As a boy, my father raised rabbits. “Raised” is a euphemism. The rabbits were meat. When customers wanted stew or fricassee, he slaughtered the rabbits with a hammer to the back of the head so they wouldn’t get scared and taint the succulent flesh with their screams. He did this after months of giving them food, water, a place to sleep, and the occasional pet when his fingers yearned for softness in his life—but no name, never a name. “Livestock aren’t meant to be friends,” he told me. “They exist to be used.”
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On Choosing Ignorance by Kara Vernor
Growing up in a liberal, college town, I frequented the art house theater where I stood in the ticket line alongside college students with labret piercings and grey-haired white couples and what I assumed to be serious environmentalists in thin-rimmed glasses and fleece outerwear.
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Death Toy Therapy by Andrew Gretes
It began like Baywatch: brawny lifeguard to the rescue, CPR, water-vomiting resurrection. One moment, Rachel was dog-paddling. The next moment, she was Lazarus.
Of course, Rachel remembers it differently. One moment, she was bobbing in the water, a stranger’s surfboard gliding dangerously close to her head. The next moment, she was perusing the aisles of a vast toy department, pulling an action figure off a display rack.
Call it what you will. Near-death experience. Misfiring neurons. Low-oxygen shopping.
The action figure looked conspicuously like Rachel: rust-colored hair, pear-shaped body, left foot noticeably longer than the right. Upon closer inspection, it was Rachel. At least, that’s what the lightning bolt label on the packaging read: “Rachel (Weak-Ass) Dudley!”
Weak-Ass was Rachel’s middle school nickname, coined from her habit of toting a seat cushion—an oversized latex donut—for three years as she recovered from a bruised tailbone. Truthfully, Rachel only needed the cushion for a month and a half, but the desks at her middle school were designed with a Paleolithic understanding of ergonomics, and so she milked the cushion until high school.
Inside the vast toy department, a boy approached Rachel and advised her against buying her own action figure. “Ma’am, it’s a rip-off,” the boy said. “You have to buy the ass-cushion separately. Besides, the wind-up nervous breakdown feature is a total bust. She takes two quick breaths and the gears snap.”
Rachel tried to ignore the boy as she read her own product description. Apparently, her action figure was part of the “Plebians of the Universe” set, a group of toys devoted to the most stunted creatures in the cosmos. Her toy came with a “give-up grip!” feature, guaranteed to drop whatever it touched. It also included a keyhole located at heart-level that promised bonus features (such as turning Rachel’s entire action figure inside-out) but which could only be unlocked by an accessory—a soulmate—that was never built due to budget cuts.
*
This was Rachel’s first near-death experience. She was thirty-one years old.
Call it what you will. Revelatory. Objectifying. Disappointing.
So disappointing in fact that Rachel set about transforming herself. She called it “Project Butterfly.” Meditation. Art classes. Exercising her glutes. Her life became an 80’s training montage. Despite her agnosticism, Rachel even sampled confession: “Father, I can’t hyperventilate correctly.”
*
It wasn’t until her late-thirties that Rachel’s curiosity got the better of her. Was her action figure still, well, pathetic? She had to know.
Rachel simulated cardiac arrest by renting a helium tank and taping a plastic bag (an “exit bag”) around her neck, making sure to provide a steady helium flow with a hose slipped under the plastic. According to a do-it-yourself suicide website, the less carbon dioxide the body inhales, the less alarmed it becomes. Rachel’s sister, after much coaxing, was enlisted to monitor Rachel’s breathing. Her job was to tear the bag off her sister’s head once sufficient—but not too sufficient—asphyxiation was induced.
Here’s what happened.
Rachel, once again, found herself inside a vast toy department, pushing a shopping cart, and holding an action figure that was unmistakably herself. “All new!” the packaging read. “Rachel (Post-Larva) Dudley!”
Sure, some of Rachel’s features were familiar. The “give-up grip!” was as yielding as ever. But there were also new features, such as a “turn my life around!” button on Rachel’s forehead which, when pushed, twirled Rachel’s head in a creepy, Exorcist sort of way. Not to mention a new accessory, a plastic bag (sold separately) that fit snugly around Rachel’s head and promised to “promote clarity!”
Again, a boy—the same boy—approached Rachel. He stood in front of her shopping cart and said, “Ma’am, wait a week, and they’ll throw that toy in the discount bin.”
Rachel blushed. She couldn’t help but feel that the discount bin was progress.
*
Rachel went public. She guest-starred on podcasts. She held retreats. She sold customizable plastic bags. Sure, anyone could talk to a shrink, but there was something about seeing your own action figure—mid-asphyxiation—that was positively breathtaking.
Call it what you will. Internet sensation. Therapeutic breakthrough. Near-death fad.
It wasn’t uncommon to find Rachel sitting cross-legged at a mountain resort and coaching her acolytes. “Remember,” she’d say, “friends lie, therapists sugarcoat, but your own action figure, I assure you, is brutally honest. If you don’t like what you see, by all means, do something about it. But above all, ask yourself: if you wouldn’t play with it, who would?”
Andrew Gretes is the author of How to Dispose of Dead Elephants (Sandstone Press, 2014). His fiction has appeared in Witness, Booth, Sycamore Review, and other journals.
Photo on Foter.com
The Man and the Moon by Samantha Edmonds
He knew I’d be too large to pull down all at once, so he decided to take me in pieces. He arrived at the top of the mountain with rope and blade, bags and buckets. This close to me, he realized I was not as expected. I was more. He might need bigger buckets, better bags than the 99-cent Kroger reusables. He was surprised to feel my brightness radiated cold, not hot like light traditionally was, but he found he liked it better. I supposed it soothed the burning in his chest.
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Patricia Smith is an award-winning poet on and off the page – author of eight books of poetry, including Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist, and she’s also a four-time National Poetry Slam champion. But what always remains at the center of her work is the fact that Smith is a storyteller. She’s able to situate and fully immerse readers that we bear witness to the most complicated of circumstances with every fiber of our beings, and this craft is mastered and beautifully exhibited in her newest collection.
Winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award, an NAACP Image award, an LA Times Book Prize, and a finalist for the Pulitzer prize, Incendiary Art has us bear witness to rage, grief, violence, loss, and the fire of resistance through imagery packed with particulars and description and lines that are equally as dense as they are musical, and we always remain aware of our bodies for the adventure that is the collection, feeling such charged emotion from the very first poem all the way through to the end. Smith was available to answer some questions about her award-winning book in advance of her reading at Fresno State on Tuesday, March 5th 2019 in the Alice Peters Auditorium. She responded through email and wrote about the audience for Incendiary Art, the undercurrent of the collection, and her attempts to balance topics both heavy and light.
A Normal Interview with Patricia Smith
“I wanted those gunshots to resound from first page to last”
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Two Poems by Romana Iorga
No one wants to touch the skin
of this poem, its unhatched
enigma. The words sit in rows
like alien pods, oozing deceit.
Argo Navis by Elizabeth Breese
Why call for a group of stars in the shape
of a boat sailing backwards to be broken
up into three parts of a boat sailing
backwards?
Newly released from Anhinga Press, Tina Mozelle Braziel’s full-length poetry collection Known by Salt won the 2017 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, awarded by California State University, Fresno.
A Normal Interview with Tina Mozelle Braziel
The house relates to writing in so many ways for me. A project like this, you can’t think through what it’s going to be like and all the different questions that you’re going to have or all the problems and things that you’re going to have to do. You just have to jump into it, begin working on it, and be willing to improvise and figure things out, learn from people as you go along.
Read MoreWE ARE SO SORRY FOR YOUR LOST by Michelle Peñaloza
We sort the cards at the kitchen table.
Instead of flowers, our people help
the family pay for the funeral.
How to Become the “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” by Mandy Shunnarah
He can’t hear her over the music, so he steps closer, closer, closer, and she steps back, back, back. The frat house rattles and thumps, shaking to the bass. The wall appears behind her and she has nowhere to go. His body looms over her like tunnel arches when he asks what her major is and if she has a boyfriend.
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Rainbow Sugar by Erin Langner
I’m worried we’re too late. Mustangs and Astro vans and stretch SUVs brim over the Peppermill’s parking lot because there’s no such thing as an unbeaten path. It’s already hot enough to feel the asphalt cooking the soles of my cheap-leather, criss-cross sandals as we walk through the double glass doors. But this is our last-chance-weekend escape, our meet-up between the coasts, on the Las Vegas Strip.
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Archangel by Theo Greenblatt
I pinched the bridge of my nose to keep from sneezing as the priest moved past me, swinging his shiny little incense bucket, smoke poofing out on all sides. “They suck up all the oxygen in the place,” my father used to say about priests. But now he was up there in a coffin on wheels at the altar and had no further use for oxygen himself.
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Discovery Kid: Longing for Pig Hearts, Stories, and the “Right” Kind of Knowledge, by Sarah Hoenicke
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
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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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