ESLF: T.A. Noonan

Next up in our series looking at 9L contributors participating in the Early Spring Literary Festival is T.A. Noonan. Her essay, "The Trouble with Correspondence" is featured in the spring/summer 10 issue (vol. 7, no. 1). Currently, I'm in the midst of interviewing T.A. for the next edition of 5 (or so) questions, which I'll post during the festival next week.

Right now, here's a little bit about the essay. A simple description for this essay would be that "The Trouble with Correspondence" is about T.A. delving into the practice of witchcraft, while also wrestling with her body image. Of course, the essay if far more complex than that, asking big, tough questions. How can you reconcile being a witch and your catholic upbringing? How can you accept your body the way it is when society says you shouldn't? However, what makes the essay so compelling is how personal it is. We see her struggling with these questions. We understand how witchcraft and body image, alone and together, impact her life. What she has to say about body image is not often heard in the media: being fat does not mean you are weak. The essay is bold, thought provoking, and honest. Without further delay here is an excerpt of "The Trouble with Correspondence."

Ask a man off the street to describe a witch, and he might conjure a barefoot, gypsy-skirted girl. Another might imagine black-robed figures sacrificing kittens and drinking babies' blood from a cauldron. Still another might think of his landlady.

The problem of witchcraft boils down to a problem of language. Take, for example, some of the current synonyms for witch -- Wiccan, pagan, neopagan, heathen. Despite what The Oxford English Dictionary and various thesauruses say, the terms aren't equivalent. Even witches don't know what to call themselves half the time.

But here's what I know: Wiccans follow a system of tenets and beliefs reconstructed by Gerald Gardner, an amateur anthropologist, in the 1950s. A pagan is anyone who doesn't practice Islam, Judaism, or Christianity. Neopaganism is a subset of paganism that includes various recontructionist, Goddess-centeric, and/or polytheistic belief systems. Heathen -- originally used to refer to an ignorant, non-Christian peasant -- is now the reclaimed title of a Nordic-themed neopagan sect. It's like this: squares are rectangles, but a rectangle isn't always a square. Wiccans are witches, but a witch isn't always Wiccan. Witches are pagan, but a pagan might not be a witch. Or sometimes a witch is a pagan -- witchcraft isn't tied to religion. A person can be Christian and practice witchcraft.

To read "The Trouble with Correspondence" pick up a copy of vol. 7, no. 1 in our webstore!

T.A. Noonan will be reading along with Adam Levin as part of the Ninth Letter reading on Wednesday, March 16 at 2pm in the Author's Corner on the 2nd floor of the Illini Union Bookstore.

ESLF: Peter Orner

For the next post in our series on 9L contributors participating in the Early Spring Literary Festival, we turn our attention to Peter Orner. His essay, "Horace and Josephine" is in the current issue (vol. 7, no.2).

Orner's nonfiction work shares a lot of the same great qualities he brings to his fiction. They are rich, fulfilling experiences on the initial read, but what makes them truly spectacular is that more and more depth is revealed on subsequent reads. Making this feat even more impressive is the economy of his prose. Orner can express an entire lifetime in only several pages. This is certainly the case with "Horace and Josephine." At first glance, the essay could be read as simply a tale of eccentric relatives dealing with the change in their social and economic status after Horace gets caught embezzling money. However, it also very much a love story. Horace's and Josephine's love story. One that sneaks up on you because the beginning is very much about Horace's scams and how that ripples throughout the entire family. The end of the story firmly focuses on the ultimately heartbreaking relationship between Horace and Josephine. The emotion of the last scene is overwhelming. Confession: I've read the essay dozens of times by now and I still can't read the end without tearing up. A wonderful thing about the essay is that when you go back to the beginning, you see how it was a love story the whole time, even though it doesn't first appear that way. The end works, it is earned emotion, because Orner, as he does in his fiction, has done such a suburb job of building the characters, in this case his relatives, on the page. We see what makes them flawed, tragic, and importantly we see their capacity for love.

"Horace and Josephine" is available in the current issue (vol. 7. no, 2), so head on over to our webstore to pick up a copy.

To read a great example of Peter Orner's fiction check out "On a Bridge Over the Homochito" which appears in his short story collection, Esther Stories.

Here are the details for Peter Orner's appearances at the Early Spring Literary Festival:

Panel Discussion: Bearing Witness with Philip Graham, Cary Nelson, Peter Orner, and Sue Silverman on Tuesday, March 15 at 10:00am.

Peter Orner and Sue Silverman reading on Tuesday, March 15 at 4:30pm.

Both events will be in the Author's Corner on the 2nd floor of the Illini Union Bookstore. The events are free and open to the public. Hope to see you there!

ESLF: 5 (or so) Questions with William Gillespie

Today is the first in a series of posts taking a closer look at the Ninth Letter contributors who will be participating in the Early Spring Literary Festival here at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. For this installment, 9L staffer Laura Adamczyk interviewed William Gillespie by email about his poem, "Newspoem" in the current issue (vol. 7, no. 2). Enjoy!

9L: In "Newspoem" you write: "The only restriction the academy puts on my writing is that after two years I have to check a box to indicate whether it's poetry, prose, tech, drama, or theory. This, of course, is not that. This is a letter." Would you indeed call this a letter? Why do you think people are so obsessed with putting the "right" genre labels on work?

William Gillespie: A work of writing, properly labeled, is a bomb defused and buried in a sealed canister. WARNING: CONCEPTUAL POEM: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO READ.

9L: This piece directly considers its reader. The "friend" that the speaker is writing to feels like a specific person at times and a general reader at others, the speaker expressing his compulsion for seemingly anyone to read his work. My question is: Who do you imagine as the ideal reader for this piece?

WG: In 1996 I attempted to write a poem a day about the news. These newspoems were posted on wall and given to friends. In 1999, I set up a newspoetry website, which continued for four years. I continue writing newspoetry for walls and the web.

In this newspoem -- dated Novemeber 1996 -- I attempted to write a personal letter a day to various friends, and then combined them into a month-long personal letter to an amalgamation. So the poem is literally epistolary.

9L: "Newspoem" has an elusive, slippery quality to it. Just when I thought I had a handle on it, it shifted. Mixed metaphors and wordplay abound. I wonder if you could respond to a question your speaker asks his reader: "Why memorize a song if it destroys the pleasure of reading it on the page?"

WG: Music and dance notation fascinate me. Except for player piano rolls, decoding encoded music must lead to different results each time. Interpretation is necessary. Same with recipes. I find this act of translation beautiful. I don't know why. Text can describe, but also encrypt, sound, movement, flavor.

9L: The motif of music runs throughout the piece (e.g. repetition of "The obvious analogy is with music). For me, it had a manic energy of a really long punk song (a bit of an oxymoron, yes) or something by James Chance. What kind of song would this be if it were a song? What band or artist would perform it?

WG: I wish I could say a long composition by King Crimson circa 1973 like "Lark's Tongues in Aspic," with different movements and strident rock violin. But it's probably more a cut-up like John Zorn's "Tre Nel 5000." Or "Revolution 9," only better. There's a punk defiance in its rigorous discontinuity. I considered it unpublishable until you guys published it.

9L: Lastly, an old professor of mine once said that all writers really just want to be rock stars. Are we just a bunch of rock wannabes without the stage presence?

WG: Yes. And without the money.

Thanks to William Gillespie and Laura Adamczyk for a wonderful conversation. To read "Newspoem" and all the other fantastic poems, stories, and essays, pick up a copy of the current issue (vol. 7, no. 2) in our webstore.

Be sure to make it out to the kick-off reading for the Early Spring Literary Festival on Sunday, March 13 at 4pm at Figure One in downtown Champaign to hear William Gillespie and Amy Hassinger read from their work.

new content @ ninthletter.com

Click on over to the Ninth Letter main page and check out the fantastic new content! We have a new Where We're At featuring the Stories and Beer reading series, which takes place here in Urbana. You can watch videos of 9L contributor, Joe Meno (vol. 3, no. 2) and 9L staffer, Matt Minicucci reading. We also have an excerpt from Robert Vivan's new novel, Another Burning Kingdom, in the Featured Writer section.

As mentioned in the Where We're At section, the next Stories and Beer will be on Sunday March 13 after the official kick-off reading for the University of Illinois Early Spring Literary Festival (ESLF). ESLF will feature quite a few 9L contributors. Starting on Friday and in the next week or so until the event, I'll be featuring their contributions to Ninth Letter here on the blog.