BEACHES TO WALK, rivers to paddle, trails to hike. The pair of red-headed woodpeckers that nested in our yard. Warblers. A red-eyed vireo laboring to feed a fledgling cowbird half again its size. Visits from friends and family (everyone wants to visit Traverse City in the summer). Neighbors’ lawn mowers, leaf blowers, chainsaws, chippers. Women’s World Cup on tv. Book tour; print and radio interviews; road food; poor sleep. Fishing with my buds on the Boardman and Ausable and a spur-of-the-minute seven-hour drive north to fish with Tim on his secret river. The storm of the decade and a yard tangle-heaped with fallen trees. Cordwood to cut, split, and stack; enough for three winters. Piles of novels. The Detroit Tigers.
And I wonder why I haven’t written much this summer.
*
I was saddened to learn recently that one of my favorite literary magazines, PANK, is ceasing publication at the end of this year. Since 2007, M. Bartley Seigel and Roxane Gay have curated some of the most consistently engaging poetry and short prose in print and online. Some of it has been “experimental,” but in PANK literary adventurousness is never obscure. Every issue includes stories and poems that deserve to be read and reread. Their current online edition features this, the best thing I read today (the current issue also features “Anxiety Index” by my friend David Hornibrook; it’s the second-best thing I read today):
Bonnie Jo Campbell
First I married the breakfast cereal in its small cardboard chapel, wax-coated, into which I poured milk. Then I married a cigarette, for the gauzy way the air hung around us when we were together, then a stone, because I thought he was a brick or a block, something I could use to build a home. There was a bird, but flying away repeatedly is grounds for divorce. The shrub was a lost cause from the get-go and the TV gave me marital-tension headaches. The kidney was dull, the liver was slick, the car was exhausting, the monster in the woodshed scared the children (though I found his stink enticing). The teacup was all filling and emptying, emptying and filling. When I married the squirrel the wedding was woodland, the guests scampered, but all that foraging and rustling of sticks and leaves was too much. And the males sleep balled together in another tree all winter! How foolish, my marrying the truck, the shovel, the hair, the hope, the broom, the mail—oh, waiting and waiting for the mail to come! Marrying the cat was funny at first, and I luxuriated in his fur, until I heard his mating yowl, until the claws and the teeth, the penile spines, dear God. Forget the spider, the mask, the brittle bone. And then a slim-hipped quiet confidence leaned against the wall of the Lamplighter Lounge, chalking a pool cue, and I said, Lordy, this is for real. He ran the table, and I fanned myself with a coaster—this was going to last! I called home and divorced a plate of meatloaf. Confidence gave me a good couple of months. I learned aloof and not eating in public, but it did not last. He wasn’t from the Midwest, and besides, tied to a barstool across the room, some drunk’s seeing-eye dog was starting to chew the fishnet stockings off a lady’s artificial leg.
Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of the forthcoming story collection Mothers, Tell Your Daughters (W.W. Norton, October 2015) and the bestselling novel Once Upon a River. She was a National Book Award finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for her collection of stories, American Salvage, as well as a Guggenheim Fellow. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan with her husband and two donkeys.
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