New Lit Mag Celebrates Young Writers With Teen Issue

805 Lit + Art sounds almost like a bill up before the Senate or a proposition to be voted upon by some constituency. Would that all such legislative proceedings had 805’s attunement to the cause of advancing a greater notion of community. Published quarterly online and featuring, in addition, an annual teen issue, 805 is put out by the Manatee County (Fla) Public Library System. The editorial board consists of “librarians, writers, and a professor.” Despite their grass-roots origins, they take work from anywhere, including art, comics, poetry, and short (less than 2500 words) fiction and nonfiction.

This review will have little to say regarding the new teen issue, there being no pressing need to hasten these young writers into the world of criticism, a commodity those who continue to write will no doubt find no shortage of. However, Gillian Chapman’s short story, “Fleur,” deserves to be singled out not merely for its promise but for its accomplishments.

Early on, Chapman’s narrator announces, “My anxiety comes in waves.” From then on we are immersed in a tidal surging and recession of the narrator’s psychological unease and her responses to it. Throughout, the blending of plainspoken admissions of suffering: “I am seventeen, and I have been sad for most of my life…” and often lyrical descriptions of both physical surroundings and inner states: “My existence is as heavy as the sky…” engenders the reader’s compassion for such stark familiarity with pain in one so young, and creates a very specific, easily relatable and identifiable world. In the end, it is the narrator’s quirky and fertile imagination which proves to be her salvation, and it is that same quality which makes the reader hope Chapman will keep writing.

As for the work in Volume 3, Issue 3, several pieces have their moments and are deserving of mention, including Jamal Michel’s poem, “Toolbox,” and M.W. de Jesus’ story, “Hired Help.” Two other pieces, though, stood out above the rest for their poignancy.

In “Sophie,” a short story by Lucy Marcus, Leah, the narrator, recalls the summer when she turned fifteen and she and her friend, Sophie, both lost their virginity to the same man, a lifeguard just out of college. When the lifeguard suddenly leaves, Sophie is upset, but for Leah, the problem lies in how that summer’s events have disturbed her connection to Sophie. Time spent swimming in the lake or eating ice cream with Sophie is described vividly, lovingly, whereas Leah’s distraction while alone with the lifeguard is apparent: “I missed the start of his story but pretended to be amused.” “Later, afterwards, we didn’t say anything at all.” And, in the middle of the evening, tellingly: “I thought of Sophie.”

But it is not until ten years later, when Leah leaves her boyfriend for a woman, that she really begins to understand both the ultimate insignificance of that lifeguard and the significance of her feelings for Sophie:

“You loved that girl, didn’t you?" he said, accusingly, as if she was the one I was leaving him for…

I rolled my eyes and shook my head. But the more I remember, the more I wish he were right. How nice that would have been.

Only after this ten-year interval does Leah realize what had truly been life-changing during that long-ago summer.

In her nonfiction piece, “We Mourn,” Anna Jurek gets right to the point: The Jurek women “mourn often and well.” After a series of somewhat peripheral losses, fifteen-year-old Anna is now mourning her grandfather, “the first good man I met.” His death shakes her in a way the earlier ones have not. Visiting him in the hospital three days before his death, she is struck by how, unlike in the case of her great-grandfather, her “Papa” “was not a breathing corpse” and by how “his eyes were still so brown and full.”

This death has darkened Anna’s world, calling into question what had not before been questioned. In contemplating her grandfather’s body in the casket, Anna feels perplexed and betrayed: “I feel so empty… He was not ready for death… It feels like it was murder. Like God murdered him.”

Jurek details her emotional distress in a variety of ways, at times with irony, at times with bitterness, at times with contrasts which stretch into contradictions, as the younger, more innocent Anna transforms into someone experiencing genuine mourning for the first time: “I am not totally alone, of course. There is never any true solitude in church. God is always there…”

Then later: “I try to feel the presence of God, of Papa’s newly ascended spirit, of Jesus and Mary and the Holy Ghost… But I am alone. I am alone in church.”

Throughout, Jurek’s depiction of her fifteen-year-old self rings painfully true to life, a pinpoint portrayal of what it’s like to be torn by the loss of someone who was loved, and who loved, as well.

Quite a few of the contributors to 805 Lit + Art are here published for the first time, and there is an unpolished, incompletely elaborated quality to many of the pieces, and often a youthful feel – in both the positive and negative sense. The artwork, interspersed fairly regularly throughout both the teen and adult issues, is breezy and colorful, though perhaps a little too easy to overlook. But all in all, the editorial board is to be admired for providing a forum for (mostly) new writers to get their work out there.