Yuck. Here’s an un-boring-ed one. I have more, some without F-bombs. (The focus group hated those.)

“May all your lorems be ipsumed to the dolor…”—famous writers’ blessing

In art and design the quatrefoil is an important and frequently used element. I don’t know too much about them but I enjoy them for their simultaneous blend of simplicity and complexity. A quatrefoil consists essentially of four overlapping equal-sized circles, with variants on that theme. Like a meander or a spiral, there is an innate optical pleasingness in looking at a quatrefoil and that is one of the reasons why it is a fundamental of visual art and design.

Both the quatrefoil and the spaces between its evenly aligned ranks and files are visually soothing. Looking at these shapes scratches an itch in your brain, the one you did not realize you had until it got scratched.

I think. I did not look all of this up on Wikipedia, nor have I studied this in the past nor do I have special intuitive knowledge powers (“super genius stuff”), like some C- grade undergrads from Wharton. Wharton is in Pennsylvania. I think.

Four. 4. Quarters. Quatro. Four anything can be represented by a quatrefoil. Four lads from Liverpool, the Ninja Turtles, four ripe plums, or four asteroids in orbit around one of the nine moons of Endor…

Today, I have four good things to talk about. I have listed them as Quatrefoil One through Four:

Quatrefoil One.

Nice people are overrepresented in the business of fiction. Thank goodness. If it wasn’t for the nice people, I would lose my mind because this writing shit is super genius stuff and that means, for me—a non-graduate of Wharton undergraduate studies, Cambridge University or Endor (or any of its moons)—it is hard as f*ck!

Quarrel One. The diamond-shaped pieces between adjacent quatrefoils are sometimes called “quarrels”, especially in a description of fenestration — like the stained glass windows in the King’s College at Cambridge. (A place, like Endor, where actual “super genius stuff” takes place.) Quarrel is a fine word and so I’ll use it here to describe the fillers I have inserted into each space between my four good things. Each of the three quarrels will describe something about quatrefoils. There is no extra charge for these trequarrels of sublime, intermediary (or interlocutory, cuz that is also a fun, six-syllable word) information.

Quatrefoil Two.

I am able to enjoy the lake we live next to in almost any condition. If it is warm, I can swim in it. There’s fishing, but somehow I don’t get around to that much. In summer, on calm mornings, I can row across its surface. When it’s really windy, I can windsurf. Windsurfing is basically a showing-off activity so when I am out windsurfing I am thinking super genius stuff like: “I bet those people sitting on the dock over there would be prett-ty-prett-ty impressed if they knew that I’m a GD pensioner!” Meanwhile, the person on the dock is actually busy wondering if Regina really does rhyme with “vagina” or whether that Canadian guy was just having them on…

If it is just a little windy I can windsurf on a board equipped with a hydrofoil. This is a new windsurfing invention and it really ramps up the “bet those people are impressed” thoughts in my show-offy brain. It may also increase the shoreline spectator consideration of other Canadian city names like Moose Jaw, Upper Rubber Boot, Crotch Lake, Dildo, and Climax.

Quarrel Two. A quatrefoil arch is a common feature in gothic architecture. Cathedrals are loaded with ’em.

Quatrefoil Three. I have work out soon in three exceptional Canadian publications and one based in the U.S.:

On Sunday, July 19th, at 2pm Pacific time, I’ll be part of a virtual (online) launch for Pulp Literature Issue 27.  The launch will be on PL’s Discord server channel, and I hope you’ll be able to join in. Just like an in-person launch, there will be door prizes and chances to chat with the authors, who will be reading from their work. The event has contributions from Denmark to Western Australia. But none from Elbow. (Saskatchewan… there may be one from Elbow, Ontario, though — home of the Elbow Roughriders.)

August will see the launch of a new issue of Agnes and True, an exceptional Canadian online literary journal. I’m super genius excited to be in this market and can’t wait for folks to read my story, “The Grittiness of Mango Chiffon”, a tale of fashion, warmth, and redoubtable resolve.

I’ll be returning to Just Words, the annual anthology of fiction, CNF, and poetry from Blank Spaces, a production of Alanna Rusnak Publishing. This compilation will be out in September. https://www.facebook.com/blankspacesmag

My pick-up truck saga, “The Sunshine Girl” will shine its ever-lovin’ light on Cowboy Jamboree, sometime this fall. “An interesting slice-of-life vignette…” according to Editor Adam Van Winkle. 

“A grit lit rag promoting fiction in the vein of Donald Ray Pollock and Larry Brown and Dorothy Allison and the like.”—Cowboy Jamboree, About.

Quarrel Three. Are quatrefoils lucky? Do they have special, magical powers? Do they stay crunchy in milk? I don’t want to influence your religious beliefs or otherwise stray onto private property but I’d say quatrefoils are never considered unlucky.

Quatrefoil Four. Drumroll, please. My grant application to the Manitoba Arts Council | Conseil des Arts du Manitoba has been accepted! My proposal to produce a Manitoba artbook will be going ahead as soon as Covid-19 allows free travel around the province. My collaborator, photographer Phil Hossack, and I will work together to create an ekphrastic collection of Manitoba-based short fiction and photography. The three-part theme we want to focus on: People, Place, Light. We’ll travel the province to gather extraordinary stories and pictures from ordinary folks.

More on this project soon, but for now, please let me know if you have a Manitoba location, a person, a story, or if you know someone with a printing press sitting around not doing much. These are all things we could use!

PEOPLE | PLACE | LIGHT

Manitoba is endowed with remarkable people. From Louis Riel to other famous individuals like Gabriel Roy, Cindy Klassen, Miriam Toews, and many, many more, there are lots to choose from. There’s also a plethora of the not-so-famous—but just as interesting. It’s predominantly this latter group we hope to meet and share with our readers, though story-telling and visual arts.

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Our province is one of diversity not just in the origins of its people, but in its geography too. The North, the prairies, the boreal, rivers, lakes, a great city and numerous smaller communities with singular stories to tell and show. Manitoba places make for fascinating discovery and study.

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Sunny Manitoba. As every Manitoban who has spent time out of the province knows, it is our light, both in terms of the vast size of the sky over the flat prairie landscape, and its year-round abundance that makes the sun’s absense felt most acutely when we are away from home. Whether it’s sitting on a Whiteshell dock in the unfading light of a late June evening, or waiting impatiently for the sunrise on a frozen January morning, Manitobans’ relationship with daylight—with the sun—is special and unlike any other place. So too, light plays a dominant role in the art of photography and we believe that by paying special attention to light in our photos (and in our fiction!) we’ll uncover truths that may otherwise have gone, uh… unilluminated.

So that’s it. Four cool things. A quatrefoil.

allfornow,
Mitch

I read a lot of short stories. Not as many as a literary journal editor—the former editor of Crazyhorse (or maybe it was The Literary Review) estimated at one time that he had read 10,000! That’s a lot. Crazy many. Wilt-like.

Not counting my own stories—read and re-read on a seemingly endless cycle, editing or not—I read at least a story a day and usually two or three. This has reduced the amount of fiction I read in novel form. And, kind of contradictory to the novel result, I now read far more poetry than ever before. I don’t write (much) poetry, but I sure love reading a verklempt-provoking line, even if I don’t quite know WTF is going on, distracted as I am by the many swooshing sounds I hear over my freckled skull.

I no longer read newspapers, something I used to love—right up there with beer, bacon, and baseball. Now I get my newspaper calories from the internet. Columnists and pundits, wags and woebegonists.

A treat these last few years is to read the CNF and ramblings of my friends and those I would like to befriend. ML Driedger and Hoss Neufeld are among the former. (Two Snowbird Western writers who resemble Miss Kitty and Marshall Dillon. Or more so Marshall Dylan, when the gunsmoke clears.)

I also read many writers like me, whose lariats spin sometimes wild, sometimes lazy as we seek to lasso the moon. Some oh-bah-fine shorts I have read lately (or revisited, like Hwy 61) include:

“The Laughing Man”, Salinger. Find it online as easy as Bananafish pie.

“Bullet in the Brain”, Tobias Wolff. Also just a gecko-twitch away, via Google. (This month’s group read for the Wpg Public Library Writing Circle, led by W-I-R Carolyn Gray.)

“The Tree Planter”, Spencer Sekulin. On *Fiction on the Web* a UK joint edited by Sir Charlie Fish.

“Sparking Spot”, Ramona Jones Go to Ms. Jones FB page and track it down there.

“What We Bury”, Madeline Anthes. barrenmagazine.com

All this is part of my latest (and one of my bestest) rock-strewn trails: “Travel widely, experiment boldly, love deeply… ” Words to live by from one of my painting heroes, Winslow Homer. I can handle the second and the third as well as any cheroot-chewin’ gunslinger who cares to draw down on me. The travel one too, with buts and caveats—I can go where I wanna go, do what I wanna do, so long as Swoop flies there for next to frickin’ nuthin’, or our grandkids are there/going to be there, or I win the lottery. (The less common kind of lottery for which you don’t have to buy tickets to win.)

But maybe I don’t need to travel as widely as ol’ WH would have me do… I live in the four seasons of nature surrounded not by people and parking lots and coffee spoons, but rather by small-but-tough animals, white-capped water, and a forest of cross-country skis and tall timber. The love of my redheaded life sits across the dining room table from me each day and inexplicably, loves me deeply with her big brown eyes.

So, I hope interesting, unusual, flaky people can drop by Jessica from time to time, so I can hack the Winslow directive to travel widely. We’ll “welcome widely!”

3.11.20—Addendum: Here’s another story, one to make the hair raise up on your neck and your heart swell a little as it pumps: https://mastersreview.com/new-voices/skin-hunger-by-melissa-goode/ (I spotted this one on Madeline Anthes twitter feed. “Skin Hunger” by Melissa Goode.)

8.26.20—And another, read with passion and intelligence at 28:55 in this open mic (San Fran Mechanics’ Institute) by Bay Area author Francee Covington… her BLM essay, “Uneasy Lies the Head of the Black Mom.” https://youtu.be/CwijFbQ-YcM

P.S.—I chime in with a reading of “Freight Trains and Jet Planes” right after Ms. Covington’s performance.

“On Main Street; once my street
I just want to say
They did things and do things they don’t do on Broadway”

I just read, and loved, Peter Ralph Friesen’s quietly profound new book, “Dad, God, And Me”. 

This novel (in many ways) has awakened smeary recollections of my own Steinbach childhood. Unexpectedly, I see stark similarities in our two fathers, although that comment will generate a “Waut?” tidal surge among Steinbachers who knew them both. In my dad’s case, it was more of a generational hand-me-down; something he dispensed with a hip check and then moved on. Or thought he had.

Certainly, the two men had core differences but they both bore the enormous weight of Steinbach in general and Kleine Gemeinde Steinbach in particular. It was, to each man, a stony brook; an overbearing, immovable, and intolerant entity.

In my view, at least.

I see two stoic, driven men—one pious, mild, and somewhat pedantic, the other secular, red-faced, a “man of action”, sometimes to a fault. I also encountered a third shadow presence: Steinbach itself. Looming with Lordly characteristics; a sub-deity.

There’s no place like it… 

Sandburg’s famed city of verse came to mind, also uninvited. The poet describes a place “stormy, husky, and brawling” as compared to my childhood home: Severe, bespectacled, and haughty. Both places feel male, both shod with shit-spackled gumshuh. Both broad-shouldered.

Chicago and Steinbach each have a primal gravitas, an undeniable presence that, like a high slap shot, leaves a mark—sometimes painful.

Adult Steinbach, that is. As kids, I remember our secret underground. Raucously—like the Free French—we chided the powerful, the self-important and the self-righteous behind their backs, schpotting in our hideouts: in the storage bins at “CT’s”, with a beer out at “the pits”, schmeatjing at the sinner’s rink and in the ballpark dug-out. Author Friesen confirms this too, recalling his and his poetic buddy Patrick Friesen’s days as noble infidels. (“Noble” is my word, not Ralph’s.) These two rebelled not with misbehaviour, exactly, but with logic and fearless debate, taking on “murderous literalism” and all those pitching a certainty built upon loose-ends and a fear of hell.

I also enjoyed the author’s many comments concerning his mother.

[…] “her eyes are soft with a deep and wordless sadness.” 

I felt it was a discrete and worthy sub-text. I noted the juxtaposition of her frazzled ham-and-eggs-and-house-full-of-children existence versus the descriptions of all other women in the local vernacular: “Mrs. Peter F. Rempel, Mrs. Jake G. Koop,” etc. Real-life shades of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and that book’s submissive naming convention. Steinbach’s patronymics to the last degree—a practice that attempted through churchy formal-speak to erase a woman’s given name, always seemed to me, as a kid and still, to be evidence of Mennonites “jumping the shark.” Women might as well been forced to address men as, “Your Honour,” and curtsey.  

Somehow, I can’t imagine my rebellious Mercury Cougar-driving mom, in 1968, to succumb. If she did, it would only have been with such an overflowing ladle-full of withering verbal irony that passing pick-up trucks would have been stuck in their Penner Tire tracks as they encountered her sticky sarcasm.

To her credit. I always speculated that my mom, despite her scandalous reputation, was secretly—perhaps guiltily—admired by some of those name-stripped Hausfraus—who regarded themselves as Madam Curie NOT “Mrs. Pierre Curie”.

Altogether, “Dad, God, And Me” is a well-written, thoughtful examination. Forensic, in ways, but never mean-spirited or overly disdainful. Those strong feelings are withheld, but they still add a salty sprinkle of complexity with their just-noticeable absence. It is written with clean text and a forthright style. There are seamless and fluent excursions into German both High and Plaut. The book is built on a firm foundation of self-examination: Candid, telling, and like the prose style, unadorned. I found it, once I adjusted to the cadence, flowing and beautiful.

Near the end, Author Friesen offers a red-hot ember of guilty truth and we are invited to share as he explores with honesty and integrity, as if he is splinta’ noaktijch… When he reveals himself so freely, we know we can believe in him and what he has told us.

Thanks, Ralph! 

P.S.–Alien revivalists do get a little sandpaper, and I was glad for that!