New Letters and Old Papers

New Letters is one of the oldest literary magazines in America (75 years old and counting). With their most recent issue (volume 75, number 4), editor Robert Stewart and company honor their past, with a look at the career of Winfield Townley Scott, and stay the course into the future with a interesting mix of new fiction and excellent poetry.

This issue started out on a light -- and lightweight -- note, however, with "Talking Points for Lot" by Lisa K. Buchanan, wherein the title biblical figure is being prepped by a letter from his agent for an appearance on a themed daytime television talk show on "Fathers Seduced by Their Daughters". This short piece relies for much of its humor on the reader being intimately familiar with the details of Genesis 11-14 and 19, but even with that understanding (and I did have to do my research) it's only a funny-once.

Heavier fare immediately followed. From the first few pages I thought I was going to be blown away by Patricia Lawson's story, "The Garrs", although I ended up "just" appreciating and enjoying it. This story is loaded with great characters, particularly the first-person narrator, and the neighbor who becomes the mother-figure to that narrator, but the story's ending is so quiet, so lacking in climax, that even though I felt satisfied by the character study alone, I wanted it to be as great a story as the characters deserved, and was disappointed that it wasn't.

Gary Gildner's story, "The Capital of Kansas City", takes place for the most part in the mind of a lawyer who is anticipating meeting, after many years, the poetry professor who was the object of her co-ed crush. The meeting never takes place, and her memories and what-ifs never amount to anything. Although I loved how the last sentence worked for this piece, this too was another finely crafted, simple on the surface, but oh-so-quiet piece that did not resonate with me for long after reading those final words.

"Sphere", Christina Yu's tale of the characters, players, and creation of a fantabulous board game, was a very different story -- in many ways. With at least 12 important, named, characters (half non-human or semi-human game fictions, half ‘normal' people), plus extensive details of the game board and the game rules itself, plus varying points of view, movement in time and space, etc., this is an ambitious piece that, I believe, attempts to show us the characters of the game acting out the emotions underlying the actions of the human players of the game. It also happens to be the story of the creator of the game, a little girl entering a contest as an obsessive-compulsive means of mental escape from an apparently abusive father. Whew.

But throughout all the goings on and levels and layers of meaning, I constantly struggled to, first, simply make sense of what was happening when to whom, and secondly, to determine what I should be looking for, who should I care about. Reading this story felt like trying to locate a fading Tinkerbelle, not in the flashlight beam of a stage production of Peter Pan, but during the laser show in Glitter Gulch on the Las Vegas Strip on the 4th of July. A dazzling experience, but one that lost me.

Another interesting, also somewhat experimental in structure but much shorter piece, was Michael Garriga's "First-Called Quits." Garriga lets the reader inhabit, quite effectively, three different points of view in as many pages on the subject (per the subtitle) of, "A Whip Fight for Honor between a Plantation Owner and a Foreman on a Neighboring Plantation Six Weeks After Transporting the Tobacco Near Lynchburg, Virginia, June 24, 1801." All solid pieces, although none without their flaws.

In addition to the fiction, poetry is a substantial part of this issue of New Letters -- not usually my favorite part of most magazines, but very strong and welcomed here.

"Diaspo/Renga" by Marilyn Hacker and Deema Shehabi is a long poem that alternates between Jewish and Palestinian personal stories. The piece is filled with wonderful details and individually illuminating passages, including

He was sixteen then, no dog, no child, a teacher.
Others learned to read
from the tea-stained grammar book
he'd grabbed up first when they fled.

I did have some trouble, despite typographic differences between the points of view, in knowing who we were following at times -- although perhaps that confusion was, in part, the deeper meaning of the piece.