Paradigm – 2008
Issue 6
Quarterly
Micah Zevin
In the appropriately named Paradigm, it is as if all the disparate forms of literature have unified to create a beautiful spiders web of art that includes sounds for the ears too. If you try to read every piece in one sitting, you may be so enthralled as to stay up to the wee hours of the night.
In the appropriately named Paradigm, it is as if all the disparate forms of literature have unified to create a beautiful spiders web of art that includes sounds for the ears too. If you try to read every piece in one sitting, you may be so enthralled as to stay up to the wee hours of the night.
In the fiction section, when you read the story “Never Date a Writer” by Alex Stephens, it is immediately clear what the writer or narrator wants to say: “Never date a writer because she’ll fictionalize everything. She’ll write about things you have done to her, or things you never did for her. She’ll write about how you never bought her flowers. Not once.”
In the nonfiction piece “Box on Coffee Table” by Matthew Lavin, the writing is stark, simple and prone to elegiac list making: “I stare at the cardboard box on my coffee table. The ashes inside were my grandfather. The man who played banjo. The man who played harmonica. The man who died before I returned to Florida to say goodbye.”
When you encounter poetry in Paradigm, as in “Body #2” by Amy Mae Schimpf, it is often a mysterious and questioning experience: “She walked to the park bathroom to read the patterns: black to red to blue. Was it a large fist? Did it have a ring?”
Paradigm treats every literary form with the respect it deserves. As a result, you too may let yourself be lured into its web of narrative and yes, even sound that never seems to finish or run out of things to say.
[paradigmjournal.com/elliott/]
