Winter 2021 – Under the Gum Tree

What’s inside the issue?

Click the links for a teaser excerpt of each piece…

Letter from the Editor

Whew. We made it. It’s 2021. I almost don’t know what to do with myself, so I’m just going to keep doing what I’ve been doing all of 2020: Move forward.

If there’s one thing I know, 2020 was a year for making stories, and that’s what we are all about here at Under the Gum Tree.

As we enter our tenth year—ten years!—of publishing, I am reflecting on the stories we read for each issue that touch on similar life experiences (addiction, miscarriage and infertility, grief and loss, troubled parent-child relationships). And as we move into a new year after living through a collective and ongoing trauma, it’s clear to me that we’ve never read stories about the type of things we’ve experienced in the past year.

Now before you rush to send us your pandemic stories, remember that we do look for nuance, subtlety, new perspectives, and authenticity of voice. That said, we are interested and eager to read the true, personal stories that many of you are already writing about 2020. We also continue to be committed to diversifying the voices we publish and sharing stories from writers who have been under-represented in publishing.

But, maybe more than that, I’m interested in what comes next in our recovery, in how we begin to heal. In a sense, it might be a little too soon to write about it, because we don’t know what that healing will look like—we are on the cusp of it, and for many it has yet to begin. For now though, as we each embark on the road to rebuilding, I continue to find comfort in stories and I hope that you do too. It’s one of the many things that has me feeling positive and hopeful for the new year—reading stories of others’ bravery, resilience, and learning.

We all need stories to stay connected, combat isolation, and remember that we are not alone in our struggles—because of that, my team and I take seriously our responsibility to find and curate those stories, and this issue is no exception. The stories in these pages face the inevitability of death, the horrors of history, the frustrations and fears of the day-to-day, the joy of dancing, and the feelings evoked by memory. And as we read them, we, along with these writers, continue to move forward, every day toward more unknowns and, of course, more stories.

Here’s to a new year of story making,

Janna Marlies Maron
Editor & Publisher

Contributing Authors

Sondra Olson

Sondra Olson

The Act of Redemption

One of the most profound contradictions of humanity is the idea that someone, somewhere, will save us, if only

…But if that is true, the laws of nature are hiding something. Or is this wished-for immortal state outside nature, beyond space, beyond time? When you are young or when all is well, it is easier to ignore mortality. Unless it strikes before you are able to grasp the significance of not taking it personally. It’s just death, you may say, but it’s only death when it’s happening to someone else. What is critical is letting go of living forever. Not abandoning hope. Imperative for hope is not being consumed by fears which undermine the very life you wish to be living forever.

But what if the present is filled with such doubt and fear, there is no room for anything else–past, present or future? I no longer believe, but have also not forgotten, the dreams of my childhood that I will be spared, if only . . .

What does it mean to remember something one no longer believes? Painter and poet John Berger suggests that memory is closely linked to belief, and that only by forgetting do we truly let go. What has not been forgotten is a worthy recognition of something that has been saved from nothingness, he says. The distinction between remembering and forgetting is an act of judgment…memory an act of redemption.

Sondra Olson’s writing began as experimentally driven lyrical essays in a workshop of Canadian writers where she lived in Northern Minnesota. “I write as a way of seeing,” Sondra says. “I write intuitively, in the language of a painter, toward the unsolved, losing myself in its wonder and process.” Sondra’s influences: Maggie Nelson, Rebecca Reilly, Carole Maso, Nick Flynn, and John D’Agata with whom she worked at the Tomales Bay, California Writer’s Conference in 2010.
Kineret Ando Yardena

Kineret Ando Yardena

You Are The Answer to The Dreams of Your Ancestors

Sometimes, when I can’t hear the call of my ancestors anymore, I know I have been away for too long–from the land, from the old songs of my people, from the soft wildness of my heart.

From the land: from the high desert mesas and low basin arroyos sprung up with pungent juniper berries and resin-and-rain-scented piñon pine, where coyote howls serenade the forest night; from the night sky, if even for a vanishing moment I can feel the gaze of the moon upon me or can catch the flickering midnight love of a distant star climbing out from behind the brink; from the edge of the sea and inside of it; and from any place where I am cradled inside the love of everything–earth and space and sky–without any human witnesses. At least for a while.

From the old songs of my people:
from the hymns and elegies, praises and psalms welcoming the twilight of Sabbath’s turning from rote-ness to beloved-ness, from time in ordinary time to time in sacred time, and back again, when we take back into our bodies the truth we’ve always known; from walking the land footstep- breath-footstep, breath-footstep-breath, the soles of my feet praying their prayer; and from letting the flight of wild geese raise my body into the full uplift of a swirling full-skirted dance. And from the soft wildness of my heart.

Kineret Ando Yardena is poet and writer, artist, educator, and ceremonialist, whose life as work emerges from her deep love and commitment to the earth, the ancestors, and all the ones. Kineret has published numerous essays and poems in a range of publications, and has led and co-facilitated council gatherings, arts-based retreats, wilderness rites of passage for youth and adults, and interfaith ceremonies. She currently resides with her beloved family in Dallas, Texas.
Carla Myers

Carla Myers

How to Take a Shower

Fight sleep. Close your eyes for just a minute. Move your thumb from your jaw so you can rub both eyes. Tip your head back. Worry that your dog is dying. She is thirteen and at this precise moment you love her so intensely tears wet your fingers. You are a melodramatic idiot.

“Live in the now.”

Remember that never fucking works. Think about what you will say at your father’s funeral. No one can make you give the eulogy even if you always have been the responsible child. Get angry even though your father is perfectly healthy and vacationing in Florida. Think about how your sister always writes thank-you notes, and you can’t even find the stationary you bought when you turned over a new leaf that time. You’re pretty sure it’s in that shit- hole you call an office, but you can’t know for sure because you are afraid to walk in there.

Carla Myers has an undergraduate degree in sculpture and a J.D. She writes flash fiction, poetry and speculative memoir. She was a finalist for the 47th New Millennium Writing Awards (2018) for Nonfiction and the winner of the same award for Flash Fiction. She was selected for The Sonder Review’s The Best Small Fictions Anthology (2019).
Charles Tarlton

Charles Tarlton

Getting Specific

They drove down to the Connecticut coast that Sunday because they were bored, and that can happen when life becomes too abstracted, as they always said, using just that word–abstracted.

What they meant was that certain general things (like going grocery shopping with a list) were always crowding out the smaller more precise things (like the sound rain makes dripping in the gutters and downspouts). Breakfast was an abstraction, for example, while getting café au lait and a croissant in a Paris bar in the early morning was not. When you reached the point where one day seemed like every other and spring flowers started to look like wallpaper, then something had to happen.

So they got to Connecticut and started looking at houses for sale near the water. They often did this when they were bored, because it let them transcend the idea of the house as an abstraction and forced them to look at the details. It was precisely in the details that things were different from what they were used to. The locations of the houses, the shape of kitchens, the views out windows, the stoves, radiators, and toilets were all new to them, and foreign. The houses were strange in their details, in their shape, their smell, their rhythms, and all these differences seemed to wake them up, make them see the possibility of something new.

Charles Tarlton has published poetry, haibun, and flash fiction in numerous books and magazines. He enjoys experimenting with the flash or micro form, and expanding them into screenplays, playscripts, and essays. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts with his wife, Ann Knickerbocker, an abstract painter.
Linda Miller

Linda Miller

Downtown

My records have their own place on the opposite end of the top shelf, each standing in its own thin slot of space on a black metal rack. Clad in white paper sleeves, my 45s have a neat, sterilized, medicinal appearance, almost like they belong in a doctor’s office.

I don’t fill the entire rack, but tend it carefully, occasionally investing in records from the Corner Cut Rate drugstore uptown. One of my earliest acquisitions last year, now sitting on the far left of the rack, has a song about a birthday gone bad.

Nobody knows where my Johnny has gone, but Judy left the same time . . .

When I play “It’s My Party,” I sing loud and strong in solidarity with Leslie Gore. Judy steals Leslie’s boyfriend, but what sweet revenge when they break up in the follow-up hit, “Judy’s Turn to Cry,” a record that sits in the second position on the rack, like a vital bookend to Leslie’s love life.

I add a few Beatles songs, “Blue on Blue” by Bobby Vinton, and “It’s a Small World,” the song from my favorite World’s Fair ride. But really, I prefer female soloists with a story, a yearning heart or a dream, like Petula Clark, a British singer who turns my world upside down with her number one hit, “Downtown.” The melody and lyrics conjure up a busy, nighttime cityscape in my mind, a Times-Square vision of pulsing lights and people on the move. To this day I’m convinced there is a high-pitched, emotional frequency embedded inside this song that only I can detect. As soon as I hear “Downtown” on the radio my inner radar pings with the message: “Pay attention. This is what you can do. Listen to Petula.”

Linda Miller has worked in newspapers, magazines, and in higher education public relations at Temple University. She revisits moments from her happy childhood in small town Pennsylvania for memoir pieces that have appeared here and in The Furious Gazelle, Dead Housekeeping, Iris Literary Journal, and the blog devoted to motherhood, Coffee + Crumbs.
Erica Hoffmeister

Erica Hoffmeister

To The Stars

There was some sort of unspoken contest between young girls in 1997. What a horrible year to be eleven years old. God, what a fucking banner year for him, though. You know who I’m talking about. You’d recognize those eyes peeking through tousled strands of hair, a side smirk, a glance upward from anywhere: come hither come taste. . .

A rite of passage, a contest, a burden of proof: whoever watched “Titanic” the most times in theater would have successfully proved her love for Leo.

She’d become a woman before the others. The best woman, the most experienced woman. This was, before we realized it, the first of many contests to prove our womanhood. The first of many ways we’d collect trophies in exchange for a predesigned version of womanhood, conquests in exchange for heartbreak. This was, before I realized it, a precursor to everything: love and heartbreak framed in competition, corrosive: prove your love, prove you love me, that you love only me. He knew—they’d all know—that I couldn’t ever bear to lose.

The first time—the first four, or five times—I felt the same as always. Tossing a pet rat in my yard, my kid-sized Hanes underwear creeping up one side of my butt cheek, mousy brown hair pushed behind my ears. My friends were scattered along the paths of adolescence, as if we had been flung from a plane with no direction, strapped to parachutes which may or may not open, with the wind to carry us to our destinations, eventually. Some of us were far ahead, full breasts blossomed beneath underwire bras, hips that swiveled, pulsing, bloodletting.

Erica Hoffmeister lives in Denver where she teaches college writing and advocates for media literacy and digital citizenship. She is the author of two poetry collections: Lived in Bars (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), and Roots Grew Wild (Kingdoms in the Wild Press, 2019), and has published other works in several journals and magazines. Learn more at ericahoffmeister.com.
Charles Tarlton

Charles Tarlton

Getting Specific

Click here to learn more about Charles Tarlton.

Contributing Artists

Cover Art and Paintings, Alison Cooley

Alison Cooley

Cover Art and Paintings

Alison Cooley was born in Washington, DC and studied painting at Sarah Lawrence College. Cooley’s atmospheric
abstraction draws on material juxtapositions and a language of repetitive markings, ink blooms, etchings, and organic elements to explore the beautiful, continuous cycles of the natural world. Symbols in the paintings replicate, change, fade, and return through the work creating a subtle tension that examines themes of compliance and resistance, harmony and dissonance, certainty and illusion. Cooley’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in New York, Washington, Richmond, and Toronto.

Images Courtesy of Tappan Collective, Los Angeles
tappancollective.com

@tappancollective
Photo Essay, Esperanza Manzanera Ferrándiz

Esperanza Manzanera Ferrándiz

Photo Essay

What’s inside the issue?

Letter from the Editor

Contributing Authors

Sondra Olson

Kineret Ando Yardena

Carla Myers

Charles Tarlton

Linda Miller

Erica Hoffmeister

Charles Tarlton

Contributing Artists

Alison Cooley

Esperanza Manzanera Ferrándiz