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Issue XII Invited
Issue XII Invited
INTRODUCED BY MARIANNE JANACK, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
When you invite people to contribute to a journal that publishes “creative philosophy” you take a chance. Some write well, but their winsome words lack philosophical perspicuity; some write philosophically, but their thoughts lack the literary lure that keeps readers hungrily flipping pages, or, nowadays, eagerly scrolling down their pageless screens . And then there’s the problem of theme: an invitation entails people writing about what they want to write about, and those things don’t necessarily all fit together. My editors and I try not to do violence to people’s writing, though we strive for our publications to function as examples of the “form”. This issue is entirely devoted to pieces we’ve invited. They invite us into unique prisms of literary philosophy and enjoin us to not only look, but see the world, our world.
Philosophy as a discipline often sells itself to students and to colleges as a discipline that focuses on argument. When I talk about philosophy with my students, however, I often focus on its power to help us see differently: to see in a melting piece of wax the ways that we understand properties, change, and persistence; to see the world as a series of events rather than a collection of objects; to imagine new and different forms of life.
Rebecca McClanahan’s “Signs and Wonders” appears in her book In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays, published by Red Hen Press. It was also reprinted in Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction. A version of it was first published in the journal River Teeth. The memoir in essays is a love letter to New York City, where McClanahan and her husband moved in midlife and lived for eleven years. “Life moves in strange and marvelous patterns,” she notes in the introduction to the book.
The phrase “signs and wonders” appears in different places in the Bible. In McClanahan’s essay, it’s about moving through New York City—through noise, dirt, and nastiness—but also through beauty and connection. It is an essay full of life, but also about seeing and a way of capturing the ephemeral.
Rebecca McClanahan’s work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, and in anthologies published by Simon & Schuster, Beacon, Norton, and Bedford/St. Martin. She has been awarded two Pushcart prizes and the Glasgow Award in Nonfiction, among other awards, and teaches in the MFA programs of Rainier Writing Workshop and Queens University in Charlotte, NC. Her website is: www.rebeccamcclanahanwriter.com
Liz Ulin’s story, “Bigger and Better”, is also about signs and wonders—and a test. While trying to spread the word of Jesus, the protagonists encounter a skeptic who gives them her underwear. “You only see what you want to see,” one character says to another, as he reflects on their afternoon spent trying to spread the Good Word.
She has had several short stories adapted and produced for theater and was the winner of the Fresh Voices Screenplay Competition. Her stories have also been published in Flash Fiction, Short Circuit, Ninth Letter, Sans Press, The Great Ape, and Broad Knowledge. She lives and works in Montreal, Quebec.
Carrie Jenkins teaches in the philosophy department at the University of British Columbia. Her poetry, which we include in this issue, focuses on the particularities of times, places, and relationships—giving to abstract philosophical themes bodies, textures, and objects.
She lives on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) First Nations. Carrie writes non-fiction, poetry, and fiction. Her first novel, Victoria Sees It, was shortlisted for the Frye Academy Award and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. She and historian Carla Nappi have been collaborating on a project called Uninvited, which has also resulted in a book by that title which is a response to Plato. You can find out more about her—and see some of her great cartoons—at www.carriejenkins.net.
Gabriela De Mendonça Gomes is an undergraduate at Hamilton College, concentrating in philosophy and literature, and she serves as the Assistant Editor of Book XI. Her essay, “Some Words on Death: Literature and Philosophy on Death, Language, and Migration” is a reflection on death, absence, and invisibility. It stretches the genre of the essay. Her piece uses a variety of genres--the confession, maps, tables, the academic essay, the meditation--which show the ways in which one might try to put absence into words or capture it in images.
John Rufo’s piece “In the Loop,” like “Some Words on Death,” defies genre categorization—something between poetry and essay, this piece is full of imagery, and the scents and sounds of place. But it is also fiction, as it imagines Sisyphus and Prometheus, and lions who laugh. The piece plays with the idea of seeing and imagining and uses a stream of consciousness reflection to reinforce and reflect the title. John Rufo's critical and creative work is published or forthcoming with Diacritics, the Academy of American Poets, Ploughshares, Dreginald, and the Capilano Review. A chapbook titled Unowned Pleasures (2019) was published by Gato Negro Ediciones/Image Text Ithaca.
While philosophical, the pieces we’ve included in this issue are less like arguments and more like invitations to see things differently—to put what we know together with what we don’t know, or can only imagine.