Tag Archives: Laura Madeline Wiseman

Issue #18 – Historical (Re)Tell

He says, “She spoke at Chautauquas while her stepchildren sang and danced. She was married to William Albert Wiseman, your great-great-great-grandfather. The one who founded the Methodist Church on Crocker by Woodland Cemetery. You know where that is, Laura.” Read the full Guest Editor’s Letter.

Cover Historical (Re)Tell

 Guest Editor’s Spotlight: The Hired Man by KateLynn Hibbard

Joshua Trees by Susana H. Case

Jazz Fusion Bolero by Sophie Jupillat

Remembering Hugo by Deanna Northrup

Carolina Wren by Joshua Allen Aiken

Freud Looks At a Picture of His Mother by July Westhale

(Re)Dreaming by Iryna Lialko

My Standardized Home by Terry Barr

The Lunatic Ball & Other Poems by Margo Taft Stever

Laura Madeline Wiseman Interviews Margo Taft Stever

Shards by Laura Yevchak

The Dinner by Ron Burch

Scheherazade by James Gallant

Bathing Caps Required by Timothy Gerken

Rachel Nix Interviews Kelly Boyker of Menacing Hedge

Laura Madeline WisemanLaura Madeline Wiseman is the author of twenty books and chapbooks and the editor of Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence. Her collaborative book Intimates and Fools is an Honor Book for the 2015 Nebraska Book Award. Her book Queen of the Platform explores the life of the suffragist, lecturer, and poet Matilda Fletcher Wiseman. Her critical reviews have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Calyx, and The Iowa Review. She teaches poetry in the Writing for the Schools Program and in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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Interview with Guest Editor Laura Madeline Wiseman

Yonder SmRaquel Thorne: In Queen of the Platform you told the story of you great-great-grandmother, Matilda Fletcher Wiseman, a suffragist lecturer. Why do you think it’s important for us to retell stories?

mugshot2014 madelineLaura Madeline Wiseman: To write Queen of the Platform, I began a journey in which I researched a suffragist and lecturer, Matilda Fletcher Wiseman, who was also my great-great-grandmother, a woman about which very little was written. The family members who introduced me to her said only that, “She spoke at Chautauquas while her stepchildren sang and danced.” They knew little about Matilda, but one of them allowed me to borrow the scrapbook Matilda kept for the first five years of her career. In this scrapbook she pasted announcements of her talks, her essays that were published in the Iowa State Register (later renamed The Des Moines Register in 1903) and excerpts from her poems and lectures that were reprinted in newspapers. The more I researched her, the more I wanted to know, primarily because I had never known that a woman in my family spoke to support herself and her family in a time when women were not the primary breadwinners. In 1869 at the age of twenty-six she started speaking, beginning a forty-year career on the lecture-circuit, authoring several books, and inventing. She patented her design for a travel trunk that rolled, one that would enable women travelers like herself to move such a heavy object with ease. This research and writing gave me new insight into the lives of female ancestors, as well as women like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, women who Matilda joined on stage. I had to tell Matilda’s story, because I had to know Matilda’s story myself. The story told in Queen of the Platform is not the only possible story to tell about Matilda’s life, which I one of the reasons why I find retellings so proactive and necessary. Writers have the opportunity recreate the historical past, especially retellings that might be missing from the historical record. For example, I just started reading Sue Monk Kidd’s The Invention of Wings, a retelling about the life of Sarah Grimke. I read about Sarah Grimke in college in a women’s studies class on the history of women’s suffrage. I find reading a novel inspired by such a world exciting because it complicates and expands what I know.

Raquel Thorne: In Some Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience you recast Bluebeard. Why was it important for you to reframe Bluebeard from a bloody monster to the object of his wives’ love and desire? For me, it’s lines like “You’re dangerous, I say, to those you marry” that devictimize these women. They become active participants.

Laura Madeline Wiseman: My book Some Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience grew out of my work with Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence. By the time I started researching what would become WWR—a task that took seven years to complete—I already had intimate experience working with survivors and resistors of gender violence. As an undergraduate at Iowa State University, I first volunteered in a women’s crisis shelter and participated in events like Take Back the Night. I continued this volunteer work as I completed an MA in women’s studies and a PhD in English. Because I had a small part in the vital force that seeks to help women resist gender violence and because I was in a privileged place—a doctoral student with an assistantship and fellowships—I wanted to see what else I might be able to do. That what else was the anthology. But that wasn’t the only what else, as a writer and poet, the imagined voices of women who survive such situations kept coming to me. I wrote the chapbook First Wife that tells the story of Lilith, Adam’s first wife in Eden. I wrote a sequence of poems on mermaids in the book Drink that gives voice to all those women swimming below the waters in myth. I wrote Fatal Effects that charts the love of three sisters who each marry the same man upon the demise of the sister who preceded her because I wanted to know what they had to say. When I was doing research for the book and reading the numerous retellings of the bluebeard myth, both those by recent writers and those of the original lore, I felt most troubled by the stories that cast bluebeard’s wives as sisters. Writers often imagine themselves inside the heads of their characters. I found myself wondering as I wrote, if I was such a sister, wouldn’t I notice that my brother-in-law had killed my sibling? And if not, why would I be attracted to my late sister’s widower? What sorts of stories would be available me, if I was among such sisters, about the possibilities of love? What sorts of men and the behaviors of men would such sisters see as normal and normalized, but more importantly desirable? What sorts of social systems might be in place that convince women like them that they’d brought the violence on themselves by how they dressed or acted, where they came from and where they hoped to go? What sorts of victim-blaming stories might permeate such a world were sisters would marry the murderer of their own kin?

I didn’t have to look far for such a world. We live there. We live in a culture that often blames women for the violence they experience, that suggests women ask for rape by what they wear, that condemn women for staying with violent men rather than asking men why they rape or asking men why they use physical and sexual violence to control those they say they love. I wanted to see what that world would like under the plotlines of bluebeard.

After the book came out and after hosting a series of readings from Women Write Resistance last fall, I was doing research for a conference paper. I did a search in Google to research if, indeed, men still murder multiple women, if such representations beyond literature, if bluebeard still lingers, or at least a contemporary version of him. I found that he does.

The first hit on my google search was of a man, whom one week after the Women Write Resistance readings in the same town, murdered a woman in a hotel room, a murdering that lead police to the other six women he’d recently slain in town, their bodies dumped in abandoned buildings and weed-choked lots. He strangled them. He tied them up. He left their lifeless bodies in showers with the water running. He killed each of them, one after another, like bluebeard, leaving a trail of dead women in his wake. According to the piece in the newspaper, the police suspected that he murdered more than the seven women. They believe this man has been involved in the murder of countless others, stretching back decades, from Indiana all the way to Texas. Perhaps most chillingly, most like the versions of the bluebeard story where bluebeard doesn’t just kill his wives and leave them tied up and hanging from hooks or chopped up in a vat of blood, but the versions where he bakes and eats them, the murderous man in had an online name he uses to connect with such future women. His online name and persona? Big Boy Appetite.

Raquel Thorne:  If you could include pieces from other journals to have in our issue, what might they be?

Laura Madeline Wiseman: Next month, I’m presenting at the Steel Pen conference with a group of writers who have new and published work on retellings. Panelists will discuss the craft of such writings and read from their work as they engage with the questions: What is the process for writing poems based on research and pre-existing texts? What kind of research is required to (re)tell a historical kinship between historical luminaries? How does a poet navigate fact and (in)accuracy when writing about the past? How does the influence of the world outside the poet hinder or enrich the truth as it is conveyed in poetry of (re)telling? What are the strategies of other contemporary writers who do similar work on the historical record? At what points can a writer depart from fact in the service of the story that wants to be (re)told?

I’m eagerly anticipating the panel. In thinking about this question, I asked them to share some of their recent retell work. Ivan Young has a poem called “Thirteen Stories of Finding Jesus” forthcoming in Passages North. It explores biblical stories of Jesus in a modern setting. Lindsay Lusby has a (re)telling of The Wizard of Oz in The Wolf Skin. She also has a poem that is a (re)telling of the traditional Grimm brothers’ fairy tale “The Maiden Without Hands” in The Feminist Wire. She also has poems (re)telling The Silence of the Lambs forthcoming in Tinderbox Poetry Journal and Third Point Press. Cat Dixon has a work that retells the Medea story in the journal Midnight Circus. Her chapbook Our End has Brought the Spring released this year from Finishing Line Press retells the story of Eva Braun, Adolf Hitler’s longtime companion. One of poem from that chapbook appears in Linden Avenue Literary Journal.

Beyond poetry and prose, I’m especially drawn to work that retells or reconsiders stories visually. Editor, writers, and artist Sally Deskins teamed up with artist Lauren Rinaldi to curate the show Les Femmes Folles: TALES in West Virginia earlier this summer at the Monongalia Art Center. I’d hoped to be able to see the show in person, but unfortunately I could not. Luckily, I had the opportunity to follow the show and the coverage of the show online, including this piece in Quail Bell Magazine that discusses the artists featured as well as several pieces in Les Femmes Folles. Though the show didn’t focus the historical specifically, it did focus on retelling the female body, in challenging the stories told about what it means to be female in our culture by offering up visual stories that resist and trouble those otherwise available to us now. Art included Launa Bacon’s painting that revisits iconic imagery of the 1950s and many provocative reimaginings of the female body such as Courtney Kenny Porto’s tonal sketches, contemplative and evocative photographs by Christie Neptune and those by Cathleen Parra, Marisa Lewon’s bodies in canvas and thread, and paintings by Chuka Susan Chesney, Cheryl Angel, and Marlana Adele Vassar. Other work in the show included abstract art by Shelia Grasbarsky and Jacqueline Ferrante, Kim Darling’s mixed-media, and Michelle Furlong’s photography.

One artist, Tracy Brown, who explores and challenges the images offered to women in media and fashion, offered a particularly evocative painting on the theme of retelling. Her piece “Beware” features a woman striding forward in tall Maryjane heals and short ruffled dress, while carrying a handbag with the digital icon of an exclamation mark inside a yellow triangle. The green paint across the woman’s forehead and the juxtaposition of the woman’s attire against the backdrop of nature scene adds to the tension of the painting, as if she’s walking away from the stories told about women’s dress and presentation in the media, but a walk that means such stories compel her to look again, even as she resists that siren call.

Finally, the show included work by the curators—body prints by Deskins and sketches and paintings by Rinaldi. Deskins’ work “Teen Years” is particularly interesting, when considering how we retell not only the stories told about the bodies of young women, but also how we imagine our own young bodies. Her piece is a collage of images—journals with notes scrawled, paint splotches, watercolor marks, and photographs of the young artist, some strong and challenging, others that mimic the sensual poses often shown in the media.

Though I’m not sure all of this work could fit into one issue, it does suggest to me the compelling, rich body of retelling work that is being produced right now by artists, writers, and poets. I’m honored to be guest editing this issue and look forward to sharing the issue later this year.

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We’re still accepting submissions for Historical (Re)Tell until 9/19/15.

Tell the truth but tell it slant, writes Emily Dickinson. For this issue, we’re looking for telling retelling of the historic, tales that offer what wasn’t said but should’ve been, what wasn’t written down but likely happened, whose voices speak that didn’t speak because there wasn’t a platform for them. We want poetry, prose, and nonfiction, music, art, collaborations, and hybrid. We want myths and legends retold from other voices, new perspectives, counter intuitive stances. Accurate, inaccurate, or close, we want work that explores how facts become transformed into the tales, histories, and family stories that inform how we tell our worlds.

Submit

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Current Submission Calls

Issue #18 – Historical (Re)Tell

Tell the truth but tell it slant, writes Emily Dickinson. For this issue, we’re looking for telling retelling of the historic, tales that offer what wasn’t said but should’ve been, what wasn’t written down but likely happened, whose voices speak that didn’t speak because there wasn’t a platform for them. We want poetry, prose, and nonfiction, music, art, collaborations, and hybrid. We want myths and legends retold from other voices, new perspectives, counter intuitive stances. Accurate, inaccurate, or close, we want work that explores how facts become transformed into the tales, histories, and family stories that inform how we tell our worlds.

Submissions due 9/19/15. Guest Editor Laura Madeline Wiseman. Issue live 10/31/15.

In Cahoots Contest 2015

In Cahoots Flier 2015 sm1) No entrance fee.
2) Simultaneous submissions okay (but if your submission is published elsewhere first, it will be disqualified for First Prize, so please notify us immediately if it is picked up elsewhere.)
3) New collaborative work only. This means all submissions must be created by 2+ people.
4) Submit 1-3 pieces in a single email. Each piece may have a different collaborative team.
5) All submissions must include a literary component but may include or be paired with a visual or audio component.
6) This is not prompt based – so there are no form nor subject guidelines.
All submissions will also be considered for normal publication.

View special submission guidelines for In Cahoots.

 

Issue #19 – Writers Create: A Winter Makers’ Fair

Writers spend a lot of time writing, and writing about writing. What are your other creative pursuits? Artists spend a lot of time writing about their work. How? This special issue of cahoodaloodaling is interested in the intersection of art and writing—writers who create in other forms, and artists who write. We want craft essays and interviews about what your art means to you as a maker or how your art impacts your writing, or the ways you find yourself writing about your art; tutorials for others to follow, to engage in your craft; photographs of your creations with brief descriptions and creation stories; stories or poems about the art of making; any combination of the above.

Submissions due 12/12/15. Guest Editor M. Mack. Issue live 1/31/16.

We are actively seeking cover and feature art for future issues.

Please review our submission guidelines before submitting.

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Issue #17 – Grit by the Glass

I wanted pieces that would make me feel like I’ve been kicked in the gut one moment, and like I’ve lost  someone very dear to me the next. I wanted work that screamed, sometimes for no reason and sometimes because that is really the only way to deal with suffering sometimes. The pieces selected spoke to me in a number of ways. Not all hit me in the same way, but they all certainly hit me in some way. They were the pieces that had me thinking about them later in the day and into the next, the ones I wanted to talk about with strangers. Read the full Guest Editor’s Letter.

Guest Editor’s Spotlight: Our Fathers by Kerry Johnson

Mommy! by Janne Karlsson

Needing to Know How Penises Worked by Elliott batTzedek

The Super Sea Trade League Strike Force ™ by Adam Kotlarczyk

St. Theresa’s Apron by Rita Anderson

You Can Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye by Stefan Doru Moscu

Be Still My Soul by James Emery

In Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of GI Boots on the Ground by Gerard Sarnat

apricity to the man unraveling thread by Hannah Hamilton

All the Gorgeous Are Broken by Wel Sed

Falter Suite by Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes

Sister Death by Laura Madeline Wiseman

Disenfranchised by Julie Shavin

Nothing Ever Happens in a Car by Jim McGarrah

micrographie by Patrick Gaouyat

Shirley Xu Interviews Patrick Gaouyat

Rachel Nix Interviews Timothy Green of Rattle


Sam Slaughter July 2015Sam Slaughter is a writer based in Columbia, South Carolina. He received his BA from Elon University and his MA from Stetson University. He is currently at work on his MFA at the University of South Carolina. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in a variety of places, including Midwestern Gothic, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Heavy Feather Review. He was awarded the 2014 Best of There Will Be Words and his debut chapbook When You Cross That Line was published in May 2015. His debut short story collection God in Neon will be published by Lucky Bastard Press in late 2015 and his debut novel, Dogs, will be published in 2016 by Double Life Press. He loves playing with puppies and a good glass of bourbon.

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Issue #14 – The Animal Becomes Us

Play Editor’s Letter

 

Cover Image by Jenny Schukin


Guest Editor Spotlight:
Lucky Cat
by N. West Moss

Art, Poetry, & Literature

Blessings
by Jenny Schukin

Ritual
by Elaine Wang

Among the Animals
by Susannah Carlson

An Old Dog Teaches My Dog to Swim
by Elizabeth Johnston

From Leave of Absence
by Sally Deskins & Laura Madeline Wiseman

Whale Song @ 52 Hz
by William James

What Toast
by M. Mack

Quanta Smears
by Robert Bharda (Ward)

Great Blue Heron
by Martin Elster

Brazen Bull
by Melinda Dubbs

The Color of Tarsiers
by Clinton Crockett Peters

Totoro
by Natalya Sukhonos

Creative Spark
By Luis Sanchez Saturno

Bonus Free Download: Morgan Bears Up
by Donald Dewey

Book Reviews

Temporary Champions
by Darren C. Demaree

Don’t Forget Me, Bro
by John Michael Cummings


About Our Guest Editor
KristinKristin Nehs grew up tangled between Tennessee and Florida and has the Dollywood memorabilia and sawgrass scars to prove it. She holds an MFA from Oregon State in one hand and a cello in the other. Her interests include sordid human affairs and pontificating. In her spare time she wrangles cats.

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