Culture and Writing by Dan Holloway (guest blogger)

Every Story Counts

One of the things I like to say to people is, “The stories we publish are the voice with which we speak to history.” What I mean is, in two hundred years’ time, people will only know us through the stories that have survived. Technology means that more and more stories will survive—and what this post is about is outlining three of the amazing projects setting out to preserve them. But that doesn’t place less of a responsibility on publishers; it creates a greater one. When historians look back, they will see the published books, the “official version” of our society, and they will also see the digital version, arguably the more representative one. And when they compare the two, that’ll tell them what we as a society really valued—and, more important, what we didn’t.

The great news is that there are more projects now devoted to preserving our world’s stories before they disappear than at any other time. The result isn’t just that history will have a clearer picture of us. The result is that our life here and now is enriched, because we can all have access to a richly textured world of storytelling.

I want to have a very quick look at three very different projects, each of which is dedicated to keeping culture alive.

The Endangered Language Fund does exactly what you’d imagine. It works to preserve the world’s endangered languages, endowing projects to that end. Why does this matter? It’s not, after all, strictly true to say that stories are lost when a language dies out; they simply migrate to a different language. Only that’s not the full picture—anyone who’s witnessed someone from the U.S. speaking to someone from the UK knows how deeply connected language and meaning are. There are around 6,000 endangered languages in the world.

The UNESCO Red Book lists them and categorizes them under five headings, from potentially endangered to extinct. It sounds rather like the Worldwide Fund for Nature’s classification of endangered species. And as far as the richness of our world is concerned, the work is just as important.

One example of this kind of cultural preservation I came across recently is A. Jay Adler’s remarkable (all the more so because he’s a self-confessed tech troglodyte, who’s dragged himself into the digital age solely to help preserve the cultures he cares about) Web site, The Sad Red Earth. He runs the site with photographer Julia Dean. I can’t put what the site is about nearly as well as Jay and Julia, so here’s what they say:

“We are two teachers—a writer and a photographer—traveling by motor home and considering the country. We report on contemporary Native American life and comment on American society, politics, and culture. Our intent is to document the range and state of Native American life in the country today, a story that remains the most neglected and underreported in the United States. This blog, the sad red earth, is an account of our experiences as we travel the nation. At the end of our journey we intend to produce a book of photography and prose entitled Native Now: The Lives of Native Americans in the Twenty-First Century.”

It’s wonderful that individuals are doing this kind of thing. It’s a little sad that it’s left to individuals to do it.

Finally, a project to remind us that the silent and the invisible exist on all our doorsteps, and speak all our languages (or, at least, use our words). ABC tales is a site designed to help everyone tell their story. In particular, it’s a site that acts as a repository for stories told by the homeless. Not just (but obviously—and importantly—including) memoirs, but fiction and poetry. And they bring those stories to a global readership.

There are people living on the streets who’ve never heard of a query letter, who wouldn’t know where to start holding a pen in their freezing hands to write a synopsis. And as a result, they are totally, and unless things change permanently, excluded from the traditional world of publishing. Does that make their stories any less important? Of course it doesn’t. Perhaps even more important, as we take a look at our privileged selves, does that make their stories any worse than ours? Take a look and find out.

Oh, and do give me a shout on any projects doing this kind of work you know about. If I can do anything to bring them to a wider audience, I will.


Dan Holloway is the organizer of the Free-e-day festival, an online event on December 1st designed to celebrate, and offer practical help to, every writer, musician, artist, and filmmaker working outside the mainstream cultural industries. He is also co-founder of the Year Zero Writers collective. Learn more about Dan and his projects by clicking on his name.

The American Short Story by Yu-Han Chao

I’m almost finished reading Haruki Murakami’s collection of stories, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. For some reason, I find myself extremely dissatisfied, not because the stories are no good—in fact, they are frank and unusual and surprising in good ways—but they are not the short stories I have come to expect after all these years of living and reading in Ireland, America, and, for a brief summer, Britain. To be honest, I was left with a distinct feeling of coitus interruptus.

In Taiwan, I read a lot of short stories: in the newspapers, in collected volumes, in magazines. Often, they were just moments, vignettes, with nothing really happening, no real plot, no progressive action, mere characterization, dialogue. I had no problem with this back then. But now, reading Murakami’s stories, which seem similar to what I used to read in Chinese, something feels missing.

When I first came to the United States for my writing program, the first and overarching critique I received in workshop was, “Something needs to happen in your story. You need plot.”

“But something does happen,” I said, not understanding the Western concept of plot.

In fact, I’m not sure I fully understand plot now, because I am at a loss how to describe it—some kind of meaningful action or change that sets the story on a different course, casts a different light—something larger and deeper than just any happening.

Eventually I learned to write this mysterious “plot” thing, insert the exciting main action that short story readers expect, and the first time I completed a story that had genuine plot, a beginning, climactic rising action, and ending, it was taken by a journal. Thus began my career of attempting to construct these almost formulaic stories. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, but I always tried to plan the main action and plot in there and provide closure in the end.

But have I become an Americanized reader as well as writer, so that I can no longer appreciate the type of unconventional, non-American stories with which I grew up? After finishing the book, I feel both dissatisfied and sad.


Yu-Han Chao is co–blog manager and poetry editor at the Rose & Thorn. She has a poetry book out and a short story collection forthcoming. Visit her writing and artwork at her Web site.

Book Review: At the Threshold of Alchemy by John Amen

At the Threshold of Alchemy

by John Amen

Presa Press [Available October, 2009]

Reviewed by Megan Roth Casella

As the title conveys, John Amen’s collection At the Threshold of Alchemy is a glorious combination of voices, passions, and raw memories. Little is lyricized, overdressed, or neatly packaged in this stirring collection of poetry that seems to pulse and drip, living on the page in forms that never promise neat resolution or resolve. Amen’s poems, instead, beat like the “pulses beneath blush and bone” as in “Purpose,” the collection’s opening piece. We enter the collection with a sense that we won’t be led through a tunnel of glass, but rather, we will be shown into an interior world, a warm, dark place full of things living, things happening, things unstill.

In Amen’s “After the Funeral,” perhaps one of the most striking pieces, images are placed in clear view, and white space is left for each stanza’s image to be absorbed and viewed from all angles.

Grandma slouched in the foyer
Her belly mounding in her lap, makeup streaked
I distracted myself in the basement, thinking
Of Ms. Gilham, my face in her cleavage.

The juxtaposition of the grandmother, her mounding belly and streaked face, with the thought of a child masturbating below in the bowels of the home dreaming of cleavage, creates a swirl of magnificent tension and a sense of the grotesque. The last stanza proceeds:

I reemerged,
Dad and his brother gnawing the gristly silence.
No one noticed the stain on my corduroys
Or saw me put a silver spoon in my pocket.

The image of the shiny spoon leaves the reader with a glimmer of something, though it feels much unlike a sweet glimmer of hope, and more like a promise of truth hidden in the depth of a dark pocket. Layers of tension are embedded into the landscape of a multistoried home, as raw humanness unfolds in the basement while a sterility is frantically formed above—a metaphor Amen will extend throughout this magnificent book.

Perhaps most consuming are Amen’s prose poems that occupy a large portion of Alchemy’s pages. In them, he hand-addresses subjects of the past who become, in a sense, mythologized by the passionate modes of the speaker—anger, remorse, memory, humility. Amen’s line is merciless—it coats nothing with language. Here, language is a clear liquid, a bright light.

The narrator shows tenderness for the mundane, and such humility in memory and in recounting past action, artifacts, and connections. “Curse,” for example, explores the historical demographics of the family psyche, observing the hardships of the mother and cataloguing painful psychological records of ancestry. Amen writes, “how / for at least three generations we’ve become masters / at burying trauma inside our own bodies, brokenness / we have no language and lack the resolve to voice” (33).

This moment defines Alchemy’s project in a way, as the book travels through verse and prose poetry, finding language to express this edgy feeling of uncertainty; Amen combines artifacts of the past together in the hope of finding answers in the concoction, the combination, the interaction between fragments of the past and present. As the title suggests, this project is one of gathering rather than measuring and forming solution. Amen gathers the language and raw materials of a tumultuous history and collages them into letters, rhythms, and imagistic moments, displaying the many prisms of a voice and a past truly at a threshold of something profound.



John Amen is the author of two previous poetry collections: Christening the Dancer (Uccelli Press 2003) and More of Me Disappears (Cross-Cultural Communications 2005). He is an artist, working primarily with acrylics on canvas. He founded and continues to edit The Pedestal Magazine.

Megan Roth Casella is a James Michener Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Miami. Her poetry and prose have appeared in various journals such as The Rose and Thorn Ezine, Elimae, and POEM, and she is the author of The Green Guide to Daily Living (Cliff Road Books, 2009), a nonfiction work designed to help the world go greener. More information at Megan's Web site.