Monthly Dispatch #5 — September 2023

A letter from the editor[s]:

Returning from the bardo of our summer hiatus, the last month has been an absolute bonanza. Poetry, fiction, non-fiction, interviews, reviews: we’ve run the lot — to say nothing of the new monthly editorial from writer and translator Frank Garrett, and the sprawling, ecstatic Frankenstein’s monster that is our first Cadavre Exquis.

All of which makes writing a “letter from the editors” seem more or less redundant. Why go on about it? The work speaks for itself.

And isn’t that the hope? That beyond the demands of ego and promotion — the necessary hoops through which writers, magazines and presses jump to find an audience, build hype, and get their pieces seen — it will ultimately come down to the words on the page, and that whatever their capacity for charm, charge or meaning — regardless of how one comes across them — they will be attentively received.

Here’s hoping —

The Editor[s]

P.S. If you have any writing that speaks for itself, and can do so without being attached to your name, there are a couple of days left to submit to ANONYMOU[S], a short series to be published later in the year with every piece read, published and promoted anonymously. More details here.

---

CADAVRE EXQUI[S]

“Interminably tangled, the escalators wove themselves into a vast network, a great steel octopode either in conflict with or consoling itself. Heart rising to throat, sinking fast. In ascent and descent, a strange plant flowers and wilts in somnolent depths …”

Contributors: Austin Adams, Name-Of Author, Israel A. Bonilla, Emma Devlin, Frank Garrett, Judson Hamilton, Tomoé Hill, Ben Libman, Adam Moody, Seph Murtagh, Róisín Ní Neachtain, Ryan Ruby, Fernando Sdrigotti, Vik Shirley, Yanina Spizzirri, Alina Ştefănescu, Christina Tudor-Sideri, Addison Zeller, and Isaac Zisman

Experimental Prose & Poetry

Argento Series [excerpt] — Kevin Killian

“Deep red • the submarine blips on the cold surface
in Antarctica • as Mariner’s ship draws near •
frothy surface on the blue wave •
Life is still • so catch as catch can • still evanescent, still”

Kevin Killian (1952-2019) was a San Francisco-based poet, novelist, playwright, and art writer. He is the co-author of Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance, the first biography of the important US poet. With Dodie Bellamy, he coedited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing, 1977–1997. He died in 2019.

Fiction

Red River Valley — Ben Libman

“I’m old in this house the one we shared, old and baffled, liver searing on the stove, and out on the plain the smoking fog in cowlick curls can’t soothe me anymore, didn’t say where he was going or why he just, well he did just and then nothing, only the silence of broad wooden beams wet with the years, and where does a person get the will to do that?”

Ben Libman has published fiction in The London Magazine, 3:AM, and elsewhere. He is the author of The Third Solitude, forthcoming with Dundurn Press in 2025. Twitter: @benlibman

Spelling Test — J.B. Baxter

“The Tutor Arrives

There is a bowl of fruit and a glass of still water arranged neatly on the table for when the tutor arrives. This will continue to be the case for every appointment over the following months and remain something that he carries latently within himself, both absent and familiar, like a sense impression of the back of his head.”

J.B. Baxter is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of the academic monograph Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction (Palgrave), and an editor with the arts magazine Hypocrite Reader. Twitter: @chromakeydream

TODAY, AT THE DUMP, THE WORLD IS IN THE BIN — Andrea Mason

“TODAY, AT THE DUMP, the world is in the bin: a classroom globe, tossed into TV & MONITORS, sits on its head, a round peg in a square crate wanting the hard angles of a TV or a monitor. She has tasked herself to visit her local waste facility once a week for a year. She wants to know about waste. She needs to know the nature of it, and the volume of it, like a storm chaser terrified of storms.”

Andrea Mason is a London-based writer and artist. She is Runner Up in the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize, 2023. Online and journal publications include 3: AM magazine, UEA New Writing, Failed States, Tar Press, Happy Hypocrite and Sublunary Editions. Twitter: @Andrea__Mason

Fob — Joshua Rothes

“Under the deepening brume of a once-splendid drunkenness, I sit under fluttering neon. Neon blushes, they say, because it bears witness exclusively to man’s infelicities. I sit pondering needlessly the case of the sot who stood under a streetlight looking for his keys. I consider this pondering work in that I am not ambivalent toward it—to hold a conviction is, after all, no mean feat.”

Joshua Rothes is a writer, editor and graphic designer. He is the publisher of Sublunary Editions, and, alongside Jacob Siefring, is also responsible for the Empyrean Series. Twitter: @joshuarothes

Essays & Features

The Chief of Birds: A Memoir [excerpt] — Michael Templeton

“A few months after I did my third step, I stood in front of a group to read my answer to their questions as part of the program designed for relapse prevention. We are given about 20-30 questions that are alleged to address our “defects of character.” One of my questions was about my understanding of God. I told the group, “Santa Claus God and Harry Potter spirituality are never going to work for me.””

Michael Templeton is a writer, independent scholar, barista, cook, guitar player, and accidental jack-of-all-trades. The Chief of Birds: A Memoir is out now from Erratum Press. He lives in Cincinnati. Twitter: @Templeton1963

From the Notebooks (2) — Andrew Milward

“On counter-culture. – The mainstream can be brought underground just as the underground can be brought into the mainstream. It is a matter of forgetting, of rediscovery, of context. (16/02/14)”

Andrew Milward is a London-based writer originally from the North East of England. His work on thought, language, art, and the history of philosophy can be found on andrewmilward.net, including From the Notebooks (1).

Interviews

“I wanted something like revenge. To be visible.”: An Interview with Tomoé Hill — Tobias Ryan

“I once wrote something where I said sometimes you meet people and it’s like a voice speaking from the depths of your bones. You may have never known them, but they’re familiar. I find the dead are like that as much as the living. Sometimes you read someone and they’re immediately in your head, the words on the page are more than text. They feel like a conversation that has been going on as long as you can remember.”

Tomoé Hill’s work has appeared in such publications as Socrates on the Beach, Exacting Clam, and The London Magazine, as well as the anthologies We’ll Never Have Paris (Repeater Books), Azimuth (Sonic Art Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University), and Trauma: Essays on Art and Mental Health (Dodo Ink). Twitter: @curiosothegreat

Reviews

An Altar of Stories to Liminal Saints by Rios de la Luz — J. Moufawad-Paul

“I wouldn’t normally care about reading, let alone reviewing, a short story collection. But Rios de la Luz’s An Altar of Stories to Liminal Saints was an exceptional case. I encountered de la Luz’s novella, Itzá, years after it was published and was impressed by the singularity of her voice. When I learned that her next publication was a short story collection, because of my love of her novella my normal antipathy for this medium dissolved in the excitement of reading something from the author who had generated one of the most brilliant literary horror novellas in the past five years.”

Rios de la Luz is a writer/creative living in Oklahoma with her son and her love. An Altar of Stories to Liminal Saints was published by Broken River Books in 2023.

J. Moufawad-Paul lives in Toronto, where he works as a professor of philosophy at York University. He is the author of Continuity and Rupture, Politics In Command, Demarcation and Demystification, and other books.

Frank Garrett

Better Shopping Through Living I: Between Tragedy & Farce — Frank Garrett

“I never met Václav Havel. But during the summer of 2001, while studying political and economic theory in Prague, I was scheduled to meet him. I was there as part of a cohort sponsored by one of the most reactionary right-wing organizations I had ever been affiliated with up to that time …”

Writer and translator Frank Garrett shops in Dallas, Texas, and is essays editor at Minor Literature[s]. His series Better Shopping Through Living will appear monthly. He saw a bunch of dead cows when he looked into Viktor Orbán’s eyes.

From the Vaults

Excerpt: Dead Girls by Selva Almada (tr. Annie McDermott) [04/09/20]

“When I was little, my mother told me the same anecdote several times. It was from when she’d just married my father. They married very young, at sixteen and eighteen, because my mum was pregnant – a pregnancy she lost at six months. They hadn’t been dating long, so they didn’t know each other all that well. Soon after moving in together, while they were eating lunch, they had an argument, some silly teenage spat that ended up getting heated. My father raised one hand as if to slap her. And my mother, not messing around, plunged a fork into his other hand, which was resting on the table. My father never tried to play the big man again.”

Selva Almada is an Argentine writer of poetry, short stories, and novels. Her work has been translated into French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Swedish and Turkish. Dead Girls is her first book to appear in English (being published in collaboration with Graywolf Press, US).

Annie McDermott translates fiction and poetry from Spanish and Portuguese. Her work has appeared in publications including Granta, World Literature Today, Two Lines, Asymptote and Alba.

---

---

Coming in October …

Guy Debord completes the MOMUS Questionnaire, new fiction from Sebastian Castillo, Jared Marcel Pollen, Józef Czechowicz (tr. Frank Garrett), and Carolina Sanín (tr. Fionn Petch), non-fiction from Shannon Frost Greenstein, and Mickaël Corriea (tr. Fionn Petch), and much more …