136 pages; full-color interior
Dear Reader:
As a small future English major in ninth-grade biology, I remember being fascinated by the unit on the guys who got it wrong. My bespectacled bio teacher scornfully talked about Lamarck, the predecessor to Darwin who thought that baby giraffes grew taller
because their parents had stretched their necks to eat the leaves of trees in the savannah. Aristotle believed in spontaneous generation, the idea that living things could form out of nothing because “in all air is vital heat.” I’ve been thinking about spontaneous generation as we’ve created this twentieth issue of Slice with its theme of Corporeal. We liked that Corporeal could mean both “of the body” and also “embodied.” Those early scientists believed that by striving we could actually change our bodies. They couldn’t see the invisible mechanisms of life, but they were convinced that flies could grow from the air, that the intangible could be transformed into flesh.
In this issue, you’ll find stories about the ways in which our bodies can determine who others say we are, our bodies can turn on us and destroy our dreams, our bodies can bear the weight of our religion. The numbers from an investment portfolio are calculated
with the same weight as the calories that keep a body alive in the woods. Steve Erickson talks with Bruce Bauman about the fractured body of America and Erickson’s novel Shadowbahn, in which the Twin Towers appear in the Dakota Badlands bearing Elvis’s stillborn twin. Lidia Yuknavitch defines corporeal writing, Edwidge Danticat muses on how to write death, and Christina Baker Kline crafts a gothic tale of sisterly love and murdered cats. In our first international Exquisite Corpse project, we’ve partnered with Words Without Borders to bring you a story that was started by an author from South Korea and passed in turn to writers from Peru, Sweden, Madagascar, and Tunisia. Each new writer heard only the last line of the previous chapter, and the complete story is presented both in the original languages and in translation: a figure standing tall in a candlelit crowd becomes the piercingly beautiful corpse of a rabbit, then a disfigured and desirable woman, and then a caged thing, before coming full circle in the final, graphic installment to appear as a man standing tall in a crowd . . . surrounded by shadows.
In this moment in America, when it feels like every day is a battle, it’s easy to think that there’s no time for art, no time for stories. In this world of alternative facts and conflicting narratives, words can feel so flimsy. In this reawakening of social activism, it’s not that the best lack conviction—it’s that the worst are full of passionate intensity while the best seem to want to slow down and verify all their sources. But it was the inscribed word that transformed a golem of Jewish folklore from raw clay into a fierce, unstoppable protector of the Jews of Prague. Scheherazade’s stories were so compelling that the king couldn’t kill her as he’d planned because he had to find out what happened next—and as a child reading that tale, I liked to think that surely 1,001 nights of stories had made him a better person as well. Words can become corporeal to do the real work of repairing the world. And authors from four continents in five languages can create a single story: a spontaneously generated crowd, standing together in the candlelit darkness.
Cheers,
Elizabeth Blachman
Editor-in-Chief
Interviews
(In Order of Appearance)
STEVE ERICKSON by Bruce Bauman
MELISSA FEBOS AND GARTH GREENWELL by Brian Gresko
EDWIDGE DANTICAT by Garrard Conley
LIDIA YUKNAVITCH by Michele Filgate
BEHIND THE BOOK DEAL: JADE CHANG, MARC GERALD & HELEN ATSMA by Liz Mathews
Fiction
Fiction Editor, Celia Blue Johnson
Associate Fiction Editor, Randy Brown Winston
AUTHOR’S PICK: HAVE YOU EVER TRIED by Anna Marschalk-Burns, With an Introduction by Marie-Helene Bertino
CATS by Christina Baker Kline
AN INTERNATIONAL EXQUISITE CORPSE by Chakib Daoud, Naivo, Jeon Sam-hye, Jessica Schiefauer, Carlos Yushimito. Translation by Allison M. Charette, Anton Hur, Elisabeth Jaquette, Valerie Miles, Saskia Vogel Lettering by Mercedes Claire Gilliom
THE GIRL by Itoro Udofia
CALORIES by David Lu
WILDFIRES by Keija Parssinen
Nonfiction
Nonfiction Editors, Maria Gagliano, Christopher Locke
AUTHOR’S PICK: MY SECONDHAND LONELY by Zoë Gadegbeku, With an Introduction by Jerald Walker
OUTSIDE GETS INSIDE by Rakesh Satyal
UNHOLY PILGRIMAGE by Jessie Chaffee
SELF(ISH) by Mika Taylor
LUCKY by Ben Jatos
TRANSCRIPT by Anuradha Bhowmik
EMERGENCE by Jennifer Alise Drew
Poetry
Poetry Editor, Tom Haushalter
Associate Poetry Editor, Trevor Ketner
AUTHOR’S PICK: THESIS by Jane Huffman, With an Introduction by Diane Seuss
BIRD STORY by Alisha Yi
THEOREM by Jill Osier
EVERYTHING ITS OWN TINY TUNNEL by Jill Osier
CHORE CHART by Laura Kolbe
EXPLAINING POPULAR MUSIC TO ALIEN LIFE FORMS by Jeffrey Morgan
EXTREME UNCTION by Michele Karas
THIS BREEZE by Matt Zambito
THE MAN BESIDE ME CONSIDERS ME BESIDE HIM by Renia White
THE RHINOCEROS CALF by Jennifer Givhan
SHAME by Jennifer Givhan
Visual Art
Art Director, Jennifer K. Beal Davis
Associate Art Director, Matt Davis
(Click Artists’ Names to Visit Their Websites)
