mojo
And when I bathe you, you lie still
and smile and show me how and where
to touch (there are places I have
never touched ’til now). We laugh
when I say (I always say)
your armpits smell like chicken soup
(as they always have, and you
do not believe me, then or now).
You are a fledgling sparrow,
a nestling here. I almost
hear the thumping
of your heart.
Don’t be afraid,
my little bird.
Don’t fly away.
Stay with me a little longer.
The powers behind the curtains of color have pulled aside the sash to prognosticate that the year 2015 will be clad in brown. Colors-R-Oui (CRO) has designated itself as the prime mover of calling the color shots. With a higher GDP and being arguably closer to the top of the list to join the UN Security Council than several other countries, CRO predicts a year of earth tones, cola coloring, and liver spots.
Steve McDede, the group’s spokesman said “We don’t dictate, but strongly suggest that if our color instructions are not followed we aren’t responsible for what will begin as snark, ridicule, and bitchy comments that inevitably escalate to social ostracism.”
I asked Mr. McDede how the CRO ideas coalesce, forming the perfect blend that gives birth, nay, bears fruit the color of most nuts. He said it all starts in a paneled hotel meeting room about thirty miles from Vegas. “The first impression for arrivals is the lights of Vegas shining its halo on the surrounding dirt or desert. It’s not a scary dark, but more a come out and play dark, unlike the garishness up the road that demands playtime.”
Mr. McDede continued, “As color mavens we look at cultural influences to foresee the coming color domination and these forces all become part of the conversation, a dialectic as it were.”
“So, banter?” I offered.
“No, much deeper,” Mr. McDede said.
“A dialectic circumscribed by wood paneling.”
“Have it your way,” McDede said after an appreciative chuckle. I smiled back, savoring my insightful witticism and the wherewithal of Mr. McDede to recognize it as such.
“I always wondered where the color mavens flock,” I said.
“Flocking mavens? I like how you think,” said McDede.
“Thank you. And what did the flock of color mavens decide are the cultural guideposts used to divine the color of the next year?”
“You mean flocking color mavens?” We both laughed uproariously.
McDede regained his composure. “The attendees look at cultural touchstones: popular dance club tracks, restaurant openings, accessories of TV judges such as eyewear or plastic surgery. A person makes a casual reference to Mother Earth and we start to riff on that, how so many people live in wastelands that have to be viewed much as an optimist like Georgia O’Keefe saw them: a backdrop for pretty flowers and cow skulls. That led to discussion of tribal rituals such as sweat huts, vision quests and accompanying hallucinations that are colored by the platform of rocks and sand.”
“That sounds like a freak show and I mean that in the best possible way. Sincerely,” I said.
“Thank you.”
“M.E. You know what I flashed on? I thought Mother Earth was a fantastic name for a character actor. I mean who’s going to forget you with that moniker, especially if you’re a boy?” I asked.
“Really, and it gets people talking about the planet, which is OK. It’s OK to get heavy. Bring it, I say,” said McDede.
“Can you imagine? Did you see Mother Earth steal that scene from right under the “co-star’s” better lines? That ME is one MF’er.”
“You are a hoot. I love it,” said McDede.
“You set me up. Where were we? Gravel?” I asked.
“Talk of gravel led to the construction industry and the economy in general.”
“So brown is the color of money?” I asked. “Brown is the new green.”
“Exactly, currency is so twentieth century. I know I never carry it anymore. When money is intangible it becomes less crass, I think. But we still need a symbol so that people know it exists. Brown does that.”
“Will we have more symbolic money in 2015?” I asked.
“It was felt that pulling out of Afghanistan and Iraq would lead to an economic rebound since the country could stop pouring blood money on the sand. That theater of war will still operate like a flashback to the dirt landscape from which so many troops and imbedded journalists were engaged. The heart of America was also with them when reminded at the start of sporting events.”
“Ah, sports,” I said.
“Don’t get ahead of me, spitfire. Sporting events led to the Olympics and then Athens. Earth tones are associated with mythology. The Greek Goddess Artemis was a huntress and wore brown, since they didn’t know yet about camouflage. The Egyptian God Anubis had a jackal head, but a gorgeous tan. We pictured him wearing a cashmere throw.
“Brown, of course,” I said.
“Russet. Not coincidentally, Anubis wearing the throw is the official color insignia for 2015.”
“Brilliant. Truly remarkable.”
“I’ll give you one other tidbit for your readers,” said McDede.
“I and our readers would love it.”
“What touches the desert in the most intimate way while covering the most ground?
“Camels?”
“Yes. You’re good, but more specific,” said McDede.
“I can’t intuit. I don’t have the faintest.”
“Think. Caramel. Peanut butter. Camel hoof. Beneath camels’ hooves are the darkest recesses that we divine as part of the spectrum of the presaged color palette.”
“What a wonderful conclusion to our interview. Our readers can’t actually live it, but I think we gave them a delicious taste.”
Zachary Doss lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where he is the fiction editor for the Black Warrior Review. His work has appeared online at Hobart.
Lauren Gordon is the author of “Meaningful Fingers” (Finishing Line Press, 2014) and “Keen” (horse less press, 2014) and she is a Contributing Editor to Radius Lit.
Shasta Grant received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Corium Magazine, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Proximity Magazine, WhiskeyPaper, Mojave River Review, and elsewhere. A Writer-in-Residence at Hedgebrook in 2007, she is also an editor for Storyscape. She lives in Singapore and Indianapolis and can be found online at www.shastagrant.com.
Kristen Gunther is a doctoral student in ecosystem management and ecology at the University of Wyoming, where she also completed an MFA in creative writing. In addition to being in mojo and Mikrokosmos, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in West Branch, CutBank, THRUSH, Parcel, and elsewhere.
Matt Rowan lives in Chicago, IL. He co-edits Untoward Magazine and is the author of the story collection Why God Why (Love Symbol Press, 2013). His work has appeared, or soon will, in NOÖ Journal, Gigantic, Skydeer Helpking, Booth Journal, Necessary Fiction and Pear Noir!, among others. More at literaryequations.blogspot.com.
About the Artist:
Jennifer Davis is a Minneapolis-based artist known for her imaginative paintings of surreal creatures and whimsical characters. She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at venues such as The Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Minneapolis, MN); The DeVos Art Museum (Marquette, MI); Soo Visual Arts Center (Minneapolis, MN); Foster Museum (Eau Claire, WI); Bloomington Art Center (Bloomington, MN); and Turchin Center for the Visual Arts (Boone, NC), as well as several galleries in major cities across the United States. Davis is a recipient of the 2013 Next Step Fund Grant from the Minnesota Regional Arts Council/McKnight Foundation. She holds a BFA from the University of Minnesota.
Masthead
Managing Editor, Nonfiction Editor, Website Design- Kallie Falandays
Assistant Editor- Matthew DeAngelis
Poetry Editor- Brian Orth
Fiction Editor- Garrett Quinn
Readers- Christopher Krueger, Matthew DeAngelis, Charlie Edwards, Trevor Fuller, Tiffany Lear, Jake Russell, Olivia Lawrence, Taylor Gorman, Kallie Falandays
Double feature today readers. Check out Jake’s feature on Meagan Cass, author of “Interview with the Ghost of Jaws’ First Victim” from mojo 5.
Be Honest
by Jake Russell
Meagan Cass wants her stories to be complex and to resonate emotionally with others, a feat she strives to accomplish by using sensory images.
For example, in her story recently accepted into Mojo, Interview with the Ghost of Jaws’ First Victim, she drew from her obsession with ’80s horror movies.
After watching Jaws for the first time in about a decade, Cass was struck by how the movie opens with the death of a teenage girl named Chrissie Watkins and then becomes a story about men trapping the shark while the women wait in the background for the men to come home. She decided she wanted to examine Watkins and give her more of a voice.
“I think the worst thing is to oversimplify a character’s motives or emotions,” she said. “I want to create a voice that is moving, rhythmic and powerful.”
Building an exercise out of a pop culture reference helps her to get outside of what she already knows, she said.
In her early work — as a student pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, and to some extent her PhD work at the University of Louisiana Lafayette — Cass thought of stories in terms of ideas. Unfortunately, many of the pieces became contrived, she said. Before her dissertation, she decided to consider what was really moving her: she began journaling characters and images that felt urgent and powerful.
“I went back to sensory images,” Cass said. “If I find myself working too much with a ‘female athlete grappling with the patriarchal family dynamic,’ I move to ‘How does she drink her Coke?’ and ‘What does her Dad order for dinner?’ and ‘How does he look at her when she orders her dinner?’ I think it’s that process of discovery and letting my characters surprise me. That’s what brings me back to wanting to edit the pieces 15, 20 times.”
A daily writing routine also helps her to take risks in the work; that’s why her goal is to write two hours each day.
“When I started my MFA and thought about my writing process, it was very much ‘I have to be in this special room, and it can only be after 10 o’clock, and I have to have chamomile tea,’ but after a while, I realized that that was preventing me from getting my writing done,” Cass said.
Cass’ advice to writers who want to get published — be honest with yourself about whether or not you feel excited about a story and whether or not it needs to be out in the world, and remember that editors are human beings, so don’t beat yourself up too much if you send out a work and realize two days later it contains a major copy error, she said.
“I would say that one thing that’s been really important to me — and this is sort of a stock answer — read the journals and figure out where you’d like to see your work,” Cass said. “But there are a lot of those journals, so one thing that’s helped me discover journals is to look at where the writers I love are publishing. If you can — if you write enough — be able to say, ‘This story feels honest, powerful and ready, and this one doesn’t feel quite right.’ That said, sometimes you need to get your shit rejected a lot before you can figure that out.”
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A big thanks to Jake Russell for putting this feature together. Here’s a link to Meagan’s work below:
Interview with the Ghost of Jaws’ First Victim – Meagan Cass
Keep Reading!
Faithful readers,
As part of our publicity boost leading up to our launch party, we’ve begun writing features about past contributors. Below is the first. Matthew Dexter’s “Dr. Fish” was published in mojo 4. Jake Russell’s feature reads as follows.
Dead Cells, Live Writing
by Jake Russell
When it comes to writing, Matthew Dexter would love to say his habit is one of getting up early, waking up sober, bursting with 2,000 brilliant words, and then busting out a first draft of lyrical prose in three minutes flat.
This, of course, is an exaggeration. While his goal is to write 2,000 words daily, his toddler, his addiction to Mexican beer, and his frequent freelance writing and editing jobs don’t always make that possible, he said. This doesn’t even touch on the temptations and pervasive distractions that come with living in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, or, as he calls it, paradise. Nevertheless, a quota is important, especially when it comes to writing novels and memoirs.
“I approach writing as the most important thing in the world,” Dexter said. “When we are gone, the writing will remain, so it’s all that matters.”
Though the phrase “starving artist” has become a cliché, it’s not far-fetched to Dexter’s own life: he spent many days penniless in the United States before moving to Cabo San Lucas nine years ago and wrote five or six unpublished novels that he now feels are “terrible.”
“My son and my writing depend on each other,” he added. “If I die too young and obscure, he will perish in poverty and indeed squalor.”
Some of this pressure comes from Dexter’s refusal to settle for “secular mediocrity”: “Perfection: absolute perfection: the unattainable: ineffable glory of the beautiful written word,” he writes in an email, pointing to “great writing and gifted authors” such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, Denis Johnson, Raymond Carver, Hunter S. Thompson, Don DeLillo, Jack Kerouac and Edgar Alan Poe.
In Dr. Fish, Dexter’s story accepted to Mojo, he uses the image of Garra rufa — fish that eat the dead flesh off of feet—which he was introduced to at the bungee and canopy company where his wife works. While experimental, it’s based on the death of his maternal grandmother — “my favorite person in the world other than my namesake son” — and tries to capture the regret of “xenophobic draconian” USA immigration policies that prevented Dexter’s family from reuniting with her in the states before she died.
These snapshots are what Dexter sets out to do when he writes.
“I really have no preconceived notions,” he said. “I want my stories to make me feel something. I am seeking perfection, anything that gives me that tingle in my spinal column and makes me high — the best high in the world, though fleeting. I want to laugh or cry or see some beauty. I want the readers to feel some glimpse of what I felt, some residual resin or ash or blood or tears or hash or laughter. Then, the readers and author are telekinetically connected and can make love or wage war in a vacuous blink of four eyes.”
Dexter’s advice to writers who want to get published — “Never quit. Never settle. Work around-the-clock. Do not be afraid to starve penniless or die for your writing and dreams. It is better to die trying than to give in to pressures from family, faculty, friends, or foes. Read everything; study endlessly. Try to stay away from the bad drugs (narcotics, heroin, Oxycontin, etc.) Write every day. Find your voice. Never give up on your dream,
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Big thanks to Jake for that interesting portrait of one of our favorite authors. If you’re interested in reading “Dr. Fish,” you can find it below:
https://mikrokosmosjournal.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/mojo-4.pdf
Keep reading!