“Touch,” from the Spring 2012 issue of The Pinch (32.1), will be featured in the 2014 Pushcart Prize Anthology. It’s a brilliant essay by the always admirable Steve Adams, a two-time contributor to the magazine, and we’re proud to have played our part in sharing it with the world. We can’t say we’re surprised, because Steve’s great, but we can say we’re really happy about it. You can still buy that issue for the low, low price of $7 through our online submission portal here.

Steve Adams has published fiction and nonfiction in Glimmer Train, The Missouri Review, Willow Springs, Chicago Review, and many others. He’s also a playwright whose plays have been staged in New York City and beyond. You can learn more about him here.

Shirt worn by Oscar Wilde, 1899. Naudin Chemisier, Paris. Cotton piqué weave. Courtesy of Merlin Holland. RISD Museum, Providence.

Artist/Rebel/Dandy: Men of Fashion

April 28 – August 18, 2013

The Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design is pleased to announce that Artist/Rebel/Dandy: Men of Fashion opens spring 2013, the first exhibition of its kind to focus on the persona and history of the distinctively dressed figure of the dandy. This groundbreaking exhibition features more than 200 objects drawn from our collection and loans from other national and international organizations and private individuals, including innovative garments, bespoke clothing, works on paper, and paintings. Beginning with the elegant dandy George “Beau” Brummell (1778-1840), the exhibition traces artist-dandies throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The role of exquisite craftsmanship in custom design, the dandy’s role as both fashion icon and caricature, and the contributions of today’s style leaders—such as Thom Browne, Rick Owens, Ouigi Theodore, and Waris Ahluwalia—are explored. Artist/Rebel/Dandy is accompanied by a fully illustrated book, co-published and distributed by Yale University Press (May 2013).

The RISD Museum, with entrances at 224 Benefit Street and 20 North Main Street in Providence, RI, is open Tuesday through Sunday, 10 am-5 pm, and 10 am-9 pm every Thursday. Admission: $12 adults; $10 senior citizens (age 62+); $5 college students (with valid ID); $3 youths (ages 5-18); always free for Museum members and children under 5, as well as students, staff, and faculty of member institutions. Free admission every Sunday, 10 am-5 pm, and the third Thursday evening of each month, 5-9 pm. For more information, call 401 454 6500 or visit risdmuseum.org.

Go to this, and take us with you.  – The Pinch

Banyan belonging to George, Prince of Wales, 1780s. Cotton; plain weave, printed. Courtesy of Brighton Royal Pavilion and Museums.

Sartorial Anarchy #5, 2012. Iké Udé, photographer. © Iké Udé. Courtesy of Leila Heller Gallery & Iké Udé.

Les Manteaux, published in Gazette du Bon Ton (vol. 12), 1913. Bernard Boutet de Monvel, illustrator.

After a short break and an attempt at petitioning the President, we’re back for more. Are you ready?

Take a moment and think about presidential language. If you’re a politician— especially if you’re the president—it’s important to be emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually empathetic in pretty much everything you do. That’s a lot to ask of any one human being. Many of us can’t do it at all, even if we try.

But today, Dearest Reader, you will. Give us a short poem/story/grocery list/doodle/whatever, and make yourself completely, utterly, totally empathetic. Feel for us. Inspire us. Reassure us. You’ve got this. Tweet at us at @thepinchjournal, mail it to us, or Facebook us.

]]> http://www.thepinchjournal.com/weekly-throwdown-be-more-presidential/feed/ 0 http://www.thepinchjournal.com/2013-spring-release-party/ http://www.thepinchjournal.com/2013-spring-release-party/#comments Tue, 09 Apr 2013 18:15:47 +0000 The Pinch http://www.thepinchjournal.com/?p=1986

The release party for our current issue is about to set Memphis ablaze.

Highlights:

• Excellent readers, including Michael Martin Shae, DJ Thielke, and Joey Franklin. If you don’t know them now, later you’ll feel silly that you didn’t — they’re the real deal.
• Pinch Punch, a sultry, exciting concoction that is sure to improve your night in mysterious ways.
• Food.
• Just the right amount of danger.
• Great, great company.
• A wonderful venue at a small, unique art gallery.
• The opportunity to help grow Memphis’s literary scene.

Everything is absolutely free of charge. This is an evening about meeting people, celebrating the growing literary community in Memphis, and appreciating the work that everyone’s doing. We’d truly love to see you there.

Freud, Jung, Hall, Farady — they all thought they knew what dreams were all about, and they were all wrong. As it turns out, if you want your dreams interpreted, there’s only one way to get the right answer: Ask The Pinch.

All week long, we interpreted your dreams for you. Readers asked us via e-mail, Twitter (@thepinchjournal), or Facebook. Here were some of our favorites:

Your Dreams, Our Interpretations:

Former poetry and creative nonfiction editor Matthew Hellams interpreted:

This dream suggests that the dreamer has put a significant investment of time, interest, and pride into a part of life that is no longer giving the emotional satisfaction that it once seemed to. There is a desire to move on, but the dreamer feels stuck by the prior energy and commitment put into that part of life. Letting go of the hold this part of the life has on the dreamer could result in a fall (if taken negatively) or a leap of faith (if taken positively).

A few of our editors took this scenario entirely too seriously and discussed it amongst themselves in a manner we wish we’d filmed. So it goes. Managing Editor Justin Luzader had this to offer to @mmmarystweets:

You’re feeling cut off from your own internal energy source by what you feel like is the natural confusion and obscurity of the world. You want the advantage of a proven worldview which orients you correctly in an obscured world.

Assistant Managing Editor Christopher Moyer (@stchristopher) responded:

All of these dreams that people are tweeting aren’t sex dreams? Well, guess what? They are.

Erin Lyndal Martin gave us this dream:

Here is a strange reoccurring dream that I have. I dream that I break into someone’s house, usually a stranger’s, except I only do incredibly mundane things like take a shower while I’m there. The whole time, my heart races with fear of getting caught, but I keep thinking of things to do (like refill the ice cube trays) that delay my leaving the house. It doesn’t excite me to be caught; I worry the
whole time.

What do you make of that?

Thanks!
Erin

Our editors were pretty into that one. Former poetry and creative nonfiction editor Matthew Hellams wrote:

This dream talks of being distanced from one’s self. The dreamer undergoes a constant fear of being found out to be a fraud, to be not the true owner of the house, and yet all of the tasks the dreamer describes performing in the house are basic self and home upkeep activities. The delaying chores could function as a defense against punishment in case one is caught. The dreamer may feel like an imposter in waking life and overcompensate by doing tasks for others in order to keep the potential judgment of others at bay.

Justin Luzader had this to offer:

What an interesting dream! The tension between the everyday and the exceptional, we think, is very telling. In the tradition of dream interpretation—according to the one dream-interpretation book we have as a reference—dreaming of house work is often a symbol of feeling you have ownership over your daily tasks, that the work you do leads directly and obviously to your comfort, and to a sense of security and accomplishment. It indicates a certain harmony between the internal and the external. Your dream, however, seems to indicate the opposite. You’re breaking into someone else’s home, you’re terrified the whole time, and you are performing the actions that, in dream-speak, are meant to represent a sense of safety and control over your environment. There seems to be a profound sense of displacement hidden here. The dream version of yourself knows what must be done to improve your situation, yet there seems to be nowhere you can go where this knowledge matters, where it will give you the control it ought. So, the knowledge you do have, the abilities you do have, are actually contributing to your sense of danger, your sense of displacement, rather than diminishing them. Overall—we’re getting a sense of being in the wrong place. There is a sense of being misunderstood, perhaps, a feeling of your strengths being misunderstood by those around you (maybe they’re even seeing your strengths as weaknesses?), or at least a feeling that your personal strengths are not being engaged fully, are not being put to work.

Cedar Lorca Nordbye submitted this dream:

I Dreamed that K was doing this artwork with (her father?) that involved projecting an image of George W. Bush wearing Saddam Hussein’s beard (or Osama’s beard?) onto a cluster of ducks that were flying/trying to fly way up in the trees.  The ducks were tethered on strings so that they couldn’t get away.  The ducks formed a kind of projection screen. The whole thing was in the yard of a neighbor using a neighbor’s trees. Feeling bad for the ducks, I cut the string of one and it crashed through a high window of the house.  We all high-tailed it out of there and back to K’s house.  The neighbors were friends of ours and came over to tell us about the duck or to accuse us.  We all played dumb and pretended to only speak Spanish.  At one point I took the neighbor aside and hugged her and said “Lo siento mucho por el pato.” and they were like, okay, thank you for admitting.  Why didn’t you ask us for permission?  I explained in Spanish that the project was K’s idea  and I didn’t know why she didn’t ask for permission.  I went to leave and at that moment taxis pulled up for everyone.  I teased the neighbors for taking a taxi just across the street, “I totally understand,” I said, “Memphis is a rough town!”  They were actually off to work.  I declined my taxi and said I was going to walk home (joking) because that actually would be dangerous in the middle of the night through a couple of rough neighborhoods)  I was actually just walking to my car. My car was parked across the street in a parking lot.  I started walking towards it and then realized that there were people in it and I had mistaken my old car for my new car.  They were both white sedans, but I’d given my old car to one of my former students when someone gave me this new car. I walked up to the students who were surprised to see me.  I joked with them that I had almost called the cops thinking someone had jacked my ride.  I said “Hey there are black people in my car!” and we all laughed because the joke was that I’m such a typically racist white guy that the only time you’d ever see black people in my car is if someone had jacked it.  One of them broke out in a rap about how the only time you’d see a white guy in his car is if it was the body of a dead cop.

Matthew Hellams interpreted:

This dream suggests an attempt to come to terms with the dreamer’s racial, political, and social guilt. The dreamer’s efforts to change problematic social constructions seem to backfire, leaving the dreamer to do damage control. Humor is used as a defense against the tense social situation. The desire for social harmony is beginning to guide the unconscious toward a new approach to social change.

Thanks for participating, and come back in the next few days for a new challenge.

Among the poetry in that issue is “8×8,” which we’ve been informed will appear in this year’s Pushcart Prize Anthology. We’re beyond proud to have been the ones to publish “8×8″ and to have another piece that debuted in The Pinch featured in the anthology.

You can order a copy of Lee’s issue on the cheap through our online submission portal. Just hit the “Back Issue” option and request #32.1 in the comments. Be sure to check out Ms. Sharkey’s work, and pick up a copy of the Pushcart Anthology when it hits stores!

The original post:

Booth P5. That’s where you’ll find The Pinch, as well as our staff.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to take a picture with a copy of The Pinch and at least one our of editors, current or former. You may e-mail or text the picture to editor@thepinchjournal.com.

They have not been warned that this is happening, but hopefully it will make them feel loved.

Our favorite submitted picture (or pictures, perhaps) from the conference will receive a care package from the staff once we’ve reviewed them all. Our criteria are hazy and totally subjective—will we choose the most bizarre picture? The funniest? The one with the most people in it? The one featuring the sincerest smile? We don’t even know yet, and that element of unpredictability is what keeps us all on our toes.

See you out there. Stay hydrated.

The best photo:

Though many friendly, lovely friends of The Pinch stopped by the booth, this picture holds a special place in our hearts, mainly because it’s upside down. That’s Lisa Fulgham along with Creative Nonfiction Editor Mariah Chitouras.

Thanks to everyone who came out! You made it worth sitting at the booth.

Roughly a week ago, we asked you to share your anecdotes about breaking the law with us.

Our favorite featured a stolen squad car and a dog attack:

My brother-in-law did a few stints in radio in some small markets for a while, ostensibly paying his dues as he became a famous radio man. He was a disc jockey for a season at a country station in Fayetteville, Arkansas and got to know some of the local color there. He told me this story about one of the town drunks named Eddie. Eddie was one of those poor souls that just walked around with trouble following him like a cheap store detective. In his backwards baseball cap and goatee, Eddie could always be seen in the back of a squad car on any given night after pay day.

One time my brother-in-law was working a remote broadcast for a promotion. He had a friend that was an officer with the K-9 unit. The officer had stopped by at the radio remote to do a little PR for law and order and to keep an eye on the benign crowd. Eddie was there, too, drunk as usual. He stumbled onto the officer’s police car, still idling behind the radio booth. Eddie thought in his deluded stupor that it might be fun to slip behind the driver’s wheel of the squad car and turn the wheel back and forth a couple of times.

Eddie climbed in and shut the door. No sooner though, than he had turned his cap around and prepared for a serious fantasy, when all of a sudden the backseat erupted in furious canine barking and growling. The officer had left his German Shepherd in the backseat. Eddie, terrified of dogs, peed his pants, threw the car into gear and floored it, trying to escape the beast trying to get at him. The dog was keeping up with him though, and in fact it felt to Eddie like the dog might be gaining on him.  After crossing three lanes of traffic and miraculously avoiding bodily injury to citizens, he bailed and let the squad car crash into the Piggly Wiggly.

The dog never did catch him, and was none the worse for the unfortunate incident. Eddie ran back to the officer, crying like a girl not to let the dog get him.

Congrats to Darrell Hugueley on taking the W this week. Everyone else: stay tuned, because tomorrow we’re announcing a special AWP-themed challenge. It will require humor, guts, a heart, and probably a writing implement.

The book was just published this month by Hawthorne Books, and you can find it in bookstores, Amazon, and through Hawthorne’s website.

Due to a nasty stomach bug going around the office, we’re a little late this week, but bear with us. We’ll be making it up to you by bringing you an even juicier, more dangerous topic. Dare we say scandalous, even?

People are endlessly interesting, especially when they’re making decisions that put them at odds with authority—whether due to poor judgment or upholding their ideals in the face of The Man. Plenty of other writers who went before you found themselves at odds with the law. O. Henry went to prison for embezzlement. Ken Kesey was arrested for possession, but not before attempting to fake his own suicide¹ to avoid the cops. We’d wager to guess that most of us are guilty of breaking the law in one way or another, whether in small, mundane ways or larger ones.

Getting to the point:

Wouldn’t it feel good to confess? Tell us a story about breaking a law.

Send your story (the really short version) to editor@thepinchjournal.com or message us on Facebook.

We’ll post up the best responses in a week’s time, and the office favorite will get a care package from our editors.

¹ He left his truck on a cliff-side road, along with a note that read in part: “Ocean, Ocean I’ll beat you in the end. I’ll break you this time. I’ll go through with my heels your hungry ribs…” This gambit did not work out.