Sarah Rose Nordgren’s poems “Blue Whale” and “Temporary River” appear in the July issue of The Collagist. Her poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Quarterly West, Hayden’s Ferry, Cincinnati Review, American Literary Review, Mid-American Review, Puerto del Sol, and other journals. She was a 2008-2009 Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She currently lives and writes in Chapel Hill, NC.

1. Can you talk about the inspirations for “Blue Whale” and “Temporary River”? What was on your mind while you were writing these poems?

I wrote “Temporary River” as a sort of reformulated memory from my childhood when my family would take regular trips to my mother’s hometown of Beaumont, Texas. Southeast Texas calls up very strong sense memories—the damp heat, the flat land that stretches on for miles with bobbing oil drills and refineries that light up at night like tiny cities. One summer the streets completely flooded. It was scary to wade through the water because of the bits of debris, and the fact that the water was so warm, which was unsettling. I remember wading through where I knew my grandmother’s garden was below the water, but I couldn’t see it.

“Blue Whale” is a more recent poem, and I wrote it when I was at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass, last year. I fell in love with whales while I was on the Cape, and learned a lot more about the history of whaling than I had ever known. Going out on a whale watching boat and seeing those massive animals up close was probably one of the top five experiences I’ve had in my life. The single, separated lines in this poem are a result of my awe. You have to slow down a bit and breathe between each one.

2. Each line in “Blue Whale” takes the reader deeper into the weight of the poem, from classical references to the image of the man with rocks in his pockets to metaphors about the body. How did the shift at  ”Our crime toward you was jealousy/O to be a mansion steering itself” seem like the right place to stop, to turn away from these and conclude the poem?

In this poem I was trying, in my way, to show not only the inconceivable physical enormity of this animal, but a spiritual enormity as well. The whale is a house that things enter and exit of their own accord. The whale does have agency and a survival instinct, but it is of a piece with its world. I wanted to address the blue whale as if in a prayer—what would I pray to a whale if it were God? Certainly I would apologize for taking its fat, teeth and baleen to fuel lamps, make corsets, etc. Those last lines turn away from the invocation of the whale and address our troubled relationship with it through history, which is full of desire.

3. The images in “Temporary River” are remarkable to me how they seem to come together rather than pile on top of one another, even as they continue to grow in number in the poem. Images like only having “one cracked paddle from the shed,/spider-webbed” or the beautiful simile “our bodies transformed/like a cloud the wind tears in two directions” both make the reader care about the poem and also add weight to the situation. The ending line, becoming reflective and introspective, seemed brilliant as a move to wrap up the poem. How did this end line formulate? Furthermore, what seemed right about connecting it with all of these beautiful images and uses of figurative language?

I wanted the images in the poem to convey a feeling of the inevitable. At the time I wrote it I was in a relationship that seemed fated and outside of time. The flood in the poem became the setting through which I could imagine the possibility of something that powerful changing.

4. You are currently a resident of North Carolina, a state where much of my own family lives. Being familiar with the culture and natural environment of North Carolina myself, I am curious how living there has affected your writing. Could you speak about how your residency in North Carolina has influenced your writing?

I grew up in North Carolina, in the Durham-Chapel Hill area, and I recently moved back here after several years away. My recent move back here hasn’t noticeably changed my writing—though of course my writing is always changing. However, North Carolina—in the way that I’ve experienced it—is in my writing no matter where I am. It doesn’t appear directly as subject matter, but it feels its way in. In terms of the physical environment, it’s the thickness of the air, trees everywhere, the mosquitoes and the smell of decaying wood. (When I was in college at Sarah Lawrence, I remember flying out of LaGuardia airport to visit my family for the holidays. When the plain would come down through the clouds near Raleigh, I would be absolutely shocked by the incredible greenness.) In terms of culture, it was my family, the Waldorf school I attended for 11 years (where we painted, memorized great poems, and built forts in the woods), going to church, and so forth. One of my dear friends and favorite poets, Linda Gregg, likes to talk about poetic “sources.” You could say that North Carolina is one of mine.

5. What other writing projects are you currently working on?

I’m currently in the final stages (fingers crossed) of assembling my first book manuscript. I’ve been playing around with the order a lot the past couple of months, but I’ve still got some reordering to do. It’s my first time putting together a book, and it’s really hard! The different rearrangements make completely different books, so I’ve really got to decide what book I want to make. It will probably keep changing in little ways for awhile, but once I feel like I have it where I want it for now, I can begin to look forward to the next project, and I have no idea what that will be! It’s scary and exhilarating.

6. What great books have you read recently? Are there any upcoming releases you’re excited about?

I find things to read through one avenue or the other, and if I really like a book I’ll find something else by that author, but I don’t follow “poetry news” per se. I am always reading good books though. “The Most of It” by Mary Ruefle (her first book of stories) is incredible. I got to the end of it and then started it again—it was that good.  Though it’s not new, I also recently read “A Humament” by the British painter Tom Phillips. It’s a “treated Victorian novel,” meaning he’s painted over most of the words so each page of the book is a painting. If you haven’t seen it, you should check it out. Very cool. A few months ago I read “The Family that Couldn’t Sleep” by D.T. Max. It’s a nonfiction book about an Italian family that has a mysterious and fatal disease that keeps them from being able to sleep. It’s wonderful—I walked around for weeks after I finished it, begging people to read it. I learned so much about prion diseases—a topic I never new I’d be so interested in: Mad Cow disease, Scrapy (in sheep), kuru (apparently caused by cannibalism)…so disturbing. D.T. Max takes all of these separate illnesses throughout history, links them, and asks some wonderful questions about humankind’s hand in all of it.

Jac Jemc lives in Chicago. Her first novel, My Only Wife, is forthcoming in 2012 from Dzanc Books.  In the meantime, she’s the poetry editor for decomp, a fiction reader for Our Stories, a member of the editorial team at Tarpaulin Sky Press, and a regular contributor to BigOther.com.  She blogs her rejections at jacjemc.wordpress.com. Her piece, “The Grifted”, appears in the April 2010 issue of The Collagist.

Her piece “Women in Wells” was originally published on Juked magazine in July of 2009.

It’s taken him a moment to figure it out, but this girl reminds him of someone. She reminds him of that woman in the well when he was a child, just up the road. That woman he told no one about, who’d spoken to him calmly, who’d seemed, not happy, but certain of her place all the way down there; that woman who’d just stopped speaking to him one day, and no flashlight could shine far enough down to see if she had gotten free or if she was just being quiet, and he couldn’t tell anyone she’d stopped talking to him because they’d wonder why he never tried to help her out. This girl who answered the door? Who said just a few words as she let him in? This girl whom he’s known forever, but not for a while? The voice this girl grew into is the voice of that woman in the well.

-from “Women in Wells” by Jac Jemc

What was your inspiration for writing “Women in Wells”? Was there anything about its writing—your process, any challenges that the piece presented you, your approach to editing and revision—that you’d like to share with our readers?

I wrote this story originally for a reading series here in Chicago, called Quickies.  You have to read your full-story in under five minutes or they drag you off stage.  I’ve realized that I often write about people entering other people’s homes unexpectedly and then both of them navigating that interaction.  I’m not sure what my obsession is with that event, but this definitely falls in that category.  I don’t generally get “ideas” for stories.  What happens is I start making sentences that have nothing to do with each other and then I try to tie them together.  That was the process for writing this.  I always have trouble with endings but then that’s always the part I like the most.

Something that intrigues me about this piece is the projection of characters onto other characters, and how the areas of overlap and mismatch define them. The boy’s memories of the woman in the well, who may or may not be real, affects his perception of the girl, as well as the reader’s. Could you speak a little to this affect, and your approach to creating these characters?

I think we define a person by the other people we know, for the most part, and we define them by some past iteration we knew of them, whether it was an hour ago or a year.  It’s like that Mitch Hedberg joke: “Someone handed me a picture and said, ‘This is a picture of me when I was younger.’ Every picture of you is when you were younger.”  So the way we see a person is always a little out of date, always approximate.  And then there’s the idea that knowing someone involves imagining yourself through their eyes, and understanding them in relation to yourself. I can’t stop thinking about that line from Kathryn Regina’s poem, “the sky is not a good place for careful observation”: “it is difficult to know my mind without other minds/ knocking into it.” Context is the key.

What work by another writer would be part of your own personal Best of the Web?

Joe Aguilar’s ‘Beneath My House’ that appeared in elimae.

An Interview with J.W. Wang, editor of Juked magazine:

Please introduce us to your publication: How did it get started? What kind of work do you publish?

Juked began in 1999, originally as an online magazine publishing mostly articles by a group of volunteer staff writers.  We were a group of friends who wanted only to put out fun, smart writing for others to read.  Over the years we’ve shifted focus, and since about 2004 have been publishing primarily fiction and poetry and creative non-fiction chosen from unsolicited submissions.  We don’t have any particular themes we stick to; we still like fun and smart, of course, but in the end it’s really about the quality of the writing, whether it piques our interest or not.

What was it about “Women In Wells” that initially spoke to you? What set it apart from the other submissions you were reading?

A good short story title is crucial, of course.  It’s the first impression for a reader or editor.  We’ll look at every submission no matter what the title is, but it goes quite a ways in terms of setting up our expectations; the story will have to work much harder to rescue itself if the title is something mundane or silly.  “Women in Wells” caught my attention immediately.  It has an inherent poetic rhythm: four syllable counts, consonance and assonance.  It also presents a striking literal image (another poetic quality) while suggesting some kind of mystery or otherworldly phenomenon.  How do you get women in wells?  What kind of women, in what kind of condition, and what kind of wells?  Who would say or think that?  It’s not a simple non-sequitur—which usually fails to draw interest because you need some kind of connection for people to relate—but an enticing opening into the world of the story.  There is the suggestion of trouble, of need.  There is the suggestion that something is not quite right, of the world being askew.  All of which come into play in the story, set up deliciously by the title.

“Women In Wells” can be found here, where it was originally published.

J. A. Tyler

“Jimmy and His Father and the Ways About Them”

J.A. Tyler is the author six novel(la)s including INCONCEIVABLE WILSON (scrambler books, 2009) and the forthcoming IN LOVE WITH A GHOST (willows wept press, 2010). His work has appeared recently with Diagram, Sleepingfish, Caketrain, Fairy Tale Review, elimae, and others. He is also founding editor of Mud Luscious Press. He contributed to the May 2010 issue of The Collagist.

Excerpt:

Jimmy, he lives in a town where all the people, they know all the things about one another. Jimmy knows who is taking pills. Jimmy knows who has a spastic back. Jimmy knows that Ms Weather’s meatloaf smells good but is powder dry, a fork crumbling it to bits. Jimmy knows these things because he lives in a town like the one he lives in.
And Jimmy, everyone knew his mother was a drunk. Everyone knew that she drank gin on the sides of streets and sucked down bottles with her fingers wrapped on the label, well after all those bars had closed, her throat a gulping calamity.
Jimmy’s mother the angel. Jimmy’s mother the saint. Jimmy’s mother.

-from “Jimmy and His Father and the Ways About Them”

What was your inspiration for writing “Jimmy and His Father and the Ways About Them”? Was there anything about its writing—your process, any challenges that the piece presented you, your approach to editing and revision—that you’d like to share with our readers?

All of the Jimmy pieces including this one were inspired by simplicity, especially that of writers like Peter Markus, of which you’ll find stylistic echoes here. It was about finding the most direct route to saying something but without losing the temperament or tangibility of emotion that was required in the creation of both Jimmy and his father.

One of the most difficult things then was to keep that balance – to not play too far into the abstract but also not to hinge too much on the concrete – the revision of this piece was especially key in that process, understanding when it was not enough and when it was too much.

As I read this work I was very conscious of the balances and the negotiations that Jimmy and his father—and the fiction itself—make, the things that are acknowledged and denied, said and left unsaid. I found Jimmy’s selective deafness to be a powerful illustration of this. Could you tell us a little about this sort of negotiating with reality and with one another, what it means for these characters and what it meant for you as you were writing and revising the piece?

What reality means for these characters is loss – their reality is a universe of loss, a world of gone, and Jimmy’s deafness is about shutting ears to the real and waiting for a new existence to reveal itself – and while Jimmy’s hearing threads in and out, allowing him to negate as escape, Jimmy’s father diminishes in the reality of loss, losing himself, so that these characters both mirror and balance one another in the small framework of this piece.

What work by another writer would be part of your own personal Best of the Web?

The ‘The Oregon Trail Taught Me How to Love’ by Gregory Sherl, published in Sixth Finch (http://sixthfinch.com/sherl.html), would be a part of my own personal Best of the Web – each time I read this I am reminded how language can balance so deftly between delinquency and strength, disgust and love, lust and honesty. He is a brilliant writer and that is a tremendous piece of writing.

An interview with the editors behind > Kill Author:

Please introduce us to your publication: How did it get started? What kind of work do you publish?

The first issue of > kill author was published in June 2009. We’d been quietly planning it for a couple of months before, and opened it to submissions in May. As to how and why it came about – we felt that the online literary scene had become too cozy, too many of the same names and faces and then everyone else following in their vapor trail. Sometimes (though not always) we felt that was reflected in the writing out there too. We’ll be honest and say that we wanted to shake things up, even if only a little. Because of this thinking, we took the decision not to reveal our identities as editors of > kill author. We want the work to speak for itself, not just be an extension of our names and reputations or our place in any kind of “scene.” Editors always say this about their publications, but we truly believe that to know what > kill author is looking for you just have to read what’s gone before because, to be honest, that’s all you have to go on. There’s no way of second-guessing us from what we’ve done or written elsewhere.

When it comes to the work we publish, we select on the basis of what really gets a reaction from us, what really moves us. We’ve read plenty of poetry and prose that was exquisitely written, but ended up turning it down because it didn’t affect us deeply enough. We’re interested in huge, powerful language and huge, powerful ideas; writers taking risks and taking the reader out of their everyday emotions and scenarios. That means we sometimes accept work that might be less than perfectly polished, because we’re convinced by the way it’s made us feel and believe that it’ll make readers react in the same way. “Invention” and “impact” are two key words for us; some have mentioned “experimental,” but we’re not so sold on that because it often suggests throwing out structure in favor of form. We still want stories that take you from A to B, but we want the writer to make that journey in fascinating ways.

What was it about “Jimmy and His Father and the Ways About Them” that initially spoke to you? What set it apart from the other submissions you were reading?

To be fair to anyone who submitted work for our first issue, as J.A. Tyler did with “Jimmy,” all they had to go on was our manifesto – no previous issues and no knowledge of what sort of writing the editors liked. We received and continue to receive a lot of pieces that, like J.A. Tyler’s, are based in small town environments and domestic settings. As you can probably guess from the answer to the last question, that’s usually not our kind of thing, so any writer submitting such material has to do something pretty amazing with the story and the language to really get a positive response from us. J.A. Tyler did. “Jimmy” has phrases that made our jaws drop open, that made us wonder how the writer twisted the words into something so poetic. There’s definite poetry in the piece: it kind of feels like a eulogy for this person, Jimmy, especially in the way his name is repeated like a mantra through the story. There’s a deep sense of loss, of time standing still since Jimmy’s mother died so violently, but the way it’s communicated has an elegiac and beautiful, almost unreal quality. A piece like this could too easily be delivered as the ultimate in grainy, hard-edged realism, but J.A. Tyler’s skill was to take it to somewhere way beyond that.

You can see “Jimmy and His Father And The Ways About Them” in its original publication on > kill author here.

Tamiko Beyer’s poem “Wondering Home” appears in the April issue of The Collagist. Her poetry has appeared in diode, Sonora Review, OCHO, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. She has received several fellowships and grants, including a Kundiman fellowship, a grant from the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund, and a Olin and Chancellor’s Fellowship from Washington University in St. Louis where she is currently an M.F.A. candidate. She the poetry editor of Drunken Boat, and a founding member of Agent 409: a queer, multi-racial writing collective in New York City. Find her online at wonderinghome.com and blogging at kenyonreview.org.

Can you talk about the inspiration for “Wondering Home”? What was on your mind while you were writing this poem?

“Wondering Home” began, and ultimately remains, a love poem to my partner. The idea of home and finding “home” (and the shifting, multiple meanings of that word) is a reoccurring theme in my work. I grew up in Tokyo, Japan, but moved to the U.S. when I was 12. As an adult, I lived in multiple places on the West Coast but never felt like I had found a place that “felt like home” until I moved to Brooklyn, NY.

I believe that meeting and falling in love with my partner played no small part in finding that sense of home. But as an asylee, my partner cannot return to her “home” country until she receives U.S. citizenship – and it has been more than a decade since she has been back to that land.

This poem, then, was an attempt to explore what “home” means when one cannot return to a homeland, and what it means to – if indeed it is possible to – create a home in a space/land that is not an ancestral land, but is culturally and politically resonant with one’s sel(f)(ves).

At the very heart of this poem, there’s a suggestion that identity is very sensitive to our positions in time and space, and to the nuances of our relationships with our places of origin. The consistent questioning–particularly in the last two lines–leaves this as a sort of open theme, a call with no response. Could you speak to this questioning, and what the negative space of the answers does for the poem?

I think this reading speaks exactly to what I wanted to interrogate as I wrote the poem. In general, much of my work is about questioning – I write poems to try to understand ideas, moments, situations, languaged constructions that I am curious about/am intrigued by. (I think – though can’t assume – that this is true for most poets.) In this process, more often then not, the questions I have lead to further questions, which bring me deeper into the subject. I don’t mind not finding answers. As I suggested earlier, “Wondering Home” is part of a larger exploration in my work, and it tackled questions that I don’t have answers to yet (as indicated right at the beginning by the title). So it was important to me to push the poem out at the end, to leave it (and the reader) on uncertain footing.

I’m also very interested in the interchange between reader and text – and I hope that the “negative space” that the questions open up can be read as an invitation for the reader to bring their own thinkings and questions to fill up that space. I finished working on this poem several years ago, and my poetics have continued to move more towards what Lyn Hejinian calls the “open text.”

Going off of the previous question, the structure and organization of the poem also reinforced the idea of transience and movement for me. As I read I felt my own thoughts falling into the rhythms of the piece, breaking at the line breaks and pausing at the question marks. With “Wondering Home”, was the rhythm already there and waiting for the words, or did it manifest later on, as the words are written?

That’s a really interesting question, and I’m not quite sure of the answer. I don’t know if I’ve ever had a rhythm to a poem before I had the words. What I do know is that the lines “The noodles your mother made / Ceiling fan’s lazy spin” came early on in the drafting of this poem and that their rhythm drove the beat(s) of the rest of the poem.

But this poem went through multiple, multiple drafts, with different line breaks and forms. So its pacing and rhythm kept changing as I revised.  But was this final rhythm in my subconscious somewhere, waiting for me to discover it? I really don’t know.

You’re a founding member of Agent 409, a queer and multiracial New York writing collective which has led workshops at events like Split This Rock poetry festival and the U.S. Social Forum. You also lead workshops for the New York Writers’ Coalition, where you work with homeless LGBT teens and “other communities whose voices have been historically silenced”. Could you talk a little about your involvement in these endeavors, and the relationship between your own writing and these projects?

I have always approached writing not as something I do in isolation, but something that I do in and for community. Social justice work has always been an important part of what I do/who I am, and when I decided to commit to poetry, I also made a commitment to myself to not lose sight of my dedication to working towards social change. My work with the New York Writers’ Coalition is so rewarding because I get to share the joy of writing with people who are hungry for the opportunity and permission to write creatively.

My writing group, Agent 409 is what feeds me, what keeps me writing, and is definitely a space I can call home. I would not be the writer I am without the support, critical feedback, and love of the members of Agent 409. Because we are a group of writers who believe in writing for social change, we do lead workshops and share our resources and expertise with our communities when we are able to, but we are also very clear that our priority is our sanity and our writing. And that is part of what I think has sustained us for so long (we’re about to start on our 7^th year).

What other writing projects are you currently working on?

I’m currently working on a manuscript of poems that investigate what I’m calling a queer::ecopoetics.  Which is to say I’ve been writing a series of poems about water and humans and our relationships and desires for (the) water (in us). A poetics of the porous, perhaps. The project seems to be expanding from mostly water poems to poems that take into consideration other, more earthbound landscapes. Right now, I’m really interested in finding the places of connections/overlaps/tensions between queer desire and politics and the urgent politics of ecological-environmental-justice. A few poems from this series were published last month on the Poets for Living Waters website. http://poetsgulfcoast.wordpress.com/2010/06/04/two-poems-by-tamiko-beyer/

What great books have you read recently? Are there any upcoming releases you’re excited about?

Right now, I’m having a fascinating experience reading Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip. I’ve never read a book quite like it before.  I read Middlemarch for the first time a few months ago and loved it. And I recently re-read, consecutively, Dura, Commons, and Penury by Myung Mi Kim, falling deeper into her work through immersion. I’m excited about the release of Duriel E. Harris’s Amnesiac by The Sheep Meadow Press this fall.

Kim Chinquee
“He Has Juice”

Kim’s piece was originally published in Web Conjunctions. She lives in Buffalo, NY, and her work has been published in The Collagist, NOON, Denver Quarterly, Mississippi Review, Fiction, Notre Dame Review, New York Tyrant, elimae, and other publications. She has received a Pushcart prize and a Henfield prize. Her short fictions “On the Wheel”, “We Decided Not To Give Them Faces”, and “I Was There For The Team” appeared in the first issue of The Collagist in 2009. You can read her Collagist interview here. Kim also judged The Collagist’s 2009 Flash Fiction Contest, the winners of which were published in the December issue.

And now their usual stuff is waiting: the bread and cheese, the boiled egg, sliced portions of a turkey. Ham, and creamer. Jam by his plate and she has butter. They’ll take whatever bread and put it in their pockets: not for hunger, but if anything is left, the lady will bring less. This concerns them. The lady comes to deliver. The lady has no English, but the lady’s son has come to them, all smiles and his hands in, with a nodded welcome.
They’ll climb. Higher and look down, in, the wind slapping. They might sit. Their jackets are thick, like they are, and she will lean there, with his stick up. He might clutch his chest with neither of them laughing, and he would blame nothing.

-from “He Has Juice”

What was your inspiration for writing “He Has Juice”? Was there anything about its writing—your process, any challenges that the piece presented you, your approach to editing and revision—that you’d like to share with our readers?

I was imagining my visit to Austria, at a bed and breakfast, a few sensory details that stayed with me, yet I felt it was important to add some tension, so I invented the relationship between this couple, the possibility of something happening on the hiking trip. I don’t remember much about the editing process for this one, but I do remember, as I was writing it, continually asking myself, what if.

I’m interested in the role of routine in this piece, the power of maintaining certain things in a life, in a relationship. In some places, passages are written in the future tense, as though based on their past actions and routines we know exactly what these two people will do. This seems intertwined with how you play with sensory information, the implications of certain sights and sounds and tastes—of how these associations, too, become familiar. The line “The wind chimes chime, and it smells like cinnamon toast” comes to mind. Could you elaborate a little on these aspects of the piece, and how the sensations and routines arose as you created these two characters?

I wanted to render the routine of things, and those sensory details as more vivid than anything else in the piece; thus, I rendered some of those parts in the future tense: what has happened, what does happen, what might happen. I think at the time, I was working on a series of pieces about a couple who travels overseas together on impulse, but the two don’t really know each other. It was a challenge for me to show what was going on in the relationship, as even the characters aren’t sure. I think, often, the things that we hang onto are those sensory details, the routine of what we know, and in this piece, the feelings and fears are never quite as solid. The woman hangs onto those details she knows. By rendering what “might” happen, I hoped to render the character’s fear, or even her lack of wanting to see the truth, the possibility of danger, of her just living in the moment with the man, hanging onto the sound of the wind chime, the smell of that cinnamon toast.

What work by another writer would be part of your own personal Best of the Web?

Greg Gerke’s “I Want to Write Flash Fiction” . I love the quirkiness of this piece, how the story twists at the end and becomes more than what it is.

Bradford Morrow, editor at Conjunctions literary magazine, tells us about the publication and his thoughts on Kim’s piece.

Please introduce us to your publication: How did it get started? What kind of work do you publish?

Conjunctions began back in 1981 and in 1996 I thought a web presence would be an important ancillary tool to support the print journal.  Little did I know that within a few years of launching the website (www.conjunctions.com), that Web Conjunctions would develop into one of the most important and far-ranging parts of our overall publishing program.  We now publish new work every week, by innovative poets, fiction writers, essayists, and others who are unconfined by the very idea of genre.

What was it about “He Has Juice” that initially spoke to you? What set it apart from the other submissions you were reading?

I’ve always admired Kim’s work, and what she accomplishes in this particular very brief story is rather extraordinary.  Through spare language and minimal narrative gesture, she manages to suggest a vast possibility of meaning and consequence.  “They will go again and they will cross the ocean” is just one example of this.  “The wind chimes chime, and it smells like cinnamon toast,” is another, slightly different in narrative strategy.  So much information, specific and yet just slightly ineffable, is suggested in each (and throughout the piece).  The reader is invited to envision what the fiction only partly unveils, and in this way “He Has Juice” proposes an imaginative collaborative effort on the reader’s part.  I like that a lot.