Welcome to Issue 7: Dear Friends aka “The Oldies Issue”. Starting today, we begin an experiment of sorts: a short issue comprised of pre-twentieth century poetry. I’d hoped people would submit a poem they love, like, or that should simply just be shared along with a short statement about or response to the poem. Creative responses intrigued me, and I had no idea what I’d get.

I was interested in “deep tracks” more than the “hits,” so the likes of Poe, Dickinson, and Shakespeare would be fine, but I wanted to avoid the high school English textbook standards since I already know them being a non-standard high school English teacher.

From a copyright standpoint, all submissions needed to be in the public domain and out of copyright, which along with a desire to explore lesser known works, led to the pre-twentieth century requirement.

What I got was what I always get from Gnarled Oak contributors… amazing work that inspires. I hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as I enjoyed putting it together, and thank you to all who submitted and made this experiment possible.

Summary

Issue 6: Cosmology (Jan-Feb 2016) is an unthemed issue featuring poetry, prose, videos, and artwork from writers and artists around the world.

Read online | Read the PDF (click to read online, right-click & save-as to download)

Contents

On New Year’s Day — Christopher Woods

Frost Flowers — Sandy Coomer

Ghosts of Home — Kim Mannix

Cosmology — Laura M. Kaminski

Time Capsule — Bill Waters

Memories — Angelee Deodhar

Chesapeake Beach in October — Andrea Wyatt

Three Crows and a Storm — Joan Leotta

Black Sun Rising — Darrell Urban Black

Wyvern — Holly Day

The Lesson — Natalie d’Arbeloff

Somnolence — Yesha Shah

the heart’s trails — Herb Kauderer

untide— David Kelly

Herring — Elizabeth McMunn-Tatangco

Ripples — Olivier Schopfer

Resting — Mary McCarthy

Rush-hour — Shrikaanth Krishnamurthy

Closed Sign at Bill’s Bait & Beer — Trish Saunders

Discovered/Uncovered — Fabrice Poussin

Reading Whitman on Roque Island — Dervishspin

found poems — Duncan Richardson

Mural with Matching Sky — Jean Morris

Pinned — George Yatchisin

Transmission — Marie Craven

Sister Speed Racer and the Silent Brides of Christ
 — Michael Whiteman-Jones

End of the Road — Debbie Strange

Editor’s Note

When I was very young, living in Virginia, my dad woke me up in the middle of the night to go outside and look through the telescope. He had it pointing at Saturn, and for the first time, I saw the rings. This was back when the Voyager probes were sending images back from the gas giants, the days of Skylab and the Viking missions. Back then, it was easy to imagine that someday I would travel to the planets.

Those starry nights along with thrilling days spent at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum ignited one of the longest running passions of my life: astronomy.

Eventually, Skylab fell, the Moon got farther away, NASA went from exploring to transporting, the speed of light remained inviolable, and I gave up on thinking I would ever travel the stars. But I kept reading. I kept peering out through the telescope, every winter staring for hours on end at the Pleiades and the star nursery of Orion.

In college I took a bunch of astronomy courses. I’m no astrophysicist, and these were the kinds of courses geared for non-science majors so the classes were filled with an interesting mix of people trying to satisfy science credit requirements without having to do math, potheads looking to have their minds blown, and people like me who grew up on Star Wars and Star Trek, Pioneer, Viking, and Voyager. Looking up in wonder at the universe.

My love of observational astronomy developed into a fascination with the bizarre nature of theoretical and quantum physics that always led me back to astronomical weirdness: neutron stars, quasars, magnetars, black holes, radio galaxies. Thinking about this stuff is to ponder the very nature of existence, and it always made me feel like I was studying metaphors as much as the physical universe.

That sense of wonder has never left me. When I look at Hubble images, sunsets and mountains on Mars photographed by rovers, or the moon hanging in the bare elm branches on winter nights, I can’t help but be amazed and filled with curiosity and wonder. Needless to say, Laura M. Kaminski’s wonderful poem “Cosmology” captures that perfectly and spoke to me very deeply and not just about what’s up there, but what’s in here (picture me tapping on my heart).

So it seems literature and art are part of cosmology too in some sense, I think. Not in the physical way, of course, but on the human scale where we attempt to know and understand the universe and our tiny corner of it as we whirl around on this “pale blue dot” as Carl Sagan so aptly described it.

We look out the window and there’s that world out there. And we try so hard to make sense of it. That’s how this issue felt to me… a cosmology made of twenty-seven ways of knowing. Parts of a grand theory, maybe.

Thank you for being a part of this, and as always…

With gratitude and thanks,

James Brush, editor
February 2016

 

Confession: I realized as I was writing this that about half of it had already been written and posted to my blog ten years ago, so I repurposed some of what I’d written then. Here’s the old post: The Universe in a Nutshell

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Gnarled Oak — Issue 6: Cosmology: Read online | Read the PDF (right-click/save-as to download)

Summary

Issue 5: The Globe in My Pocket (Oct-Nov 2015) is an unthemed issue featuring poetry, prose, and artwork from writers and artists around the world.

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Contents

the globe in my pocket — Ehizogie Iyeomoan

Poem Where No One Thinks about Death — Glen Armstrong

playing my guitar — Brian Robertson

the blues — Herb Kauderer

Agnes Martin at Tate Modern — Jean Morris

Aubade: A Parallel Poem — Yuan Changming

Big Shot Family — Paul Beckman

Jackie O’s Strange New Life — Elby Rogers

moving sale — Sheila Sondik

Renovation (A Fragment) — Ben Meyerson

a single cloud — Shloka Shankar

Poem — Howie Good

Deconstruction — Olivier Schopfer

masquerade ball — Archana Kapoor Nagpal

The Halloween Quintet — Judy Salz

Boyhood Buoys (4): Frogmeat Sale — Yuan Changming

Apex — Mary McCarthy

Thunder — Leah Browning

read-letter day — David Kelly

Holiday — Rachel Nix

spring breeze — Kala Ramesh

the tightening — Debbie Strange

Shoal — Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

Year of Glass — Katie Gleason

Eagle — Kenneth Pobo

My Mother’s Voice — Mary Kendall

China Seagull — Jo Waterworth

across the open sea — j.lewis

Nightswimmer’s Purgatorial — Todd Mercer

Mountains Will Break Your Heart, If You Let Them — Trish Saunders

Editor’s Note

Here at the end of the final issue for 2015—an anniversary issue since it’s been a year since we went live—and since it’s Thanksgiving week here in the US, I want to express my gratitude and thanks to all who make Gnarled Oak such a joy.

So thank you to everyone who sends poems, stories, videos, and artwork for consideration. The submissions queue here at Gnarled Oak is so good I sometimes feel like my email is a journal in and of itself, and a good one at that. I can’t publish everything, of course, but everything is read and appreciated.

Thank you also to all of Gnarled Oak’s readers, especially those who help promote and share the work that appears here. This would be nothing without the support of Gnarled Oak’s readers and the community that has grown up around this journal. So thank you for reading and for sharing. Someday a poem is going to go viral like a cat video; I just know it!

While we’re imagining that better world, maybe we can imagine a world in which we stop blowing each other up. Can poetry and artwork, stories and videos help bring that world about? I don’t know. Some days it seems like it doesn’t make a bit of difference. But maybe it does.

And so I’m thankful to all of you who share your words, ideas, stories and visions with the rest of us. You make the world a better place. You give hope, understanding, perspective, insight. I believe that helps. I know it doesn’t hurt.

With gratitude and thanks,

James Brush, editor
November 2015

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Gnarled Oak — Issue 5: The Globe in My Pocket: Read online | Read the PDF (right-click/save-as to download)

Summary

Issue 4: A Parachute in the Wind (Jul-Aug 2015) is an unthemed issue featuring poetry, prose, videos, and artwork from writers and artists around the world.

Read online | Read the PDF (click to read online, right-click & save-as to download)

Contents

In the Beginning — Tony Press

common s[un]flower — Robin Turner

texas dandelion — Robin Turner

bindweed — Robin Turner

I confess — Caroline Skanne

Old Gods — Luis Neer

Security — Marie Craven

A Reverence for Rust — Debbie Strange

old broken gate — Brian Robertson

Fragments — JK Anowe

Graffiti — Miriam Sagan

Crooked Smiles — Arika Elizenberry

Bystander — Mary McCarthy

Dog Whistle Effect — Lauren Yates

Angel — Olivier Schopfer

searching — Kala Ramesh

twigs — Duncan Richardson

Elegy for Apologies I Will Never See — Lauren Yates

Wabash & Balbo — Todd Mercer

Walking in Chinatown on Sunday, You Do Get Lonely
 — Trish Saunders

Lime Light — Marilyn ‘Misky’ Braendeholm

Unmusically — Sheikha A.

Sanyi — Saddiq Dzukogi & Laura M. Kaminski

Lines on a Postcard — Joan Colby

deep dreaming — Marianne Paul

Night Court — Marie Craven

wilma suddenly — Angie Werren

red rover — Angie Werren

I Planted a Lemon Tree in My Mouth — Tonya Sauer

Sweet Tea — Roslyn Ross

Considering Luminescence / Consideraciones Sobre la Luz — Eduardo Yagüe

Editor’s Note

August is a weird time of year. There is a certain cognitive dissonance that comes from starting school and returning to the classroom in the midst of summer. Sure, it’s almost September and then you might start to feel autumn coming on farther north, but here in Texas it’s high summer and will be for quite some time. Maybe to native Texans it doesn’t seem weird, but I started my school years and went to high school in northern states and that idea that school starting equals autumn is pretty well locked in, never mind the fact that I’ve been here for twenty-seven years.

This year coming back to school brought me back to something I’d put out of my mind for the summer: the shredder, that big clunky wonderful machine that devours huge piles of paper and rapidly churns them into confetti. I kind of like shredding papers. I like feeding that beast, and standing there in all that white noise is sort of soothing.

Because I teach in a juvenile correctional facility, I shred a lot of old student work. Whatever the kids choose not to take with them when they leave goes down the shredder in the interest of protecting their privacy. So part of closing out my classroom in early June involves shredding all the unclaimed work: tests, quizzes, journals, worksheets, essays, and, yes, stories and poems. Some of them quite good. It makes me wish more of the kids I teach would recognize their own talents and value their voices at least enough to take their work with them out to the Free. But they don’t, and so I shred.

Last spring, whilst peacefully shredding away, I looked down to see that I was shredding the wrong pile. “Noooooooo!” I nearly yelled like Luke finding out Vader was his father, for I was shredding all of my brilliant Notes to Self that I’d written over the course of last school year. Things about what I want to do differently this year, ideas for lessons, activities and projects. You see, I was determined to reinvent things and rethink what I do in the classroom. It’s a useful exercise for teachers to do, I think, to throw out the old and try new ideas. And I was going to do that.

So, I started this August with a bit of trepidation. Not only is it too hot to be in school, but most of my ideas for this year are confetti, recycled months ago. So, I’m starting again by trying to re-reinvent things, and it’s exciting. It’s New 2.0. And I like that.

And speaking of things new and exciting, I hope you’ve found this issue of Gnarled Oak to be as exciting as I did. So thank you to all of you (or all y’all as we say in Texas) who submit (and resubmit) and read and share all this amazing work. You help me—and hopefully others—see the world in new, surprising, beautiful, sometimes heart-breaking and often wonderful ways. Even in August.

With gratitude and thanks,

James Brush, editor
August 2015

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Gnarled Oak — Issue 4: A Parachute in the Wind: Read online | Read the PDF (right-click/save-as to download)

Summary

Issue 3: Blue Vegetarian Lions (Apr-May 2015) is an unthemed issue featuring poetry, prose, videos, and artwork from writers and artists around the world.

Read online | Read the PDF (click to read online, right-click & save-as to download)

Contents

Love Is in the Air — Neil Ellman

crescent moon — Laurie Kolp

Column — Janet & Cheryl Snell

& in the dream — Marcia Arrieta

Everything but the Sky — Swoon

That Sinking Feeling — Joseph Farley

Solar Therapy — Michele S. Cornelius

To: That Bird So Small I Mistook You for a Floater — Barbara Young

The Trees in Buena — Seth Jani

He Realized the City Was the Abstraction — W. Jack Savage

Rendered — Richard King Perkins II

Mary at 30 Thinks about 60 — Kenneth Pobo

Mary at 60 Remembers 30 — Kenneth Pobo

Sisters — Shloka Shankar

Penelopiad — Jade Anouka

These Hands — Debbie Strange

Buddha & Co. — Howie Good

Wastage — Bill Waters

Poem Without Words — Dick Jones

Camberwell Old Cemetery — Jean Morris

waxing moon — Eric Burke

Omen — Sonja Johanson

The Episodic West — W. Jack Savage

Errant — Lawrence Elliott

Sakura Yama — Bobie (Yves Bommenel)

microwords — Herb Kauderer

Ode to a Writing Prompt — Yoni Hammer-Kossoy

Fish in Bowls Are Like Bears in a Circus — Trish Saunders

Holding the Moon — Laura M. Kaminski

On the Beauty of Nature — Dane Cervine

Ode to a Bee — Michele S. Cornelius

Hidden Flowers — Laura M. Kaminski

pick-your-own — Julie Bloss Kelsey

The Red Drum — Marie Craven

Editor’s Note

It was probably early November, back in ‘96, one of the best times of year here in Austin when the summer heat has broken and the first cold fronts start rolling in. I was in grad school at UT Austin at the time and one especially nice day my fellow students and I filed into the bare off-white room with the scuffed up walls and mismatched chairs somewhere in the bowels of the Communications Building where our weekly graduate screenwriting seminar met.

Our professor, Robert Foshko—Uncle Bob, after he and my aunt married a few years prior—usually started with some story from his years working as a writer and producer during the golden age of TV that would serve to illuminate and somehow tie together our weekly discussion. Or perhaps he would talk about some obscure film from which we could all learn something about writing, and then we would dive into our pages and the critique of the good, bad and ugly in all our writing. Bob wasn’t afraid to tell us where we’d gone wrong or to tell us what we had done well either, which for some teachers is the harder trick.

He was unyielding in his demand for our best work and always honest in his assessments yet kind at the same time. You always knew he was on your side even when your writing that week was lousy. Though I abandoned screenwriting for poetry and fiction, the lessons I learned in his class have continued to influence my writing and my teaching.

He was forever reminding us not to be afraid to leave things unsaid, to show and not tell. Our audiences are smart people, he’d tell us. They will figure things out and appreciate your letting them do so.

But on that particular November day, he stared at us with his inscrutable expression, took a deep breath as if about to gently tear into some especially egregious writing and then did the seemingly unthinkable. He said, “You know, it’s a beautiful day out there. And you people are young. Go outside and enjoy yourselves today.”

I didn’t go to the library to read for my other classes. I didn’t study or write. I hopped on my bike and rode all over Austin that sunny autumn afternoon. We made up for that day of course, nothing is free after all, but years later, I still think it was one of the best things I learned in grad school.

Bob died unexpectedly earlier this month. It’s a painful blow to the whole family and to the many of us who loved him, but I found some measure of solace in this issue of Gnarled Oak.

All of the amazing work contained in this issue was selected and the order (mostly) set before he died, but somehow the work that came in the weeks after Bob’s passing helped me. It’s a strange serendipity, I know, but it makes me all the more grateful to have the honor and privilege to publish this journal and be able to fill it with such fine work. So, as always, my sincerest thanks to all who submitted and contributed work, all those who read Gnarled Oak, comment and share it with friends and networks. I can’t thank you enough.

Now, go outside and enjoy yourselves today. See you in July.

With gratitude and thanks,

James Brush, editor
May 2015

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Gnarled Oak — Issue 3: Blue Vegetarian Lions: Read online | Read the PDF (right-click/save-as to download)