Issue 18: Sound & Silence

Editor’s Note: Issue 18

With two young children running around the house and an office I work out of from home, I sometimes feel the near gut-wrenching and mind-angsting need to rest and be still, to have just one thought and complete it. Or ponder it. I’ve even yearned for the lavishness of taking a sabbatical or a vow of silence or fantasized about the seemingly luxurious focus of a monastic life. Ah, to be single-minded.

My brain is many-minded. And really, these aren’t viable options. I am trying to teach my 18-month-old how to talk. And every parenting article can’t stress enough the importance of conversing with your toddler, how she is learning new words every day, and how this is her verbal foundation. So I find myself talking all the time—pointing out each object in the room that catches her fancy and naming it, repeating to my daughter, “pillow. Pill-ow.” Yes, lest my daughter become tragically scarred in her verbal skills, now is not the time for silence.

Even so, I have still found myself craving it. Recently, upon arriving at Ad Lib’s artist retreat, I noticed that another group was also using the retreat facility, that they were having a silent retreat. For a moment I pondered tucking myself into their fold—opening the closed door and strolling in, quietly of course. I wondered about the silence there, wondered what it tasted like. But then I saw a dear friend waving me over to the correct conference room. We shared some words, a warm hello. My group started singing a few hymns, and the sounds of music and worship helped me remember that it isn’t simply loud sounds or my boisterous children that make my ears so tired, but rather, the noise, the sin, the clatter.

And then as we created Issue 18, I witnessed the distinction these contributors give us between sound and noise and also how silence helps us listen and hear. This issue was a gift to me, to ears made weary from a “noisy world” (as one reader calls it), and we hope it is a gift to you as well. So, it is with joy that we bring these offerings—an essay that helps us consider the effects of forcing silence on others, poetry on the sound of grief, aging, and love, fiction about silent fathers and the noise of laundromats, and art about the voice of cathedrals. Yes, like my daughter’s sweet “pill-ooow,”  these are  sounds worth listening for, but we must first be quiet in order to hear them  (for me, a cozy reading chair and a warm fire help).

May we all have ears to hear,

Brianna Van Dyke

Editor-in-Chief

Kyrie Eleison

For thence,—a paradox
Which comforts while it mocks,—
Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail . . .
—Robert Browning, “Rabbi Ben Ezra”

Mockingbirds flutter by, flashing
the white patches on their gray wings
amid their dance, flaunting before us
the way all lovers do with their public displays
of affection. We talk about whether we’ll reach 50,
my husband and I, sitting on the front porch,
bemoaning the many ways our health
has failed—his high blood pressure, bad heart,
my slow and complicated recovery
from my seventh surgery, turning up one new pain
after another. One mockingbird pulls
a refrain from his ever-expanding
repertoire. Come, he seems to croon.
Grow old along with me.
We long for the years of our young
marriage when we solved each ache
with Tylenol. One swallow. And done.
The other mockingbird, now perched on our roof,
chatters away, sending forth a tune
we cannot translate, a mystery that envelops us.
I look at my husband and love him more and more
and want to call to him like these birds,
want to tell him that we, too, may be a song
on some untamed tongue.

Contributor’s Notes

Miranda Barnes is a Midwestern gypsy currently living in Chicago, Illinois, teaching and tutoring writing students while working a day job. She received her MFA in writing from Spalding University in 2005. She is the author of a full-length book of poetry titled Between Two Hours, which has not yet found a home. Her poem “Wrung Hands” appeared in the inaugural issue of Blood Lotus Online Literary Journal. Another poem, “Insatiate Waters,” was awarded first place in the Virginia Lowell Grabill Writing Awards, 2001. Miranda Barnes has performed readings for the Poetry Factory at the Box Factory for the Arts in St. Joseph, Michigan, and the Hungry Young Poets Reading Series, presented by River Styx Literary Journal, in St. Louis, Missouri.

Jessica Daigle was born and raised in Deep South Louisiana, a place filled with richness in religion, culture, and food, all of which influence her writings. She currently lives in Lubbock, Texas, where she is completing a PhD in creative writing and women’s studies at Texas Tech University while raising her three children in “The Dust Bowl” region. Her writings have been published in such places as Rattle, storySouth, CALYX, Redivider, So to Speak, and other journals. She was the winner of So to Speak’s Winter/Spring 2009 Creative Nonfiction Contest and was a finalist in Arts & Letters 2010 Prize in Poetry. She has also been awarded a Ragdale Foundation writing residency in poetry. Currently, she is an associate editor of Iron Horse Literary Review.

Charity Gingerich hails from Northeast Ohio and is a third-year poet in the MFA program at West Virginia University, where she also teaches rhetoric and composition. She completed her undergrad at Kent State University (Stark Campus), obtaining a BA in English with minors in history and writing. Gingerich’s poetry will be featured in Center for Mennonite Writers Journal, November, 2010. Besides writing, she loves to sing in various choral groups, travel, tend her flowers, and feed her friends and neighbors—an inevitable result of growing up in a conservative Mennonite home with a mother who is both a wonderful cook and the warmest of hostesses.

Wesley Hurd was born in Claremont, California, in 1946. Wesley is the Founder of McKenzie Study Center and BlueTower Arts Foundation. He has a graduate degree in theology and a PhD in education concentrating in educational philosophy and social thought. He received his MFA in painting from the University of Oregon in 2000 and was nominated for the Portland Art Museum’s Northwest Contemporary Art Award in 2007. He presently teaches at Gutenberg College in Eugene. His work explores the unfolding meanings we attach to our most fundamental human experiences—the beautiful, the mundane, and the tragic. The Rumination Series explores his fascination with the physical and mental dualities imbedded in ordinary human existence. He and his wife Carol have lived in Eugene, Oregon, since 1977. Wesley presently shows at the Chambers@916 Gallery in Portland, Oregon, and the Jacobs Gallery in Eugene, Oregon.

Artist, poet, and associate editor of the Arsenic Lobster Poetry Magazine, Clarissa Jakobsons instructs art and writing classes at Cleveland’s Cuyahoga Community College. She also weaves unique artistic books with her poetry, which have been exhibited in Cleveland and Denver shows. Sample publications include: Qarrtsiluni, Ascent Aspirations, The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, Wicked Alice, and DreamSeeker Magazine. Clarissa is a popular reader of her poems in the United States as well as in Europe, but don’t be surprised to see her kicking sandcastles and painting Provincetown dunes, climbing majestic Berkeley hills, igniting Tai Chi poems from the towers of Notre Dame, lifting weights on Treasure Island, or walking under an Ohio crescent moon.

Brett Elizabeth Jenkins currently lives and writes in Minnesota. She has her MFA from Bennington. Look for her work in PANK, Anderbo, G.U.D., decomP, and elsewhere. She can be reached by email at brett.e.jenkins@gmail.com.

Courtney King Kampa, twenty-three, is a classically trained ballerina and has worked as a lobbyist at the United Nations and a model for Seventeen Magazine. She graduated from the University of Virginia this past May and currently lives in New York, where she is pursuing an MFA at Columbia.

Rick Kempa writes: “My poem, ‘A Figure of Sound,’ celebrates the glorious high country of northern New Mexico and the worshipful awe that it inspires. I teach writing and philosophy and direct the honors program at Western Wyoming College in Rock Springs.” (wiki.wyomingauthors.org/Rick-Kempa)

Kai Hoffman-Krull is currently a first-year student at Yale Divinity School, studying religious literature through the Institute of Sacred Music and Arts. Kai also runs the divinity school farm and attributes much of his theology to compost.

Mary Lotz writes: “When I first moved to the edge of the Great Plains, I was silenced by the sound of the winter wind, how it could howl around the corner of a house, play taps on the trash can, rustle a field of corn into a loud chorus. On the days it blew, I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. But over the years I came to love the things that blew past in summer—clouds, geese, tumbleweed mustard, the big Harley Davidsons on Interstate 29, groups of them, leather-black and streaming, their throaty rumbles like unspent promises. They were heading to Sturgis, South Dakota. I was heading to work. Where I live now—Michigan, with my husband and two Gordon Setters—the wind makes softer sounds and seems to always come with rain. There are still days when I can’t get a word in edgewise; like Job in the whirlwind, I’m learning to listen.”

Christina Lovin is the author of What We Burned for Warmth and Little Fires. A two-time Pushcart nominee and multi-award winner, her writing has appeared in numerous publications. Southern Women Writers named Lovin 2007 Emerging Poet. Having served as Writer-in-Residence at Devil’s Tower National Monument and the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Central Oregon, she was recently named inaugural Poet-in-Residence at Connemara, the North Carolina home of the late poet Carl Sandburg. Lovin has been a resident fellow at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been supported with grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Kentucky Foundation for Women, and Kentucky Arts Council.

Julie L. Moore is the author of Slipping Out of Bloom (WordTech Editions) and the chapbook Election Day (Finishing Line Press). A previous contributor to Ruminate and winner of the Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize in 2008, Moore is also the recipient of both the Rosine Offen Memorial Award from the Free Lunch Arts Alliance and the Judson Jerome Poetry Scholarship from the Antioch Writers’ Workshop. Recent work has appeared in American Poetry Journal, CALYX, The Missouri Review Online, New Madrid, and The Southern Review. Moore enjoys long walks in rural Ohio where she lives, writes, and directs the writing center at Cedarville University. (www.julielmoore.com)

D.S. Martin is a Canadian poet who lives near Toronto with his wife and two teenage sons. His collections include Poiema (Wipf & Stock), a prize recipient at the Canadian Christian Writing Awards, and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). His poems have appeared in such publications as Canadian Literature, Christianity & Literature, Dalhousie Review, and Queen’s Quarterly. He also blogs weekly about Christian poetry. (www.kingdompoets.blogspot.com)

Linda McCullough Moore lives and writes and mentors writers in Northampton, Massachusetts. Her work appears in more than 200 fine places. She is currently seeking a publisher for her story collection, Final Dispositions; the title story is a winner of the 2010 Pushcart Prize.

Dull of sense and slow of heart, David Oestreich is grateful when he is graced to glimpse anew the glory of God in all things. He lives with his wife and three children in northwestern Ohio where he is a human resources professional. His work has previously appeared in Minnetonka Review, Umbrella, Dash, and Eclectica.

Michelle Arnold Paine is a contemporary painter with a BA from Gordon College and an MFA from University of New Hampshire. She has collaborated with both Catholic and Protestant church communities to create “portraits” of the worship space or create art for a worship setting. Most recently she was Artist-in-Residence at Valparaiso University, Indiana, where her paintings were featured as the visual element of the Advent Vespers. During the three years Michelle spent living and working in Italy, she steeped herself in the Renaissance masters, the rhythms of the Catholic liturgy, and the intimacy and beauty of daily Italian life. In the medieval architecture she encountered mystery and the visible, tangible expressions of divine presence. The pieces represented here are also an evocative metaphor for our interior lives—that place where there is no longer thought, interest, or opinion, only silence: listening and waiting in the darkness. Michelle resides with her husband outside of Boston. (www.michellepaine.com)

Jennifer Merri Parker, who studied English and American literature at Harvard and creative writing at Seattle Pacific University, works in Mississippi as a writer and a librarian. She regularly associates with her Schnauzers, a pet toad, local writers guild and storytellers guild members, and Poets Anonymous, which is a group of poets and not a recovery program.

Mary Harwell Sayler lives in a rural area of North Florida where poetic stimuli abound. Her publishing credits include twenty-five books in all genres except poetry, but about two hundred of her poems have appeared in e-zines and journals such as Windhover, Bridges, Dovetail, Kalliope, and Chest medical journal. She also works with other poets and writers through The Poetry Editor website. (www.thepoetryeditor.com).

Randall J. VanderMey chairs the English Department at Westmont College, where he has taught for over twenty years. Besides publishing poems, short stories, essays, and academic articles, and co-authoring a book on psychiatric genetics, he has published God Talk, a book of essays about Christian clichés; Kenosis, a song cycle set to contemporary music; Charm School, a book-length dramatic poem about the Odyssey; and two college composition handbooks for which he is lead author: The College Writer and The College Writer’s Handbook. He and his wife Dana, an RN, have a blended family of four grown children and, so far, two grandchildren.