Hybrid
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Searching Childhood: Driftwood Center at Night; Daughterland; Tongue-lied Girl; Lobotomy; Undaughter *
art by Jeff Hartnett
by Maggie Wolff
*We at LIT admire Maggie's bold and unflinching prose. But, we would be remiss without supplying readers with a trigger warning for strong content: trauma and emotional abuse, alcohol and drug abuse, behavioral health hospitalization and discussions of suicide.Searching Childhood: Driftwood Center at Night
This is where you remember the night memories: your sleeping mother, her sleeping daughters, a night so still someone should have heard the crunch of grass under the men’s shoes.
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On Hybridity: Hybrid Editors Charlotte Slivka and Gabrielle Gonzales in conversation with LIT Social Media Editor Grace Dignazio
“Hybridity is the creativity of necessity.” — Charlotte Slivka
What should the literary hybrid look like? This was the starting point of my inquiry as I spoke with LIT Hybrid Editors Charlotte Slivka and Gabrielle Gonzales to try to get to the bottom of what comprises a successful hybrid text. When I think of the hybrid, I think of work that is slippery and playful, transgressive and unclassifiable; work that skirts the edges of genre to create something wholly new and unexpected. I think of the wildly experimental practices of transdisciplinary artists like Cecilia Vicuña,
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down on the Ol’ Brain Ranch
photo by Allison Guan
by John Sullivan
(A new situation comes into focus. The bulbous / florid-faced / fake-smiley guy is talking to an empty suit draped over an empty chair. Talking ardently, even strenuously, occasionally grabbing the suit by its lapels & hoisting it (gently) off the chair to speak to confront the suit (more or less) face to face. You realize he’s talking to his father.)
aka “Doc Benway”
I … I … I always hated how you had to control us.
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Love in the time of distance; Someone to Carry On With; I am most myself when someone is holding my hand
photo by Allison Guan
by Shana Ross
Love in the time of distanceI tell her I have been re-reading Gertrude. She says I would write your autobiography. Referentially. Unironically. Lovingly. Unwilling to trace possibilities to their dead-ends in the maze printed on the paper placemat, one fingertip at a time over and over until the future has been seen. A marble run, a domino track, a Rube. Set off and unwatched. We go about our day but in my ears is the clattering.
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sike.
art by Robert Rogers
by Baraka Noel
I’m sensitive. A smell can send me spinning. I cry for fiction more than life. Today, I saw this cavalcade of blue-black glistening flies vibrating on a dollop of canine feces. So many eyes kaleidoscoping over shit. So much dog shit on the streets. So much information.
I guess they call it empathy. As a child, I wished for synesthesia; now I shower in the dark to deprive my senses of context. I’m pretty sensitive. But, that’s not entirely why I wound up in a psych ward.
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Matches, and Shoveling
art by Carl Svantje Hallbeck, 1856
by Maureen Sherbondy
Matches
My father collected matchbooks under a glass table. He wanted visitors to know all the restaurants he’d been to. But no one ever stepped foot in his apartment but us four kids. There were no beds. He kept us on surfaces with no covers. We were his display items just like the restaurant names on paper. I wanted to sleep beside the matchbooks and pretend I was visiting New York restaurants. Once he took us to Cape May for a few days.
