public Space, and with these fellowships we hope to continue the tradition of supporting new writers whose work shows distinctive and exceptional talent. Our focus when reviewing applications will be on finding writers who have not yet published or been contracted to write a book-length work​ and who would benefit from the time, space, and editorial attention the fellowships offer.​

To apply you will need to submit, via the APS Emerging Writer Fellowship​s​ category ​on​ our Submittable page: (1) a previously unpublished short story or essay, and (2) a cover letter​ that includes one paragraph with biographical information, and one paragraph about a piece of writing by another author that has been meaningful to you. Please include in the cover letter your email and postal address, the title and word count of your piece, and any publication credits to date. (The lack of any publication credits won’t count against you​.)​ Please also state whether you would wish to take advantage of the residency ​at our Brooklyn office.

There is no fee for applying, but please note that we can only accept applications through the proper category on Submittable ​and​ that we will not be able to consider email or postal applications. Please only submit one application per author. There is no upper word limit on submissions.​ Applications that do not follow the guidelines will not be considered.​

The deadline for applications is 5pm EST on October 15, 2014. Successful applicants will be informed no later than ​February 10, 2015. The fellowship period will be March 1, 2015 – September 1, 2015.

Deborah S. Pease (1943-2014)

August 18, 2014

Deborah Pease was a dear friend, devoted reader, and founding benefactor of A Public Space. She was the author of the novel Real Life (W. W. Norton), and several books of poems, collected in Another Ghost in the Doorway (Moyer Bell). Her poems also appeared in AGNI, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus, and other journals; as well as in the chapbook The Crows at Appleton (Monogram Editions) and Opposed to Indifference: Poems of Memory and Conscience (Haybarn Press).

A phone call nine years ago about starting this magazine expanded over time into long conversations about everything from the size of a footnote to a favorite sentence in the magazine. Packages, addressed in her elegant handwriting, arrived often on Dean Street, with a novel by Niccolò Tucci, a catalog from the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, news of the Poets House Showcase—for her one of the truest ways to value art was to share it. With that in mind, and as a way to remember her, here is a small selection of her work:

All the Observable Grace

It is difficult
Amid so much disturbance
To step lightly into the narrow boat,
To let the current carry it
Into the wide, slow-moving river.
Difficult to embark on the indeterminate journey.
Difficult not to find defeat in hostile terrain,
Easy to lose all sense
Of the river’s promise,
Easy to forget how the sun contends with shade
In ever-extending clemencies as day begins.
It is difficult to reach the shore
From arid plains, difficult to imagine
The ease of drifting.
Life begins
On the sloping river bank.
Minnows wheel in the shallows.
Trees on either side blend their reflections.
Light appears to emanate from underneath.
Birds are apprehended by their calls,
By the peace they call into being.
Only otherness
Allows the tentative step
Into the narrow boat, impels a casting off
Of customary gravity.
Coolness washes the face in sun-measured warmth.
A cleanliness is laid upon habitual usage.
Aquatic creatures plow delicate wakes
Criss-crossing all that was known
And is known again.
It is difficult not to wish
To live this way forever
In all the observable grace.
Day changes
In the manner of a face becoming old.
Night nears.
A log juts
Pronged with antlers.
Ahead lie clouds and islands, glazed tributaries,
A wideness, river-lakes, washes of blue,
Pale-hued supplicants.
Waters reclaiming the earth.
[Read more]