We gather in the residue of pixels.
We mourn the loss of Melissa Wiley, offer you a full slate of reading, and announce some of our new editors. Plus: tips on becoming a better poet.
This week, we published an interview with Ancestor Trouble author Maud Newton by Surya Hendry, a short story about a struggling comedian by Robin Zlotnick, a hybrid piece about a Zoom writing group by Lauren Camp, a book review of Robert Vaughan’s Askew by Leigh Chadwick, and another cartoon by AMP. We also added new editors.
Dear Identity Theory Readers,
A quick note of remembrance: approximately a week ago, Melissa Wiley, author of the first short story we published this year, was found dead in her home. She was 42.
Here is a picture of Melissa at her best:
This loss, of course, makes me incredibly sad, in part because I had it on my to-do list to contact her about something this month and didn’t—will now never—get around to it.
Read her story from January 2022: “Songs without Words.”
Maud Newton’s Most Excellent Book
Maud Newton started blogging in the early 2000s. Most of you probably know about her. When Surya Hendry, who started living in the early 2000s, joined our staff earlier this year, I recommended that she talk to Maud about her new book, Ancestor Trouble (you might remember that my mom called this one “a most excellent book”). Surya’s interview went extremely well. Here it is: a conversation with Maud Newton about Ancestor Trouble:
Maud Newton: After many, many years of therapy and a meditation practice, and the experience of my own family, I have really come to believe that ignoring toxic histories is toxic for the individual person.
It might feel in the moment like it’s better to sweep it under the rug or not look at it. But it’s still there; we still know about it. And so, I have really come to believe in the importance of acknowledging it to ourselves, acknowledging these histories within our families.
Particularly, in our current world, where there are these sort of abstract debates about, "Does racism continue? Does it not continue? Slavery was so long ago, what relevance does it have now?" All of this kind of stuff. I believe we can short-circuit some of that by stepping forward and saying: my ancestors did this. And here’s how I feel about that. And, I’m listening for ways that I might be able to help—by advocating for reparations, or any number of things.
We think, maybe, that holding it close and keeping it quiet is better for us and our families. But it’s actually poison, in my opinion.
Read the rest of Surya Hendry’s interview with Maud Newton.
Identity Theory is a Strange Little Boat
I dug this up after posting the Maud Newton interview: In 2004, four years into the life of Identity Theory, Robert Birnbaum wrote a retrospective on his first four years working for the site:
Here's the thing—in addition to being able to indulge whatever dictates of ecstatic artistic urgencies present themselves, this strange little boat sails uncharted waters with a flotilla of other strange and drunken boats. What a fine thing it has been to meet in some unlikely way, fellow sailors [lists a long group of lit bloggers including Mark Sarvas, Ron Hogan, Sarah Weinman, and Maud Newton]. That's the really energizing and inspiring thing: that the never-ending conversation goes on, bringing meaning and meanings to its participants. That's a pretty good thing, no?
TELL JOKES!!
We all loved this short story by Robin Zlotnick, “Watermelon Boyfriend, HaHa Lounge, ‘94,” about a comedian finding her act in the early ‘90s. Here’s a clip:
The words keep coming, but inside she’s freefalling. At the end of her set, when the flashing red light stabs at her over and over, she folds into a meek bow and backs off stage as the emcee barrels up to recover the mic and the evening’s dignity in one deft move.
“Fran Lefkowitz, everyone,” he says, excruciatingly deadpan. “And now, put your hands together for one of our favorites here at the HaHa Lounge and soon to be one of yours as well…Dave Meyerson!”
In the green room, which is really just the hallway between the stage entrance and the kitchen, Fran slumps onto a cracked faux leather couch and unconsciously pulls white fuzz from a hole probably dug out of another comic’s frustration. She twirls each fuzzy tuft between her fingers, ties a knot in the center, and drops it to the ground. In the background, muffled Dave Meyerson sets one up, Wah wah wah, wah wah wah. Wah wah, wah wah wah, and kills it with a punchline, Wah wah wah wah wah! He pauses for laughter, real and crackly and maddening. Fran smacks her hand on the couch in a burst of frustration, just as Ernie James waddles over, barely hanging onto a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, wispy gray hairs wilding from his speckled balding head. Ernie’s a fixture at the HaHa Lounge, like an old dusty lightbulb you haven’t had time to change.
“Little lady, that sounded rough,” he spits through yellowed teeth. “Try wearing a tight dress or something. And, you know, telling jokes.” Two streams of smoke billow from his nostrils, dragon-like. Fran simultaneously waves him and the smoke out of her face. He ambles on unconcerned. But then she takes out her notepad and in dark, pressured pencil, writes, “TELL JOKES!!”
Read the rest of “Watermelon Boyfriend, HaHa Lounge, ‘94” by Robin Zlotnick.
Leigh Chadwick Hits for the Cycle, Featuring Assless Chaps
We’ve published Leigh Chadwick’s poems. We’ve published Leigh Chadwick’s fiction. And now we’ve published a book review by Leigh Chadwick: With the Help of Leigh Chadwick, I Review Robert Vaughan’s Askew.
Robert Vaughan has a kind face, and from the few interactions I’ve had with him through social media, he also appears to have a kind heart. This is important to note because his newest collection, Askew, recently published by CJ Press, which stands for Cowboy Jamboree, which means—I have no idea what it means, but it seems kinky enough to assume that it involves assless chaps—if I know one thing about Leigh Chadwick, it’s that she’s a fan of assless chaps, and if you don’t believe me, ask her, and if you don’t believe Leigh Chadwick, ask her husband—and where I’m going with this, I have no fucking clue, except that this has become an uncomfortably long run-on sentence, and now I imagine every reader is imagining what I’m imagining: Robert Vaughan in assless chaps.
Read the rest of Leigh Chadwick’s review of Robert Vaughan’s Askew.
We Gather in the Residue of Pixels
Lauren Camp contributed a poem sorta thing called “Present Tense” about meeting on screens to write. Here’s an excerpt:
Because no one could gather, we gathered in the residue of pixels. I was and remain full of my mentorly questions, trials, risks I float toward them, dare them to board.
We meet every week; we return to each other. They come with disclaimers, fast fingers, approximations, entropy. Formless futures, blank pages. This world we’re in glowers, made as it is of strangeness. Of strangers. Ruin. Removal. Of anger. It tries to defeat them—has closed them in.
I ask how they live how they lived who they loved what is current about their previous selves.
Read the rest of “Present Tense” by Lauren Camp.
What Does It Mean?
This week’s cartoon from Alan Michael Parker:
Welcoming Our New Editors
We hired six new editors over the past week. We’ll be adding a few more next week. I’m going to introduce you to four of them right now because they’re already reading submissions. You’ll learn about the rest of the new crew next week.
Here are your new BFFs. They’re excited to read your writing:
Sophie Newman, Prose Editor
Sophie Newman is a writer from Monterey, California. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Writer's Digest, Hippocampus, and on her mother's coffee table. In 2021, she earned her MFA from The Ohio State University. She currently lives in Los Angeles, where she's revising a novel.
Katie Burgess, Prose Editor
Katie Burgess's work has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Smokelong Quarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Wind on the Moon, is available from Sundress Publications. She lives near a mayonnaise factory and teaches at the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities.
Carlos Tkacz, Fiction Editor
Carlos Tkacz is a PhD student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he studies speculative fiction and pop-culture through an ecocritical lens and in the Global Anglophone context. His particular interests are science fiction, representations of violence, and narrative theory as it pertains to subjectivity. When he's not reading and writing, he can generally be found teaching or rock climbing!
Dayna Copeland, Assistant Editor
Dayna Copeland is a writer and a musician in Denver, Colorado. A graduate of writing programs at Yale and Florida State University, Dayna has been published in Schuylkill Valley Journal and Landlocked Magazine while also working in publishing at The Denver Post and Boulder Weekly. She will be a forthcoming participant at the 2022 Tin House Writer's Workshop and is working to complete her memoir on nostalgia, music and the deep south.
Bonus: A Few Tips to Become a Better Poet
A mini column by Danielle Rose, Identity Theory Poetry Editor
Here’s some honest, down-to-earth advice for beginner or intermediate skilled poets who want to improve their craft: Steal, burgle, & plunder.
I mean it. I really do. But first, a few ground rules: Before anything else, you’re not going to just lift lines wholeheartedly (and if you do, certainly do not get them tattooed on your body). You’re going to steal something else: technique.
Can I tell you a secret? I have been trying to write my own version of Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband (which is, perhaps, her best book—Red is boring, fight me plz) for almost twenty years now. Not to literally rewrite the book—but to capture a certain tone, a certain approach, a treatment or a bit of perspective. I have been reading this book for years, and every time I sit down I am drawn to try to do some of the same things Carson achieved: A narrative with minimal narrative-movement; a rich internal/after without the messiness of the moment responded to; a certain kind of conversational thought-process that comes out as what is called a ‘voice’.
Dearest Reader, you’re never going to be successful. Put that out of your mind. What you do is find what you like, what moves you or pushes you in a direction toward something you maybe can’t see but you know is warm because you can feel it off there in the distance somewhere, and then you try to do the same thing. You try to make something new out of something you already love, maybe from something that feels so much like it loves you back.
That’s it. Identify what you like and try to do the same thing, just differently because you’re a different person with a different mind and a different set of experiences that brought you to what might look like a similar place. It is like A Wrinkle in Time, to travel you just… fold the string. Eliminate all that messiness of getting there—go in and take the parts of the poem machine that you want to learn how to operate and make work.
And then, eventually, you might be able to turn that poem machine on and it will spit out something so new. Because it is your hand on the button, your mind feeding it material.
So go burgle, poets. Steal, thieve, and above all take everything you love that isn’t bolted down. It has already been done before, I promise. Now it is time to do it again, but this time a little differently.
Your Weekly Cage
The poetry books keep rolling in from afar. Nicolas Cage (and snake!) are loving them. And so is the dog.
“Near email length limit”
Substack says I don’t have much more room in this one, so I’m going to let you go.
Send our new editors something to read, why don’t you?
Thanks,
Matt Borondy
Founder/EIC/ETC.
Identity Theory
Thank you again, so much! Also, good old Robert. <3