May/June Feature: An Ekphrastic Explosion

Pieter Breughel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” the muse for W.H. Auden’s famous poem “Musee des Beaux Arts”

Ekphrastic art responds to work from another medium: a poem commenting on a painting, a sculpture interpreting a song, a mural depicting a myth, etc. In April, the Honors College at the University of Houston held its fourth annual Ekphrastic Arts Festival, an event featuring works from UH undergrads. A central part of the festival, organized by Honors College professors Kimberly Meyer and Gabriela Maya, was an ekphrastic art competition. In commemoration of Homer’s Iliad, this year’s themes were war and rage. Students submitted their best ekphrastic pieces and the winners shared theirs at the event.

We at The Aletheia are honored to share those artists and works with you. This year’s winners are: Sarah Rodriguez (Visual Art), Archie Parks (Music Performance), and Hayder Ali (Literary Art). See their works and bios below. To learn more about the Ekphrastic Arts Festival, its sister event, Dionysia, and the Honors College in general, visit www.uh.edu/honors. Enjoy.

Edward S. Garza
Editor Emeritus
The Aletheia

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Futility by Sarah Rodriguez

Sarah Rodriguez is a senior in the Philosophy department who often spends time wrecking things on camera. Ideally, there would be some logical reasoning behind her practice, but there probably isn’t.

Aletheia Writers Win Big at 2013 UH English Awards

We at The Aletheia commend Darlene Campos, Bryan Washington, and Melissa Dziedzic for winning awards from the University of Houston’s English department. Campos has won the 2013 Sylvan N. Karchmer Fiction Prize, Washington the 2013 Bryan Lawrence Award in Fiction, and Dziedzic the 2013 Bryan Lawrence Award in Nonfiction.

We were honored to publish stories from both Campos and Washington in our Fall 2012 issue, which you can read through our Chapbook Archive above. We were equally honored to have Dziedzic read her personal essay “Hair” — the essay, in fact, that won her the Lawrence Award — at our Avant Garden event earlier this month. Jobs well done, everyone!

Edward S. Garza
Editor-in-Chief

April Feature: A Conversation with A.P.V. Sutton, Featuring New Poems

By Edward S. Garza

A.P.V. Sutton graduated from the University of Houston in December 2012 with his Bachelor’s in English-Creative Writing. He serves as Poetry Editor for the undergraduate literary journal Glass Mountain and is one of the founding editors of Houston and Nomadic Voices. He has published his poems in several publications, including two in the Fall 2012 issue of The Aletheia. In this interview, we speak about those two pieces as well as his approach to poetry. Stay tuned after the conversation to read two of Sutton’s new works.

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What was the first poem that had an impact on you?

The first poem I seriously read was “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” the frequently cited villanelle by Dylan Thomas, though it’s important that I tell you that I was originally lead to that poem by my favorite band, of Montreal. Begin digression: so it was circa 2007, oM had released Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, and in an interview Kevin Barnes said that DT’s poem influenced the album’s last track “We Were Born the Mutants Again With Leafling.” For me, the language of both the poem and the song sounded like some crazy/wonderful neo-English that I wanted to become fluent in.

Ourselves, In Cells

A play by Sawyer Estes

illustration by Liz Morgan

CHARACTERS

Lyle: Resides in the middle can. He’s naked and lithe. Boyish. Gaudy. Forties or fifties.

Mona: Resides in the SL can. She has on a white turtleneck. Hair in knots. What was once exquisite has aged severely. Forties or fifties.

Heath: Striking and masculine. Dressed in black dress pants, black dress shirt, and white tie. Younger.

SETTING

The stage is surrounded on three sides by pitch-black curtains. Within this square there is another square composed of a man-made fence; it is a grey wood, picket, and unpainted. The gaps between its boards are terribly slight, and it is absent of any doorway. Two metal garbage cans, placed adjacent to one another, sit center stage. Note the closeness in their proximity. Now, multiply their small length apart by two, and place another metal garbage can just this distance away from them stage right. The separation from the third can to the paired two should neither be obvious nor indiscernible.

The lights begin to rise slowly as if to signify a sunrise. Once raised, Lyle upsurges from his can and begins singing.

LYLE

(rapturous)

Ahh-hhh-hhh-hhh! Bahduh Dum DumDAH!! 

Rest. Dramatic breath.

Ahh-hhh-hhh-hhh! Bahduh Dum Dum… Bah Dum Dum—

Lyle gives himself a round of applause.

TA-DA!

MONA

(From within can; a low grumble)

PLEASE, GOD! PLEASE, GOD!

LYLE

Oh me, oh my! Did I sing? Did I smirk? Did I give myself away?!

On beat, Lyle drops and Mona rises immediately.

She looks forward, left, back, right.

Sees third can, and stares. 

March Feature: An Interview with Kurt Lovelace, Including New Poems

By Max Gardner

Kurt Lovelace is a junior in the department of mathematics at the University of Houston and a member of the Honors College, where he has been pursuing a new degree in mathematics and classics. During his previous working career, Kurt spent 27 years as a software engineer for Northrup Grumman, General Electric, and Bell Atlantic. As an entrepreneur, he also has been involved in several start-up corporations, guiding their development as the CTO using high performance clustered computing, especially for large data-set seismic image rendering and genetic research using bioinformatics.

First and foremost, Kurt always has been a writer, having published his earliest poetry and short stories while still a teenager. Kurt sees an analogy here between himself and Wallace Stevens —in that they both had full-time careers while they wrote poetry.  Kurt grew up for 5 years on Grand Bahamas Island during the 1960s and moved to the Washington D.C. area where he lived for another 22 years before moving to Houston, Texas.  Kurt is a veteran of the U.S. Army, having served in the 56th Field Artillery Group as a launch crew member for the Pershing 1B/2 nuclear missile in Germany during the early 1980s.

Please also continue reading after the interview for some new poems from Kurt that were not featured in our fall 2012 chapbook.

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In “Blossoms in the Salt-Sand Waves,” you reveal the narrator’s history by revisiting several different episodes throughout their childhood. With each one, we are given startling and beautiful images that tell us a lot about the character. How do you go about choosing the format for any particular poem or set of vignettes? What led you to choose this particular method for this collection of poems?

Well, this is my first attempt, in years, to sustain a long poem. I find few poems being written that are over a few pages nowadays, so that even short lyrical poems sometimes seem too much for the mercurial attention spans of the average reader. But I know that poetry is mostly read by writers and fellow poets, and so all readers for whom a longer poem might not present a daunting problem but rather be a welcome reprieve from the overabundance of short, tentative explorations present in most lyrics.

February Feature: A “Quip” Interview with Caleb Spalding Atwood

By Edward S. Garza

A resident of Houston, Caleb Spalding Atwood is the author of Quip Factory: Millions of Quips, Rips, Dingers, Zingers and Barbs. Part thesaurus, part lexical buffet, the book celebrates witticisms and offers myriad ways to create your own. Moreover, 100% of profits contribute to the Wounded Warrior Project, which provides programs and services to meet the needs of injured service members (www.woundedwarriorproject.org).

Before retiring, Atwood worked in labor relations, where his abilities earned him employment at such established organizations as The Detroit News. In addition to his corporate work, he eventually served as an adjunct professor at the University of Houston’s College of Technology. He and I discussed his book, inspirations, and quip tips.

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What were some of the driving forces behind the creation of Quip Factory?

In order to answer this, it’s first necessary to define “quips.” Most people think “quip” is just another name for a “joke.” That’s understandable because incongruity is the key to both. They differ in that the objective of jokes is to get laughs while the objective of quips is to express opinions and get people to understand, think, act or react to them.

January Feature: Bryan Washington

By Blythe Nguyen

Bryan Washington is a sophomore at the University of Houston, a student in the Creative Writing Program, and, in his spare time, a baker. He has been writing since elementary school, a time in which he remembers writing stories about going to the moon. Today, Washington enjoys reading Junot Díaz, Grace Paley, and J.D. Salinger, whose book The Last War with the Eskimos was an early influence on him. He admires these writers, he says, for their abilities to go from a formal to an informal voice, something he aims to do in his own work. Besides fiction, he writes his own Opinion column for The Daily Cougar.

In his work, Washington gravitates toward chronological plots, sometimes writing in a reflective tone. For example, in “Sandra,” published in the Fall 2012 chapbook of The Aletheia, the dots are connected by the title character’s son, the narrator. With revealing imagery and diction, Washington captures the son’s complex feelings toward his mother, as well as his anxieties. In the short interview that follows, we discuss his work and his approach to fiction.

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I think writing such as yours can resolve issues and as well as raise complex questions. Do you agree?

I’d meet you halfway on that. It’s fun to toss accusations, but I’m more interested in the ambiguity of our own individual situations–the sort of ambiguity that’s proffered by asking questions. One after another. If I end up making any verdicts, they’d ideally serve more as a foreground for illuminating the questions I’ve asked, the questions I’m asking, the questions that can’t be answered. When I’m lucky, the conclusion depends on the reader.

The Bar Mitzvah of Solomon Robatzki by Darlene Campos

Happy holidays, everyone. Today we present another wonderful story by Darlene Campos, a writer who’s been featured in both our chapbook and this website. We’re sure you’ll enjoy it.

The Editors

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The Bar Mitzvah of Solomon Robatzki by Darlene Campos

Levi Robatzki, the rabbi of Congregation Beth Shalom, was scurrying around his Lower East Side neighborhood to run pre-Shabbat errands. As usual, he was continuously being stopped for questions.

“Rabbi, how often should I pray?”

“Rabbi, how often should I read the Torah?”

“Rabbi, which bakery has the best challah bread?”

“Which bakery has the best challah bread?” Levi gasped to his crowd of followers. “Any good rabbi would know it’s the one on East Houston Street!”

The Breaking Point and Visual Storytelling: An Interview with Jairo Razo

By Max Gardner

Jairo Razo’s work is featured in our fall 2012 chapbook. His piece, “You Should Have Never Left,” set the tone for the issue as the cover image; his work “Memoir” also added a visual aspect to the short story “Sandra.”

The artist was born in 1990 in Houston, Texas. His introduction to artistic expression began when he was 14 in his technology class, where he made stop-motion movies out of clay figures. Later on at Spring Woods High School, where he was acquainted with Adobe Creative suite, he learned what he thought was “Graphic Design.” After arriving at the University of Houston School of Art, his mind was opened by his professors to a world where anything and everything could be a potential tool to create conversations with people through visual mediums. To help push his understanding of art and the world around him, he continually works in many fields, including photography, videography, and graphic design.

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In your piece “You Should Have Never Left,” the red splatters are startling on the black background and the piece immediately pulls you in. It’s almost as if the longer you stare at it, the more you realize that there is something new you did not see at first, such as the three-dimensional shadowing to the paint portions. The title is also very suggestive. What exactly were you going for with this piece emotion-wise, and how did you go about creating it?

“You Should Have Never Left” had been in my mind for a while, and it wasn’t until a few months ago that I was finally able to sit down and actually create the piece. I tried to bring a lot of energy and movement onto the canvas and thought of achieving this by using a vibrant color that simply pops on the black background and further accentuating that vibrancy with highly erratic paint strokes.

Gestures of Other Worlds and the Musician’s Duty: An Interview with Alex Winkler

By Adrienne E. Meyers

I’m Alex Winkler, a musician who is starting his third year as a Music Composition major at the University of Houston. I study classical piano and composition, but my interests in other instruments, genres, and roles as a musician extend far beyond that. I’m interested in writing music in all styles and for many different purposes, but my various works are all aimed to move people through music. I wholeheartedly feel that it is my duty as a musician to combine my various interests and passions for art into a holistic creative process.

I’m currently working as the sole composer for Liberators: The Musical (Morningstar Theatrical LLC), which was accepted as the only musical theater work in this year’s Houston Fringe Festival which showcases local theater projects. This project has been a side project since the fall of 2011 and the first act will be premiered in late August – early September. Some of my past projects include playing keyboard, singing, and playing drums for rock bands in the Houston area, working as a recording artist for local studio Noteworthy Music, recording with various jazz musicians in the area, as well as being selected as the film composer a student film during my freshman year. My diverse set of interests have given me (and hopefully others) a lot of joy, and I hope to continue to work with great artists in the future as I pursue a career in Film & TV music.

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What inspires the music/creative process for you? Does it pull from past events, ideas, surroundings, interactions, etc., or does it begin more spontaneously?

I couldn’t say I approach the creative process in any one way, since I write so many different styles and each piece means something different for me personally. For instance, once when I was wandering the UH campus on a quiet, dark night, I looked into a fountain to find the reflection of a tree, illuminated by the soft yellow street light, looking back at me. The solitary melancholic image stuck with me sparked a melody in my head later that night, which I immediately played at the piano with the harmony and all. But sometimes things don’t come that easy as a composer.