Dear friends and lovers,
HOUSEFIRE BOOKS has a new tumblr!! Click the fuck out of that link and follow the fucking shit out of it. We will be sharing our own web content and other awesome things by our friends, which is YOU! We want to get all up inside you and your tumblr, because facebook eats a thousand moldy dicks, doesn’t it?!?
So, be sure to follow HOUSEFIREBOOKS.TUMBLR.COM
LOVE AND WHATEVER FOREVER,
HOUSEFIRE
A CLOTH HOUSE is a dream lattice of childhood and growth and death. Joseph Riippi creates a world that’s both soft and sharp, deftly examining the ways our tragedies shape us and the memories we invent to survive in the aftermath. Simply put, A CLOTH HOUSE will break your heart.
- Sarah Rose Etter, author of TONGUE PARTY
Joseph Riippi knows what it’s like to be ‘the fat girl,’ and he proves it in A CLOTH HOUSE. He also proves that houses made of cloth (or any other ad-hoc tent or ‘fort’) is not enough to shield such a girl from pain or to protect her from the things that she will lose.
- John Dermot Woods, author of THE COMPLETE COLLECTION OF PEOPLE, PLACES & THINGS
In A CLOTH HOUSE, Joseph Riippi is alive to the modes of regret and tenderness that can exist at the same time, in the same person. His great talent is for dramatizing these modes with a purity that can make his readers feel as though they are watching a beloved film.
- Edward Mullany, author of IF I FALTER AT THE GALLOWS
PAY STRICT ATTENTION:
HOUSEFIRE only accepts stories written for HOUSEFIRE, and moreover, only things written for HOUSEFIRE from a prompt we give you. Most of our published submissions are solicited by the editors.
HOUSEFIRE is now sponsoring a monthly series of prompts open to the public. If you think that your work belongs on HOUSEFIRE, choose a prompt, write a piece, and send it in.
MARCH PROMPTS AND RULES, YEAR OF OUR LORD 2012
You may submit one piece for each of the numbered prompts.
1. Choose one of the following titles and write either a poem or a piece of fiction. You may include no mention of death, no modern technology (such as cell phones or computers), and no large animals (anything bigger than a bread box).
+ WE HAD NO PAPER TO WRITE IT DOWN, SO WE JUST SAID IT AGAIN AND AGAIN
+ THE MAN WHO USED TO BE MY FATHER
+ WE SLEEP; WE WAKE
2. Use this image to write a poem. NO FICTION. 
3. Us this image to write a piece of fiction. NO POETRY.
SEND ALL SUBMISSIONS TO:
housefirepublishing@gmail.com
and in the subject put the word “MARCH” somewhere, all caps.
ABOUT YOUR SUBMISSION:
All submissions are considered for both the website and print as to be determined by the editors. If we reject a submission then you as the author are free to do with it as you please, but if you wrote it from a title that we gave you then we ask that you please change the title as not to call attention to this rejection of your work (this is for both you and us). All accepted submissions remain the property of HOUSEFIRE Publishing to re-publish in any form we see fit until the end of time, however, that being said, if one of our writers gets an awesome book deal and wants to include a piece that was written for HOUSEFIRE, as long as it isn’t physically in print in one of our books HOUSEFIRE will gladly relinquish all future publishing rights as long as there is something nice said about us somewhere between the covers of the aforementioned awesome book. Also, if this happens we’ll tell everyone to buy your book because we love you (in this theoretical scenario) and we want you to be successful (that’s a given in every scenario, as we support all writers, whether or not we decide to publish them. We support the art form. We love words).
Sound good? Yeah, sounds good to us too.
xoxo
The currency here baffles. The sun, like all slowly dying things, is brazen and persistent. My arms fold and unfold, shadowing the wrinkling of my brow. Here her skin peels off to reveal more skin. Why we bother to get filthy when all the dirt washes so easily off is beyond me. I am unrehearsed. I am naked, late and unprepared. When I tell her I love her, it is in my own language and she pretends to understand but how could she? She who says love like opening a palm, like closing a fist, like waving; says love like a truth nobody would bother to question. I write stories on her skin which peels off only to reveal more skin. Blood comes in quantities I am unable to measure, unwilling to guess—uncertain it is actually blood at all. Every morning the sun, like all slowly dying things, rises hopeful and unafraid. There is no courage here. When I tell her I love her, it is in my own language and she pretends to understand but how could she? She who says love with no trace of fear, no trace even of the knowledge of fear. If all this dirt washes off, what are we doing in the mud?
xxxxxxx
ROY COUGHLIN is the mutant alley child of a banana slug and the cute redhead who works at Family across the street from Animal and who (please) fantasizes of being penetrated anally by Zooey Deschanel. (The cute redhead and the banana slug will never, ever really meet.) The cute redhead has two brains. She has a mutant brain in her colon. It’s just like the brain in everyone’s colon except about 11,000 times smarter and more powerful. It’s capable of thinking thoughts like, Summer is over and we’re going to be beaten to death in our slippers! and then instantaneously translating the thought into, like, a New Yorker cover by David Hockney. The banana slug has a mutant optical tentacle. The mutant tentacle can recognize sexy mouthparts. One time the banana slug was copulating and its penis got chewed off by its partner slug (no worries) and the banana slug realized that not every sexy mouthpart is a safe mouthpart. (Note to Family: “Not every sexy mouthpart is a safe mouthpart” would look good in gold across your window.) Roy is the phantom mutant alley child spawned by the cute redhead in a nonexistent daydream of being anally penetrated by a Berber houseboy Zooey Deschanel.
Holy shit, what happened to our blood?
Inside, and
in our ears. It rushed
up instead to one spot that still stings,
up to a crack where linoleum met skull.
She’s laughing at us. All
kinds of carts to prepare.
We have no idea how to make it more
primal. How
to reheat it and cry.
I go to the store and find
reconstituted sadness.
I don’t know what is real
life, no one showed me. The tests
did not prepare.
I want to drink the plasma from
her left nipple,
for no reason other than to see her win.
I want her to be angry, and
I want her to break my bones.
She made the sky descend,
it rains down, precipitation or no.
We are the stray cats occupying her space
and she needs to put us down,
out of our misery, or perhaps further in.
She’s hunting for flesh
and I’m just tapping some keys.
By the time we get there
the meat will be gone.
Maybe it already is.
xxxxxxx
ELLE DEE has a sister whose name is Baby Hiccup Specks. Baby Hiccup Specks has nine wives. The first wife is tomorrow stalking toward us with its head down. The second wife is the word on your shoes. The third wife is a band called Lode of Nymphs. The fourth wife is a french fry’s french fry. The fifth wife is Iannis Xenakis on Thorazine. The sixth wife is the worst intermediate vector boson ever. The seventh wife is a coupon for Essent, an imaginary shampoo. The eighth wife is a famous twister named after a passenger train. The ninth wife is a gladiator in the least likely week of human slavery. People say that Elle Dee looks like Baby Hiccup Specks, “but cute.”
He looked at me. I was crouched next to that creek trying to get water; and though dusk, his eyes sank night straight through my chest. The quartz rock clutched between his hands and weighing him low was so pink alongside that mountain, I thought I would die rose-horned and real. Swallowed by foxtails.
xxxxxxx
LISA KOLARSICK is a hive inside which a swarm of honeybees compose an opera of salt and poison. The bees, young and toothless, buzz in collective shame and though they look like they are dancing, they are not.
We went to a party by the lake but deserts had taken over. We ate silver apples on the moon. We talked about our feelings. Everything was possible. Your body oozed beautiful. Secreted matrimony.
The beach lost something that day. The fires burned serially. Nothing was left and perfect. Dawn came.
Breath placed alcoholic percentages in Fibonacci sequences. Bleeping golden. The things buried in the backyard were equally dead and alive, dependent on observation. Strange attractions raced by gravestones. Kidney stones gifted to strangers.
On the third day we were petulant for a resurrection.
The stone rolled at a rate beggaring perception. There were pennies on the lids. We threw another party for Timothy Leary in a vacant lot. The anarchists organized a protest. Congress switched us to the wild turkey standard.
We documented each moment in shadows. We left our native land. We attained doctorates in distraction. Ignored the sky. Reputed. Disowned.
Left and never returned. Your mother called, “comb back hair, comb back hair.” Or something phonetic and fucked.
We forgot each other’s names. We had been dead for months before we knew. Your body oozed. Secreted. Eyes, warehouses of defunct conglomerates.
We walked through them down to the beach, the water dark without reflections. We contemplated the impossibility of van Gogh. It remained hard to comprehend how you said yes, lifeless limbs mechanizing fine motors. We were suffused with je t’aime like god’s love mocking us from a burnt-out husk. We raised our children in a home of whalebone.
The light that once guided us was polluted by the knowledge of corpses, dying impulses darting synapses in the abandoned surf.
xxxxxxx
NEAL KITTERLIN is the worst idea an unruly cat ever had.
When you were little you dreamt of Cinderella weddings until your grandmother, dry-eyed, pulled you aside to help cut her face out of all her photos because she could not look at it anymore. Grandpa was having an affair with another woman and your grandmother made it clear that this woman was a slut as she pulled from another stack of photos and poked at the slut’s face. You stood there all afternoon in flowered panties handing her pictures while she cut away. Halfway between tears and yawning, you stayed beside her.
Now, many years later, it is your wedding day. You have done everything you are supposed to, but not everything you want to. He is at the altar waiting for you and you are all white dress and dark hair. Naked under a mille-feuille of transparent lace, organza, and tulle you wonder if anyone can see your eyes. You eat and eat and eat at the reception, trying to fill your dress and yourself, afraid he will fail.
It is only months later when he tells you, remorseful and ashamed, of the mistakes he has made and you realize that you have become your grandmother’s scrapbook project. You cry and sob and wail, hopes and dreams leaking out until you are only a smudge.
When shame and meekness get boring, he takes you far away to another state and late at night in your hotel room he tells you he can make this up to you. That he can fill you up and satisfy you and he holds out his arm and you slice a thin piece off with a steak knife. The first piece is leathery and tastes like expensive perfume and cheap cigarettes. The second, deeper piece is chewy and pulpy, but full of so much to drink at the same time. You study his face and know that you have to keep going because you can see your face in his eyes and he can’t yet see how little he has left you, how much he has erased. You mash and grind well into the night.
When you wake up he is still there, withered and small in many places, but still all hands and head and dick. You let him hold you for the first time in a long time because, headless or not, your belly is full. And, after all, you can still remember your grandmother’s many missing faces and the other woman—the slut—her face is a blur.
xxxxxxx
STEPHANIE MCATEE is the old way of doing things. The way that involves callused hands and tired limbs, a full stretch of muscle. The way that drags on. The way that does not compromise, but only gets heavier and heavier with each sunset. The meat-and-potatoes way. The bleed-it-out way. The only-cure-for-a-headache-is-a-stomp-on-the-foot way. No sleep till Brooklyn.
ABOVE: Marika Haskins. NOT PICTURED: Eileen Myles.
EDITOR’S NOTE
Not so long ago, perhaps in February, we sent a request to the wonderfully talented and groundbreaking Eileen Myles with a request for an interview and a link to our previous articles, that way she would know what she was getting into. Myles graciously agreed, and so we sent her the questions with a request that she try and get her answers back to us within five days, but then we didn’t really hear anything back, so we figured it wasn’t her cup of tea. Oh well, we thought. We tried. After a few more e.mails back and forth, some time in May we finally got her answers to our questions, and she proved to us that it wasn’t her cup of tea at all. Eileen Myles sidestepped, twisted, or outright rejected nearly every question and prompt we gave her, and returned what many would consider an unpublishable interview. For a while we were actually planning to never publish this, but we love Eileen Myles, and honestly we love that she totally shit on our whole approach to interviews. That is just SO her, you know? I mean, do I wish that she would have just responded to the prompts and written us a bunch of bitchin’ poems? Of course I do. However, we’re glad to have gotten anything. The ones that she did answer she answered well, and the ones that she shit on make us smile. They also make us say, “Really? You couldn’t have just answered that and written a poem?” but we are smiling the whole time we’re saying that, because fuck all, she’s clever.
Eileen Myles is a rad lady, and in our opinion this is a rad interview. We just hope she had fun.
THE “THIS DIDN’T WORK AT ALL” INTERVIEW
HOUSEFIRE
Take your favorite Woody Allen movie and write it as a poem. ANNIE
HALL is off limits, as is SLEEPER. Also off the list are any of the
films Woody Allen isn’t in as one of the main characters. If you don’t
like Woody Allen, oh well. Pick one of his movies and go for broke.
EILEEN MYLES
Why do we have to watch this ugly
man kissing
BEAUTIFUL WOMEN
HOUSEFIRE
Write a piece of flash fiction about a woman who falls in love with a
tree, and then name it something awesome (the story, not the tree).
Now please write the story again, but differently, and name it
something else. Give us one more version and a brand new title made up
of no less than 21 words. None of these stories can end in death, and
dialogue is a must. Tell us which of the three you like the most.
EILEEN MYLES
THE ENDLESS RAPE OF THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE
She sits at the Denver international airport realizing those towers
are teepees. She’s put behind her all that stuff about that woman she
met who was growing in the park. She turns around.
THE ENDLESS RAPE OF THE AMERICAN ARTIST
She realizes that the illustration of teepees in the middle of the
terminal is a not a copy of a work of art but the airport itself. She
turns.
THE ENDLESS RAPE OF THE NATIVE AMERICAN
She is told the airport is cursed. It is on a sacred site.
HOUSEFIRE
Talk about the best piece of small press fiction you’ve read in the
last year - like give us a synopsis, and the author, and what made it
so enjoyable. Now please write your own version of it in 200 words or
less. Keep the title.
EILEEN MYLES
It’s time to get serious about how we categorize our publishers. In
the 80s something was invented called the mainstream and it meant
corporate publishing. Previously the larger publishers were called Big
Houses and the smaller ones were called Small Presses. Since then in
music and film we call the independent media ‘independent’ or indies
for short. Whenever I see someone who is involved with books still
call independent presses small presses I think wow they must be
comfortable for some reason with keeping the world of indie publishing
sounding small and failed despite the fact it that persistently puts
out the bravest and the best books. Dodie writes crisply and directly
and digressively about a distracting love with a priggish man, a
Buddhist. Along the way she goes all around the world, looks at art,
meets her friends, talks about her feelings. She questions why it’s
important to be unemotional in order to have power. Dodie’s prose
style is amazing and endlessly blossoming into something even smarter
than it was before. She thinks on her feet. Even if she’s sitting in
bed writing.
THE BUDDHIST
I’m not much of an imitator.
HOUSEFIRE
The love of your life passes away, and in her will she asks that you
have her stuffed and then date her corpse for at least a year. And
this is not a casual date scenario - she wants you to travel with her,
to show her off around the country, proving to the world how much you
love this woman. Also, there is a lot of money involved (she was
totally loaded), and after a year of this you stand to inherit three
million dollars. If you say no, her corpse will be dressed up in men’s
gym clothes and hung upside down from a Starbucks Drive-through, her
lifeless body holding a sign that says “It turns out she didn’t love
me afterall.” What do you decide to do? If you agree to date the
corpse, how do you dress her up? What pose do you get her stuffed in?
After the year is up, what do you do with this gal? And what, my dear,
do you spend the money on? And, on the other hand, if you end up
saying no, I mean seriously, how do you sleep at night? She was the
love of your life!
EILEEN MYLES
I think I start writing a blog about this insane request my ex left in
her will. I call it Dodie Bellamy’s THE BUDDHIST.
HOUSEFIRE
I want you to write a poem about a serial killer, preferably the Son
of Sam, the Shoe Fetish Slayer, or the Vampire of Sacramento.
EILEEN MYLES
I don’t want to. I’ve never been interested in any serial killers
except Eileen Wuronos. Okay here’s my poem.
Eileen Gray.
Eileen Wuronos.
Eileen Myles.
HOUSEFIRE
Tell me about your favorite field trip as a child. Spare no detail.
EILEEN MYLES
Going to the fireworks on the fourth of July. Being out at night with
my parents and my siblings and having ice cream. Having ice cream with
my family any summer night. That’s all. It was great.
HOUSEFIRE
Write a poem about something that would happen in a Dungeon and
Dragons campaign. This can not include your favorite mythical
creature, nor can it include any references to the people playing the
game. Go!
EILEEN MYLES
I know nothing about Dungeons and Dragons.
HOUSEFIRE
Would you rather be haunted by the ghosts of all your dead pets or
live in a house made from repurposed coffins? And by that I mean that
they dug these things up, dumped out the bodies, and made your house.
No ghosts though. Oh yeah, and write a poem about whichever one you
end up choosing.
EILEEN MYLES
I hate all this dead stuff. I’m not into it.
HOUSEFIRE
Also, did you go to prom? Tell me about it, or, if not, why you didn’t go.
EILEEN MYLES
Yes I did. I went with a guy named Bob Conroy and he wore a powder
blue pinstripe tux I would have liked to wear. I wore a pink dress and
my hair was pouffed though it was 1967.
THE “FINISH THIS SENTENCE” INTERVIEW
1. When I was a kid, the thing that frightened me the most was… my mother.
2. If I was in an elevator with Elvis Costello I would… say hi and say
I was crazy about certain songs of his.
3. If my best friend and future wife both needed a kidney, and I was
the only blood match for both, I would… probably give it to either
because they would be the same person.
4. If I had to choose between slowly turning into a giant spider or…
turning into a little one I’d pick big.
5. Nobody knows this, but I killed a woman in the city of… New York.
6. Religion is for… the lazy.
7. The least talented writer I know is… Jeanette Winterston.
8. My favorite breakfast includes… pancakes.
9. When I die my tombstone will read… I’m actually here.
xxxxxxx
See, she’s rad. Normally when we publish an interview with someone you have a bunch of proof of what a great writer they are, but this time you may need to do a little research on your own. Check out some of this. I reccomend INFERNO.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Eileen+myles&x=0&y=0
THE LOVERS
by Tara Atkinson
It was this friend I used to take baths with just because it sounded
fun, when we were still little enough to do that, putting beards on
each other’s faces with the bubbles, pretending we were mermaids, and
this friend I went skinny-dipping with, when we were old enough to do
that, climbing the chain link fence around our little community pool,
not saying a word because we were so scared, treading dark water with
goosebumps and all those stars.
This friend I used to tan on the roof with. This friend I used to bus
into school before sun-up with. This friend I used to practice
cheerleading in the backyard with, and I’d grab her ankles to help her
cartwheel but who, whenever she’d try to do the same for me, would
squeal and duck so we’d both end up in the grass. This friend I’d
coordinate Halloween costumes with.
This friend I saw every day including Christmas for three years
straight, every single day of Junior High, not because we tried to,
but because our lives had become that intertwined, and when we visited
our out-of-town relatives our parents even let us bring the other one
along. We called ourselves sisters and shared clothes and exchanged
best friend necklaces as our actual sisters sulked in the background.
This friend I snuck into the tarot card tent with at the 4-H fair when
we were fifteen because she had the biggest crush on a boy who played
the trumpet in marching band and was two grades ahead of us, tall with
thick red hair and you could tell already had to shave each morning.
It was coming up on Prom and this friend wanted to know if he’d ask
her and in the reading the lady, who had those wrinkles like she’d
tanned and smoked too much and lots of gypsy-looking bangles and a
scarf over her head, turned over a card with a dark man and a
red-haired lady naked in a patch of oversized calla lilies. “The
lovers,” the lady said and raised her penciled-on eyebrows at us. On
this tarot card you could see not just the rosy smears of nipples but
also the cleft of lady parts and my friend looked over at me and saw
my face all red and laughed her urgent, soprano laugh and then the
tarot card lady got mad and muttered under her breath and knocked the
cards off the table and we thought she had cursed us. We got so scared
walking home that we went into the Catholic church and knelt in front
of the creepy crucifix and prayed for forgiveness for our dealings in
witchcraft.
This friend I danced with in the talent show and I hadn’t had any
dance classes so I had the boy part and wore slacks and sometimes just
stood there in the middle of the stage as she spun off under the
lights in her white dress and shiny hair and there is a photograph of
us they put in the local paper as she is leaning back into my arms for
a dip just like a bride and groom’s first dance and I remember that
made me happy. I did think we’d always be friends.
This friend who called me up to have coffee when she came down to
visit her family for the first time in about five years, having always
before this made her daddy drive the eight hours all the way to the
city, which he did it seems almost every other weekend before his
health problems with the diabetes and such, him out in the driveway
poking around under the hood of that Camaro he’s had since we were
little kids, it looking with the T Tops out like a car puzzle with the
last two pieces missing, and I’d think I should send something along
to her, like the M&M cookies that were our favorites, but always ended
up feeling shy and just thinking about it. I did make those cookies
for her when she came to visit and set them out with the coffee. And
when I said “Good to see you, Kaylin,” she laughed a little and said
no one outside her family had called her that in a long time, which I
didn’t understand at all, since that is her name, and she told me that
now she usually goes by Kay, and I don’t know why, since Kaylin is a
perfectly fine name and Kay is really just a letter, not a name at
all, if you ask me. She was all dressed in black which made me worried
a little that maybe her daddy had taken a turn for the worse but she
just laughed when I asked her about it, sitting there looking fancy, a
real city girl now, everything but that laugh of hers seeming so
different, her laughing that same bright squealing like a horse
whinnying, sipping the coffee and eating the cookies and neither of us
with much to say.
This friend I gave my bike to when she left for college because she
couldn’t take her car into the city, my yellow Schwinn with the wicker
basket which I traded for her jankey old mountain bike even though I
didn’t like it much, because I wanted her to have something nice up
there. She told me it didn’t last one month though she locked it up
with one of those serious locks they say you need in the city, told me
she came back from doing her laundry at the laundromat one day and the
front tire was missing, then the basket, and then piece by piece the
whole thing completely disappeared.
And here I am, in my own little house that my husband built just how I
like, with a full half acre garden in the back just crowded with every
vegetable you could think and a neat row of maples along the property
line and even a little pond for drainage that ducks sometimes swim on
and every night after dinner as the sunlight is getting golden I look
out our sliding glass doors onto all that goodness, holding the baby
who has begun, in a mirror of my burping him, to pat me on the back as
tell him the names of all the things he points at, happy to stay put.
xxxxxxx
TARA ATKINSON is a sinking ship somewhere off the coast of Mexico. It is a cruise ship, full of thirty year old hipster boys, a few dozen teenage girls, and a bunch of asian tourists. Needless to say there are lots of pictures being taken.
