My siblings stand “at attention,” and salute me before I dole out their chores on individual, handwritten lists. We each have an alias printed on laminated name tags. We go on bike rides. I instruct them to form a line behind me, oldest to youngest, and then circle around to ride behind my littlest sister. And there we are: a wobbly snake; our helmets five points of backbone. It is in this way that our childhood sits in my memory. Rarely am I an “I” so much as a “we.”
Read MoreA Note to Our Normal Readers
A Note to our Normal Readers from the Founding Editors of The Normal School
Sophie Beck, Steven Church, and Matt Roberts
Dear Normal Readers,
We’re sad to announce that The Normal School’s Spring 2019 issue will be the last print issue of the magazine. We will, however, continue to publish outstanding fiction, poetry, nonfiction and multi-media work in our online magazine (www.thenormalschool.com). We’ll also be working with Outpost19 on our book series, The Normal School Nonfiction Series, and on other projects tied to the mission of the magazine. Sharkbear lives on!
Though we are sad to say goodbye to the print magazine, we are proud of what we’ve accomplished in eleven years of publication and excited for the future of our dynamic, multi-media web-based publication that will maintain our commitment to core values of innovation, inclusivity, quality, and literary citizenship. This difficult decision was made in consideration of both the rising costs and logistical challenges of producing a bi-annual print magazine as well as of the personal and professional goals of the Founding Editors. The magazine could not have existed without the visionary support of Fresno State, the hard work and dedication of our incredible students in the MFA Program in Creative Writing, and the original work from our contributors. Thank you for an incredible run! We hope you’ll stay “Normal” and keep reading the magazine at www.thenormalschool.com. We’ll re-launch the magazine as online only in Fall, 2019. Stay tuned! We may have a few surprises up our sleeves.
Special Note to our Subscribers: We’ll be in touch soon with some options for those of you have subscriptions that extend beyond our final issue. We hope we can find satisfactory ways to honor the commitment you made to us with your subscription. Additionally, we plan to create a revamped online archive of past print issues that we hope to launch in Fall 2019; and the goal is for this to help keep the print versions alive and accessible.
And a note to our Print Contributors: We’ll open up for a special shortened submission period on Jan. 15 that will run to March 15. The final issue will be released in May/June 2019 and coincide with the release of the first title from The Normal School Nonfiction Series, Once More to the Ghetto: and Other Essays by Jerald Walker.
Also, we are, as of today, currently OPEN FOR SUBMISSIONS for our final print issue, our online magazine, and The Normal School Nonfiction Series from Outpost19. Submit here:
https://normalschool.submittable.com/submit
Thank you for your support over these last 11 years!
Sincerely,
Sophie, Steven, and Matt
Beauty and violence. Despair and hope. Racism and tolerance. Some might reference these words, aligned alongside one another, as juxtaposition. Others might label this a power move. I would clarify that, when used by Lee Herrick, it is life-altering and, in his third book, Scar and Flower (Word Poetry Press, 2019), Herrick delivers just that. He approaches prose with passion, a vengeance against social injustice, but also with subtlety and elegance.
In his opening poem, “Dear _______,”;
...I saw my daughter cradle the broken body of a tiny bird. I saw a young poet repair the broken charm of a younger poet...
Herrick’s work pushes a shifting lens, a way to see the world through more than one filter, affording an opportunity to compare, contrast, and uncover the coexistence of duplicities within life in a way that pauses breath and ceases a moment. In a way that alters the view forever. In a way that matters most.
I had the honor of interviewing Lee Herrick about his writing processes, his influences, and his works.
A Normal School Interview with Lee Herrick
“Not finding my birth parents nudged me into making peace within myself, sort of a forgiveness of Korea, of the adoption.”
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My Strangest Breakup by Vera Claeys
Vera Claeys is an interdisciplinary creative based in Davis, CA by way of Austin, TX. She has been published in Nasty Magazine, curated a photo exhibit entitled, Golden Doubts, and collaborated on an art installation for Hive Arts Collective in Austin, Texas.
She currently works for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as an event manager. Her zine entitled "Cool, Calm, and Rejected," will be published later this year.
veraclaeys.com
Photo on Foter.com
Safety Dance by Kim Kankiewicz
Cass’s Zapp Attack™ is emblazoned with an orange and red flame design. Carrying it makes her feel like one of Charlie’s Angels. She wishes she’d owned it when the sweaty guy outside the Joslyn Museum groped himself as she walked past. Cass blushed when she described that incident to the women in her Bible study a few days later, ashamed of her helplessness and of the titillation she’d felt alongside her revulsion.
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You Don't Own Me by Joe Bonomo
Infamy is fine. Did you hear the news? John Bonham used a mud shark as a sex toy! Rod the Mod had to have his stomach pumped! Paul is Dead! But when a band gets too famous, literally too big for the room, I resist. My name’s Joe. I’m a fameist.
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Balling by Jerald Walker
A private college in Boston was making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Along with being criticized for its lack of racial diversity, one of its black faculty had filed a discrimination lawsuit, and another had complained to the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. A third had quit. It was rumored that the president, under whose watch these troubles festered, was being forced to resign. And so when I saw their ad for a professor of creative writing, with a specific appeal for applicants of color, I could not believe my good fortune. The college, it seemed to me, like a flowering boll of cotton beneath the hot Georgia sun, was ripe for the picking.
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Unpredictable by Patrick Madden
Each sentence seems its own aphorism, a particle afloat humming in harmony with the others.
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Don’t Talk to Strangers by Bonnie E. Carlson
If someone had asked Jake O’Malley if he was lonely, he’d probably have said no, loneliness being such an unmanly emotion. He just had a lot of time on his hands. After all, he had his dog, Milo, a little gray mutt with curly, wiry hair, his constant companion. No, he never thought he was lonely until he met Zoe in the park.
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Farewell, Cassini, How Far You've Come by Gabriela Denise Frank
Cassini’s impending doom stirred an inexplicable sadness in me. As the broadcast went on, I felt the bitter irony of human gains: here, we create a technological marvel who faithfully increases our knowledge—for two decades, Cassini has delivered images and data of thrilling celestial phenomena to our fingertips—and, in return, we send it on a suicide mission.
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Telway Lament by Andrew Collard
And then one morning, just before the sunlight turns to bees
at my bedroom window, I will see it, through fog—
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A Normal Interview with Jessica Jacobs
“To not include landscape in my poems is like telling only half the story.”
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A Normal Interview with C.G. Hanzlicek
“[W]hen you live with a government run by The Liars’ Club, it can be a comfort to turn to poetry, since poets are only part-time liars.”
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Three Poems by Alessandra Narváez-Varela
When I sit on the toilet, my thighs,/ purple and mold-green, file against / each other, mercilessly. My neck hairs / rise, dandelion-like, aware of her thighs
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Beemoor Romance by John Hearn
The first thing she told me was that she works at Victoria Secret, which I took as a way of saying she’s very sexual, very accepting of all kinds of shenanigans. And that she’s good at sex. That’s how I took it. But at that time she was already pushing seventy or so and I found it hard to picture her liver-spotted hands and bony fingers holding up a black and pink corset, bringing it up to her slightly hunched frame to give a customer a sense of how it would hang, how it would look to the guy she was planning to have sex with next.
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Smallmouth by Justin Hocking
So many things fell into place after that dental exam. The twenty-seven previous years of painful shyness. My trouble pushing words through this tiny oral aperture. Everyone always asking me to speak up. The dentist helped me understand that my social anxiety has a physical component, right here on my face.
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Malus by Geoff Anderson
I find the last crabapple—rotted, not fallen
from the branch but buried up in the leaves.
What has stopped the cankered globe from falling?
By Any Other Name by Carissa Halston
When you were a teenager, you volunteered for an organization in the town where you grew up, a town so small most people called it by the name of the city beside it. The organization raised money for people living with HIV and AIDS. You’ve forgotten the name of the organization, but not the names of the people you met there. Michael. Terry. Anthony. Angel. Always men, even when their names were fluid.
Read MoreCurses by Berry Grass
TNS stands in solidarity with the trans community. As a show of support, we are proud to reprint and celebrate the work of Berry Grass.
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Learning How to be Female by Annie Lampman
As a child of the late 70s and early 80s, I was convinced that glossy “magazine women” were a distinct subspecies of human females who came out of the womb painted like colorful aliens, born complete with purple eyelids, black-lined eyes and thick-coated lashes, bright pink cheeks, and shiny-plump red lips. I studied them for hours, fascinated by their colorful flawlessness compared to the plain imperfection of “normal women.”
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