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Howls From The Underground: An Anthology is published by Screamin Skull Press. You can purchase a paperback copy by clicking on this link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Howls-Underground-Mr-Tony-Nesca/dp/1722975083/

Ali Kinteh is the author of The Nepenthe Park Chronicles. Please click the following Amazon link to get a copy: When the Canadian writer Tony Nesca invited me to submit some penscript irritations of mine to an anthology he was earnestly putting together, it was a proposition that I was ever likely to turn down. He is the scripter of more than a dozen voluptuary titles spanning twenty years. He is among my most favorite contemporary authors, simply because of his verse anarchy and word dissidence. He has the testicular minerals to thread an exhaustive sentence without accretion. His expositions (and his scruples) hearken to a beady period in mid-twentieth century literature when Hubert Selby Jr. Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson and Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote sempiternal masterpieces; when Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke and William S. Burroughs were incendiary guerillas known as the Beat Generation. Tony Nesca is, what I would call, a prose percussionist. His musicality has not deviated far from the pen pot now that he has replaced the strum with a quill. The ictus of his sentences bequeaths an earthy cadence that braids his storytelling. His extemporaneous tenor is both lucid and lexical. His taut and roiling descriptions characterize the bombination of the sibilant street and lamenting city. A faint but simmering baseline disports itself in the bohemian vale, amid the pneumatic drillings and the fragmentary discord of denizens, whose pensive chimes are as portent as a leper’s bell. This faint, simmering brooding lingers on, till the book’s ending or when the reader stops. In these shriving times, it is refreshing to read the works of a dogged, unmodulated but protean author who is unencumbered in expression, unsubdued by style, unlike the chinless desiderata that currently hold sway in the theater of the absurd, which we hope to occupy. But we must remain steadfast to our principles, though it could mean endless purgatory and recessive penury. We, who are of a deep-rooted tradition of learning and letters, write simply because we must, simply. A niagara of success d’estime would, of course, be welcomed and embraced by our schools of thought and introspection. It is our desire to erect a sacramental stall in the Market Square of Ideas. And if you, dear reader, remain in doubt about Nesca or, more to the point, his work, forensic ruminations into husky book titles such as Emma Strunk, Jukebox Music, Junkyard Lucy, Vodka Orange Sunday and Last Stop To Saskatoon serve as heuristic exemplars of his transgressive back catalog. I consider the novella About A Girl to be his magnus opus.

So I accepted his invitation. Saying yes beckoned me into a millefeuille of intemperate authors and artists, scribes and poets, who do not stray into conventional genres. They came (to quote author Scott Laudati) from under the smog of New York City, the West Texas taquieras, the upper sands of Lake Michigan and the green cliffs of Kent… (and, in my case, the town of Leyton by the Lea River). Most of these artists were unknown to me previously. Nesca, however, deserves praise for herding us cats together. We were scattered in the quintessential dust across two continents, separated by an eternal ocean, rising and sleeping in multiple time zones. The anthology was collated and published in a relatively short period of time. All of us were apportioned an equal number of pages to spew our guts. I have since read Howls From The Underground thrice. Any book worth reading ought to be read thrice. The first reading was a brisk absorption along the Appian Way, on back-and-forth Greater Anglia train rides from rambunctious London to fair Witham. The second was a delightful encounter over two nectarous bottles of valpolicella and three delicious Guantanamera’s in the garden before the October sun. The third, and the most concentrated effort, were without the above pleasures. Carte Noir coffee and a notebook were my only companions. I stayed up all night with it. I was accompanied by the beating wind. I tugged more slowly at the book’s riptide contents. When I had finished, Dawn was being charioted sadly across the firmament by her flighty horses, Lampos and Phaethon. Her tears ostensibly dropped from the sky and dampened my notations. She was still mourning her unyieldingly decrepit consort Tithonos. But I do not pity her. I wanted the sun to come up.

Once the sun had risen, I had already decided to write a compendium, save my own virulent contribution. Perlustrating examinations of authors is a parlous task that I don’t readily shy from. I have a foremost obligation to my own writing integrity, of which there can be no compromise. I am a pugilist democrat, a homme serieux, if I may say so myself. I interpret things in a manner that may offend the sons of Adam, daughters of Eve. I would rather be defamatory by accident than to be declamatory on purpose. A writer can often unintentionally wound those that she loves by a few blotchings of ink. Her parents and offspring may give her no quarter for making a naked disclosure. Her friends and colleagues may part with her for her indiscretion. Her husband might not forgive her freebooting. (And I may not be invited to partake in an anthology ever again). A similitude for a writer of this kind could be a Stuwwelpeter or Edward Scissorhands type, who is inordinately skilled at topiaries and hair trimming, but wounds and cuts by chance, leading to calumny and accusations of casuistry. Employing a contraindication in such circumstances cannot be blamed on a writer who declines such form of transcendence. But I’d rather that than to be a shill, and lose all credibility. My thrice reading of Howls From The Underground allayed any contention for my part. The book is a quarry of incendiary stories and pungent verses. Furthermore, I should hasten to add that I have neither favor nor gain from any of the contributing authors, if I were to say anything agreeable about their work. I am too disagreeable for that. And if my essays were removed from it, the anthology would not have suffered. It was exceedingly well put together. We had, collectively, done well. Tony Nesca had handpicked well.

Drew Alexander Ennis’ efflorescent artwork throughout the book is both madeleine and fetching. His sketching in minatory ink typesets a Brechtian-like print that rendered me moonstruck before the witching hour. I stared at the curvatures that his belabored brushstrokes undertook as he embellished his creations. The portrait that grabbled me most was the one that immediately followed my chapter – a man seated by a desk with a notepad and pencil. His left hand clasped the left side of his face. The fingers of his right hand pressed against his chin. Behind him, others are seated; their countenances unseen. His own arresting countenance is beleaguered. His disposition is riddled with angst. I looked upon him as myself in a previous phase, when the hours were harsh and friendless. It did not quite, thankfully, incite the gothic terrors that caused Peter O’Toole’s character General Tanz from the 1967 film Night Of The Generals to tremor uncontrollably when he stared at Vincent Van Gogh self-portrait known as Vincent In Flames. Van Gogh, it was said, sketched this painting whilst he was an asylum inmate. I nicknamed Ennis’ piece Ali In Flames because of its momenti mori affectations.Only Ptah can objectively sub-vocalize the source of his fiber-optic impulses for such illustration and design. If he were to produce a kunstleerroman, I’d be intrigued to read it. But flick through the anthology. One can belabor Ennis’ sibylline delineations between each chapter for moments on end, and at a canter, if you will.

The anthology begins with the outthrust of Nicole Nesca. Her books are often charged with contravening overtones. The eclecticism of her pen strays from convention and comfort zones. It was as if Shakespeare’s Hamlet had Nicole in mind when he said The lady shall speak her mind freely or the blank verse will halt for it. She hails from Youngstown, Ohio. She has published half-a-dozen or so tumultuous books. Incidentally, Tony Nesca, the prose percussionist, is her husband. She sets the bar high for the rest of her cohorts to hurdle. Her opening poesy … And The Music Swells is a salient awakening to the anthology’s Rabelaisian theme. Mooncalf and Rat’s Nest Rant are staccato versed. The Artist is of the distilled reality of the ignoble artisan, who is at the tender mercies of exponential forces that govern her from within and from without. You forgot to pray for the angels and they turned away from you. So you cut and pasted your own wings. Feather by feather, you created those wax less wings and aimed for the burning sun. Most careers do, however, end with an Icarian dive into the sea. Their demises do not mark as deterrents for the next host of artisans. By all means, they should not do so. It still remains possible to saddle the burning sun. The Artist adroitly aims for Helios. Anoche is a marcelle-waved short story brimming with afferent endeavor. It is resplendently homespun. Drunk and beautiful, she laughs and cries in a single sound. The Corybant, in this jazzy narrative, is a lambent flame, engrossed with her ritual chores amidst the habitual revelry. Pride, baby, pride. This is sublime reading for the initiated. Hemorrhaged is one of the standout pieces in the entire collection. It is solemnly and scrupulously written. Every sentence is laden with weltschmerz but hastens with vigor. The gravitas of this story, of a woman in the aftermath of an hysterectomy, bleeding in the midst of a shower, and then being rushed to hospital, exerts itself forward as if it were written on a Dodge Tomahawk, pages flapping in violation of the wind. Nicole Nesta writes without a motorbike helmet whilst driving down a declivity. She writes without abatement, without beseeches, without brakes.

Scott Laudati, an author from New Jersey, was previously unknown to me. One comes to know an author by the way he blandishes his words. He devises some of the most mercurial passages in the book. What says I love you like our noses sharing a dollar bill is emblematic of his wit. I want to build a library with you is a cerebral way of of saying I want to marry you and father your babies. For aren’t libraries built to last? Verily, the oldest libraries outlast the longest marriages. These verses of plentiful charisma are plucked from his marvelously calibrated love story Take The Path For Cocaine And PLATH. The protagonist contemplates stealing a puppy in a dog park for his love. This was after he had purchased cocaine for their noses and before he purchased two books The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway and an unnamed title by Sylvia Plath for their prospective library. The latter choice of the heart may have exerted a second chance for this most enterprising of suitors.

Laudati’s contributions are not without the fain forays into the forelands of our times, and the hecatombs of yesteryear. The twin sanguinary decades of our century pulsate through his kalam. In Baby Boomers (False Flags) and Fish Tank, world events marinate in the backdrop. His quotidian avocations meander with stainless verse. History’s bated breath still seethes in the smoke of previous battlefields, which have induced little rumination from the mob in these preposterous times. God and Country are still being importuned. That is all that matters: Put your hand to your heart and thank God for Wal-mart. Is that Him out there? No. It’s another talking point to get your kids on their knees so when your head rolls into their laps, your sacrifice will have some meaning, and you won’t look like the other fools of history, who died for nothing. (Baby Boomers; False Flags).

Laudati’s neoteric writing is crisp and deliciously cogitating. I recited his prosody in a mezzo mezzo incantation to my darling child, who delightfully chorused these free verses between his elfin chuckles. Leave Me Alone recalls the glutted foreboding of the girdled night worker on shift. We see the earnest Orestes with a slug of Freud. The glutted foreboding I observed from my former life as a security officer played out through the prism of this idiom: The city is finally yours. Just a faraway hum of an ambulance. No taxi horns. No one is left to ask anything of you. One soul, laden with tyrannical melancholy, watches over a slumbering city. Putting The Art To The K-mart is an evocation of The Wonder Years. When we were young, rocks were the thing to throw. It taught me a lot about glass. An audacious arts indulgence, culminating in paint, urine, semen, cigarette butts, the use of mushrooms and more broken glass, ends with prison or jail for its creatives, and the inevitable firing of their avant-garde arts teacher. Thereafter, we spent the rest of the year, gluing pasta together. We were all safe after that but none of us went on to make something anybody would ever stop and look at. ‘Better to be safe than sorry’ is one of the structural apothegms of our wet educational system.

GH Neale, author of the novels Archipelago, Arriba and Argonautica, offers a sacrilegious amuse-bouche titled En La Plaza Mayor. It is a vivid and irreverent piece. The author’s preciosity to detail raptures the reader into the palpitating sights and smells of Spain’s capital city. Neale has assembled an unsavory menagerie on vacation in Madrid They stumble upon the Plaza Mayor. Signor Ali Spagnola asserts himself as an exemplary host. Neale teases the reader with a voracious menu, which is wasted upon three vulgarians and a lady: Arthur, of the quinine mouth and uncouth manners; Jackie, his insipid, acquiescent wife; Attis, Arthur’s frothy and flaccid disciple. His wife, (the lady) Amalia who is with child. It is quite a spectacle. This food is to die for, a veritable vernissage lectisternium, a banquet for the gods, exclaims Attis to which Arthur replies I’d rather eat shit than to eat this food. But he engorges the food anyway, eating himself further into ugliness. My sympathies abide with Amalia. She partakes of the food whilst giving due consideration to her unborn. She ends up vomiting over her dress, though I’d wished she’d throw up over Arthur so that he could trot home for any early bath. Or even upon her husband for being a moist dick. Americans guffaw crudely at the scene. I was rather fond of the endearing British who took residence at the Marigold Hotel, rather less of the philistine Americans seated here at the Plaza Mayor. Nevertheless, GH Neale is a writer of incredible depth and precision. His able storytelling is analogous to the amaranthine books from the days of yore.

Ted Prokash follows on Neale’s heels with a juddering offering The Letter. The taxonomy of his work is difficult to categorize. His storytelling hedged me from my seat because, having begun innocuously enough – Dimitri spewing his rage into a peremptory letter to the one he loves – until he is pursued and coarsely murdered by two men, one of whom is the brother of Dimitri’s heart. In the course of his interrogation before he is butchered, we learn that Dimitri had severed his penis and sent to his heart, Katerina. We can deduce that he is a sick man, but not sick in the conventional sense. In order to ascertain his bereaved mind, we need study the contents of his final letter. He bemoans the bellwethers and the beguilers that steer society into conformism. His vehemence is directed at the hypocrisy of these armchair academics and social scientists that pretend to care for the so-called lower classes. Just observe one of these people, he writes, in a restaurant or tavern. One of these upstanding, good citizens. Will they be bothered to give one kind word or a show of deference to the poor servant girl who brings them their coffee? Bah!! They will order her around like the mean, petty bourgeois scum that they are! All their talk about lifting up the lower classes is just pandering. Glib condescension serving to uphold a false sense of propriety… It is interesting to note that the (poor servant) girl who brings him his coffee (laden with a shot of whiskey no less) is terrified of him, despite his polite efforts to allay her anxiety. In the letter he adds: What could be more indicative of one’s regard for the state of our species than the forfeiture of the incarnate tool of life’s impetus – the very flesh tool of procreation itself?!

Dimitri had asked Katerina to post his letter on the door of the church, somewhat in the manner of Martin Luther at Castle Church, Wittenburg, as a warning to all who enter into the halls of academia and the shadowy corridors of government. Let it stand as a warning against the forfeiture of personal courage in the name of group acceptance. The letter is not destined to reach Katerina. It is extinguished after him. His murderers read the letter before they consume it to ashes. They consider it ironic that Dimitri is part of the retroussé he despises. They harbor the same contempt for those in governance. That’s the problem in this country. We’ve no shortage of gentleman of letters. One can walk into any barbershop and hear a grandiloquent. But when it comes to do the hard work of governance…

Prokash is an absorbing author of rousing stories and astounding books. His works are ameliorated by on what Arthur Miller called the politics of the soul. He writes with a carefree panache that can only be liberating for the uncontrived creative, who is a disciple of the gyre and of the proclivities of the tellurian kind. He interlaces the hubris that resides in the flophouse of the human heart. As a result, his characters are expansive. I would recommend you read his 2016 doughty novel The Brothers Connolly, a tale of three brothers, of differing age, temperance and fortune. Timeworn themes of blood feuds, the coming-of-age and Paradise lost are reborn and replenished in the small town of Nasewaupee, Wisconsin. The Letter, itself, is not dissimilar to allusive works like it. It is amorphous in scope. It is easy to ascribe these brutal stories to the east of the former Iron Curtain. In today’s world, Dimitri’s derogations and murder could occur under the gaze of the Eiffel Tower or beneath the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. Whether it be east or west, our freedoms are being assailed, from the right and from the left. It is that prevalence of mindful thought that makes Prokash an important read. May his books be exalted upon all bookshelves in our times!

Laura Kerr’s opening paean pines for a remote prelapsarian age, when the world felt like a better place. My Apple Tree is marked in the dainty voice of a child. I knew when to reach my arms up high, mimicking the branches. Balanced on tiptoes, I was the apple tree, waiting to touch the sky… My mother was the fairy who cut an apple in half and gave a star to me. Her verses are supple and tender. She provides an enema of the incunabulum. This salience is often deaf to the adult mind. But it burns with refulgence in Kerr’s palms. The Dreamer exhibits the same appeal. The child sees gargoyles and boogeymen in the darkness of her room, conjured from sinuous contours made by clothesline and blankets. Who can remember having these jitters at bedtime? That I should dream tonight like a child who doesn’t understand. I can’t remember him, my boogeyman. Similar peturbations are reflected in My Ghost. Kerr’s broodings here are subtly conveyed in deliberate, multifaceted verse.

In The End is a funereal vignette to what was an electrical object of some kind – a once-prized television set perhaps – dislocated on a rubbish tip. I am split screen greens and scarlet line rockets, upright on my reinforced skyscraper legs. This dexterous piece is laden with allegory. This once valued commodity is being rummaged by allsorts, man, beast and machinery. Man: Lifting my battery-box torso arched against electron guns and phosphorescent socket tunes, for the moonlight technician plays a thumping circuit. One can envisage the beasts of the air pecking and flying off with detritus bits of metal and cable: I am a loveless seagull hut. Funny how ludicrous my seagull hut is… I feel feathers landing on my lap. And finally her Rage against the Machines: Bulldozer hands gather them up. I am the queen of the deflecting electron heap. I am God. I am garbage. I am not a pile of wreckage dressed for night groans. The night groans can be heard on the landfill site. Garbage trucks and refuse lorries return with more roughage. But she could never have foreseen this ending, even at the very end. I am not a pile of wreckage dressed for night groans, she says, mournfully.

Ode To Him is a stark dirge about a hoarder, who goes up in flame with all of his obsessions. On My Body speaks to the journey of the etherized noesis, metamorphosed in ink, onto an almanac or paper by the poet’s hand. The oeuvres of Kerr’s work are wellsprings into the abstract. I’ve read some of her acrostics elsewhere. She has been decorated with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal for her contribution to art. Few possess that dual quality of painting words and imagery. Few mortals find obverse favor from Saraswati.

I was enthralled by all three of Chrissi Sepe’s charming fables. Beers And Sunlight tells of a peculiar but not uncommon relationship. Micah has forsaken all ambition. She has moved in with a feral pulchritude named Ray. She met him in a park while employed as a dog walker. She is besotted with his indefinable charm. She becomes his espouser. He is less of a lover, more of a companion. She makes love to him but only in her dreams. He sees no purpose in penetration, though he yields to her just the one time. She watches him sleep and yearns for his affection, though she is careful not to bother him for it. She listens to his music. When he awakes, they watch television. They bathe together. They do little else. Meanwhile, Ray is desiccating in the shadow of his true love, Jim, who has abandoned him but still pays the rent. They look like the archetypal couple to others, and perhaps they are. They just get by, drifting effortlessly, daily, in a symbiotic union… Long after Beers And Sunlight had ended, I was left to wonder at their misalliance. Ray’s feelings for Micah are conspicuous enough. However, he does not love her enough to free her. The little he does is enough to keep her put. And when he is seemingly giving her a choice to leave so that she may proceed with her life, he, in effect, is telling her to stay. Micah, listen. You can do whatever you want. It’s up to you. If you need to leave, then do it. I’ll understand. But I really wish you would stay. And she does. He knows his power.

I’m Sexy AF is of an ostentatious internet model mired in the merry hell of Instagram, which acts as a placebo … Vanity of vanities. All is vanity. (Ecclesiastes 1:2). She flaunts her young body before her friend’s flashing camera. She claims she does not need the emotional reinforcement of her fans, but nevertheless keeps a keen eye on their number. Neither is she much bothered about the conjecture she receives from voyeurs and the like. The manifestation of her soul sickness is laid bare here: If anything, it (Instagram) turns the voices off. The voices that tell me that I’m worthless… That’s why I love Instagram. It turns those voices right off. Even if only for a little while.

One can presume that her malady would exponentially increase once the inevitable senescent tide sets in. She is neither Dorian Gray nor Peter Pan but she is bound to their ravenous appetites. As her age rises, so will the volume of those voices. As her pulchritude abates, so will her purblind reality. She and Greta are a sybaritic pair, amongst a generation of reflexive neurotics. Seppe, in this understated story, has captured the inner and outer trappings of this tawdry social media phenomenon.

May Instagram be extirpated in our days!

We Love To Watch Zee Cockroaches is of an eccentric couple, Karina and Tomas, who claim to bore easily, are bored easily but they love cockroaches. They play host to Denny and the narrator. Seppe has created a pair of anomalous characters, and they are conveyed very well in this short story, accents, actions et al. This kooky drollery rolled out well over its five or so pages. I wished it were longer. It would have been interesting to have read on Karina and Tomas’ itinerant through Europe. But that is a matter for the author. It is not for me to suggest what a scrivener should be doing with her time. Characters are Seppe’s redoubtable strength. In fact, it is easy to show empathy for them because they are demonstrably human, whether bizarre or broken. In life and literature, it is kooks, misfits, quaints and freaks that generate thought and ideas, and are behind the wheel of every civilization adorned by Man.

Stephen Moran’s chapter contains the most transgressive reads in the anthology. His chthonic fable A Parable filled me with ethereal awe. It is a tale of the unexpected. It relates the story of a woman named Mary, who falls upon a rakish stranger tied to a tree. She had taken a detour onto a country boulevard from the highway. Her car stops, seemingly of its own desire. The stranger is a confluence of corporeal angst and carnal misgivings. Despite his ebbed intimiations about freeing him, she does so anyway. He immediately falls upon and rapes her. After she wakes from her ordeal, he is standing over her with a thick branch in his hands.

I gave you freedom and pleasure, she cried…

I know. (He replies).

Who are you? She asked.

Jesus Harold Christ! I exclaim to myself on a packed train!

Moran, by legerdemain and hook, had inverted the greatest story ever told. His Jesus had obviated from agnus dei lamb to fulminant wolf. He had argued that his state was necessary and natural. She was responsible for his entrapment, at least vicariously. But she had unwittingly refused his sacrifice and freed him from his bonds. This ectoplasm from heaven was now bound from sin, just like any wanton beast, and to partake in ignoble plunder. And so he forced himself upon her, as if it were his first temptation. And in spite of her name being Mary! Mother of God!!! Perhaps this was no son of Man. Was he a son of Earth? Perchance this was some demon or incubus from Hades, diabolically mocking as he diabolically does. And no marvel, says II Corinthians 11, verse 14-15, for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.  Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works. Incidentally, A Parable is also a stark inversion of the Parable Of The Good Samaritan. Mary would have fared better had she gone the way of the Priest and the Levite and crossed the street. For aiding the Nazarene had its diminishing returns and she had damned her soul.

Transitory, Moran’s other short tale, is of Scott Holden. He operates (and I use that word plaintively) in the throes of a careworn existence. Human affirmation is nondescript until it is made verifiable by a computer. If he is unknown to a computer, then he does not exist. Holden finds himself entangled in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy which subsequently breaks down his baseline power. He reports for work. The administrator consults her computer and claims he is not due for work. He is scheduled for work on the forthcoming Sunday. Returning home, he texts a co-worker who he socializes with. The co-worker responds I don’t know you. When he returns on the Sunday, the computer is consulted by a manager, Roger. You do not exist, he is told. After losing his truck, he returns to the establishment and enquires after Roger. He is told that there is nobody by that name present. Or he thinks that’s what he’s being told. He runs away screaming, seemingly having lost his mind.

The undercurrent of this story accentuates the oblique vulnerability and shabby reality of Holden in an incorrigible world. He lives in an exclusionary state, waking up to the day in the dead silence of his whiskey-induced sleep. This banal velocity, prefixed with implicit paranormal convulsions, mechanizes the madness and despair. And when he runs off at the end, into the darkness, one fears the absolute worst for him. Moran’s muscle-bound authorship is acutely layered, but it maybe that I have misunderstood A Parable and Transitory. These are not derivative interpretations. They came to my mind as I scoured his eldritch stories. Perhaps A Parable has nothing to do with the Nazarene born in Bethlehem, or living in an existential hellscape. If I am wrong on one or both accounts, it was worth the gamble.

CS Fuqua’s savoir-faire writing underscores the composite synthesis of human relations. His poetry explores the complex tapestries of our affiliations with friends, foes and fathers embedded by the passage of time. Sometimes, Fuqua’s verses are dithyrambic cloudbursts. On occasion, his sentences are terse and raging. These naturalistic but primal themes aren’t easy to convey, let alone converse. When a writer, such as he, makes surgical incisions close to the bone, the tissue would be undoubtedly bloody. It would, later, render scars upon the flesh. Which side of the wall have you fallen? Killers condemns us all. Or most of us, at the very least. The accidental killing of a lizard because the young girl happened to be frightened of it, and demanded I take care of it, and I did… The death of the creature haunts the narrator. He has a wedded conscious. Pray, give me respite. Absolution.

Ross is about the best buddy lost forever from an innocuous cause that metastasized through the years. Four decades and five years hath passed. He reaches out to his one-time friend. He asks for forgiveness, and an explanation of his wrongdoing. I hoped you’d stopped running or could’ve at least paused long enough for one of us to catch up. There is no answer. The bitterness is unabated. The feeling is unrequited. When one reaches down into his subaqueous past, he often finds there is nothing left for him.

Stop Me is, from my mind anyway, clearly about American President Donald J. Trump. Fuqua is unsparing of his critique of the fella in the White House with characteristic frankness. Oh, it’s a beautiful day. And people are smiling at me and I’m smiling at them because they’re okay, we’re okay, the whole world is okay because everybody’s white, or soon will be, and the same religion. Is America the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave? Or is it the home of the White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant and those who subscribe to WASP ideals? The victors of the current culture wars will determine the course.

Father & Son, For The Old Man, Gibson and Bloodline are of the existential Cold War virilism between the non-salient father and his unworldly son. The pseudo alpha male father is a Minotaur. His spendthrift hours are spent in taverns with ettins and ogres, and in whorehouses with two-bitted hags. The ogre does what the ogre can. (W.H Auden). He is violent, puerile and damned to perdition. The usurpation of his life’s promise, through his own acute recklessness, has hardwired his bitterness and psychopathy. This bitterness and psychopathy is visited upon his son with physical beatings and malicious putdowns. The son is supposed to be the antecedent of all loveliness and sweetness to his father, not a punch bag for his lugubrious shortcomings. The son’s rousing incantations through poetry is his pushback. It is his advocate.

In Father & Son, the son recalls the time when he did give a shit after being dealt different doses of cruelty during his childhood. If contact is part of some 12-step program to salvation, I forgive you. You can toddle into the great abyss, having pissed away your life to arrive at the end and mutter, ‘Praise Jesus. I love you son, and believe you’ve made hunky-dory with the universe.

Gibson is the story of another father-son animosity that plays out over a timeless guitar. Bloodline is real powerful stuff. Dad is sick. He is poised to cross the River Styx. His obduracy remains. But the son has inherited the trait too. He’s sick, repeats the cousin. And then comes the poem’s closing line: Yes, I heard. I respond. And I wish the cousin well. His dad, we can conclude, is already dead to him.

Thom Young’s 1969 is a corporeal ballad about the cacophonous times of a nameless, rudderless, red-haired female, full of cum and mistakes. Written in a deterministic tone of voice, the poet’s outpouring of feelings are transportable over the years in polychromatic verse and melancholic description. She goes to holy hell and back. She’s neither here nor there. I put her on a plane to Texas. She was still married but not in a marriage. And when my angel arrived, it seemed she didn’t need a plane to fly. After sometime together, their affair does not working out and so he put her back on the plane, to the swamps and regret. Her own feelings are both elusive and dormant through these blank verses. We are guided by the poet’s affectations which, at the beginning are devoted and constant, and by the end, lurid and conflicting. Through him, we learn that she kills her husband over a fight about what color the new baby’s room should be. After she aborts the pregnancy, she travels to Hope, New Mexico where she met a shaman that told her to ingest the peyote to see god. After she dies, the narrator stood above her like a god. A kaleidoscopic stream of lyrics is initiated, recalling her sparky, spiky and spunky disposition. She’s a tease, a devil, a slut, a mother, a demon, an angel, a lost cause, a hope, a prisoner of her own heart, a time that once remained innocent, a run through the fields amongst the wildflowers, an acid trip in San Francisco in 1967, a stroll through death and a dance in the old ballroom by the docks…

The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said that Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. Hitherto, we look back at the many lives she’d lived, and the many people she’d been. The years, the decades, and a lifetime spent chasing each other; knowing it never could happen. Some things in life don’t end like the movies. An obvious truth, though seldom realized, even on life’s deathbed.

The anthology’s embroidery is mediated, in the final analysis, by Tony Nesca himself. He produces simpatico narratives, ensuring a sturdy finish. His section begins with I Remember, a lush joie de vivre that casts him first as a thirty year old reminiscing on his fourteen year old self growing up in Northern Italy, and then as a fifty-three year old plodding on the cobblestones of life’s lackluster boulevard. The narrative crawls at a levelling pace, and in hallucinatory detail, as the chronicler seems to have consumed enough booze and drugs that could stun the average mule. I Remember is ravished by disembogued sentences, devoid of platitudinous wares. I’m looking at pockmarked ceiling sun bursting into the room like the face of God. The most unimaginative soul on earth would have small difficulty formulating that image. She’s smiling that pure sound of sunshine and dirty water. Nesca recognises the beauty in the chthonian. He awards it its due. Our lips meet for thousandth time and for the thousandth time ain’t nothing better. Wowzers!

My Melancholy Sunshine permeates with the plainsong acoustics of the urban street. Neon Crazy tap dances its extremities at an impetuous lope. The troubles of the laborious earth come to Timmy’s bar. He mourns the death of rock n roll, an entire way of life. Behold! We are now in the midst of a bite-sized, soundbite culture. His friend Bob complains of the addictions of girlfriend Tracy but Timmy soothes him with a tranquilizer, a whiskey. I think about murder and suicide but not really. This line is the essential point of this exposition. We give thought of murdering the cipher who brings us trouble. We think of murdering ourselves to free us from this vale of trouble. But do we have the courage? No one cries like we should… No one cries like they should. Empathy, concord and solidarity are in very short supply.

Lazy Afternoon is a racy no-hold barred poem with intended consequences. … I saw your love, baby, and I saw the rest. Your lips spouting golden orange, my love a slow-easy trickle down your leg. No interrogatories are required here! When The Rain Is Heavy And Wild is a plangent composition that rattles in cadence with the weather. Their gloom making it just right. The tumult from the heavens is as eloquent as the jamming of saxophones and pianos. Maybe God and man should form a band! Another one for me, Jack, you say in the wild of the moment. Indeed! Done We Wrong is an encapsulation of the world’s traumas and treasures in crisp, minimalistic couplets. A Short Story serves as the final act to the anthology. Descriptions of The Native Clubare fevered and incandescent, like a literary Star Gate sequence from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, amidst the violent projection of verse anarchy and word dissidence. The nebula of lights and bedlam from a swath of ravers flares this acid trip into mindless ecstasy. Is this Pandemonium, capital city of Hell? Or rather, some Djoumbala joint in the City of Angels?

Thus, the anthology closes on this exquisite high. Morning had broken, as it did on that very first morning. Dawn’s rosy fingers had already left the milky skies. And my remorseless fingers were already at it with my laptop, penning this piece that you have now just finished reading. Infinite ~ WindPoem V ~ Native American Flute Meditations, the latest album from C.S. Fuqua in his  WindPoem Native American Flute Meditations series, features 68 minutes of meditative and relaxing music, celebrating the Native American flute as a solo and World Fusion music instrument. Nine Native American flute instrumentals and four multi-instrument cuts highlight the versatility of the Native American flute. Please visit https://youtu.be/o7fpRIRIKkg for a five-minute preview of the album.

In keeping with tradition, Infinite‘s instrumentals incorporate nature and other ambient background sounds to complement the Native American flute. In addition, Infinite represents an expansion of WindPoem sound with the addition of multiple instruments, including guitar, koto, bass, and more on four of the instrumentals. The remaining nine cuts feature solo and multiple native flutes. A haunting instrumental arrangement of the traditional song “Amazing Grace” closes the album. Infinite features wooden and bamboo Native American flutes custom-crafted by Fuqua.

Fuqua has researched and published extensively on the history, mythology, and crafting of the Native American flute, and has authored The Native American Flute: Myth, History, Craft and the illustrated manual Native American Flute Craft. With a background as newspaper reporter, magazine editor, and author, Fuqua has published widely in nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, with fourteen books currently in print. The first WindPoem album was released in 2014. For more information, please visit http://csfuqua.com.

Fuqua is available for presentations the history, mythology, and music of the Native American flute. Presentations are offered free to Las Cruces area public schools and youth organizations. For more more information, please contact him at email@example.com.

Digital and CD sales:

The iTunes WindPoem store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/author/c-s-fuqua/id507470171?mt=11 Need a laugh?

Native American flutes have always been known primarily as “love flutes” or “courting flutes” and were generally played for no other reason than courting rituals by a young man serenading his intended bride, although some men played them for their wives as a sign of love.

The above statement—paraphrased from an “authentic” Native American flute history and instrument website—is baloney, indicative of the uninformed, misogynistic belief of many, if not a majority, of modern Native American flute fans, crafters, and musicians. Rather than research and discover the flute’s rich background, they’ve adapted the love flute myth as history—that the flute was developed as a courting tool for men only—while ignoring the instrument’s true background and multitude of uses by native people. When confronted with reality, they respond with claptrap like the following halfwitted comment in an online native flute forum: “Granted, everyone had their own traditions and norms about flutes, and I’m sure someone will jump in here and say ‘oh sure, women have always played flute in my tribe.’ But as a generality women were kind of kept off the business end of a flute.”

Sadly, most Americans of both native and immigrant heritage have been brainwashed to believe certain stereotypes and false “history” of early native life, especially that of native women, stereotypes created by early European invaders and perpetuated in magazines, books, and, later, movies. When the native flute’s popularity surged in the mid-twentieth century, accepted stereotypes did what they do best—smothered the instrument’s true history with nonsense. Before Europeans landed in the New World, native cultures were matriarchal and celebrated men and women as equals. The mother’s ancestral line, not the father’s, determined a child’s lineage. In community affairs, women became shamans, had the right to vote, could impeach a chief if a majority became dissatisfied with leadership, served in advisory positions, assisted in managing village affairs, spoke in council meetings, had the power to veto war, and even fought in battles themselves. And the flute? Yes, it was as much a woman’s instrument as a man’s.

So why are we saddled with this love flute myth malarkey as history? Gullibility and laziness. While failing to explore fact-based sources, we’ve accepted and internalized the erroneous accounts of American Indian life by European invaders. To undermine native culture, Europeans deftly exaggerated accounts of Native American life and lied about women and their status. They portrayed native women as obedient, subservient to “red devils” who attacked and scalped good Christian explorers whose only goal was to bring patriarchal European civility, social harmony, and redemption to an evil and barbaric world. In reality, Europeans could not cope with the independence, power, and equality of native women compared to the role of European women. So they set about transforming native culture into a crude version of European culture. Pre-invasion cultures developed a deep connection to their past through stories and music, but that ended in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as Europeans forcibly took native children from their families and sent them to “Indian schools” where teachers required native children to speak only English, wear western-style clothing, and study western-based history rather than preserving native history and heritage through traditional sources and methods. As Europeans forced Native Americans to assimilate into the European, Judeo-Christian lifestyle, the cultural status and equality native women had once enjoyed vanished, and their share in power and authority disintegrated.

Erosion of women’s status extended even to the native flute. The flute had traditionally been a social instrument, used for the sheer joy of making music. Songs and music were like breath itself, an integral part of existence. Native people embraced music to honor the Creator. Shamans utilized music in medical cures. They integrated music into ceremonies to call rain and locate hunting game. Children incorporated music in their games, while adult tribal members included music in vision quests, harvest rituals, war, and death rituals. Although customs and practices differed between cultures, the flute was common to most. Plains Indian tribes could be identified from a distance by the songs they played as they traveled. Members of some tribes played flutes to announce their peaceful approach to a new village. In what’s now the southwestern U.S., the Hopi people not only valued flautists of both genders, they nurtured a flute clan responsible for developing the talents of flautists. Each autumn, a girl and boy, side-by-side, both playing flutes, would lead a procession and ceremony to honor the gods to ensure good rains and crops. Even today, despite dominance of the love flute myth, Native American flutes are used in ceremonies other than courting rituals, including weddings, worship ceremonies, and political ceremonies.

Many early Europeans noted in their writings that native people used the flute as a social instrument to make a joyful noise. In June, 1528, while exploring the west coast of Florida, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca wrote that “a chief approached, borne on the back of another Indian, and covered with a painted deerskin. A great many people attended him, some walking in advance, playing on flutes of reed.” Had only men been playing, it’s likely the writer would have said so. In 1539, a member of the Hernando de Soto Spanish expedition to Florida wrote that “some Indians arrived to visit their lord, and every day they came out to the road, playing upon flutes, a token among them that they come in peace.” In yet another account, the same writer, describing events in what is now Alabama, wrote “the Cacique came out to receive (de Soto) … and he was surrounded by many attendants playing upon flutes and singing.” Note the writer chose the word “attendants,” not “men.”

In Pueblo country around 1540, Pedro de Castaneda wrote about his travels that “the people came out of the village with signs of joy to welcome Hernando de Alvardo and their captain, and brought with them into the town with drums and pipes something like flutes, of which they have a great many.” Around the same period, Antonio de Mendoza wrote, “The Indians have their dances and songs, with some flutes which have holes on which to put the fingers. They make much noise. They sing in unison with those who play, and those who sing clap their hands in our fashion … five or six play together, and some of the flutes are better than others.” Pedro Fages, writing about an encounter in California in 1769, described a dance for which “only two pairs from each sex are chosen to perform the dance, and two musicians,” presumably of each gender, “who play their flutes.”

Then came the turning point in flute accounts when artist George Catlin in 1832, capturing the European desire to romanticize and diminish native life, described the flute as strictly a courting instrument. Writing about the Plains flute while in Upper Missouri, Catlin said, “In the vicinity of the Upper Mississippi, I often and familiarly heard this instrument, called the Winnebago courting flute, and was credibly informed by traders and others in those regions that the young men of that tribe meet with signal success, oftentimes, in wooing their sweethearts with its simple notes, which they blow for hours together, and from day to day, from the bank of some stream—some favorite rock or log on which they are seated, near to the wigwam which contains the object of their tender passion until her soul is touched, and she responds by some welcome signal, that she is ready to repay the young Orpheus for his pains with the gift of her hand and her heart.”

Europeans latched onto the courting aspect while ignoring that marriage and courtship rites varied from culture to culture, that the courtship period itself could last more than six years, that the girl had the power of choice, that the genealogical line was through the mother’s family, that women were held as equal individuals within the culture, unlike women of Western society, that the flute certainly was not a courting requirement. The flute became an effective tool in the Europeans’ determination to assimilate native peoples and erase native women’s status. The first Europeans to migrate to North America, especially those steeped in Puritan, Catholic, and Quaker Christian traditions, did not tolerate women in prominent positions of government or societal decision-making. Portraying indigenous society as barbaric and the people as savages, Europeans systematically eliminated indigenous women’s power within tribes and clans. Portraying the flute as a man’s-only instrument helped achieve that goal. In last few decades, native women have begun to regain their rightful places in tribal life. Even female deities and original matriarchal native mythologies have enjoyed a resurgence among many native peoples. A quarter of federally recognized tribes are now chaired by women. In 2014, 147 native women were elected to serve as tribal leaders—26 percent of 566 federally recognized tribes. Female tribal leadership in 2015 decreased slightly to 24.5 percent.

Nevertheless, the resurgence of power doesn’t thrill everyone in the Native American community. Since Wilma Mankiller became the first female chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma in 1985, some male candidates in various tribal races have continued to ridicule female opponents as inept, unable, and too female to make the important decisions required of a chief—as if men have proved themselves more qualified than women in anything. Women are changing the face of tribal governments as they become administrators, teachers, and community organizers, regaining positions of authority like those held by their ancestors. And they’re playing the flute, demonstrating once again that it is not a man’s instrument, that it’s an instrument of the people—all people.

The Native American flute has grown so popular today that it has taken on mystical qualities with some claiming it will help lead the world into salvation. For those who prefer to leave mysticism to the mystics and simply enjoy an instrument solely for its music, the native flute is a welcomed addition, finding itself in the capable hands of both male and female artists. Rather than wrongly claim the flute has served only a courting function for native men, we should accept the fact the instrument is no more masculine or feminine than life or death. It is now, as it always has been, an instrument that adds beauty and dimension to music without regard to the musician’s gender. For a comprehensive list of references from which the above information was taken, please refer to the bibliographies of The Native American Flute: Myth, History, Craft and Native American Flute Craft, both available from Amazon.com, iTunes, Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, and other online and local bookstores. Claiming Native American Ancestry

“Brother’s got high cheekbones!”

“Sister’s hair’s jet black and straight!”

“Granddaddy looks like Geronimo!”

I’ve heard it all my life—relatives claiming Native American ancestry. Officially, we’re white, “but we got Indian blood in us from way back,” so they say. In 2015, a Pew Research Center study revealed that at least half of all U.S. adults who identify as multiracial are whites claiming Native American ancestry—that’s 8.5 million people! In a 2016 Fusion.net article, Native Peoples magazine editor Taté Walker pointed out the obvious. For that many whites to have Native American ancestry, American Indians would have to be “getting it on with everybody.”

Some claims of native ancestry are legitimate. Most others, not so much—and there’s a name for the people making them: Pretendians.

Claiming native ancestry isn’t new, but white claims of being a quarter or less Native American have skyrocketed in recent years. Asked for proof, those claiming ancestry resort to family lore and physical attributes like high cheekbones. Moreover, these wannabe Indians readily feign extensive knowledge of whatever tribe they claim. They buy, display, and wear stereotypical garb and trinkets as though every Indian in America purchased their clothes and jewelry at interstate tourist traps, but these Pretendians don’t engage in the native culture. Instead, they profess their nativeness, especially on social media, by coining outlandish “Indian” names like Howling Wolf Tree, Badger Womyn, and Eagle Feather Heart. (Get your own ridiculous “Indian” handle with the online name generator at http://www.lingerandlook.com/Names/FictionNames2.htm.) If their claims are questioned, Pretendians shore up their authenticity with inaccurate knowledge of Indian culture and history based on popular myth and stereotypes, demonstrating little or no fact-based understanding of past or present native issues. They will even attack true native descendants as imposters to make themselves appear genuine. A few years ago, a distant relative who’s researched our mutual genealogy put authority to our family’s claims to native heritage, discovering two Muscogee women in my paternal grandfather’s ancestry. “I’m still working on documenting it, but, after all,” he told me, “we have a great-great-great grandfather who traded with Indians up and down the river.” How trading anything other than a certain bodily fluid gets native genetics into a person’s DNA is beyond my understanding, but the claim, he insisted, had been validated. We could check with clear conscience those white and Native American ethnicity boxes on job and other applications.

White folks claim native ancestry for a variety of reasons, including a romanticized view of native culture and people. Take the Native American flute as an example. It’s mystical, haunting, spiritual! It touches our ancient soul. According to one of several creation myths, it was given to native men for use in courting women, a fairytale now accepted by most as fact. Besides misogynistic, the myth-as-history is preposterous. In reality, the flute’s place in native culture was and remains broad, from entertainment to courting to fertility rites to greeting visitors—like any other instrument ever made. The story, however, fits well into the Pretendian narrative that embraces myths promoted by European invaders, myths designed to undermine native women’s cultural status. Europeans ensured general acceptance of chosen myths-as-history through systematic destruction and replacement of native culture and values with European nonsense now accepted by many Pretendians as fact.

Based on assumed nativeness, Pretendians have even developed a sense of political correctness regarding aspects of their claimed heritage. When I began crafting Native American flutes twenty-five years ago, the instrument was known simply as a Native American flute. In recent years, a movement among mostly Pretendians contends that Native American flutes can be crafted only by Native Americans. If you’re non-native and claim no native ancestry, the flute you make must be termed a Native American style flute. If we accept such skewed logic, then non-Europeans can craft only a recorder or transverse style flute, and non-Spaniards can make only Spanish style guitars. By far, Cherokee is the most claimed of all Native American ancestry. The 2000 U.S. federal census reported that 729,522 Americans claimed Cherokee heritage. By 2010, the number had increased to 819,105, some 70 percent of them—white folks—declaring mixed race. I grew up in southern Alabama and northwest Florida, so this statistic is no surprise. Bring up native culture in conversation, and someone will claim native heritage. Nine out of ten times, that heritage will be Cherokee, usually “traced” to an Indian princess—never mind that no such status ever existed.

Throughout the country’s history since the European invasion, Americans have used mixed-race status for personal advantage. For example, a person with African American and white heritage who looked white would usually pass as white to avoid discrimination to rise in society as only whites could do. Even today, most people who have less than twenty-eight percent African-American ancestry, according to a 2014 23andMe genetics study, claim white-only heritage. Conversely, whites are increasingly quick to claim native ancestry in an effort to gain perceived minority advantages in employment or scholarships. Making the claim is easy. Since 2000, the Census Bureau has allowed people to check multiple boxes for race and ethnicity without proof or validation.

This kind of ethnic multi-checking has created an alternate reality for native heritage. Until recently, tribes determined membership on whether a person spoke the language and followed cultural practices which defined cultural affinity with the tribe. As white claims rose, blood quantum became the standard determinant. If one grandparent, for example, belonged to a tribe but the other three grandparents did not, a person was considered to have one-quarter blood quantum. Before 1963, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians allowed anyone with at least one-thirty-second blood quantum (one great-great-great native grandparent) to join the tribe, but the claim had to be documented. You couldn’t just check a box. After 1963, the standard increased to one-sixteenth. Before the mid-1800s, the Cherokee were the south’s most populace tribe, numbering around 16,000. But they had something whites wanted—land for farming and gold mining. And let’s not forget racial prejudice. These were local Indians after all, substandard humans in the European mindset. To appease white desire, the U.S. government in 1838 and 1839 forcibly removed the southern Cherokee to the Indian Territory in what later became Oklahoma. After removal and as tensions rose between north and south in the run-up to the Civil War, whites realized an advantage in claiming Cherokee ancestry, insisting these claimed ancestors had escaped forced removal to hide, remain, and marry in the south. Official records, however, indicate that few, if any, Cherokee escaped removal, although 4,000 died on the Trail of Tears en route to the Indian Territory. Claiming Cherokee ancestry enabled southerners to step out of their role as oppressor by legitimizing themselves as native born rather than of European origin. The claim thereby relieved them of guilt for what they’d done to the actual Cherokee and established a delusional native right to defend their despotic system of slavery from an “aggressive” federal government.

This delusional mindset has had a long shelf life. It’s evident today in southern Pretendians’ defense of the rebel battle flag as heritage not hate and their unyielding support of political candidates who promote xenophobic and racist ideology. Claiming ownership of an imagined native past allows these whites to forgive themselves for their European ancestors’ aggression against native peoples and their own present-day assaults against different cultures, races, and ethnicities. Claimed ancestry became a political issue in 1924 when Virginia politicians were forced to address matters of mixed-race rights. The state’s Racial Integrity Act at the time banned marriage between whites and members of any other race, defining people as white only if their “blood is entirely white, having no known, demonstrable, or ascertainable admixture of blood of another race.” That put a kink into claims of ancestral links to Pocahontas by prominent white Virginia families. Generationally, if the claims were true, it meant family members were at most one-sixteenth native. The Virginia legislature therefore amended the Racial Integrity Act with the “Pocahontas Exception,” allowing white families to claim native ancestry to Pocahontas but still be classified as white. Conversely, those with one-sixteenth African American ancestry could not claim white status and remained designated as black.

According to Native American journalist Mary Annette Pember, claims to Cherokee ancestry went nationwide during the twentieth century, thanks to Tinsel Town. Hollywood movies made the Cherokee acceptable to people outside the south by civilizing the tribe. In 1971, a popular Keep America Beautiful ad campaign established Iron Eyes Cody, The Crying Indian, as the quintessential image of Native America, a tear rolling down his cheek as he mourned environmental destruction. Cody famously traced his heritage to the Trail of Tears and a Cherokee grandfather who purportedly worked with the Confederate outlaw band, Quantrill’s Raiders. Cody made no personal claim to glory, however, calling himself just another Injun who left the reservation to find success in Hollywood. After he’d portrayed Indians in more than 200 films, the public discovered that Iron Eyes Cody’s heritage did not trace to the Trail of Tears after all, that he’d never lived on a reservation, that he was actually Espera Oscar de Corti, a Louisiana-born actor with 100 percent Sicilian ancestry—not a drop of Indian blood. The three federally recognized Cherokee tribes—Untied Keetoowa Band, Cherokee Nation, and the Eastern Band of Cherokees—have a combined population of 344,700 members, most living in close-knit communities in eastern Oklahoma and North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains. Although becoming a Pretendian may seem harmless, it has consequences beyond a wink and snicker. In the workplace, whites can be hired based in part on claimed heritage, taking a position that should be filled by someone of true native heritage. Iron Eyes Cody is a good example. His success at playing an Indian prevented true Native Americans from landing roles that should’ve been theirs.

To address increasing claims of ancestry, the Cherokee Nation has created a task force to deal with false assertions by individuals seeking official recognition, leading one investigator to theorize that many Pretendians are simply seeking a sense of place and connection. The problem is, the only way some know how to achieve such connection is to buy it and own it. Heritage is not such a commodity. Pretendians may be fully sincere in their romanticized native view of nature and spirituality. Their appeal vanishes, however, when they use their nativeness to justify or forgive disturbing personal traits. Sociologist Herbert Gans in 1979 coined the phrase symbolic ethnicity to describe the act of white Americans claiming native identity without changing behavior or suffering social consequences. The practice is pervasive, exemplified by Native American heritage clubs that have no members of documented ancestry and by Pretendians claiming heritage for reasons of employment or scholarship benefits. For them, ethnicity is voluntary, a piece of clothing that can be put on or taken off at will, unlike skin.

As America becomes more racially and ethnically diverse, whites unwilling to accept their changing status search for a collective identity of ancestral place and culture to link to the world they live in and to justify personal racism toward other groups. The recent presidential election provided a national stage upon which many whites who claim Native American ancestry could express racism and xenophobia without regard to decency, empathy, or societal restriction. Many Pretendians on social media professed steadfast support for Native Americans protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) while vehemently condemning similar groups such as Black Lives Matter and opposing anti-discrimination legislation designed to protect women, people of color, and LGBTQ individuals. They adorned their social media pages with rebel flags and politically hateful slogans, many supporting Donald Trump despite his business investment in DAPL and his pledge to proceed with the original DAPL route, ignoring Native American rights by reversing President Obama’s order to determine an alternate route . For all the claims of indigenous blood, ancestry no longer needs to be a mystery. We can easily determine by DNA analysis whether we have native ancestry—which is exactly what I did last year. Forget those two native women in my paternal grandfather’s ancestry, and don’t give the Indian trader a second thought. Thanks to DNA testing, I know the truth. I’m as white as a person gets.

When I informed the relative who’d “discovered” the perceived native ancestry, he replied, “Another genealogist in the family feels strongly there’s Indian blood. So we just have to continue to wonder.”

No, we don’t.

Pay no mind to high cheekbones.

Ignore hair color or texture.

And Granddaddy? He looks like Granddaddy.

Science is a marvelous thing. It doesn’t depend on faith, myth, or family lore. Science relies solely on fact—like climate change or gravity. Sure, you can board the bus of denial, but every time it’s driven off the cliff of reality, it will crash to the ground below. Bryc, Katarzyna et al. “The Genetic Ancestry of African Americans, Latinos, and European Americans across the United States.” The American Journal of Human Genetics , Volume 96 , Issue 1 , 37 – 53.

Cobb, Russell. “Why Do So Many People Pretend to Be Native American?” Longreads, This Land Press, 19 Jan. 2015, blog.longreads.com/2014/08/04/why-do-people-continue-to-fashion-native-identities-out-of-thin-air/.

Day, Meagan. “No, You Are Not Part Cherokee. And Neither Is Elizabeth Warren.” Timeline, 5 July 2016, timeline.com/part-cherokee-elizabeth-warren-cf6be035967e#.lzpra1dux.

Fuqua, C. S. Native American Flute Craft: Ancient to Modern. Cooperative Ink, 2015.

—. The Native American Flute: Myth, History, Craft. Cooperative Ink, 2012.

Garrison, Tim Alan. “Cherokee Removal.” New Georgia Encyclopedia, 19 Oct. 2004, www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/cherokee-removal.

Hakala, Kate. “Why Do So Many People Claim They Have Cherokee In Their Blood?” Nerve, 27 Nov. 2014, www.nerve.com/life/why-do-so-many-people-claim-they-have-cherokee-in-their-blood.

Hu, Elise. “Minority Rules: Who Gets To Claim Status As A Person Of Color?” NPR, 16 May 2012, www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2012/05/16/152822762/minority-rules-who-gets-to-claim-status-as-a-person-of-color.

McLaughlin, Michael. “Trump Supports Dakota Access Pipeline. Did We Mention He’s Invested In It?” Huffington Post, 2 Dec. 2016. Web. 21 Dec. 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-dakota-access-pipeline-investment_us_5841d8f9e4b09e21702e8f58.

Moya-Smith, Simon. “The ‘Part Cherokee’ Factor: Pew Survey Misrepresents Indian Country, Critics Say.” Indian Country Today Media Network, 12 June 2015, indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/06/12/part-cherokee-factor-pew-survey-misrepresents-indian-country-critics-say-160712.

“Pretendian.” Urban Dictionary, 10 Oct. 2010, www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pretendian.

Pulley, By Anna. “Why Do So Many White People Claim to Be Native American?” Fusion, 11 Mar. 2016, http://fusion.net/story/279637/white-people-claiming-native-identity/.

Siek, Stephanie. “Who’s a Native American? It’s Complicated.” Cable News Network, 14 May 2012, inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/14/whos-a-native-american-its-complicated/.

TNO Staff. “White Americans have Remained ‘Shockingly European’ Despite Decades of Pro-Racial Mixing Propaganda, New DNA Study Reveals.” The New Observer, 14 Jan. 2015, newobserveronline.com/white-americans-remained-shockingly-european-despite-decades-pro-racial-mixing-propaganda-new-dna-study-reveals/.

Zimmer, Carl. “White? Black? A Murky Distinction Grows Still Murkier.” The New York Times, 24 Dec. 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/12/25/science/23andme-genetic-ethnicity-study.html?_r=0. Literary Themes Subconsciously Rooted in Childhood

Insecurity and salvation.

Fast forward four-and-a-half decades.


He slowly turned his gaze.

“You know me?”

After a moment, he nodded almost imperceptibly.

“Who am I?”

He smiled slightly. “Ray,” he whispered.

Aides began wheeling patients to the dining room for lunch.

“I’m sure they do.”

He leaned slightly forward. “I’m proud…”

He sat back.

The nurse positioned herself behind the chair.

“I love you,” he whispered.

She hugged him.

“Yeah, I love you, too, Dad.”

His eyes glazed.

I lowered his hand to his lap and let go.

That’s fine.

What does it hurt?

Perhaps I’ll thank him.

Perhaps not.

* from Neil Young’s “Old Man” On rare occasion, we realize upfront a person is special. Peggie Ann Kilpatrick was such a person.

When our daughter turned three, Bonnie and I decided to place her in a preschool for socialization and early education. Our acquaintances’ children were older, and our daughter had no one her age for company. Finding a good school, however, wouldn’t be easy. State regulations governing preschool operation were loose, to say the least. Employment required little or no professional training or educational background. Many facilities were (and probably remain) so poorly regulated, they were at best safety hazards. Beyond regulations, many, if not most, promoted the teachers’ and owners’ political and religious agendas. Such schools were not for us. We required a secular school that served children without regard to racial, social, cultural, religious, or ethnic group, that reflected community diversity and respected the child and child’s family without promoting ideological agendas.

We began our search with traditional schools, but none lived up to their promotional material, operating more like babysitting services than preschools or kindergartens. So we turned to schools based on alternative teaching methods. Among the few in our area, only one discipline intrigued us—Montessori. Montessori educational method dates to 1907 when Maria Montessori, realizing a desperate need in Italy for a more effective educational system to serve lower income families, opened Casa dei Bambini—the Children’s House—in one of Rome’s low-income districts. Although few U.S.-based Montessori schools today serve specifically low-income families, most encompass Maria Montessori’s methods by centering on whole child development, including the physical, emotional, social, and cognitive aspects, with younger children learning from older children who reinforce what they’ve learned by teaching the younger, a system that mirrors how most people socialize and learn in the world at large. Further, Montessori method incorporates special tools and aids for students to learn and experience through sensory-motor activities to develop cognitive powers such as sound, sight, smell, taste, movement, and touch.

We visited the first Montessori school on a chilly midweek morning. Children ranged from three to five years in age but reflected no cultural or racial diversity. They sat at small tables, engaged in solitary activities, from puzzles to coloring, in a large room that exhibited obsessive attention to order. As the owner spoke with us, a “teacher” drifted around the room, hands behind back, monitoring and instructing kids to do tasks in a certain way rather than encouraging them to explore. What struck us most was the room’s extreme quiet. It was mid-morning with lunch soon approaching, and not one child was talking. It felt uncomfortable. Our daughter expressed no interest when the owner offered to show her some of the activities. We left, disheartened. If this school was representative, how could anyone praise Montessori method as better than Snaggletooth Dorothy’s Backyard Babysitting Service?

The second school renewed our hope somewhat. Kids were more engaged and social, better reflecting Montessori basics, but tuition proved prohibitive for our budget. That’s when we visited Peggie’s school, a converted house that had once served as a restaurant, the main room large, but not cavernous, to accommodate the complete student body when the kids weren’t in smaller, open rooms involved in group and individual learning activities. About twenty-five children—Japanese, East Indian, black, white—engaged in a variety of tasks, assisting and interacting constructively with each other. Without invitation, our daughter squirmed out of my arms, walked over to a table, sat down next to a girl about her age, and began to work on a puzzle.

Peggie—Ms. Peggie—grinned. “Looks like she’s found a home.”

Tuition, though lower than that of the other schools, threatened to exceed our budget, but Peggie was completely open about operation costs, with every penny justified as she ran the school on a shoestring, serving as owner, CEO, lead teacher, curriculum developer, chef, chauffeur, handyman—you name it, Peggie filled the bill. When we did the math, we concluded Peggie had to be a magician. So we found a way to fit tuition into our budget.

Peggie and the two teachers she employed—in particular, Beth Allison Young—engaged every student with respect and positive guidance, loosely termed Montessori Rules, to create a dynamic, cooperative, fun community of little people developing their educational and social skills. Peggie’s Montessori Rules became the foundation for personal responsibility and action that still guides our daughter today, some twenty years later.

Peggie’s grace extended beyond the children to their families. When conservative politicians forced a federal government shutdown in the mid-1990s, they created budgetary havoc in households of federal employees, including ours. Peggie offered to delay tuition payment during that time, something we could not accept. She was overextended already, but her gesture was an example of how she cared for others, how every family whose child attended her school became a part of her own extended family.

As our daughter progressed from preschool into kindergarten, Peggie underwent medical tests that revealed smoking-related lung scarring. By then, she’d lost twenty percent of her breathing capacity due to early-stage emphysema. A week after the medical news, someone sideswiped her on her way to work, putting her car upside down in a ditch. She crawled out through a broken window with minor injuries, lucky to be alive. If parents brought up either the accident or the medical results, Peggie deftly shifted to another subject. She steadfastly refused to burden the school’s parents with her problems.

Shortly before the end of our daughter’s last year with Peggie, a friend and I performed a program of folk songs for the school. The kids enjoyed the show, and Peggie asked us to perform a couple of songs at the upcoming graduation ceremony, the school’s biggest annual event. My friend couldn’t make it, but two other Montessori fathers—Jamie Gauthier and Joe Schartung—joined in to play a song we designed specifically for the event, a blues-rock version of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.”

Flustered and flushed when speaking to a roomful of adults, Peggie persevered until she could redirect the spotlight to Beth, a child, or a parent, deflecting praise for herself to others, no matter how much she deserved honor. During this graduation, however, she couldn’t dodge the compliment we fathers built into the song. As Peggie and the kids danced together, we belted out the last verse:

“Young Ms. Peggie has a school, E-I-E-I-O
“And in that school are wonderful kids, E-I-E-I-O
“Well the kids learn here, the kids play there,
“Learn here, play there, grow in Montessori care.
“Oh, young Ms. Peggie has an excellent school, E-I-E-I-O.”

Our daughter remained in touch with Peggie after kindergarten, visiting during elementary, middle, and high school, once to conduct a hands-on juggling presentation for Peggie’s Montessori kids as part of a high school class assignment. Even Peggie tried to juggle. The kids loved it just as they enjoyed most events and activities Peggie arranged, activities that included rudimentary lessons in Spanish and Japanese, a professional clown’s performance, and child-and-parent cultural demonstrations on food and clothing.

Not long after the juggling presentation, Peggie retired, and our contact with her became more sporadic. Shortly before moving to another state a couple of years ago, I bumped into her at a department store. Her emphysema had worsened, and she now required supplemental oxygen, a topic from which she quickly moved with “Let’s talk about that girl of yours.”

Each of us encounters so many people along life’s path, but few have profound and permanent effect on us. Peggie’s influence was broad and substantial as she equipped young children with the tools to build a solid, respectful, moral, productive foundation for success in all areas of their lives. Whether by negligence or design, the Peggies of the world traverse their journeys mostly unrecognized and unthanked. Luckily, we were able to express several times to Peggie our appreciation for all she had done for our daughter. In typical Peggie style, she’d say, “The credit lies with that girl.”

Each day the world loses special people. Everyone is transitory, a brief flicker in the firestorm of time, but some survive death through the reputations they craft in life. Peggie is one of those people. The influence she’s had on hundreds of children and their families will extend for generations to come. The children she taught—and their children and their children—will continue to employ, benefit from, and pass on the values Peggie instilled, the values of Montessori Rules. Peggie Ann Kilpatrick
November 19, 1949 – July 9, 2016
Please visit the online memorial. From the initial elevator lift to the novice attorney’s office floor, the reader realizes Stacee Pocket will provide one heck of a funny ride, erotic or otherwise. In Molly Haven’s The Signatures, Stacee bubbles with an innate naiveté and friendliness—not to mention a heck of a body—that can either endear her to others or drive them nuts.

In an early scene with her more worldly friend Evie, Stacee reveals herself as a young woman with little carnal experience outside “true love.” But Stacee’s got plenty of licentious episodes coming her way when her boss sends her on a mission to obtain eight signatures on documents connected to THE big case—signatures needed “to plug up some dangerous holes.” What could be easier than plugging holes? She has an entire day to do it—never mind the offhand remark that “quite a few associates” before her have tried and failed.

Stacee sets out, confident she’s equipped with whatever it takes to get those signatures. In ways she hadn’t before considered, Stacee exploits her assets fully to get ahead by satisfactorily completing the assignment. From a retired, hustling magician to a movie star, a fashion designer, a nerd in a Jetsons T-shirt, and several other colorful characters, Stacee encounters a number of challenges that lead to extraordinary sexual romps as titillating as they are time-warping and hilarious.

An occasional suspension of disbelief is required, primarily to cram so many sexual shenanigans into a single day, but time is not the story. Discount the time element and simply accept that, yes, encounters as weirdly sensual and funny as these can happen, and try not to wonder, “Why don’t they happen to me?”  The Signatures is Molly Haven’s debut novel. The author has handily achieved a high standard of explicitly sexual humor, delivering a salaciously delightful read.

The Signatures is available through many outlets, including Amazon.com, Kobo, B&N, and Smashwords. Embark on fantastic adventures in a whimsical universe of poetry and art where everything is possible. Explore and celebrate the wonderful and diverse world through imagination! And if you see the authors there, wave!

“…a charming and heart-warming journey.” ~Joanna Dreiling, M.Ed., reading specialist

“…a feeling of hope and the certainty that happiness and goodness are still out there.” ~Cynthia Harris, author

If I Were, I Would! is available in trade paperback, iBook, Kindle, Nook (Barnes & Noble), Kobo, and audiobook (Audible.com, Amazon.com, iTunes). The audio enhanced iBook, available from iTunes for iPad and other devices, features print-book layout and full read-along audio to assist in vocabulary expansion for young readers.

Download an iBook preview with audio at  https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/book-title/id916556775?mt=11.

View the Youtube trailer at http://youtu.be/WccgaGyM3xs.

If I Were, I Would!  is available through most bookstores and the following links:

iTunes: (audio enhanced for iPad and other devices): https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/book-title/id916556775?mt=11

Amazon.com:  (print edition): http://www.amazon.com/If-I-Were-Would/dp/1501046942/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1410276021&sr=1-1&keywords=c.s.+fuqua

Kindle full-layout HD edition: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NE1Q146

Kobo: (standard ePub edition): http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/if-i-were-i-would

CreateSpace: (print edition): https://www.createspace.com/4981387

Beth Young is an award-winning artist with an extensive background in commercial, creative, and instructional art. A specialist in Montessori Method instruction and certified in early childhood education, Beth is a full-time elementary school art teacher, affording her intimate knowledge of the types of illustrations that appeal most to young children.

C.S. Fuqua’s books include Muscle Shoals ~ The Hit Capital’s Heyday & Beyond, Hush, Puppy! A Southern Fried Tale, the award-winning The Swing: Poems of Fatherhood, and The Native American Flute ~ Myth, History, Craft, among others. His poems and short stories have appeared widely in publications such as Main Street Rag , Christian Science Monitor, Chiron Review, Cemetery Dance, Year’s Best Horror Stories, and The Old Farmer’s Almanac. 

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