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ECKLEBURG BOOK CLUB | daughterrarium by Sheila McMullin

Exploring the intersection of shame and anger, my work is a fantasy autobiographic. Emerging as lived experience and reenactment daydreams, my poems reflect hostile aggression
against an embodied woman, spectral tendencies to dissociate, maneuver into escapist fantasies, or reproach with candor. It is a trial in empathy. The whole of the manuscript, daughterrarium, explores relationships which are not chosen, which are often mitigated, and exploited as a backdrop to sexual fantasy or maidship. Despite, what emerges by the end of the collection is something with such strength.

What People Are Saying about daughterrarium

“There are those who have hurt you not because you are ignorant, but because you have a heart.” Sheila McMullin’s daughterrarium is a collection of the kindest rage I have ever seen. The book chronicles, among its tendernesses, McMullin’s refusal to turn the rage onto herself–“How not to blame myself for being fragile?”– and the difficulty of locating what is hurting us, or why, and how to heal a wound that is constantly re-opened. If you believe in rage, if you care deeply about women, then read this brilliant book again and again across your lifetime. Otherwise, “You have to get out of the way.”

–Sarah Vap

What are we born into? What does it mean to be loved by God and Earth? What do we owe and to whom? How does one experience the fusion of anger and shame in a mind and body? What do the doctors say to the bodies that are broken? Where do the bodies go when they are taken away from themselves? How does a body heal itself? How does a body degrade itself? How does a body mourn and survive the trauma of fear, pain and abuse? I admire daughterrarium for pushing too far, for making me cringe with its representations of what one human can do to another, of what a body can do to itself. McMullin takes a tenacious look at violence and the abject while also interrogating, with great compassion, the nature of faith, family and growth.

–Daniel Borzutzky

In a dish of fevered poppies, glassy ranunculus, and red tide hunger, the daughter infects herself. She’s infected by self, burning up until McMullin’s cool hand runs across the daughterrarium’s viral waters. Cancer, the crab, a sunrise that won’t clot. The neogothic daughter, her many manifestations bleed together in this prize-winning jailbreak. She says [t]ake me out of this bed and put me back in the grass, but really she’s taking us. Out, back. Give her your hand or get out of her way.

–Danielle Pafunda

Publisher’s Information

 

  • PUBLISHER: Cleveland State University Poetry Center
  • ISBN: 978-0-9963167-5-0
  • DIMENSIONS: 6.1 x 0.4 x 7.9 inches
  • PAGES: 112]
  • PRICE: $16.00
  • RELEASE DATE: 04/01/2017
  • PURCHASE HERE

 

Recommended Works by Sheila McMullin

Favorite Eckleburg Work: https://eckleburg.org/lessons/week-1-evolving-origins-poetry-workshop-2/

End of the Sentimental Journey by Sarah Vap

Sarah Vap’s End of The Sentimental Journey is a beautiful collection of the most critically astute filth I’ve ever read. With humor, stunning insight, and shimmering vulgarity Vap invents a fresh means of poetic critique in the poem itself. What she unveils for us is our own culpability in the gendered policing of contemporary poetry. I, for one, feel stimulated at being called out. I love this book. –Dawn Lundy Martin READ MORE

Lydia’s Funeral Video by Sam Chanse

Lydia’s Funeral Video is a one-woman play that takes that most existential of quandaries — to be or not to be — and transposes it onto a dystopian not-so-distant future. READ MORE

Discussion Questions for daughterrarium

1. Did it make you think about your ancestors, your present family, your distant family, your plant family? I hope so, and how so?

2. How does this book interrogate the distance between shame and anger, and the somatic and/or thought spirals this can trigger?

3. The book uses several tones throughout — how does the movement through each enhance, compliment, complicate, deflate each other?

About Sheila McMullin

Sheila McMullin is author of daughterrarium (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2017). She co-edited the collections Humans of Ballou and The Day Tajon Got Shot from Shout Mouse Press. She volunteers at her local animal rescue, is a youth ally and organizer, and holds an M.F.A. from George Mason University. Find more about her writing, editing, and activism online at www.moonspitpoetry.com.

Exploring the intersection of shame and anger, my work is a fantasy autobiographic. Emerging as lived experience and reenactment daydreams, my poems reflect hostile aggression against an embodied woman, spectral tendencies to dissociate, maneuver into escapist fantasies, or reproach with candor. It is a trial in empathy. The whole of the manuscript, daughterrarium, explores relationships which are not chosen, which are often mitigated, and exploited as a backdrop to sexual fantasy or maidship. Despite, what emerges by the end of the collection is something with such strength.

Do You Have a Book Launching? Submit Your Book to The Eckleburg Book Club…

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SELFIE INTERVIEW | Darlene Pagán

Darlene Pagán teaches creative writing and literature at Pacific University in Oregon. She published a poetry chapbook, Blue Ghosts (Finishing Line Press 2011), and a full-length collection, Setting the Fires (Airlie Press 2015). Individual poems have appeared in journals such as Field, Calyx, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Poet Lore, Hiram Poetry Review, and Hawaii Pacific Review, and also earned nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her essays have appeared in venues such as Brevity, The Nebraska Review, and Literal Latté. She adores her family, swimming, hiking, beaches, the rain, the moon, and roller coasters.

Eckleburg: What drives, inspires, and feeds your artistic work?

Darlene Pagán: I write because I have to. Writing is the only way I know to truly understand the complexities of what it means to be fully alive and fully present in the world, and in a body that is rife with contradictions. Mothers everywhere inspire me and children.

Eckleburg: If you had to arm wrestle a famous writer, poet or artist, either living or dead, who would it be? Why? What would you say to distract your opponent and go for the win?

Darlene Pagán: I would love to arm wrestle Isabelle Allende. She has such passion and fire, such a talent for storytelling that we’d be sure to laugh and tell stories during a match that would likely last an evening if I could help it.

Eckleburg: What would you like the world to remember about you and your work?

Darlene Pagán: My activism in word and deed.

 

What others are saying about Eckleburg…
 
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Eclectic selection of work from both emerging and established writers….” The Washington Post
 
Literary Burroughs D.C…. the journal cleverly takes its name from the The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald….” Ploughshares
 
 

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The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review was founded in 2010 as an online and print literary and arts journal. We take our title from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and include the full archives of our predecessor Moon Milk Review. Our aesthetic is eclectic, literary mainstream to experimental. We appreciate fusion forms including magical realist, surrealist, meta- realist and realist works with an offbeat spin. We value character-focused storytelling and language and welcome both edge and mainstream with punch aesthetics. We like humor that explores the gritty realities of world and human experiences. Our issues include original content from both emerging and established writers, poets, artists and comedians such as authors, Rick Moody, Cris Mazza, Steve Almond, Stephen Dixon, poets, Moira Egan and David Wagoner and actor/comedian, Zach Galifianakis.

Currently, Eckleburg runs online, daily content of original fiction, poetry, nonfiction, translations, and more with featured artwork–visual and intermedia–from our Gallery. We run annual print issues, the Eckleburg Reading Series (DC, Baltimore and New York), as well as, the annual Gertrude Stein Award in Fiction, first prize $1000 and print publication, guest-judged by award-winning authors such as Rick Moody and Cris Mazza.

We have collaborated with a number of talented and high profile literary, art and intermedia organizations in DC, Baltimore and New York including The Poetry Society of New York, KGB Bar, Brazenhead Books, New World Writing (formerly Mississippi Review Online), The Hopkins Review, Boulevard, Gargoyle Magazine, Entasis Press, Barrelhouse, Hobart, 826DC, DC Lit and Iowa’s Mission Creek Festival at AWP 2013, Boston, for a night of raw comedic lit and music. We like to promote smaller indie presses, galleries, musicians and filmmakers alongside globally recognized organizations, as well as, our local, national and international contributors.

Rarely will readers/viewers find a themed issue at Eckleburg, but rather a mix of eclectic works. It is Eckleburg’s intention to represent writers, artists, musicians, and comedians as a contemporary and noninvasive collective, each work evidence of its own artistry, not as a reflection of an editor’s vision of what an issue “should” be. Outside of kismet and special issues, Eckleburg will read and accept unsolicited submissions based upon individual merit, not theme cohesiveness. It is our intention to create an experience in which readers and viewers can think artistically, intellectually, socially, and independently. We welcome brave, honest voices. To submit, please read our guidelines.

Over the ashheaps the giant eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg kept their vigil, but I perceived, after a moment, that other eyes were regarding us with peculiar intensity from less than twenty feet away. – The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

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ECKLEBURG BOOK CLUB | How to Travel With Your Demons by Lillian Ann Slugocki

Demonscover

Leda waits for a car service to bring her to the airport. It is snowing. She’s travelling home to Chicago to identify the body of a family member. At its simplest, we follow the protagonist from point A to point B. There is also a strong mythological subtext to the story– like Odysseus she encounters many obstacles along the way, as well as guides, both good and evil. But, all roads lead, ultimately, to the morgue, and a surprising transformation. The journey of the hero, and her subsequent transformation is also very much “…a personal experience of constant becoming– an overlapping of the past and the present.”

What People Are Saying about How to Travel With Your Demons

Lillian Ann Sugocki is a poetic, edgy, postfeminist voice. Her words have long been a deep and playful inspiration to me—embracing the sadness and joy of an erotic life.
Erin Cressida Wilson, Screenwriter (Secretary, Girl on a Train)

There’s something intoxicating about Lillian Ann Slugocki’s prose. You might want to make sure you’re sitting down while reading her.
—Bill Yarrow, author of Blasphemer (Lit Fest Press 2015)

Lillian Ann Slugocki’s characters are determined and conflicted, spirited and sensual. She creates a world in which dark corners beg to be explored—beguiling and irresistible.
–Carol Reid, Candy Land, 2015

Publisher’s Information

 

  • PUBLISHER: Spuyten Duyvil Press
  • ISBN: 978-1-941550-53-3
  • DIMENSIONS: 7.5 x 5
  • PAGES: 90]
  • PRICE: $10.00
  • RELEASE DATE: 12/22/2015
  • PURCHASE HERE

 

Recommended Works by Lillian Ann Slugocki

Favorite Eckleburg Work: http://eckleburg.org/eckleburg-book-club-i-am-barbarella/

Wreckage of Reason: Back to the Drawing Board by Anthology

This is an anthology of contemporary experimental prose by women writers. Full disclosure: I am a contributor. But I fell in love with several pieces in this book as I also managed the blog tour when it was first released. In particular, I love Elizabeth Bachner’s story, “How to Shake Hands with a Murderer.” We follow the protagonist through a landscape that is both real and imagined, traveling deeper and deeper in her psyche. Bachner’s prose is luminous, and she introduced me to a new term: katabasis which means a journey to the underworld for redemption. READ MORE

The Bhagavad Gita by Damn Sure Right

This is an awesome translation by Stephen Mitchell, published by Three Rivers Press, New York, 2000. I recommend this book to anyone who is going through a difficult time in their life, intense upheavals. Reading this book, especially Chapter 10 keeps me grounded. The prose is absolutely gorgeous, yet it retains the true spirit of the original, with a message that is timeless and modern.
http://www.amazon.com/Bhagavad-Gita-A-New-Translation/dp/0609810340 READ MORE

Discussion Questions for How to Travel With Your Demons

1. How to Travel With Your Demons includes a layer of meta-fiction in which the narrator reflects on the process of creating a story. How does getting an inside view of the writer’s process enrich the dominant narrative?

2. Leda, the protagonist, offers the audience the opportunity to consider what or who are our demons, and how they travel with us throughout the passages of our lives. Who or what are your demons as you travel through life, and how do you deal with them? What lessons do you learn when you confront your shadow self?

3. One of the book’s central themes is the pressing need to live an authentic life. From what are the consequences of not living an authentic life?

About Lillian Ann Slugocki

Lillian Ann Slugocki has been published by Seal Press, Cleis Press, Heinemann Press, Newtown Press, Spuyten Duyvil Press, as well as Bloom/The Millions, Salon, Beatrice, THE FEM Literary Magazine, HerKind/Vida, Deep Water Literary Journal, The Nervous Breakdown, The Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review, Blue Fifth Review, Non Binary Review, The Daily Beast, and The Manifest-Station. Winner, Gigantic Sequins 4th Annual Fiction Prize. Forthcoming: How to Travel with Your Demons, Spuyten Duyvil Press, Winter 2015. She has an MA from NYU in literary theory, and has produced and written for Off-Broadway and National Public Radio. Follow her on https://twitter.com/laslugocki

Do You Have a Book Launching? Submit Your Book to The Eckleburg Book Club…

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Leda waits for a car service to bring her to the airport. It is snowing. She’s travelling home to Chicago to identify the body of a family member. At its simplest, we follow the protagonist from point A to point B. There is also a strong mythological subtext to the story– like Odysseus she encounters many obstacles along the way, as well as guides, both good and evil. But, all roads lead, ultimately, to the morgue, and a surprising transformation. The journey of the hero, and her subsequent transformation is also very much “…a personal experience of constant becoming– an overlapping of the past and the present.”