CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:

By Sam Ruddick

Permafrost is the literary magazine edited by the students and faculty of the MFA Program at University of Alaska, Fairbanks. It calls itself the “farthest north literary journal for writing and the arts,” which sounded a bit suspicious to me, so I did a little poking around to verify the assertion. For some reason, I thought the distinction belonged to Rosebud. As it happens, I was wrong. Rosebud is out of Chugiak, which is quite a bit south of Fairbanks (closer to Anchorage, actually), and—while I did manage to find a website called Electric Verses dedicated to Finnish poetry, maintained by the Nuoren Voimann Liitto (Finnish Literature and Culture Association)—I’m not sure that its editorial offices are actually farther north than Permafrost’s. I’m going to trust the folks at Fairbanks for now. Judging from the writing they publish, honesty is something that comes naturally to them, so I’ll try to be honest, too, and in that spirit I have to confess: I was skeptical at first.

My final verdict is a favorable one—I want to get that out of the way up front—but I think it’s more important to explore the reason for my initial skepticism than it is to give you a blow-by-blow account of the magazine itself, particularly in light of what I ultimately came to decide about that reason (not to mention the fact that I want you to read Permafrost on your own).

So here it is.

When I looked at the table of contents, I was immediately struck by two titles: “Poetry Writing 101—Outcomes,” courtesy of James McCann, and “The Poetry Vaccine,” by Sam J. Miller. I have a visceral aversion to poems and stories about writers and writing. My feeling has always been that they’re self-referential and self-absorbed, and as such self-congratulating, their appeal limited to people engaged in the endeavor, their purpose a pat on the back. I want to read about people, not poems.

But then I started to wonder: who are literary journals for? Who reads them?

And I have to admit, more often than not, the readers are generally, if not exclusively, affiliated with AWP culture. The magazines themselves, with some notable exceptions (The Paris Review) are generally produced by universities, and—I know this is a stretch, but stay with me—it’s worth noting that the most sophisticated scientific journals (Journal of Biological Chemistry) are written and edited predominantly by academics, for academics, too. Researchers, professors, and graduate students from universities at the forefronts of their fields pour a great deal of expertise into those journals, and I’m coming to believe that the same is true of literary magazines. Just as scientific journals are devoted to advancing the sciences, literary magazines are devoted to advancing literature. By the time the latest developments in science make it to mainstream magazines like Discover, the developments are not new. At least not to scientists. The same is true of innovations in the mainstream press. Don’t get me wrong, I like Kurt Vonnegut, and I don’t mean to be an elitist, but I am something of a specialist, and the truth is that by the time Vonnegut dazzled the mainstream with metafiction (a term I use for convenience, not accuracy), the territory had long been charted by the likes of John Barth and Donald Barthelme.

So if writing about writing’s appeal is limited to writers, who cares? It’s still worth doing, and its influence makes its way into the popular culture eventually. Popular culture would not look the way it does now if artists were not having conversations amongst themselves. The assertion that literature about literature is self-referential falls apart under scrutiny for much the same reason. If we think of literature as art, than we must consider how innovations come about in the other arts, as well. Music (instrumental music), it can be argued, refers only to itself. Brahms begins his first symphony with an intentional echo of Beethoven’s Fifth. Stravinsky drew on folk songs to compose the Rite of Spring, which was nothing if not a profound innovation, and an influence on everything that came after. The line from Pissarro to Cezanne is a straight one, and from thence to Braque and Picasso. But it isn’t just a matter of influence. It’s about how one hears, how one sees. Cubism is all about seeing—and, in that sense, painters paint about painting, just as musicians make music about music.

Why should writers pretend—or even want—to be different?

Obviously I’m not suggesting that we should write about writing and nothing else; stories and poems about stories and poems are frequently a dull affair. But I would go so far as to say that they’re no more likely to be dull than anything else in a literary magazine, and that’s because writing well—about anything—is hard.

So if you are a writer, and you’re interested in exploring what we do, why we do it, how it’s done, what’s been done, what might be done, you have to be open to reading about the enterprise.

And I enjoyed Permafrost.

James McCann's poem was ironic and very funny, a criticism of the culture to which it belongs. Formatted in bullet points, it lists, as the title promises, the learning objectives of a poetry workshop. They range from “the student will know one hundred and fifty terms of prosody and be able to insert them into ordinary conversation” to “the student will recite poems to unwilling listeners without fear or shame.” As members of AWP culture, how many of these people have we met? How many of us have become these people? While the gesture McCann makes here may not be a particularly original one, it is nothing if not honest. And it’s wonderfully executed. The vicious honesty and playful humor of the poem made me laugh out loud, particularly at the line: “the student will be able to inhale helium and speak like Donald Duck for extended periods of time.”

Of the five short stories in the magazine, two deal with writers and writing. “Distractions,” by Kristofor Lastine, is about Leon Welbourne, who is struggling with “the new novel.” His last two were disappointments, and he wears his “tweed hat low to avoid eye contact and conversations about snow accumulation… and the new novel.” I liked that, the likening of avoiding eye contact and mundane conversations to avoiding our writing. How much of our struggle with writing can be compared to avoiding the mundane, the conversations about snow accumulation? And, metaphorically speaking, what is writing but eye contact? As writers, we are obliged to look ourselves and our world directly, and in doing so we make ourselves profoundly vulnerable. As Harold Pinter said in his Nobel lecture, “the search for the truth can never stop…it cannot be adjourned…it has to be faced, right there, on the spot.” Perhaps that is why, later in the same address, he said that “a writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity…you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed…you find no shelter, no protection.”

Lastine touches on a similar theme in his story, and does so gracefully, obliquely, in a single sentence, with a single image, the hat worn low. What do we strive to accomplish in our writing, if not this kind of economy? And how inescapable is the compulsion to make the effort? Lastine’s protagonist says “I can’t step away from my writing. The typewriter beckons me.” A similar ambivalence pervades his personal life. He tells a woman that by the end of his marriage he couldn’t stand the sight of his ex-wife, yet remembers the way she used to stand by, “wiping the (medicine cabinet mirror) with a hand towel to keep it from fogging up” while he shaved, and—with nothing more than the image—Lastine evokes a sense of longing that can only be found in the most effective fiction.

“The Poetry Vaccine,” by Sam J. Miller, is a surreal piece of historical fiction that takes place in The Soviet Union. Narrated by the assistant to a sadistic doctor named Chukotkin—a doctor reminiscent of Dr. Mengele in a camp reminiscent of Aushwitz—the story begins “the lab smelled like blood when I arrived for work,” and goes on to tell us that “to my great horror, I started salivating.” Our protagonist's awful complicity in the nightmare is deepened when he reveals that he “used to let men pay (him) to bring their enemies to the lab.” Yet there is an almost tender side to him, a vulnerable side, a side that treads the same difficult waters that we do. “What can I say, comrade, I enjoy words.” He tells his bunkmate the story of a man he killed in Odessa, and—with tears in his eyes—his bunkmate says “That’s beautiful.” Chukotkin asks “how is it that you can remember a poem… when you can’t even remember to form a complete sentence?” Perhaps we need poetry to survive. Or perhaps Miller’s protagonist simply has the detachment that Lastine’s narrator feels he should have, in “Distractions.” It is the detachment it takes to witness the world, to take notes.

As the typewriter bug says to William Lee in the screen adaptation of William Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch, the only difference between writers and the rest of the world is that we are obliged to write a report. And to my eye, writing about that process is worthwhile.

Sam Ruddick is a staff writer for Luna Park. He is a Henfield Prize winning fiction writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in various publications, including Georgetown Review, The Sonora Review, Gulf Stream, The Saint Ann’s Review, Phantasmagoria, and Pindeldyboz. He has a PhD in English from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi, where he received the Joan Johnson Award for Fiction in 2008. Contact: sam.ruddick@gmail.com.

[Above picture is the cover of Permafrost 30, 2008.]