The OGQ

YOU MUST LOOK!

by Andrew Tonkovich

Friends, colleagues, fellow activists, and writer pals at the Community of Writers have for years cheerfully put up with my proselytizing for, writing about, and otherwise sharing the art, prose, and poetry of a mentor, artist, activist, writer, and university professor whose example, it turns out, I guess I took pretty sincerely. Knowing even just a little about one Harry “Peter” Lawson Carr (1925-1981) perhaps explains the kind of weirdo I am today. Carr was my long-ago teacher at California State University Long Beach and didn’t so much teach as aggressively live, whether via scholarship, creativity, critical thinking or political action.  Born in Pasadena, Carr served in the US Navy, earned a PhD from USC, co-founded the CSULB Comparative Literature Department and, just when I’d sort of adopted him as my mentor, died suddenly at age fifty-five. But if we’ve never met or you don’t know my own writing, I think you’d like to know Peter anyway, whose record of unceasing engagement, creativity, and persistent wonder seems to keep making him friends — despite being dead for forty years.  Some deal. Here’s the cover of what I argue is his best book, Aliso Creek, self-published, with drawings. He lived near Aliso Creek in Laguna Beach. Note the place, the people, and a version of the poet/artist himself.

If you’re in Southern California this fall, I hope you might take in the show I’m co-curating with the excellent Cerritos College Art Gallery Director James MacDevitt, to whom I owe this big break. It’s an opportunity to share exemplary work from among the thousands of drawings, paintings, notebooks, published and unpublished writing I’ve been storing, cataloging, and cherishing for years. I’ll deliver a lecture at the opening, on Monday, October 28, with a PowerPoint featuring hundreds more of the images shared here, followed by an informal docent tour. It’s been hard to choose one to place at the entrance to the gallery, but James and I might pick “The Entry of the Ruling Class into Long Beach, CA,” an obvious if hilarious homage to Belgian painter James Ensor’s “Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889.”

Or maybe we should go with this both politically unshy and ecologically themed piece, which I call “Orange San Onofre,” with lovely naked humans swimming in the Pacific Ocean just offshore of the (now-decommissioned) nuke plant just south of San Clemente.

I love this job.  It’s a labor of love, and I struggle in a child-like state of exuberance at explicating both labor and love. Peter had art, classics, myth, and literary chops. But he was also a bigtime opponent of nuclear power and the US nuclear-military machine, Nixon, Reagan, war, capitalism, golf, smog, smog, and development.  He co-founded the Orange County chapter of the grassroots Alliance for Survival, of which I and thousands were members, attending rallies, concerts, and protests at Diablo Canyon and San Onofre.

Sharing this variety of quick biographical-historical detail is what I’m doing lately, staging not just a show but making decisions on behalf of a story, an artist, a revisionist history. You’d be surprised at how many times I’ve had to explain the once-ubiquitous anti-nuclear and peace movements of the late 1970s and popular anti-Reagan resistance. The art show has become a writerly project for this longtime editor (of three journals just now!) but first-time curator, with responsibilities including helping compose a press release, describing the paintings, summarizing and critiquing the books, contributing a short essay to the catalog, trying to be thoughtful in interviews, querying editors about possible commentaries or coverage, not to mention making up titles (as above!), scanning work, and creating a database of the material.

This tiny illustration cracks me up every time.  It’s mean, sure, an easy send-up of everyday modern tourist alienation from Nature. The humans are trapped in a tram (maybe like the cable car in Olympic Valley) or on a train or in a bus.  But it’s also a sincere, genuine invitation, right?  To be surprised, to embrace wonder?

So, here’s what I’m learning about writing and curation and biography and history and, yes, myself. Los Angeles Times columnist and my former OC Weekly editor Gustavo Arellano (A People’s Guide to Orange County) recently began his post-performance lecture at the Mark Taper Forum by admitting that before signing on as dramaturg for that legendary theater’s staged reading of The Trial of the Catonsville 9, he hadn’t even known the meaning of the word.

Dramaturg (or dramaturge): “a literary adviser or editor in a theatre, opera, or film company who researches, selects, adapts, edits, and interprets scripts, libretti, texts, and printed programs (or helps others with these tasks), consults authors, and does public relations work.”

Watercolors

by Janet Fitch

HOW TO WRITE ALTERNATING PAST AND PRESENT CHAPTERS

by Shi Naseer

POEM

by Hermelinda Hernandez Monjaras

Hermelinda Hernandez Monjaras, an undocumented poet of Zapotecan descent from Oaxaca, Mexico, is a 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow. Raised in Fresno, California, she holds an MFA in creative writing. She has also participated in Juan Felipe Herrera’s Laureate Lab Visual Wordist Studio and received a Community of Writers fellowship.

REUNION

by Max Byrd

1

The first one he saw stepped out of the subway car two doors ahead and started for the stairs.

It was the 59^th Street stop, 8:15 in the morning, and the stairway as Cushing looked up at it was a churning mob of shoulders and hats.  The stranger fell in and began climbing the steps with the hectic weariness of all New Yorkers, not in the least conspicuous—average height, gray hair curling over his collar, shoulders slumped a little in what used to be called a scholar’s stoop.  He wore a tan raincoat, one of those vintage coats before microfiber came in, a London Fog with the pretentious epaulettes.  Cushing hadn’t seen one in years, nor had he seen an old blue and white Pan American bag like the one in the stranger’s left hand.

Where on earth had he dug that up?  eBay probably, Cushing thought casually, hanging back, not yet understanding.  Then as he watched, halfway up the stairs the tan raincoat began to fade and grow pale, the color of water.  The gray hair flickered to near transparency.  In mid-swing the Pan Am bag simply vanished, then the hand, the sleeve, the whole man vanished, as if someone had slowly raised a window curtain and let in light.

At the top of the stairs Cushing stood and looked left, right.  The mob boiled up around him like a geyser.  He was bumped, pushed, elbowed aside by all too solid flesh.  He let himself be carried out of the current while he squinted hard at the sky—squinting seemed to help his memory these days—and tried to remember the pills he had taken at the hotel that morning, the blood pressure, the cholesterol, the anti-trembling one, the eyesight one, two or three others.  At his age, he liked to joke, he just walked into the drugstore and said, “I’ll take one of everything.”  Clearly, he had forgotten something, he thought, or mixed them up.  He shook his head to clear it.

The visit to his cousin went as well as could be expected.  She was four years younger than Cushing but had gone through more pain.  Bedridden now, tended by a Puerto Rican nurse who watched him narrowly and looked as if she would count the spoons after he left.  The cousin had done something in show business, administration or production, and still lived in a nice apartment close enough, she said, to smell Broadway.  They talked about his flight in from Phoenix the night before, then an old family friend named Chew, who had died.  When they were children, they had thought Chew was Chinese because of his name, but he was really a good old boy from Memphis with two violent felonies in his record.

At the Amtrak station Cushing found that he was early—well, he was always early, all his life—and the platform for Boston was nearly empty, a good change from the crush of the streets.  At the far end of the platform a bum, as they used to call them, or a tramp or a hobo, stood leaning against a filthy wall.  A poster for a circus was plastered behind him.  As a boy Cushing had worked two weeks one summer for a circus passing through his little town, so maybe he had been in show business too.  When he drew closer, he saw that the tramp was wearing an Army fatigue jacket and torn jeans.  One knee poked out of the jeans like a knobby moon.   He had stringy long hair and a dark green baseball cap with the insignia of an Army regiment.  This was the second one.

“Vietnam,” the tramp said, “’sixty-seven and sixty-fucking eight,” and Cushing nodded.  The man’s face looked strangely familiar.

“You go too?  You look the right age, dude.”

Cushing shook his head.  “No. Sorry.”  And wondered why he had said Sorry.  No, he knew why.

“We could have been war buddies,” the tramp said in an unreadable voice, and now Cushing saw that there was a mad look in his eyes.  “Rice paddy buddies, popping anything that moved.  Anything yellow that moved.  Yellow blood everywhere.  And the dope, man.  Never had such good dope.” He spat on the platform pavement, a big unhealthy-looking blob of green mucus.  He fumbled in his windbreaker and came out with a squashed pack of Winstons and Cushing was surprised because he didn’t think they made Winston cigarettes anymore.  The tramp lit one with a practiced snap of thumb on match and blew smoke up at the “No Smoking” sign next to the circus poster.

“You could have been right in it wit’ me,” the tramp said, still in that unreadable voice that could have been sad or angry or simply thoughtful, musing.  “But you took off somewhere else, like college or Canada, am I right?  And I went off and got shot instead for my country, man, right in the kidney. I still don’t pee right. Then while I was laying there a Viet Cong stabbed me in the butt with a bayonet, see if I might be alive.  But I wasn’t movin’, right then I wasn’t alive.  You should have been there, man.”

Cushing was looking down the tracks.  He didn’t want to look at the tramp with the Army cap and the dirty clothes and the hole in his pants.  He felt in his pocket for his wallet.  Ten dollars, he thought.  No, twenty, the man had to eat.

But when he looked up again, the platform was empty, the tramp was gone, Cushing’s train was rocking on the tracks, coming into the station backward, as trains did nowadays.

2

The first event of the Reunion was held at a classmate’s house on the North Shore, not far from Plum Island, which indeed you could just about see from the highest part of the classmate’s lawn.  Standing alone as he often did at parties, Cushing shivered in the afternoon sun. He was still brooding about the two vanished figures, hands trembling a little, though he was sure he had taken the right pill.  To distract himself he tried to remember what Plum Island was like.  He remembered that he had gone there once with a girl from Dedham.  He remembered that the name came from the wild plum bushes near the beach and that the sand often changed colors over a day, from white to tan to plum (of course).  What had happened to that girl?  What life was she living now? Plum Island had been on maps since 1614.  He blinked and thought people don’t appear and disappear like ghosts.

“I heard a funny one.”  This was another classmate named—thank God for name tags—Grier, who had wandered over from the bar at the other end of the lawn, near the house.  “You know the three ages of man?”

Cushing smiled and shook his head.

“Youth, middle age, and ‘You’re looking good!’”  Grier grinned and Cushing flinched at the obligatory punch on the shoulder.  Despite his delicate name, Grier had played on the football team and the year after graduation finagled a tryout with the Cincinnati Bengals, which he failed.  Cushing hadn’t done any sports.   Grier’s punch had hurt, Grier’s handshake was firm.  No ghost. Cushing decided to risk another whiskey sour, the preferred drink of his college years, which he would order to impress girls from Wellesley, who were not usually impressed enough.

The bar was just a long utility table, tended by undergraduates wearing blue and white vests, the college colors.  Cushing chose the corner by the clay tennis court—the classmate had done very well—and was turning away with his whiskey sour when a woman took his arm and pressed it against the side of her breast.  “Brenda” or “Linda”—her nametag seemed to blur.

“Jimmy Cushing! You haven’t come to one of these for years.  I hoped you’d be here!  I wanted you to be here!”

She had the yellowy breath of a white wine drinker and she pulled Cushing even closer, as if to show that the breast press was not a mistake. People noticed, some snickered.  She leaned in for what Cushing’s show business cousin would have called a ‘smackeroo,’ and Cushing, who was not without humor, smiled at Grier watching nearby, and told her, “You’re looking good!”

“I’m very drunk,” Brenda said (he had decided on Brenda) and pulled him toward a bench beside the tennis court.  “Tell me everything,” Brenda said.  “I want to hear everything!  Where do you live now?  Are you still married? Oh, right, divorced, I knew that, ‘Mr. Bachelor Man.’  Well, I’m a mess, God, Jimmy, I want to hear everything.  Don’t you wish we could go off and talk all night?”

She was still pressing his arm against her breast, her left breast, and classmates were staring.  She pressed it harder, up and down.  I’m getting to second base at my goddam college reunion, Cushing thought.  “Do you remember when we dated?” Brenda said, although now he was beginning to think her name was Amanda.  “And I wouldn’t let you do it?”

“I don’t think—” Cushing began.

Brenda spilled a little white wine on her dress and leaned over unsteadily to kiss him on the cheek again.  “We should have stayed together,” she said. “We would have been so good together.  You were always the smart one, smarter than Lyman was, that prick.  Remember how we used to go into Boston for plays and we talked about how you’d go to law school and we’d live in Brookline, in a jolly corner.  Jimmy, I wish we could start over, I wish we could have lived in Brookline.  ‘Of all sad words,’” she recited mournfully, “something, something, it might have been.’”

There was more about their not doing it, and Cushing nodded and drank his whiskey sour and thought, I don’t remember any of this.  We never dated.  We never went to Boston or talked about Brookline.  She went out with Lyman Hobbes, who was a math whiz, and they got married after graduation.  I barely knew her.  I would remember her boobs, he thought.  I have a good memory for boobs.

This made him chuckle and he stood up to go to the bar again.  When he came back with his third whiskey sour, he didn’t see her right away and despite the alcohol his face went cold with fear.  Another one?  Why were people disappearing?

Then he picked her out over at the end of the lawn, talking to someone else.   He should stop drinking, he thought.  But even as he watched,  Brenda-Amanda began to grow hazy, indistinct, though maybe that was just the sea mist blowing in from Plum Island.  He should at least cut back, he thought.  But he took another swallow and thought that a better question was why were people appearing?  He didn’t believe in ghosts.  Nobody believed in ghosts.

The dinner was on the lawn.  Four long tables with white cloths, set up for twenty at a time, under strings of colored lights—theirs was a small college; eighty was a good turnout.  The Committee had ordered roast beef for the carnivores and huge salads for the vegetarians.  Cushing got the salad by mistake, but it didn’t matter.  He switched to Sam Adams beer and listened to shrieks of laughter and the jokes and the high-pitched questions buzzing up and down the table, and eventually they came round to him.  Yes, he still lived in Arizona.  Yes, he still taught American history in high school.  No, nobody since his divorce.  Yes, ten years was a long time.  His son lived in Taiwan, doing tech stuff.  No, he didn’t see him that much.  Arizona was fine; the summers weren’t really that hot.

“We all thought you’d be a lawyer.”  An owlish classmate named Henry leaned across the table, all eyebrows and elbows.  Henry sold real estate in Poughkeepsie.  “Or some kind of judge.”

“He got the best grades,” Cushing’s neighbor told the table with a hint of disapproval in his voice.  This neighbor was an orthopedic surgeon. “Best grades in the class,” he repeated, “our Jimmy.  He wrote the Class Ode.”

“Class ‘Odor,’” a Roast Beef snickered.

“I thought you’d live in New York and be a professor or a writer.”  This was bleached-out Linette, pale as air.  She had dated one of his roommates but always looked in a certain way at Cushing.

“He was a total grind,” Henry informed his wife, who was picking at her salad, bored.  “He practically haunted the goddamn library.”  Then earnestly, “You should have played football, Jimmy.”

Cushing stared down at the table.  His eyes filled with tears.  “You should have been a lawyer,” somebody said.  Why would they tell him this, he thought, when it was too late?  He made a sudden violent motion like someone beating away a swarm of insects.  Then a woman’s voice.  “Leave him alone, you!”

3

The next morning, he skipped the panels and symposia and ceremonies for the graduating seniors and the reunion classes.  By the time he pulled into the parking lot next to the gym, it was already afternoon and the sea mist had returned, prowling farther inland than yesterday, brushing its fingers against the leaves of the ash trees lining the paths, whispering against the classroom windows.

Cushing wandered for a time, enjoying the crowd, the spectacle of flags and pennants and big blue and white banners draped everywhere.  The biggest banner hung over the library steps and announced the Senior Theme in great blue letters: “POSSIBILITIES.” Just before six, as people were starting for their various dinners, the football band burst onto the college quad and started to high step chaotically among the seniors and their parents, blaring school fight songs as the mood struck.

From the steps of the History Building, he watched the band form a long blue snake (with white plumes on their hats), followed by exuberant new graduates cheering to a wildly disordered version of the “Bunny Hop.”  In the doorway an older man, obviously a professor, stood with his briefcase in hand watching.  “Hell of a lot of noise,” he said.

“I think I took your class, sir,” Cushing said. “Nineteenth-Century American history.”

“You think?”

“No, no, I did take it.”

The professor glanced at Cushing’s name tag.  “Don’t remember you,” he said.  “Was I any good?”  Then without waiting for an answer.  “Never mind.”

The bunny-hopping crowd curled around the end of the quad and lurched toward one of the arching gates that led to the dormitories.  “Possibilities,” the professor said. “Look at them, possibilities-–kids marching off to be bankers, actors, doctors, everything possible.  You know, during the Civil War, Grant would sometimes watch his troops go by and wonder what would happen if somebody could put a ribbon on the caps of the ones who were going to die that day.  What if—”

“Realtors,” Cushing interrupted.  “Judges, orthopedic surgeons, veterans, bums.”   The professor raised an eyebrow.  “School teachers,” Cushing said to his own immense surprise.  For a long moment neither man spoke.

“You know why I teach history?” the professor asked quietly.

Cushing didn’t care.  He listened to the invisible band, marching away, leaving all possibilities behind.

“That way, you lead more lives than one,” the professor said.

Cushing said nothing. As he expected, the professor had vanished. Now the music faded, too, the college fell empty.  He found a bench and sat down while the ghosts swam slowly toward him, floating out of the silver-gray sea mist, a thousand mirrors, a thousand vanishing faces.  Wayward and flickering existences, petals on a wet bough, dissolving and dwindling, closing to a single point.  Leave him alone, you.

ABOLITIONISTA! TRIBUTE

by Steve Sosuyev

Thomas Estler—1997 Fiction participant and Community of Writers volunteer for many years—was honored in October with the 2023 Motif Lifetime Achievement Award, in recognition of his Abolitionista books and workshops—devoted to the abolition of the secretive slavery that is the sexual trafficking of children.

When a colleague succeeds spectacularly, such as by winning a globally recognized lifetime achievement award—in this case, the World’s Highest Honor for Child Advocacy—we might be tempted to say, “I’m so proud of you.” And we catch ourselves. What have I done to be so proud of? At most, I have the right to say “I’m so pleased for you.” Well, when Thomas and I discussed this on the afternoon before the Awards Ceremony, walking to Carnegie Hall with our freshly pressed tuxedos on hangers, he reminded me that, in 2010, when he first told me of his idea for a comic book about human trafficking, I encouraged him and asked lots of skeptical questions—which, he assures me, helped him realize his vision for a comic book, in Japanese Manga format, enormously popular with American kids, that would engage young people with a suspenseful story while educating them to protect themselves and their friends.

And I did design and edit the first Abolitionista! book in 2010, and the second in 2012, and the third and the fourth—well, I jumped on board, but Thomas was the one with the vision, and I was the one with software for fashioning books.

Thomas received his award after all of the other honorees on that October evening. Among the many illustrious recipients he gave, by far, in this reporter’s opinion, the most passionate speech—spontaneous, energetic, and personal, rendered without notes or pauses. Thomas focused on protecting children, and revealed new challenges arising today because of sophisticated technology that allows perpetrators to recruit youngsters into the pornography industry a few blocks from their homes, lured into activities that they isolate them and sometimes lead them to suicide.

No one in the evening’s program had acknowledged the New Jersey Youth Orchestra, who played throughout the ceremony. Before concluding his remarks, Thomas took a moment to thank these musicians; he had learned the conductor’s name, and he introduced her. The audience went nuts because we had been wondering, Who are those marvelous musicians?

For several years, Thomas has served as the Director of Education and Creative Projects for Saving Jane, Inc., a New York nonprofit that enlisted him after they saw his first book. He has become a guiding light for survivors, with the popular workshops that he conducts in the New York City public schools.

Hosting the Carnegie Hall ceremony was Matt Vogel, a seven-time Emmy-Award winner and celebrated Sesame Street Muppet performer, widely recognized for his iconic role as Big Bird. Among the ten honorees at the Carnegie Hall event were Dr. James R. Downing, the CEO and President of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and Amina J. Mohammed, the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations and Chair of the United Nations Sustainable Development Group.

Past recipients of Motif Awards have included Dr. Lloyd Morrisett, the Founder of Sesame Street, and Gene Wilder, who accepted the 2013 Motif Global Humanitarian Medal of Honor in memoriam of Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel.

The Motif Awards is committed to the universal ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the fulfillment of the Millennium Development Goals, Education for All, and many other causes supporting the education and well-being of children. Motif Awards holds consultative status with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Steve Susoyev is a graduate of UCLA Law School and has written extensively for the legal community on the child-custody rights of gay and lesbian parents and other human rights issues. His reviews and articles have recently appeared in the Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide and The White Crane Journal. In 2007 his imprint, Moving Finger Press, released his Return to the Caffe Cino, an anthology of revolutionary off-off Broadway plays that won that year’s Lambda Literary Foundation book award for drama.

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EISENBERG MOMENTS

by Eugenie Montague

What do you read for? This is a question I first asked a student who had signed up for a course on creative writing but found themselves intimidated when time came to write an actual story. As so often happens, trying to articulate something useful to a student turned out to be rather clarifying for me—and hopefully the student. Like most people, I read for many things, but I have found this to be a productive question over the years, both inside and outside of a classroom. Do I read for plot? Or character? Or language? To experience surprise? To inhabit a new world? To feel invested? To feel seen? To see others, or to see the world? Is one element more important than another? Would I forgive a lack of one for a surfeit of the other? Does it depend on the book, or my mood? Fill in the blank: I would follow a book anywhere as long as____________.

In that class long ago, as an example of what a person might read for, I explained that I read, in large part, for the Eisenberg moments. Sure, I get sucked into plots; I fall in love with characters; I love structure and I have a running list of sentences so beautiful I want to get them tattooed on my body—but a large part of what I read for are the moments in a book where I feel like I have never read a truer sentence and, just for a moment, the world or something in it comes into brilliant, destabilizing focus.

I call them Eisenberg moments because of a line from Deborah Eisenberg’s A Lesson in Traveling Light. A young woman is going on a road trip with her boyfriend, though she knows at some level she has already lost him. They stay with some of his old friends and, when she meets the girlfriend of the other couple, she describes her this way: “Natalie must have been just about my age, but there might be an infinite number of ways to be twenty….” That line stopped me in my tracks when I first read it; the fog cleared; I saw into the dark spaces. Turns out, Eisenberg spoke about coming across moments like these in books: “You know how it feels when you read something that opens up a little sealed envelope in your brain. It’s a letter from yourself, but it’s been delivered by somebody else, a writer.”  To me, reading these sentences or phrases or paragraphs feels like the world shifting, but (unsurprisingly) I think Eisenberg’s description is better: It’s happening inside me; I’ve been changed, my mind is altered.

I think the temporal element of the Eisenberg moment is important too. These are lines that make me pause. Sometimes, I pause simply to savor the experience of breaking the seal on that envelope. But sometimes the defamiliarizing elements of these sentences or phrases are causing reverberations that I have to sit with, allow to play out.

An Eisenberg moment can be a physical description of a character, like this from Brad Watson: “He could’ve been somebody I knew, maybe somebody I’d gone to school with, his face just now starting to beef out under the jaw with his wife’s cooking, and his eyes more tired than hard or cold but looking as if they didn’t have a whole lot of humor left in them.” Or a physical description of what it feels like to hear music, by Cristina Rivera Garza: “Their spines responding first, almost subconsciously, to the beat, and only after to the melody.”

Or it might be a description of a more nebulous emotion, like this from Alexander Chee: “Envy is like, the skin you’re in burns. And the salve is someone else’s skin.” Or this from Rosa Alcalá: “You lived with the body. There was no room for the book. You lived with the book, and the body broke a window trying to get in.”

It can be a seemingly offhand thing a character says that brings them into almost painful relief (and with them, others, the world). From Michael Bible: “Also, it seems strange to say it, but that was the first time I remember anyone telling me they were sorry.” Or a few lines of laugh-out-loud dialogue that bring the same painful clarity to the place we live in, as done by Kathy Acker:

‘Listen. This city’s about to collapse. The planet-country-empires are destroying New York (us): they’re sending Z-bombs to attack our intestines and hearts, heart attacks; they’re causing the huge pathways of the city like giant snakes to turn on themselves, make people go crazy on the streets, make people have to take increasing dosages of speed-junk, make people murder, sexually assault.”

“It’s just some guys have too much money.”’

An Eisenberg moment can be only a few words, like this fragment of two lines from Morgan Parker: “Blurry/ princess, self-narrating.” Or almost half a page as this description from Anuk Arudpragasam’s protagonist about what it felt like to sit and talk with his friends before the war:

“What they spoke about at such times he could no longer say, but there were moments, Dinesh could remember, when their conversations would begin to slow down, when everything they said would seem to circle around some strangely intangible object, around a place or thing they could sense in the vicinity even if it couldn’t be seen. All their questions, answers, pauses, and responses, all their additions, hesitations and elaborations, each and every utterance they made at such times felt like a delicate attempt to move closer to this object, so that tentatively, intuitively, stopping and starting, their conversation would seem to spiral around this sensed but unseen place or thing, drawing closer and closer to it, moving more carefully and more nervously as smaller and smaller circles were drawn round it, till finally, with much apprehension, each of them fully absorbed in what was going on, something was said that could not possibly get nearer to what they sought. When such a point was reached they were able to sense it almost instinctively, even if they couldn’t see or touch what they had found, as though what they had been searching for all along was not so much a place or a thing as a mood, a mood which had been obscurely understood from the very beginning as a means by which they could come together, by which they might move out of their own separate worlds, onto a plane in which they could recognize and understand each other fully for a brief time.”

I could go on for ages with examples, of course; I have books where almost every page is dog-eared or underlined. But I’ll end with an Eisenberg moment that encapsulates what it feels like when I read an Eisenberg moment, this one by William Trevor: “Rain has sweetened the breathless air, the angel comes mysteriously also.”[1]

[1] Brad Watson, Dying for Dolly (There is Happiness: New and Selected Stories); Cristina Rivera Garza (translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana), The Taiga Syndrome; Rosa Alcalá, You, the Body & the Book) (You); Alexander Chee, Edinburgh; Michael Bible, The Ancient Hours; Kathy Acker, Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective; Morgan Parker Black Woman with Chicken, (There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé); Anuk Arudpragasam, The Story of a Brief Marriage; William Trevor, After Rain (After Rain)

Eugenie Montague received her MFA in fiction from the University of California, Irvine. Her short fiction has been published by NPR, Mid-American Review, Faultline, Fiction Southeast, Amazon and Flash Friday, a flash-fiction series from Tin House and the Guardian Books Network, and was selected by Amy Hempel for The Best Small Fictions (2017). She currently lives in El Paso, Texas with her family. Her debut novel, Swallow the Ghost, was published by Mulholland Books in August 2024.

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