Boo Trundle
BOO TRUNDLE is a writer, artist, and storyteller whose work has appeared across various platforms, stages, and publications including The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Risk!, McSweeney's, and NPR's The Moth. Her e-book, Seventies Gold, published by 3 a.m. analog, is available on Amazon.
Seeing how one passage talks to a passage from another book was interesting. In any book, in any project, each piece, each line, each word is a hologram of the whole book and so any part you take would have the energy of the whole in it. That's why you make books, I think.
When I hear younger, single folks talk about marriage as if it were an end zone, a pearly departure gate from the waiting room of unsigned love, I often butt in with a passionate (and unwanted) speech about what really happens after the honeymoon. In my view, the wedding, or commitment ceremony, rolls out yearly from that initial, kissy contract. Every day asks you to commit a little more of your soul; if you’re a person like me, who finds commitment painful and perhaps even life-threatening, staying married can involve years of crossing romantic Rubicons.
If there’s a story that starts and stops, pauses, picks back up and ploughs forward through Cate Marvin’s three books of poetry, it’s the story of a heart that would have broken if it were fragile or dumb enough to crack, or a heart that was taken back bitterly because it was unwanted, but maybe wasn’t given altogether away.
I met Mike Young when he read for the Buzzard’s Banquet series in a Fort Greene bar. Due to a booking mix-up, the room with tables, chairs, and a microphone went to a group of stand-up comedians; the poetry and fiction crowd landed in the storage cellar with a dangling light bulb and a reek of stale beer. Mike kept it fresh and interactive by passing out free black Sharpies(!) and hard copies of his poem.
The notion of burning in hell doesn’t get as much play in our broader culture as it once did. Still, we all have our own version of hell, and we might spend more time there than we’d like.
Though our hearts may break for lonely characters in fiction, we still don’t have to invite them to dinner. A once-glittering socialite like Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart ends up penniless, friendless, and doomed, and we settle back with a weepy cocktail of pity and anger. After all, she’s not our responsibility.
