John Fox

John Matthew Fox joins the blog to share how he came to write “Requiem for a Daughter,” the Editor’s Choice in fiction that will be appearing in Relief 4.1.

I wrote “Requiem for a Daughter” in 2005, or maybe it was earlier, or later.  It depends whether you count the living, the thinking, the drafting, or the revision.  Deborah Eisenberg said that she took eight years to write the eight stories in her collection, “The Twilight of the Superheroes,” and even though I’d like to be faster, there’s a process you can’t rush.

For this story, the tri-part structure of the college, daughter, and student arrived at once, in my first draft, but the rest took more effort.  After I’d had it down for a few years, I rewrote it as a short screenplay, and reimagining it in a different medium helped me better understand the story.

The ending–with the bittersweet dialogue–was influenced by Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Decalogue,” specifically film two in the ten-part series, where a doctor confronts a moral dilemma.  Kieslowski’s last lines shoehorn an enormous amount of emotional complexity into few words.  Of all my influences from film, he’s made the biggest impact–I watch “The Decalogue” and his trilogy “Three Colors” on an annual basis.

In Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More says that God intends for a human person to serve him “wittingly, in the tangle of his mind.” In writing poetry–the tangled interplay of word, image, sound, evocation and association–the mind probes the complexities of the heart in order to create and communicate beauty. For me, the best poem would be a coherent marriage of beautiful images, beautiful words and beautiful ideas. That’s the goal I strive for.

Hiroshima

World War True
pursued its end
in sins of the flash
hydrogenising,
rendering Homo Icarus a skeleton
before his splash.

No matter whether or when
its fire devours you
or wind explodes you
please take the turning
either left or right
into no matter
it is all
unto filmed ruination.

No time to flip coins
hoping the reverse
of the future
comes up.

These facts dissolve the breath
quoted in Genesis 1: –1
in a quadrillionth of a second
when the blind saw the dying
as the phosphorescence
of a smoking white jewel
its silting folds of lightning fog
reflecting whispers of lit faces
the cloud a pearl in the shell
of earth’s verticality of beauty.

Open your eyes
to become blind
part your lips unless
there is time left to sing
words to bear the displaced weight
of what can’t be spoken.

A rising continent of superheated air
shrouded in the jewel
and the accrual of death
steaming the skin of the sea off.

We will make a star
so that the scent of death
reaches, touches every face.

***

Tom Noe is a professional editor and writer whose book publishing credits include: The Sixth Day (for children), Into the Lions’ Den and A Friend in God.His most recent project was the libretto for an opera based on the story of Eros and Psyche from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. He’s currently working on a new play set in a Catholic Worker house of hospitality. His poetry can be found in Relief issue 4.1

Amy Frykholm

Amy Frykholm joins the blog to discuss how she came to write her essay “The Flesh of Strangers.” After, you can read the first few paragraphs from her piece.

I wrote the first draft of this essay more than 15 years ago while I was still living in Estonia. I started a series of stories about my encounters there in a notebook with thick graph paper that a friend’s cat had peed on. I was so frugal in those days that I didn’t think to replace the notebook; I just dried it out. Or maybe that particular stink was stimulating to my creativity. I don’t know.

I wrote and re-wrote the essay for years, trying to figure out what it was about. Should I add a long section on the history of saunas? Should I put it in the broader context of my experience in Estonia? It languished.

Then three things happened in the course of one year. I met Lisa Ohlen Harris, non-fiction editor for Relief, at a conference and heard her read from some of her own work about living in Syria and Jordan. A light bulb of recognition went on. Then, while at Duke University for another conference, I saw an exhibit of Jennette Williams’ photographs taken in bathhouses in Hungary and Turkey. (link to Jennette William’s page; link to my review on the Century website) I felt another “click.” These bodies move me in a powerful way. Finally, I read a book by Varda Polak-Sahm, called The House of Secrets about the Jewish women’s bathing practices.

I began to see that the essay was about the mysterious process by which “I” have come to inhabit my body. Essentially, this is a story about incarnation, about the uneasy relationship between body and spirit. I was able to finish the essay, and I immediately sent it to Lisa, who had been a kind steward of the process. I am so glad that the essay has finally found a home after so many years of wandering. Thanks, Relief!

Here is a teaser from “The Flesh of Strangers”:

The heels of my black boots against the stone and snow of the street pounded out a rhythm. “I exist,” they said.  ”I exist.”  On a Friday afternoon of failing December light, I was a shadow against the fences of the houses in the Kivimäe neighborhood of Tallinn, Esonia.  My boots were smart and sharp.  They made me a taller, more polished version of myself.  But my performance  of crisp heels against cobblestone, the performance of my own existence, was for an audience of one.  No one else was on the street.  I struggled even to hear myself.  ”I exist” was the mantra of my feet, but my mind preferred a less substantive existence, slipping along the back streets in the low light and the slugh of early winter, shade without form, unnoticeable.
Living in a foreign city, I had become increasingly timid.  I wanted to be invisible, a false native, blending in as I skirted the ancient city wall on my way to teach English classes.  When I went to the marketplace, I asked for a kilo of tomatoes first in Estonian and then, if I received a confused look, in Russian.  I hated being noticed, and I hated my fear of being noticed.  All of this pretending was a strain on my existence.  I became less and less sure that I did exist, silent as I so often was, lurking like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man.
On this Friday afternoon, I was on my way to the sauna, a two-story building of crumbling Soviet concrete.  Every Friday, when I finished teaching my last class at the Estonian Academy of Music, I packed a sponge, a change of underwear, shower shoes, and soap in a plastic bag emblazoned with a Miller Lite logo and walked a few blocks to the neighborhood sauna.
In my small flat on the edge of the city, a shower was no easy task.  I had to turn on every spigot in the apartment full blast for forty-five minutes until a little steam would waft toward the ceiling of the red-tiled shower room.  So I undertook the process rarely, preferring to heat a little water on my stove and bathe quickly in the hallway from the shadeless windows.  By Friday, I was dirty.

***

Amy Frykholm is a staff writer for The Christian Century. She is the author of two books: the recently released Julian of Norwich: A Contemplative Biography(Paraclete) and Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America (Oxford). She lives in Leadville, Colorado, the highest incorporated town in the United States.

Jill Bergkamp

Jill Bergkamp writes a post about how she came to create her poems “Sarah,” “Leah,” and “Ruth,” all of which will appear in Relief 4.1.  Her poem “Ruth” is included at the end of this post.

I wrote this set of poems in 2007.  At the time I was very curious about the lives of the Biblical Patriarchs; what I had been taught in Baptist Sunday school compared to what I imagined when I re-examined their stories as an adult woman and mother.  I wrote “Sarah” first, with a different title, “Limits,” and was told in a workshop that it was one of the worst titles anyone had heard – so I kept it in a drawer until a few months ago.

I wrote “Leah” after our family moved to Florida from California.  It was a difficult transition for me, and it comforted me to read about the Biblical patriarchs, how they were nomads and traveled to some desolate places; how they could have imagined God forgot about them.  Leah fascinated me because of how she faithfully kept plugging out children all the while feeling neglected by her husband.  Each child’s name is so telling, at first I had every name in the poem, but ended up only keeping four.

“Ruth” always fascinated me as a child.  She was so loyal to Naomi, and I think there must have been a flannel story about her gleaning in the fields, and then uncovering and lying under Boaz’s feet.  I remember being told the advice Naomi gives her, and it’s amazing to me, how we sat in Baptist church with paper juice cups and graham crackers and learned these nuances about female friendship, power, and seduction.  The focus I remember from the story of Ruth was the love and devotion between the two women, but somehow I intuited there was more to that story about how to survive loss.

Ruth

It doesn’t matter if you loved him,
only that you want to live. A mother,
not your own, hums foreign melodies

whose strange notes keep you awake.
And when the metrics of your heart
are weighted sand she whispers counsel–

lay yourself bare on that threshing floor,
no artifice. Face and hair
are freight enough, you are not

finished. More aching field than widow.
How easy it is not to be dead,
only still, blooming late, eternity is not

the miracle here,
and this is not the last song you know.

***

Jill Bergkamp is a California native who now lives in Florida. A graduate student in Florida Atlantic University’s MFA program in Poetry, Jill now serves as Director of Children’s Ministries at the United Methodist Church of the Palm Beaches, as well as teaching English Composition.  She was the recipient of Relief’s first Editor’s Choice Award, and a Rona-Jaffe Foundation Breadloaf Scholarship.