October 6, 2018
My extremely new piece about my ancestors and the Naval Pussy Stockade – “The Fisherman Bombardier of Naval Station Norfolk” – is forthcoming in Conjunctions:71 in November 2018 – preorder a print copy – and stop by and visit the special Issue 71 page for more details! I’m swooning to be sharing pages with Joyce Carol Oates and Samuel R. Delany and Joanna Scott as well as many other marvels of the written word, including Laura van den Berg, Ann Beattie, Brandon Hobson, Eleni Sikelianos, Greg Jackson, Julianna Baggott, Jeffrey Ford, William Lychack, Catherine Imbriglio, Dave King, Lauren Green, Can Xue, Nathaniel Mackey, A. D. Jameson, Quintan Ana Wikswo, Lynn Schmeidler, Samuel R. Delany, Kelsey Peterson, Sarah Blackman, Gerard Malanga,Martine Bellen, Maud Casey, Greg Bossert, Stephen O’Connor, Matt Bell, Madeline Kearin, Bin Ramke,Diane Ackerman, and Elizabeth Hand (Liz Hand).
And here’s the first paragraph, just for kicks. I’m out here in the wonderland of Norfolk finding my ancestors and it’s a wild ride, as it has always been with them.
“In this mariner’s damp the lichen sprouts, or rather creeps, in the manner molds and kisses do, slightly closer then farther towards and away from their undisclosed destination. Sun, perhaps, is for the suicidal ones. And the rotten logs are for the whore molds – whore spores of all kinds, honorable and excoriable, seductive and repulsive, venal and venereal and Venetian, Vesuvian, Venusian, exquisitely fantastic whores – some with scales some with soft, striped skin, slick.
After all, for centuries the Navy ran a red light ghetto here called the Pussy Stockade, inhabited by many of my ancestors, who were rich until they died, highly venereal. And I owe them something, a stalking, a haunting, along the decaying quay at sunset. Quays and whores and sailors make fine company as ghosts. All dripping wet, all spectres of the slimy sea.
And it was in that way I went walking on the quay at sunset, where good things never happen, depending upon the interpretation of goodness as asset or as liability. I am wearing a preposterous reproduction of a nineteenth century courtesan corset and a hoop skirt. There is a why for this, and I shall elaborate.”
Upcoming Issue
Edited by Bradford Morrow
Curiosity is as central to life as breathing. And like breath itself, when it ceases, the vibrancy of life fades and disappears. Curiosity leads to discoveries both beneficent and, at times, destructive. It often occasions wonderment, but also terror. It prompts the precise scientist, but also the nosy gadfly. A double-edged sword, curiosity has forever held a crucial role in myth, literature, science, philosophy, history—nearly every field of human endeavor. While most of us know the old saying about curiosity killing the cat, we must also remember that “satisfaction brought it back.” Curiosity incites and compels, taketh away and giveth.
In this issue, curiosity impels a personal assistant to learn hidden truths about her deceased employer—a famed playwright—and his relationship with the woman who directs an Italian arts foundation to which he donated his priceless library of first editions. A novelist, inspired by a different kind of curiosity, studies the traditional teachings of his Cherokee forebears after reading the notebook his beloved grandfather possessed when he died. Elsewhere, a young boy removes his clothes and, driven by dangerous curiosity, crawls into the gaping darkness of a sewer pipe, where he mysteriously vanishes, altering the lives of everyone who knew him. While most of the stories, poems, and memoirs here investigate the places where curiosity transports us—from forgotten burial grounds to natural history museums, from alluring lakes to postapocalyptic seaside shanties—A Cabinet of Curiosity also features a singular visit to an archetypal curiosity cabinet in Amsterdam with its treasury of specimens, of oddities in jars and on shelves, of things pinned and things afloat.
Curiosity in all its guises is the wellspring of revelation. It is a prime mover behind our deeds, good or evil, simple or complicated. While the thirty-one writers gathered here individually explore many of the ways in which curiosity drives and defines us, together they propose that the realms of curiosity are, finally, inexhaustible.