FUSION: Global Art, Words, and Music: Volume 4

FUSION: Global Art, Words, and Music publishes outstanding writing, translations, and photography from our community and internationally recognized artists. The world-renowned writers, visual artists, and musicians in our international features inspire young artists. Where else do students have the opportunity to see their work published alongside, for example, Guggenheim fellows, a winner of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, New York Times bestsellers, and artists whose work is exhibited in major national galleries? FUSION encourages explorations of the rich relations between music and all the arts, responding to E. M. Forster’s charge, Only connect!

Editor-in-Chief, Special Features Editor: Joseph Coroniti

Fiction Editor: Julie Rold

Global Poetry Editor: Deborah Bennett

Associate Editor, Poetry & Outreach: Beth Platow

Associate Editor, Fiction & Outreach: Mark Polanzak

Associate Editor, Creative Nonfiction: Akshay Ahuja

Graphic Design and Layout: zzGassman Design Workshop

Copy Editor: Lesley Mahoney

Work-Study: Callie Huber

FUSION: Global Art, Words, and Music

MS-7 LART

Berklee College of Music

1140 Boylston Street

Boston, MA 02215

FUSION considers submissions from September through April at fusionmagazine@berklee.edu. For submission guidelines and more information, visit FUSION Online at fusionmagazine.org

© Copyright 2014 Berklee College of Music

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

ISBN: 978-0-615-96906-0

Cover image: Iona—Restored Stone Cross by Michael Russell

Masthead image: Callie Huber

Contents

Cover

Editor's Introduction

Joseph A. Coroniti, PhD, Editor-in-Chief

From a Selkie Song to Settled Airs: Voices and Visions from the U.S. and Scotland

BERKLEE COMMUNITY

Fiction

Andrew Choi

Childhood

Alexandra Groff

In Which the Time Passes

Kathleen Parks

Beacon

James Sanderson

Three Words

Chris Stites

The Lion Boy

Inés Velasco

In Her Own Time

Poetry

Jordan Casty

Sonnet 23

Emmett Ceglia

The Pain of Creation

Paige Chaplin

first/last

Erica Charis

Untitled

April Gompers

Stained Glass Sea

Raspberry Sorbet

Seph Hamilton

Starfish, Sleeping

Erin Snyder

The Arboretum

Translation Initiative

Juana Aquerreta

La piedad por tus ojos

Mercy in Your Eyes

Naongsunsa (1262-1342)

The Mountains Speak

Author Unknown

Calon Arang

Calon Arang

Yohan Joo

The Rain

Han Feizi (280-233 BC)

At the Foot of the Stump

Yiru Wang

Poem of Seven Steps: Translators’ Preface

Cao Zhi (192-232 BCE)

Poem of Seven Steps

Yu Lou (1125-1210 BCE)

In Praise of the Plum Blossom

Creative Nonfiction

Nicholas Salvador

Eating Together

Cordelia Vizcaino Leal

Chasing Song

Interview

Leah Hinton

Singer-songwriter Moana Avvenenti

Film Studies

Zev Burrows

Star Wars Episode VII: Return of the Empire or Revenge of the Consumer?

Visual Art

Diane Esmond

Photographs of Six Paintings

Louise Bichan

Portrait of fiddler Jenna Moynihan and harpist/vocalist Màiri Chaimbeul

Lauren Desberg

Portrait of Jenna Moynihan

Fiddle Fingers, Jenna Moynihan

Moana Avvenenti

Self-Portrait with Gum

Tiger Okoshi

Family Traveling in the Stormy Indian Desert

Crying Baby

Resting Boy

Callie Huber

Night Vision sequence

Edward Wersocki

Elation

Maeve Gilchrist, Scottish harpist and vocalist

Louise Bichan

Kimberley Fraser

Kimberley Fraser

Philip Barlow

Alasdair Fraser, Natalie Haas

Natalie Haas

Natalie Haas

FEATURED WRITERS

Lacey Daley

Friction

Amy Quan Barry

loose strife

Brian Burt

Occupations

What I Was Trying to Say Was

Amy M. Clark

Elegy for Our Dog

Surf Lesson

Carolina Ebeid

A Thing Will Still Be a Thing No Matter What You Place in Front of It

Napoleon

Major Jackson

XXV. Salobrena

Kirun Kapur

Dancing with My Father

For the Survivors

Kent Maynard

After Lorca’s Death

Biting the Branch

This Window and a Wish

The Witch’s Eye

Jennifer Militello

Dear B,

Dear B,

Pete Mullineaux

Raftery’s Buttons

A Piper Prepares

A Slow Start to the Set

Music of the Spheres

Concertina

Requiem

Tonight’s the Night

Lynne Potts

Last Imagining My Death Poem

Europa and the Bull

Leslie Williams

Self-Portrait with American Crows

Avenue of the Stars

Celtic FUSION

The Scottish Feature

Larry Bethune

Adventures in Scottish Culture:

A Personal Journey

Iain Anderson

Celtic Connections: Glasgow’s annual folk, roots and world music festival—The Beginnings

Robert Crawford (poetry)

Norman McBeath (photography)

Excerpts from Simonides

Excerpts from Venice

Claudia Daventry

Blot

Leaving Amsterdam

Selfish

Selkie Song

Time Difference

Paula de Fougerolles

The Chronicles of Iona: Exile

Douglas Dunn

Retirement

The Wash

Jana Laiz

Alba Obsessed

Michael Russell MSP

Scottish Photographs

Susan Sellers

Given the Choice

CONTRIBUTORS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Editor’s Introduction

From a Selkie Song to Settled Airs: Voices and Visions from the U.S. and Scotland

As in every issue, these pages include a fusion of creative talents, from Berklee students, staff, and professors to featured artists with global reputations.

Jazz trumpeter and painter, Professor Tiger Okoshi, has given us three brilliant works. Tiger writes, When I play my trumpet, my horn is my brush, high/low, fast/slow, bright/dark … I paint the air one note at a time.

Berklee’s creative writing program fosters remarkable student fiction, creative nonfiction, literary translations, poetry, plays, and screenplays. While our students demonstrate an exceptional level of achievement in music, they engage fully in other art forms. Many are highly accomplished in writing, the visual arts, theater, and film.

As part of our commitment to Global Art, Words, and Music, FUSION’s Translation Initiative pairs international students with native English speakers. This results in fine translations, a celebration of diverse cultures, and greater involvement by international students in the intellectual and artistic life of the community. Our students come from over 90 nations. This issue includes poems translated from Spanish, Korean, Chinese, and Old Balinese.

Our online issues of FUSION feature videos, multimedia projects, music competitions, and student columns on such topics as film, busking, and making a living in the arts.

• • •

The people of Scotland vote this year in a special referendum to decide their nation’s future: to separate from the United Kingdom and become an independent country for the first time in centuries, or determine that they are Better Together, as part of the UK, alongside England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

The world is watching as the Scots debate sovereignty and what it means to be Scottish. This decisive moment has inspired our special Scottish Feature. We do not presume to offer an opinion from Boston on what is best for Scotland. We simply take this opportunity to highlight some of Scotland’s greatest writers and artists. One of our poets, Douglas Dunn, won the 2013 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. The BBC reports that Committee chair and Britain’s poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, said Dunn was one of the greatest poets Scotland has produced. We are delighted to share Douglas’s poems with our readers and that our students’ poems share space with such work.

An interest in Celtic culture and music has been growing steadily at Berklee. Every year, FUSION produces its popular Celtic FUSION concert, featuring outstanding student and professional Trad players.

Berklee Celtic music masters, such as cellist Natalie Haas, harpist and vocalist Maeve Gilchrist, Danú fiddler Oisín McAuley, Cape Breton fiddler Kimberley Fraser, and multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, Mark Simos, play with students who have won competitions throughout the Celtic world. Many students and recent alumni have begun promising international careers, including harpist and Scottish Gaelic singer Màiri Chaimbeul, from the Isle of Skye; pianist Hamish Napier; fiddler and step dancer Holland Raper; and Jenna Moynihan, a fiddler in the Scottish tradition, whose agility is matched only by her warm tone.

I often invite these student musicians to give clinics. Celtic fiddlers, pipers, bodhran and bouzouki players, pianists, and guitarists inspire students to learn Trad music. A jazz or classical flautist hears her peers, discovers an old tradition, and buys a wooden Irish flute.

I am very happy to co-edit this special Scottish feature with Larry Bethune, Berklee’s vice president for student affairs. Larry, like an accomplished piper, has his fingers on the pulse of Scottish culture, in Boston and in Scotland. Over the years he has created a community that understands its shared musical origins. Larry’s Preface, A Personal Journey, celebrates the adventure of discovering one’s heritage, including a deeper understanding of Scottish music and its relation to American roots music.

• • •

You will find more details in the Contributors Page, but I would like to give you, at the front of the book, a sense of the achievements and broad sweep of our featured artists.

Photographer Michael Russell is Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning in the Scottish Government. His photographs, taken each day as he goes about his duties, provide an authentic perspective on the western constituency of Argyll & Bute, which he represents in the Scottish Parliament. As Michael says of his photograph of restored stone Celtic crosses from the island of Iona, These crosses have been raised for the first time in hundreds of years. This powerful image of renewal and the FUSION of old and new was an easy choice for our cover.

The National Portrait Galleries in London and Edinburgh have more than 50 of Norman McBeath’s photographic portraits in their permanent collections. Norman has collaborated with a number of award-wining writers, including Robert Crawford, published here, and the celebrated Irish poet Paul Muldoon, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and poetry editor of The New Yorker. Collaborations such as these speak to FUSION’s passion for interdisciplinary projects, whether by students or world-renowned artists.

Novelist and scholar Susan Sellers, of St Andrews University, has given us an excerpt from her new novel, Given the Choice. Her first novel, Vanessa and Virginia, has been translated into 17 languages and adapted as a play performed around the world. Susan is also an editor of Virginia Woolf’s works for Cambridge University Press and translator of the influential French author Hélène Cixous. Only so many writers bridge so successfully the gap between elegant scholarship and critically acclaimed fiction.

The BBC’s Iain Anderson contributed an essay on co-creating Celtic Connections: Glasgow’s Annual Folk, Roots and World Music Festival. Iain can be heard as the late-night voice of country, folk, blues, soul and rock ‘n’ roll on BBC Radio Scotland.

This issue also includes gifted writers not from Scotland, including Major Jackson, a Guggenheim Fellow, and Lynne Potts, AGNI Poetry Editor and winner of the 2012 National Poetry Review Prize.

I was fortunate to spend time with poet Kent Maynard in a small village in Cameroon. He has the keen medical anthropologist’s eye and a deep understanding of the people with whom he lives. His extensive experience working in West Africa has lent authenticity and power to his ethnographic poetry.

I’ll let the music of two of our poets take us out.

Robert Crawford’s collaborations with Norman McBeath and others are important for giving a Scots voice to a wide range of literature. Robert translates the power of ancient Greek fragments by the poet Simonides into fresh and energetic versions that reveal the flexibility and nuance of Scots. A few lines from Orpheus are a fitting celebration of what Seamus Heaney recognized as that moment when the bird sings very close/To the music of what happens:

Abune his heid fleed coontless burds. The fush

Flang theirsels up oot o the daurk-blae wattirs

Jist for the drap-deid brawness o his sang.

Above his head flew countless birds. The fish

flung themselves upwards out of the dark-

blue waters simply for the drop-dead beauty

of his song.

Creating this special edition has been a rich exchange by our students, faculty, my fellow FUSION editors, and our extraordinary artists on both sides of the Atlantic. The seaway has had its risks and squalls, but like Raftery, the poet and fiddler Pete Mullineaux writes about in Raftery’s Buttons, we have, together, sharpened our wits and found the steadying rhythm that binds this book. Thanks to the generous spirit from all on this crossing, we have,

staved off the elements,

mellowed cares,

re-jigging old scores

wild ramblings

into sweet strains

and settled airs.

Joseph A. Coroniti, PhD

Editor-in-Chief

Special Features Editor

BERKLEE COMMUNITY

Fiction

Fiction

Andrew Choi

Childhood

They say that when a person dies, his life flashes before his eyes. Well, my life hasn’t flashed before my eyes. I’m not dead yet.

I’m trying to think of all the possible reasons why this could or would have happened to me, and the only thing I could think of is that Gary is an ungrateful little prick. What’s his problem with me! I was the closest thing to a friend he’s ever had, and here he is showing gratitude by stabbing me in the back… literally.

I think it was three times he stabbed me. That’s how it feels. Whatever the real reason was, he really wanted me dead. And that’s what I don’t get. I was the nicest guy in the world to him and he lures me into a trap and kicks me down a freaking ravine to die. The audacity. He must have really thought he killed me; he didn’t even take my phone. Perfect for me. Unfortunate for him; I’ll get my revenge.

"Hello, 911? I’ve been stabbed and throw down a ravine—I need an ambulance. Grunts. I’m a few meters away from the top of the Smoker’s Hill. You know, where all the potheads go to smoke. Gasps. Hurry. I’ve been stabbed three times, I hurt all over, and I’m bleeding very badly. Yeah, it’s someone I know—his name is Gary, Gary Grayson. No, ow, gasps, I don’t know exactly when it happened, just hurry. Fuck, what do you think he stabbed me with? Shit, looks like he stole my wallet, too. JUST. HURRY. Yes, the ravine by Smoker’s Hill. Hurry–" Beep.

Fifteen minutes he says… I think I can get to the top by then. And if I can’t they’ll come get me.

I’m trying to remember the first time I even met Gary. I remember I couldn’t remember his name the first several times even though I had him saved on my phone. But I don’t remember anything beyond that. The boring little shit. I was always surprised when he showed up at my house even though I was expecting him, because I could never remember his plain-ass face. But he’s just a customer, and I’m just a merchant. I was never really obligated to remember his face anyway.

Dammit, I think some of my ribs broke when I fell. Makes sense, actually. It’d be weird if I rolled down all those rocks and bumps, and hit a tree and walk out of this completely unfazed. And I’ve got blood everywhere, too. My ass is getting warm from the blood trickling down. It’s not a great feeling.

Oh yeah, I remember. That run-of-the-mill prick got connected through Tim. I guess I should’ve noticed in Tim’s tone that he didn’t really like Gary, but I wanted the money and I told Tim that I wanted the connection. I guess that’s how this got started.

All I remember was he wasn’t very memorable. He never made a lasting impression. Most of all, everything about him seemed so… fuzzy and gray. If he were in my profession, he’d have been the best. No one would remember him, and no one would recognize him in public. He’d have been the perfect salesman.

Ow, my leg… it doesn’t feel like a break, but still hurts. But I don’t think I sprained it either… I’ll have to ask when the paramedics get here.

He was a steady buyer. The shithead used to come once a week, just the standard dime bag. And then he started coming more frequently and got smart enough to size up to sacks. I guess even he knew his life was boring. But at this point, he’s just a good customer: I welcomed him every time, as long as I was getting my money, and I guess he mistook that as friendship. How was I supposed to know it would end up like this?

Look at all this blood. Look at all this blood. That bastard is going to pay. If he thinks he’s going to get away with attempted murder, he’s got another thing coming. I don’t die that easy.

Conversations with him were the hardest things to ever deal with. He always gave awkward one-word answers with those unbearably short awkward pauses that seemed to last for days.

Hey, Gary. How’ve you been?

Good. Unless they were in any particular rush, people normally follow up with a story or two.

And how’s work?

It’s ok.

But like in any good business, customer service is key. You can’t just turn away a loyal customer after taking his money. No—you have to make small talk to make him feel at home no matter how boring he is, so he can bring in other customers by word of mouth. But the fucker didn’t have any friends, but by the time I got to know that, it was too late.

I think my first mistake, if I would even call it that, was making small talk about his non-existent friends. I just wanted more customers. I don’t really care about the boring prick’s friends. I don’t care how he gets along with his buddy-buddies. I wouldn’t care even if I were paid. Well, actually, I