Sperm Donor X

~
This is for anyone who saw Sperm Donor on the Style Network recently. (In case you missed it, the segment of Style Exposed primarily focused on Ben Seisler, a Boston lawyer who has become the biological father of at least seventy-four children via sperm donation. It showed Ben, his fianceé, and the mother of two young children who were born using Ben's sperm grappling with a variety of questions about the role of a sperm donor.)

On a related but very different note, a couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to watch Sperm Donor X, a film by Deidre Fishel about the experiences of four different women pursuing motherhood via sperm donation. The documentary footage was filmed over a period of several years, as the women very openly discussed their various reasons for the choice, went through the process of attempting to become pregnant, and reacted to the outcomes, which were different for each of them. It was a very thoughtful (and thought-provoking) piece of work. (56 minutes, New Day Films, 2010.)

Two poems from Inertia and Linebreak

~
"Paper-Thin Hotel" by Alex Stolis, Inertia Magazine, Issue 11.

"This Friday" by Susan Browne, Linebreak, November 22, 2011.

Fiction, poetry, and a very short story by Doug Paul Case

~
This was after I rolled the windows down, hoping rushing wind would rid my clothes of his cologne. This was after I slid into my car, having barely opened the door, as if I were afraid his neighbors would spot me.

From "Driving Home, I Imagined the Man I'd Just Met, Alone in His Apartment, Washing By Hand the Glass from which I'd Just Drunk," a short story by Doug Paul Case, published in Wigleaf (November 3, 2011).

~
"Daddy?" Jennifer said when he went back to the living room.

"What?"

"Would you please read us the funnies?"

The shyness of this request, and the sight of their trusting eyes, made him want to weep. "You bet I will," he said. "Let's sit down over here, all three of us, and we'll read the funnies."

He found it hard to keep his voice from thickening into a sentimental husk as he began to read aloud, with their two heads pressed close to his ribs on either side and their thin legs lying straight out on the sofa cushions, warm against his own. They knew what forgiveness was; they were willing to take him for better or worse; they loved him. Why couldn't April realize how simple and necessary it was to love? Why did she have to complicate everything?

The only trouble was that the funnies seemed to go on forever; the turning of each dense, muddled page of them brought the job no nearer to completion. Before long his voice had become a strained, hurrying monotone and his right knee had begun to jiggle in a little dance of irritation.

"Daddy, we skipped a funny."

"No we didn't, sweetie. That's just an advertisement. You don't want to read that."

"Yes I do."

"I do too."

"But it isn't a funny. It's just made to look like one. It's an advertisement for some kind of toothpaste."

"Read us it anyway."

He set his bite. All the nerves at the roots of his teeth seemed to have entwined with the nerves at the root of his scalp in a tingling knot. "All right," he said. "See, in the first picture this lady wants to dance with this man but he won't ask her to, and here in the next picture she's crying and her friend says maybe the reason he won't dance with her is because her breath doesn't smell too nice, and then in the next picture she's talking to this dentist, and he says..."

He felt as if he were sinking helplessly into the cushions and the papers and the bodies of his children like a man in quicksand. When the funnies were finished at last he struggled to his feet, quietly gasping, and stood for several minutes in the middle of the carpet, making tight fists in his pockets to restrain himself from doing what suddenly seemed the only thing in the world he really and truly wanted to do: picking up a chair and throwing it through the picture window.
(pp. 50-51)

From Revolutionary Road, a novel by Richard Yates (Little, Brown & Co., 1961).

~
You live alone and earn a reasonable monthly sum that keeps you comfortable and with enough free time to keep your literary aspirations hopeful. You have a desk drawer full of story ideas written almost wholly on sticky notes, envelopes, and napkins. You bought a Mac, because you think that’s the instrument of choice for creative people like yourself.

From "Anatomy of Two Artists," a short story by Robert John Miller, published in Fiction365 (October 25, 2011).

~
My son recounts the plot of a zombie film
from France. He forgets exactly why,
but one day the dead rise up
and shake off the dust--not ghouls,
staggering with stiff arms,
but as themselves.
They head back into the world willing
to do the usual stuff--eat, buy shoes--
but everything's out of synch. . . .

From "Horror" (p. 8), one of the poems in Recurring Dream by Avra Wing (Pecan Grove Press, 2011). "Horror" first appeared in Prime Decimals.

The Fall 2011 issue of the Apple Valley Review

~
The Fall 2011 issue of the journal features fiction by Dawn Paul; poetry by Simon Perchik, Joanna Kurowska (translated from the Polish by Joanna Kurowska), Jin Cordaro, Nausheen Eusuf, M.J. Iuppa, Xiwen Mai, Ann Neuser Lederer, and Rachel Gippetti; and artwork by Justin Snodgrass.

The Apple Valley Review is a semiannual online literary journal. The current issue, previous issues, subscription information, and complete submission guidelines are available at www.applevalleyreview.com.

"Composition 101" by Nicelle Davis

~
He writes how his best friend bled and died in his arms. He is twenty and at school on the GI Bill.

"Composition 101," a poem by Nicelle Davis, is continued at Broadsided (May 1, 2010). The poem is paired with artwork by Cheryl Gross.

"Telling You"

~
Life is like this: one minute you're lying by your air conditioner in the heat, reading haiku and wishing you didn't have to go to see your new therapist, and the next minute you're in his office blinking at him in surprise and thinking that he looks familiar, that you've seen him someplace before.

. . .

My Buddhist boyfriend wasn't the first man to dump me. The boyfriend before him did, too. His teenage sons instructed him to dump me because I'd declined their invitation to a game of Monopoly. I'd just eaten dinner at their house, and they asked me to play, and I said no. (I had my reasons.) Then, after I'd gone home, the sons held a family conference and told their father that he could do better than a woman who wouldn't play Monopoly. And so my boyfriend told me, in a gentle voice, "I have to let you go. Let me know if there's ever anything I can do for you."

"Actually," I said, "there are three things you can do for me." But I will repeat only the first thing here, which was never to call me again.

These excerpts are from "Telling You," a short story by Jasmine Skye. The story is continued in The Sun (Issue 335, November 2003), pp. 42-46.

Liars and Saints

~
Liars and Saints, a novel by Maile Meloy (Scribner, 2003). The first two thirds of this book were particularly good.

He said he was a photographer, and offered to take their picture for her husband; he said it was the least he could do for a man who was at war. So he came to the house, with a big flash umbrella and a camera on a tripod, and set his equipment in the living room. Yvette made him a highball, and because the bottle of ginger ale was open, she made herself one, too. On an empty stomach it went right to her head. It was three in the afternoon on a Saturday, and she'd dressed the girls up for the picture, but the photographer wasn't in any hurry. He was clean-cut with clear green eyes and looked like he could have been a soldier himself, in khaki trousers and a pressed shirt. They talked about the situation in Korea, and he told an off-color joke about war brides. He asked for another drink and she made him one, but Clarissa stalked in and said she wasn't wearing nice clothes another minute, so the photographer arranged them on the sofa and started to fiddle with his flash.

Clarissa sat on the ottoman, and Margot stood behind, with her hands on her sister's shoulders. Clarissa hated to be touched by Margot, and her hair was coming out of its curls. Yvette pulled the hem of Clarissa's skirt to cover her knees. Margot smiled serenely at the camera, and nothing about her was out of place. Yvette felt like her own smile might look tipsy, so she pressed her hand against her lips to try to straighten her mouth without smearing her lipstick.

"Over There" by Alan King

~
From Alan King's poem "Over There," which was published in Blue Lotus Review:

You said it, pointing

at the light, thick as gravy
and almost as edible, the way
the moon ladled it over you.

Maile Meloy, Half in Love

~
Half in Love, a collection of short stories by Maile Meloy (Scribner, 2002).

A few highlights:

"Tome" (from Best New American Voices 2000) For eight months, I had been telling my client he had no tort claim. . . . Sawyer had worked active, outside jobs all his life, and suddenly he could do nothing. It seemed to be the idleness, more than the brain damage, that made him crazy. He couldn't read, because the words came out scrambled, and he could barely sit still to try. He phoned me three times a day. My secretary stopped putting his calls through, so he came to the office, on foot because they wouldn't let him drive. He was a big, graying, blond-bearded man, my father's age, muscular but getting fat without his work. He treated me like a daughter, scolding and cajoling me. He wanted to sue, demanded to sue.

"Aqua Boulevard" (from The Paris Review, winner of the 2001 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction) Tati gave me the leash, a long orange strap, and the children kissed Oliver good-bye and went out the door. . . . I had not wanted a dog, but the children loved him. It was true they did not fight so much now. The day my wife brought him home, my daughter held the dog in her arms and said, "This is the happiest day of my life." Children are whores. They will say anything. But I thought it could be true.

"Kite Whistler Aquamarine" (from Witness) Then the temperature dropped overnight to twenty below, and a Thoroughbred filly was born at our house, early, before we expected her.

"Last of the White Slaves" In the house in Saudi Arabia they employed two Arab servants, Eugénie said: a cook and a butler, both discreet and understanding about the sleeping arrangements. It was an embassy house, marble-floored against the heat, with a wing for the servants. The cook, a widow, kept to herself. An older man named Ahmed was butler and valet; he had worked for the old ambassador, and Miles considered him a friend. But Christopher disliked the old man, and finally threw a fit about the way the laundry was done.

Ann Patchett, Anne Lamott, and Alice Munro

~
State of Wonder, a novel by Ann Patchett (Harper, 2011). A surprising, often beautiful book.
~
Imperfect Birds, a novel by Anne Lamott (Riverhead Books, 2010).
~
Too Much Happiness, a collection of short stories by Alice Munro (first international edition by Vintage Books, 2010; originally published in Canada by Toronto's McClelland & Stewart and then in New York by Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).

From Alice Munro's story "Deep-Holes": Sally stumbled along faster than was easy for her, with the diaper bag and the baby Savanna. She couldn't slow down till she had her sons in sight, saw them trotting along taking sidelong looks into the black chambers, still making exaggerated but discreet noises of horror. She was nearly crying with exhaustion and alarm and some familiar sort of seeping rage.

I'd read several of these stories before--they were all from either The New Yorker or Harper's--but most were new to me. "Too Much Happiness," for example, which closes the collection, is about Sophia Kovalevsky, a nineteenth-century mathematician and novelist.

Parenting anthology

~
Last year, one of my poems appeared in an anthology called Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting, edited by Alys Masek and Kelly Mayhew (City Works Press, 2010).

Here are a few other pieces from the collection:

Often I dream I have forgotten
you somewhere.
Like a parcel, I leave you
in the backseat of the car . . .

An excerpt from "Long Night," a poem by Sharon Dornberg-Lee, pp. 205-206.

~

Lump

Of coal. In your stocking. Solid mass in the toe. Or in your throat if you're a coal miner right before the rush of rock like rain . . .

"Lump," a prose poem by Julie L. Moore, is continued p. 222. It was originally published in Alaska Quarterly Review. (Two other poems by Julie L. Moore appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of the Apple Valley Review.)

~

I knew something was wrong as soon as the baby was placed, warm and sticky, on my chest. Something failed to click. . . .

It was one of those moments that made me wish I'd never seen a movie. Other moments like this include: the moment my father told me he was dying, the moment my father actually died, the moment my mother stopped breathing, let go of my hand and started to turn purple. No soft-focus was there. No voice-over telling me how to feel, no cut away to rain running down a windowpane to give me time to digest the scene I had just witnessed. Just one brutally continuous shot, hard light and worst of all, reality.
. . .
We got home and went straight to bed. Four of us: husband, dog, baby, mother. Everyone fell asleep and I awoke to find my dead mother wearing a blue and pink stripy hat and crying. I pulled the covers up towards my face and stuffed the comforter between us. I did not want to touch her, whoever she was.

An excerpt from "403 Days Later," an essay about post-partum depression by Ella Wilson, pp. 199-204.

Two memoirs, a novel, long and short films, and two poems

~
My name is Howard Dully. . . . In 1960, when I was twelve years old, I was given a transorbital, or "ice pick," lobotomy.

My stepmother arranged it. My father agreed to it. Dr. Walter Freeman, the father of the American lobotomy, told me he was going to do some "tests." It took ten minutes and cost two hundred dollars.

. . . I hadn't been a bad kid. I hadn't ever hurt anyone. Or had I? Was there something I had done, and forgotten—something so horrible that I deserved a lobotomy?

From My Lobotomy: A Memoir by Howard Dully and Charles Fleming (Three Rivers Press, 2007).
~
Scaredycat, 2006, a 15-minute short film (and official selection at the Sundance Film Festival) which was included on the DVD Fifteenth and Taylor: Dispatches from a small apartment and packaged with the full-length film The Adults in the Room, a thoughtful documentary/drama hybrid by Andy Blubaugh.
~
Pauline said, "Once upon a time, there was a woman who had a birthday."

Michael stopped pouring his cereal and looked across the table at her.

"It was January fifth," Pauline said. "The woman was twenty-three."

"Why, that's your birthday, too!" Michael's mother told her. "That's how old you turned, only yesterday!"

"And because this woman happened to be at a low point in her life," Pauline went on, "she was feeling very sensitive about her age."

Michael said, cautiously, "A low point in her life?"

From The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).

I recently reread this one, along with Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and Celestial Navigation.
~
"The Lost Strudel" (originally published in The New York Times) and "On Rapture" (originally published in O, The Oprah Magazine) from I Feel Bad About My Neck: and other thoughts on being a woman by Nora Ephron (Vintage Books, 2006).
~
"Your Marriage Gets Louder as You Get Older," a poem by Amorak Huey, and "Half-hearted Apology," a poem by Nicole Koroch, from Ramshackle Review, March 2011.

Just when I think I can't like Tina Fey more than I already do...

~
...she writes a book. There were a lot of funny and quotable moments, but I've read two good reviews of this book, so I'll just link to them. One review is at The Buffalo News ("Tina Fey delivers the laughs in 'Bossypants'" by Emily Simon), and the other is from the Los Angeles Times ("'Bossypants' by Tina Fey is funny and heartfelt" by Mary McNamara). There are also many other reviews, op-ed pieces, and blog posts about the book with regard to humor, feminism, etc., and two excerpts in The New Yorker. (I've only read the first, re: working moms, and felt it didn't do the book justice. McNamara mentions the excerpts in her review.)

Bossypants by Tina Fey (Reagan Arthur Books/Little, Brown and Company, 2011).

The Spring 2011 issue of the Apple Valley Review

~
The Spring 2011 issue of the journal features fiction by Glen Pourciau, Gregory J. Wolos, and Kevin Carey; poetry and prose poetry by Ryan Ragan, Michelle Valois, Nick Ripatrazone, Neil McCarthy, Tamara Grippi, Karen Skolfield, Danielle Hanson, Regina Faunes, Svetlana Cârstean (translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Claudia Serea), Linda Benninghoff, and Tammy Ho Lai-Ming; and artwork by Sarah Walko (photographed by Christopher Keohane).

The Apple Valley Review is a semiannual online literary journal. The current issue, previous issues, subscription information, and complete submission guidelines are available at www.applevalleyreview.com.

Happy poetry month!

~
Mention poetry, and people tend to divide into two camps: the ones who have a well-worn copy of The Bell Jar on the bookshelf and an opinion about Billy Collins's place in the literary canon, and the ones who still remember Mrs. So-and-so, the English teacher from hell, and her fixation on Emily Dickinson or her impossible test questions about the meaning of some poem or other.

"A Few Painless Ways to Celebrate National Poetry Month" is continued here.

Lorrie Moore's Birds of America

~
What should she say? It must be the most unendurable thing to lose a child. Shouldn't he say something of this? It was his turn to say something.

But he would not. And when they finally reached her classroom, she turned to him in the doorway and, taking a package from her purse, said simply, in a reassuring way, "We always have cookies in class."

Now he beamed at her with such relief that she knew she had for once said the right thing. It filled her with affection for him. Perhaps, she thought, that was where affection began: in an unlikely phrase, in a moment of someone's having unexpectedly but at last said the right thing. We always have cookies in class.

(Excerpted from "Agnes of Iowa," which originally appeared in Elle. This quote is on page 88 of the Vintage paperback.)


From Birds of America, short stories by Lorrie Moore (1998).

What a great collection. I was going to type out more of my favorite segments, but there were just too many. Seriously.

Two stories from Guess Again by Bernard Cooper

~
Guess Again, short stories by Bernard Cooper (Simon & Schuster, 2000).

"Exterior Decoration" (originally published--in slightly different form--on August 25, 1999 in The LA Weekly): "Standing at the living room window, Ray looked up from his morning coffee and saw that the garage door of the house across the street, which just yesterday had been a shade of beige, was now painted a sumptuous red. Ray froze mid-sip. He suspected that Cliff, still asleep in their bed, had sneaked out and done it in the middle of the night." (pp. 140-152 in paperback)

"A Man in the Making" (pp. 125-139 in paperback)

Three stories and an essay from The Saint Ann's Review

~
These are all continued in the Summer/Fall 2008 issue of The Saint Ann's Review.

~

Now, if I may be permitted another small comment on a matter so large as art, I only wish that, in casting me as the pedantic, spinsterish anti-heroine in your book, you'd given me a fuller head of hair; baldness in women is so difficult, so tragic, that I think you, as a writer, might have misstepped in failing to imagine my character's suffering sufficiently. But, no matter—the book was hilarious and at one of our Friday seminars everyone in our department concluded that your fame was indeed well deserved after we'd read and exhaustively discussed it, the book I mean, from the first sentence to the copy accompanying your author photo. Do you remember our Friday seminars?

(From the short story "Eleven, the Spelunker" by Diane Greco, pp. 12-24)

~

She had been sitting at a table in the evening, having a drink. She recalled feeling very much like a vulnerable woman, sitting at that table alone—she felt it described her well—that was how someone watching her would have put it, and it didn't matter to her to have been thought of that way. Anyone could have come up to her. She looked good—she knew it, too. Tan from the first few days of the vacation and she wore most all clothes very well. She had never had a problem with weight and she thought of that as a talent which had a certain shelf-life—eventually it would give out, it would become exhausted, and she intended to use it while she could. She was having a Corona. She was a woman who could drink beer. She always felt this was a skill, too. And then this man, wide-cheeked, narrow-jawed, extremely athletic, extremely masculine, salt-and-pepper stubble on a kind face, asked her if she'd seen a billiards ball roll under her table.

(From the short story "An Overqualified Woman" by Peter Levine, pp. 131-144)

~

Whether you like it or not, that's not the problem with us. It's the lint trap. Or at least, with her it's the lint trap.

It was on a Sunday. I put my clothes in the dryer and walked out of the utility room.

"Did you clean out the lint trap?" she asked.

How many times has she asked me that? She never gets tired of asking me, but I'm tired of answering. She knows the answer and she knows my position.

"Did you?" she asked again. "The lint can catch fire."

(From the short story "Trap" by Glen Pourciau, pp. 154-158)

~

Earlier in the day my brother and I had asked my grandfather if it was all right to put on the casket a large photograph of my father and his motorcycle, a red and white Yamaha YZF R-1, one of the fastest superbikes in production. He agreed, and that was the first thing you saw upon entering the room: this photo of my father smiling behind the machine that killed him.

(From the essay "Of Men and Motorcycles: An Inquiry into the Death of My Father" by William Giraldi, pp. 183-195)

"Late Afternoon" by Joanne Page

~
The phone rings. I hold the phone to her ear while she says goodbye.
I can hear someone crying at the other end. She does not say who.

"Late Afternoon," a poem by Joanne Page, is continued in Queen's Quarterly (114/4, Winter 2007), pp. 530-533. The poem, which is about Bronwen Wallace, is accompanied by photographs of the letter and bracelet Page describes in the text.

"Pulse" by Grete Tartler

~
In Athens a woman threw herself
in front of a train
as people were rushing to the Olympics
and all shouted, "No, no!
Couldn't she find a better time?" . . .

This is an excerpt from "Pulse," a poem by Grete Tartler (translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Grete Tartler). It was originally published in The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review (Winter 2010) and reprinted today (Friday, February 4, 2011) at Poetry Daily. The full poem can be found here.

Short fiction by Christopher Boucher

~
. . . The van was parked right out front. I could see that the family was of Asian descent. The man was talking on his cell phone. The wife was reading a magazine. The kids—one boy and one girl—were sipping juice boxes in the back seat.

Soon I began seeing that van everywhere: parked outside the organic grocery store where I worked, idling outside the hospital when I went to pick up some test results.

Then the family showed up at Bowling Night, in the lane right next to my team’s. I turned to see the mother writing on the score sheet and the daughter swinging her feet from the chair. I watched the father—a man of about forty, I’d say, with longish black hair—pick up the ball and stare down the lane. I could tell from his delivery that he’d bowled before. Sure enough, he knocked down eight pins.

I was furious—enough was enough. This was a league night! When the man sat down I leaned back and whispered, “Hey.” . . .


"Family," a short story by Christopher Boucher, is continued online in Web Conjunctions.

Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules

~
Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules, a collection of stories edited and introduced by David Sedaris (Simon & Schuster, 2005).

I read this as slowly as I possibly could, hoping that he'd have a new collection of essays out by the time I finished, but no dice.

Some of the stories that really stuck out to me were ones I'd already read (e.g., "Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri; "People Like That Are the Only People Here" by Lorrie Moore--who every once in a while has a wonderful, perfect sentence; and "Cosmopolitan" by Akhil Sharma) but this was an interesting collection.

Among others, Sedaris also included "Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired" by Richard Yates, "Gryphon" by Charles Baxter, "The Garden Party" by Katherine Mansfield, "Half a Grapefruit" by Alice Munro, "Applause, Applause" by Jean Thompson, "Where the Door Is Always Open and the Welcome Mat Is Out" by Patricia Highsmith, "Song of the Shirt, 1941" by Dorothy Parker, "The Girl with the Blackened Eye" by Joyce Carol Oates, "Revelation" by Flannery O'Connor, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" by Amy Hempel, "Irish Girl" by Tim Johnston, and "Bullet in the Brain" by Tobias Wolff.

Side note: Purchase of this book helps support 826NYC, a nonprofit tutoring center in Brooklyn, New York.