Hello. The blog is no more. But you can still read your favorite columns, like The Shimmying Writer, Books Borrowed from my Ex, Reading Books While Burping my Baby, and 15 Views of Orlando, in addition to weekly fiction/essays/book reviews/interviews at Burrowpressreview.com
As soon as we figure out how to feed recent posts from there onto our homepage, there will be no more need for this note. But for now, go to BP Review and read some stuff.
1 of 3 – Intro
All my life, my reading habits have been at the mercy of my surroundings. When I was a kid growing up in Venice, Florida, I read books by lamplight on the lower level of my bunk bed, the only place in my house where I could shut myself away from the sounds of a five-person family (CNN Headline News on the living room TV, oven timers blaring and chili pots bubbling, front door opening/closing, younger brother reciting vocab words aloud). When I traveled the country for my first job after college, I trained myself to read anywhere, so long as I had at least fifteen minutes to kill: I’d read books while waiting for meetings to start, or while holed up in some middle-of-nowhere hotel, or while sitting on a bench in the middle of some unbelievably busy campus (Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, Texas Tech), paying no attention to the constant activity around me. I prided myself on being able to read not just during long flights, but during take-offs and landings…I knew the precise time to finish a page and stash the book away, too, so that I could rise with the other passengers and move forward and not regret a single moment of reading time lost.
I think that, when most of us picture the act of “sitting down to read a good book,” we have a warm and idyllic image in mind: we picture a fireplace, a long couch where we can kick our feet up on a coffee table, an endtable upon which we can place our glass of red wine or—if it’s summer and the sun is shining—our tall glass of iced tea or lemonade. We picture uninterrupted intimacy with our “good book,” a feeling of “sinking in” to a novel and “losing ourselves” in its “world.” We picture ultimate relaxation and/or escape, a brain massage for hours and hours, maybe even the sensation of falling asleep with the book spread across our chest. ( Read more )
2 of 3 – Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine
And so, during my first month with Baby Jackson, I searched the tall stack of books on my living room end table for anything with a thin spine. The fewer pages, the better. I would not be opening Gravity’s Rainbow or Sister Carrie or Infinite Jest, or even Essex County or Fortress of Solitude; at the end of 2011, I’d dedicated myself to Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me, a 400-page multi-POV monster that—in those frantic December days that involved final portfolios from students, holiday parties, family visits, bed rest for my 8 ½-month pregnant wife, trips to the OBGYN and the hospital—had taken me a more than a month to finish. Sometimes there were full days between reading opportunities, and I’d need to reread pages and pages just to understand where the hell I was, and really, Egan’s book did me no favors: both characters in Look at Me are named Charlotte, and sometimes the point-of-view shifts mid-chapter, or mid-page, or mid-paragraph, and sometimes we unexpectedly travel back in time, and it’s a book about identity loss and identity creation and really? I chose to read this during the hectic third trimester?
Anyway. During the baby’s first month in our house, I would not be “challenging myself” to any other long or difficult reads. That was the lesson I learned.
The first book I pulled from my stack was Ben Tanzer’s Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine. 172 pages (soaking wet), with an average-to-large typeface (if this book had been printed in Look at Me’s tiny typeface, it probably wouldn’t have cracked a dozen pages). And Tanzer writes in quick back-and-forth dialogue, short two-page chapters, so—in a world of constant disruption—I just figured this would make a nice confidence-building start to my 2012 reading life. That was the plan, anyway. ( Read more )
3 of 3 – Prize Winners, Ayiti
Best American Non-Required Reading 2011, and Ben Tanzer’s Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine: finished. Also finished: Artifice Issue 4 (which I read, but can honestly say that I probably wasn’t in the right frame of mind to understand or comment upon, so we’ll take a pass on that one…Artifice is a great literary magazine, but man, its unique mix of poetry and prose that is “aware of its own artifice” isn’t always the best choice for a man running on two or three hours of sleep). But if you’ve been reading this series, you get the general theme, right? Short. Short books, short stories. Short short short.
The other two thin volumes I decided upon for the month of January were even shorter than Tanzer’s book: Ryan Bradley’s Prize Winners and Roxane Gay’s Ayiti, neither more than 120 pages, and both from the rising small-press publisher Artistically Declined (who also published Tanzer’s popular You Can Make Him Like You). And maybe this sounds a little strange, but as I held each book, I instantly realized that these were the perfect-sized books for a man with a baby in his arms. Smooth surface, but not slippery-smooth. Not too heavy, not too tough to hold with a single hand. And no, I don’t need two hands to lift a paperback (I’m not that out-of-shape), but some books can be very difficult to hold one-handed; you’ve got to have your fingers in the perfect position to prop the book open, to pin the pages back on either side. And when I opened Prize Winners to read the first story, I felt…happy…comfortable. ( Read more )
It is once again that time to highlight an author who appears in the upcoming Burrow book, 15 Views of Orlando. This time, we’ve got an author who used to live in Orlando, moved to Seattle to resurrect the dream of the 90s, and now lives in an undisclosed liberal elitist haven in the Northeast. Amid all this ping-ponging, we hope he will visit Orlando again soon, and perhaps, grace us with a reading…
Too quick across the face of this earth, Tom DeBeauchamp has never watched a puppy grow up to a dog and die. His stories and reviews have appeared here and there, online and in print. He waits for mail that never comes. He attracts sometimes the inverse of moths and jars them and stores them in cool, damp, dark places where they batter the glass with their bodies, desperate to touch the unity for which inverse moths despair. He reminds you we are all closer always to the molten central fire than we’ll ever be to the distant radiations of space.
Tom’s 15 Views of Orlando story culminates in Lake Keogh, a man-made lake near the Red Lobster in Waterford. Tom also appears in the 15 Views bonus features, where he has this to say, among other things, about Orlando:
It’s been years since I moved away, and most of what I remember is vague and hazy, the feel of driving in the heat with the air off, the sprawl west of Alafaya and the forgotten scrublands between Bithlo and the beach. I remember it being an unformed place, or a place with a sudden form, like everyone there was confused about how they’d ended up there, uncertain about how they’d leave. It had a transitory skin. But there were others, other transients who’d been there longer. I remember it as one of the strangest places I’ve ever lived…
Tom has reviewed books for HTML Giant, The Collagist, and others. His fiction has appeared (mysteriously and sometimes ordinarily) in Hobart, Smalldoggies, in Burrow’s first anthology, and elsewhere. Click, read, enjoy.
THE FIELD
by Martin Glaz Serup
94 pp/ Les Figues Press
$15
I consider myself an experimental writer, but admit: I am cautious of experimental writing. By definition it draws attention to writing rather than the story, form above content, style over substance, the onus on daring instead of endurance. My prejudice, fair or unfortunate. The bigger risk a writer takes with experimental and hybrid works, the harder to buy into the concept, the more skeptical my eye. I have a voice, always, challenging, go ahead, make me want to turn the page. Can you? The answer is often no. But when a writer succeeds with a daring form the reward dazzles; a circus trapeze act so thrilling the trapeze disappears and you simply see the swingers flipping and soaring overhead. The Field made me forget the trapeze.
Described by the author as “everybody’s autobiography” Martin Glaz Serup’s text originally existed as installations in Finish and American art galleries. I sorely wish I’d seen them. This lonely little book was a perfect January read. I respect the themes Serup explores, or more so, avoids.
This is squarely a text of avoidance. The first stylistic constraint is the absence of pronouns, at least those gender specific. Initially this was noticeable, and then less, as the reader is absorbed into the voice. The Field communicates, sentence by sentence, chopped and assembled, the anxiety of times and irrational concerns. Spare paragraphs, many a single sentence on a page, establish a lurching cadence that reinforces the anxiety. The field, for example “suffers from a fear of lifts,” “feels ashamed for taking pictures,” “tries to pretend nothing is happening.” Or this particularly interesting passage:
The field sometimes thinks it’s unhappy in a mild and ordinary way that makes it happy because it thinks things could be much worse, which makes it afraid because it thinks things could still get much worse, so it tries to think of something else.
Me too! I do the same exact same thing. And that is the heart of this brief tract, that Serup has created a blank field (not a pun) the reader inserts him or herself into seamlessly. As open as the content is to self-imposition, Serup’s work is pointed, too, and that is through poetic diligence and a command of craft.
Serup lures readers along with details, on first read mundane, but with consideration, salient. That “the field enjoys looking at snow-covered fields” or that “the field likes caves and mussel shells; the field likes secretive things in general.” There are so many small details peppered through the spare text that each one takes on importance, and makes the reader pause to consider it. And reconsider.
I liked the book so much I read it a second time. I wondered if The Field was a breakup book. It reads perfectly like an impersonal memoir of despair and breakdown. At the beginning of the book, “On a trip to Paris without the kids the field asks, do you think we’re having a crisis. Yes, comes the immediate reply.” A few pages later, “According to the field’s nearest and dearest the field spends far too much time on the toilet in the mornings. The field just sits there, waking up. The field is a slow waker.” It sounds like the ringing criticism of domestic partners, god, just wake up. Later in the book, “Stepfamiles, what to think of them, the field doesn’t have any particular opinion… it doesn’t feel like… developing the thought further.” There is another romantic trip without this kids where, in nocturnal loneliness, the field listens to combines in a nearby field. It nails loneliness, as does a passage where the field speaks of enjoying talking on the phone until “its ear gets warm and dark red and throbbing.” That is very much the enjoyment of a person without another person nearby to physically relate to, and it is moving. The field’s desolation builds, and then later still it “speculates about whether it perhaps should seek professional help.” The sense of confusion, anxiety, and loss imbued in the text reminds me of my own past breakups. It’s possible that is a slight of hand, and me inserting my own experience into the text. Which Serup has so deftly allowed. He has positioned himself as a writer at the forefront of his field, (again, not a pun!) relational aesthetics. The art done across disciplines in this movement fascinates.
It takes less than an hour to read, and is worth the time. Buy the book and enjoy it, enjoy your personal response to the blankness, and the balls of a storyteller who meanders and is indirect and amorphous and knows the voice is strong enough that even with the lack of clear direction, the reader is going to follow. Kudos to Les Figues Press for having the vision to publish a translation of a writer at the beginning of an important career.
I like books that read as meditations, and The Field does. Close your eyes and repeat, what in the hell is all this living, anyway? And to combat winter’s loneliness, I recommend Sea-Monkeys, Mr. Serup. I don’t know if they have them in Copenhagen. But if they do…
With the upcoming release of 15 Views of Orlando, Burrow Press is highlighting a handful of the book’s contributors. Here’s one now!
John King, an aficionado of college degrees, recently acquired his fourth, an MFA in creative writing from NYU. While his doppelganger proudly teaches composition and creative writing at the University of Central Florida, John currently resides at an undisclosed location and toils on his epic novel, Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame. He also reviews books for The Literary Review and theater for Shakespeare Bulletin. His work has appeared in Turnrow, Gargoyle, and Pearl, and is forthcoming from Palooka.
John’s 15 Views of Orlando story is set in Crocodile World, which, for non-locals, is a caricature of a real place called Gatorland. He also wrote a Florida literature manifesto, which appears in the book’s bonus features. Here’s a brief excerpt:
Florida—this peninsula stretching from the American south to the subtropics, fragmenting into the archipelago of the Keys—is intrinsically dramatic, an epic provocation to the imagination. The state is wild, from ancient kudzu-choked forests of the north to the expanse of the Everglades where prehistoric reptiles still roam in their almost unimaginable realness. And the sky: almost unbearably blue and infinite over flat horizons, with cathedrals of wispy clouds hovering like heavenly thoughts, so meticulously idyllic that they look painted on by Renaissance masters.
And of course John’s work has appeared elsewhere. Here’s a poem called “Spinning” and a short story called “Guy Psycho: The Savior of Pop?” for you to enjoy until the book release party on Jan. 31st at Urban ReThink, 6-9pm, where John is a featured reader
