Before this year’s planning for Writers’ Fest began, I’d never heard of Tom Paine. As Élan’s Junior Fiction Editor, I’m quite ashamed knowing I missed out on his work for so long. After some internet digging to find one of his short stories, I can confidently say I’m ready to attend his Writers’ Fest workshop.

In addition to the excerpts found in Paine’s profile on the Writers’ Fest website, I also read a longer piece of his titled “Oppenheimer Beach.” I really enjoyed this story for its introspective and explorative narrative. The protagonist is a war photographer named Hugh, and he’s tired of life—so tired he drags his son (pulling him from a prestigious school) and wife (despite their rocky relationship) to a vacation in western India. While away from his family, Hugh runs across a young native boy who helps him look deeper into his emotional state.

Immediately into the piece, the first three characters above are quickly defined. The son, Magnus, stays inside on his iPad. He’s established through dialogue as someone who can’t relate well to his father, rambling lines like, “If he sees me use it on some of his nature, if he sees what it can do even out here, then maybe he’ll want to try it, and we can use it together on our trip. I just think he needs to see it work on what he likes, like a local tree or unusual bird or something…”

Hugh’s wife, Alfhild, is also shown as a contrast with her laid-back parenting approach and naked yoga stretches. Through dialogue, it’s revealed that her and Hugh’s marriage is falling apart: “I get that you have foolishly burned all your bridges and given up your photojournalism career… And I get that in six months or less, having completed this forced ‘end of the world let our child see it for the last time odyssey,’ we’ll return completely broke to New York, Magnus will be a year behind in his studies, we will probably divorce, and I will find a wealthy new lover, younger perhaps and more limber, who likes to play computer games with my son, and doesn’t walk around drowning in guilt…”

Hugh himself is the most complex, with his vacation-decision and overall disconnect towards his family. He’s obviously wound up with repressed emotions, relying heavily on beers and joints to pass the days by. He’s further defined by Oppie, the native Rastafarian boy. It says a lot when their interactions are more natural and equal compared to Hugh and Magnus’s. Oppie is essentially a foil, but even he is characterized with motivations and experiences: “You can tell everything about a person by how they respond to looking into the black eye of a squid, or how the squid respond to them.”

“Oppenheimer Beach” is so well-crafted in the way character relationships and deeper concepts are established through minute details that pile up on each other. Everything in the story matters, from the ambiguity of Oppie’s true family to the fate of Hugh’s marriage. Even the ending itself doesn’t resolve much, but stands as a symbolic representation of Oppie’s closeness with a reef, away from tourist-tainted land.

-Seth Gozar, Junior Fiction Editor

There are some authors who are committed to only one genre, meaning that they live and breathe that genre and any other type of literature is beautiful to read but too scary to write. I assure you that Rilla Askew is not one of them. Raised in northeastern Oklahoma, Rilla draws on the rural setting she was surrounded by in her childhood, as well as her birthplace, the San Bois Mountains; even though she didn’t spend much time there. The essay that blossomed my love for her work, The Tornado that Hit Boggy, is cemented in not only her roots, but also the people and town that collectively raised her. The essay describes the tornado that hit Boggy, Oklahoma and her family. Rilla wasn’t born at that time but the stories she’d been told by family members were engraved in her brain, like the devastated path the tornado left behind as it danced up the mountain to get to their small town. She tells of her aunt who survived but was left with scars and emotional trauma that was evident in her reaction to a dark sky (“Oooooh, I’m scared of storms”) no matter if a storm was forecasted or not. Yet, even Rilla knew that her recount of the tragedy was only possible because of people like her Aunt Sissy and Eula, exemplified in a line from the essay featured in the TriQuarterly, “From her I learned that it’s sensory details that paint the picture, and also that one needn’t be present to bear witness—it’s enough to have heard the story told vividly from the living witness’s mouth.”

Rilla Askew’s mastery doesn’t stop at personal essays. Her proficiency also transcends into the world of fiction, which can be seen in her plethora of recognitions like the American Book Award and The O. Henry Awards. One of her books, Harpsong, is an example of how she can take real events and integrate fictional characters that seem so real to the reader. The atypical love story follows two homeless people in love. Harlan, a harmonica player and Sharon, his fourteen-year-old wife, force their way across the Great Plains in the Great Depression-era. The novel is nothing short of unexpected, but exactly what you’d want and expect from a writer as complex and impressive as Rilla Askew. I’ve always had trouble writing stories that take place in Florida, where I was born and raised, but she makes it appear to be effortless yet interesting.

It’s been said that there is an element of fiction hidden in all truth and an element of truth in all fiction. This is no different than scraping the build-up of grime that sticks to a dirty pan. It takes getting beneath each layer to get to the bottom, to get to the truth, or maybe to get to just another story. I never really understood what that meant until I came into contact with Rilla Askew and her personal essays and works of fiction. I’m so excited to meet her at Douglas Anderson’s Writer’s Festival this year. In the aforementioned essay she says, “I’ve tried writing it in fiction, but the story won’t bend for me. The details are too fixed, the story at once too confined and too large… Writing fiction, I can intuit how many details are just enough. I can change them. But when the story is true, I can’t seem to find which of the complications to leave out.” I’ve learned that some truths are ours to turn into stories for others, but some truths need to just be told and shared as the truth.

-Chelsea Ashley, Junior Website Editor

The theme of racial identity has been frequenting my writing as of late. Being biracial half-Mexican and half white, I have gone exploring my heritage in both my poetry and fiction. Of course there many joys in being of mixed race, such as having the opportunity to claim and celebrate both cultures. However, for me a sense of inadequacy always resurfaced, that is concerning my inability to satisfy a certain racial identity. With that there sometimes came the alienation, feeling out of place, and as though I belonged to neither parent’s side.

One of the many poets coming to Douglas Anderson Writers’ Festival is Lee Ann Roripaugh who explores this theme. This confusion, and hurt is peppered throughout her work but especially prominent in the poems Snake Song and Transplanting. When I read these poems I thought of my own struggle with claiming my father’s identity. There were times I was insulted and openly made fun of by Spanish speaking strangers at my hesitant use of the language. Several times I drifted apart from that crowd frustrated, embarrassed, and trying to create distance between myself and my father’s culture.

Likewise in Roripaugh’s image driven poem Snake Song she captures rather perfectly being torn between two identities, and struggling to navigate both through the metaphor of the snake, and her birth. Here she especially targets how she communicates through both English and Japanese.

“I was born in the year of the snake
and maybe this is why
I speak with a forked tongue.

…when
I open my mouth to talk,
a strange song, not mine, comes tumbling out.

Ai-noko, half-caste, I tilt
my head in the mirror first this way
then that–Horikoshi

cheekbones, Caucasian nose, my ojii-san’s
serious eyebrows
feathering like ink strokes

…
My blood runs hot and cold.”

 

In her poem Transplanting Roripaugh plays more subtlety with her isolation, and estrangement.  In this poem she talks of how her sneeze is different from her mother’s and the unexpected distance and criticism that breeds.

 

3. Sneeze

My mother sneezes in Japanese. Ké-sho!

An exclamation of surprise—two sharp

crisp syllables

… Sometimes,

when ragweed blooms, I wonder why

her sneeze isn’t mine, why something

so involuntary, so deeply rooted

in the seed of speech, breaks free from

my mouth like thistle in a stiff breeze,

in a language other than my mother’s

tongue. How do you chart the diaspora

of a sneeze? I don’t know how

you turned out this way, she always

tells me,”

After reading these poems, I was in awe of Roripaugh’s approach to such a highly personal subject. Indeed, reading it gave me flashbacks of my own experiences and my own questioning and confusion. Yet she can’t help but touch on the importance and beauty of Japanese culture to her identity. In my own life I’ve made peace with my Mexican identity, and Caucasian identity like Roripaugh.  I’ve realized they are both an enormous part of me, one I have to learn and love on my own terms, despite what others say. Inasmuch, I’m excited to attend her workshop at Writers’ Festival, and glean some inspiration and technique to further my exploration of identity and culture.

-Aracely Medina, Senior Poetry Editor