I have often heard people use the word “escapism” when talking about stories. I have never liked this label. People have claimed that a major motivation for readers is the escape from their lives into a preferable world. While stories may give some small relief by distracting the reader from personal problems there is surely an overlying inherent value to stories that is independent of the reader’s life. I have always enjoyed experiencing another person’s imagination. Imagination may be the most personal and varied part of the mind and viewing the effects of others’ imaginations creates ways to reorganize how to view the world. Finding ideas, as a reader, that I wouldn’t think of by myself is the greatest reward. The term “escapism” has always bothered me because it implies that readers can’t appreciate the work for itself.

Michael Samiotes

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There is a used bookstore in Boston, Commonwealth Books, where I found a collection of stories by a man named Breece D’J Pancake. He died at the young age of 26. There is a black and white portrait of him on the back cover, looking pensively at something outside of the frame, something I’ll never know. Is he writing a story? Reading? Or just simply lost in his own melancholy? These are all of the stories he had written in his short career, in between the yellowed covers of an old West Virginia road and praise of his seemingly singular luminosity. It’s a strange name, Breece D’J Pancake, but I have been looking for good short fiction and on the first page, in his story “Trilobites”, there are already sentiments and regret:

“I see a concrete patch in the street. It’s shaped like Florida, and I recollect what I wrote in Ginny’s yearbook: ‘We will live on mangoes and love.’ And she up and left without me – two years she’s been down there without me. She sends me postcards with alligator wrestlers and flamingos on the front. She never asks me any questions. I feel like a real fool for what I wrote, and go into the café.”

There is the sad refrain of “without me,” echoing vibrantly with the desire to share mangoes and love with someone else. The opening story deals with a search to fill some void of missing satisfaction or lost sentiments. The narrator’s father died and his mother is looking on selling the farm. The narrator has looked for trilobites, an extinct arthropod, but has been unable to find any of those gems. There are his options, but he is unable to know how to make heads or tails with them. There is an inevitability of a future, but where does it lead and how does it involve him?

It’s all a search: writing, reading, and finding new authors who bring some aspect of their own life into your own. Though in contemporary fiction, it’s difficult looking for the authors who have already passed away, like looking into the fiction of some distant ghost. They’re reading to you from beyond the grave. Roberto Bolaño was delivered to the English-speaking world that way. A man decorated with literary awards, yet he died in 2003 of liver failure, two years before New Directions published By Night in Chile. The Savage Detectives has the search for some truth, the author Ceserea Tinajero, and there are the critics looking for Archimboldi in 2666. It’s hardly ever conclusive, but it’s satisfying, much like my own means to look further into the life of who these authors are.

It’s limiting, it’s an eerie feeling at times; people who lived a life so close to my own, but they’re non-existent now. There are only scraps of their past life existing within the present. But reading their literature, they were once impassioned about something at points in their life, be it a craving for some intangible truth or to represent something beyond their hidden knowledge.

That’s what a bulk of the entries for Long River Review entail, young adults clumsily tripping over language to deliver something that is viscerally tangible to them. Yes, it’s not at all perfect. It becomes an eyesore at times. But there are a few that strike the nail on the head, and it becomes as invigorating as finding that strange author’s name in a used bookstore tucked away in Boston. There’s an entire world of books and knowledge out there, waiting to be written, waiting to be read. Even to be a part of that world is most rewarding and challenging. There are all the woes in the publishing world now, but it needs to be its own self-acknowledging phoenix, ready to fall apart and start over again. Literature is not something that will cease existing. There are still all our literary ghosts, but there is always the search ready to be written about, waiting to be read.

Daniel Gregory

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I apologize for the strange symbols taking the place of traditional symbols. I am not sure how to fix the issue yet.

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Adorned in a forest green wool sweater, poet and author C.D. Wright seemed slightly nervous at the beginning of her reading at the University of Connecticut on Feb. 10.

Laughter is certainly the best medicine.

Upon pausing for a sip of water, Wright was reminded of a funny anecdote that she told the audience. She had gone to a friend’s reading and he was so nervous he had dry mouth but was unable to drink water because his hand couldn’t stop shaking.

“He asked, ‘How am I going to drink this water?’” Wright said.

The audience’s chuckles put Wright at ease.

The reading was part of the Aetna in Residence Program, a program that brings an internationally or nationally renowned poet to UConn every spring and fall. The program was started in 2003 and is funded by an Aetna grant.

Wright read a medley of poems, mostly from her newest collection, “Rising, Falling, Hovering,” published in 2008. The collection was inspired by modern America.

One of the most distinctive aspects of Wright’s poetry is its style. Many of the poems employ modern techniques. For instance, she often uses short, simplistic lines. Her poetry also tends to be conversational; one long run-on sentence broken up into many smaller ones. It is both narrative and descriptive, but unlike many narrative poems, it doesn’t sound like prose.

One poem I liked was “Floating Trees,” a poem about domestic life from the “Tremble” collection. I thought the descriptions of this poem were very eloquent. Wright immediately got my attention with the title. Like the other poems, the lines were very terse, but nonetheless effective.

Wright was unable to pinpoint the main source of inspiration for her poetry.

“Inspiration is for amateurs,” she said. “You get a few gifts, but in poetry, much of it is free-willed.”

One poem, “In a Mansion of Happiness,” was inspired by Parker Brothers first board game, “A Mansion of Happiness.” The poem is part of the collection entitled
“One Big Self: an Investigation,” a collaboration with photographer Deborah Luster that portrays prison life at a Louisiana prison.

Wright also read some of the poems in the “40 Watt” series, a series of forty short poems. The most memorable of these poems was entitled, “Poem Where Every Other Line is a Falsehood,” which does exactly what the title describes.

“It was like writing country,” Wright said. “I hate country, but it’s my culture so I’m allowed to hate it.”

The poem was very innovative, taking an approach I had never seen before in poetry.

Wright has published 12 books of poetry and prose. Her literary honors include the MacArthur Fellowship and Lannan Literary Award. She was named Poet Laureate of Rhode Island in 1994, a five- year post, and currently teaches at Brown University in Providence.

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