"Grip" Arrives!

My lovely issue of Fourth Genre arrived in the mail this week.  (Is it me, or do those inscribed tablets look awfully phallic?)
 
If you're a Pine Manor-head, or you went to Marcia Aldrich's panel last year at AWP (where she read the piece aloud), or you picked up one of Fourth Genre's little brochures at the AWP book exhibit (which featured it), then you know I'm excited about the at-long-last publication of my little creative nonfiction piece, "Grip."  Here's the beginning of it:

Over the crib in the tiny apartment, there hung a bullet-holed paper target, the size and dark shape of a man--its heart zone, head zone, perforated where my aim had torn through:  36 little rips, no strays, centered on spots that would make a man die.
     Beginner's luck, said the guys at the shooting range, at first.  Little lady, they'd said, until the silhouette slid back and farther back.  They'd cleared their throats, fallen silent.
     A bad neighborhood.  An infant child.  A Ruger GP .357 with speed-loader.

It's not as morbid as it sounds, a target pinned above a crib:  the place was small, the walls already plastered full with paintings, sketches, pretty leaves, hand-illuminated psychedelic broadsides of poems by my friends.  I masking-taped my paper massacre to the only empty space, a door I'd closed to form a wall.

When my stepfather got out of prison, he tracked my mother down.  He found the city where she'd moved.  He broke a basement window and crawled in.  She never saw his car, halfway up the dark block, stuffed behind a bush.

And it goes on.  It actually turns out to be sort of a love letter to my son.  

After the journal had accepted it, they asked if I would write another essay about how it had been composed.  This turned out to be a very odd thing to do, but I did it, and it's in the issue, too:  "Getting 'Grip.'"  The idea, I think, is that these how-I-wrote-it essays are supposed to be useful to people interested in the craft or process or something.  I'm not sure how useful mine will be, though I tried to make sure it kept a snappy voice and wasn't just deadwood in tone.  (It also thanks UNL grad student and Prairie Schooner managing editor James Engelhardt, who gave me feedback on a revision, for saving me from my cetological excesses.  Don't ask.)

Anyway, the issue also includes pieces by Heather Sellers, who's appeared on this blog, and Lisa Buchanan, whose work I have loved forever, and woolly wild prolific man du jour Ander Monson, with whom I read once on a panel at Ball State and who persists in never recognizing me when we bump into each other, which is a feat, but maybe when you have bushy hair and an electric manner it's hard because everyone always remembers you even when they don't leave much of an impression themselves (you can see I've given this far too much thought), as well as a very nice interview with Brenda Miller, done by Marcia Aldrich and some of her students, who felled me with their brightness. 

It's a good issue.  Even if the inscribed tablets are like phalluses or ghosts.

Non sequitur:  It's interesting to be teaching Meridel Le Sueur this week--or this year, I should say:  her  reportage on Depression-era suffering is becoming all too widely relevant.  Even her tossed-off observations like this one: 

Statistics make unemployment abstract and not too uncomfortable.  The human being is different.  To be hungry is different than to count the hungry.

Indeed. 

Next week, we read Hurston's gorgeous, gorgeous Their Eyes Were Watching God, and that brings us up to 1937, and then we stop reading primary texts and the students start felling us, I hope, with their brightness as they read their research papers aloud as if we're all at a tiny scholarly conference. 

Professionalization is apparently the name of the game, and I'm doing my bit by all these game young people who wish to do this for a living.