Justin Quinn Interview
MH: Let’s begin with a question you sometimes seem to balk at by suggesting that your path has evolved by chance and that at times you simply engage with what is at hand. Granted that chance operations—including certain aspects of our lives—become the basis of discovery and choice, nevertheless, will you tell us what sparked …
Dirt Road to Nowhere
Enough was enough. Anevay Jaimson left work early and sped off in her pickup truck, the man’s sly touch still crawling on her skin. The sexual harassment had become a regular occurrence —something she couldn’t ignore. She drove past run-down gas stations and dumpy antique stores, along streets where listless old men stood on corners …
Gray Blob
Emily lay on her bed in underwear and a tank top, her body balanced precariously on the edge of the mattress and her hand suspended above the dusty wooden floor. The room was dark, and the floor was littered with clothes and trash. Emily’s chest felt fragile—her skin like glass, her papier-mâché ribcage shaking with …
I Stack Things, I Tear Things Up
1. By way of introduction I offer as my own an explanation of my artistic methods provided by a student attending a lecture I’d just given about my work. “So,” he paused before asking his question, “your art is tearing stuff up or stacking things?” I paused myself before replying, “well . . . basically …
Who Will Perform the Rites
It has only been three nights since I decided that you didn’t love me enough. Tonight, trenched in silent anger we feign sleep in some alternate universe, some parallel hell where we stare dead-eyed at the same ceiling, the same eggshell white. Laid to rest in separate rooms, I swelter under winter blankets left on …
Artwork
Buzz Spector Interview
MH: You work through multiple media–drawing, painting, the sculptural construction of books and pages, collage, and sometimes end your process with photography. For example, your piece My Fiction begins with a sculptural process and ends in a photographic one. How does the procession of media filter the ideas you wish to convey? Does this metamorphosis …
Poetry
WOOD SONG I remember the world in spring — those few weeks when the blooming trees let go their pollen for the breeze with unexpected force to swing sky-high, multitudes milling round at different speeds of draught and drift so many metres from the ground — a festival, a stunning airlift. Maple, walnut, beech, alder, …
Buzz Spector Bio
Buzz Spector was born in Chicago and was educated at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and then the University of Chicago, where he received the master of fine arts from the Committee of Art and Design. Internationally recognized as an artist and critic, his work has been exhibited in museums throughout the United States and …
How to Keep
“You can’t touch them,” my babysitter warned about the bunnies burrowed in a hole at the corner of our front lawn. I’d see puffs of fuzz float from their home and land soft in the grass as I drew with chalk on the driveway. I’d peer in at the tight-eyed lumps, barely furry hides heaped …
Karyn with a Y
Oh my God, remember that roll of nothing but the crew pretending to be more buzzed than we were from jello shots? No one ever saw those. It was before Facebook. Aw. I miss that. And then the next year we were seniors, and we all had MySpace, and the morning after prom there were, …
There’s No Place Like
I’ve seen a hermit crab make a can of Sprite home, and she seemed happy. Alice Stanley holds a BA in English from Principia College and an MFA in Dramatic Writing from Arizona State University. Her recent play Truth Wars won Chicago Dramatist’s New Play Bake-Off at The Goodman. She currently lives in Chicago performing …
A Late Night Thought
What a dangerous thing a late night thought can be. A late night thought can torment like a leaky faucet, dripping endlessly. Our eyes widen to reality as it slips slowly away from us—our dreams slowly become the newer, richer world. It is stripped and stretched and mangled, the once calm thought. Thinking of an …
Become a Color
in the golden light of dawn rising walk the woods and become a color strip the sinews off your body breathe each molecule bare as the violet breath in your lungs blooms purple algae robin-egg haze grazes the tips of grass a blue sun rises in pulses of …
The Simple Life
Paris & Nicole have perfect manicures and they are milking cows. They look so good. Nails hard as a spell of hail. Doctors recommend daily usage of SPF 40, at least, 60 for extra protection—if things get too bright. Like contemplating a rhinestone. Nicole’s all like oh my god, it’s too hot outside. Palm tree …
Daily Routine
Walking awhile at night Each house got personal. -Jon Anderson Then impersonal again, in the old style of repetition. All the houses with their minor domestic differences. It seemed dishonest somehow to find comfort in them, those gestures: the manicured lawns with expensive sprinkler systems, the …
Justin Quinn Bio
Justin Quinn was born in Dublin in 1968 and received a BA and PhD at Trinity College Dublin. He co-founded the Irish poetry magazine Metre, which ran for seventeen issues from 1995 until 2005. Quinn currently resides in a Soviet-era housing project on the outskirts of Prague in the Czech Republic. He lectures at Charles …
Solitary
I. John’s brother Colin went to jail when he was twenty-three. Colin stole cars and used them to pick up kilos of cocaine from the docks at the edge of town, then drove in to the city to sell. He later told John he would leave the cars somewhere no one would be likely to …
Incantation
I dreamed my father cracked a wishbone over my head and blessed me. The sound like lit match. Anointed with the heart of the carcass. I wondered why he was being so good. Of course in dreams bones shatter like teeth: the two prongs unsinewed, gnostic, meaning it could happen, it can’t not happen. So …