This issue features fiction and poetry from Mexico guest-edited by Hernan Lara Zavala and Darlaine Mahealani Dudoit. Included in this feature are such writers as Luis Arturo Ramos, Silvia Molina, and Francisco Hernandez.
Also, the subject of our symposium is the relationship between American fiction and poetry and nature writing as a literary genre. Titled “The Rise of Nature Writing: America’s Next Great Genre?” the symposium includes responses by sixteen nature writers such as Edward Hoagland, Barry Lopez, and Nancy Lord.
The American contributors of fiction, poetry, and essays in this issue are Alberto Rios, Diane Wakoski, Shirley Kaufman, and others. The portfolio of woodblock prints is by Karen Wikström.
Fall 1992 (vol. 4, no. 2
226 pages
“The abalone, the octopus, the toothless trumpet player who has been playing ‘The Man with the Golden Arm’ for three decades now, the crab, the deaf-mute who advertises being so on a sign hung around his neck, the snail, the blind man begging at the empty tables of La Roca,the oyster, the starving shoeshine boy and his twin dog, the huge shrimp . . . they blend their essences and their juices and save my life.”
—from
“Means of Death” by Gonzalo Celorio,
translated by Leland H. Chambers
“It
started as a recollection in Portuguese:
A woman's voice, familiar
Over a collision of dishes. Night
After
night, the blending smells of codfish;
Pinto beans followed by the old world
Habits of cigarettes
And pekoe tea sipped from saucers.
A gone time.
—from “From Saucers” by Sam Pereira
“I hope ‘natural history writing’ really signals a shift in direction for American literature, away from a concern with the pleasures, the pains, and the fates of the self toward a concern for the mysterious web of being in which we are all delicately suspended. And that people will someday say our years saw a renaissance in literature, not the resurgence of a genre; a rediscovery of the resilience, the pertinence, and the scope of natural history as a metaphor to illuminate the joy and the terror of human existence.”
—from
the symposium “The Rise of Nature Writing:
America’s Next Great Genre?” by Barry Lopez
Untitled
Woodcut
by Karin Wikström, 1992
The
Dance
Woodcut by Karin
Wikström, 1992
| Karin Wikström was born in Sweden and has been living in California since 1977. She has participated in exhibitions at the San Francisco Art Institute, the Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art, and the Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum, among other places. She has also done the woodcut illustrations for books by Yolla Bolly Press based on works by John Steinbeck, Robinson Jeffers, and Theodora Kroeber. She recently received a fellowship from the Lala Institute in Berkeley and will be working there on a new series of large-scale prints during the fall of 1992. |
About the guest editors: Hernan Lara Zavala is a short story writer, novelist, and essayist born in Mexico City in 1946. He has published three books of short stories (De Zitilchen, El mismo cielo, Antologia personal), two books of essays (Las novelas en el Quijote, Contra el angel), and a novel, Charrasa.
Darlaine Mahealani MuiLan Dudoit is the managing editor of Manoa. Born and raised in Hawai'i, she is of Chinese-Hawaiian-English-Irish-Portuguese-French ancestry.