A Literary Magazine That Resonates
Published biannually at Bucknell University, West Branch, a slim volume of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, welcomes unsolicited manuscripts between the months of April and August. West Branch Wired, a recent addition to the journal, offers a quarterly on-line extension of the printed issues.
Although I was initially disappointed to discover only two short stories in the Fall/Winter 2010 issue of West Branch, I am reminded of the old adage: quality over quantity. Urban Waite and Cam Terwilliger offer fresh perspectives on the perplexing nature of father/son relationships. I am surprised, yet satisfied, by the ways in which these richly crafted stories come together in the end.
While eating oranges, brothers, Raph and Juan, witness bulldozers destroying their orange grove in Urban Waite’s “No One Heard a Thing the Night the Chicken Died.” Much to their dismay, the boys’ house will soon look out on a country club, no different from the rest of the houses in their suburban Long Beach neighborhood. The poetic precision of Waite’s language resonates: “There were oranges everywhere, unpicked and rotting on the ground; the trees sagged with the weight of the fruit."
In Terwilliger's "Happy Trails," Dennis, a recent high school graduate, struggles with feelings of bitterness and resentment towards his father. Even after suffering a stroke and subsequent memory loss, the man emanates strength: “Dad lay motionless. . .the machines around him bleating pitifully. . .yet even when he was like this, the thickness of his neck and torso seemed to telegraph power.”
One thing that makes Terwilliger’s story different from so many coming-of-age stories about father/son turmoil is the uniqueness of having Roy Rogers as a character. He is the only person (albeit figment of Dennis’ imagination) with whom the young man shares his thoughts and fears. Dennis is not a man in the old-fashioned, stereotypical sense; he isn’t a strong, valiant cowboy like Roy Rogers; he isn’t a brute like his father who pitched baseballs at a wooden chair “until his tendons seethed with pain.”
When Dennis admits to his dying father that he has spent his entire life hating him, the man doesn’t embrace his son and apologize. Instead, he tells Dennis that saying he’s sorry at this point wouldn’t change a thing-- and he is right. Terwilliger offers the reader a sense of closure lacking in sentimentality, an ending that is a raw and genuine reflection of life.
In her essay, “Writing about the City: New Orleans, Destruction, And the Duty of the Poet,” Katie Ford examines the difficulty in writing about natural disaster. The poet, according to Ford, should never set out with a particular subject in mind; he/she should learn what the subject is through the act of writing. She writes that disaster-- earthquakes, hurricanes, terrorism-- “can be the surface concern. . . of our poem’s conception, but that they ought never to be the heart of the poet’s work.” Writing about such events often comes across as cliché and sentimental; if no discoveries or revelations occur during the process of creating a poem about a certain place, “you will have to abandon that city or village.”
