New Faculty Books Explore Inner Landscapes, Unfettered Possibilities & Past Future Gazing

None of This is Real

The characters in Miranda Mellis's recent short fiction inhabit universes where the laws of time and space don't apply, but the psychological terrain they traverse is as vivid and honest as the world outside your window.

In both her collection None of This is Real (Sidebrow Books 2012), and her one-volume short story The Spokes (Solid Objects 2012), Mellis offers no tidy endings. What makes her characters heroic is not whether they arrive somewhere (though in a way they do), or even whether they change (that’s not the point). It’s that they remain present. They engage grief in all of its numbing ambivalence. They look unsparingly into the eyes of what is beyond understanding but not beyond knowing. They go on.

If, Not Then

In a new book-length poem, appropriately titled IF (Talisman House 2012), Leonard Schwartz explores the question: How much uncertainty can one admit to?

These finely constructed couplets carry the reader along almost breezily. Throughout the book, beginning with the opening lines, Schwartz sows small celebrations of miraculous possibilities.

If we are ‘signs without interpretation’ In place of a prison I transplant a trillium.

“Uncertainty can be ecstatic,” Schwartz said in an interview, “because everything is possible and nothing is closed off.”

It can also bring torment, and Schwartz’s deft and supple buoyancy leaves the reader defenseless when it does. In this work there are no finalities in any proposition—no promised effect to follow up a posited cause. And what sometimes remains is excruciating enigma.

IF is a companion to Schwartz’s At Element (Talisman House), a collection of poems released in 2011. His new electronic chapbook, The Production of Subjectivity: Conversations with Michael Hardt, came out in March.

Science Fiction Triple Feature

When Bill Ransom was a modestly successful (i.e., woefully underpaid) 32-year-old poet, he got an unusual offer from the science fiction giant Frank Herbert. “Can you write like me for 750 bucks?”

“I can write like anybody for 750 bucks,” Ransom said.

The resulting collaboration between these native sons of Puyallup became the celebrated Pandora Sequence, a trilogy of science fiction novels published between 1979 and 1988. The proposition carried risks for both writers. Would people see the elder Herbert, a publishing juggernaut and the creator of Dune (the mother of all science fiction universes), as running out of ideas? Would Ransom, who was just beginning to make a name for himself, get pegged for “riding on the coattails of the Great Frank Herbert”? Neither man let these speculations distract them. What mattered to both, Ransom said, was telling a good story and remaining friends. Herbert made sure that both names appeared on the cover, a practice almost unheard of in fiction at the time.

In December 2012, Wordfire Press released a new single-volume print edition of the three novels, The Jesus Incident, The Lazarus Effect and The Ascension Factor. The book includes a serial introduction by Ransom, with the story behind each of the novels and previously unreleased details about the two men’s collaboration and friendship. In addition, the books are now available in electronic versions along with Ransom’s three solo science fiction novels: Jaguar, Viravax and Burn.