wunderkammer

THE EARTH COLLECTION: Coal People

by John Heckman Wright                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Those who talk of clean coal have never lived near a coalfield.  I was born in Eastern Kentucky just after the miner’s strikes against the Duke Power Company down in Harlan County, Kentucky.  My family lived on the rim of the Appalachian Plateau, so my dad’s job wasn’t to dig the coal from the mines but to haul it all across Kentucky and West Virginia, sometimes up to Ohio and even down to Indiana.

By the mid- 1980’s the coal boom that swept through Eastern Kentucky in spurts from the turn of the century to its peak in the 1970’s was well on its way to drying up.   

Dad lost his job when the trucking company he had worked for since he was a teenager went bankrupt.  The coal that was left in the mountains was getting harder to reach, and unions had won little victories over the years that made the cost of extracting that coal steeper for the coal companies.  It would be nearly a decade before the companies would launch a new campaign, Mountain Top Removal, and this time they wouldn’t need so many workers to drill into the side of the mountains to remove the coal.  In this new world, instead of drilling, the company would just level the mountain and take the coal from the center.

On the way down Lucky Holler to the nearest mouth of the Licking River we pass a small wood house with a tin roof and a ringer-washer on the front porch. Boyd and Kathy live here alone in this old holler. They don’t have electricity or running water, so they pull their water from the creek and sit around at dusk by lantern light, head to bed before the stars come out.

Strangely Enough, I Feel Nothing

mixed media art journal

by Sparkleface

 

Do a Good Job

mixed media art journal

by Sparkleface

From the Diary of: July 12, 1885

by Amber Nelson

July 12, 1885

Could lunch on the smell of flowers and new mown hay, 

drink the moisture of the air, and dance to the hum of bees.

it’s the country life

of

cultivated red raspberries

invention & 

a church being a heavenly fire escape 

didn’t know it

I explained the necessity of having a rooster.

for waking

& awakened

False

mixed media art journal

by Sparkleface

Writers as Kids

a Wunderkammer theme week curated by Kathryn Regina

Before writers were writers they were boxers, ballerinas and scarecrows. If nothing else, they were much, much shorter. When my friend Darah's husband posted a photo of her as a 9-year-old gymnastics star on her Facebook wall, I thought, did Frank O'Hara take gymnastics photos? Are there little league photos of Allen Ginsberg? Who wouldn't want to see those pictures?

That's why we've devoted the next two weeks to childhood photos of writers. Each of our participants was given the photo of another writer and wrote a short piece based on that photo.

You can expect 2 installments a day for the next two weeks at 9am and 3pm PST. You can also expect adorableness and amazing writing. Come back often!

Kathryn

Images, clockwise from top left: Frank O'Hara, Sylvia Plath with her brother, William Faukner

Don't Call Me Mother: I'd Only Be a Breeder if Kim Deal Asked Me to Join the Band

by Sadie Pfannkuche

Illustrations by Justin Graham

In second grade I desperately wanted a Baby Alive doll. I don’t remember why-I didn’t play with dolls as a rule-and the only other doll I had ever requested was a Wonder Woman action figure. I had the biggest crush on Wonder Woman/Lynda Carter in the history of girl crushes.  Some secret part of me wanted to touch her and change her out of the drab utilitarian uniform of her public life into the glamorous metallic and silky costume of her secret life. Yes that’s right, in short, I wanted to touch and possibly fondle Wonder Woman’s boobies. And that desire hasn’t completely disappeared. To this day when I see her on television hawking mail order contact lens I have this urge to grope her. 

But back to the Baby Alive (she never had a proper name; I only called her by her product  name.) She was a facsimile of the real thing- made of soft plastic; she had a permanently pursed mouth, ready for a bottle or the plastic feeding spoon full of fake baby food that was included with her.   I dutifully fed and bottled her only to realize within seconds that Baby Alive was much too much like the real thing. The food and water that went into her mouth, exited her bottom almost immediately. Now I know that as an adult, this makes sense, but at the age of 7, I hadn’t grasped even the most basic points of Newtonian physics. So it never occurred to me to question what happened to the “food” that Baby Alive ingested. Within seconds of feeding her, her diaper was full of creamy fake baby food, green, if I remember correctly. 

I refused to feed her again and, instead, carried her around for a few days out of obligation even though I wanted nothing more than to have Santa Claus take her back to the demented toy workshop from whence she came.  

When I no longer felt guilty, I stopped paying her any attention at all and relegated her to the shelves with the unloved stuffed animals. 

Even when I see an actual live baby, no matter how cute, my heart does not flop about like some emo boy’s bangs. I don’t make cooing noise and my body continues to run as normal, without the faintest  tock of a biological clock. What am I thinking instead, you ask?  

Don't Call Me Mother: Motherhoodlessness

by Miki Howald

I

What is it like to be a woman who knows she doesn’t want children? It means to have everyone doubt you, and to doubt your ability to know your own desires. It means to always be second-guessed by family, friends, lovers, doctors—to be told how it is, what you don’t know. It means to disappoint your loved ones: You’ll never understand how I feel, how much I love you, my mother says, unless you have children of your own.

I work in family support services, and all day we promote children as the future, families as the foundation of society. All day I hear women say: I’m a mother first. I don’t even know what that means. Is she a person second? A woman third? Where does she consider writer or friend or lover? I always think to myself, but I am me first. Do I just lack the motherhood desire? Is that so unnatural, so unheard of? 

II

Sex and babies occupy completely separate spheres in my head, and I hate to be reminded that sex—that wonderful, exhausting, addictive thing I love—can produce children. Recently a friend posted pictures of her newborn on Facebook with the status line update: We made this from scratch! and with that one line my favorite activity was tainted, turned into something I’d rather avoid. I reminded myself to call the doctor the next day and make an appointment to discuss an IUD. 

I’d like to ask the doctor about tying my tubes, but I’m afraid of hearing the paternalistic advice that I might change my mind later. You’re still young, you might meet a nice man and fall in love. I wonder if doctors ever warn women who are eager to have kids: you might meet a real asshole who hits you and uses your children against you. I hope they do. 

Don't Call Me Mother: Auctions and Archives

by Ellen Placey Wadey                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

To this day, when I sit in writing workshops, I feel the anxiety cranking under my sternum. As we discuss other writers’ pieces -- their characters and plot lines and epiphanies and listen to them explain the complex details of the rest of the story: intricately woven events and reversals and awe-inspiring denouements, I think, “Jeez, I wish that I knew what was going to happen next.” All I have are broad sketches of incomplete characters who have compulsions they can’t articulate. They aren’t really sure why they have been rendered in the first place let alone what they are supposed to be doing. Most times, I don’t have anything past what is on the page and a belief that over time more will be revealed – both to me and any readers who stick around long enough to find out. So, I keep bringing my poor characters – faint, disoriented and reluctant as bats – into the workshop sunlight to be dissected, so that I can see them better, so that they can tell me what they want to do next. The closest thing I have to a plot line is a hunch.

Not having a child dawned similarly for me. There were times in my life when I was sure that I would have children. It was expected, anticipated even. Many of my friends from college got married right after graduation and started their families right away. My mother said what most mothers say, “When you have your kids…,” and I went along with the daydream. 

I can’t point to a day or a discussion when my husband and I made the choice not to be parents. We didn’t debate over-population or our sketchy gene pools – something that probably could be used as a very effective means of birth control for a host of people – or even the more mundance concerns about our limited resources or the clamp children would put our freedom. It might sound lame, but having children just never made its way to the top of our list. Other things kept getting bumped up in priority – both of us working on degrees, paying off debt…then acquiring new debt, spending lots of hours building careers, even a health concern – but any of that could have been negotiated with having children, but none of it was.

Don't Call Me Mother: FETAL ALCOHOL JESUS

by Allison Gruber

The Onion once ran an article whose headline read, “Like Having Big Boxes Of Shit In Your House? Get A Cat!”

I think about motherhood similarly. Want to be plagued by feelings of inadequacy and incessantly reminded of your own mortality? Tired of having your own needs met? Be a mom!

While I’m certain motherhood has its rewards, I’m also certain that so to do lobotomies, high colonics, and root canals.

When I think of motherhood, I think oppression. But this is coming from someone who finds her cat a little too demanding; in my estimation goldfish are too needy; I get bored quickly; the novelty wears off fast; I don’t want anything that can’t be returned; In relationships, “liking me too much” is a deal breaker; I don’t want a perpetual condition; I hate the question, Do you want to hold the baby? -- because it’s not really a question; I hate the sight of toys strewn about a room; the first time I babysat my niece, while changing her diaper I got shit on my hand and reacted as though I’d been shot.

I am simply not cut from maternal cloth.  

Truth be told, even as a kid, I wasn’t so fond of kids. I remember one morning in 1984 when my mother, pregnant with my sister, tried to break the news of the impending sibling by asking me, “What if God wanted me to have another baby?” 

I think she expected that by virtue of my being a girl, and by presenting the pregnancy as a mandate from God, I would have no choice but to be agreeable. 

Nevertheless, all of eight years old, I looked her square in the face and said, “You tell him ‘no.’” 

And so my sister became my very first lesson in “that which is out of your control.”