NEWS: Our Big Fish Prose Poetry/Flash Fiction Contest Winner is...

We're overjoyed to announce that "Rosicrucian Triptych" by Ursula Villarreal-Moura is the winner of the 2012 Big Fish Online Prose Poetry/Flash Fiction contest. Congratulations! Thank you so much to everyone who submitted. We'll be posting Ursula's piece in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

NEWS: Exciting Contests Open on December 1st Featuring Phantasmagoric Judges

In just DAYS our 2013 Montana Prize in Fiction, Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction,and Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry will open for submissions.

Submissions for all contests are accepted December 1, 2012 through March 1, 2013. Winners receive $500 and publication in CutBank 79. All submissions will be considered for publication in CutBank. The contests’ $17 entry fee includes a one-year, two-issue subscription to CutBank, beginning with the prize issue, CutBank 79.

Please send only your best work. With all three of these awards, weare seeking to highlight work that showcases an authentic voice, anoriginal perspective, and willingness to push against the boundariesof the form at hand. For more information, guidelines, and to apply, click here.

Montana Prize in Fiction Judge – Maile Meloy

Maile Meloy is the author of the novels Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter, and the story collections Half in Love and Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, which was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2009 by the New York Times Book Review and one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times and Amazon.com. Her first book for young readers, The Apothecary, won the 2012 E.B. White Award and was named one of the best children’s books of the year by Publishers Weekly, the Chicago Public Library, and The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, and other publications, and she has received The Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two California Book Awards, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction Judge – John D'Agata

John D'Agata is the author of The Lifespan of a Fact, About a Mountain, and Halls of Fame, and editor of The Next American Essay and The Lost Origins of the Essay. He teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where he lives.

Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry Judge – Cole Swensen

Cole Swensen in the author of fourteen books of poetry, most recently Gravesend (U. of California Press, 2012) and Stele (Post-Apollo Press, 2012), and a collection of critical essays, Noise That Stays Noise (U. of Michigan Press, 2011). She is also the founding editor of La Presse (www.lapressepoetry.com), a nano-press that publishes contemporary French writing in English translation, and the coeditor of the 2009 Norton anthology American Hybrid. She is the recipient of a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship, and her work has received the Iowa Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, the PEN Award in Literary Translation, and the National Poetry Series. She teaches in the Literary Arts Department at Brown University.

Cutbank Open for Submissions

We're all overjoyed to announce that Cutbank is now open for submissions. The submission period runs from today until February 15. Please submit everything to us through our submittable account, right here. For more information on our overall submission guidelines, visit our submission page, right here.

ALSO, don't forget about our contests! Our Big Fish Online Prose Poetry/Flash Fiction contest also opens today and will be open through November 1. Please direct contest submissions through our submittable account as well.

Below is a brief description of the contest. Find more information on this and other upcoming contests right here.

A prize of $200 and online publication will be given for the best piece of writing under 500 words that we receive. Flash fiction, short-shorts, micro-prose, prose poems, poetic prose, just plain short stories–whatever you call your briefest prose pieces, send them our way.

The contest winner will be chosen by the CutBank editorial staff and announced on our website on December 1. All submissions will be considered for both online publication and print publication in CutBank.

BIG FISH: Epic Manliness, Vincent Guerra

"Epic Manliness" by Vincent Guerra was the previous winner of the Online Big Fish Lyric Essay contest, as announced last spring. We're presenting it now to coincide with the soon-to-open Big Fish Flash Fiction/Prose Poetry contest! That contest is open from October 1st to November 1st. Read more about that here. In the meantime, enjoy this piece by Vincent Guerra.

Epic Manliness

Telemachus, the Door’s Ajar

No one detects a man’s hypocrisy better than his twenty year-old son. But an absent father often reaches a heroic rank, through the exaggeration of second-hand accounts and a child’s imagination filling in the empty hours. However, as Robert Bly tells us, this absence injures a son’s self-confidence.

Telemachus, on the playground, was known to classmates as Telemarketer, Televangelist, even Teletubby. Eventually, Telemachus would doubt his own legitimacy: Mother has always told me I’m his son… but I am not so certain, he tell us. One might locate this doubt as the driving question of the epic––the father leaves, the epic begins.

If life is just a long paternity test...¹

The Classicist’s Father

A man’s father raced speedboats. He showed us his jacket embroidered with two, hand-sized patches—one of a boat, the other of a gold trophy like a Grecian urn. “My father died,” he told us, “in the final year of my dissertation at Berkeley. I crashed,” he said, and the man, raising his hands to his face, summoned an invisible wall of water to wash over him.

We were sitting in a circle in a run-down cabin on moldy, orange couches and metal folding chairs. Everyone was tired from the five-hour drive to the retreat center in the mountains. There’s something unbearable about listening to men talk about their fathers. I felt like rising from my rusted chair and screaming, “No one fucking cares,” then heading to the cafeteria to eat their meat lasagna until I fell asleep.

Of course, I kept quiet, and the man continued: “I couldn’t read a single book; I couldn’t write a single word. I had been working for six years; I had two chapters left, and all my motivation sunk. I realized that my Ph.D. was to spite him, a man who didn’t even earn a high school diploma. When he died, there was no reason for me to continue with my degree.”

If one is not in search of one’s father, one is often subconsciously or consciously plotting his death (Is this why Telemachus leaves the armory door open, allowing the suitors a chance to defeat his father?). Even a dissertation can be an Oedipal weapon. Here, we have the second motor for the epic.²

After he finished his sermon, he passed the wine and communion and removed his father’s jacket with the rest of his vestments.

The General of Shame

Robert Bly, poet and father of the mythopoetic men’s movement, ends his poem, “My Father at 85,” with a note of triumphant irony: “He never phrased / what he desired, / and I am / his son.”³ The speaker describes his father. The father stays silent. “I do not want / or need / to be shamed / by him / any longer,” Bly writes. “The general of shame / has discharged him / and left him in this / small provincial / Egyptian town.”

According to Bly, his father was shame’s middle management. According to Bly, his father resembles three birds: 1) an eagle, the bird used throughout the Odyssey to signify the kingly Odysseus 2) a vulture, a carrion bird who hovers above the dying, who was revered in ancient Egypt for its ingenuity in using stones as tools 3) a baby bird, “waiting to be fed”

Bly continues: “If I do not wish / to shame him, then / why not /love him?” Sometimes, a son’s love is like a pillow sealing the mouth of an invalid.⁴

The Manliness of the Middle-Distance Warrior⁵

One should not deliver the deeds of heroes with a soft voice. ––Dionysus Thrax, 2nd Century BCE Grammarian

Homer distinguishes between two types of manliness in the Odyssey: hnopeh, which connotes valor and a proper relation to other men and to one’s wife (attributed to Odysseus), and aghnopih, which denotes “excessive manliness,” a self-destructive manliness (attributed to the suitors for their displays of macho and their general sleaziness toward married women). These men, while courageous in appearance, rush into battle, quickly dying, not having to prove themselves over the long war. In other words, they have commitment issues.

We learn of one such suitor’s thoughts on the value of life: “Friends, / I can’t bend it. Take it, someone—try. / Here is a bow to rob our best of life and breath, / all our best contenders! Still, better to be dead / than live on here, never winning the prize / that tempts us all—forever in pursuit, / burning with expectation every day.”

Conflicting Advice from the Damned

The Poo and the Alphabet⁶

A is for aweful, which things are; B is for bear them, well as we can. C is for can we? D is for dare: E is for each dares, being a man… ––John Berryman

Achilles: By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man— / some dirt- poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive–– / than rule down here over all the breathless dead.⁷

Henry: Henry likes Fall. / Hé would be prepared to líve in a world of Fáll / for ever, impenitent Henry. / But the snows and summers grieve & dream.

Lucifer: It is better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven.

Woody: All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates... which means that all men are homosexuals...

Bending the Bow

They are shooting me full of sings. ––Henry Pussycat

Like an expert singer skilled at lyre and song… under his touch it sang out clear and sharp as a swallow’s cry.

He would have strung the bow, but Odysseus shook his head.⁸

After 428 pages of struggling, the story arcs to full tension,

and the suitors think it must have been an accident

when Odysseus puts an arrow through the throat of their leader, Antinous.

The suitors’ signifying birds?—Geese, who feed then are slaughtered.⁹

The Breadwinners¹⁰

I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger: and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.¹¹ ––John 6:35

If life is a handkerchief sandwich… ––Henry Pussycat

Odysseus: It is. But Odysseus, the “son of pain,” expects as much.

The modern breadwinner, however, stomachs something akin to Tennyson’s Ulysses:

“Life piled on life,” the stagnancy of routine, social superfluity––a qualitatively different

pain.¹²

The Rebels¹³

Robert Bly’s Iron John, his attempt to harden the too-soft and fatherless American male, calls on its male reader to seek the “Wild Man” within himself. The Wild Man in Bly’s account of the fairytale—a retelling of Grimm’s Iron Hans—comes from a twelfth-century romance, titled Robert the Devil. While the Wild Man in Bly’s version mentors the young prince into manhood, in Robert the Devil, the wild man is the demon from which the young prince must flee.

If, as Bly insists, “The boomers are a culture of siblings. Their fathers are all dead.” Then they are also a culture seeking their mentors in the figures of devils.

Telemachus’ Mentor was Athena—neither a wild man nor devil, but a god of wisdom (It might also be relevant to state the obvious that Athena was female.).

Wild Child, Full of Grace, Savior of the Human Race

He trains my hands for battle; my arms can bend a bow of bronze. ––Psalm 18

There was another priest at the Jesuit retreat center that fall, a twenty-something novitiate who made the Jesuits seem more like Jedi Knights than priests of a Catholic religious order. His was a convert’s enthusiasm: “What got me into Catholicism,” he said, “wasn’t the evangelical, feel-good Jesus-as-best-friend. It was the rebel Jesus, the Curt Cobain Jesus.”

The Curt Cobain Jesus.

Kicking the Suitors Out

“Working with the most mundane consumer activities, men are able to cultivate a sense that important matters are at stake and that the success of one's actions are vital, even though there is no clear and present danger animating the scene.” ––“Man-of-Action Heroes”

Thus Troy. Thus the Curt Cobain Jesus.

In an interview in last June’s Outside magazine, the musician Jack Johnson talks about his new album inspired by Bly’s Iron John (Johnson’s father died the previous year.). Columnist, Michael Roberts identifies Johnson as, “A writer of many, many love songs who takes his wife and kids on tour. A summer breeze incarnate. A soft man.” But meeting Johnson for the interview, Roberts notes, “And yet, something about Jack Johnson feels surprisingly—how to put it?—potent. For starters, he looks different. Wearing brown pants, with thick, bronzed arms popping out of a snug green T-shirt… Tougher, too, and definitely more hirsute, with a beard and a thicket of sunbaked hair.” According to Roberts, all Henry needed was a new haircut.¹⁴

“Why Oh Why Oh Why? Because Because Because Because Goodbye Goodbye Goodbye”

Bly might be somewhat right: perhaps one does become a man when the image of one’s father dies––when one ceases to compare oneself to one’s father––when the archetype dissolves and a person emerges, slightly overweight, retired, attending junior college music classes, hiking the mid-Sierras on the weekends.

Of course, for many, the image is all there is:

“your stance in the sand. Think it across, in freezing wind: withstand my blistered wish: flop, there, to his blind song who pick up the tab.” ––Henry¹⁵

How do we pick up the tab? After loss makes confederates of us.

Telemachus had his mother, his nurse.

He would have strung the bow…

1. At age twelve, I was sure my father was Jim Morrison’s illegitimate son, that I was heir to the Lizard King. My father grew up in Venice Beach; Jim Morrison moved to Venice Beach after dropping out of FSU. This coincidence only confirmed my already growing belief that I was born to be a mystic rock star. Unfortunately, the logistics didn’t add up: Morrison was nine when my father was born, already dreaming up his own shamanic mythology, while moving every few years for his sea-going father, a navy admiral.

2. “The End,” The Doors’ twelve-minute musical epic, climaxes after the singer’s confrontation with his father: “Father. Yes, Son. I want to kill you.”

3.

4. "You cannot become a man until your own father dies," Bly says in an interview with Time in 1991. Bly, the speaker of this poem, was 59 years-old; he did not become a man until two years later, at age 61.

5. “Telemachus” roughly translates to “he who fights from afar.”

6. My father worked at a shit factory. He commuted three hours a day to the sewage treatment plant down the valley in Sacramento. He worked the graveyard shift and slept in the day. In the morning, the music blaring from his car signaled his arrival home.

7. Immediately following this passage, Achilles asks about this son: “But come, tell me the news about my gallant son. / Did he make his way to the wars, / did the boy become a champion—yes or no?”

8. In ancient Greece, the stringing of the bow held the symbolic weight of becoming a man.

9. Driving with my father, the windows down in his mercury-blue Tercel, a soda held steady between my legs, I asked him the question perhaps all nine year-olds ask: What is the meaning of life? My father slowed his Toyota into an apple orchard. Needless to say, his answer was profoundly disappointing, indicating only that he, as I thought at the time, did not know.

10. The summer my father met my mother at the Independence Day parade in Nevada City, CA, he worked as a furniture mover in the Bay Area. He planned to enroll in the California College of Arts and Crafts that fall. Only the clay torso in the shed beneath a sheet of plastic and myself (Vincent, after Van Gogh) remain as remnants of this intent.

11. Lord: Origin: bef. 900;  ME lord, loverd,  OE hlāford, hlāfweard  lit., loaf-keeper.

12. My father’s pain is famous among my relatives. He uses a sourdough starter that’s now fifteen years-old.

13. A picture taken at a Halloween costume party in Minneapolis in 1967 shows Berryman with a Stonewall Jackson beard, dressed as his grandfather, the Confederate General Robert Glenn Shaver. Berryman’s biographer, Paul Mariani, writes that early in the Civil War, Shaver commanded Arkansas’ “Bloody Seventh” infantry. After the war, Shaver became commander of the Arkansas Klu Klux Klan. Mariani writes, “His was the last organized army to surrender to the Yankees.”

14. But Berryman’s Dream Songs don’t present a model of manhood, as Bly attempts. Instead, they give us a crisis in the dream depths of one who sits on the fence between Rebel and Breadwinner, weighing, like Hamlet, the worth of life as a man, deciding not.

15. Mariani gives this description of Berryman’s desperate father: “As Smith’s drinking increased, he began walking the beaches distractedly, at times dangling a .32 caliber automatic from his right hand. Often he swam out into the gulf as his older boy anxiously watched him disappear.” Smith would soon kill himself with the same .32 caliber. Ten weeks later, Berryman’s mother married their landlord, “Uncle Jack.”

News: 2012 Winners for Prizes in Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry

2012 Montana Prize in Fiction, Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction, and Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry

It gives us great pleasure to announce the winners of our annual contests:

2012 Winners:

Montana Prize in Fiction (judged by Benjamin Percy): Matt Valentine, “The Hindu Shuffle”

Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction (judged by Eula Biss): Daisy Pitkin, “An Algorithm”

Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry (judged by Bhanu Kapil): Jeff Downey, “Scapegrace”

Thank you to everyone who submitted! It was a pleasure reading your work.

All three pieces will appear in the new issue of CutBank 77.

Big Fish Lyric Essay Contest: Our Winner is...

We are pleased to announce that the winner of our annual Big Fish Lyric Essay Contest is "Epic Manliness" by Vincent Guerra! Stay tuned as we will post the piece right here on CutBank Online at some point in the coming couple of weeks. Thank you to everyone that submitted to the contest. We look forward to hearing from you again next year!

2011 Big Fish Lyric Essay Contest: Ineffable by Ryan Spooner

There is just a little over a week left for submissions for the 2012 Big Fish Lyric Essay Contest, which closes April 1st! With that in mind, we'd like to re-post last year's winner, "Ineffable" by Ryan Spooner. It's a great piece and worth another read. We look forward to presenting this year's winner on May 1st. For more information, visit our contest page. 0.           A point

I remember the strange feeling of fascination that gripped me when I first learned there are ten dimensions. A feeling like being drawn to the warmth of a fire, but at the same time made uncomfortable by its heat, an itch under the skin. A weight all around me. Fascination like Rudolf Otto spoke of as mysterium tremendum et fascinans: attraction to, but at the same time repulsion from, the ineffable otherness of the unknown and the unknowable. Otto pondered God, or gods; he described the human experience of the holy as one of terror and wonder triggered by the overwhelming mystery of the divine.

Everything starts with a point. A point, such as one graphed on a coordinate plane, has no dimension. It has neither length nor width. It cannot be measured.

There’s mystery there, in the immeasurable.

1.          Two points connected.

A line has no width or depth, only length. It is one-dimensional. Lines are named for the points they comprise. A line spanning the gap between points A and B is given the name Line AB. Essentially, points give a line purpose—after all, what is a line but the points it connects?

I feel that there are two of me, linked but held separate by the line that connects them. One goes about his business, understands that there are things he needs to do to keep things running smoothly. He accomplishes short-term goals, makes and plans to make long-term ones. He gets lost in books, in television shows, in the eyes of a woman. He plays video games and browses the Web, laughing at photos of cats with slapstick captions. The other thinks only of dying.

These two strangers—one immortal in his inability to comprehend death, the other in a prolonged state of dying—occasionally meet. They brush against one another in my mind. Each becomes aware of what is known by the other, if only briefly. There is a rending kind of collision; I panic.

2.           Divergence

A second line branching out from the first toward a third point creates a figure in the second dimension. The second dimension is governed by length and width.

In his 1884 novella, Flatland, Edwin Abbott imagines a world existing on a single plane, like a sheet of paper. Its inhabitants—lines, triangles, squares, and circles—are divided and ranked by shape in a mockery of Victorian social hierarchy. They “move freely about, on or in the surface” of the world, Abbott says, “but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows.”

Abbott’s protagonist, a square, is goaded into a metaphysical mind-fuck by a curious three-dimensional visitor: a sphere. The sphere is visible to the square only as a circle that appears from thin air and can grow and shrink in size. This is because those living in Flatland can only see three-dimensional objects as a series of two-dimensional cross-sections—what the square is actually seeing is the sphere passing through his world. To a Flatlander, a person passing through Flatland would resemble more closely slices of lunch meat than a human being.

3.           Folding a crucifix into a cube

There’s a hefty paperback on my bookshelf called A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe that I’ve never read. It was given to me eight years ago by the man my mother was dating: a blue-blooded, born-again, Rastafarian architect named Ian Rutherford. Inside the book’s front cover is his inscription, taken from The First Epistle to the Thessalonians:

PROVE ALL THINGS; HOLD FAST THAT WHICH IS GOOD. i • THE • 2i

He was convinced God was an architect—The Architect—and tried to concretize a trinity of Jesus, Haile Selassie, and himself into my life for the five years or so he and my mother were involved. He wanted to adopt me, wanted to be my father.

I page through the book, written by Michael S. Schneider. Chapter three: “Three-Part Harmony.” In the margin, illustrations of cross-sectioned fruits and vegetables show “internal three-corner structure.” On the page opposite are diagrams of butterflies, flowers, and cucumber slices. The book is full of references to religion, philosophy, and pop-culture. Schneider quotes Carl Jung: “There is an unfolding of the One to a condition where it can be known—unity becomes recognizable.” He quotes Homer: “All was divided into three.” He compares Shinto symbols to the Citgo logo, a piano’s keyboard to the cathedral of Notre Dame.

The third dimension, which Abbott’s square calls Spaceland, is measured by length, width, and height. The square becomes aware of it when he is able to lift himself from the plane of Flatland, transforming himself into a cube. His notions of the universe are torn apart. “Behold, I am become as a God,” he says. “For the wise men in our country say that to see all things, or as they express it, omnividence, is the attribute of God alone.”

The third dimension is a way of touching to points on a line together: simply fold the page. The third dimension gives us the leeway to turn paper crosses into cubes, to cover them in dots and make dice like we did in grade school.

In 2004, Ian Rutherford, under the omnivident guidance of his own God, changed his name to John Ru The Ford and traveled to Indonesia to marry a woman he’d met in a Yahoo! chat room.

4.           Time

Draw a line between who you are now and who you were five years ago. Suddenly you become an object defined not only by length, width, and height, but also by duration. That line, time, exists in the fourth dimension. “If you were to see your body in the fourth dimension,” Rob Bryanton, author of Imagining the Tenth Dimension, writes, “you would be like a long undulating snake, with your embryonic self at one end and your deceased self at the other.”

“Just like that Flatlander who could only see two-dimensional cross-sections of objects from the dimension above,” Bryanton continues, borrowing from Abbott, “we as three-dimensional creatures only see three-dimensional cross-sections of our fourth-dimensional self.”

The cross-sections are like the pages of a flip book. Thumb the edge and watch the little man dance.

At this stage, time is linear. In fact, it exists as a ghostlike streak behind you, like motion blur in a photograph. You can interact with it only via retrospect, which is about as useful as chasing your own tail. Nevertheless, you indulge yourself; everyone’s guilty. For instance, regarding his role in the emergence of nuclear weaponry, Einstein said “If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.”

But Einstein didn’t become a watchmaker—nothing can change that. Since we observe only the now, or an endless series of nows strung together, perhaps it’s better to comment solely on the moment, the current cross-section of time. Even so, isn’t that just a type of premature nostalgia—of preemptive retrospect, so to speak? When the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, famously said “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” was he not merely projecting himself into the future and trying to reflect on the present? What does it take to keep ourselves from looking back?

5.           Roads not taken

They’ll soon begin building black holes beneath the mountains along the Franco-Swiss border. Early in September of 2008, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, fired up the machine that will change the way we think about the universe: the Large Hadron Collider. Over sixteen hundred superconducting magnets, most weighing over twenty-seven metric tons, project and stabilize opposing proton beams and send them on a collision course in a subterranean cryogenic facility near Geneva, Switzerland. The subatomic particles crash into one another at just below the speed of light.

The fifth dimension is one of choice. Every second of every day, a new you is created in the fifth dimension. Every time you make a choice, a thousand lines splinter off in the direction of different possible yous that could result from your decision. Time in the fifth dimension moves forward and backward. Sideways. Diagonally.

Over the phone I tell my uncle what they’re doing in Switzerland. “Is shit gonna blow up?” he says. “No,” I say. “I don’t know.” “Are they gonna blow a hole into the side of the earth and suck a bunch of people into another dimension and make contact with aliens?” he says. “That happened in a video game,” I say. “Whatever, man. I just want shit to blow up,” he says.

Three months earlier he and I had sat up all night brewing coffee and watching my grandfather sleep. We hung in the pauses between the old man’s breaths as the hospice nurse snoozed beneath a crocheted blanket in a chair across the room.

The next night we’d stood on the porch of my grandfather’s double-wide, smoking cigarettes and staring across the highway at a tobacco field. “Oh my god,” someone was saying, “what the fuck!” Only my grandfather’s wife remained inside. The rest of the family drifted back and forth across the yard like ghosts. My uncle and I muttered clichés about it being his time to go.

“It’s a good thing,” I told him, performing. “All that pain—it needed to happen.” “Fuck,” he said.

6.           Moving

If we were able to move about the fifth dimension, we could jump backwards, forwards, and sideways through time, creating and observing lives we could be living had we done something differently.

The Large Hadron Collider is encased in a seventeen-mile-long circular concrete tube. According to CERN, a single proton moving at full speed around this circle can complete about eleven thousand revolutions per second. Presently, collisions have been postponed; explosions and coolant leaks have CERN physicists bogged-down in repairs and recalibration. There are some who feel these roadblocks are not accidental. In an essay published October 12, 2009 in The New York Times, Dennis Overbye examines “the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future.” He explains that

a pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Two years before I spoke with him about CERN, my uncle tried to take his own life. He decided he didn’t want to be who he was anymore and ate handfuls of pills. A month or so before that, he’d sold the Mossberg shotgun he kept in his closet.

Imagine lines in time drawn from the pharmacy to my uncle’s home in South Carolina. From the pill bottle to the palm of his hand. Or, imagine lines drawn from the barrel of the shotgun to the soft spot under his chin, from his toe to the trigger. From my uncle to his grave, or to the place where, instead, he sat with me by the bed of his dying father.

All of these lines could exist, have existed, and do exist—somewhere.

7.           Infinity

We tend to think of infinity as a circle or a figure eight because it has no end, no beginning. This is only a foothold into understanding the nature of the all-inclusive. Infinity is the representation of every possible instance of choice and every resulting outcome across all of time, from the Big Bang onward and outward. Infinity represents, as Bryanton puts it, “all possible timelines which could have or will have occurred from our big bang.”

The seventh dimension is infinite because it cannot be measured. It is, for all intents and purposes, a point.

8.           A line between two everythings

My uncle was six when I was born. I grew up alongside him in my grandfather's house. My mother was sixteen. I spent the first eight years of my life calling my grandfather “Dad.” Not because I thought he was my father, but in imitation of my uncle. We lived as brothers until my grandmother died. My mother, finally financially stable enough, took me into her home. My grandfather remarried within a year.

My life and the life of my uncle drifted apart. The space between us grew until the months after his attempted suicide. Then, gradually, we began drifted back toward one another.

With each collision within the Large Hadron Collider, the Big Bang will be recreated in miniature. Six detectors sit at the points in the Collider where the proton beams cross and the collisions occur. They’re geared toward measuring the presence of anti-matter, dark matter, quarks, gluons, and the elusive Higgs boson—which physicists call the God particle, as it’s said to be the reason matter has mass. Regarding the Higgs, Overbye quotes Physicist Holger Bech Nielsen, who, along with his colleagues, brought forth the claim that the mysterious particle may be the source of CERN’s woes. Nielsen “said of the theory, ‘Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.’ It is their guess, he went on, ‘that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.’ ”

If infinity is conceivable as a point, then there must be other points—other infinities—for lines to be drawn to, each with its own Big Bang occurring under its own conditions, each infinitely different from ours.

9.           Folding reality into what you will

A two-dimensional plane folded through the third dimension enables two points on different lines to touch. An eight-dimensional plane folded through the ninth dimension enables different realities to touch.

We picture doors that pass through space and the spaces between, and open onto vistas of glassy mountains framed by purple, rippling skies streaked with upward-falling snow. We picture streets of gold, rivers that flow with milk and honey. We picture a place where our dead relatives live on happily and wait for our arrival. We picture the stuff of dreams because who would dare hope to find, on the other side of all that’s possible, something the same as what we'd left behind?

10.           A point

Take enough steps back from anything and it becomes nothing more than a point on the horizon. Imagine the web-work of lines crisscrossing back and forth between all possible infinities as a single point containing everything that could ever possibly be—under any and all circumstances.

Every once in a while, after a period of mentally distancing myself from it, I try to re-approach the idea of death. I snap awake in bed, my face hot. I pace. “Fuck!” I say. “Shit!” No matter how much it terrifies and sickens me, I can’t leave it alone. I pick at it in my mind like a scab, never letting it heal.

I try to collapse my fear of death, fold it in on itself. In vain I attempt to cram the unknown into the tiny confines of rational thought.

I want to stop.

I can’t.

The mind is predisposed to search for meaning, to make parallels, to see patterns. Sometimes this results in revelation; sometimes it results in the creation of a sad fiction. More and more I’m having trouble divining the difference. Charles Hinton, in “Many Dimensions,” compares the foolhardiness of our endeavors to Egyptian priests worshiping a veiled deity, attempting to bind her with cloth. “So we wrap ‘round space our garments of magnitude and vesture of many dimensions,” he says. “Till [sic] suddenly, to us as to them, as with a forward tilt of the shoulders, the divinity moves, and the raiment and robes fall to the ground, leaving the divinity herself, revealed, but invisible.”

Hinton presents the inner workings of space as a god, as something to be feared, respected—maybe even worshipped. Something we should recognize will always be just beyond reach, wholly apart from us and unable to be understood. Something not seen, but somehow felt to be there.

Exciting Upcoming Contests

It gives us great pleasure to announce our 2nd ever Big Fish Lyric Essay and Writers on Writing Contest! A prize of $200 and online publication will be awarded to the best piece of nonfiction writing under 5,000 words that we receive in one of the following categories:

THE LYRIC ESSAY: Innovative, sonically pleasing nonfiction prose on any topic is welcome in this category. John D'Agata quoting his teacher Deborah Tall once suggested that a lyric form of the essay "is a kind of essay propelled not by its information, but rather by the possibility for transformative experience." CutBank likes this definition, but we're also excited to see how you interpret such a malleable genre.

WRITERS ON WRITING: We're looking for original, personal takes on the literary arts--form is largely up to you. We're hoping to receive your best craft essays, stylistic manifestos, and impressions on why writing matters. You might even take a crack at defining the lyric essay for us. Smart, self-referential fiction pieces that illuminate the writing process or the importance of writing are also welcome in this category.

The contest winner will be chosen by the CutBank editorial staff and announced on our website May 1. All submissions will be considered for both online and print publication in CutBank. Submissions are accepted from March 1 to April 1 and must be accompanied by a $9 submission fee. Previously unpublished work only. Multiple submissions are acceptable, as long as each one is accompanied by its own submission fee. Simultaneous submissions are also acceptable, but please withdraw your work promptly if it is accepted elsewhere.

CutBank at AWP!

It's an AWP miracle! Issue 76 has just arrived! Furthermore, we will be extending our Fiction, Poetry, and Creative Nonfiction contests until March 7th! Come out and visit us at table A8. Issue 76 includes:

FICTION by Sean Bernard, Joseph Celizic, Josh Denslow, Maggie Maurer, Madeline McDonnell, Erika Seay, Greta Schuler, Todd Seabrook, and J. David Stevens

POETRY by Adam Clay, CAConrad, Hannah Ensor, Sarah Gelston, AB Gorham, Zachary Greenberg, Derek Gromadzki, Lauren Hilger, Brandon Kreitler, Lo Kwa Mei-en, Angie Macri, and Sarah Kathryn Moore

NONFICTION by Barbara Duffey, Cal Freeman, Shara Sinor, and Ryan Spooner

ARTWORK by Morgan Blair and Nicole Simpkins

Chapbook Contest Now Open

Happy New Year everyone! We're pleased to ring in 2012 by opening our first ever chapbook contest. The contest is open from now until March 31. Please direct all submissions to our submishmash page, here. For more information, visit our contest page.

Contest Judges for Montana Prize in Fiction, Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction, and Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry

Contests are all open from now until February 29, 2012. Click here to submit! Montana Prize in Fiction Judge – Benjamin Percy

Benjamin Percy is the author of two novels, Red Moon (forthcoming from Grand Central/Hachette in 2012) and The Wilding, as well as two books of stories, Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk. His fiction and nonfiction have been published by Esquire, GQ, Men's Journal, Outside, the Wall Street Journal, and the Paris Review. His honors inlcude a fellowship from the NEA, the Whiting Writers' Award, the Plimpton Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories and Best American Comics.

Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction Judge – Eula Biss

Eula Biss holds a BA in nonfiction writing from Hampshire College and an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. Her second book, Notes from No Man’s Land, received the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Her work has also been recognized by a Pushcart Prize, a Jaffe Writers’ Award, and a 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library. She teaches writing at Northwestern University and is working on a new book about myth and metaphor in medicine with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Howard Foundation Fellowship. Her essays have recently appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Best Creative Nonfiction and the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Nonfiction as well as in The Believer, Gulf Coast, Columbia, Ninth Letter, the North American Review, the Bellingham Review, the Seneca Review, and Harper’s.

Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry Judge – Bhanu Kapil

Bhanu Kapil lives in Colorado where she teaches writing and thinking at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, as well as Goddard College’s low-residency MFA.  She has written four full-length cross-genre works–The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), and Schizophrene (forthcoming, Nightboat Books).

Big Fish Online Winner

I am proud to announce our 2011 Big Fish Online Winner: "When Lewis Carroll Faced the Jabberwocky" by Todd Seabrook. Thanks to everyone that submitted this year! Please enjoy the winning piece below. Click image to see full sized poem!

Big Fish Lyric Essay/Writers on Writing Contest

Congratulations to Ryan Spooner! His lyric essay "Ineffable" has been selected as the winning entry in our spring Big Fish Online contest.

We're also pleased to credit Cal Freeman's genre-bending prose piece "Cartesian Grammar and the Lyric Form" with Big Fish honorable mention status. Keep your eyes peeled because these poetic prose pieces are both coming soon to CutBank online.

Our editorial staff was blown away by the quality and variety of this year's submissions, and we'd like to extend our sincere thanks to all who submitted. Reading your work was a true pleasure.

Montana Prize in Fiction, Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction, and Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry – Winners Announced!

We’re pleased to announce the winners of this year’s print contests: the Montana Prize in Fiction, Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction, and Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry! Thank you to everyone who submitted. We received an unprecedented number of submissions, and were impressed and excited by the power of the submitted work. It was a pleasure reading your writing. The winners will each receive a $500 prize and publication in CutBank 75, out summer 2011. Additionally, several finalists will also be published in the 75^th issue. Montana Prize in Fiction – judged by Eileen Myles

Winner: Anne Ray, Novio, Novia

Eileen Myles writes, “I first admired this story because it felt enormously readable. I felt teased forward as a reader. In its way it's very inward, this story, so though it is taking place in “the world” there was a peephole experience about it so that you felt like you were looking out from the inside in a very graphic way. There’s lots of details but they are never heavy. It’s almost murmured in a way. I knew enough about the narrator but mostly I knew about how the narrator felt about herself. Not so good but still registering things on an exact level like how a moment of successful dancing though quickly abandoned did indeed go to one’s hips in relation to the music and the man you were dancing with and everything else in the world and the writing delivered a sensation that life on almost more a micro level than a macro one is persistently shocking.”

Finalists:

Kim van Alkemade, “His Amy Hours”

Matthew Burnside, “Six Rules to Win the Game”

Sara Leitenberger, “Emergency Donkey: A Travelogue”

Nicole Louise Reid, “A Purposeful Violence”

Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction – judged by Thalia Field

Winner: Ryan Flanagan, “Wolf Man”

Thalia Field writes, “this excerpt from a longer work uses language in a way which continually surprises conventions of memoir -- invested in a pedagogy of the poetry of its subject -- to teach and instruct the reader in things we might not know -- the specific ways we might not know the story, which is a memoir and a lesson being learned. Inviting us into imaginative scenarios dovetailing an addict's hallucinatory exit, this piece allows grace into the cracks.”

Finalists:

Maggie Anderson, “Prolonging the Illusion”

Helen Phillips, “Life Care Center”

Catherine Sharpe, “One Thousand Kittens”

Chris Wiewiora, “Now”

Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry – judged by D. A. Powell

Winner: Wendy Xu, “I am Your Youngest Poet, and Fill Your Bed with Ink”

D. A. Powell writes, “It's a poem that negotiates that middle space between playful and serious; between the mythic self and the private self. Flaming planets, demons, dreams and wolves could easily be the stuff of legend. But in this poem, they are the forces an artist wrestles with in order to ‘push through ink and digit’ and to lay aside the ache of the ‘disconnected telephone’ and ‘the car sitting in the driveway covered in snow.’”

Finalists:

Sara Deniz Akant, “The Kingdom”

Kerin Sulock, “Applied Psychological Strategy: Neurofeedback”

Adam Tavel, “Having Drank Two-Thirds a Bottle of Riesling During Her Office Hours, Professor Adler Lectures on the Venus of Willendorf"

Arianne Zwartjes, “weld, so irretrievable”

Submissions Open for the Big Fish Online Contest: The Lyric Essay & Writers on Writing

We're thrilled to announce the launch of the Big Fish Online Contest: The Lyric Essay & Writers on Writing, open March 1 - April 1!

In addition to innovative, sonically pleasing essays on topics of your choosing, CutBank is looking for great craft essays, as well as essays on teaching writing or why writing matters. Stylistic manifestos and smart, self-referential fiction pieces that illuminate the writing process are also welcome.

A prize of $200 and online publication will be given for the best piece of nonfiction writing under 5,000 words that we receive in one of the following categories:

The Lyric Essay. Innovative, sonically pleasing nonfiction prose on any topic is welcome in this category. John D'Agata quoting his teacher Deborah Tall once suggested that a lyric form of the essay "is a kind of essay propelled not by its information, but rather by the possibility for transformative experience." CutBank likes this definition, but we're also excited to see how you interpret such a malleable genre.

Writers on Writing. We're looking for original, personal takes on the literary arts--form is largely up to you (our submitters). We're hoping to receive your best craft essays, stylistic manifestos, and impressions on why writing matters. You might even take a crack at defining the lyric essay for us. Smart, self-referential fiction pieces that illuminate the writing process or the importance of writing are also welcome in this category.

All submissions will be considered for print and online publication. For more information, guidelines, and to apply, click here.