Introducing Karolina Gajdeczka

Karolina Gajdeczka is a Polish American writer and poet.  She has lived her whole life in the DC Metropolitan area and is now studying English and creative writing at Mount St. Mary’s University.  She has had work previously published in Lighted Corners, where she is currently the editor.  Karolina has been writing poetry for the past several years and began exploring fiction writing in college.  She loves traveling and spending time outdoors hiking, mountain biking or doing yoga.

KAROLINA GAJDECZKA photo by Ethelbert

POET giovanni singleton MAKES HER DEBUT

Poetry Society of America’s Debut Poets Series
https://psa.fcny.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/new_american_poets/giovanni_singleton_selected_byly/

A CONVERSATION WITH giovanni singleton

Joyful Noise: A Conversation with giovanni singleton
http://www.pen.org/blog/?p=3560

INTRODUCING TO THE E GALLERY - giovanni singleton

giovanni singleton photo by Sarah Collins

writer giovanni singleton is a native of Richmond, Virginia, a former debutant, and founding editor of nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a journal committed to experimental work of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces. Her debut collection, Ascension (Counterpath Press, 2012), is informed by the music and life of Alice Coltrane. singleton has recently been selected for the Poetry Society of America’s biennial New American Series, which recognizes recent first book poets. Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon says, "giovanni singleton lets silence do its work. The poems are minimalist, while engaging a concern for the historical, the personal, the spiritual. I hear Lucille Clifton saying 'the human, the human' when I read this." She is a recipient of a New Langton Bay Area Award Show for Literature and her writing has recently appeared in VOLT, Poet Lore, Zen Monster, and is forthcoming in I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women, What I Say: Innovative Poetries by Black Artists in America, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. Work from her AMERICAN LETTERS series was selected for San Francisco’s 1st Visual Poetry & Performance Festival. She has received fellowships from the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Workshop, Napa Valley Writers Conference, Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Writers Workshop, and Cave Canem. singleton has given presentations on writing, editing, graphic design, and publishing at high schools, colleges, and conferences such as the American Literature Association, Series X: Bay Area Women Publishers, and the New York Festival of Literary Magazines. She has received fellowships from the Squaw Valley and Napa Valley Writers Workshops and has served as a guest writer at Cal State Los Angeles, Chabot College, and California College of Arts. Over the past 15 years, she has taught poetry at Saint Mary’s College, Naropa University, and at museums and schools throughout the Bay Area.  She coordinates Lunch Poems, the monthly poetry reading series at UC Berkeley under the direction of Robert Hass. She collects bookmarks and enjoys figs and greek style yogurt.

Me-K AHN ON REVISION

Whenever I'm struggling with the seventh or eighth draft of a story, I'm reminded of Toni Morrison's thoughts about writing being more about the editing than the actual writing. To write is to fall in love with the editing process! And despite how thrilling it is to finish the first draft of an entire story in one sitting, I enjoy the editing and revising the most. This is the stage when the characters can really come alive and lead you to where they want or need to go. Editing and revising can take you to the most unexpected exhilarating places if you don't get in the way and just let the process take over. The worst thing I can do is try to map out the ending before I get there. I need to get out of the way and let the writing do the writing.

Me-K AHN

EXCERPT FROM 6.25 (Yook-i-oh) by Me-K AHN

EXCERPT FROM 6.25 (Yook-i-oh)

  X saw them together. Well, actually, she saw Producer MJ first, naked, all six-feet of him in front of her, blocking the doorway of his apartment. No glasses. Flaccid.

       She’d knocked three times. He never locked the door, so she walked in.

      Had he planned to just stand there behind the closed door until she left?

      Behind the Producer in the bedroom, pale skin glowed on the futon in the grainy darkness. It looked like an Ingres nude, long and elegant. The beauty of it stopped her. She expected to see the nude surrounded by silk and satin tapestry with a bead-encrusted peacock feather duster in hand. It was Jimin. Thinner than she’d imagined. 

      She could hear the echoes of the protest in the distance outside. The President of Korea had just allowed U.S. beef into the market even amid breakouts of Mad Cow disease in Montana. It was 10 p.m. Protesters had come out in record numbers for the all-night candle vigils.

      She couldn’t move, fixed on the creaminess of Jimin’s skin. She wanted to reach out and touch it. As if it might make it easier to leave. She clutched the toothbrush she’d just bought from the 7-11 tightly in her hand.

      “I’ll put some clothes on,” the Producer said.

The line of his waist snaked violent in the darkness. As if his body were transforming. He threw the covers over Jimin who barely stirred.

       X did not wait for the Producer to dress; she ran, out of the warm, grainy frame, into the cool echoes of the riot police, her suspicions confirmed. She finally had a reason to run away. Yet she knew she could only run so far; images of Jimin kept passing before her—Jimin filling MJ’s glass, Jimin at his elbow, Jimin polite, ingratiating in all the right ways.

      In these quaint alleys she once loved, the lingering tear gas from the riot police still stung her nose, though a strange calm had settled for the moment.

      But then MJ grabbed her arm from behind, and everything went red inside her. He was out of breath and stopped them in front of a cobblestone wall. She noticed the contours of his face were more agitated than usual. It was what she usually loved about him, the drama of his face, the lines so bold and assured they etched themselves into her. She stared at the silhouette of his long chin, and saw Jimin that first night they met, making sure MJ had enough dried squid and peanuts with his beer, showing his guests to the bathroom.  

      The Producer pulled her closer. “X, we didn’t do anything,” he said. “We were just sleeping.” His touch was desperate in the way it lingered on her. 

      She jerked away, and saw Jimin again, this time on the floor with that collage in front of her, that shorn hair. “I thought you were on your way back from work,” X said.

      MJ nodded, his black curly hair still disheveled.

      “And ten minutes later you’re in bed with her?” She threw the 7-11 toothbrush down. “Very impressive.”

      “I told you…,” he said. “Go ask Jimin yourself.”

      So X turned back as if she were heading towards the Producer’s apartment. But then turned again to the main street. Away from Jimin. Back towards the burning smell.

ON BORDERS AND ERASURE by Me-K

     If Sappho says, “Desire melts the limbs,” then is it the very desire of my characters that distorts their faces, disturbs the symmetry of their bodies? It is fairly obvious that mobility can be a conduit of desire, that moving in and out of places, crossing borders, is in part a grasping for that which these characters themselves don’t have. But what exactly do the characters want? In Eros the Bittersweet Anne Carson asks, “Whoever desires what is not gone? No one...[for] to be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope”. Is it those spaces in between, the gaps and ruptures between origin and destination in which my characters wish to remain? Or are they grasping and leaning towards something else?

     As I saw my characters moving back and forth not only between geographical borders but psychological borders and boundaries as well, changing their minds on a whim simply because they could, going in and out of relationships, friendships, kinship, I began to see them disappear, render themselves invisible, and it was a self inflicted kind of disappearing act. I saw them start to erase themselves unconsciously. They not only begin to fragment, morph, and distort, but they ultimately disappear. They come to not exist even though of course they still exist. What they gain in one sweep or pass of movement, they lose in another and so forth. They erase themselves metaphysically. 

     In the story “Zelig ca. 2008,” a struggling filmmaker can't decide what girl he wants. As soon as he professes his love to a screenwriter, he leaves her for a starlet, but then keeps seeing the screenwriter, who accuses him of living in his own fantasy world, of erasing himself in his own dissatisfaction, his own indecision. The story begins:

        This is a story about O, a man who was disappearing into the plots of his films, but going about his everyday life anyway. Lately it was love letters, for the first time in his life:

        You're perfect for me.

        We'll build a cocoon and love in it forever.

        Screenwriter X had dumped Director O two months earlier because she claimed he had no beginning and no end. Because he was a mystery that no one could solve.

         Later in the story O says:

         Zelig was a guy who could jump into anyone's skin and just become that person. He was such a natural.

        Zelig was such a chameleon that he didn't exist, X said. He existed as so many different people that he cancelled himself out.

        That makes him even more real to me.

         Because you're living your life in a film, X continued. A film that doesn't

exist. Chasing after starlets that don't exist. It's your own movie playing inside your head. You're disappearing into the scrim of your own script.                  

     I began to attribute the erasure in part to choice. Desire is heightened in our culture, a commodity to cultivate and then exploit, something to prey upon. Everywhere around us, desire is created, nurtured where it didn’t exist before. This kind of planted desire results in a grasping, a restlessness for the astounding array of options available to those with access. Where to live? What country? City? Apartment? House? Where to work? What kind of work? Who to date? Marry? Break up with? Friends? What to eat? Books? Music? Internet? Bars? Restaurants? Trips? And once we get what we desire, once we achieve those desires? How long can these results last? Since we can’t desire that which we have, how long before we are on to the next thing? Desiring, longing, grasping, wanting, needing something else we do not have.

     Too many options can manifest in a certain kind of paralysis, leading to a groundless kind of wandering. No decisions can be made. One wanders from one thing to the other, lost, unable to make important decisions that could ground, unable to stick with something for long enough to connect. In the “Zelig,” after making love to X, O wavers about his new starlet:

               I’ve run out of things to talk about with her, O said. I don’t know what I’m doing.

              You’re being fictional, X said.

              O laughed. And do fictional characters exist? Can I exist if I'm fictional?  If I'm fictional, I can always exist, he continued and smiled. I can always be 26 years old. Like I promised myself.

             The more you talk the less real you become, X said. You’re canceling yourself out!