Volume 28, Issue 2
editorial staff
readers
Featuring work byPOETRY MK Chavez • Christina Cook • Geffrey Davis • Adam Houle • Carrie Jerrell • Jacob Newberry • Maria Teresa Ogliastri • Emma Ramey • Billy Reynolds • Brian Russell • Dara-Lyn Shrager FICTION Craig Bernardini • Andrew Friedman • Khristian Mecom NONFICTION Dan Beachy-Quick • Susan Knox • Robert Kostuck • Rebecca McClanahan • Sarah Fawn Montgomery • Anne Panning • Vivian Wagner TRANSLATIONS Patricia Bejarano Fisher • Yvette Neisser Moreno INTERVIEWS Dan Beachy-Quick • Rebecca McClanahan BOOK REVIEWS Robert Campbell • Kwame Dawes • Shannon K. Winston ART Philippe Pirrip
Amy Wright for Zone 3: Your recently released nonfiction, The Tribal Knot, is a multi-generational family memoir. I love this concept, but I am not familiar with this mode of writing. Did you feel yourself to be working within a tradition, or were you inspired by particular models?
Rebecca McClanahan: The term “multi-generational memoir” was offered by an early reader of the manuscript, and I was grateful for the insight. There are many ways to weave the author’s story into an ancestral history, many excellent models. While working on my book, I read dozens of books and am still reading them (I just finished Sonya Huber’s fascinating Opa Nobody a few days ago) and could not possibly name all the books that inspired me. Here’s a few, off the top of my head: Ian Frazier’s Family, Mary Clearman Blew’s All But the Waltz, Suzannah Lessard’s The Architect of Desire, Mimi Schwartz’s Good Neighbors, Bad Times, Lee Martin’s Turning Bones, Robert Root’s Recovering Ruth. Fiction writers, too, teach us how to write ancestral histories: Alice Munro’s The View From Castle Rock, Edward Jones’s The Known World. Oh, so many fine books out there.
READ MORE>The question of identity often begins with a curious tendency among people to ask what before who. That is to say, people feel the need to ascribe certain restrictive identifiers, like gender binary (female-male), before ascribing personhood, as though a person weren’t fully a person at all until proper pronouns or labels can be placed. When someone walks by us swiftly, before we even realize who the person is, our mind makes a quick sweep of the person’s age, gender, race, shape, et cetera. In other words, identifying someone or something is initially dictated by our objective perceptions and our subjective, often habitual, and peripheral exercise of categorizing in types and schemata. In this process, we also negotiate our sense of individuality within a collective framework of difference by avoiding further questions of identity. Yet, it is our individual differences, which are shared and rooted in the very idea of identity, that inform us and enrich our culture; respectively, our culture, our collective effort in attending to our shared differences, helps us grow and better understand ourselves as individuals.
news & events
contests
Zone 3 Press sponsors two book competitions: The Zone 3 Press First Book Award in Poetry and The Zone 3 Press Creative Nonfiction Book Award. Winners receive $1,000 and publication of their book, as well as an invitation to give a joint reading at Austin Peay State University with the contest judge.
Zone 3 Press publications are made available from the Zone 3 Store and your favorite booksellers.
Featuring work byPOETRY MK Chavez • Christina Cook • Geffrey Davis • Adam Houle • Carrie Jerrell • Jacob Newberry • Maria Teresa Ogliastri • Emma Ramey • Billy Reynolds • Brian Russell • Dara-Lyn Shrager FICTION Craig Bernardini • Andrew Friedman • Khristian Mecom NONFICTION Dan Beachy-Quick • Susan Knox • Robert Kostuck • Rebecca McClanahan • Sarah Fawn Montgomery • Anne Panning • Vivian Wagner TRANSLATIONS Patricia Bejarano Fisher • Yvette Neisser Moreno INTERVIEWS Dan Beachy-Quick • Rebecca McClanahan BOOK REVIEWS Robert Campbell • Kwame Dawes • Shannon K. Winston ART Philippe Pirrip
Amy Wright
“I believe that writers must trust what is given to them. ‘Riches that might seem plain?’ I like that idea.
READ MORE>The question of identity often begins with a curious tendency among people to ask what before who. That is to say, people feel the need to ascribe certain restrictive identifiers, like gender binary (female-male), before ascribing personhood, as though a person weren’t fully a person at all until proper pronouns or labels can be placed. When someone walks by us swiftly, before we even realize who the person is, our mind makes a quick sweep of the person’s age, gender, race, shape, et cetera. In other words, identifying someone or something is initially dictated by our objective perceptions and our subjective, often habitual, and peripheral exercise of categorizing in types and schemata. In this process, we also negotiate our sense of individuality within a collective framework of difference by avoiding further questions of identity. Yet, it is our individual differences, which are shared and rooted in the very idea of identity, that inform us and enrich our culture; respectively, our culture, our collective effort in attending to our shared differences, helps us grow and better understand ourselves as individuals.
