Issue 141

Winter & Spring 2012

  • 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

Video Essay Su Friedrich Video Essay Su Friedrich

Gut Renovation

Contributor's Note

Until 2005, Williamsburg was a modest neighborhood in Brooklyn that was home to working- and middle-class Italians, Hispanics and Poles, to many small industries, and increasingly to artists who were fleeing Manhattan real estate prices.

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Video Essay Robyn Schiff Video Essay Robyn Schiff

Wolfvision

Contributor's Note by Nick Twemlow

Wolfvision is more than a joint collaboration between my wife and me. I did find the images and edit the piece and Robyn did write the voiceover script as a response to my edit. But there were many other participants. The woman who records webisodes of herself discussing her eating disorder.

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Video Essay Michael Lent Video Essay Michael Lent

October Fire

Contributor's Note

October Fire is a phenomenological exploration of interstitial place. It was filmed on location in California. We’d stopped off to visit family and friends in California while relocating from the Pacific Northwest to the east coast. It was a brief and surreal break—palm trees, sunshine, and surfers, in winter. And then the fires.

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Video Essay Kristen Radtke Video Essay Kristen Radtke

That Kind of Daughter

Contributor's Note

We often cherish literature for its ability to illuminate—creating scenes that we can visualize, projecting ideas from a written text that we can internalize and make dimensional within us. So does offering a visual counterpart to this experience take away some of that reader’s responsibility?

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Video Essay Steven Chen Video Essay Steven Chen

Grandpa

Contributor's Note

Grandpa has been three years in the making. I used several different types of film and video, including old Super 8 and Hi-8 family footage, color 16mm film, HD video shot in the TV studio at The Evergreen State College on the Sony HDC 1400, and in my parents’ home, the Panasonic AG-AF100.

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Video Essay Dinty W. Moore Video Essay Dinty W. Moore

History

Contributor's Note

What I knew at the outset was that I was guest teaching in Scotland for a full month, and that I would have several free afternoons left over for exploration. So, in addition to the still camera I lug with me everywhere, I brought along a digital video camera.

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Video Essay Joe Wenderoth Video Essay Joe Wenderoth

Send New Beasts

Contributor's Note

I started making films when I got a Mac, and learned to use iMovie. Outside of family stuff, the first projects I took on were short silent films to use during poetry readings. In my experience, I had come to understand that poetry, read aloud, is intense, and demands a great deal of attention.

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