The Chase: A Note from the Editorial Director
At the edge of the side yard there stands an oak tree easily six stories tall, bare in late March. Its branches are snow covered with the latest storm blowing through late last night leaving in its wake five inches of snow and a brilliantly crisp clear morning. It is cold and still outside, but I am warm in the house. Long shorn of its leaves, the oak is striking in the afternoon sun, dominating all attention with sunlight falling from a blue sky above and reflected light bouncing from the snow-covered yard below. It sways gently, the white-topped branches in striking relief against almost-as-tall evergreens standing behind lining the neighbor’s property. Everything is calm and beautiful.
Suddenly, a violent gust of wind strikes the top branches, whisking a small blizzard into the sky, whirling and spinning chaotically, flying off into empty space. I’m alarmed and shocked. The abruptness of the scene in contrast to the stillness a moment before is equally beautiful and terrifying. Change happens quickly, I think.
By now, many of us have heard news of the decision from the Board of Trustees to close Goddard College at the end of the 2024 Spring term. The Board’s press release told us the decision was difficult, but, in all honesty, it’s one many of us in the Goddard community have been expecting and dreading for years.
We are not alone, it seems. According to authors Evan Castillo and Lyss Welding in Closed Colleges: List, Statistics, and Major Closures, published on the website BestColleges.com on June 3, 2024, “ . . . fifty-eight public or nonprofit colleges have closed, merged, or announced closures or mergers since March 2020.” And it’s not just an American phenomenon; a random read through the April/May 2024 issue of Philosophy Now gave me this nugget: “In sadder news, the University of Kent at Canterbury is planning to close its Philosophy section along with a number of other humanities subjects.” (Steinbauer 6)
Goddard’s beautiful Vermont campus, the site of countless moments of learning, laughter and friendship, of rest and renewal: what will happen to it now? Such thoughts are painful, even depressing. Change is inevitable, the only constant in the universe. Yet, change can also provide opportunity, a source of delight, and, if we are searching for it, inspiration, like the morning after an unexpected snowstorm.
I remember being bored at a neighborhood sale in Ypsilanti in mid-June long ago. This wasn’t your typical rummage sale because it was in an upscale neighborhood near Eastern Michigan University’s campus. College professors, lawyers, and political folks lived alongside engineers, business owners, and folks in the medical field in this neighborhood, and every year they held a sale, and every year my friend and I would comb the discarded objects littering the garages and yards of people with more money than us. He was a bit of a pack rat back then and found countless treasures, but I rarely found anything of value beyond the trinkets my kids wanted to buy with their allotted ten dollars for the day: an abacus, lego set, old sugar bowls of crystal, a globe, and books. Lots and lots of books.
It was hot. The kids were hungry and cranky by the time we hauled their finds back to the car at the end of the afternoon. When we passed the last house at the edge of the neighborhood, an older man was packing up boxes and carrying them into his garage. I noticed an old acoustic guitar lying on a blue tarp beneath a shade tree. It was nothing special: dents in the soundboard, strings broken and curling in every direction. I did not recognize the maker, Coin, but, according to the label inside the sound hole, it had been made in Japan in ‘74 and imported by a dealer in Oakbrook, Illinois. Normally, I wouldn’t have considered buying a guitar sold at a garage sale, regardless of how upscale the neighborhood. But I had a feeling, vague as it was, of something happening. It wasn’t alarm or shock exactly, but it was close. The abrupt change from feeling tired and bored to something else. Let’s call it possibility. I asked how much. He said make me an offer. I gave him twenty bucks. My kids used it as a drum on the way home.
I cleaned it up, changed the strings, and was delighted to discover it held its tuning. I hung it on the wall and although it's not the same caliber guitar as my Martin Grand Performance Cutaway 16E Rosewood, which I keep in a case and would never expose to dust and humidity when I’m not playing it, I play the Coin guitar almost every day when I don’t have the time to get the Martin out of its case. You know, those in-between moments when I’m waiting for the family to get ready before leaving the house or when a musical idea enters my mind before bedtime, and I want to try it out. It was the best twenty bucks I ever spent.
The arresting moment when everything changes, or is about to change, is the stuff of possibility, the stuff of art. Chasing these moments is the stuff of a literary life. The purpose of all art according to Janet Burroway in Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft is “ . . . to quell boredom. People recognize that it feels good to feel and that not to feel is unhealthy.” But isn’t it more than just this? Mary Karr in The Art of Memoir describes the truth for a memoirist as “. . . the bannister they grab for when feeling around on the dark cellar stairs.” Leo Tolstoy said, “Art is a human activity, consisting in this: that one person consciously, by certain external signs, conveys to others feelings he has experienced, and other people are affected by these feelings and live them over in themselves . . . “ (What is Art?, 1897)
Finding that arresting moment, that engaging feeling, feeling for it, searching for it—that moment that startles us to grace and beauty or shocks us to terror and dread—is the chase of literary art and the stuff of Clockhouse. Chasing that next intriguing idea, that feeling that fascinates us for the mystery of the change it may provoke in us or for the potential to bring us back to ourselves in ways perhaps banal but grounding, this arresting moment is why we write and why we read.
In Clockhouse Volume 11, we offer you such moments. From the absurd moment of taking a ridiculous job to pay the bills in Michael Cannistraci’s In a Pickle to moments of profound grief in Michael Ben’s Flight Instincts, these stories are well worth the chase. Madeira Miller in when I lied in october balances attraction and flirtation with personal safety and doomed love. An epiphany, a flash of insight, a vision, an oracle, a discovery—it’s difficult to capture in language that moment when the wind gusts and the snow abruptly flies off the branch, the sudden change of feeling from calm to shock, from shock to delight, like the moment when one comes across what the French refer to as l’objet trouvé, the found object. I’d like to extend this idea to include le moment trouvé, the found moment.
Transgender identity, wanting to purge some aspect of yourself, are found moments in Jocelyn Bermúdez’s Azules; a dreaded diagnosis are those shared in Janet Ford’s Scheherazade. A pregnancy is possible in Jamisyn Gleeson’s Mulled Wine. This chase, whether looking out a window in winter or walking through a neighborhood sale on a hot summer day, offers many enduring moments for us if we choose to look for them.
Goddard College is gone, along with many other cherished programs and institutions. Although the physical campus provided many of us with moments that will nourish and sustain us for the rest of our lives, the campus was never the essential component of the liberal arts experience. It was us. It is us. It’s always been us. It is what we do and what we will continue to do in our daily lives, in our writing lives, in our artistic lives. Change may be the one constant in the universe, but never discount the chase: the continual pursuit of arousing the human soul to renewal, to understanding, to risk, and to dream. Rejoin the chase once again and always.
Ken Damerow, Editorial Director
Cover photo: Caroline Dunphy
Suddenly, a violent gust of wind strikes the top branches, whisking a small blizzard into the sky, whirling and spinning chaotically, flying off into empty space. I’m alarmed and shocked. The abruptness of the scene in contrast to the stillness a moment before is equally beautiful and terrifying. Change happens quickly, I think.
By now, many of us have heard news of the decision from the Board of Trustees to close Goddard College at the end of the 2024 Spring term. The Board’s press release told us the decision was difficult, but, in all honesty, it’s one many of us in the Goddard community have been expecting and dreading for years.
We are not alone, it seems. According to authors Evan Castillo and Lyss Welding in Closed Colleges: List, Statistics, and Major Closures, published on the website BestColleges.com on June 3, 2024, “ . . . fifty-eight public or nonprofit colleges have closed, merged, or announced closures or mergers since March 2020.” And it’s not just an American phenomenon; a random read through the April/May 2024 issue of Philosophy Now gave me this nugget: “In sadder news, the University of Kent at Canterbury is planning to close its Philosophy section along with a number of other humanities subjects.” (Steinbauer 6)
Goddard’s beautiful Vermont campus, the site of countless moments of learning, laughter and friendship, of rest and renewal: what will happen to it now? Such thoughts are painful, even depressing. Change is inevitable, the only constant in the universe. Yet, change can also provide opportunity, a source of delight, and, if we are searching for it, inspiration, like the morning after an unexpected snowstorm.
I remember being bored at a neighborhood sale in Ypsilanti in mid-June long ago. This wasn’t your typical rummage sale because it was in an upscale neighborhood near Eastern Michigan University’s campus. College professors, lawyers, and political folks lived alongside engineers, business owners, and folks in the medical field in this neighborhood, and every year they held a sale, and every year my friend and I would comb the discarded objects littering the garages and yards of people with more money than us. He was a bit of a pack rat back then and found countless treasures, but I rarely found anything of value beyond the trinkets my kids wanted to buy with their allotted ten dollars for the day: an abacus, lego set, old sugar bowls of crystal, a globe, and books. Lots and lots of books.
It was hot. The kids were hungry and cranky by the time we hauled their finds back to the car at the end of the afternoon. When we passed the last house at the edge of the neighborhood, an older man was packing up boxes and carrying them into his garage. I noticed an old acoustic guitar lying on a blue tarp beneath a shade tree. It was nothing special: dents in the soundboard, strings broken and curling in every direction. I did not recognize the maker, Coin, but, according to the label inside the sound hole, it had been made in Japan in ‘74 and imported by a dealer in Oakbrook, Illinois. Normally, I wouldn’t have considered buying a guitar sold at a garage sale, regardless of how upscale the neighborhood. But I had a feeling, vague as it was, of something happening. It wasn’t alarm or shock exactly, but it was close. The abrupt change from feeling tired and bored to something else. Let’s call it possibility. I asked how much. He said make me an offer. I gave him twenty bucks. My kids used it as a drum on the way home.
I cleaned it up, changed the strings, and was delighted to discover it held its tuning. I hung it on the wall and although it's not the same caliber guitar as my Martin Grand Performance Cutaway 16E Rosewood, which I keep in a case and would never expose to dust and humidity when I’m not playing it, I play the Coin guitar almost every day when I don’t have the time to get the Martin out of its case. You know, those in-between moments when I’m waiting for the family to get ready before leaving the house or when a musical idea enters my mind before bedtime, and I want to try it out. It was the best twenty bucks I ever spent.
The arresting moment when everything changes, or is about to change, is the stuff of possibility, the stuff of art. Chasing these moments is the stuff of a literary life. The purpose of all art according to Janet Burroway in Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft is “ . . . to quell boredom. People recognize that it feels good to feel and that not to feel is unhealthy.” But isn’t it more than just this? Mary Karr in The Art of Memoir describes the truth for a memoirist as “. . . the bannister they grab for when feeling around on the dark cellar stairs.” Leo Tolstoy said, “Art is a human activity, consisting in this: that one person consciously, by certain external signs, conveys to others feelings he has experienced, and other people are affected by these feelings and live them over in themselves . . . “ (What is Art?, 1897)
Finding that arresting moment, that engaging feeling, feeling for it, searching for it—that moment that startles us to grace and beauty or shocks us to terror and dread—is the chase of literary art and the stuff of Clockhouse. Chasing that next intriguing idea, that feeling that fascinates us for the mystery of the change it may provoke in us or for the potential to bring us back to ourselves in ways perhaps banal but grounding, this arresting moment is why we write and why we read.
In Clockhouse Volume 11, we offer you such moments. From the absurd moment of taking a ridiculous job to pay the bills in Michael Cannistraci’s In a Pickle to moments of profound grief in Michael Ben’s Flight Instincts, these stories are well worth the chase. Madeira Miller in when I lied in october balances attraction and flirtation with personal safety and doomed love. An epiphany, a flash of insight, a vision, an oracle, a discovery—it’s difficult to capture in language that moment when the wind gusts and the snow abruptly flies off the branch, the sudden change of feeling from calm to shock, from shock to delight, like the moment when one comes across what the French refer to as l’objet trouvé, the found object. I’d like to extend this idea to include le moment trouvé, the found moment.
Transgender identity, wanting to purge some aspect of yourself, are found moments in Jocelyn Bermúdez’s Azules; a dreaded diagnosis are those shared in Janet Ford’s Scheherazade. A pregnancy is possible in Jamisyn Gleeson’s Mulled Wine. This chase, whether looking out a window in winter or walking through a neighborhood sale on a hot summer day, offers many enduring moments for us if we choose to look for them.
Goddard College is gone, along with many other cherished programs and institutions. Although the physical campus provided many of us with moments that will nourish and sustain us for the rest of our lives, the campus was never the essential component of the liberal arts experience. It was us. It is us. It’s always been us. It is what we do and what we will continue to do in our daily lives, in our writing lives, in our artistic lives. Change may be the one constant in the universe, but never discount the chase: the continual pursuit of arousing the human soul to renewal, to understanding, to risk, and to dream. Rejoin the chase once again and always.
Ken Damerow, Editorial Director
Cover photo: Caroline Dunphy