A Flash of Difference at AWP 2019

by Tara Campbell

photo courtesy of Maureen Langloss

Flash fiction is having a moment, but how diverse is the field? What is the state of flash in terms of race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual identity/orientation, and disability? I had the honor of moderating a panel on this very topic at AWP last month, and came away with a burgeoning new reading list.

For those who weren’t able to attend, or who were there but couldn’t quite keep up with all the info being dropped, here are some of the resources that were shared:

Panelist Marlena Chertock provided perspective as a disabled, bisexual, Jewish woman writer, with recommendations including:

• Paper Darts, whose editors, she notes, “are all women and many queer-identified, make a point to publish women writers. Many of their stories have LGBTQ themes or underlying political messages.”

• Monstering, “disabled women and nonbinary people celebrat[e] monsterhood”

• The Deaf Poets Society, “an online journal of deaf and disabled literature & art”

• Wordgathering, “A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature”

Christopher Gonzalez spoke to Latinx (Puerto Rican) as well as Queer/Bisexual identities and how difficult it was to find other flash writers from these exact communities. He recommended the following writers whose work he turned to:

• Writer, scholar, and activist Ruben Reyes Jr.

• Writer and former Fulbright recipient Stephanie Jimenez

• Essayist and PhD candidate Marcos Gonsalez

Megan Giddings, flash queen and editor of Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction, an anthology of flash fiction and craft essays by writers of color, made the additional recommendations:

• Kathleen Founds’ When Mystical Creatures Attack, Iowa Short Fiction Award winner, a novel in stories, in the form of a high school English class’ take on—well, mystical creatures

• Celebrated writer and activist Desiree Cooper (thanks to Maureen Langloss for that catch—my pen wasn’t always able to keep up!)

• Both Megan and Erinrose Mager (see next panelist) recommended Sawako Nakayasu’s The Ants, a “study not of, but through, ants. In a dashing sequence of prose pieces, Sawako Nakayasu takes the human to the level of the ant, and the ant to the level of the human.”

Born in South Korea and raised in Pennsylvania, Erinrose Mager spoke to navigating identity and expectations as an Asian American writer. In addition to Nakayasu, she also recommended we check out Steven Dunn, novelist and writer of powerful flash fiction, and tantalized us with a tip about a collaboration she’s currently working on between scientists and writers of color who are imagining the future together.

Additional publications and authors to watch:

• Jellyfish Review A Long Time Coming edition, focusing on writers of color

• Ellipsis Zine Love | Pride zine, a celebration of LBGTQ writers and writing

• Smokelong Quarterly Global Flash Series: currently accepting French and German, but they also have editors for Spanish and Kiswahili among others

• Author of the PEN Open Book Award-nominated collection “How to Sit” Tyrese Coleman

• Twice-listed in Wigleaf’s Top 50, and winner of the PEN/Bingham Award for Debut Fiction, Rion Amilcar Scott

• Prolific and award-winning author Amina Gautier

Microfiction Reading

In the spirit of amplifying flash fiction written from diverse perspectives, we ended the session with a reading of microfiction selected by each of the panelists:

• Chris Gonzalez read Jacob Guajardo's "Good News is Coming" from Wigleaf

• Marlena Chertock read “Braindrain” by C Pam Zhang from Paper Darts

• Erinrose Mager read Marta Evans’s “Five, Ten, Fifteen, Twenty” from Wigleaf 

• Megan read Reem Abu-Baker’s “The Babies” from Winter Tangerine

DiverseFlash List: Creating and Growing Resources

In preparation for this panel, we developed this resource (http://bit.ly/DiverseFlash) for readers, writers, and teachers of flash fiction who want to diversify their reading lists and syllabi. The areas of diversity we sought to amplify include race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual identity/orientation, and disability, as well as other marginalized voices. Writers from these backgrounds were asked to identify their communities/identities in their own words and to provide links to five specific flash fiction stories.

Even better, this list is a growing document. If you’re a writer from one of these perspectives and would like to be included in this list, please fill out the survey (http://bit.ly/DiverseFlashSurvey), and include up to five links of flash stories you'd like to feature. Please keep the link to update your answers over time. Please note, this information will be publicly available.

And lastly, a THANK YOU

to poet and fabulous human Tameca Coleman, who started the whole discussion last spring that prompted the formation of this panel!

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Panelist Bios

Tara Campbell (moderator) is a fiction editor at Barrelhouse, a Kimbilio Fellow, and an MFA candidate at American University. She is the author of TreeVolution (novel), Circe’s Bicycle (fiction and poetry collection), and Midnight at the Organporium (story collection). She teaches fiction at American University, the Writer’s Center and the National Gallery of Art.

Marlena Chertock has two books of poetry: Crumb-sized and On that one-way trip to Mars. She uses her skeletal dysplasia as a bridge to scientific poetry. Marlena lives in Washington, DC and is on the planning committee for OutWrite, an LGBTQ literary festival in DC. She has also served as Communications Coordinator for the LGBTQ Writers Caucus.

Christopher Gonzalez serves as a fiction editor at Barrelhouse. His fiction has appeared in Split Lip, Pithead Chapel, The Acentos Review, JMWW Journal, Spelk, and elsewhere. He currently works in book publishing and lives in New York.

Erinrose Mager’s work appears in The Collagist, Passages North, DIAGRAM, The Adroit Journal, New South, Hyphen, BOMB, and elsewhere. She is a Creative Writing/Literature PhD student at the University of Denver. She received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis.

Megan Giddings is a fiction editor at The Offing and a contributing editor at Boulevard. Her work has been in Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast, and The Iowa Review among other places. Her debut novel, Lakewood, is forthcoming.

Barrelhouse Reviews: Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky

Review by Jeannine Hall Gailey

Deaf Republic
by Ilya Kaminsky
Graywolf, 2019
Softcover, $16.00
ISBN: 978-1555978310

Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic uses deafness and sign language as a powerful metaphor for the capability to stand up to brutal regimes, the refusal to cooperate with evil, and our shared reactions to the violence of the world. It’s a book about love, the power of communication, horrific evil, and the double edge of silence—“an invention,” says Kaminsky in the book’s end notes, “of the hearing.”

If Kaminsky’s Dancing in Odessa was a joyful yet unsparing narrative of a boy, and the history of the city he came from, Deaf Republic is something altogether different: more ambitious, more sprawling, more imaginative. An extended metaphor that at once encloses the intimacy of marriage and the shocking aftereffects of violence. A play (it lists characters as “Dramatis Personae” and has sections labeled “Act I” and “Act II”), or a parable about a fictional country and the revolution, deaths, and lives of its people. There are revolutionary puppeteers, soldiers who shoot anyone for deafness or for speaking up, women who seduce soldiers and murder them, soldiers who murder women in the street.

The book begins with the shooting of a young boy, Petya, at a public protest in the fictional country Vasenka, and ends with the revolution over, all the brave insurgents dead. It’s a difficult, angry, angsty fairy tale and, at its heart, a dark warning about the nature of humanity. Did I mention the poems are interspersed with an invented sign language, the language the villagers use to communicate without the soldier’s knowledge?

From “Deafness, an Insurgency, Begins”:

Our country woke up next morning and refused to hear soldiers.

In the name of Petya, we refuse.

At six a.m., when soldiers compliment girls in the alleyways, the girls slide by, pointing to their ears. At eight, the bakery door is shut in soldier Ivanoff’s face, though he’s their best customer. At ten, Momma Galya chalks NO ONE HEARS YOU on the gates of the soldiers’ barracks.

By eleven a.m., arrests begin.

Our hearing didn’t weaken, but something silent in us strengthens.

One of the most impressive aspects of Deaf Republic is the way disability—the plague of deafness that the soldiers vow to annihilate—is an expression of rebellion, an act of defiance against inhumanity. (Kaminsky himself is hearing-impaired.) Echoes of the violence in the history of Odessa, which he explored in his first book, resound in this book, along with contemporary news stories. He reframes hearing or not hearing as an act of resistance. From “Checkpoints”:

In the street, soldiers install hearing checkpoints and nail announcements on posts and doors:

DEAFNESS IS A CONTAGIOUS DISEASE. FOR YOUR OWN PROTECTION ALL SUBJECTS IN CONTAMINATED AREAS MUST SURRENDER TO BE QUARANTINED WITHIN 24 HOURS!

And Kaminsky’s characters—a female puppeteer who arranges the murders of soldiers, a pair of newlyweds who celebrate their new pregnancy while stubbornly refusing to bow down to the new order—offer touching glimpses into life before the war. Or despite the war; these characters enjoy entertainment, celebratory sex, and other small joys, although their inevitable massacre is more a foregone conclusion than a surprise.

The framing of the poems “We Lived Happily During the War” and “In a Time of Peace,” both set in America, indicates that Kaminsky has something to say about contemporary American culture. But to fully understand the indictment in these two poems, you have to read the whole story of Deaf Republic: the fictional monstrous behaviors of soldiers, the cowardice and bravery of the invaded country’s populace, the way that silence, murder, revolution, resistance, and sacrifice all fall inevitably together. From the first poem, “We Lived Happily During the War”:

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested

but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was

in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house—

The poetic forms in this book, which include prose poems, lyric narratives, fragments, and poems in dialogue, indicate a narrative ambition that’s rarely seen in poetry collections. The story that Kaminsky intends to tell could have been contained just as easily in a play or in traditional lyric fiction. But Kaminsky’s ability to juxtapose stark reminders of evil with little pleasures could only be contained within the small, dense spaces of poetry.

Deaf Republic challenges us to think about listening, silence, and communication in a world that regards both violence and joy with dull indifference. As a disabled person myself, it made me think of my disabled body as an instrument of defiance against a world that regards bodies as mere tools or currency. Kaminsky’s work offers a way to consider how we challenge the evils we encounter every day, and how we value the small pleasures offered in the time “between bombardments.”

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Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. She is the author of five books of poetry, including her her most recent, Field Guide to the End of the World, winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and the SFPA’s Elgin Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets. Her web site is www.webbish6.com and you can follow her on Twitter and Instagram @webbish6.

“A Little Bit Better Than I Used To Be”: On The Dirt and Possibility

by Amy Rossi

A friend of mine plays a fun, charismatic version of Mick Mars in a local Mötley Crüe tribute band. I’ve seen them play a few times now. I always enjoy myself, not just the ability to dance and scream and let it all go, but the way it brings together people of all ages, from all over the state who care about the songs enough to see someone else take them on.

Sometimes my friend weaves through the crowd with his guitar and stops in front of me, and I get to have my own 1983-on-the-Sunset-Strip moment. We’re no longer beholden to time in this space, which is part of the joy: it’s not just the musicians on stage that get to embody someone else.

One night at a show, after a particularly rowdy rendition of “Don’t Go Away Mad (Just Go Away),” the Vince Neil of the band paused. “You know,” he said, “girls always love that song. And I’m watching you all sing along and it’s kind of weird because, it’s about…you know…”

Of course he didn’t need to finish. Of course I knew. Perhaps he was speaking as Vince Neil or perhaps he was speaking as himself, but he was only telling us what Mötley Crüe’s music and their book, The Dirt, have been telling us. The songs are about women, are marketed to women. But at their core, they aren’t for women.

*

To ask if a movie is faithful to the book is to ask a pointless question.

Critics Linda Hutcheon and Gary Bortolotti call this “fidelity discourse.” They have no time for it, explaining that the joy of experiencing adaptation can go further and be more productive: “By revealing lineages of descent, not similarities of form alone, we can understand how a specific narrative changes over time. If we take this history into consideration, suddenly it is the success of the narrative itself, as well as that of its adaptations, that can be considered in a new light.”[1]

We can understand how a specific narrative changes over time. That is why, in the year 2019, we need a Mötley Crüe biopic.

It’s also why fidelity to the book doesn’t matter.

The Dirt is not faithful to its source material. It claims to be the true story of Mötley Crüe, but the book version isn’t the truth either: it’s dependent on the memories and judgment of people who spend over 400 pages telling us why their memories and judgment cannot be trusted. (Or, in one instance of sexual assault, we’re currently told those memories and judgment can’t be trusted.) The book may have come first, but that doesn’t make it the true story. Just part of the true story.

The site of the party in the opening scene of The Dirt, the apartment is just short walk up the hill from the Whisky and the Rainbow. Thirty-plus years later, the building appears to have recovered.

*

Almost as soon as 1980s metal became its own thing, it became a joke. This is Spinal Tap quickly capitalized on big haired buffoonery in 1984, giving us “one louder,” “none more black,” and “this one’s called ‘Lick My Love Pump’” in the process. In 1988, The Decline of Western Civilization, Part II brought us dispatches straight from the Sunset Strip. It’s hard to argue against setting up Paul Stanley as a joke, but Penelope Spheeris is equally unsparing of the made-up teenagers single-mindedly pursuing their metal dreams. Perhaps their belief in themselves is misguided, but what band ever got famous thinking about their backup plan?

On it goes. One of the most captivating elements of Rock of Love was the difference between the women who were in on the joke or part of it. There’s the existence of the 80s metal spoof band Steel Panther, whose over-the-top persona seems to be the very worst kind of parody: they might be making fun of the misogyny of the era, but they’re still saying the words. Rock of Ages hit Broadway and then the big screen, giving us Tom Cruise’s attempt at an Axl Rose impersonation, and while it’s fun, it never takes the rock part seriously. There’s the movie The Rocker, starring a whole lot of people who are way more famous now than they were in 2008, including Emma Stone, Will Arnett, Bradley Cooper, and Rainn Wilson. The titular rock star finds the same salvation as Mark Wahlberg does in Rock Star: in music that isn’t metal. Even now, if you go see a band that falls under the hair metal umbrella, you’ll find concertgoers in wigs and bandanas and open denim vests, as though they have to make it clear this isn’t too serious.

Metal, as presented in popular culture, is something to be outgrown, something to put on as a costume. It is not its own thing.

Down the street from the Whisky is the Rainbow, where something was always going on under the table.

*

As a film, The Dirt is often unflinching. It makes us look at Razzle, from the excellent band Hanoi Rocks, lying dead in Vince Neil’s lap, face mottled with blood. It makes us look at Vince’s 4-year-old daughter Skyler, lifeless in the hospital. It won’t let us turn away from Ozzy Osbourne, seeking new lows of depravity in the form of ants and urine. It makes us look at Nikki Sixx with two syringes sticking out of his chest in a resuscitation attempt after a heroin overdose. And then it makes us look at Nikki a few hours later, passed out at home, needle in his vein, blood trailing down this arm.

This is what fame does, the film tells us. It is comfortable adapting these threads into the larger arc of the story.

However, in this telling, fame has nothing to do with women. Not a thing. It was the major question I had going into viewing The Dirt: how will that particular narrative live in our present, as more varied narratives complicate our understanding of the past? Would we get to see the shades of gray in power and consent? Would it all be presented as fun and games until the line of excess is crossed, just like drugs? Could we see the reckless joy of groupie life, the reasons young women wanted to hook up with rock stars and stars-to-be? Any take seemed possible. What seemed the least likely was ignoring women entirely.

And yet.

Tommy Lee’s history of domestic violence is condensed into a tour bus fight with a fiancé who has called his mother terrible names and fucked his best friend. We’re asked to believe his violent outburst is an aberration. Something that managed to shock Nikki, who had just snorted cocaine off her butt, and Mick, who had just declared all the women who screw the band “slobs” in the same breath as he announced his respect for “females.”

Fame has so little to do with women in The Dirt that we never meet Lita Ford or Vanity or Pamela Anderson or Donna D’Errico, let alone “Bullwinkle” (the nickname given to the girl who can ejaculate, apparently well after stimulation stops?) or Lovey (the one Nikki refers to as that, as in muzzle that). We don’t meet the woman to whom Mick is paying child support, or the one he marries on tour. We don’t meet the girl who Tommy Lee tells to blow all his friends. Or the ones who they get to do unspeakable things with a hotel phone, or the ones who bought them food and drugs when they were struggling. We barely meet any of A&R executive Tom Zutaut’s girlfriends. In the film, Zutaut says: “Don’t leave your girl alone with Mötley Crüe, because they will fuck her.” He doesn’t appear concerned about the agency of the girl – or of the band.

This would maybe be less disturbing if I didn’t have a visceral memory of the real-life Zutaut sharing a story of a different encounter, with a different girlfriend, and a different member of Mötley Crüe declaring he wanted to have sex with her (and doing just that) on VH1’s Do It For the Band: The Girls of the Sunset Strip. A story that ended with Zutaut smirking and saying: “But she could’ve said no.”[2]

*

Roughly 30 minutes into The Dirt, the band is preparing for their first big gig. Mick Mars is terrified, and he wobbles down to the rest of the band, unsteady in his heels, makeup on, pentagram headband tied firmly, studded electric blue harness only somewhat restricting his movements.

And while maybe his deadpan proclamation of “We’re gonna die” is supposed to be funny, his look is not.

It just is.

For once, we’re being invited to look under the surface.

If this doesn’t sound like it matters, consider why people move so quickly to dismiss hair metal as surface-level, empty, image-driven. Maybe the bands were always already the punchline because they embodied a certain level of privileged shittiness. That’s one way to look at it, sure, but it seems like an overly generous read on 80s discourse. We’re invited to laugh at hair metal bands because they borrow the markers of femininity – big hair, makeup, high heels etc. – and many of the fans were women. We don’t have to take this group seriously; they’re just a chick band.

The Dirt doesn’t question the band’s look. It doesn’t give an origin to teased hair and makeup. It’s part of being glam. It’s part of being metal.

It’s part of the story.

Motley Crue's final show at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, December 31, 2015. If I wasn't around to be part of the birth of Hollywood metal, I wanted to at least help say goodbye.

*

Women aren’t the only characters missing from The Dirt. We meet Tommy Lee when he’s about to see the band London, one of the most pervasive presences on the Strip – a band that seemingly launched a thousand groups. You’d never know it though, from the movie. There is no time for this lineage.

We get an incredible visual of David Lee Roth and the aforementioned Ozzy scene, but other Sunset Strip bands only exist on a marquee: Y&T, Dokken, Quiet Riot (only the first metal band to have an album hit #1 on the charts; it’s fine). We’re informed the punk scene exists. Razzle has to tell the band who he is. As far as the movie is concerned, the whole metal scene on the Strip is adapted, mutated into a vacuum that gives birth to Mötley Crüe. Nikki is lighting himself on fire because he’s proving how punk he is, not to outdo other bands competing for attention from labels.

It feels like a missed opportunity, and not just because the feud between Axl Rose and Vince Neil could have filled a 100-minute movie on its own.

If this adaptation was intended to take metal seriously, to introduce a new generation to sweaty guitar licks and rock horns and headbanging, to show us that teased hair and lipstick and eyeliner and boots were girly and feminine and fucking badass, it could have shown us all the bands that followed in Mötley Crüe’s footsteps. It could have shown us the trail they blazed. It could have shown us that the scene was a living, breathing, pulsing force, that this square mile or so gave birth to a scene that eventually took over.

The Strip: as sponsored by Jack Daniels.

*

When the Vince Neil in the Mötley Crüe cover band said he didn’t get women singing along to the lines, “Girl, don’t go away mad; girl, just go away,” I thought: of course not. I didn’t think this unkindly. It’s the natural order. He is a member of the target audience.

The “girl” in the lyric feels like a filler more than anything else. I’ve screamed along to the song on some New Year’s Days after rough years. I’ve sung it with a man in mind, romantically and politically. I’ve casually and probably tunelessly sung along to it simply because it’s a fun chorus. The sentiment is easily adaptable.

Or maybe these are negotiations I’ve become so accustomed to making that I no longer think about them – which is a privilege unto itself.

*

LA Weekly writer Lina Lecaro points out that this isn’t the story of the scene or the girls. That’s a fair take, and she was there, so who am I to call it invalid? But all these years later, the true story of Mötley Crüe is the true story of the Sunset Strip, and the true story of the Sunset Strip is the true story of the girls who supported the bands and packed clubs every night, sharing clothes and makeup with the guys on stage – people at the right place at the right time finding each other.

We can understand how a specific narrative changes over time.

When a narrative has longevity, change is inevitable. That’s the beauty and power of adaptation. That’s why we need more of The Dirt, not less. We don’t need one true story; we need the mess and overlap and challenge and difficulty of many stories.

Maybe now that we’ve established metal matters, we can invite more voices to the narrative. Maybe we can keep looking under the surface. Maybe we can claim this one for our time, for all of us who want it.

You know you've made it when Miller Lite creates a banner for you. There was a rumor that Motley Crue was going to come play at the Whisky the night after their last show, and the place was packed. The wrong time was printed on the tickets, so we lined up on Clark Avenue to see Faster Pussycat, LA Guns, and maybe Motley, and you never would have known what year it was. (They didn't play.)

[1] Bortolotti, G. R., & Hutcheon, L. (2007). On the origin of adaptations: Rethinking fidelity discourse and "success"-biologically*. New Literary History, 38(3), 443-458,601-602. Retrieved from https://proxying.lib.ncsu.edu/index.php/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/docview/221382152?accountid=12725

[2] A ten-minute clip of this show has been on YouTube for years but was recently taken down. Zutaut recounts this story in The Dirt on page 94, saying “She didn’t even try to stop him” after Nikki asked if he “minded.”

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Amy Rossi's favorite Mötley Crüe song is "Wild Side." Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in places such as Wigleaf and Paper Darts, among others. Find out more at amyrossi.com.