Issue 141
Winter & Spring 2012
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Welcome to the fourth issue of TriQuarterly Online. We are excited to present our first-ever collection of video essays, curated by accomplished video essayists John Bresland and Marilyn Freeman. We also have fiction from Bonnie Nadzam who recently received the the 2011 Center for Fiction's Flaherty Dunnan First Novel Prize for LAMB (Other Press, 2011). We are excited to showcase translated pieces from two international contributors. The first is prominent, Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan. His work was translated from Arabic by Fady Joudah who also has poetry in this issue. The second is a short story from prolific Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop. Finally, we have some new, young voices that we are eager to share. Please enjoy these writers as well as the rest of our outstanding new fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. We look forward to receiving your comments at triquarterlyonline@northwestern.edu.
EDITOR’S NOTE
One could argue that text, onscreen, feathered with images and sound, is becoming more like video. And video is becoming more like text. How are writers to contend with this? How does the visceral nature of digital technology—sound, image and the sometimes cruel edgelessness of the screen—alter the writer’s relationship to language? The seven video essays in this collection, curated by John Bresland and Marilyn Freeman, raise a host of thrilling questions, not least: How is writing today different than it was yesterday? What does it mean for writers to build a text with, as Virginia Woolf once cannily advised, whatever pieces come your way?
Managing Editor: Amanda Morris
Faculty Advisor: Susan Harris
Copy Editor: Ruth Goring
Graduate Fellow: Ben Schacht
Book Review Editors: Karen Zemanick, Leigh Arber
Fiction Editors: Matt Carmichael, Schuyler Dickson, Cathy Gao, Tedd Hawks, Sarah Kalsbeek, Ankur Thakkar, Stephanie Tran
Nonfiction Editor: Sarah Hollenbeck
Poetry Editor: Lana Rakhman
Chapbook Review Editor: Anthony Opal
Art Director: Patrick Allen Carberry
Staff: Emily Ayshford, Rebecca Bald, Danielle Burhop, Michelle Cabral, Matt Carmichael, Jen Companik, Vincent Francone, Cathy Gao, Amanda Gebhardt, Barbara Ghoshal, Eric Grawe, Dane Hamann, Noelle Havens, Elizabeth Herbert, Russ Hicks, Gretchen Kalwinski, Adam Kovac, Nath Jones, Jen Lawrence, Eldad Malamuth, Carrie Muehle, Dana Norris, Tien (Mimi) Nguyen, Hana Park, Cory Phare, Lydia Pudzianowski, Nate Renie, Mark Rentfro, Paula Root, Tal Rosenberg, Virginia Smith, Megan Marie Sullivan, Amanda Tague, and Myra Thompson
The Process of Discovery
In the months before their separation, Priya had been subject to predictable dreams, textbook things.
She’d be a child again, running up slick marble stairs in sock feet and then tumbling, wildly, airborne, free of anything solid, waking suddenly in a sweat, muscles clenched in expectation of the inevitable snap of impact.
Royal Mountain City Fugue
Man steps off a train at central station. A city and boxes and forty seasons before him. Seasons like autumn, where he stands now with a smooth face and skinny legs or a spring ten years later when the snow will still fall in May and gather in his whiskers as he cycles down an empty street from a dinner at dawn.
The New Bishop
On August 1, feast day of St. Alphonsus Liguori, the new bishop assumed his office, giving a most peculiar speech in which he noted that he was absolutely certain that he, like St. Alphonsus, would eventually be deserted by most of his companions, be excoriated for abandoning pomposity for simplicity, and have his neck bowed by the burdensome weight of circumstance.
A Trail of Shadows
Translated from French into English by El Hadji Moustapha Diop
I
I get out of bed early in the morning, while the city is still sleeping. At the back of the living room, I quietly edge my way through the French doors. Our balcony. Cramped. Cluttered. The worm-eaten wooden planks crack under my feet.
River Purgatoire
It was still early morning when I stopped to take her photograph just above the tree line, twelve thousand feet. Glory was sitting upright on the metal guardrail, her back to a high wall of rock and little aprons of old melting snow.