Issue 15: Borrowing

Editor’s Note: Issue 15

Dear Readers,

I am very proud to introduce our newest issue of Ruminate, featuring the winners of the 2010 Short Story Prize. The short stories along with the nonfiction, poetry, and art, together, make for quite an issue, beautifully sweeping yet intimate, larger than life yet containing a keen depth. David James Duncan, finalist judge of this year’s contest, says of the prize-winning story, “it gazes into hell” and “never loses track.” And I think this issue concurs. It is not afraid to stare, without flinching, at life and death—and without asking, grab the reader’s hand and take her for a ride.

Shann Ray’s “The Miracles of Vincent Van Gogh” moved our staff so much so that we were inspired to use its idea of borrowing as the theme for this issue. Its narrator John Sender, a loan officer and man in love, says that every man borrows: “They borrowed what they felt they needed. And not just from him, from everyone, and not just money, they borrowed everything.” And it seems that although Ray’s characters often borrow the wrong things, that borrowing is quite possibly the only redeemable perspective with which to view life and life’s end. In response to Ray’s piece, David James Duncan says, “We’re all renters,” and I concur. Our life is not our own. Our life is a borrowed life.

Featured artist Jess Erickson calls her work in this issue a memento mori, translated “Remember, you will die.” Her pieces depict death through seemingly innocent, benign windows. She says in her artist’s note, “I have grown up in a culture that has attempted to sanitize and ignore the harsh realities of death. . . The elderly in our culture, those easily ignored beacons of our certain end, are tucked away in tall buildings disguised with gazebos and manicured gardens.” Like John Sender’s loan applicants, Erickson’s pieces draw attention to our attempts to cover up and ignore, desperately trying to escape “our certain end.” And it makes me wonder, is it possible to face death? As Niditch says in his poem “Sabbath Bread,” could we draw “on a hurt life to obtain eternities”?

This issue soars at its end through the “lavish lemon light” of Barbara Crooker’s poem “TuWi’s Considers April Sunlight.” “After this long hard winter, I reach out my arms, / lift my face to the sky. / Fry me, sunny side up.” And I give a resounding Amen. Yes. Please Lord. After a long hard winter, envelop me, thaw this hardened soul, help me to live in the light of “Remember, you will die,” and remember the death that infuses this borrowed life.

Peace and grace,

Amy Lowe

Senior Editor

2010 Short Story Prize

The Short Story Prize was graciously judged by author David James Duncan and was generously sponsored by the Friends of Ruminate program.

First Prize
Shann Ray: The Miracles of Vincent Van Gogh

Second Prize
Susanna Childress: Nothing to Fear

Honorable Mention
Nels Hanson: Now the River’s In You

Tu Wi’s Considers April Sunlight

Some cook in the sky must be ladling it out, pouring liquid gold
from her copper saucepan, basting the meadow in hollandaise.

Where it drips: buttercups, dandelions, butter & eggs.
Where it splashes: forsythia, daffodils, tulips.
After this long hard winter, I reach out my arms,
lift my face to the sky.
Fry me, sunny side up,
on spring’s hot griddle; clarify me, anoint me,
in your lavish lemon light

Last Note

Borrowings of the Ruminate Staff and Contributors

I borrow stories. My grandfather told me how he stuck himself on top of a telephone pole, my grandmother, how she was befuddled by the Bohemians in a women’s clothing store, making off with free underclothing; one man told me stories of WWII that I could not see in words, but a story of helping his father ranch tumbled into a poem like a paragraph from Little Britches.
Hannah Blair STAFF

My sister-in-law got my brother The Complete Calvin & Hobbes for Christmas one year, which I then borrowed for six months so I could read it start to finish.
Stephanie Walker STAFF

After getting burned with several small-stakes items like pens and watching too many midday court shows where one party says, “It was a loan,” and the other says, “It was a gift,” I crafted a policy for myself that I would never lend money to friends. Who wants the awkwardness of unpaid debt to muddy a friendship? All that next-paycheck, neck-scratching, any-day-now-I-promise stuff. So, instead, I give. Between good friends lending is almost vulgar. Would you lend someone you loved a kidney?
Ian Williams POETRY

In conflicts with my wife and daughters I’d get overly strong, and make people distressed, and usually it happened because I was unwilling to hear what people really needed me to hear. I remember watching a moment when my wife told her father something she wanted him to change. She was upset, and pretty heated. He listened and grew soft . . . his eyes softened, his body calmed. He said, “I’ve made you angry, haven’t I.” She said yes. He asked for her forgiveness and said, “Please tell me more.” He listened. He changed. For years now I’ve borrowed this way of trying to bring greater peace. Really, I borrowed the healing gift he had. I hope I can repay him, with the same kindness and courage to love.
Shann Ray FICTION

Why buy a leaf blower if you can borrow one? Well, here’s one good reason: if your spouse doesn’t know the difference between a two- and a four-cycle engine. (The former needs oil mixed in with the gas, if you’re curious.) “But I was having so much fun!” she explained to me. As I brought back our friend’s now-crippled tool, along with two hundred bucks, I thought: “Are we having fun yet?”
Phillip Henry STAFF

When I moved into my new house, I was without a shovel but longing for a garden. In Spanish, with wild digging gestures, I asked my elderly Hispanic neighbor for “a spoon for the garden.” Three months later, I had basil, cilantro, tomatoes, peppers, snap peas, and morning glories winding around the door.
Grace Olson POETRY

I couldn’t find my razor a few days into my first year at college, so I snuck into my new roommate Megan’s shower basket and noticed she had one just like mine, so I used it. I mentioned it to her later and she informed me that it was actually my razor—she couldn’t find hers the other day. We knew then that we were going to be great friends.
Edie Adams STAFF

I guess the best thing I’ve borrowed is the persona of Tu Wi’s, my imaginary inner poet from the Sung Dynasty. When she wants a poem written in her name (I have seven of them now), it behooves me to get out of the way, and let her take over.
Barbara Crooker POETRY

For a poetry class in college I created a Cornell box (after Joseph Cornell) to represent a poem using found objects. My fiancé built me a writer’s box to use. I rummaged through my grandmother’s house and borrowed a floral pin, wooden bird, cigarette box, and candy dish. The poem described the heart, so I arranged the objects in the box to capture the heart’s four chambers. I felt quite clever.
Shanna Prowlus Wheeler POETRY