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In March, coming off an illness, I could feel myself flailing. I would teach class and stumble through the literature, but the students had the jump on me. The young women knew the play’s effect better; the young men understood the characters more fully. My mind was just unfocused and dull, but I didn’t know if they could see it.
I had a few tools, though. I could out-plan those stinkers, not to get the best of them but to give them what they needed. We were reading short plays in class, looking to adapt them. As one art-minded student asked, “Are we improving these scripts?” No; we are making them come alive. How can we take what’s on the page and help it have the most impact? If you were to stage the play at the college, what would you need to do it, and why would you make those choices? Putting that idea into practice, one Monday night, I created my own plan, complete with staging, lighting, costuming, and all that jazz. By sitting down for an hour, reading the play closely, making notes, and then rearranging those ideas, I came up with an outline I liked, and I could talk about it the next day to illustrate what they could do to plan their assignment. Not an essay (yet they could still choose that route) but rather a project they’d invent, a choose-your-own-adventure type of deal. This was where I made my big mistake. I showed them my outline, talked it over, felt good about it. I told them what I learned by making it. Set the deadline, brushed the chalk off my hands, and waited for their work to come in. Those college kids, of many ages, had nothing on me. Yet when I downloaded their work and opened those files, I was amazed. I had never had a project with so much variety. Students asked to perform their adaptations; others submitted drawings. Instead of a play, could it be a movie, with the script altered to explain the camera angles? There were PowerPoints, video puppet shows, storyboards, and many, many outlines like mine. As I made my notes on their work, the question for revision was “What’s the best form for getting your idea across?” And students took that query in their own direction, some changing up their format, but most making it come alive with the same structure they had been planning in. I didn’t set out to make them innovate their form, and the work they did was the result of their imagination and trust, not mine. I felt so lucky to see their passion and understanding: they showed they grasped the details of the plays and their overall effect. It was all a very happy accident. As the semester is wrapping up and I write this, the score is two to one, with the students in the lead. 
Each issue of a journal, in my experience, is a happy accident. You have no idea what it will be or feel like when you’re in the nitty-gritty of the selection process. The team who made those choices and refined the many details of this journal in the service of the writers is wonderfully effective. I’m very glad to have worked with such a thoughtful set of human beings.
I just finished the order today, placing pieces softly next to complementary work. Creating that order is my hardest intellectual exercise of the year. What appears, or what’s intended, is a handsome setting for each fine blue jewel in the journal. As you read, there should be no hard resets, no incongruous marriages, if possible. What’s appeared is undefinable, but I’ll give it a try. There are ghosts here. Marlene Olin’s story “The Mirror” revives the specter of the first year of COVID and our strange reactions to isolation. Conversely, in both his poems, Bruce Cohen shows how words infect us but also instill the memory of our loved ones. A condemned place is a portal to where the spirits live, as Amy Jean Bailey shows in “Every Phone Booth a Wind Phone, Every Window a Portal.” There is loss but there is also remembrance. At the same time, though, we can’t help but become new people. Through biology or ecology, we grow apart from what we were and what we’ve known. Ashley Parker Owens’s “Fermentation” is that process; Abbie Langmead’s “the self as the ship of theseus” is the recognition; “Whatever Reverie” by Brasswax is its dissection. Really, though, all three pieces have those aspects and innumerable more. But it’s true, you can change your mind, change your world. You realize the connection between you and the universe or just your shrewd but welcoming ersatz cab driver in “El Jem” by Lindsey Clark. Danger follows us, and all we can do is suss out the strange world and the strangers in it. Aleks Merilo holds us on the knife edge in “TEOTWAWKI” while we wait for the truth to come. In Michael Cannistraci’s “Try Not to Obsess,” the danger is personal and pervading, washing inside the narrator and the damaged man he converses with. We can never find the truth until we dig deeper or the immense light is revealed to us. In Sali Andiamo Siyaya’s “Mama’s Sacred Tree,” it’s that familiar curiosity that leads to a change for the narrator’s family and the whole village. There are always roots and a genesis whether we see them or not. We inherit our views and our tendencies and their physical manifestations, for good or bad, in Lucy Turner’s “Augsburger Ballantine Colt 45” and in the poems of survival and change from the rightfully esteemed Marge Piercy. Finally, in Memory Derthick’s “Essie’s Famous O Fries,” our fashions, expressions, and landmarks have been lost along the way, but if we look deep enough, we can find the origins of our material world. It’s just not what we would expect or understand. As in every volume of Clockhouse, there’s a great scattering of shape and form, capped off by the cover art. “Homing of the Gears Town” by Zahra Zoghi looks like a calculated and mathematical world, or clashing worlds, a stream of chaos, and a place and a soul just barely hanging on. It’s patterned but dynamic and speaks in accord with the environmental and destructive nature of the work inside this journal while bearing a stripe of survival. We’re all just making do. Inventing. Finding grace in surviving the bad old days. Finding what you never expected, what you didn’t know you needed. 
I have hope. Working with those students, reading these works, seeing the greater whole of that class and this journal, I can feel a great swelling of care in the world. There’s a place to start over, to recollect, to remember.
There’s a magic, and magical realism, to being here on Earth. And let me tell you, I could use it these days. I think we all could, unexpectedly, beyond what we can imagine. It’s two to one, but I’ve got a plan. - David Waite, Editorial Director |