Essays

Visiting Hours in the Multiverse

My younger brother and I are sitting in the waiting room at Arbour Hospital in Jamaica Plain, hoping to talk with Mom during visiting hours, but she’s refusing to meet and blames us for being a captive in this mental hospital, in this world, at this time. We want her to receive help, but she unfortunately doesn’t believe she needs any.

Time in a mental hospital feels simultaneously infinite and stagnant. I’ve visited enough of them to understand that time here has its own speed. I knock on the window of the intake specialist, and she doesn’t answer, even though I can see her shadow behind the frosted glass. I can hear her talking, and I assume she’s on the phone. Over the years, I’ve learned to not expect great customer service from mental hospitals, but Arbour lowers the bar even more. I just want to talk with someone, anyone, who can tell us how Mom is progressing. During our last phone conversation, Mom basically told me I was a part of a larger conspiracy to ensure she stays locked up for life.

Truthfully, the thought of her freedom terrifies me. When she’s manic, doors to other worlds open to her, and we lose her in seemingly different universes. I see these doors everywhere — perhaps because I’m creative (or just my mother’s son) — but I know how to keep them shut. Most days, I’m able to hold off those other worlds from devouring me like they do her, but today is not one of them.

Joseph Lapin is an author and creative living in San Diego, CA, and his writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, LA Weekly, Salon, Huck Magazine, and The Los Angeles Review, and Narratively selected his memoir, Just Get in the Ambulance, as one of their top-ten all-time best memoirs. His fiction has appeared in Sliver of Stone, Literary Orphans, and Mental Ward: Echoes of the Past, an anthology from Sirens Call Publications. He is also the host and creator of The Working Poet Radio Show (on hiatus), a proud graduate of the MFA program at Florida International University, and the Vice President of Marketing and Communications at Circa Interactive.

 

Lux Lisbon, On the Roof Again

Lux Lisbon’s on the roof again. She crawls out every night. She went up day one, smoking cloves after sex, and the neighbor boys watch through their telescope.

Few books worm into my brain as Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides does. I first read it in the months after college graduation. My friend Charlotte and I didn’t want our minds to waste, and collectively we’d amassed a number of books to read in undergraduate fiction workshops. Somehow this one rose to the top of our book club list.

I’d never read anything by Eugenides and was magnetically pulled to the Detroit suburbs where a group of neighborhood boys spies on the Lisbon girls, five sisters aged perfectly thirteen to seventeen. The book is a reconstruction, as stitched together by artifacts pilfered from the Lisbon home (cult of Mary prayer cards and tampons, diaries and retainers) as by the collective first person voice that narrates. I found their gawking oafish and malignant, and I watched them watching the Lisbons to understand why they are so taken.

 

Michael Colbert loves coffee (his favorites are Costa Rican and Ethiopian) and horror films (his favorites are Candyman and Silence of the Lambs). He is currently an MFA candidate in fiction at UNC Wilmington, and his writing appears or is forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Southern Humanities Review, and Avidly, among others.

Purgatory

A few weeks ago, as I walked through the front door of the detox house I’m a medical assistant at, I noticed what appeared to be a familiar character languishing on his old couch haunt, but I couldn’t be sure, as he was listless and downcast, and our eyes did not meet. He was all alone in the family room while the other handful of patients were huddled in the kitchen, murmuring amongst themselves and gazing upon him with disdain.

It looked like an Inuit folklore funeral where the man in question had been put on an ice floe and sent out to sea, into the sunset of a cold world.

Charles J. March III is an asexual, neurodivergent Navy hospital corpsman veteran who is currently trying to live an eclectic life with an interesting array of recovering creatures in Orange County, CA. His various works have appeared in or are forthcoming from the Evergreen Review, 3:AM Magazine, BlazeVOX, etc. Links to his pieces can be found on LinkedIn and SoundCloud.

Left Over Orphans and Farm Animals Are Good to Keep in Your Wagon

She’s voter polling me for Arizona and the next election. I tell her “I agree…” when I say I believe in immigration leading to citizenship and I want to put more money into education and marihuana laws. I tell her I take care of my mother and I make $3.50 an hour and she asks me if it’s true. I couldn’t make this sob story up, I tell her. I want to scream I’M A QUEER FEMINIST ACTIVIST AND POET when she asks me if I think my legislatures are: “doing well.”

I’m trying to be civil because I know this is her day job.

Ky J. Dio is the Host and Administrative Director of the creative writing collective: Juniper House Readings. She has been performing spoken word for 8 years and has been published 13 times for poetry and flash fiction—in American Writers Review 2019, Coalesce Zine, and The Nude Bruce Review Vol 9., among others. She lives in Flagstaff, AZ.

The Emperor’s New Clothes and The Fashionistas of Contemporary Art

Art today is governed by aesthetic anarchy regulated and overseen by a Babel of critics whose observations are, as Barnett Newman pointed out, “as useful to an artist as ornithology is to a bird.”

The revolution began years ago when academic technique, fidelity to nature, and “beauty” were abandoned in favor of subjective, even solipsist, vision. The viewer now relies on critics to reveal what in the world he or she is looking at and what it’s worth. Responding, arbiters of taste—many, sales liaisons to curators and investors—have developed a dogma expressed in arcane jargon that has become so self-enamored that it refers more to itself than the art. Still, this rhetoric gives an air of science and unimpeachable method to matters of taste.

David Comfort is the author of popular trade books from Simon & Schuster, Citadel/Kensington, and Writer’s Digest. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee and finalist for the Faulkner Award and Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Award. His nonfiction has appeared in Pleiades, The Montreal Review, Stanford Arts Review, and Johns Hopkins’ Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review. His 2021 essays on religion will appear in Free Inquiry, Truth Seeker, and 3AM magazine.

Don’t Make Me Turn This Car Around: How Fighting with My Brother Helped Me Understand French Philosophy

After attending school for many, many, many years, I have come to the realization that some of the theory I have been assigned to read can be applied at home—my childhood home. It has occurred to me that I haven’t given my parents enough credit concerning the methodology of discipline and punishment experienced by my brother and me by them (primarily my mother).[1] Studying the work of Michel Foucault caused me to realize how applicable his ideas are to the more common, everyday institutions I have come into contact with (as opposed to hospitals, military systems, and monasteries). As children, my brother and I were observed by the panopticon that was my mother. Her methods of observation consisted of eyes in the back of the head, the glare, Santa Claus (as all seeing substitute in December), and Jesus (as all seeing substitute January through November). Her methods of discipline included the phrase, “Wait ‘til we get home,” the threat, and a bamboo cane kept under the front seat of the family station wagon during long road trips. These methods were applied to maintain order so my brother and I would appear “normal” in public and be well-behaved, respectable children. We were always encouraged to be creative and clever, but reflecting back, this was never to be done while shopping at the grocery store or kneeling on a church pew; our individualities were to be expressed in private, in the small enclosed rooms of the house.

Amy Colombo has an MFA in Creative Writing from West Virginia University, and a Ph.D. in Media, Art, and Text from Virginia Commonwealth University.

A Bendel Bonnet, A Shakespeare Sonnet

What do a Bendel bonnet and a Shakespeare sonnet have in common besides rhyme? Throw in Mickey Mouse. No, it’s not a riddle manqué or a question rejected by the Miller Analogies test. As many probably know already, these are just a few of the superlative attributes applied to the person who is nonpareil in Cole Porter’s 1934 song “You’re the Top.” In fact, the list of best-in-kind comparisons goes on for verse after verse, including the Mona Lisa, the Tower of Pisa, Mahatma Gandhi, Napoleon brandy, cellophane, an O’Neill drama, a Waldorf salad, Whistler’s mama, and camembert. While the wit of this compilation is yet another example of Porter’s lyrical brilliance, it may also be considered symptomatic of a tectonic shift in the hierarchy of cultural values that took place in the early twentieth century.

 

Walter Cummins has published seven short story collections and three essay collections, as well as a number of co-written books.

A Force, A Cosmic Certainty

Trapped in quarantine purgatory, my partner and I, like two stereotypical GenXers, decided to escape to a galaxy far, far away. As we watched all three Star Wars trilogies, I was transported to the mellow days of the 70s in fog-drenched Monterey when my hair shone naturally golden and my sister and I frolicked in the ice-plant, climbing twisted scrub oaks in our front yard, part of the army base where my helicopter-flying father was stationed. I was five-years-old when George Lucas released his space odyssey Star Wars — that lightning in a bottle of space dust forever entwined in my consciousness. Though I was too young to remember viewing the first film, at some point, I developed my first girl-crush on an intergalactic princess with cinnamon buns for hair.

 

A graduate of the Bread Loaf School of English, Laurie Clark taught high school English in independent schools across the US for over 20 years. She recently published an essay in Middlebury Magazine. She blogs for a local mid-century ceramics company and communes with hummingbirds.

Sitting with a Dying Physician

The smell of sickness saturates the room.

A vomit basin, half full, lies on Mary’s lap. Her thin lips quiver. “I can’t eat or drink anything.” She shakes an unused cup of melting ice in her right hand; a tangle of tubes and wires jostle. She grabs an ice cube and slides it into her mouth. She turns her head to the side and retches. “I need a feeding tube.” She shoves her breakfast to the side. A sob rises in her throat. “It’s getting hard not to think about death.”

 

Paul Rousseau is a semi-retired physician and writer, published in medical and literary journals. Lives in Charleston, SC; longs to return to the West. Lover of dogs.

Ghost

I live in a world of spirit.

Each day I am sober is miraculous and terrifying.

Each day I am sober should not be.

I am a ghost who walks and breathes.

 

Adam Fout writes nonfiction and speculative fiction. He is a graduate of the 2020 Odyssey Writing Workshop and has been published in or has upcoming work in The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review, december, J Journal, Pulp Literature, and DreamForge. Read his blog on addiction and recovery at adamfout.com or follow him on Twitter @adamfout2.

Essay and Other Nonfiction Workshops at Eckleburg

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We accept polished creative nonfiction/essays up to 8,000 words year round, unless announced otherwise. Preferences veer toward shorter works under 1500 words with an arts and culture focus. If you wish to include a bio, keep it short, under 200 words. Submit your nonfiction.

Essay Collections and Memoir Manuscripts

We publish short works at The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review. At this time, we do not publish novel, long memoir, essay collections, story collections or poetry collections at The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review. We do offer manuscript workshops at The Eckleburg Workshops. If you are looking to place a manuscript, we can suggest several excellent small and large presses whose excellent books are promoted through our Eckleburg Book Club — i.e., Random House, Graywolf Press, Coffeehouse, Tinhouse, St. Martins Press and more.