From the Editor’s Perch…by Carl Nelson

[Reprinted here because you know, websites expire, …..but please read it at Carl’s site if you can! ]

Maternal Horror, review of “How I Kiss Her Turning Head,” by Carl Nelson

Jennifer Woodworth’s newest book, How I Kiss Her Turning Head, which is just out by Monkey Puzzle Press, is a most gentle jaunt into the genre of Maternal Horror.  ‘Maternal Horror’ is a term I have had to coin myself.  But this is not Rosemary’s Baby.  This is the Brahms Lullaby of Xtreme Mothering.  The baby and child in these stories and sketches comprise a wonderful blessing – so wonderful, that we follow our first person hero as if pushing off down the pipe of some Xtreme Sport …  Right down the rabbit hole of maternal instinct, without time to say, “Hello!  Goodbye!” into a sort of mental ward where the ordinary and quotidian prerogatives of life conflict to our first person narrator’s charming wonderment.  And off we go, as the book paints a gentle rebellion for two.

“I have never wanted anything more than I want babies.”  The narrator tells us at the beginning of the first and best story, “Mother of One”.  And shortly she adds:

“I want another baby,” I say to my husband.”“I know you do,” he says. He means he does not want another child, not now, not ever.” How charged and compact that exchange is! Our author knows a subtext, and next to that, a rebellious flight of words. All of this makes for a good read. Her stories churn in the updraft of a contained conflagration. Her words and flights of fancy are cloaked like actors to carry more romantic weight. But all of the ducks here are rubber ducks. Her first person narrator “contains multitudes” of insight, but all from an idea fixee. Her first person narrator is entirely rational aside from being mostly fixated. Imagine an Asperger of mothering, with the soft voice, and gentle nudging of the genuinely aware – and you’ll be getting close to the voice of this narrator.The interest of the first story, “Mother of One” – which is a lovely jolt of maternal compulsion – is deciding partly where the horror lies. Is the Surrogate Mother, or is the Outsourcing Birth Mother the monster of this tale. Is it the narrator’s world which is a bit off kilter – or is it the narrator? The ending tale finds our heroine legally confined but still rebellious. Though it wouldn’t surprise me to hear our narrator reply from her ward – in an attractive way and with an appealing tone, (or perhaps she would just ‘suggest’), if asked, ‘how it could be “rebelling” when the world is backaswards?’ Jennifer Woodworth has a playful dramatic sense, writes a fine narrative, composes a lovely tune with her words, and is smart enough to say things worth reading. This is a small book to purchase and enjoy, and possibly to start your collection with.

Includes study guide! Never in my wildest fantasies…! Thank you so much, Beth Castrodale of Small Press Picks!

October 26, 2014

To buy the book, email me at jen ::::@:::: fishclamor dotttt com| Discuss the book (.doc)

How I Kiss Her Turning Head

By Jennifer Woodworth
Monkey Puzzle Press, 2014, 36 pages

The stories in Jennifer Woodworth’s strangely beautiful How I Kiss Her Turning Headexamine the most primal aspects of mother-child bonds, bonds that can surpass love and approach obsession, yet, within the small, warm worlds of their origins, feel natural and necessary.

Throughout the book, Woodworth takes us to the physical and emotional heart of such connections, with vivid descriptions like this one, from “Stork Scissors & Baby Toes,” in which the narrator finds the scissors of the title too indelicate for her newborn’s toes:Mommies rock for weeks, barely moving from the chair, nursing their newborns, completely alone: They find their secret joys. Baby toes are one of them. You can hold them between two fingers and they look just like five little sugar snap peas in a pod. We love to run our lips across baby’s perfect tiny little wiggling toes, use the tip of the tongue to find the longest nails, and the incisors to gently cut the extra away. And what a joy it is then to run baby’s smooth, cool toes across our moist, milk-puffed lips!

But the desire to bond can have a darker side, as suggested in the opening story, “Mother of One,” in which the narrator, the mother of a single child, desires another and, thwarted in that desire, takes in an infant for daycare. After making many attempts to soothe the fussy, unhappy (and formula-fed) infant, the narrator finds one approach that works: breastfeeding the baby, and sending her own milk home in the formula bottles provided by the birth mother.

The narrator observes:I wanted the baby to feel like she was still with her mommy so she wouldn’t cry. I guess I wasn’t her mommy, but it sure felt to the two of us like I was. I mean, who was her mommy? I knew I wasn’t, but neither was her mother, really, at least not in what I knew was my radical La Leche League opinion.

Though this story doesn’t directly address the anxieties of either stay-at-home or working mothers, these anxieties (and the unfair judgments leveled against both groups of women) are very much in the background, and they encourage us, the readers, to examine our own beliefs and potential prejudices.

One of the most beautiful, sweetly sad aspects of the collection is Woodworth’s writing about the fleeting nature of the connection between mothers and very young children, who haven’t yet turned—or who have just started to turn—away from their parents and toward the larger world.

The title of the story, “M-A-R-backwards Y,” describes the way the narrator’s little girl has begun writing her name on school papers. The narrator thinks, “She’s a big girl now: She’s taken her name into her own hands, made it smaller, made it something she can handle.” The daughter has announced, as well, that she wants to start sleeping in her own bed. Yet, the narrator observes, “She still says, Mommy, I love you forever. She’ll let me hug her (can I still say she wants me to?) and carry her to the classroom till I can’t anymore.”

As for husbands, when they are mentioned at all in the collection, they are contrary at best and sinister at worst. On the contrary side, take this exchange from “Mother of One”:  “I want another baby,” I say to my husband.

“I know you do,” he says. He means he does not want another child, not now, not ever.

Later on, the story “Notes on Being Her Mommy – Part N” ends with this line: “I’m biologically useless to my husband now.” In any other context, this line might suggest a disconsolate—even abandoned—wife. But coming as it does, as a kind of afterthought to a mother’s many loving observations about her baby daughter, it feels almost triumphant.

On the sinister side of spousal relations, we have the husband of the final story (“Ray”), who has taken part in having his wife, the narrator, committed to a mental hospital, separating her from their child. Toward the end of the story, the narrator observes:My husband was to decide whether he’d take me home or not. Of course I did not want to go home with him but it had become quite clear to me that if he didn’t take me home, they’d never let me out, so you would not believe the lies I told to get out of there. Like how sorry I was that he had hit me.

We never get the husbands’ points of view in these stories, but this doesn’t feel necessary given the focus on the mother-child bond. To the protagonists, this connection comes to the exclusion of almost everything else, suggesting, at times, a potentially worrisome obsession. Yet, again, it also feels like the most natural thing in the world.

Would My Pick be Your Pick? By Beth Castrodale

If you’re interested in ________, the answer may be “Yes”:
▪ Making Babies by Anne Enright (nonfiction)
▪ The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
▪ Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
▪ Any books about the mother-child bond

Autunm eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends.
From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk:
then time returns to the shell.

In the mirror it’s Sunday,
in dream there is room for sleeping,
our mouths speak the truth.

My eye moves down to the sex of my loved one:
we look at each other,
we exchange dark words,
we love each other like poppy and recollection,
we sleep like wine in the conches,
like the sea in the moon’s blood ray.

We stand by the window embracing, and people look up from
the street:
it is time they knew!
It is time the stone made an effort to flower,
time unrest had a beating heart.
It is time it were time.

It is time.

Translated by Michael Hamburger 

Anyone I would love to see the German and any other translation–please send me links here in the comments! I will be delighted!

Many thanks to Gone Lawn, which has accepted my prose poem “Even the Sky” for its Summer issue! It kind of goes with “Wake” which they published in their winter issue so I’m especially delighted. Thanks @GoneLawn !

I won’t have any hard copies again for a while, but e-copies I have! 3 bucks! You know you want it. It’s a 30 page prose chapbook. I think you’ll love it. Write me at Jen at {{{{{{Fishclamor.com}. I’ll send it right away!

Eastern Iowa Review: Best Lyric Prose Plus Anthology

Editor: Chila Woychick

Two of my prose poems are included in this anthology, “Soprano” and “Shayna.” Thank you Chila Woychik and Eastern Iowa review! The anthology is available here at Amazon (please leave reviews!).

Eastern Iowa Review: Best Lyric Prose Plus Anthology.

From the current Gone Lawn. It took about 3 minutes to read but will never leave me. @GoneLawn. #story of the day

Many thanks to Gone Lawn, which has accepted two poems I love for their December 20th issue—“Wake” and “Lot’s Wife.”

I love the mag. Check it out here. Thanks for stopping by!

This Old Thing? Really?

Out of Print, But It Was Here!

There are 36 awesome pieces in today’s new Bending Genres! Many thanks to @bendinggenres for publishing my story-gone-awry, “Unity” in today’s issue!

Many thanks to @Bending Genres Journal for accepting my prose-poem/story-gone-wrong “Unity River” for their August issue!

With a whole big section of prose poems! Check out Eastern Iowa Review’s latest issue here!

My prose poems, “Soprano” and “Shayna” are here.

To see all the poems, click on the pretty cover of Eastern Iowa Review’s Issue 8 and when you arrive, scroll down to the section you want to read (prose poems, stories, what have you). Then click on what you want to read. Thank you Eastern Iowa Review for publishing a whole section of prose poems!

Errata

Where it says snow 
read teeth-marks of a virgin 
Where it says knife read 
you passed through my bones 
like a police-whistle 
Where it says table read horse 
Where it says horse read my migrant’s bundle 
Apples are to remain apples 
Each time a hat appears 
think of Isaac Newton 
reading the Old Testament 
Remove all periods 
They are scars made by words 
I couldn’t bring myself to say 
Put a finger over each sunrise 
it will blind you otherwise 
That damn ant is still stirring 
Will there be time left to list 
all errors to replace 
all hands guns owls plates 
all cigars ponds woods and reach 
that beer-bottle my greatest mistake 
the word I allowed to be written 
when I should have shouted 
her name

by Charles Simic,

Eastern Iowa Review has accepted two of my prose poems (“Soprano” and “Shayna”) for their next edition–check this billboard for details later on! In the meantime, check out the journal–for writers, they are interested in lyric essays and prose poems, among other things; and for readers, they clearly have fabulous taste!

So I was wondering if maybe you’re putting a load of crap into that one idea that’s bothering you so much, wondering if you could Screw Up so very Importantly.

What I mean is this:  suppose it is bothering you that you have to cut the grass, clean out the garage, fix the swing set, and figure out how to pay for the new driveway, and you think jesus god I can’t possibly keep track of all that AND take care of it without a cigarette,so you pick a fight with your wife over whether or not her parents like you—are you with me here, Lester?

Because that thing about her parents is just the one thing—I mean, you can keep track of whether or not her parents like you.  No list required.  And, in fact, you aren’t even talking about anything at all, since it’s one of those ridiculous fights you make up when you need to divert your troubles from one area of your life to another.

And you know this, so you think, this is beautiful.  I don’t actually have to keep track of anything AND I’ll get a cigarette, if I can figure how to storm out of here in a huff,and it gets to be this Importantly huge fight where vile (same as evil, veil) things are said on all sides that are neither relevant nor true.

It starts, say, with you saying right out of the deep blue sky, even though—especially since–you know you might be about to get some, because she has just asked you to take a shower—it starts right here, Lester, with you saying,

Your parents hate me and never wanted you to marry me!

And she says that’s because you ran over my dad’s golf shoes and you have been thoughtless and inconsiderate to my mother every time you’ve seen her!

That’s because she just never thought I was good enough for you! 

Well, maybe she was right!

Maybe she was!  But she didn’t have to dump gravy on my head last Thanksgiving just because I set the table with the forks on the wrong side! 

Yeah, well, your mom should have taught you how to set a table properly!

Well aren’t you little Miss Debutante. 

Yes, as a matter of fact I was a debutante.

Of course you were.  I had to take you away from BRAD. 

What’s your problem with Brad?

He’s an asshole, that’s what.

Well he’s my mother’s hairdresser now, and how dare you.

How dare I you say—HOW DARE I? 

You with me here, Lester?  And you notice that you still do not have a cigarette, and you still have a load of shit to do at the house, and goddammit you just do not want to deal with it.  So then you have to say it.  You just have to say it.  You say, Importantly,

Look, I think we should watch separate TV’s.

When really that’s the last thing you want, because when it’s all said and done, you want to smoke your goddamn cigarette and come in and watch a sexy movie with your wife, but now there’s this big thing about the whole separate TV’s, and don’t you think I should at least consider a career in fiction?

I need you stay with me here, pal—so you’re irritated about all this little shit and you think it would be easier to make up just the one thing, but by this time you have sort of forgotten what’s going on and here you are having a vile ( evil, veil) fight with your wife about whether her parents like you or not, which is silly to argue about since really it has nothing to do with your marriage, and SHE loves you and YOU love her and really the parents are a just a handy foil. 

Every couple must have their fake issues.  It’s part of the sacred covenant of marriage.  One must never forget the importance of having the fake issues. I mean, come on Lester, you can’t possibly really talk about all the real shit—who has that kind of time?

One must never forget that the fake issues are fake, either, and that in their own Importantly Fucked Up way, they help you stay close to each other.  In this Importantly Fucked Up way, your marriage is better off with the fake issues.

Maybe you might wonder why this thing is bugging you in terms of what’s going on right there in river city where The Stuff That Matters lives and grows and busts open like a pink peony and is huge and gorgeous and smells good, even if it has ants crawling on it.  They fertilize the flowers.  I mean, you know what they say, no buggy, no pretty.

Of course this is patronizing AND condescending, and I do apologize, but I kind of like the story and the whole idea of the fake issue being a part of the sacred covenant between a man and a woman, required so that they don’t BLOW each other UP because you forget to put trash bags in the trash after you take it out, and once you left the seat up when you were drunk, and once you forgot to tell her about a money-machine withdrawal Fastcash-Forty-Bucks,and that last time you wanted to and she didn’t, or was it the other way around, and, and, and, you see, Lester: it is just as important to have the fake issues as it is to have the Hot Married Sex. 

Now that I’ve written this, I see that “fake issue” should have been the Fake Issuethroughout.

Forgive me.

–Jennifer Woodworth, 201

Thanks to Bellow Literary Journal for first publishing “Screwing Up, Importantly” in their August, 2013 issue.

My prose chapbook, How I Kiss Her Turning Head, published by Monkey Puzzle Press, is a book with several sketches and short works of fiction about the obsessions and dark thoughts of mothers and babies; it is available for three bucks as an ebook. You know you want it.

I still have pretty little hard copies if you’d like to buy one from me–they’re ten bucks, and I know you want one.

Write me at Jen at )Fishclamor( dot com. I’d love to send you either one. Free shipping!

(If this email doesn’t work, please let me know in comments?)

Thank you!

meet me in front of a jazz club

in new orleans; there i’ll kiss you

hard. you have been lover

to me through lives upon deaths, your fingers

spread in my hair, your demolition kiss

a wrecking ball through love affairs

& marriages. but that night, before i knew

your kiss so well, it was & we were two martinis drunk

one after the other; the steering wheel biting

my ribs, my hands clutching at anything

under the headrest behind you.  Surprised at the bar,

still standing when we emerged:

I wondered how, having spent a lifetime of breath

in that one kiss, how the things of this world remain standing.

–Jennifer woodworth

Many thanks to Flashquake, who first published this poemin slightly different form in 2009.

My prose chapbook, How I Kiss Her Turning Head, published by Monkey Puzzle Press, is a book with several sketches and short works of fiction about the obsessions and dark thoughts of mothers and babies; it is available for three bucks as an ebook. You know you want it.

Write me at Jen at )Fishclamor( dot com. Love to send you one. You’ll like it, I know you will.

(If this email doesn’t work, please let me know in comments?)

Thank you!

This is for you, a message thirty years later from “Esmeralda the Gypsy,” who read your palm that Halloween, that brilliant, cold fall night when the whole university was out in costume. The maple candy melted in our mouths, and the deep red in the leaves chased the yellow away—do you remember we’d learned that only during a fall of cold, bright days, will the sugar in the maples freeze into red. Did street lights ever make a place more like a movie set? Or was it the thousands of students outside in costume? That giant carrot—I knew it was you—only you would have dyed a whole sheet electric orange, wrapped it around you tight from knees to head, chosen that wild carrot hair.I grabbed your carrot hands, turned them over, silently studied them before I told you the story of your life—who you loved, whether she loved you too, how many children, your happiness then and now, how much of yourself you give away in love, the steadiness of your heart, the difference between what’s left and what’s kept; what you’d made of what had been given you; what you’ve made by now of what you’ve been given. Turn it over—the back of your hand, this finger, here—you’re good at math? Yes, if you want to—you like to count, you. You don’t read, this is art you’ll never make, though the mind of genius will be in your hands—where do you lose your desire for it—and at that instant, an enormous rabbit sprang out of his hole to chase you, and you became a giant carrot with flying green crepe-paper hair running down the street, turning over cards and tables, changing candy for prayers and for dreams, and you ran off with the true love you’d find in your late twenties, your marriage, your generosity in love, and the children you’d have, all clutched in your hands— did you keep your fist closed long enough to put them, safe, under your pillow? I hear their candy wrappers and their screaming even now—was it delight or terror you felt? Were stage lights in the dark enough to turn you around, to chase the giant white rabbit away? At least you were on the right side of the looking glass—and there in the lights with thousands of students in costumes, we walked or ran or rolled in raked-up piles of leaves in front yards—that dazzling, numinous fall, and this is what I knew of you that would not be true for decades, but would be true nonetheless many times— the candy the lights your true love your long happiness the babies the bunny and I knew you, I knew you then.

–Jennifer Woodworth

Thanks to Ginosko Literary Journal for first publishing this piece, in October 2016  number 18.

Maternal Horror

Jennifer Woodworth’s newest book, How I Kiss Her Turning Head, which is just out by Monkey Puzzle Press, is a most gentle jaunt into the genre of Maternal Horror.  ‘Maternal Horror’ is a term I have had to coin myself.  But this is not Rosemary’s Baby.  This is the Brahms Lullaby of Xtreme Mothering.  The baby and child in these stories and sketches comprise a wonderful blessing – so wonderful, that we follow our first person hero as if pushing off down the pipe of some Xtreme Sport …  Right down the rabbit hole of maternal instinct, without time to say, “Hello!  Goodbye!” into a sort of mental ward where the ordinary and quotidian prerogatives of life conflict to our first person narrator’s charming wonderment.  And off we go, as the book paints a gentle rebellion for two.

“I have never wanted anything more than I want babies.”  The narrator tells us at the beginning of the first and best story, “Mother of One”.  And shortly she adds:

“I want another baby,” I say to my husband.”

“I know you do,” he says.  He means he does not want another child, not now, not ever.”

How charged and compact that exchange is!

Our author knows a subtext, and next to that, a rebellious flight of words.  All of this makes for a good read.  Her stories churn in the updraft of a contained conflagration.  Her words and flights of fancy are cloaked like actors to carry more romantic weight.  But all of the ducks here are rubber ducks.  Her first person narrator “contains multitudes” of insight, but all from an idea fixee.  Her first person narrator is entirely rational aside from being mostly fixated.  Imagine an Asperger of mothering, with the soft voice, and gentle nudging of the genuinely aware – and you’ll be getting close to the voice of this narrator.

The interest of the first story, “Mother of One” – which is a lovely jolt of maternal compulsion – is deciding partly where the horror lies.  Is the Surrogate Mother, or is the Outsourcing Birth Mother the monster of this tale.  Is it the narrator’s world which is a bit off kilter – or is it the narrator?  The ending tale finds our heroine legally confined but still rebellious.   Though it wouldn’t surprise me to hear our narrator reply from her ward – in an attractive way and with an appealing tone, (or perhaps she would just ‘suggest’), if asked, ‘how it could be “rebelling” when the world is backaswards?’.

Jennifer Woodworth has a playful dramatic sense, writes a fine narrative, composes a lovely tune with her words, and is smart enough to say things worth reading.  This is a small book to purchase and enjoy, and possibly to start your collection with.