In Memoriam: Derek Alger

(18 November 1953 – 29 October 2014)

We are all “reeling over the untimely death of [our] good friend, Derek Alger,” as Charles Salzberg writes in Honoring Derek Alger.

Derek was a graduate of the MFA fiction-writing program at Columbia University, a Contributing Editor for Serving House Journal, and a former editor-at-large at Pif Magazine, where more than 100 of his interviews with writers have been published over a period of 14 years.

Seven of those interviews appear in Serving House Journal, with four reprinted from Pif and three published in SHJ for the first time (Terese Svoboda, SHJ-2; Lauren B. Davis, SHJ-5; and Bruce Holbert, SHJ-7).

Derek’s fiction and essays appear in Confrontation, Del Sol Review, Ducts.org, The Literary Review, and Writers Notes, among others.

“One on One” Archive of the interviews at Pif Magazine

Posted by Clare MacQueen
Associate Editor/Webmaster
Serving House Journal
Serving House News

Okla Elliott Joins Editorial Team at SHJ

We’re pleased to announce that Okla Elliott has joined Serving House Journal as a Contributing Editor.

Elliott is the Illinois Distinguished Fellow at the University of Illinois, where he works in the fields of comparative literature and trauma studies. He also holds an MFA from Ohio State University.

His drama, nonfiction, poetry, short fiction, and translations have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Indiana Review, Jacket Magazine, The Literary Review, Natural Bridge, New Letters, North Dakota Quarterly, A Public Space, and The Southeast Review, among others.

He is the author of a collection of short fiction, From the Crooked Timber, and three poetry chapbooks: The Mutable Wheel, Lucid Bodies and Other Poems, and A Vulgar Geography. He is also the co-editor, with Kyle Minor, of The Other Chekhov.

Several of Elliott’s short fictions appear in Serving House Journal, and he was our Featured Author in Issue 5.

—Clare MacQueen
Associate Editor and Webmaster
Serving House Journal
Serving House News

Stories by Tom Sheehan Nominated for National Book Award

I’m pleased to share with you that The Westering, a collection of 21 short stories by Tom Sheehan, has been nominated for a National Book Award. Matt Tempesta has details for you at The Daily Item.

Sheehan has been writing far longer than most of us have been around. He began at the age of five, and that was 79 years ago! Hundreds of his stories have been published, and his work has been nominated 15 times for the Pushcart Prize.

Two of his stories appear in Serving House Journal: “The Old Man in the Garden of Long Shadows” (Fall 2011), and “Last Call for a Loner” (Spring 2011).

(Parenthetically speaking, one of my favorites by Sheehan is a war story—a genre which I almost never read, but I’m glad I gave it a try last year, because “Parkie, Tanker, Tiger of Tobruk” is stunning, one of the best stories ever. It appears in the January 2011 issue of Contemporary World Literature.)

Brief bio of Tom Sheehan

Thank goodness Tom shows no signs of slowing down or retiring: The Westering is the first in a series of nine (!) volumes of his stories about the American West to be published by MilSpeak Books.

Winners of the National Book Award will be announced in mid-November. Congratulations, Tom, and best of luck!

—Clare MacQueen
Associate Editor and Webmaster
Serving House Journal
Serving House News

Murdering the Mom: "a truly striking accomplishment"

“You’re killing me, Duffy. You’re killing me,” the mom always said. Murdering the Mom is a story that elevates the obscene to the sublime. Duff Brenna takes all the materials of hardship and abuse during an unhappy childhood and sculpts [them] into art, into something transcendent. This is a heart-rending memoir that exceeds the expectations one normally has of a memoir, that is, it reads like a captivating novel.

—From the publisher, Wordcraft of Oregon

Read Chapter One...

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5-Star Review at Amazon.com:

...Brenna reaches deep into the darkest recesses of the human psyche. All too often parents treat their children, the very ones they’re supposed to love most and protect, with anger and selfishness, violence and neglect, and Brenna, the child, is indeed a victim of circumstance. But Brenna, the man, is not. No one escapes this world unscathed, but in Brenna’s case it’s something of a miracle, given his upbringing, that this memoir wasn’t written from Death Row. With great skill, insight, wisdom, introspection, and above all a sense of humanity and forgiveness, a brilliant writer transcends the tragic and turns this powerful, raw, heartfelt story into the finest art.

—James Brown, author of The Los Angeles Diaries and This River

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There are some memoirs that seem so artful in the dissection of the joys and horrors of a life that they resonate long after that last page. Duff Brenna provides just such a story....

...like many people recalling wrenching childhoods, his emotions surged with ferocity and he was left to ponder the truly momentous questions of life and, especially, of love. He writes “[B]ut love changes—it evolves, the purity of it becoming perverse mixtures of love and adoration, hatred and jealousy, tenderness, passion, devotion, loathing. What was left of those tumultuous emotions? I couldn’t sort it out. I still can’t sort it out.”

Even with this admission, though, Brenna provides a compelling attempt to untangle the emotional threads of his childhood. By viewing his past with such a sense of honesty and compassion, he delivers a memoir that’s a truly striking accomplishment.

—Elizabeth Millard, ForeWord Reviews (see full text)

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This, I think, above all, is Brenna’s grand achievement here. He is not settling old scores—and god knows there were scores he might well have wanted to settle if he’d a mind to. But no, he is exploring—unsparingly, unflinchingly, but above all fairly, with balance and breathtaking honesty—the humanity of a group of people born into and continually creating a kind of hell in which they thrash around without a clue as to how to get out.

—Thomas E. Kennedy, Inside Higher Ed (see full text)

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Somewhere, a long time ago, I read that honesty is telling the truth to other folks, but integrity is telling yourself the truth. Duff Brenna is a man of profound integrity, and this book is concrete proof of that.

Murdering the Mom: A Memoir
220 pages, ISBN 978-1877655746
published by Wordcraft of Oregon

Please feel free to visit Duff’s website, too, where you’ll find a complimentary MTM bookmark and lots of information, including reviews and excerpts, about his other most excellent books.

--Clare MacQueen
Associate Editor/Webmaster
Serving House Journal
Serving House News

New Book of Poems "Takes Us On An Exuberant Journey..."

Overpass
by Steve Davenport
Misty Publications, 2012

“Steve Davenport has taken the slapdash lexicon of a mortally wounded industrial base and stitched, jammed, jumbled and creased together this searing collaboration of form and function.” —Tyehimba Jess *

B. H. Fairchild calls Davenport’s new poems “brilliantly improvisatory as well as stunningly energetic and daring.” *

As Davenport himself says, “A key thread running through my new book of poems, OVERPASS, is the plight of a character dealing with metastatic breast cancer. Her name’s Overpass Girl. The poem I’m posting here [“Sauget Dead Wagon”] comes late in the book and expresses the frustration and anger that accompanies her battle against a disease that will not let go. It also expresses mine as author whose work has limited effect. A dead wagon, by the way, is a common name given to the vehicle that travels the countryside, picking up carcasses of farm animals, and delivers them to a rendering plant.” [Facebook post dated 5 July 2012]

With its unsettling image of chemo capsules dangling from an herbaceous plant on the front cover, and a table of contents which reads like an enticing list of mainstream magazines, this new book intrigues from the get-go.

As Martha Collins sums it up: “Overpass creates a startling and delightful tension between its richly gritty content and a craft that crashes through its own formal restraints with deft use of wordplay, syntax, allusion, and joyful sound.” *

* Quotations excerpted from back cover of book.

Links:

Nine Poems and Three Fictions, chapbook by Davenport published online by The Literary Review, which includes several poems from Overpass

Review by Eric Miles Williamson of Davenport’s first book of poems, Uncontainable Noise

Two stories from Davenport’s “Black Guy, Bald Guy” series:

Black Guy, Bald Guy

The Last Set of Machetes

Davenport’s story, “Bomb, Reporting From Inwit,” is from a novel-in-progress.



—Clare MacQueen
Associate Editor, Serving House Journal

Mathias B. Freese Wins an NIEA for 2012, and more…

The sixth annual National Indie Excellence Awards were announced last month. On behalf of Serving House Journal, I'm delighted to share with our readers that a collection of essays by Mathias B. Freese, This Möbius Strip of Ifs, took first place in the general Non-Fiction category. 

I'm pleased to add that we listed This Möbius Strip of Ifs on our Bookshelf of recommended reading last fall, in Issue 4.

Work by Freese also appears in Issue 2 (“Soap,” an essay) and Issue 3 (“Sincerely, Max Weber,” a short story). Which leads me to the next item of awesome news:   

Freese’s collection of stories, I Truly Lament, has been chosen as a finalist in the 2012 Leapfrog Press Fiction Contest.

From Leapfrog Press:  “I Truly Lament is a varied collection of stories, inmates in death camps, survivors of these camps, disenchanted Golems complaining about their tasks, Holocaust deniers and their ravings, and collectors of Hitler curiosa (only recently a few linens from Hitler’s bedroom suite went up for sale!) as well as an imagined interview with Eva Braun during her last days in the bunker. The intent is to perceive the Holocaust from several points of view.”  

Congratulations, Matt!  And best wishes for many more such accolades!  


--Clare MacQueen 
Associate Editor/Webmaster
Serving House Journal 
Serving House News

SHJ Author Chosen as Finalist for Best of Net!

On behalf of Serving House Journal, I'm so pleased to announce that Yahia Lababidi's essay, "Meditation on Murder," was chosen as a finalist for the 2011 Best of the Net awards, sponsored by Sundress Publications.  The essay appears in Issue 2 (Fall 2010) of SHJ. 


The 2011 Best of the Net Anthology is available online by clicking on the general headers of Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction, and then on individual entries within the lists. 



As the Best of the Net website says, "This project continues to promote the diverse and growing collection of voices that are publishing their work online, a venue that still sees little respect from such yearly anthologies as the Pushcart and Best American series. This collection serves to bring greater respect to an innovative and continually expanding medium in the same medium in which it is published." 



If you've not had an opportunity yet to read Lababidi's thoughtful, and thought-provoking, essay, I hope you will soon. And I hope you'll agree that it's one of the finest pieces of writing you'll find anywhere, not just on the Web!  


Clare MacQueen
Associate Editor/Webmaster   

Our Daily Bread

By Lauren B. Davis 

Published by Wordcraft of Oregon (October 2011) 

Bestselling novelist Lauren B. Davis balances horror, humor, and humanity throughout the pages of her latest book, Our Daily Bread, which was announced just last Saturday as one of The Globe and Mail’s best books of 2011. A gifted writer, Davis describes violence and despair without bludgeoning her readers, thereby creating an unforgettable read, frightening at times, but as enlightening and redemptive as it is disturbing. So good, in fact, that this reviewer read the book twice, to savor again gems of prose like these:

“It was one of those brilliant first days of true spring when the world heaved itself out of the long silver somnolence of winter.” (p. 56)

“His clothes were pushed to one side. And on her side: empty hangers, skeletons where the flesh of cloth had been.” (p. 122)

“Tom’s thoughts were dust devils, whirlwinds sucking up dirt from below and shooting it up in a fierce scatter of possibilities.” (p. 157)

Many books tell us of unfathomable abuse of the powerless, particularly children, against backdrops of extremity: poverty, ignorance, hypocrisy, ostracism. What sets Our Daily Bread apart? Though inspired by the real-life Goler clan of Nova Scotia, this novel spares readers the gratuitous salaciousness found in certain memoirs and documentaries. Indeed, there’s far more narrative about the daily lives of “the townies,” the Gideonites, than about the demented Erskine clan of North Mountain.

Spellbinding chapters that describe the brutal lives on “the mountain” begin and end this novel, sandwiching narratives about townspeople like Tom and Patty Evans and their two children, Ivy and Bobby, and a matronly widow named Dorothy Carlisle. The moral center of the story, Dorothy finds herself mentoring and protecting 10-year-old Ivy, despite her unwillingness to become involved with “children and their war games.” Ivy’s steadfast father, Tom, struggles stoically to take care of his family and to understand Patty’s restlessness. Why does she continue to reject his marriage proposals? 

Meanwhile, 15-year-old Bobby hooks up with an unlikely counselor in crime—Albert Erskine, a 22-year-old burglar and dealer of the best weed around—yet conceals the friendship from his parents and swears Ivy to secrecy as well.

Several of Gideon’s residents are hooked on what the Erskine clan is selling: moonshine, marijuana, and meth. Not surprisingly, the children on the mountain suffer most. Albert is no longer a child, yet his uncles remind him with their shotguns, fists, and boots that Erskines don’t talk and they don’t leave. Townies refer to Erskines as “those people,” lost for generations, so there’s nothing can be done about it—except to isolate “Satan’s shit” on North Mountain away from the pious residents below.

Events escalate and the story zooms in on Albert as he tries to protect Bobby and the children, who are all, boys and girls alike, in danger of being raped and murdered by fiends, the Erskine uncles maddened by meth. The book becomes a riveting page turner as it rushes toward its fiery and surprising climax. 

—Reviewed by Clare MacQueen (Associate Editor, Serving House Journal) 

(Our Daily Bread, 258 pages, ISBN: 978-1877655722) 

Reading by Thomas E. Kennedy

To print poster with details, click on image below.

Winter Tales: Men Write About Aging

By Michael S. Begnal, B’Fhiú an Braon Fola

I have an essay (and a couple of poems) in a book collection titled Winter Tales: Men Write about Aging (Serving House Books, 2011), edited by Duff Brenna and Thomas E. Kennedy. The title gives you the basic idea of the subject matter. My essay is called “Paul Tillich Never Took Ativan.” I take as my starting point Tillich’s assertion that “The fear of death determines the element of anxiety in every fear. Anxiety, if not modified by the fear of an object, anxiety in its nakedness, is always the anxiety of ultimate non-being”—in other words, my take on aging here is in reference to its ultimate outcome, but in a specific rather than an abstract way.

Other contributors include Norman Mailer (interviewed shortly before his death), Mario Vargas Llosa, Robert Pinsky, Steve Kowit, Stephen Dunn, Liam Mac Sheóinín, and many more. I like what the editors have assembled, and I think that Serving House is quite the up-and-coming press. A companion volume of women on aging is planned.

(Winter Tales: Men Write about Aging, 262 pages, ISBN 978-0983828907)

Get Drunk in a Public House of Literary Art: Serving House Journal 3 is now available!

by Thomas E. Kennedy

A Serving House is another term for a Pub or a Public House or Road House or, to put it more bluntly, a bar: a place we visit to drink and get high, to get drunk.

Thus, the name Serving House Journal is constructed of a couple or three puns: It serves America—nay, it serves the world!—by serving fine poems and prose; it is a house in both the literary sense and the bar-room sense of the word; and it is a journal. And like a Serving House, it serves the purpose of literature prescribed by Baudelaire: Enivrez vous! Translation: Get drunk! Or as Odin put it in The Sayings of the High One, Get drunk on the best kind of drunkenness—where afterwards your head is returned to you in better shape than it was before.

Let’s cut to the chase: Serving House Journal 3 (SHJ-3) is now available, and under the guiding literary consciousness of Founding Editor/Novelist Duff Brenna, Creative Nonfictionist R. A. (Ricki) Rycraft, Poet Extraordinaire Steve Kowit, and the gorgeous technical ministrations of Clare MacQueen, it shows itself—once again—to be, quite simply, an outstanding bar to hang out in and eat poetry, drink ink, get drunk in the best of ways where you escape for a little while—in a flagon of fiction, a pot of poetry, a keg of prose—only to return afterwards with a greater understanding of literature and its relationship to existence, not to mention the good time you will have had!

In SHJ-3, we have a taste of This River, a memoir by James Brown—no relation to the musical king other than that they both put some quake in your quaker, some shake in your shaker, some rock in your sock! Read Brown’s excerpt, “Some Kind of Animal”—a harrowing explosive account of road rage—and we dare you to resist running out to buy the book! (You don’t have to run out—you can buy it via the link provided.)

Among the essays and CNF, flash and short fiction, interviews, poems, reviews, translations, and three distinguished poets talking about their poems (with a full-length conversation between Duff Brenna and Jack Driscoll), you will meet exceptional authors like Chauncey Mabe, Walter Cummins, Vance Bourjaily, Dorianne Laux, Thomas Fleming, Vladimir Nabokov, and no less than a new translation of a poem by Johann Wolfgang Goethe—to name but half a baker’s dozen—and find a multitude of words to quench your thirst for beautiful language and bring you closer to an understanding of existence.

You will also read an account by publisher-poet David Memmott of yet another local American attempt to override the first amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America and abridge the freedom of speech—(Mommy and Daddy? Which words do you not understand of the following: Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech...)—in this case yet another group of “concerned parents” (god save us from “concerned parents,” especially the church-going sort!) versus a high school play. The beauty of the story Memmott tells, however, is that this time the First Amendment wins!

Side features of SHJ-3 include “The Bookshelf” —a thumbnail reference to timely titles and what they are about.

Poem for poem, story for story, essay for essay, word for word, Serving House Journal 3 is a bargain. How much does it cost? Nothing. That’s right: Zip. All it takes is to click the link below and imbibe your fill.

Hey, man, free drinks! Let’s go! Run—don’t walk—to the nearest Serving House!

www.ServingHouseJournal.com

About Thomas E. Kennedy

Poet Steve Kowit Joins SHJ as Poetry Editor

Serving House Journal is proud to announce that Steve Kowit has agreed to come on board as Poetry Editor. Kowit is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Lurid Confessions, The Dumbbell Nebula, and the popular poetry teaching manual, In the Palm of Your Hand.

Kowit’s 2006 collection of poetry entitled The Gods of Rapture: Poems in the Erotic Mood was praised by U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins as “poetry that marvelously inhabits the adjoining rooms of the past and the present.” Montana’s Poet Laureate Sandra Alcosser said, “The Gods of Rapture could provide an erotic daybook of the year. Pace yourself and prepare to be seduced.”

Steve Kowit’s work appears regularly in magazines and journals and has been read by Garrison Keillor on National Public Radio. Kowit is the recipient of a National Endowment Fellowship in Poetry. He is the winner of two Pushcart Prizes. His latest collection of poetry, The First Noble Truth, won the Tampa Review Prize for Best Collection of Poetry for 2007. Of this collection, Charles Webb, author of The Graduate and numerous other works, said: “The First Noble Truth is a green oasis where the water tastes sweet and makes me laugh, makes me feel warm and comforted, glad to be alive.”

Webb’s quote is apt. If you read Kowit, you too will feel warm and comforted. You will feel glad to be alive. And we might add: you will feel intellectually engaged and enlightened and you’ll want to go on-line and buy all of his books, and you won’t be sorry if you do. Kowit is one of the great poets of his generation, and we are very fortunate to have such a huge talent as a member of our editorial staff.

By Duff Brenna, Founding Editor

In Praise of Impurity: On Literary Interviews

by Thomas E. Kennedy, Contributing Editor

The purist will insist that a book, a poem, a story, an essay must stand alone once its author has gone public with it. The purist wants no apology, no explanation. The purist of the purists don’t even want a bio note or a photo.

I’m not a purist. I’m not even pure. If I’m pure at anything, it is at being purely impure. And when it comes to literature, I crave all those extras—the footnotes, the prefaces, the introductions, the afterwords, the bio notes, the photos, even the blurbs, and the quotes from the reviews. All of it continues to hold me in its spell; even if wanting more than only the poem or the story itself might seem beside the point, I will continue to want more. I will eat the poem and the commentary, too, gobble down the bio notes and proceed to the photos, peering intently at the reflected faces of the authors for whatever else I might find there.

And I’m crazy about interviews, too. I’m crazy about reading interviews and love to be interviewed as well. I love to hear authors talk about everything from what kind of pencils they write with, to what they read, to where they best like to sit when they write, to whether they write drunk or sober or high or in between, to whether they have sex when working on a novel. (Hemingway claimed that he didn’t because the same motor was involved in both activities—poor Papa!)

I want to hear it all! Just like Eliot’s Lazarus come back from the dead to tell us all—I’m all ears! Tell me, Lazarus! Tell me every single detail!

And in this age when people no longer write letters, I believe that interviewers fill a gaping need by getting authors to go on record with their thoughts about their art, their thoughts during the process of creating their art, the extra-literary factors that impact upon the literary factors. How much they get paid—or how little. Whether they’re involved in choosing the covers of their books. Whether they seek advice from writer friends, from lovers. Whether they listen to music when they write—and if so, which music. Whether they write everyday and for how long. I want to hear it all!

So I am here to praise the interviewers—the John Griswolds (OronteChurm.com), the Derek Algers (www.PifMagazine.com)—all the great interviews that appear in all the great literary magazines—the Writers Chronicle interviews, the Paris Review series, the Glimmer Train series—and indeed the interviews that appear in text or via links in the new issue of Serving House Journal—Issue 2 includes interview extras with Terese Svoboda, Jeff Lindsay, Mathias B. Freese, Walter Cummins and Laura McCullough.

Come to think of it, there’s also a great one by John Griswold with Duff Brenna to which there is a link from the new issue. The occasion for that interview is the republication, by New American Press, of Brenna’s second novel, The Holy Book of the Beard—a novel wildly praised throughout the United States when it first appeared nearly fifteen years ago and which should never have been allowed to go out of print.

Praise to Griswold for showcasing it on his blog! Praise to all the interviewers!

I just can’t get enough of this holy impurity!

About Thomas E. Kennedy