This Lit Mag Rocks
Contributors to Post Road's issue sixteen have waged war on everything that English departments hold dear--public readings, pastoral essays and bland journeys of self-discovery. These writers inject life into tired tropes.
Author/musician Wesley Stace (aka John Wesley Harding) offers his diary from a recent book tour for the novel by George. He admits that the more interactive readings--including a Literary Death Match in San Francisco, where he played hoops onstage against other writers--have it all over the subdued events at most bookstores. "What I really mean is: if a writer has a chance to turn their bookstore reading into anything BUT a bookstore reading, then he or she should," Stace writes. "It's the wise thing to do."
Someone finally said it. If you value this level of honesty, buckle up. Post Road has lots of it.
Jackson Connor spices up the pastoral in his essay, "Rara Avis: How to Tell a True Bird Story." He tells a fake one, sort of. Connor identifies bird species in rural Pennsylvania, where he grew up. But he also says that he can't always tell one bird from another: "If I'm pressed...anything bigger than a sparrow is a red-tailed hawk, and anything smaller than a redtail is a sparrow." Myth debunked: country boys always know the moods, flight patterns and names of every creature in the yard.
Connor also flouts a second archetype: country boy so in tune with nature that he doesn't have a cynical bone in his body. Connor presents something very different while recounting--and maybe embellishing--a scene from grade school. When his teacher asks the class to share family stories with a moral, Connor shares an anecdote from the Vietnam War. Seems his uncle Dewey parachuted into a Vietcong regiment after chugging bourbon in midair. When his teacher asks for the moral of the story, Connor says, "Don't fuck with my uncle Dewey when he's been drinking."
Cute little naturalists don't talk like that, do they? Alas, Connor won't make Oprah's shortlist. He's too irreverent, though highly entertaining.
Same goes for everyone in this issue, even when they get serious. Or semi-serious. Or gritty, like poet Liz Scheid in "What They Don't Tell You About Breast Feeding." She writes, "You'll find nothing drippy--pun intended--in Post Road, not even when you encounter victims of child abuse in Dawsen Wright Albertsen's "Chris Stops the Boys." Here, Robert and William, two brothers, confront their father Scott's madness head on: "The boys ascend the stairs. Scott stands frozen in the doorframe. William smiles. Robert holds William's belt loop." Minimal sniveling for these boys. Instead they survive, something far more authentic and satisfying.
Meanwhile the reviewers satisfy with humor and conviction. See John McNally's "The Promise of Failure, or Why You Should Drop Everything You're Doing and Read Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road Right Now!" as a prime example. In his review/confessional (one of thirteen ‘tweeners in this issue), McNally declares an affection for Yates' tale of prodigious failure. He loves it partly because he felt inadequate himself on the second read, living on the cusp of divorce and piling up rejections to his debut manuscript.
But instead of poor me, we get pissy me. McNally writes, "I'm not an elitist...but when someone tells me that they didn't much care for this book, I find it hard to look them in the eye afterward." Oh no he didn't! Profs often keep the gloves on, but McNally came to play. Like the other contributors, he reveals an abiding passion without ever stooping to melodrama.
With Post Road you have the self, but not just the self. There's also a show--of force, frenetic energy, even joy. This issue features forty-one writers, including a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fulbright winner. Twenty-seven have at least one book in the can, and most of the others have published widely.
But if you haven't, take heart. One undergrad, Jeremy Rice, appears in this issue. He chronicles his mother's drug addiction in "Little Orange Bottles," and the essay reads more like an act of rebellion than one of "healing" or "reconciliation" (truly, what do those words even mean?) Rice describes his writing process in the last paragraph, and most of the contributors can probably relate: "I hunch my back, grip my pen, and stab the paper like an injection, batter the page, sully the cool silence with hot words."
