Two scenes:
I’m at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts on a Geraldine R. Dodge fellowship for creative nonfiction, staying in a refurbished corn crib, if such a thing is possible since I’ve taken a bit to strutting. Across the way is an open door, someone is up late, too, and I introduce myself to Daniel Nester (working midnight-oil late on the first volume of his estimable two-part prose-poetry series, God Save My Queen). We become fast friends, partly because we’re on the same wave length about nonfiction and poetry and the creation of what I have begun to call “imaginary nonfictions,” which is very much in tune with what I’m in the process of writing—visits to roadside memorials set up in highway medians, the accident victims all teens. This endeavor later gets picked up, embraced even, by Richard Peabody for Gargoyle #40. Our only disagreement, which goes back and forth for a while, is over which category to include “Verges,” the name of my six-part series narrated by me and (“me”). Fiction or non?, Richard writes. Imaginary nonfictions, as this work has equal portions of each, I reply. Richard, suddenly the Aristotelian, insists that it’s one or the other: paper or plastic. I choose plastic.
While I’m also at the VCCA, locus of “outsider art,” I consider taking it upon myself to make up a set of small brass plaques that at night I’ll affix to fence posts, a slate in the walkway, a bird bath—“Epiphany,” “Long Course,” “Marcel,” A.R. Jansen. The cost becomes prohibitive even for an order of ten. Delivery time will require me to drive back from New York in February.
Things I long to do:
I’m back in New York in a gallery just above the Gagosian. What I see amazes me, a Paul Klee-like construction made from monofilament, the stuff I used to fish with as a boy. It’s beautiful and complex—straight lines: parallels, intersections, diagonals, sets of right angles, replicated in shadows set adrift as I move. This, I realize, is what I’d like my writing to do. In my head, if not my mind, I see Klee’s pencil and watercolor drawing, Man on Tightrope. If I were brave enough, of course I might be able to create such a thing from the lines of my schoolboy tablet. But it may have to be something else. For when I write, it’s the moving shadows I see and an unimaginable elevation that I desire—levitation, levity. Earlier in my career as a writer, I often wished to spread the pages out across my work table and then climb a ladder for an aerial view, wishing that someday all that’s solid would melt into air.
Submissions:
Out of Bounds Essay, Bloomsbury Review of Books. Editors: Reamy Jansen & Daniel Nester
What we’re looking for: fresh, off-beat nonfiction prose of no more than 300 words. Send two copies of your entry to Reamy Jansen, 16 Homestead Ave., Highland Falls, NY 10928. Include SASE, e-mail and contact number.
If you wish to see a sample Out-Of-Bounds Essay, write to the Submissions Address
Daniel Nester is the author of God Save My Queen (Soft Skull Press, 2003) and God Save My Queen II (2004), both collections on his obsession with the rock band Queen, as well as The History of My World Tonight (BlazeVOX, 2006). He’s working on an essay collection and a memoir, and works as an assistant professor of English at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. Find more about him at http://www.danielnester.com.
Reamy Jansen is Professor of English and Humanities at Rockland Community College SUNY. He is a past Vice President of the National Book Critics Circle. For fifteen years, he has been a Contributing Editor to The Bloomsbury Review of Books and is co-editor of its new, short prose section, The Out of Bounds Essay. His poetry and personal essays have been published in a variety of literary magazines and he has received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize. He can be reached through the Poets & Writers Directory.
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