Redivider – 2006
Volume 3 Number 2
Spring 2006
Biannual
Christopher Mote
As if Ploughshares weren’t enough work, Emerson College has its grad students doing their own thing. Like a number of young, urban lit journals, Redivider isn’t afraid of subverting pop culture while presenting fresh new modes of aesthetic philosophy that even the amateur types can “get” and appreciate.
As if Ploughshares weren’t enough work, Emerson College has its grad students doing their own thing. Like a number of young, urban lit journals, Redivider isn’t afraid of subverting pop culture while presenting fresh new modes of aesthetic philosophy that even the amateur types can “get” and appreciate. And yet, how far it has come. Two short stories stood out for me: “Odds Even Odds” by Tom Stoner and “The Wall of Sequoias” by Urban Waite. The twisted narrative of “Odds Even Odds” is almost unworthy of its characters. The sway between the absurd and the sublime parallels the story’s intricate search for resolution between odds and evens, the narrator/mathematician’s idea of balance versus his wife/musician’s creative spirit and three-step compositions, further complicated by her reckless and very pregnant sister who threatens to drive them all over the edge. The pace of “The Wall of Sequoias” is much different, plotless and character-oriented. Questions of fidelity, manliness, labor, and sexual awakening provide the framework for a boy’s coming of age in the Sierras during the summer. Gradually, Waite gives us the details and builds to a moment. Visual art gets well represented in Redivider, as does the experimental fringe via a pair of avant-garde plays by collaborators Mark Halladay and Martin Stannard. But the author interviews alone may be worth the subscription: this issue features fiction writers Antonya Nelson and Kelly Link. I must say that Kathleen Rooney, here with Link, has been a consistently engaging interviewer, even when she veers off course on occasion (she has a habit of asking guests for favorite recipes). As a whole, Redivider is more than showy: its experience is textual, visual, didactic, and especially conversational.
[http://pages.emerson.edu/publications/redivider/]
