My first time in Miami is tiny cups of sweet Cuban cortadito; and going to the Miami Open with my husband to join the crowds cheering for Carlos “Carlitos” Alcaraz, the Spanish teenage sensation and World #1; and rainy…
On the settee, and smoking, Susan Dunn watches out the glass door to the yard, where one squirrel rapes another. She feels no need to stop it, hasn’t creased a brow or pursed a lip, and goes on smoking…
Prince tipped extravagantly. He’d leave $100 bills tucked under the ketchup. He did not condescend, but would wiggle his little fanny all the way out the door. The limos gobbled him up and deposited him at Paisley Park. Lavender…
1997 James James steadied the table as Augie reached into the hazy air to disarm the smoke detector. The hem of Augie’s new sweatshirt lifted away from his stomach, and James glimpsed his hip bones, the bumps of his…
CH1 Grandpa Choi once sat me down and said, you’ve got a face that begs to study. “Jang Mi-in, you’ve got a face that needs education.” Needs. There wasn’t wiggle room in his vernacular. I knew what he meant;…
By Khushi Daryani • “Only in America do you have the luxury of being depressed,” claims Ruifang from Ling Ma’s Severance (Ma, 226). A recently resurfaced novel due to its uncanny similarity to the global pandemic, it contains several…
At dusk the light goes diffuse, like slow motion, like simple. The backyard trees are velvet; cirrus swift brushstrokes make the sky seem safe. The railroad rattling through the front yard slows too, whistle filtered through the gloaming until…
I was ten when I discovered I had a womb. It bloomed red. The same year I learned about space. Booster rockets to escape gravity, separated and lost forever. My mother bagged items in a grocery store, Mary, an…
By Heidi Czerwiec • I come late to creative nonfiction, after decades of writing and training and teaching and researching as a poet. While I feel I’m still playing catch-up with the standards of nonfiction craft, what I bring…
Week of April 4, 2020 I swallowed most of a fly today at Spring Creek Park. It swept past my lips, then lodged itself into the back of my throat, launching a series of gagging coughs. A family of…
“un/synced” began as an exercise for a writing workshop—a last-minute couple of scenes that I threw onto the page an hour before deadline. It was our second week of shelter-in-place, my husband had been sick in bed for days and we were awaiting the results of his COVID test. I was in a kind of fog state, but still trying to minimally meet my commitments (care for my husband at a distance; shift client meetings to Zoom; convince my parents to steer clear of grocery stores; feed kids; turn something, anything really, in for my writing assignment).
In class at The Writers Studio, we had been reading Renata Adler’s Speedboat and I was drawn to the way her narrator’s fragmented observations unsettled me. It mirrored how I was feeling as the pandemic unfolded. At the same time, I was reading Jenny Offill’s Department of Speculation. Offill’s series of wry, sometimes tender, prose poems filled me with longing. Over the course of the novel, they intertwined and layered to depict a rich story of an artist, a mother, a marriage, a family. I felt buoyed, as if I were reading my way into a connected, larger whole.
I wanted to experiment with these techniques. What might I unlock by letting go of a need to explain? By allowing the story to exist in the white space between the words? By juxtaposing prose fragments and letting the way they sit next to one another on the page speak for itself?
Writing this piece became a container for me to attune to and make sense of the pandemic as it unfolded in my environment (my environment being my living room, my backyard, Zoom meetings, phone calls). The “un/synced” narrator began to show up in my journal with her fragmented observations—sometimes wry, often filled with longing.
But it would be months before a connected, larger whole would begin to emerge. It wasn’t until I noticed that the characters I’d written were each working hard to manage their isolation, that I recognized what the story was about. I had to narrow the focus. I made myself deemphasize a theme of frantic self-improvement, dropping beloved fragments about a Zoom birdwatching workshop, a backyard exercise band workout, a meditation class that resulted in a sprained ankle. I merged what had been multiple characters and allowed attention to rest on the narrator. With fewer characters competing on the page, her relationships with her husband, with her friend, with her body felt richer and more nuanced. (Her relationship with her headphones was already fully realized.) What is left, I hope, in the words on the page and in the white space between them, is a character navigating connection and disconnection in an uncertain world.
LISA BASS lives, works, and writes at home with her family in California. Her writing has appeared in jmww. She studies at The Writers Studio.
