Etc.

7 Questions
by Miroslav Penkov

Miroslav's story "The Letter" appeared in APS13. His collection of stories, East of the West, was published by Picador in 2011. On April 20, Miroslav will be honored as a notable emerging writer at One Story's Literary Debutante Ball.


1. Can you describe your daily routine, any rituals or habits?

It’s general consensus that a writer ought to write, or at least put in the hours behind the typewriter, every day.

I’ve never been able to write every day. Nor do I think I’ll ever manage to. Sometimes I’ll write five, six, ten days in a row. Other times, a week goes by without new words. I tell myself that’s fine, as long as I keep turning the new story over in my mind, like concrete in a lorry.

I write in the afternoon, or late at night, or whenever there is time in between. But never in the morning. The morning is a savage time to me. When the sun passes its apex, I take some instant coffee - a couple spoonfuls in a little cold water - and that gives me a decent nudge toward the computer. I reread everything I’ve written the day before, or even further back in time, and I rewrite the parts that need rewriting. This gets me going and eases me into deeper water.

I don’t sharpen pencils just the right way, don’t line up paper clips in rows or circles on my desk. In writing, I try not to assign meaning to small occurrences or habits and turn them into what they’re not. I don’t disconnect my internet or phone. I like what a great Bulgarian lyrical poet - Damyan Damyanov, crippled by polio all his life - had to say about distractions. “When I’m writing,” he said, “Aphrodite herself can stand before me in the nude and all I’ll do is wave her away. ‘Get out,’ I’ll say, ‘can’t you see I’m working?’”

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Posted on March 30, 2012 | Comment | Permalink

Etc.

Stet?

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John D’Agata and Jim Fingal’s The Lifespan of a Fact, a book-length discussion between a writer and his fact-checker centered on one essay, breaks open the relationship between the writer’s intention and the facts he needs to deliver it. It also puts on display the working relationship between writer and editor. In APS 15, that interaction played out in quite a different way.

Leslie Jamison’s essay “Lost Boys” is a meditation on the West Memphis Three murder trial generally and the Paradise Lost documentaries specifically. In describing footage of the parents of one of the murdered second-graders, Leslie wrote: “Michael Moore’s parents, Todd and Dana, look like a pair of librarians. When they are interviewed, Todd Moore speaks directly to the camera, wondering if his son called out for him in the woods. Dana looks at her husband when she talks. She wants his confirmation in her mourning.”

That scene appeared in this trailer, which prompted the following conversation over several e-mails.

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Posted on March 20, 2012 | Comment | Permalink

News

Monkey Business Eigo-ban dai-ni-go kanko: Announcing Monkey Business 2!

Monkey Business Eigo-ban dai-ni-go kanko: Announcing Monkey Business 2!

Luna Park called it one of the best new literary magazines of 2011. Junot Díaz said it was "an astonishment, by turns playful and profound, that makes you wish it were a monthly." Now Monkey Business International is back, with Haruki Murakami on writing, travel, and his love of libraries; Hiromi Kawakami's off-kilter insights into a very eccentric neighborhood; Hideo Furukawa's eerie "Breathing Through Gills"; manga renderings of stories by Franz Kafka and Lafcadio Hearn; Mieko Kawakami's prose poem version of J. D. Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish"; Minoru Ozawa's quirky haiku; Yoko Ogawa and other writers responding to a post-disaster questionnaire ("What Do You Wish We Had in Japan Today?"); more of Sachiko Kishimoto's tantalizing "Forbidden Diary"; a poem by Stuart Dybek; new stories by Rebecca Brown and Barry Yourgrau—plus much, much more. The issue will be out in April, and there will be a launch party extravaganza in May, but while you wait, we are proud to announce a new home for the Monkey, which will feature content and conversations as lively as what awaits you in the magazine. Check it out!

Posted on March 16, 2012 | Comment | Permalink

Issue 15

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News

ANNOUNCING APS 15

ANNOUNCING APS 15

Dadas’s accounts of his travels appear at first to be oddly innocent. The innocence reads as befuddlement, a kind of obliviousness. But as you continue to read, as he walks and walks and walks, something else begins to show through: a stubborn desire to attain a state of innocence... It’s a strange way of thinking about wonder—the will to wonder. —“A Stubborn Desire”: Maud Casey in fugue country. On mad travelers, the childlike awe of Werner Herzog, Isaac Babel’s mastery of the genre of silence, and what happens when an old couple discovers the village they’ve been living in their whole lives.

Why, Poppy’s a Larson, you know his mother was. The Reagans attended their wedding. So did Julia Child!
Chris sighed and closed his eyes.
Sweetheart, you’re driving. Please open your eyes. Sweetheart!
So much sadness and pain to follow. She was always glad the last thing she said to him, in their married life, was sweetheart.

"Lost Cat," a new story by Mary-Beth Hughes.

Games I play while riding the subway: Check out the passengers, decide which are adulterers. Imagine what’s harder for that woman by the door: long periods of solitude or the lack thereof. Guess which of those three guys over there recently awoke into a vacancy so total that for a second (right before the engine of consciousness kicked in), he felt freed at last from time and self and was terrified, awed, elated… —Martha Cooley reads Alfred Döblin’s modernist masterpiece, Berlin Alexanderplatz, on the R train.

Plus: Leslie Jamison on the West Memphis Three, Joel Rotenberg translates Ernst Weiss’s Der arme verschwender, Jeroen Toirkens’s Nomads, new work by Sarah A. Strickley and Tania James; poems by Jorie Graham, W. G. Sebald, Timothy Donnelly, Matthea Harvey, and others.

APS 15 is here.

Posted on January 26, 2012 | Comment | Permalink

Happy Holidays!

"The essential work of interpretation is best found in a culture’s quieter spaces," Teju Cole says. "We need reports in fiction, nonfiction, and photography that are engagé without being ephemeral and are steeped in a proper thoughtfulness. Small magazines are among the guarantors of these habits of liberty." This work at A Public Space wouldn't have been possible without your support.

Thank you to everyone—writers, readers, supporters, mentors, friends—who has been a part of A Public Space this past year. Please join us for another year of art and argument, fact and fiction, by contributing to our annual fundraising campaign, or giving a subscription to all the writers, readers, travelers, and dreamers on your list this holiday season.

1878: Eadweard Muybridge photographs the racehorse Sallie Gardener at a gallop. John Haskell’s essay “The Persistence of Muybridge” appears in APS 12: “I believed I could find, somewhere in his armor of control, a crack, and in that crack I could find his desire, and by giving him that desire, I could make him happy.”

1886: Arthur Rimbaud writes Illuminations. John Ashbery’s translation appears in APS 13.

1887: Walt Whitman’s poems are the subject of a Contemporary Humor column in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Omaha Girl: “Why, they are not even rhymed.” Eastern Man: “Nevertheless they are marvels, considering that they were written in a place where the poet had to stop between every word to fight mosquitoes.” Therese Stanton imagines the poet’s swarming tormentors in APS 14.

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Posted on December 7, 2011 | Comment | Permalink