To say there’s a bit of sex weaving its way through this latest issue of The Journal (issue 41.1) would be too crass, too sh
allow, and only somewhat near the mark.
Poets Miguel Murphy (p. 18) and Adam Day (p. 66) are turning sex around (yes, all puns intended), turning it sideways (literally, you’ll see), making it new yet familiar, painful yet pleasurable, and you’ll be conflicted, unsure if you should be smirking or feeling guilty when it’s over. Then you’ll go back for more, wondering if you should but unable to stop yourself.
And don’t think you can slip away into some prose when someone starts reading over your shoulder. Kathryn Nuernberger’s nonfiction (26) will turn on you in pleasing ways as well, bring even more meaning to what the French call, “the little death.”
There’s much, much more to be loved in this issue but this is, after all, just a tease.
Fernando Pessoa never visited the United States, so he never made it to California. At least, not physically. A writer so ahead of his time — post-modernist before there was post-modernism — he surely would have found a novel set in a time and place beyond his own experience attractive. He would have laughed at early eighties So Cal culture (as we all should); he would have delighted in characters who are trying to understand their place in the universe (even if that universe is high school); and he definitely would have liked punk rock (in principle, and maybe in practice as well). And if nothing else, he’d have been intrigued by the cover. It’s a pretty cool cover.
Long before I had a book deal or even an agent for my first novel, Californium, back when it was just a manuscript, I knew, well I believed, it was a book somebody would want some day. So, even then I’d think about that day Californium would be published, and where I’d be.
do with Portugal, or Europe, or anything historical beyond the early eighties punk scene set down amidst California’s growing military industrial complex (in a funny way, I promise). This is the third week of a teaching assignment with Disquiet International and Bluegrass Writers Studio Low-Res MFA program. I committed to it before the pub date was set.
over these past few weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of attending so many other great readings around this historic city—Padgett Powell, Molly Antopol, Maaza Mengiste, John Herrin, Mikhail Iossel, Chanan Tigay, Annie Liontas, Arthur Flowers, Sabina Murray, Afonso Cruz, and National Book Award Winner, Denis Johnson (who I am blatantly name-dropping here because he came to my reading too and laughed at all the right places, which may be the most authentic kind of positive review I could ever hope for).
You know how you sometimes hear those apocryphal stories about writers and writing: Ernest Hemingway’s wife leaving his entire manuscript on a train; Sherwood Anderson writing the bulk of Winesburg, Ohio, in the middle of the night and naked; Alice McDermott basing an uncompleted novel on one of my short stories? Some are completely false (like the thing about Alice McDermott; I just really like her). But some are based in fact and a few of those happen to be completely true.
I’m giving a “two weeks before it’s released” reading of CALIFORNIUM, which really isn’t a thing. The thing is that I’m reading with David Caplan and Frank X. Gaspar. The other thing is that the reading will be at Livraria Ferin, a bookstore in the Baixa-Chiado neighborhood of Lisbon. So, two things. Super cool things.
R Dean Johnson 