– Announces New Officer, Writing Feedback Opportunities, and Volunteer Staff Positions –

The Hinge Literary Center is excited to announce the election of a new executive director, the opening of several volunteer staff positions, and the launch of new programming.

The Hinge has appointed Lisa Shroyer as new executive director, [...]]]>  

– Announces New Officer, Writing Feedback Opportunities, and Volunteer Staff Positions –

The Hinge Literary Center is excited to announce the election of a new executive director, the opening of several volunteer staff positions, and the launch of new programming.

The Hinge has appointed Lisa Shroyer as new executive director, effective immediately. Shroyer has been a loyal member of the Hinge community, participating in several poetry workshops and serving in support roles on key initiatives of the organization. Shroyer works as an editor in magazine publishing, is a published author, and also serves as business manager for At Length, a Durham-based online literary and arts journal. She lives in Carrboro. Former officer Bridget Bell served as executive director of the Hinge from its inception in 2011 through April 2013. During her tenure, the organization grew immensely and achieved success in its mission to play an active role in the local literary community. Bell will remain closely involved with The Hinge.

In conjunction with its new director, the Hinge is excited to announce the opening of several volunteer staff positions including Social Coordinator, Online Coordinator, and Programming Coordinator. The Social Coordinator will be in charge of organizing and promoting the Hinge’s Third Friday events. The Online Coordinator will be in charge of updating the Hinge website as well as social media content. The Programming Coordinator will be in charge of marketing for Hinge classes. Each position requires a one-year time commitment. These are unpaid positions. Those interested should send a cover letter and resume to hingelit@gmail.com by Friday, June 28. Questions can also be directed to hingelit@gmail.com.

The Hinge is also excited to announce the launch of Flash Feedback, its newest programming. The Hinge Flash Feedback is a mixed-genre writing group facilitated by a Hinge representative in which writers can get immediate feedback from other writers on a short piece of work, while encouraging connections and growth within the literary community. The first meeting of The Hinge Flash Feedback will be on Wednesday, June 26 from 7-9 p.m. at Mercury Studio in downtown Durham. Flash Feedback sessions are $10 a head and are limited to six participants. More information and registration is available at flashfeedbackhinge.eventbrite.com.

Co-presented by the Center for Documentary Studies and the Hinge Literary Center, Professor Diablo’s True Revue is a collaborative performance series showcasing artists—writers, musicians, visual artists, and others—who make use of documentary ideas, methods, and impulses in the creation of their work.

Following five full house performances since its launch in the spring of [...]]]>

Co-presented by the Center for Documentary Studies and the Hinge Literary Center, Professor Diablo’s True Revue is a collaborative performance series showcasing artists—writers, musicians, visual artists, and others—who make use of documentary ideas, methods, and impulses in the creation of their work.

Following five full house performances since its launch in the spring of 2012, the True Revue returns to club Casbah to dig through arrowheads, love, and weather stations in a one-time event that explores the theme of “Lost and Found” with biologist and artist Courtney Fitzpatrick, songwriter/musician Melissa Swingle, photographer Leah Sobsey, and interdisciplinary artist Jane D. Marsching.

Professor Diablo’s True Revue VI: “Lost and Found”


Tuesday, May 28; doors open at 7 p.m., show at 8 p.m.


Casbah 
1007 W. Main St., Durham, North Carolina


Tickets: $7 in advance, $10 at door. Click here to purchase.

Courtney Fitzpatrick’s undergraduate training was in visual art, and she taught photography at New York City’s Hetrick-Martin Institute before returning to her original interest in evolutionary biology and animal behavior, research that has been supported by Duke University, the National Science Foundation, a Fulbright Fellowship, and the Leakey Foundation. Her collection of nonfiction essays and photographs, Maji Moto: Dispatches from a Drought, emerged from seventeen months in Kenya studying primate reproductive biology in the wild. Fitzpatrick is a post-doctoral fellow at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center.

Jane D. Marsching is an interdisciplinary artist who explores
 our past, present, and future human impact on the environ
ment through collaborative research-
based practices with scientists, educators,
 kite builders, meteorologists, architects, and musicians, among others. The author of Far Field: Digital Culture, Climate Change and the Poles
, Marsching  is an associate professor and Sustainability Fellow at Massachusetts College of Art and 
Design. Victor McSurely collaborated on her NOAA Webcam piece featured in Professor Diablo’s True Revue.

Leah Sobsey is an artist who works in traditional, digital, and alternative-process photography, mixed media installations, and public art, exploring memory and the notion of collections as they relate to personal and public identities. Sobsey has exhibited nationally in galleries, museums, and public spaces, and her work is held in private and public collections across the country. Cofounder of the Visual History Collaborative, her current work includes Collections, a photographic series on specimens from the National Parks Museum collections, and Bull City Summer, a collaborative documentary project that explores the Durham Bulls.

Melissa Swingle is a songwriter who has performed, 
toured, and recorded with her bands Trailer Bride and
 the Moaners. She recently has been performing with Melissa and the Swinglers and is at 
work on a solo record. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, 
and raised in Mississippi and in Ivory Coast, West Africa,
 she has toured all over the U.S. with Neko Case, the 
Mountain Goats, M. Ward, Drive-By-Truckers, and
 Calexico, and has opened for Wanda Jackson and Hasil
 Atkins. Swingle is a multi-instrumentalist who plays the singing-saw like no
 one else and just recorded saw tracks in the studio with Dexter Romweber for his next release.

In conjunction with At Length magazine, we’re happy to present Ben Miller and his essay “Ghosts of the Mississippi,” a selection from his new collection River Bend Chronicle: The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa [...]]]> We’re back from our break and excited to bring you our first Hinge Essay!

In conjunction with At Length magazine, we’re happy to present Ben Miller and his essay “Ghosts of the Mississippi,” a selection from his new collection River Bend Chronicle: The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa from our friends at Lookout Books.

Ben will be checking in here at The Hinge throughout the week to respond to your questions and comments and we’re looking forward to the discussion. We hope you’ll join us!

Ben will also be appearing at The Regulator at 7 pm on Monday, April 15. We’ll see you there!

Ghosts of the Mississippi

In Davenport, Iowa, where I grew up, there was an elderly woman who had encountered Flannery O’Connor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the late 1940s. I heard Blanche’s side of the story many times but never tired of it, partially because she did not take any relish in the telling, always pushing her water glass aside, as though the liquid might become infected by the dirty details. Blanche lived in the Mississippi Hotel with her twin sister, Sadie. Their rooms offered a quizzical view of what downtown Davenport offered: infantry of parking meters, granite hulls of department stores weathering poor sales, levee mélange, and the tugboat-pushed barges riding one of those bends in the Mississippi River that lend eastern Iowa the silhouette of ruptured fruit. Jazz genius and cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, the city’s most famous native, had once described it all by raising his horn and walking out the notes of his winsome composition “Davenport Blues.” Blanche and Sadie must have heard the tune, though Blanche was sure to have dismissed it. In winter, when sidewalks were icy, these tiny sisters clung to the building bricks, creeping like paisley-scarfed mountain climbers with a disdain for the vertical. Neither had married. Both smoked like factory chimneys and sported fine coats of facial down that appeared blond or brown, depending on whether the shades were drawn. From a distance of twenty feet, one might have thought they were identical twins. But to get up close was to note only differences. Sadie’s blue eyes, Blanche’s green ones. Sadie’s wide smile, Blanche’s thin frown. Sadie’s lilting voice, Blanche’s academic drone. Once I had occasion to fetch Blanche from the hotel, whose lobby was scary with couch cushions squashed into the shapes of those no longer on the planet. The elevator shivered, clanked, arrived on the right floor, the edgy hall. I knocked on the metal apartment door. Sadie answered, wearing a robe, and as I was asking her to tell Blanche that her ride was waiting downstairs, Blanche popped out from behind the robe. It was like seeing an atom split. After graduating from the University of Iowa with an MA in English literature, Blanche had immediately enrolled in business school and, a few years later, received an accounting degree—smart move, given her attachment to formal verse, a kind of writing she never gave up, continually testing herself against the sonnet, the sestina, the villanelle, and reading the results at meetings of various writing groups. One of these, Writers’ Studio, is where we met in the autumn of 1978, when I was fourteen.

I joined the club during my recovery from the starvation diet that had halved my weight, from a high of more than two hundred pounds, and granted me a first ghost, the fat boy whispering in my ear: “Did I deserve that? I ate only what you told me to.” I had found the meeting time and place listed in the Quad-City Times and asked my mother to drop me off there, in front of a tenement on a side street in deserted downtown Rock Island, Illinois, across the river from Davenport. It was night: she was glad to do things like that at night. It made things exciting. For some of her children it worked out better than for others. She sped away. A newer car pulled up, parked, and out climbed a man in a tan belted overcoat. He wore a cap, carried a briefcase, smoked a sweet-smelling pipe: awesome. “Here to attend the meeting?” he asked. I said I was. He looked surprised, but extended his pink hand. “I’m Howard Koenig. What’s yours?” I forced it out, loud. Howard nodded and produced an old key that opened the door to the rest of my life. It was dark inside, and still pretty dark even after he’d flicked a switch. Together we climbed a narrow creaking staircase to another door off a hall with all the charisma of an Alcatraz tunnel. Howard, enveloped in maroon pipe haze, unlocked that door, too. We entered the musty room rented by the club. More lights, brighter lights, were flicked on, and I saw that steam heat had cooked the colors out of the walls. The meeting table was crooked. But such sad details, one after another, failed to temper my jubilation. I had shaken the hand of one Howard Koenig. He had taken off the coat to reveal a green chiffon suit and tie that went with. He was relating things I should know. He worked in a civilian capacity for the Army Armament Materiel Readiness Command at the Rock Island Arsenal (the military compound situated on an actual island, as the city of Rock Island was not). His favorite author was Edgar Allan Poe, with whom he shared a birthday. His first wife had died in a car accident out East and after that he had moved to the Midwest. He had remarried. Her name was Rita. They had children.

I was decades younger than any other club member. This did not seem strange to me. I had long been the outgoing misfit who found acceptance only in unconventional social circles, befriending school janitors, parking lot guards, neighborhood shut-ins—those ruminating fragile retirees. But I was a novelty to Writers’ Studio. Members stared happily as they settled onto the folding chairs. Bifocals abounded, and every pair welcomed my long stringy hair and the scar-like facial niches that dieting had cut. No one said a thing about the yellow scampish T-shirt bearing the white iron-on letters I had requested at the mall kiosk where a man would put any words on any rag you handed him. I had picked the Bob Dylan song title: DESOLATION ROW. I returned the smiles of my welcomers. Howard, club president, waived the dollar attendance fee in my case. The lady who introduced herself as Blanche lit a cigarette in approval of the move, before qualifying her enthusiasm, snapping: “We shall see.” We shall, I thought. Some strangers were mysteries inviolate and other strangers were mysteries you felt like you knew, despite knowing nothing. I saw ballpoint pens astride notepads, spiral and bound—it was one of the oldest sights in my life, the blank page to fill with colors and then, soon enough, embroider with letters and words, with a will to seek answers if not necessarily to find, and accept, them. “What have you brought to read us?” Howard asked me right off, and when I said I had come to listen—this time—there were appreciative murmurs. It meant, they thought, that I was polite. I let it mean that, too. Their affection, any love—good or bad—had me. I was the fool for love. I fell all the way, with no strings attached to their warmth to keep me from falling. They had spotted a fellow traveler. At the end of the first meeting of rhymes I was admonished to come back the following Thursday for more grins that were genuine (even if the teeth might not have been). How could I refuse? Iowa City had its aloof workshop, open only to geniuses imported and later exported, like a secret trade in diamonds, but in the most bizarre and comical way Writers’ Studio was more exclusive. Who, seeing our figures spill out of the building, could have imagined what we had been doing up there? Previously I had had but two allies I could totally trust: stroke-stricken Granny Stanley and our neighbor the widower Mr. Hickey, clad in a clip-on bow tie, polka-dotted or striped. Sitting beside Granny’s four-poster bed, and in Mr. Hickey’s immaculate kitchen, had taught me the rhythm and substance of genial patter with the aged, training that had come in handy on this night. I liked acting as if I hailed from an era when I wasn’t born yet. It was the most reliable way of briefly lightening the load that had come of being born to a certain couple on November 5, 1963, a few weeks before JFK’s assassination. “See you later, alligator,” I chirped at worried club members after convincing each, individually, that it was permissible to drive off to a post-meeting snack and leave me in the dark at a pay phone across from the extinguished glow of the Walgreens drugstore cursive. “My mother’ll come . . . ” “Aren’t you hungry?” No, I lied. “She’ll come . . . soon.” “You could call her from the place.” But I didn’t have money for a snack, nor did I feel I’d earned the right to dine with writers who had published in Highlights and Guideposts. I was in awe of their old-school grammar, marketing tips, typescripts. “See you later, alligator!”

Read the rest of “Ghosts of the Mississippi” at At Length.

Our friend Duncan Murrell, Writer-in-Residence at the Center for Documentary Studies, has an interview with Ben Miller here.

And don’t forget to add your questions and comments to our discussion with Ben below.

Ben Miller’s debut memoir, River Bend Chronicle: The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa, is forthcoming from Lookout Books in March 2013. He has published in AGNI, the Antioch Review, Ecotone, the Kenyon Review, and One Story, among other journals, and his essays have been reprinted or noted six times in Best American. He lives in New York City with his wife, the poet Anne Pierson Wiese.

Tuesday, January 22; doors at 7 p.m., show at 8 p.m.

Casbah

1007 W. Main St., Durham, North Carolina

Tickets: $7 in advance, $10 at the door; click here to purchase

After four successful shows in 2012, Professor Diablo’s True Revue kicks off 2013 with a show that explores, [...]]]> Professor Diablo’s True Revue: “Borders”

Tuesday, January 22; doors at 7 p.m., show at 8 p.m.

Casbah

1007 W. Main St., Durham, North Carolina

Tickets: $7 in advance, $10 at the door; click here to purchase

After four successful shows in 2012, Professor Diablo’s True Revue kicks off 2013 with a show that explores, through documentary performance, the nature, use, and meaning of borders—national, cultural, artistic, and personal. With this showcase of musicians, dancers, and writers, the latest version of Professor Diablo will cross borders with impunity and without fear, from Mexico to Siler City, from Appalachia to India, always asking the question: why do we draw borders at all?

The Performers:

Andrea E. Woods Valdés, a Duke University faculty member, teaches Modern Dance and Dance for the Camera. She uses dance, music, song, spoken word, and multimedia as contemporary African American folklore. A native of Philadelphia, Woods is a former dancer/rehearsal director of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Co. Her work has taken her to: Cannes, Taiwan, Russia, Senegal, Morocco, Korea, Poland, Singapore, Belize, Yucatán, Puerto Rico, Ghana, Cuba, and throughout the U.S. Woods is a recipient of the North Carolina Arts Council 2012 Fellowship. Her dances explore family, nature, community, spirituality, and African American history and culture, and are inspired by blues, jazz, folk music, and African American art and literature.

Paul Cuadros is an award-winning investigative reporter and author whose work has appeared in the New York Times, The Huffington Post, Time Magazine, Salon.com, and other national and local publications. For the past twenty years, Cuadros has focused his reporting on issues of race and poverty in America for a variety of publications and broadcast media. He is the author of A Home on the Field: How One Championship Team Inspires Hope for the Revival of Small Town America (Harpers Collins), which tells the story of Siler City, North Carolina, as it copes and struggles with Latino immigration through the lives of a predominantly Latino high school soccer team. Cuadros continues to write about immigration and the Latino community and is currently an assistant professor at the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Katie Wyatt An accomplished violist, Katie has toured and performed nationally and internationally with the orchestras of the New World Symphony, Verbier Festival Orchestra, Columbus Symphony Orchestra, Youth Orchestra of the Americas, and the Spoleto Festival of Charleston, South Carolina. She is also the co-founder and executive director of KidzNotes, a Durham-based non-profit that fights poverty and encourages positive decision making by instructing and engaging children in classical orchestral music. She lives and works in Durham and continues to perform in the orchestras of Fayetteville and Durham, with her chamber music quartet, with the indie folk-rock chamber orchestra Lost in the Trees, and the Indian-bluegrass fusion band Hindugrass.

Diego Carrasco Schoch has a combined twenty-five years experience as an educator, choreographer, and performer. As a principal dancer with the Milwaukee Ballet (1991–2003), a soloist with the North Carolina Dance Theater (1987–1991), and a frequent guest artist for independent choreographers, Schoch danced a wide repertoire of both classical and modern works. Locally, Schoch has performed as a touring artist for the 2011/12 North Carolina Dance Festival, Gaspard and Dancers, and KT Collective, and is on faculty at the American Dance Festival’s Samuel H. Scripps Studios and the Raleigh School of Ballet. Visit diegocarrascoschoch.com for more information.

John Heitzenrater is a multi-instrumentalist whose performance career spans more than two decades and many genres. The instrument on which he is often featured in his cross-cultural ensemble, Hindugrass, is sarod; but he has also performed and recorded on tabla, bassoon, guitars, bass, ghatam, keyboards, and voice. In his diverse performance career, he has shared the stage with an array of talented musicians from around the globe, including Michael Stipe and Mike Mills of R.E.M., Jody Stephens of Big Star, Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo, Chris Stamey of the dBs, and Mitch Easter of Let’s Active; he also performed at the Dalai Lama’s World Festival of Sacred Music.  Heitzenrater recently finished scoring the short films A Soaring Life by Lucas Ridley, The Finish Line and Character Face by Nic Beery, and the feature film 20 Years After by Chris Johnson.

Welcome to our last Hinge Story for the year! We’re pleased to bring you a story by John Rowell, excerpted from his upcoming novel People Come and Go So Quickly Here.

John will be checking in through Sunday, November 18th to respond to your comments and questions. We look forward to what you have [...]]]>  

Welcome to our last Hinge Story for the year! We’re pleased to bring you a story by John Rowell, excerpted from his upcoming novel People Come and Go So Quickly Here.

John will be checking in through Sunday, November 18th to respond to your comments and questions. We look forward to what you have to say!

Bowman of Manhattan

Soon after I arrived in New York, I was told that you could always spot tourists in Manhattan because they walk down the street with their heads craned up and tilted back, staring at the buildings in open-mouthed disbelief, in awe of the infinite, skyward reach of steel and concrete and glass that is Manhattan.  That is true of tourists, and I had been a tourist once.  But what I’ve learned more recently—about walking down the street—is that you can always spot a gay man in New York not because his head is tilted up, but because it is constantly swiveling around.  Walk down the street, any street in the city, practically, and, if you’re a guy, maybe a guy of a certain age, maybe between, oh, 19 and 25,  and registering somewhere on the looks and body scale from Stunning to It’ll-do-in-a-pinch, then you’ll most likely, on occasion, catch the eye of some other similarly composed male specimen.   Now when that happens, when two sets of male eyes happen to meet and lock as they pass one another on some crowded avenue, I find that neither party ever just stops right then and there to chat, as you might expect.  No.  Almost always, both parties continue walking in the direction in which they were heading, as calmly as possible, despite that they are now both suddenly trembling with curiosity, desire and lust.  Still, a few more steps must be taken in one’s original direction, and then the test:   the heads go back around again, to see if the object of desire has swiveled his head in turn.  And if, in fact, the object of desire has done the same thing, walked towards his intersection but turned his head around again, then a decision must be made by one or both parties.   Either you both start heading back to the middle of the sidewalk to see what might transpire face-to-face, or you  just cross the street, keep on walking, and forget about him forever, which isn’t nearly as Anna Kareninish as it sounds, since in another block or two, you’ll start swiveling around for someone else.  And so will he.  And all this head-swiveling reminds me of nothing less than Linda Blair in The Exorcist, the way her head constantly did a really impressive 360 whenever she lapsed into a Satanic fit.  And wouldn’t it save all us gay men a whole lot of time if our heads could actually swivel all the way around and just stay there, like Linda’s, so we could keep walking forward and looking backward at our lust objects at the same time?  And I say, this is New York:  a primitive island of gay men hunting in the concrete woods for sex, maybe for love, at every moment, and imitating Linda Blair all day long.  It’s a wonder anybody ever gets to the office.

And I’m not immune to doing the Linda myself; I picked it up pretty quickly after arriving here, a skill as necessary to acquire as learning the subway lines, and the bus routes, or how to get around in the Village and Soho, once the streets become named rather than numbered.   Anyhow, this is the way I met Richard, by engaging in a mutual round of Linda Blair-ing on Fifth Avenue near Forty-Second Street during a lunch hour I happened to take one October afternoon.

I was temping at the New York Public Library, the big one, with the lions out front; I was assisting a research librarian named Arnold Hathaway in the Rare Literary Manuscripts collection.  I had to wear white gloves to work in Arnold’s department, naturally, since on a daily basis I helped Arnold lift and display and file rare papers and manuscripts of long-dead but very famous authors whose work had suddenly been chosen to come out of Archives for an advertised public viewing.  That was Arnold’s chief responsibility at the library, to curate the new exhibitions, which changed about every six weeks or so.   I was extremely intrigued to have a job that involved the mandated use of a fashion accessory—I thought of the gloves as a costume piece that helped me get into character as a temp who worked in the Rare Literary Manuscripts collection of the New York Public Library—and I couldn’t help that the gloves, which were soft and slightly shabby in a vintage way, with a dainty mother-of-pearl-button at each wrist, made me feel like a person from a dressier, more formal and romantic time; truth to tell, not as much Mr. Darcy or Algernon, as I might have expected,  but more like the pencil-skirted, red-lipped models out of the pages of a 1959  Harper’s Bazaar.  Also the gloves made me think of those old movies set in New York of the fifties and early sixties, where young starlets like Hope Lange and Barbara Parkins were seen running around clean, gleaming midtown Manhattan on glamorous lunch hours from their office jobs, wearing smart suits, pillbox hats, spike-heeled pumps and, yes, white gloves, while gloriously made up in matte red lipstick and penciled-on eyebrows, and just generally popping off the screen in super-saturated Technicolor.

This is what I was thinking that morning as I helped Arnold transfer an exhibit of F. Scott Fitzgerald memorabilia out of locked oak and glass display cases, and back to the hidden archives, to make way for a new display on Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table.  As usual, Arnold was taking an inordinate amount of time with each volume, each document; he was meticulous, one might say fussy, to a fault, and he preferred no unnecessary conversation while we worked.  He pursued his job with a surgeon’s attention to detail, with no jollity and seemingly no interest in the manuscripts beyond the fact that they were made of delicate, aged paper which needed to be handled in the most painstaking way.   I was curious to read them; he merely strove to keep them from being damaged.  I tried to imagine Arnold having sex; I wondered if he was this careful and exacting in the act, moving everything into its proper place just so, grimly determined to do it correctly, frowning unconsciously, beads of sweat appearing atop his considerably exposed forehead as he fussed.  Mid-morning, I decided to see if I couldn’t lighten the mood with old Arnold, who I judged to be in his late thirties or so, and clearly “on the team,” though so consumed with his job and the detailed minutiae of it all that I doubted he got out much after hours from the library.  He probably dreamed in sepia tones.

“You know, Arnold,” I offered, “these little gloves remind me of old movies, where the women were glamorous all day long, even at the office.  You know what I mean, all those fifties movies set in Manhattan?”

Arnold turned and looked at me down his nose, through his pince-nez glasses, the lenses of which were covered with fingerprints.   “Do you have any idea,” he said, in his nasally, pinched voice, “how many male temps I’ve had tell me that?”

“I’m sure I don’t,” I said.

“Well, quite a few.  All you wanna-be actors with temp jobs who have come to New York because you first saw some ridiculous old movie on TV in your ‘formative years’, where the gals all run around in white gloves and pearls.  I’m glad you like the gloves, but you can’t keep ‘em.  Property of the Library.  And don’t ask me to provide the pearls, we’re fresh out.”

“Well,” I said, “Tiffany’s is just a few blocks away.”

He shot me a miffed look, which he then relaxed into something like weariness, and he removed his pince-nez with his white-gloved hand.  “I can see you are susceptible to pipe dreams,” he sighed.  “Now can we resume work, please?”  And then we were once again, as my job description stated, “handling precious documents with utmost care.”

Despite Arnold’s attempt to dampen my fantasy, I nevertheless felt quite imbued with the spirit of looking for love in midtown that I had once learned—and I guess Arnold was right about this—from watching those old movies on “Dialing for Dollars” on sick days from school.  And that’s the mood I was in as I walked down Fifth Avenue on my lunch hour; it was a sharp fall day, warm but with an insistent cool breeze blowing this way and that, enough to rustle your hair or lift your tie up and keep it back over one shoulder, like an aviator’s scarf.    All I could afford for lunch was a hot dog from one of the street vendors that line Forty-second street every day along the edge of Bryant Park, whose clientele all seem to be tourists eager to sample their first giant, salt-encrusted pretzel, or young office temps like me who can manage only a hot dog and a soda and the all-important copy of Show Business Weekly, to check out upcoming auditions.

I had finished the hot dog, and was simply enjoying walking down the avenue, among all the other suited-up and business-casual’ed people ambling and bustling their way through a Manhattan lunch hour.  At the corner of 39^th Street, about to check out the windows at Lord and Taylor, I suddenly saw a tall, dark-haired man in a black suit walking my way who, even behind his dark glasses, even in the blur of the fast-moving pedestrian traffic, seemed to have singled me out in order to stare at me.  As I got closer to him on the sidewalk, he lifted his glasses and brushed past me, giving me a half-smile.  I kept walking, by now having forgotten all about the windows at Lord and Taylor, though I was directly in front of them.  Almost automatically, I felt compelled to do the head swivel;   Here goes Linda, I thought, having a devil attack on Fifth Avenue, but I couldn’t stop myself, so there I went… Swivel!   And yes, fortunately, he had swiveled back, too.  The game had begun.  And yet, after a few more forward paces, when I swiveled back again, I saw that he had actually not kept going, but had instead rooted himself right on the sidewalk, staring back at me to see if I would walk back to him. Well, clearly no more Linda Blairing for us; now we walked towards each other like gunslingers in an old Western preparing for a duel, he the bad guy in all-black, me the hero in my white shirt, khakis and topsiders.  We met in the middle of the block, wind blowing, cab horns honking, sidewalk people hurrying past us and around us, oblivious,  while three stylish but dull-eyed mannequins in Diane Von Furstenberg wrap dresses  watched us nonchalantly from behind Lord and Taylor’s gilt and glass frames.

“Hi.  Richard,” he said, extending his hand.

“Hey.  Bowman.”

“Bowman.  Well, that’s an interesting name.”

I smiled, and looked down at the sidewalk.  I felt like the proverbial cat who finally caught the bird, then didn’t know what to do with it.  Yet, somehow I sensed that’s what he would want; I felt he would take the lead.  He was older, after all, probably close to forty.  Forty!  Tall, handsome, deep-voiced, and…forty.

“Would you like to have lunch?” he asked.

“Oh.  Well, I did already.  I have to get back to the library in, like, five minutes.”

“You’re a student?” He took off his sunglasses, and brought the left earpiece up to one corner of his mouth, staring at me intently.  Incredible hazel-green eyes.

“No, no.  I just work at the library…for the moment.”

“Oh, you’re a temp.  That means you’re an actor.  Temp equals actor.”

“How do you know that?”

“I was an actor, too.  Once upon a time.”

“Oh, cool.  How long were you–?”

“I don’t really want to talk about that.  I don’t do that anymore.  I wised up.  I wanted to eat and drink and wear nice clothes.”

I nodded and smiled, feeling slightly insulted.

Still, he continued to stare at me, half-smiling, head slightly cocked, sucking on one earpiece end of the sunglasses, and not saying anything, as if he were sizing me up for something, the way casting directors sometimes look you over in silence after an audition.

“You’re a very attractive young man,” he said, finally, putting his glasses back on his face.  “You should do well.”

“Thank you.”  I stared back down at the sidewalk again.

“You’re blushing,” he said.  “That’s cute.  Could be an act, but it’s still cute.”

“I don’t—“

“Listen, Bowman.  I need to run.   Here’s my card.”  He reached into the side pocket of his jacket and produced a black leather wallet, and opened it up and took out a slick, black card, embossed with white letters.  It read RICHARD J. GATES, and underneath it said:  MARKETING CONSULTANT.  Below that was listed an office address, on East 45^th Street, and phone numbers.  “Call me if you want,” he said, briskly.  “Today’s Tuesday.  If I don’t hear from you by Thursday, I’ll assume you’re not interested.  Which is no problem, but I think you should call me.  So, your move.”

“Yeah.  Well, thanks for the card.”

“See you around,” he said, and he patted me on the shoulder, then turned away and walked up the avenue, without looking back.

I waited until Thursday afternoon to make the call.  A little after five, after Arnold had signed my time slip and dismissed me for the day, I made my way down to a pay phone in the dark lower lobby of the library.  The phone booths, lined up side-by-side, seemed foreboding and Puritanical: made of old, dark brown wood, each one was about the size of a coffin stood upright, but fitted with narrow, oblong windows in its door, which folded in and out like an accordion.  Inside, there was a little pull-down bench shaped like a half-moon, and above your head, a dim yellow light.   I laid Richard’s card on the short shelf under the phone, then dug out my dimes, which I’d learned to hoard ever since I arrived in the city, just for the sake of using pay phones.  I dialed the number at Richard’s office, which felt both safe and a little scandalous at the same time, though I’m not sure why.  Wouldn’t Hope Lange have dialed him at the office, fearing the possibility of a wife at home?

“Richard Gates,” said a voice after the first ring.

“Hi, Richard?  This is Bowman.”  There was a short pause, as if he were trying to place me, which immediately made me wish I hadn’t called.

“Bowman…Bowman!  How are you?”

“I’m fine, how are you?”

“I’m great.  Listen, I’m just about to step into a meeting.  Can you call me back later?”

“Sure, I—“

“Actually, no, I have a better idea.  I’m busy tonight, I won’t be home until late.  Can you meet for a drink tomorrow night?”

“Sure.”

“Great.  Oh…no, wait…actually… looking at my calendar here…I’ve got…do you know Sandra Bernhard?”

“You mean the comedienne?  Do I know who she is or do I know her personally?”

“Obviously you know who she is.  Do you know her personally?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.  Well, I know her personally, and I have tickets to her new show tomorrow night.  Would you like to go?”

“Oh….Yes.  That would be…that’s good.  I hear the show’s… good.”

At that moment, a woman dragging a clingy, crying child appeared in front of my phone booth, giving me the “Will you please hurry up?” look.  At the same instant, a rude click from the phone indicated that it needed another dime from me.  I reached frantically into my pocket.

“Sandy’s always fab,” Richard continued.  “The show’s playing downtown, on Second Avenue.  Why don’t we have a drink first?  Meet me at Piranha Bar at seven,  then we’ll head over to the theater after that.  You know Piranha Bar, yes?”

“Sure.”

“Good.  See you tomorrow,” he said.  And then the phone clicked off from his end.

The woman with the child had obviously found another booth, so I took an extra minute to look up Piranha Bar in the fat, black notebook of Yellow Pages hanging from a wire under the pay phone.  I wrote down the address on the back of my time slip.  Piranha Bar was on lower Second Avenue.   I would have just enough time to get back home to Ninth Avenue from the library, take a shower and get dressed before hopping on the N or the R train to head downtown.

I picked up the business card, and held it in my moist palm.  I ran my finger over the raised embossed letters, RICHARD J. GATES.  I felt just like Hope Lange.  If it had been 1959, I knew I would be making up my mind to wear white gloves to Piranha Bar tomorrow night.

***

Of course, what I wore was khaki pants and a crew neck sweater, but I did throw  on black Reeboks, just to give myself a hint of downtown respectability.   It occurred to me Richard might still be in a suit from the office, and that I’d look underdressed next to him, but then…well, maybe that was the idea.

I got to Piranha Bar a little before seven.  It was disco dark and jammed wall to wall with a boisterous, preening crowd.  Suddenly, I was seized with a split second of panic that I might not, in fact, recognize Richard, since we had only stared at each other for all of about four minutes on sunny Fifth Avenue.  I scanned the bodies:  the bar was jumping with both men and women, mostly East Village types in black leather and fishnet tights, a few of them sporting bleached blond or turquoise Mohawks, stiff and sprayed and almost lethal looking, like weapons.  Wall Street guys in conservative gray suits intermingled among them, probably hoping to crib a little of the cool that they couldn’t pull off on their own simply by unbuttoning their top shirt buttons and loosening their ties, and then knocking back Waspy-looking vodka tonics.  Over the black, racetrack-shaped bar, a six-foot long neon fish with a large, open mouth and knife-sharp teeth kept biting fiercely, then releasing, changing colors from yellow to green to pink as it did so.   I ordered a beer and grabbed the one empty stool I could find, and stared at the piranha.  From the bar’s loudspeakers, Prince wailed good and hard about a girl in a raspberry beret, and I noticed that the woman sitting a couple of stools down from mine was actually wearing one; she sang along on the chorus—out of tune but with forceful  drunken effort.  No one paid her any attention.

Suddenly I felt hot, whiskeyish breath on the back of my neck and teeth biting my earlobe.  “Hi there, Little Bowman Peep,” said a voice.  I pulled my ear away and swiveled around on the stool; fortunately, it was Richard, in the same sunglasses and similar, if not the exact same, black suit that I remembered from Fifth Avenue.

“I bet people call you that a lot, don’t they?” he said.  “Little Bo Peep.  Little Bowman Peep.”

“Actually, they don’t,” I said.

He squeezed in next to me, onto a newly vacant stool, and cupped my cheek with the palm of his hand, holding it there as he turned away to quickly scan the crowd.

“Perfect,” he said.  “Just as nice as I remembered.”

“Do you mean me or the bar?”

He turned around on the stool to face me. “You, Little Bowman Peep, you,” he said.  Then he quickly slammed both of his hands down onto my knees, an unexpected move that took me so much by surprise I nearly did a spit take.

“You’re a saucy little boy,” he stage-whispered, seemingly unaware of how violently he had landed his big hands on me.   “And if I were that piranha up there, I’d eat you up alive.”  He pulled me toward him and gave me a big, wet kiss on the mouth, causing me to fall off my stool and into his arms.  His cologne this evening was definitely Eau de Jack Daniels. Clearly, Piranha Bar was not Richard’s first stop since leaving the office.

I struggled back onto the stool.  “In that case,” I said, “I’d better be careful where I go swimming.”

“That’s right, little boy, you better be careful. A lot of sick fish in the water these days, you know.”   He flagged the bartender down for a “Jack and ginger, light on the rocks” and then grabbed my hand and held it, then stroked it.

Part of me wanted to pull my hand away, but another part of me—my heart—had started to beat in time with the chomping teeth of the neon piranha.   I wasn’t so sure about Richard’s aggressiveness, especially in a public place, but I sure liked the way he drank me in with his big hazel-green eyes, fluttering his long dark eyelashes in the way of love-crazed sirens from silent movies, the ones who vamped coquettishly through the first and second reels in order to snag their man by the third.  Still, I’d been around enough D.A.R. ladies back home to know that showing up even slightly soused on a first date would most definitely get you uninvited to the debutante ball and whispered about at the country club.  Perhaps second impressions are really the thing, after all.

I decided to see if I could take charge.  “Drink up, Dick,” I said.  “We’ve got an eight o’clock curtain.”

“No one ever calls me Dick,” he said, “and I don’t expect you to start, little boy.”  He took a long sip of his new cocktail.  “So…you’ve never seen Sandy on stage, right?  You’ll dig her, she’s divine.  Afterwards, we’ll all go out, you, me…Sandy.  It’ll be fabulous.”

“You know her that well?”

“Actually, we dated.  Briefly.”

“Another life, I guess.”

“Something like that.  Now hold on…hold on….”  He peered at his left wrist, and kept bringing it up and then away from his eyes…. “ah, good…the Cartier says we’ve got time for another round.  You want to stick with beer, or should Little Bowman Peep switch to goat’s milk?”

Before I could answer, he fluttered his eyes again, his right hand went up, and the bartender was suddenly at our command.

***

After the show, we stood outside on Second Avenue, waiting for the star to emerge from the theater.  The October night had turned chilly, and the wind was picking up.  We were the lone couple on the sidewalk; the performance had been over for almost a half hour, and I had watched as the audience filed out of the lobby, chatting and laughing, then hailed cabs, dwindled, and disappeared, leaving only Richard and me out front, waiting.   The house manager had locked the double outside doors and turned the lights off in the lobby.  Above us, the marquee abruptly went out.  I imagined the stage manager inside, placing the ghost light on stage, and saying good night to Sandra.

“Do you think maybe she went out another way?” I asked, finally.  “It’s been over a half hour.”  I didn’t want to ask why we hadn’t simply gone backstage.

“Sandy always has to do a wind-down.  She’ll be out.”  He had lost his buzz from earlier in the evening, and seemed tense; he pulled out a cigarette, and lit it, which I hadn’t seen him do before.  “Do you mind?” he asked, blowing smoke.

“No.”

In a minute or two, Sandra and four other people emerged from the lobby doors—the house manager had to unlock them in the darkened inside vestibule—and spilled out onto the sidewalk talking loudly, and laughing and smoking.  They started up Second Avenue without looking our way.  Richard threw his cigarette onto the sidewalk, grinding it out, and called after them.

“Sandy!”

She turned and, after a second or two, said:  “Oh, hi.”  She bid her posse to wait, and walked over to us.

“I didn’t know you were here,” she said.  She kissed him.  “How are you, sweetie?”

“I’m good.  How are you?  You’re good?”

“Yeah, you know…we’re doing well.  Frank Rich liked us, that’s all that fucking matters.”

“Fabulous.  The show’s fabulous, honey.  Sandy, this is Bowman.”

“Hello,” she said, offering her hand at an angle that seemed to suggest I should kiss it.  I shook it instead.

“You were fantastic!” I said.  “It’s an amazing show.”

“Oh, good,” she said, and turned back to Richard.  “Thanks for coming, sweetie.   Call me.  We’ll catch up, okay?”   She leaned over for him to kiss her cheek, then turned, swinging her large bag over her shoulder, and rejoined her posse.  They quickly proceeded as one up the avenue.

“Okay, so,” Richard said, now all brisk and businesslike.   “Do you want to go back to my place?”

I thought for a second.  To make this happen, he would probably have to take up with Mr. Jack Daniels again.  He would no doubt have to smoke another cigarette or two.  He would inevitably stroke my knees and my thighs and bite my earlobes on the way there, as a warm-up.  He would not mention Sandra Bernhard at all for the rest of the night.  At his building, we would have to walk through the harsh fluorescent light of the lobby; he would be worried about me seeing him in bright light at midnight, so he would walk fast—and ahead of me—to the elevator.  He would nod the briefest of nods to the doorman as he brushed past him, maybe even calling his name:  “Hi, Domingues,” or “Hello, Ivan,” and the doorman would say, “Good Evening, Mr. Gates,” though it was technically morning, and then I would say hello also, just to be mannerly, and he would speak to me, so as not to offend the tenant, and everybody would pretend that this was business as usual, that not dawdling or dwelling on any of it made it all disappear instantly from memory.  Once inside the elevator, Richard and I wouldn’t speak at all, the silence and the anticipation between us under that equally forbidding greenish-yellow halo of a light bulb a kind of prelude to whatever unknown things were about to happen upstairs.  Once in the hallway, after four deadbolt locks had been keyed and turned, and the door opened, I would walk in and get an eyeful of his apartment, and instantly tell him—because the traces of southern etiquette that I still clung to would demand it—how spacious and beautiful it was, which it surely would be, at least compared to my own fifth-floor-walk-up, peeled-paint railroad flat on 48th Street.  I would instantly freeze at the moment he began to reach under my sweater from behind—more Jack Daniels on my cheek—as we stood in his living room, gazing out onto the late night lights of Manhattan from the fifteenth floor—the city that never sleeps, but constantly screws around—and he would continue to roam his hands all over my body, unbuttoning this here, sliding that off there, as my eyes landed on framed photographs of Richard and friends scattered across his bookcases, black and white images of a younger, happier-looking Richard with other, younger men, especially one model-faced blond who keeps reappearing in photo after photo—in front of the Eiffel Tower, on the beach at Fire Island, at a birthday party.  I imagined the next morning, waking up in a strange bed as the sun came up over the canyons, having to rush back to Hell’s Kitchen on the dingy N or R train in rumpled clothes to get ready for my nine a.m. stint at the library, and, later, donning those damn white gloves for yet another day’s work of standing next to sexless, lonely Arnold as the two of us gingerly, silently place Dorothy Parker’s letters to Robert Benchley circa March 1928 into an oak and glass display case, with Arnold working cautiously while I stand there like a good servant but unable to really concentrate, my head still in a sort of drunken, sleepless place, still with Richard in a building, an apartment, a bedroom, a bed I may or may not ever see again or even be able to find if I, in fact, ever have another reason to go looking for it.

And still I stood there face-to-face with Richard on the sidewalk in front of the darkened theatre, waiting to answer his question—and I also thought—of course I thought—what would the D.A.R. rule book say?  What would my mother do?  And  lovely, virginal Hope Lange, in white gloves, at the end of a glamorous Manhattan evening, circa 1959, and aglow in super saturated Technicolor… what would Hope Lange do?

And I looked at Richard, finally, directly into his hazel-green eyes, eyes that were not fluttering now, but fixed expectantly on mine—we’re in the third reel, after all—eyes that waited—hopefully? nervously? frantically?—for an answer.

“Subway or cab?” I said.

John Rowell is the author of the short story collection The Music of Your Life, a finalist for the 2004 Ferro-Grumley Prize for Best Fiction Book of the Year.  His stage adaptation of his book, with the same title, opened at the Jermyn Street Theater in London’s West End in November of 2010, and was a 2012 semi-finalist at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center’s National Playwrights Conference.  A native of North Carolina, John holds a B.A. from UNC-Chapel Hill, and an M.F.A.in Writing and Literature from the Writing Seminars at Bennington College.  He is the recipient of fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, The Sewanee Writers Conference, The Edward F. Albee Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, The Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Eastern Frontier/Norton Island Residency Program, the Kimmel-Harding-Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, Nebraska and The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.   John served for two years as the Reginald S. Tickner Fellow/Writer-In-Residence at The Gilman School of Baltimore, Maryland, where he is now a member of the permanent Upper School faculty, teaching English and Creative Writing and directing in the theater program.  At Gilman, he also currently holds the John K. and Robert F. M. Culver Chair for Distinguished Teaching in English and Writing.  John has previously taught literature and fiction workshops at Mediabistro in New York City, Loyola College, University of Maryland Baltimore Campus, and in the M.F.A. program at the University of Baltimore.  His fiction, essays and reviews have been featured in such publications as Tin House, Bloom and Show Business Weekly, among others, and he currently serves as the Baltimore critic for the Theatermania website.  Most recently, John was represented with a story in Long Story Short:  Flash Fiction From Sixty-Five of North Carolina’s Finest Writers, published by UNC Press, and he is currently at work on a novel entitled People Come and Go So Quickly Here.

Every third Friday of the month, in conjunction with Durham’s Third Friday Art Walk, The Hinge hosts a casual shin dig. At these shin digs we partake in the following: laughing, snacking, drinking, and general merry-making. Join us this Friday, October 19.

Time: 7-10 [...]]]> Join us for Durham’s Third Friday Art Walk!

Every third Friday of the month, in conjunction with Durham’s Third Friday Art Walk, The Hinge hosts a casual shin dig. At these shin digs we partake in the following: laughing, snacking, drinking, and general merry-making. Join us this Friday, October 19.

Time: 7-10 pm
Location: 305 E Chapel Hill St, Suite 215, Durham, NC 27701 (We are at the end of the hall.)

The Regulator, 720 Ninth Street, Durham.

This special evening will include the following:

The chance to win a writers’ retreat at Doe Branch Ink Readings by Hinge faculty The chance to meet other readers and writers Libations

We will [...]]]> Join The Hinge Literary Center for a Fall Open House

Saturday, October 6 from 7-9 PM

The Regulator, 720 Ninth Street, Durham.

This special evening will include the following:

The chance to win a writers’ retreat at Doe Branch Ink
Readings by Hinge faculty
The chance to meet other readers and writers
Libations

We will also be collecting new/gently used children’s books for Book Harvest, a non-profit based in NC that “connects donated books with at-risk kids.”

This event is free! We’d love to see you there.

We’re happy to present her story “I’ve Looked [...]]]> We’ve taken a little summer break but we’re very excited about the return of The Hinge Story!  This month our featured writer is Susan Jackson Rodgers, whose second story collection, Ex-Boyfriend on Aisle Six, will be coming October 1 from our friends at Press 53 in Winston-Salem.

We’re happy to present her story “I’ve Looked Everywhere,” which originally appeared in Story Quarterly. Susan will be checking in through the afternoon of Sunday, September 30 to respond to your questions and comments.  We look forward to what you have to say!

I’ve Looked Everywhere

I lost my cell phone yesterday.  This afternoon I heard it ringing faintly from deep inside its hiding place:  a totebag, purse, kitchen drawer, pocket?  I tried tracking the sound—first it seemed to be coming from the bedroom, then the study—but just as I thought I was getting close, the battery must have lost power, or else the person hung up.  I went through the possibilities.  Not very many people have the cell phone number.  You, my sister, my ex-husband, my massage therapist, my housepainter who is also, maybe, my boyfriend, though maybe not.  I called them all, all except you and the ex-husband because he’d only call in case of an emergency and he’d try the land line first for that; and the housepainter, because I’ve called twice this week, and I don’t want to appear desperate.

I decided to go to the library, to return the overdue books, but remembered that they are lost too.  Three of them, checked out two months ago, and the fines have almost exceeded the value of the books.  One was a book of poetry that I used to keep by my bed, because after you left I discovered that reading poetry before I went to sleep produced interesting, poetic dreams.  The other was a biography of a child actor; I love stories about people doing drugs.  And the third I can’t remember.

I’m losing confidence, but not weight.  I’m losing my glasses, my mind, my sense of balance.  In yoga class I used to be able to do the Stork and now I can’t, I topple over like a badly constructed block tower.  Everyone pretends not to notice because they’re practicing their serene yoga faces.  I’m losing estrogen, instant recall, the ability to spell words I have always known how to spell.  The stocks I own are losing money, have lost money, are worthless.  The country I live in is losing wars—against drugs, fat, violence, stupidity, invisible forces we can’t name, enemies we’ve only imagined who now rightly despise us.  I’m losing faith.  Altitude.  Ground.  I’ve lost two husbands—one to heart failure, and one to a twenty-year-old—and children—one to her dreaded Peer Group, and the other to a cultish mentality about a particular heavy metal band that shall go unnamed.  I lost my name, twice, and now I can’t get it back again.  I’m losing elasticity, skin and otherwise.  Losing perspective.  Losing my appetite, but not for food.  I’ve lost the receipt to the beige dress I bought for my daughter’s high school graduation that she said made me look like a matronly cow so I decided to wear the purple rayon pantsuit instead.  Without the receipt, I’m stuck with the cowsuit, which hangs in my closet with many other articles of clothing my daughter has forbidden me to wear.  I’ve lost my taste for older men because really, how much older can I go?  I’ve lost my yen.  For transatlantic travel, for driving a stick-shift, for falling snow, loud dinner parties, loud noise of any kind except certain rock bands from an entirely different era, late-night phone calls.  I’ve lost the lyrics to that song that is nevertheless stuck in my head:  baby please don’t go, something something something . . . . I’ve lost the left shoe from my favorite pair, the black sandals for whom I get regular pedicures in the summer, the sandals that I bought three years ago in Italy—you were with me.  Do you remember the sandals?  Where in God’s name does a single black leather Milanese sandal go?  Is it at your house?  Under the bed, perhaps, or in your closet, with your shoes?

Old friends.  The desire to be first in line.  The desire to go at all.  The need to fit in, to do what I’m told, to accept second best, to fight the good fight, to be quiet.  I’ve lost the remote control—forever this time, my car keys, a pair of $200 sunglasses I promised myself I would never lose, three skin cancers off my back, the directions to your sister’s summer house, the children’s baby teeth, many important documents that I’m certain I had signed by a notary public but did not, apparently, store in a safe place, a charcoal sketch of my childhood home, and the Maxime Le Forestier album I bought in Quebec in 1975.  On the list of lost things also is the list of things I keep meaning to do, and the list of things I’m sorry I did, though when I wake up at four in the morning, there they all are, crowded around my bedside like eager dogs, pawing my hand, begging me to scratch their ears.

I’ve lost my place in the book I’m reading, the negative for the picture of us I wanted to enlarge (standing on the stone steps, Lake Michigan behind us), the phone number for the acupuncturist my neighbor recommended.  Both parents and a brother, six dogs, eight cats, four hamsters, three birds, and, I’m not kidding, a pear tree, which died of blight.  The instructions to the Cuisinart, the breadmaker I got for my second wedding—and you tell me where a breadmaker could possibly be hiding.  The extension cord I swear I bought last week, this week’s TV Guide, my favorite pen.

I’ve looked everywhere.

Every day there’s something else, things dropping away like the careless removal of clothing or make-up after a party, like the diamond earring that slips from my fingers into the bathroom sink and down the drain, disappearing so quickly it seems to have planned its daring escape.  We both watch it fall, incredulous, as if this kind of thing never happens.  You kindly take apart the pipes underneath the sink (still wearing your handsome evening clothes, crisp white sleeves rolled up to your elbows) but the earring is gone.  You straighten, unroll your sleeves, pluck the remaining earring from my palm and drop it into the drain just like that, without looking at me.  And I can’t read the gesture, or the expression on your face; can’t decide if what you mean is, See, it doesn’t matter, it’s just a thing; or, Now the two earrings will be together forever; or, Through your terrible carelessness, your inability to watch what you’re doing, your consistently wretched sense of timing, you’ve sealed your fate, and mine.

There!  Did you hear that?  The phone—it’s ringing again.  Three rings, four.  Now is the moment when I realize I could have just dialed the cell number myself, and tracked down the phone.  “Dur,” my oldest daughter would say.  I stand in the middle of the room, six, seven, the afternoon light fading now, the shadows lengthening across the woven rugs.  The rings stop.  It must be later than I think, the way the light falls across the floors.  The day must have gotten away from me, as it does sometimes.  Does that ever happen to you?  The day slipping by?  Who knows where it goes.  But it’s late, in any case, it’s starting to get dark, it’s getting dark a lot earlier now, and in the mornings when I go for my walk, there’s a chill, a dampness.  Sometimes I wear a sweatshirt, my favorite one, faded blue, extra large, soft from many washings.  The one you must assume, by now, that you’ve lost.

Susan Jackson Rodgers is the author of two story collections: The Trouble With You Is and Ex-Boyfriend on Aisle 6.  Her fiction has appeared in journals such as New England Review, North American Review, Glimmer Train, Beloit Fiction Journal, Midwestern Gothic, Quick Fiction and Prairie Schooner.  She grew up in Connecticut and New York City, taught for many years at Kansas State University, and currently teaches creative writing and literature at Oregon State University.

SEPT 25 / tuesday / 8pm / Casbah Durham

Readings / Films / Photographs by ERIN ESPELIE ADRA RAINE ELIN O’HARA SLAVICK

Mixtape is a bimonthly sha-bang of great artists showing their work and reading the works of others. Sponsored by the Hinge Literary Center. Curated by Chris [...]]]> Summer is over, let’s mix it up.

SEPT 25 / tuesday / 8pm / Casbah Durham

Readings / Films / Photographs
by
ERIN ESPELIE
ADRA RAINE
ELIN O’HARA SLAVICK

Mixtape is a bimonthly sha-bang of great artists showing their work and reading the works of others.
Sponsored by the Hinge Literary Center.
Curated by Chris Vitiello.

SEPTEMBER’S FOLKS:

Erin Espelie is a filmmaker, writer, and editor, specializing in
representations of science and nature. Her poetic, nonfiction films
have screened at the New York Film Festival, Rotterdam International
Film Festival, Full Frame Festival (“Silent Springs,” 2012), and
elsewhere; two new films will have their premieres in October 2012,
one at the NYFF and the other at the British Film Institute’s London
Film Festival. She continues to serve as executive editor of Natural
History magazine, where she’s written a monthly column since 2002.

Adra Raine is a doctoral candidate in English at UNC, where she’s
studying 20th-century American literature. In her abundance of free
time, she muses on the mystery of being in the world by making short
films, poems, and prose writings.

elin o’Hara slavick is a professor of Visual Art, Theory and Practice
at UNC. She received her MFA in photography from the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago and her BA from Sarah Lawrence College, where she
studied poetry with Tom Lux, Jean Valentine and Jane Cooper. Slavick
has exhibited her work internationally and has authored Bomb After
Bomb: A Violent Cartography, (Charta, 2007), with a foreword by Howard
Zinn. Her next book, Hiroshima: After Aftermath, will be out in spring
2013 on Daylight Books. She is also a curator, critic and activist.