Callaloo was founded in 1976 by its current editor, Charles Henry Rowell, when he was teaching at Southern University (Baton Rouge).  He originally described the fledgling periodical as a “Black South Journal,” whose function was to serve as a publication outlet for marginalized writers in the racially segregated US American South.
Shortly after Dr. Rowell moved the journal to the University of Kentucky at Lexington in 1977, Callaloo began to publish black writers nationwide.  He had transformed Callaloo into an African Diaspora journal by 1986, when the Johns Hopkins University Press became its publisher, after he moved to the University of Virginia (Charlottesville) as Professor of English.  After a fifteen-year tenure at Virginia, he moved Callaloo again—this time to Texas A&M University in College Station, where it has remained since 2001.  At this point in time, the life of Callaloo—as a forum continuously publishing creative writing, along with visual art and critical texts about literature and culture—is probably the longest in African American literary history.

*IMPORTANT NOTICES*
CALLALOO has switched to an online manuscript tracking system.

…

Let them be dead.

Let them be dead then.

For I have taken many deaths.

My face was drawn in the uterus with the pointed edge of a protractor. One line drawn down the center of my face, down and away from the widow’s peak, to the flattened bridge of my nostrils—the waters of my mother’s belly forced a slant upon the tip of my nose—down toward the lips and jawline. One cannot measure my head in one conjunctive assembly and find the skull, the mask of the skull to resemble that of a fleeting comet. My eyes bear the privacy and protection of men unlike me.

My mother died upon my birth and I have imagined her cliffed over the edge of a wooden gurney with a webbed thigh, her womb stretched out and bloody.

He, too, my father, he, too, is dead.

It was a gesture of protest—for he had wished to be cremated; but, I did not…cremate…him—once, he stood on the vein of an open road, waiting for me to return from my Bible practices, when he saw, at that exact moment, my pursed lips, the luring magnet of a lover, through the foliage of the trees.

He had been there after the boys had come.

…           

You see, they had come that afternoon.

I cannot tell you this without, first,…oh, there lives in my head one chorus, one voice and orb, at this very moment, it lives there…I must tell you, now, that there is only, that there is only love. For I loved him.

I loved Schevoski.

And he had as much to do with my being there, in that cave, as my father, as they did, and I cannot continue without first telling you about Schevoski.

It was an exchange; it was the episodic, auxiliary elation of an accident.

He had touched me, you see, he had touched me first—somewhere between the eyes—and he had done so privately.

I remember now the exact position of the paper elephant.

We had paused in our verses and had begun cutting things out for the Ark and an instrument, a tool, something linear and intimate, rolled out from under him, from under Schevoski, and he had gone to retrieve it there under the desk and we were there together, the others conversing, and he, he kissed me.

He lifted his finger and I can see, even now can I see it, its methodical banter, how it lingered in mid-air amidst the chaos of that new and private world we had never encountered and it landed in the center of my forehead.

Oh, the feeling of it, that new and private thing, sent an electrifying chill through my afore abstract predicament.

It was, it was the feeling of elation one feels when the radius of a star lulls in front of him; when a line is drawn in its center and magnified in his dreams. There is something there, an otherwise breached timidity; nothing, nothing there was breaking.

In that sanctimonious incline, that slope and we were there in it together, and I can see him now, Schevoski, vividly, the pulsating vein near his clavicle and oh, now, how it pulsates under his skin, glowing and pertinent, in its incubator.

He was broad-shouldered, his pale face coppered with a fingerprint.

His hair was yellow.

There it was between us, the paper elephant.

He took it inside his hands, and leaned into me.

He kissed me.

And I can see now, too, the manner in which he left me there, before whispering something promiscuous in my ear, and how I had come out of the world of intimacy to find him standing amidst the Others, shoving his eye through a hole in the paper elephant with the smirk of a Centaur.

Yes, yes, I whispered.

I would meet him there.

I promised him that.

I had opened a window upon the third moon.  My father slept and the cattle were roaming in the entrapment the world had caused. I lowered my head between the parallel beams of the barbwire and met him there, in the pasture, and we were naked and he kissed me and we held each other in our nudity, in the term of our whispering.

I would chase him, first, or him me, the oxygen elapsed and ticked inside of me quickly, whispered and panted inside of me, for we had kissed, we had kissed there on the blades of my father’s pasture.

The Brahma had begun to roam.

I can recall how he stretched his finger out, darted in and out of the wood, until the moon spilled out in front of him. I had been chasing him and I had done so with a bit of malice, a bit of warmth rising from my loins and something else not yet designed.

Yes, yes, I had chased him, his collared shadow upon the earth. A grunt would erupt from his diaphragm, the wind around us whispering something privately.

He would turn occasionally, Schevoski, a tuft of blonde bellowing out and wilting over his forehead. He would turn, whisper something, as I was the captor that particular evening, an unintelligible note stirred. What was it?

A lark?

How many times had I chased him? I do not recall.

But he liked it.

The running, the laughter, the looking over his shoulder, the note of the feathered bird rising under a fold in the Universe. This sound should not be foreign to you.

As I hear it now.

The green opened its arms and caught us. I stood over him. I remember this, oh, how I remember it, I would curtsy with error, as if I were drunk with wine, and step backwards, away from Schevoski and toward him again with my hand flattened out against the pale light and moon, lying there beside him.

I would insist he get naked, that he’d play along, the feathered bird, with its sonorous cackle and shrill, piercing a blade in the dark.

He would stand there, comparative to the chill of a porcelain femur, he was cold like that, and I never understood, even now, how he had become so anemic to the pleasures of the world, when he was so brutally stark.

He would stand there nude, pale, nude, and I would point at him from the green, so that I resembled a Drosophila. His head would tilt, as though, for a moment, the tune was pausing in his head. The bone of his hip in some complex position.

Perhaps, he appeared more vulnerable than he was.

What had he whispered over and over again?

Let me kiss you? Let me kiss you?

Why had he desired that? To be hunted down? Kissed?

I had lain there with him.

Both nude and silent.

I seemed a porcelain cup, a femurish prototype, one begetting the other in its origin, dangling from the rim of a child’s finger, spilling out onto the green. My oxygen fluttered, something was said of the heart and mind, and when I kissed him, my hand parted from my hip and pointed to the white edge of the moon.

We had lain there as two birds on a branch.

But there was no caw and shrill.

Only silence.

He had turned toward me, his hand pressed against the green.

He wanted to speak; but, he could not.

I wished that the fire would cease, that it would burn without us. But we clawed and stirred, turned and turned in it. The hooves drummed in this Chimera.

I had kissed him.

A murmur erupted, parted under the wing of the invisible Drosophila.

Perhaps, it was because we had heard it that neither of us could pretend it did not exist. It was the echo of a feathered animal, a bird perhaps, and…and…and as it was, I folded my wing over him and bit him.

Why’d you do that? he asked.

Again, I had kissed him.

I don’t know, I whispered. I don’t know.

And what’s further, I had told him, I had confessed that I had imagined stripping the wingbone of its feathers and killing him with it.

Why had I told him that?

He imagined—I knew him, I knew Schevoski—he had imagined the wingbone puncturing his spleen, the poison polarizing, his eyelids lowering and the wing, the wing with its blade and equator configured between us, a queer and a ghost, the elements of the two for what were we exactly? Dead?

I had not felt this internally, not really.

What it was was the temporary, malicious nature of boys, that institutionalized phenomenon of how one feeling turns into another prematurely and bursts in the brain.

A ruptured vessel leaking upon the imperceptible bridge of the heart.

We knew then, and the same, the same is true now, isn’t it? Isn’t it? That no one would accept this in Ellis County, Mississippi, where clouds loom and lurk in this sky and with this sky, this heart and moon—where the blood of slaughtered cattle lingers a lingering of the pitiful kind in the breathing of men who slaughter without regard to its looming—who on earth would have accepted Us?

Schevoski whispered something in my ear.

A blade reached my ribs when he said it.

What had he confessed? That he could go no further than this?….when the whisper reached my heart, I lay in the green with my back turned, my hip in the glow of the moon like the protruding tusk of a bursting seam; the powdered phantom of the vast incubator had reached me. I coughed.

Why had he made it seem that it was a love that only I wanted? I saw him now, standing under the blade of the moon; the circular rim of his penis jutting out; and each, each of us wept silently.

A shoulder was turned. A jaw lowered. We were here, the two of us, in this Universe with its puritanical laws; its religious greed, the kind that has perceived and brilliantly laid out, in its own mind, the template for the rest of those lives, those lovers who cannot help who they loved; why couldn’t they see that?

Each of us was digesting the turned shoulder; the lowered jaw; there it was, in this country that had borne us, this wide and gargantuan Universe, that even now, those lovers cannot weep without the injection of puritanical cruelty.

All that was left of our time together was the paper elephant.

He said it was a gift, that the paper elephant was a gift.

And all made by the hand of God resounded; the locusts; the dying shrill of a bird; the buzzing; and his breathing, he breathed with me there, and turned, his pale shoulder clothed and vanishing, as if it were a dream, as if the entire exchange were a dream.

The following afternoon was when it happened.

The blinding phase of the sun rotated overhead.

I was returning from my Bible studies and found myself alone on the open road that led to my father’s house. So much of what had taken place between us was in my heart and I had not bathed or slept and there was an isolation, full and pulsating, in my heart and I was sick with what I knew, I had discovered something from within, an exposure, a fading exposure that was once alive and feverish and was dying out.

I pursed my lips.

The cacophony of the world was quelled by the primal footsteps of the beasts—they had come that afternoon—entering and splitting further the radius and its star.

I had been thinking, my mind covered with the premature blooming of death, and someone yelled out, J.D. Foster, he yelled, and I turned to find Schevoski standing there, the cattle roaming behind him, and for a moment, I thought, I thought he had come to…to…apologize, to reinsert some sort of….he stepped backwards, away from the wind of the blows…the beasts had come and they kicked and kicked me and my head lifted a centimeter through the beam of the blinding sun and I saw him, Schevoski, standing on the outer rim of the melee, his mouth bridled, his eye showed between his index and thumb fingers; but he had not intervened—-I spat blood out of my jaw, and even this did not matter, they kept on, queer, they yelled, queer, and one of them laughed, my eye was closing and I saw him standing near the edge of the Others with Schevoski, pointing and resting his hands on his knee, laughing and laughing, Queer, he yelled, queer, and the others kicked and Schevoski turned and there was only the sound of  exhaustion, of the beasts growing tired, but even this did not stop them, any of them, so I yelled out, for someone, anyone, to save…me…and thus I heard the footsteps of my father, the paper elephant fluttering where it had come loose from the pages that were turning in the heat.

…

Southscapes

Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature

By Thadious M. Davis

In this innovative approach to southern literary cultures, Thadious Davis analyzes how black southern writers use their spatial location to articulate the vexed connections between society and environment, particularly under segregation and its legacies.

Basing her analysis on texts by Ernest Gaines, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Natasha Trethewey, Olympia Vernon, Brenda Marie Osbey, Sybil Kein, and others, Davis reveals how these writers reconstitute racial exclusion as creative black space, rather than a site of trauma and resistance. Utilizing the social and political separation epitomized by segregation to forge a spatial and racial vantage point, Davis argues, allows these writers to imagine and represent their own subject matter and aesthetic concerns.

Focusing particularly on Louisiana and Mississippi, Davis deploys new geographical discourses of space to expand analyses of black writers’ relationship to the South and to consider the informing aspects of spatial narratives on their literary production. She argues that African American writers not only are central to the production of southern literature and new southern studies, but also are crucial to understanding the shift from modernism to postmodernism in southern letters. A paradigm-shifting work, Southscapes restores African American writers to their rightful place in the regional imagination, while calling for a more inclusive conception of region.

About the Author

Thadious M. Davis is Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.

Reviews

“Thadious Davis’s Southscapes will be hailed as a paradigm shift in both southern and African American studies. Her call for a more inclusive conception of the South could not be timelier. Employing a sophisticated critical arsenal drawn from spatial and geographic scholarship, Davis maps a new terrain for the study of both canonical and newly prominent writers, especially poets. Southscapes will lead to previously unsuspected approaches to southern culture and to a sense of excitement about the new horizons of perception Davis so brilliantly reveals.”
–John W. Lowe, Louisiana State University, editor of Bridging Southern Cultures: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Best of LSU Fiction, edited by Nolde Alexius and Judy Kahn and published by The Southern Review, is a long-overdue collection of the great fiction writers who have been associated with Louisiana State University as professors, undergrads, grads, and editors. Beginning with three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Penn Warren, this anthology records the journey of LSU’s prestigious literary tradition.

The twenty writers collected in this volume share the LSU experience yet explore the craft of fiction with diverse and unique world views: John Ed Bradley writes of a failed LSU football hero, James Wilcox of the quirky interactions of a dysfunctional family on a camping trip, Moira Crone of a northerner’s firsthand experience of a Louisiana hurricane, Rebecca Wells of an anti-war cotton grower in the deep South, and Laurie Lynn Drummond of a legendary Baton Rouge policewoman’s experiences on and off duty.

Arranged chronologically, original author biographies introduce every title on the table of contents and reveal the connections and influences among the writers. Whether you are rediscovering the work of literary legends Robert Penn Warren, Walker Percy, Jean Stafford, Peter Taylor, Vance Bourjaily, and Charles East or reading contemporary writers like David Madden, James Gordon Bennett, Valerie Martin, Andrei Codrescu, Tim Parrish, Matt Clark, Michael Griffith, Allen Wier, and Olympia Vernon, each story will deepen your appreciation of the talent LSU has produced and supported.

Best of LSU Fiction is not only a literary history of Louisiana’s flagship university but also an original presentation of some of the country’s best fiction writers. Readers who love great fiction are sure to find new favorites in this volume.

While Christmas stories are traditionally sweet, warm, and fuzzy, not every holiday memory generates a feeling of ease, merriment, and plenty. Penned by the capable hands of twelve of the best writers in the South, the stories in this collection challenge, illuminate, and provoke strong feelings as they examine Christmas from a variety of unexpected angles.

From the desperation arising from marital separation in “Occasion for Repentance” to a widowed judge’s attempt to open his heart in “The Amaryllis,” the contributing authors examine human experience in the context of the Christmas season. In a manner exclusive to only the best literature, these stories elucidate emotions shared by all people. The stories affirm the power of family in the face of hardship, as exemplified in “Novena,” where a daughter welcomes her elderly mother into her home, or “Blue’s Holiday,” where a father dresses up as Santa for his aging daughter. Each character in every story is deeply developed, unifying the anthology with a pervading sense of quality authorship. With an impressive ensemble of award-winning writers, including Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Olen Butler, critically acclaimed Olympia Vernon, and Guggenheim Fellow Elizabeth Spencer, “Christmas Stories from the South’s Best Writers” provides sensitive and deeply felt reflections on the Christmas season from a mature and thoughtful perspective.

A:   The beginning statement is worded oddly.
        I do believe, as always, that a gifted writer is born. I can remember, early-on, seeing creatures, human beings, Beings, and being able to interpret their feelings. I did not know I was a writer. I knew that I was born with something that was puzzling to me, the ability to see people and images against various shades, landscapes; and, it was in my head that I was able to pen them down. A man holding a guitar, his actions, movements, the sound of the strings being plucked, was all forming, in my mind, as words.

It is comparable to a moving camera, an image that is full and round, in the beginning, and then becomes pixelated in my mind. I can see the fibers, the dots, the little atoms sprouting at the tiniest thread of the anatomy. The same is true with sounds. They, too, in my mind, are sharp and piercing; and, then, I am able to envision these sounds as images. It is, perhaps, why I cannot write without music.

The earliest writing experience was from the time I learned to hold a pen/cil. I remember later writing in a diary, as a young girl of nine perhaps, about a dead bird I had found in a fishing boat in Mt. Hermon, Louisiana, the town where I was reared. I wrapped the dead bird in paper and folded it in my shirt, later trailing the blood of the corpse through the front door of our house to an open space in my room. Little did I know that my mother had followed me and found the dead bird—she had traced the blood—and demanded I throw it out.

I did.
I took it and dropped it over a barbed wire fence in the backyard. I remember seeing this experience and wanting to, early-on, save the dead. My early writing experiences were captured in my head. I could never write them all out. They were there and they were many. I was but one pixel along a full and round universe; and, I was aware of that.
………..

Does your studying toward a criminal justice degree at all influence your fiction or your outlook on life?

No.
I studied criminal justice; because, I wanted to save the world.
As the dead bird, it seemed, to me, a means of getting closer to that peace I sought after in the world. I cannot imagine now having followed that route.
There is too much in my head, my heart; and, I doubt any of it could be relieved by anything other than writing about it. I have more space there.

It does not influence my fiction.
It is only part of the landscape, the journey.
It is only a reminder that I once thought, to some degree, that finding that peace was possible. I have since discovered that the pen is mightier.
…………

Three very different novels published in as many years are the mark of a prolific mind. Do plot lines and words flow easily from your pen, or are they a hard struggle?

I have written many novels.
These are simply three that are part of the world.
Yes, yes, words flow easily. They do for the gifted writer. They should always.
An image appears first; and, from that image, the words are bursting, bursting ahead and I cannot stop the well from flowing. I cannot describe it to anyone.
And I wish I could describe it to you now.
But I cannot.
There is one person in the world who has witnessed it; and, it was painful to watch, as I have written novels before in such an awkward position that it appears I am dangling from a pulley, that I am simply a doll filled with cotton or paper, leaning over the keys.

I have suffered greatly because of it.
I cannot help it.
My posture is poor, I have arthritis, severe insomnia, as my mind will not sleep, will it ever ever sleep when there is so much pain in the world? Such a well of it to draw and interpret?

I remember coming out of the rain.
I had come through the door, driven through a storm, and wept, as I had abandoned my lover, again, and thought I would die in the process. My vehicle, at the time, needed new tires; the experience frightened me; but, I remember, I remember lying on the bed weeping and an image appeared and the energy attached to it was the energy of Anne Frank.

My computer was attached to its adapter by a tiny wire; only this wire kept its battery charged. I called a friend of mine. He came over immediately. I wept in his lap, he held me in my weeping, and I told him what I saw, the energy I felt, and he said, Then write, Olympia. Then write.

I did, for the next twenty-six hours and five minutes.
It was finished; and, I slept.
It was sent to my agent, next to my publisher; but, while my publisher was considering it, I wrote A Killing in This Town, at the beginning of September, finishing it late November or so.

It was chosen for publication.
But the novel I wrote in twenty-six hours and five minutes is so precious to me that I doubt I want anyone to ever see it.
…………

Do you prefer to plan developments from the start, or had you rather allow the novel to construct itself? Do you work on a schedule, or when the urge to write takes hold of you?

I do not believe in outlines.
An outline says to the character(s) that you don’t believe them.
A character will never appear before a writer who does not trust her.
Period.
I only write when the characters show me the image, the moving image. It appears like a red balloon sailing across a nerve in your mind, before you pinch the tail end of it and find yourself in the Force of wind and rain, in the gritty, unyielding Force of the Universe.

Who our characters are is none of our business.
It is simply our duty, as gifted artists, to follow the red balloon, to respect its presence and ask not where it is going or if the helium will run out. The rush is that you are aware that it will, at some point, or that you can, suddenly, lose it.

This can happen, if the nerve does not grab hold, if it becomes apparent to the Universe that you are not serious about its natural progression or decline. Either way, it is making it clear to the nerve that it must follow, keep up, never lose sight of the journey.

And what a feeling when that nerve responds.
I have never given birth to a creature; but, it must be close.
…………

Do you like to listen to music as you write? If you do, does it have an impact?
I must listen to music when I write.
I cannot write without it.
Music better allows me to see the floating image, the red balloon, to narrow it down.
Because of this, my characters expose me to a wide range of artists. Those artists can range from….the Lady Sings the Blues soundtrack (on vinyl, my characters love the sound of it), Franz Schubert, Mahalia Jackson, Josephine Baker, Dave Matthews Band, Elis Regina, Nico, Willie Nelson, Bach, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Georges DeLerue, Strunz & Farah, Janelle Monae, Beirut, Devotchka, The Weepies, and so many more. Too many to mention.

Nothing is comparable to the sound of a violin in my head when I am writing.
It is an instrument my characters love dearly, and one that moves me to tears.
It is profound when a woman is brushing her hair in the mirror, and suddenly turns to her husband, who is lying with a page across his lap, and the violin is playing—only in my mind is it playing—-and its Voice has brought forth to my eye the moving image of the two lovers, her breasts in the mirror where the gown has fallen below her waist.

I want to cry now, thinking of this, as I want to return home, to Louisiana, where this note is, where Love is. You have caught me here this early morn, at this point in my life and I cannot lie about it. I want to be there lying against the pillows, the sound of the violin bellowing out.
…………

Your works are anything but banal. Are real life people and situations at all an inspiration? Can you pin point, looking back, where a novel emerged from, or is inspiration a mystery?

I never know from whence a character will emerge.
I have seen a child before in the dotted water stain of an apron. I have seen many, many people arrive, invisibly, before me, whether dreaming or awake. They appear and are with me and are most with me when I am exhausted or just waking. I am exhausted tonight; so, they are with me. They are shy tonight; because, they are aware that We are not alone.

I cannot consider myself a fiction writer while stealing from the lives of others.
I do not believe in writers who do this, who steal from the lives of Others in order to build an empire. A novel is the introduction of characters otherwise unknown to you or anyone else in the world. They do not exist, before the image appears. They simply exist, because they have deemed the writer worthy of developing the image, the story.

When a story is true, when it has really happened, a writer cannot pretend that s/he is shocked by the details of the future. S/he cannot brace himself, honestly, for the accident that is about to occur. S/he simply cannot lie; so when this happens, the accident is less believable. The blood is placed versus splattered. Those who die are dead because their deaths were….creating the illusion that one is unaware when one really is is dangerous.

I find it a great disrespect for the characters and their Voices.
Now, one can write about a feeling. This is different.
A feeling is different. One can meet a woman who is heart-broken and understand her heartbreak, as well as respect her profound need for privacy. It is not the story of the woman and her heartbreak one takes from it, but the pain this heartbreak has caused.

Pain does not discriminate.
Love does not.
Feelings do not.
Each belongs to Us and we must respect the grand capsule of their existence.
…………

Would you say that, once created, characters impose their lives on you?

I would never use the word ‘impose’ when it comes to my children.
Children do not impose their lives upon us. They simply come through the birth canal and We, if We listen to their Voices, those Voices that convey so well their intentions, We cannot deny that they are Ours.

Oh, what births they are.
With each birth, I remember. I can remember well their flesh and weight and how very quickly each emerged and that feeling—anyone who has loved another Being, sincerely, has felt it—-the moment s/he appears and You are aware, as both writer and flesh, that a Great Event has taken form, shaped your bones to fit.

I am only here, because of Them.
……….

Both Logic and Eden posit the need for women to speak out. What does Logic add that Eden fails to point out? A Killing in this Town gives more room to white women who do not seem ready to resist. Is this assessment correct?

I cannot answer this question.
I leave interpretations to the reader.
…………

Language, words, syntax, images… I must admit your prose is hard on this reader. However, one must also admit that it does sometimes open doors while standard writing simply seals meaning. Does this writing practice come to you naturally, or do you seek creative distortions?

Mothers name the experience, not the child.
I cannot focus on the birth of a child, the vagina expanding, the blood, the head, the feet, the sound of the wailing child birthed into this world, if I am focusing on the ticking clock over her head. I will miss the experience entirely.

She trusts that I am in the room; and, I am in the room, because I can capture, with great feeling, the manner in which her hair is flattened or wet. I can describe, in full detail, the placement of birth and blood sprouting. I have an angle of expansion, of great degree, that is not accessible to her; and, she should only focus on the birth itself.

Nothing more.
Nothing else counts.
…………

How do you account for the disease and death metaphors at work, though in different contexts, in all of your published works?
I cannot answer this either.
I respect the Image entirely.
…………

Critics and readers at once pinned on your fiction labels that, to me, do not fit your work exactly, such as “southern mystique” or “magic realism”. Others named literary “ancestors” or “influences”. Would you deny the notion that art begins with imitation?
YES.
I appreciate your asking this question.
It seems that in order for an extraordinary Voice to exist then it must have, along the way, encountered a thread, pearled by others. These ‘labels’ have suffocated me.
The thread has been so tightly wound around my throat that I stand in my kitchen for hours near a dripping faucet, wondering however could anyone pin any of my children to another Womb, when it is apparent that each possesses her own Voice entirely.

I am not the least bit concerned with what other writers have done. I did not set out to ‘be’ a writer. This gift has more to do with God than any other Energy in the world; and, it is a grand disappointment that my children, although extraordinary and bearing their own helium, are very often weighed down by that which neither depicts them fairly or has chosen to toss them over the barbed wire fence, if they do not bear a resemblance to what births were conducted before them.

It is an insult to compare them to any character who existed before their own (existence).
I hope not to die early and have them orphaned off to a world that will dress them equally in some flat attire, worn and left over, the clothing strewn from a mildewed closet that they are uncomfortable in or are not used to.

They are my children.
And they deserve to stand alone.
………..

Have you been reading contemporary novelists (like Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead, Mat Johnson, Alice Randall) whose fictions are so very different from yours? Do you deliberately seek to be original?

Originality is never deliberate.
It is of no concern to me how any other writer is performing.
I was born into this world to hold and measure my own pen and camera.
Anything else is remote and their remoteness is not damaging to me.
…………

The jacket for A Killing in this Town represents a harrowing scene: little girls brought along to view Stacy Rubin’s lynched body in 1935. I have a theory that James Byrd’s recent lynching must have been in the back of your mind, denounced through the horse dragging ritual Adam refuses. Like the past invading days that are supposed to be more enlightened. If you tell me my theory is incorrect, I’ll be left with the personal need, in my essay, to understand why and how this particular horror impacts my reading so strongly.

James Byrd was not on my mind when I wrote A Killing in This Town.
It bothers me when my work is left to the mind of someone other than the characters
who were gracious enough to share this part of their lives with me.
A Killing in This Town arrived from exhaustion. I could not sleep, as the sun had risen behind the clouds and there was a quiet in my house that I could not untangle.
I was lying against the pillows and saw the image of a naked man. He came through a wooded forest and was naked. I was not asleep.

I met him in the center of the woods and he did not speak to me with his tongue, but with his mind. I asked him to tell me what happened to him; and, he showed me the moving image of his death. And it was quick, the image was quick.

He asked me, then, to write the story not as it was shown to me, but as others can understand it. He turned and disappeared; and, I was frozen for what, perhaps, was a solid hour, before my limbs moved again and there I was, at the keys, with my hand over the screen….and I asked him, whoever he was, to help me.

I began that afternoon.
I would write after class, at night, with my window overlooking a little garden that had gone uncultivated, until the novel was finished.

I suffered grave nightmares after its completion.
I was unsure if I could handle being in the world again, as it was not the same in my eye as I had left it. And it wasn’t until A Killing in This Town that I learned what racism was.
The racists and those fighting against it showed me life inside of Its well, with all of Its frayed edges, Its false depictions of Love.

And if you are to write about this, write it as I saw it.
Nothing else will do.
…………

Disease and disharmony reign among the racist and loveless whites in A Killing in this Town. Only Gill and Adam are redeemed. Marcel Proust argues in Contre Sainte Beuve that readers like to imagine an afterlife for the characters one has just been with while reading. Can one imagine Sonny Willow and the Thomases will have better lives in this beyond, Memphis, at the end of the railroad line?

I do not answer for characters.
They share their lives with me and are gone.
…………

Do your still unpublished novels follow the same line as the ones you have released for the public to read?

No.
No two novels are the same.

…………

You are also a teacher. What do you tell your students who look up to your expertise about the art of writing? Do you assign books on writing and fiction for them to read, such as (French theoreticians come to mind it is a strong suit here) Deleuze and Guattari on “minoration”, or Ricoeur, Foucault, Schaeffer, Genette, Greimas, etc.?

Many students have been lied to.
They have not received honest critiques of their work; and, when this happens, they are very often combative (when honesty does appear).

I am returning to my children soon, and will leave this profession to those more willing to hide behind a veil, in order to spare the feelings of the young writer, when the young writer, himself, will discover, in time, his own fate.
…………

I am exhausted now, Claude, and will return to bed.

And so.

I brought her mouth up to suck.
She was so pale in water, there, on my breast, her body light, fierce, as if she had known, since the morning I pushed her out, that I could not muster the sound of a crying baby, a crying voice, the slippery egg that had come out of my vagina, handed to me in powdered gloves, men laughing and women laughing too, before I turned my head to catch a glimpse of my own paranoia, sitting across the room, disturbed.
The sound, how could I digest the sound in that room, the nurses, the patting on the knee, as if that disturbance, alone, would cause me to push. I laid there, legs apart, listening to the voices, the father whispering: he said that it was out of love. But even this voice, I did not wish to hear for I had found a place to go, to sit where there were no children, no babies in my stomach churning in darkness, binding me by the weight of an aching tooth, lying sideways, a throbbing that had been forced upon me.
Perhaps, if the tooth had been uprooted, I could have concentrated, said: yes, I will push and I will take the slippery egg home and bathe it and hold it for the fragile thing it is; I will, for the most part, pay attention.
I am a long woman. My face is long and distracted by the sharpness of my father’s eye. I imagine he submerged his long hand inside of a long tool box and pulled out a screwdriver, or hammer and disappeared into a studio, near the woods, and fashioned me about. Is is true what they say? That a man disappears and comes out from the woods with the mind of a child, with a perfect map of his daughter’s face, so it won’t collide with the energy throughout a room of white? I don’t know. He did not want a long child. It did not work.
And there I’d go, to the studio near the woods, close my eyes, feel the contours of my invisible face. It is wise to touch your invisible face in darkness. I never reached for light. Ashamed I was, to see, admit, that I was as unperfect as a divided line, drawn in strict nervousness by a child who could neither hold his wrist to suit the path of his instruction or turn away from what he knew to be: a collision.
So my father, the carpenter, turned away from me. At birth, my mother recalls a night of pure and perfect silence, where he lifted his hand above my body, my face, and brought his hand down upon it. Impatience is what it is called when a man cannot wait for the skin on a child’s face to grow into form, to live. There, from the beginning, my face would forever be wrinkled and long and unworthy of the time it took to conceive it.
This mirror and that one. This hurtful comment from a sibling: about the length of girl’s nose, the mishap, ill quality of a chin that serves no purpose in a quiet world, the fingers, when apart, forming turbulence among the normal persons of the world.
Ugly.
And so the paranoia, as tamed and heavy as the wrong idea in the wrong mind, met me at the edge of a line: I had come out of the bathtub, hair tangled, confused, because I had forgotten, for a moment, how to divide the three into twenty-eight. It is that moment when a child needs something required, an accomplice to what is in her mind, so the idea won’t come out of her nose and dissolve.
The paranoia startled me at first.
I was confused, thought about the time my grandmother told me that paranoia comes to you in your own form. If you are anorexic, it comes to you starved. If you are bolemic, it comes to you with its finger down its throat. And if you are a girl, there is no limit to what form it exists. You are how it makes a living, breathes.
I paid it no attention. The first few seconds are the most penetrable. You must dry your hair and pretend, for a long while, that it is not there. If you speak to it, it will swallow you and your hair will always be wet and your folks’ll drive you to the place where girls sit in rocking chairs and look through windows with no shadows.
He coughed for a moment and drew his hand from his pocket and lit a cigarette. He didn’t care that I was girl or child. It was his room and I was to pay him attention. The nerve of me with my naked self, skinny girl, lying back on the blanket with a straight body and a face that even my father could not set to blue.
But there I was, waiting for him to start the conversation, almost wanting him to, so I could have someone to talk to. Dangerous, indeed. But it was my dangerous self that would speak. I wanted to.
I began to hum. I dont’ remember what, something about a boy who died in snow. It wasn’t a real tune. Nothing that came out of my imperfect mouth was genuine. Nothing out loud or that could be traced, even if I had lain my humming down on paper and set it to the muscle in my throat: the boy was there in white, in the snow, face down.
Just when the paranoia was about to speak, my sister, Lita, came into the room, unbinding her panties from her pubic hair, stuck her finger up North, and brought it, the finger, to her face, realized that she was bleeding. She looked at the finger in the mirror, became familiar with its odor and asked if I thought she was dying. Yes, I said, you’re dying.
She slapped my face and ran up to the window where my father was out near the tree, watching the red of her finger die down: it had to; it had turned into a blur and dripped onto the floor. There was a trail of blood behind her. She looked at it, with her own extraordinary discomfort, and counted each drop with the finger. When she made it to seven, she breathed a strong wind from her nostrils, and walked away.
She was not long-bodied, but extinct. She was the last of its kind. But I don’t care really. I can only tell you about the finger. She looked at me to see if I was yet crying. I wasn’t. She fetched a white towel and brought herself down again, to where the blood was, pantiless, and wiped the red, one drop at a time, on the fabric. She knew, in some manner that seemed sick for a girl her age, that her bending down that way, was opening up the hole in her vagina and causing it to leak.
She took a second towel and put it between her legs, looked twice in the mirror, as if, she too, for a moment, had seen the paranoia in the corner of the room, heard him say: Get out. One glance at me, another at the blood-filled towel between her legs, before she disappeared.
The water was running and I could hear her coughing uncontrollably: the smoke from the paranoia’s cigarette had penetrated the walls around her and she wanted to tell him to come here, come to the bathroom, ask him if he liked the show she’d put on, liked seeing her bend down like that, stick her finger up her pussy. But he didn’t care either.
She’d be a whore soon.
On that occasion, I did not speak. But not much time elapses, before a girl turns woman and marries a man who does not care about her long face or protruding nose or the day her father went out near the woods to etch what he believed to be the contours of his daughter’s face only to find that his disappointment is greater than the weight of a hammer, a screwdriver.
What year it was, I do not remember. The night of my daughter’s conception, even this I do not recall: I could not touch my husband’s love in darkness for fear that he would pull it back and it would end up like blood on the fabric of whore’s finger.
The aching was incredible. The morning of the doctor visit, the nurse, in her enormous state, said to me: Congratulations are in order. She could not hold it, not even for a moment, while I gathered myself to hear the news, braced what was left of my body; she wanted to add something to my life, a line that she had established, before doctor or man, because she wanted to feel something inside of her move, vibrate.
Congratulations are in order. For whom? Which woman? The glorious one who carries a bagful of groceries from the front door to the countertop and cannot remember where she abandoned her keys? Or the witty one who knows, word for word, the first five amendments to the Constitution, but cannot arrive, although calendar-set, to her own funeral?
For me? The long-faced woman with the generous husband who will love the child, whether boy or girl, the healthy child, the mentally unstable child, the dead one too? Perhaps, this is what she meant. I want to congratulate you, she meant, on having a husband who will love this child, regardless of all these things, even if you, with your horrible self, are not aware that both collision and chance are prone to discuss the issue, regardless of the burden.
I must confess that I smiled at her, before she walked out of the room.
I wanted her to stay. A woman needs not be left alone with herself and the paranoia. She begins to formulate an opinion of herself that is both unstable and regretful. It is when she notices what she was born to tackle and is afraid of it. She knows that she can carry, to full term, an egg that will burst if it is not held accountable for: it will burst in her stomach, out in the open, in public, and begin to cry.
I do remember my exact order of movement after hearing the news, what happened and so on and so forth: I heard the tapping of shoes on the floor, a woman with her nose up to a magazine, wondering if advertised milk was made of Calcium or glue, the rattling of keys, screeching of tires, the sound of the mailbox stirring, the house door opening, my husband standing in the kitchen, touching my belly and smiling, kissing me on the cheek, the phone call he made to his mother, his mother’s laughter, going upstairs, running water, wet hair, the neighbor’s motor running, his wife yelling for Swiss cheese, the car door slamming, silence, my husband sitting on the edge of the bed, walking toward me, his face blurry, my husband talking, his hand reaching over the porcelain tub in a shadow that caused me to move, the movement of his mouth, Happy I think it was, walking out of the room, closing the door.
And so it went for the next few months, until one night, I spoke.
I’m not ready, I whispered.
My husband was lying beside me and he turned toward me, his mouth slightly open, without peace. Pardon? he said.
Even now, when I needed him, he used this vocabulary: Pardon. I had fucked up his order. He had gone down to the coffee shop, laid sixty-two cents on the counter, and asked for cream with two sugars and God-lay-me-down, somehow, because I was disturbed, detained by the man in hat and suit, I spilled it. The coffee was spiraling and I asked him, repeatedly, if I could do anything to fix it and he, the man that he was, could only say to me: pardon.
On this night, I was not his wife. I was the waitress and he had always been kind to me, until the coffee came spiraling down. It was my fault.
I turned away.
He had not paid attention. He was not as my sister, Lita, who coughed when the smoke of the paranoia’s cigarette filled her lungs. Perhaps, if he had coughed, I would have known, by way of some echoing in the distance, that he truly loved me.
Unhappy I was.
Congratulations are in order for the unhappy woman.
And then, when I lay there on the sheets, the nurses rambling, the doctor pushing my knees up to my belly, everyone telling me to push, I could not. I had no egg to push out of my belly. It was a collision. It had collided indeed with the paranoia and my inability to balance an already quivering line with that of a wailing child: I had no energy.
But she, when light touched the eye nerve, opened her mouth and swam out of my vagina. And I, in turn, was as my father, as the man near the woods, I did not look at her.
I am here now, in the white, the bathtub overflowing, wondering if I could take this child and give it to the paranoia, the three of us drowning. Baby. Mother. The man in the corner of the room.
She sucks this breast.
She knows that it is her own.
The sound of the sucking is what I now hear, as in nature, when the mother of the animal knows when her young is in danger, somewhere near the woods, near the paranoia, and goes to it, saves it from the man who thinks that long-faced girls are not to be looked upon, stands between the face and the world and the husband and the paranoia and pulls out her breast and hears this sound, while lying sideways, and goes to sleep.
…
Published: WSQ, Spring/Summer 2007, Shelly Eversley, Jennifer Morgan

Published: New Orleans Noir (2007)

http://www.patsymoore.com/bohemians/AF16.html

QUINONES: It seems to me that your characters—or, perhaps sometimes, your omniscient narrator—have an unusually high degree of awareness of—or sensitivity to—their physical bodies. Virtually every page of Logic contains a reference of this kind (sometimes the image is recurring, i.e. that of the index finger). I was wondering if, as a writer of fiction, your interest in this comes, at least partly, from your background in criminal justice.

VERNON: My interest in Criminal Justice does not play any part in my writing: this degree stemmed mainly from wanting to change/save (due to age) the world. My connection to the human body is one I was born with; I found that when people move, cry, run, scream, speak, bathe, commit themselves to the simplest forms of expression, they are most genunine in behavior. There is a beauty there. As a child, I could not help but notice the bodies around me, especially those of Mississippi. They were stunning, graphic, raw, expressive; the face of one born in the Deep South, the body, the throat, the hands, all these things are unique to any other human body/form in the entire world. I am not sure if it is the earth or dust that makes it so.

QUINONES: Is the following passage fairly representative of your view of an important part of human experience?: “Somebody told her that a woman without a map in her feet was running from a dream: courage began when the fetus was asleep in the womb and there was a vertical thread that tied the feet together in order to test the strength of the mind. Everything was connected in this way: head to feet, neck to ankles, breasts to abdomen. It’s no wonder that when one breaks down, one member of the pair is affected by the other.”

VERNON: I have never been asked this question before and/or given a passage to measure it. I will say this is the closest view, yes. The brain is a powerful source of intelligence and for those who do not respect it, failure. It moves the feet in the direction it should go. This direction can be fatal if the voice of the brain is not listened to accurately. I have found it amazing when a baby lies nude in the womb and his/her feet are bound together, as if there is a measure of rest and profound intelligence taking place. Yes, the human body is a force.

QUINONES: Kind of as a corollary to the above: you’re very tuned in to science, the scientific structure of natural phenomena—atoms, molecules, mathematics, nature itself. To what degree are your characters merely inhabitants of nature, to what degree are they something more?

VERNON: When a mother breathes while pregnant, she molds and shapes the fetus, the child, to the environment of atoms, molecules, mathematics, nature. This is why it is unsafe for a mother to smoke while pregnant. The fetus inhales the fumes of the cigarette and the cigarette, itself, shapes the fetus. The fetus has been shut in, locked inside a room of which there are walls and he cannot flee. I have been blessed with the ability to notice the natural phenomena of the human being. The characters who bless me with their presence and language have been molded, since birth, by the natural events of nature and science. Their mothers have breathed the dust and they are, themselves, shaped by an infinite degree of nature, without choice. They can only hope the dust they inhale is of good and solid and natural, God-made, profound elements. Characters, as they are written, as they share with me, open their blouses and ribs and bodies and reveal to me the air they have breathed. This is when they become something more than what they have breathed, something more than nature, for they have begun, by now, to interpret what they have inhaled and become more solid as beings.

QUINONES: Your prose is quite original. How do you work on your sentences?

VERNON: With each book, the entire piece comes to me at once: the words, the feelings and emotions, the title, the beginning, the ending is sometimes blurry but becomes more clear as I write from the characters’ feelings. I do not work on sentences. They come to me instantly, the vision comes in less than a second and it is equivalent to being, I’m thinking now, or becoming, I should say, a part of a ray of light that is so sudden that it warms the bones of the entire body; it is beautiful, yet the energy is so very striking that I must sit, regardless of where I am, and breathe, so I am not overtaken by it. I realized, after hearing from a teacher that I was a writer and looking over my years of growing up, that I am, indeed, a gifted writer of feelings, emotions, pain, sorrow, the interpreter of human beings and their interactions with themselves, others, love, suffering, etc.. The sentences I write, I do not claim them solely and give them to the characters for sharing their language with me so beautifully. It is a painful thing at times to be gifted. A gifted writer will suffer her body and mind to take on the voice(s) of her characters, until she is overtaken with sweat and fever and cannot remember what day of the week it is. Yet, I cannot return to the womb and change this. It is a blessing, a gift.

QUINONES: Do they just flow spontaneously, or do you have certain things you want to do with things like language metaphor, and symbols?

VERNON: Yes, they flow. I do not pay attention to language, metaphor and symbols while I am writing. The characters point in the direction that bears their language and I go. I am unsure how their emotions run together or apart while I am writing; I am only aware when the process of transcribing their lives is over what they have done, how they have murdered, raped, killed, loved, suffered, starved, etc.. It is none of a writer’s business what the character is doing. It is only the writer’s job to follow them around: I have written from the voice of many characters who believe differently than I on many levels; but, from the voice of characters who teach me, show me why they have chosen to think as they do. I learn more about racism, love, hate, suffering, pain, every element of humankind from my characters than from any other source in the world. They are beautiful, dirty, fragile, etc., and I have been fortunate that each has shared with me such qualities so that I may live my life with the wisdom of knowing they have lived their own lives, albeit beautiful, dirty, fragile, etc. and given me the permission to view it.

QUINONES: Do you have any special type of preparation for creating such poetic prose?

VERNON: No. I never know when it’s coming, so I cannot prepare for it. When it does come, however, I will sometimes make a call to family/friends letting them know that I’m going in.

QUINONES: I read, in one of your online interviews, mention of a writer I was startled to see you talking about, at first—Hubert Selby, Jr.. However, upon reflection, it seems that there is a certain similarity in your work and Selby’s, in terms of the violence, and violent emotions, that the characters experience. What kind of a role, if any, do you intend for physical suffering to play in your fiction?

VERNON: I never “intend” for physical suffering to play a role in my prose. I have always seen darkness as a genuine element of the human condition that seeps through, bleeds. I think when we are content, as human beings, we are content because we are trying to prevent the darkness or physical suffering from fully taking over. Physical suffering is genuine. It exists. It is a crucial part of the cycle of life and, without it, we are unaware of our true feelings, the true details of our feelings. We are simply actors without it. We are simply minute characters on a large stage and we are all pretending, in some way, that our physical suffering can be tucked away inside our bodies, so that we may be able to join others on an even larger stage of pretending; it is simply when we can no longer mask the suffering (via death, loss, heartbreak, etc.) that the full beam of the darkness presents itself. And we have no choice. We must acknowledge its existence.

QUINONES: There’s a tendency to try to classify writers from the South as belonging to a type of genre unto itself, solely based on geographical roots, and there’s also a clear tendency to categorize African American writers in their own genre. Do you think such classifications are helpful or harmful in any specific ways?

VERNON: It has always bothered me to be classified as an African-American writer. It is clear that I am an African-American. This is a fact I embrace. But when I am “classified” as an African-American writer, it says that the voice of my characters is solely an African-American voice with African-American problems and African-American suffering belonging to one people. This is untrue. Never do I want anything written by my hand to possess one type of pain for one group of people with one source of meaning and so on and so forth. The issues of rape, racism, poverty, obesity, violence, prostitution, etc. are universal issues; I care about the voice of the raped, the obese, the wronged; and I couldn’t care less about what race I am when I am writing from such an energy. I care about the issue and the person experiencing the issue, regardless of what race he or she is.

I also feel there is an African-American “list” that is bestowed upon the African-American writer; I am supposed to have read, by now, all the Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston I can get my hands on; but, even these writers, when they are described, are described as African-American writers and I simply do not agree that I should embrace such a list, to no disregard for the writers before me; but, I would rather share it because of what I have written not because it is an odd event to be African-American and gifted.

The Deep South has produced some of the finest writers in the world, if not the finest, and if I were categorized in any way that is pleasing to me, it would be as a southern writer. This way I can share the list of those both black and white and be regarded for my literary contribution to the spirit of the world and/or mankind.

QUINONES: It seemed to me that Logic and A Killing in This Town are quite different, thematically. Is that a correct perception, and, in general, would you say you’re interested in exploring distinct themes in different novels? Even if that’s the case, are there any constant themes running through your work?

VERNON: I never plan. This is very well the reason for each book having its own distinct voice and presence. I know not what character will wake me from my slumber or if I will at all like him. It is not my position to like or love or judge; it is only after I have experienced the experience that I realize the course the book has taken. There is nothing more fascinating than a writer partaking in an experience that is foreign to her, that strikes, belittles, kills, goes against all the symptoms of normalcy and into the realm of an active womb filled with the lives and voices of the confused and as they are working it out, we, the gifted writers, are simply embraced by the presence of their breathing.

…