Not Quite the Big Show

Last winter I saw a production of "Into the Woods" in Newton, Mass. For community theater, it wasn't half bad; the volunteer ushers were overpaid, the rickety chairs put my ass to sleep, but the show itself was acceptable. If The Paris Review and Tin House are Broadway plays, then Fifth Wednesday Journal is a community theater production of "Into the Woods" in Newton, Mass. 

Vern Miller, publisher and editor of the journal, put me off immediately in his Editor's Notes, writing, "We decided early in our planning that we are obligated to bring our readers the work of some new voices in literature." The word "obligated" gave me pause. I imagined a bunch of boardroom suits rolling their eyes at the mention of profit sharing. I don't feel obligated to smoke cigarettes, have sex, take my dog to the park; these are activities I enjoy. What I'm obligated to do is clean the ashtray, wash the bedsheets, and scoop up the puppy poo. A small journal should welcome new writers with open arms, should, in fact, aggressively pursue new writers, not begrudgingly let them tag along for the ride. 

(For the record, this issue publishes three first-timers.)

Miller's poor choice of words aside, the writing in Fifth Wednesday is competent. It's passable. Some of the poetry is, in fact, quite good. 

This issue features new work from Marge Piercy, a selection titled "Searching the Essence." If you're able to overlook the misprint in the second stanza, you'll get to experience passages like "I danced all night, danced / every partner down. Now / I pant climbing my hill. / My knees whimper and nag," and "After all these years / I still don't know what I / may be. Lacking wisdom I still / have curiosity. Perhaps that's / all I am: a question mark?" 

Other work gathered here isn't quite as profound. Allison Joseph checks in with "The Numerology of Kisses," in which she tells us that we will each, over a lifetime, "spend over 20,000 minutes kissing--/ over 120,000 calories burned, best diet ever." Later we learn that the average woman kisses 79 men before she marries, and Joseph then relates to us her feelings about her "Mr. Eighty": "All I wanted to do was lean in with eyes closed, / kiss and kiss this one man." That's cute, but it reads more like the inside of a Valentine's Day card. 

Overall, though, the poetry outshines the fiction at every turn. Some of the titles are in themselves worth the cost of admission, like Nicole Wilson's "Now That I'm Not Going to Wisconsin, He Tells Me, You Can Buy a Nicer Dress," or Ann Corbitt's "I Imagine the Local News Played While You Died," wherein a character in a hospice has just lost a loved one, and when a friend tells her that the deceased is present, she thinks, "[...] this is impossible, Georgia too / small for all her dead to roam / fenced-in back yards. Still, I stub my cigarette out so you won't see it." 

The fiction in Fifth Wednesday often feels like little more than a series of rude interruptions, commercial breaks during your favorite show, each three stories long. I'll just touch on the first two in the issue. 

Matthew Batt's "Regarding the Test You Are About to Fail" is a readable entry concerning a professor of writing at a community college in tiny Nenemoosha, Wisconsin, a mill town full of people the narrator describes to us as "I mean supernice." The plot is old: male professor intrigued by a young female student, but Batt finds ways to put his own spin on it: "Ruby, my former student--yeah, it's that kind of story--she was beautiful. Not in the local way--big hair, luminescent eye-shadow inspired by fishing lures, dangly earrings to match. Ruby was beautiful in a classical kind of way. Etruscan, perhaps." Having seen these parts of Wisconsin, I can vouch for Batt's take on "local" beauty, and how the girl without the dangly earrings and 80s hair is the girl who stands out. The enigmatic Ruby floats across the pages with "Long, blond hair the color of winter wheat, strewn about everywhere, as if hers were a windy, windy world," and we get adequately caught up in the mystery.