BURN PILE: Ephemera. Self-doubt & Jellies. Ink artfully spattered. And gourds.

Juli Berwald: Looking at Life Through The Two Dozen Eyes of a Jellyfish
"They sense their world with not just one but with many, many faces"

“Sometimes during the day, while the kids were at school and I was supposed to be working, I sat watching the pulsing, the resting, the floating. What was life like for a jellyfish? What did they feel? Could they hear the sounds in the house? Did they taste the water? Did the jellyfish know I was watching them?
From Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone, by Juli Berwald.”

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David Queen is a Truman Capote Fellow at the University of Montana. His story, "House Call," is in the latest issue of Whiskey Island (Issue #69), and another called "Dry" is forthcoming in Jellyfish Review. David also published a review of Mary Miller's new collection Always Happy Hour in Fiction Southeast.

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Narrative Magazine’s Poetry Contest Winners are online:

The Food Chain by Raven Leilani
Free Huey P. Newton with Every Purchase and Other Poems by Troy Jollimore
Watching the Foxes by Milo Gallagher

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CutBank Poetry Editor Aya Satoh is interviewed by Rachel Mindell (MFA 2015) of Submittable about her experience at Thinking Its Presence, “a conference focused on explorations of race, creative writing, and art,” in An Encounter with the Ephemeral Archive: Thinking Its Presence 2017

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Alicia Mountain’s (MFA 2015) poem, “Inescapable Luck,” is in The Southampton Review.

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At Poets.org, a celebration of “Native American Heritage Month, a time for us to honor the history, culture, and traditions of Native Americans past and present.” Featured poems from Alexie to Zepeda, and several essays, as well.

What Flannery O'Connor's College Journal Reveals by Karen Swallow Prior.
“The brief diary shows an aspiring writer struggling to overcome doubt and anxiety.”

“…eight years after her death, The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor would be honored with the National Book Award for Fiction. But the young woman of 18 writing in the journal knows none of this. What she knows is that she wants to succeed as an artist, but she is filled with self-doubt…”

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“On Not Writing” by Alison K Williams

“This is checking my tool box and wondering where the secret tool that makes it easy is. This is suspecting everyone else has the secret tool and they’re all only pretending it’s hard so I don’t feel bad.

This is ridiculous envy.”

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"Two months after the publication of my suicide essay, I woke up one morning and knew I was going to kill myself that day."
“Reading ‘Girl, Interrupted’ in the Psych Ward” by Anne Thériault at Electric Lit.

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Some Cheer and Reality Checks for the Coming Holiday!

“What to Read when You Want to Feel Grateful”
The Rumpus shares a selection of books “that have taught us, inspired us, woke us up, offered us hope, [given] us a glimpse at our possible futures, and so much more.”

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Native American Girls Describe the REAL History Behind Thanksgiving | Teen Vogue

Featuring: Laurel Cotton, Duannette Reyome, Evannah Moniz-Reyome, Kiera Thompson, Wacantkiya Mani Win Eagle, and Wanbli Waunsila Win Eagle.

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In the Guardian: “Is it too late to save the world? Jonathan Franzen reflects on the role of the writer in times of crisis.”

"I’m not on social media, but my friends reported that I was being called all sorts of names, including 'birdbrain' and 'climate-change denier'. Tweet-sized snippets of my essay, retweeted out of context, made it sound as if I’d proposed that we abandon the effort to reduce carbon emissions, which was the position of the Republican party, which, by the polarising logic of online discourse, made me a climate-change denier. In fact, I’m such a climate-science accepter that I don’t even bother having hope for the ice caps. "

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"It’s the most wonderful time of year again: pre-Thanksgiving! Here at Manger, we’ve been wracking our brains for weeks to give you new content about a holiday that’s had the same menu for three centuries and change."
WE HOPE YOU ENJOY YET ANOTHER THANKSGIVING ISSUE OF OUR FOOD MAGAZINE! by Krithika Varagur

And for no good reason at all, Ralph Steadman. “Don’t be sniffy about people who dip pens…”

And here's your Pre-Thanksgiving Easter egg...

PS: Special thanks and HT to Hamish Rickett for this week's jellyfish preoccupation.