August 30th, 2010
Camera Obscura’s most recent addition to the Winter table of contents, “Uraguay”, by Henriette Lazaridis Power, warrants a second read immediately after the first, if for no other reason than to enjoy the carefully wrought language again, or to discover one of the many details hidden within the folds. The story begins:
“In the time it took to curl his toes over the edge, his reasons not to jump became the reasons he should do it. And that was what his friend—a man he hardly knew before this trip—shouted to him now. “Do it!” Two simple words, echoing, taunting, allowing. Against those syllables, the rest of it had no chance. Children. Family. Career. It was all extra. Extravagant, even. What mattered was this pure moment above a blue bay. What mattered was that he should jump.”
Henriette Lazaridis Power is a Greek/American writer whose work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Salamander, the New England Review, The New York Times online, The Millions, and the blog Beyond the Margins where she is a regular contributor. A Rhodes Scholar and a Ph.D., she taught English literature at Harvard for ten years. Power is the founding editor of The Drum Literary Magazine, an online literary magazine publishing short fiction and essays exclusively in audio form. Power is currently finishing a novel set in remote Northern Greece.
We also added a haunting short-short by Amanda Yskamp called BTU that begins:
“The crackling of flames translated to the arc of a Tesla coil in my dream – a line of blue barbed with sparks, the sound of voltage showing its fractures , until the siren shook me loose.”
Amanda Yskamp’s work has appeared in such magazines as Threepenny Review, Hunger Mountain, Caketrain, Redivider, and The Georgia Review. She lives with poet Doug Larsen and their two children on the 10-year flood plain of the Russian River.
In the process of reading some great stories. Much more to come. We’re hoping to get the Winter Issue out the door on Dec. 1 (Hmm, sounds like a great holiday present)
MEP
August 18th, 2010
Given its philosophical underpinnings and esoteric nature, almost to the point of mysticism for the uninitiated, mathematics can be a great tool around which to build a story. However, despite my personal mathematical leanings, I would be leery of any suggestion to begin a story with an actual mathematical equation. Slated to appear in the Winter 2010 issue of the Camera Obscura Journal, “The Wolf’s Choice” by Peter Tieryas Liu, excerpted below, is an exception that I will gladly make.
” v= Hd was the equation for the rate at which galaxies sped away from one another, the H standing for Hubble’s Constant, the v, for the vapid volume of velocity. The third variable was d, representing distance, the diametrical disposition of difference. And somehow, these three digits summarized the universe into a trinity of letters, simplicity exemplified. It struck me, when I first learned the variables, how it would have taken a thousand times more energy to resist change than to accept it.
I’d spent eight months wandering through the honeycomb of Asia, shifty Bangkok, grand Beijing, contemporary Shanghai, futuristic Tokyo, all convicted in the nexus of modernization and unshackled faith. I was adrift, tugged and pulled by the gravity of solitude, a festering hunger driving me like a relentless martinet.”
Peter Tieryas Liu has recently had short stories accepted for publication in the Binnacle, Gargoyle, Prism Review, Quiddity International Literary Journal, and ZYZZYVA. He’s worked as a technical writer for Lucasfilm and is a character technical director for Sony Pictures where he’s worked on features like Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and I Am Legend. This story is dedicated to Leza.
Much more to comes as the issue unfolds – MEP
July 22nd, 2010
The topic of the US-Mexican border is hard to escape in recent headlines, and border towns themselves often tell a visible story of the disparity of life on either side of the imaginary line, emphasizing the difference between those who have and those who don’t. Camera Obscura Journal is lucky to be able to include in its next issue, the beautifully rendered story, Rosebud Ben-Oni’s “A Way out of the Colonia” excerpted from her novel in progress entitled The Strange and Sad Disappearance of Oni Montoya.
Excerpts from the story:
“The child could no longer sit in her mother’s lap without causing the woman pain, and had already forgotten the warmth she’d once felt there. Now she looked bewildered and frightened as the woman declared that the sky had decided to leave Matamoros.”
. . .
“Year after year, the trunk of the sapodilla tree had thickened around the middle, its color blanched by the sun to a dull brownish-grey. As if it was an old man who’d spent his life in the fields and found his soul in the very work that thickened his skin. Such men are rare, he told Oni as he shaved off the deep groves of the branch. There are very few people who reap the beauty of life from survival alone, and can wear it so visibly.”
Rosebud Ben-Oni is a writer for New Perspectives Theater, which is producing her play Quimera on the Pedernales, and has been the recipient of a Horace Goldsmith Grant, given so she could complete her first novel, which deals with her experiences as a Jew of mixed race. She has had recent work in Slice Magazine, J Journal, Wreckage of Reason: An Anthology of Contemporary XXperimental Prose by Women Writers, Arts & Letters, Identity Envy— Wanting to be Who We Are Not, and The Texas Poetry Review. Recently produced plays include Owless of Santa Clara (Snorks and Pins, Roy Arias Studios, July 2010), Nikita (Shotgun Theater Festival, the Gene Frankel Theatre, Jan 2009 and Thespian Productions, Producer’s Club, May 2009); Nary a Bodega (Leah Ryan Benefit, Producer’s Club, November 2009); The Amaranthine Thread (Leah Ryan Benefit, Producer’s Club, November 2009 and Where Eagles Dare, February 2010). She is currently finishing her first novel, which is entitled The Imitation of Crying.
Many thanks again to everyone who has supported the journal in one fashion or another!
-M.E. Parker
June 15th, 2010
On the same day that the journal received a review on New Pages for the first issue, the future began to take shape for the next one. Congratulations to all the great photographers and writers who appeared in this first issue.
Hints of Camera Obscura Journal Volume II emerge from the primordial literary selection process with K.R. Sand’s short story “Half Life.” Sands unfolds this intricate story from the prospective of Marie Curie, guiding with precision a serendipitous encounter of science with art, ultimately to their unexpected collision.
The story begins:
“Oh, how she hated celebrity! All this traveling and eating and smiling and thanking and demurring–so tiresome! Such a waste of precious time! She was no longer young, and there was still so much work to do. Six weeks for this American tour, all the while accumulating heavy wooden plaques, childish gold and silver medals, useless doctoral robes, framed certificates, and other detritus that she’d have to carry in her luggage or pay to have shipped home to Paris. But this was the price she had to pay for the radium, the precious gram she needed to keep the work going. Although Americans were generous with their vast wealth, they certainly claimed their pound of flesh in hand-shaking.”
K.R. Sands is a university English professor, somehat new to fiction, whose scholarly work includes several articles and two books on the history of demon possession and exorcism (http://www.amazon.com/Kathleen-R.-Sands/e/B001HOOYSM/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1).
8-minute interview of K.R. Sands by the director of the Mütter Museum:
The College of Physicians of Philadelphia and Mütter Museum
More updates as the issue unfurls.
And many thanks to all the supporters of the journal. Your subscriptions are much appreciated!
M.E. Parker, Editor
May 6th, 2010
With the first issue out the door, Camera Obscura has received a tweak or two and a nip tuck to the website (with much more on the way). The site is best viewed with all current browsers Firefox, Safari, IE 7 & 8 and Chrome. IE 6 and lower may have some issues (very sorry, but it’s time to update).
Also, for anyone wishing to carry Camera Obscura: Literature & Photography, I now have two distributors you may contact :Ingram Peridodicals and Ubiquity distributors.
More interviews to come. Thanks so much to everyone who has subscribed.
M.E. Parker, Editor
April 1st, 2010
And she is a beaut. The printer did a fantastic job. Pushed us to the limit on timing, but it was well worth it. For everyone who pre-ordered a copy (we thank you immensely), these will ship by mid-April at the latest. I am working on distribution right now.
Forthcoming on Aperture, interviews with some of the writers and photographers we published in this first issue.
Also, I hope any writers attending AWP will stop by our table and say hello. I would love to meet you.
M.E. Parker, Editor
Camera Obscura Journal
March 2nd, 2010
We were excited by the overall quality of the submissions in the amateur category. One of these images even made the cover. Thanks again for all who entered. Check the guidelines for the next competition already underway.
Outstanding Amateur Photography Award
Jan Luit for Free Floating
Editor’s Choice Award for Amateur Photography
Catlin Harrison for Self-Image (green)
Amateur Competition Finalists
Mary Brown for Embrace
Mark Harary for Grand Central Terminal
Hugh Jones for Reunion
Carrie Wendt for Hidden Frog
Shannon West for Transformation
March 1st, 2010
We are happy to announce the winner of the first Camera Obscura Photography Award. We received some great entries and narrowing down the finalists was a tough call. The winner’s photograph as well as those of some of the finalists will appear in the journal in April. Many thanks to all who entered.
Winner: (Selected by our Judges)
William Horton for I’m Here
Editors’ Choice
Tom Chambers for The Goatherd
Finalists
Jennifer Adams for Hero’s Son
Holly Bown for A Farmer’s Peace
Sandy Edelstein for Keppela Kiss
Mindy Harris for Kissable
Chieko Tanemura for Knitting
Hao Tran for My Best Friend
Chuck Uebele for Father Daughter
Caron Van Orman for Double Dimple
Maria-Mihaela Vass for Bond
Rachael Waller for Mustang 42
Featured Photographers
Robert Alvarado
Cheri MacCallum
Non-professional announcement coming soon…
February 3rd, 2010
For your consideration – Elaine Chiew’s bridge crossing Brother Heart .
Bridge the Gap attempts to narrow the divide between two photographs, between writer and photographer, between the writer and the reader, to deliver, artfully, a story born when the two images meet, or a story so intertwined in the division of the images that it cannot be unraveled, and do so in fewer than 1000 words. Elaine’s story is even more ambitious in the worlds she brings together, as though she has choosen to cross the gorge at its deepest point on nothing more than a cedar plank.
M.E. Parker, Editor
January 25th, 2010
You know that Padgett Powell book that’s nothing but questions? That’s what I was hunting for in the Portsmouth Library when I stumbled onto Nani Power’s Crawling at Night. I’m not sure what exactly caught my attention about it—a cover design that looked like some lost Smashing Pumpkins album, accolades from some Names, the Atlantic Monthly Press (didn’t know they had one)—but I lingered on it. She also had several other novels. Now, by no means am I so well-read that I don’t find new authors all the time, but taking up such shelf space at the local library, she somehow seemed like someone I should know. In her jacket photo she resembled Charlotte Bacon, a former mentor of mine, but I was pretty certain it wasn’t Charlotte in disguise. The book, I could see, was about sushi, and Nani Power had worked in a sushi kitchen for a while, and that drew me in a little further. Are motives always so noble and intellectual? I was hungry, and here was some kind of sustenance.
Still, it was by no means a sure thing that I would continue to read—every second a trial. One page explained that the phrase “crawling at night” came from the Japanese “yobai,” which stems from a tradition of hosting travelling guests on futons, whereby a male guest could anonymously slip into a female’s futon and stay if accepted, slip away discretely if rejected. I kept going. By no means was the book the radical stylistic plunge that I’d been hoping for in Powell’s Interrogative Mood, but it had menus for chapter headings and lists and the opening sentence was “Lists are life.” Hey, yeah. No but yes. Lists of “dead things wrenched from the ocean floor, arriving daily in their iced beds. His needs.” All at once, the orderliness of lists, the squishy glisten of sushi, the discipline of making, the violence in it, the need. Hunger.
And language, sentences. In the end, it came down to the sentences.
“How he judges tuna for its fat content with a flashlight in the dawn fish market alongside the haiku image on a barren branch. All thoughts whirling like flimsy scales flashing in a sink’s wetness, yet they get sieved along the way.”
Need I tell you that I checked it out?
Fast forward a couple of weeks. By some inexplicable collision of the universe’s pulp, Camera Obscura receives a story from none other than Nani Power. At first I can’t believe it; it seems too serendipitous. But the sentences in her “214″ make it unmistakable that it’s one and the same author:
“She made his stomach turn like frogs, in her new clothes, smelling like stores.”
“Her name was a bag of broken sounds.”
“You see a cat ass tear through some place; he’s like this one.”
To top it off, her story is about elements in collision; it is made out of the cloth of disparity, held together by its propulsive voices and energy, violence and need and something soft lurking beneath. I think it a very fine story in its own right, the coincidence hovering around it for me serving merely as an added pleasure, an unexpected spatter of roe in the midst of apiece of sushi that you’d assumed was solid through and through. I’m grateful to have made the acquaintance of Nani Power for the second time in a few weeks, and to acquaint—or reacquaint—you with her.
Nani Power is the author of Crawling at Night (Grove/Atlantic Monthly, 2001),a New York Times Notable Book of The Year and a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Award as well as the British Orange Award. It has been translated into seven languages. Her second novel, The Good Remains (Grove/Atlantic Monthly, 2002), was also a New York Times Notable Book of The Year, and a finalist for The Virginia Library Award. The Sea of Tears, her third novel, was published in January 2005 by Counterpoint Press. Her newest book, a food memoir, Feed The Hungry, was published by Simon and Schuster in April 2008.
Her stories have been published in numerous literary magazines including The Paris Review, Salon, Gargoyle and Nerve.com.
Tim Horvath is a prose editor for the Camera Obscura. More about Tim at The Darkroom
