spring mag portfolio

SPRING MAG 2012 | 1

OTTERBEIN UNIVERSITY’S STUDENT LITERARY MAGAZINE | VOL. 93 | SPRING MAGAZINE 2012

QUIZ quill&

4 | QUIZ&quilL SPRING MAG 2012 | 5

nonfictionThe Zen of Fortune Cookies – Tony DeGenaroOn the Southern Accent – Vian YohnHeart of Atlas – Emily SwankUncovering My Dad’s Secret Past – Mike CirelliWordless – Tony DeGenaro

fictionThat Burning Ring of Fire – Emily SwankMiss Austen – Jennifer RishSoft Cell – Andrew MillerFor Anita – Brittany Ivy DorowColor – Jennifer Rish

poetryDon’t Go Out! – Jordy Lawrence StewartDead Write – Alyssa MazeyHighway Prayer – Tony DeGenaroChoke – Meg FreadoChewing Water – Boris HindererAbout a Color. – Brittany Ivy DorowThe Full Moon’s Suicide – Meg FreadoThis Writer – Lindsey RowlandOranges – Tony DeGenaroA Blue Jean Wax Poetic – Jordy Lawrence StewartThe Lighthouse, the Tree – Tony DeGenaroAs the Clock Claps Its Hands – Vian Yohn

DRAMAMonsters – Whitney ReedThe Kite – Brittany Ivy Dorow

artSpring Wonderland – Marisa RenceYin and Yang – Brittany Ivy DorowBobcat – Katie ZaborszkiEntrance to a Dream – Brittany Ivy DorowFour in Charleston – Marisa RenceHeart – Katie ZaborszkiCity View – Marisa RenceDrawing with Skull – Hannah FarleyCommon Ground – Brittany Ivy Dorow

Author and Artist Bios

table of contents8 16 38 5272

12 22294661

791028343942 4344587688

1378

611213340516066 74

90

OTTERBEIN UNIVERSITY’S STUDENT LITERARY MAGAZINE | VOL. 93 | SPRING MAGAZINE 2012

MANAGING EDITOR Tony DeGenaro

PAGE DESIGNER Mike Cirelli

COPY EDITOR Whitney Reed

advertising COORDINATOR Jeff Kintner

faculty advisor Dr. Shannon Lakanen

Staff Mackenzie BoyerEmily ClarkKayla ForsheyMeg FreadoAlyssa MazeyBrittany Peltier Kathleen Agnes QuigleyJordy Lawrence Stewart

JOIN OUR STAFFQ&Q is always looking for students to join our staff. All years and majors are welcome. We meet every Thursday from 5-6:30. Email [email protected] for more information.

SUBMISSION POLICYQ&Q prides itself on publishing the highest quality creative work. Therefore, every precaution is taken to assure a writer’s anonymity during the selection process. Only the advisor of Q&Q knows the identities of those who submit work to the magazine until after staff members’ selections are finalized.

CONTACT USSend all inquiries to [email protected].

QUIZ&quilL


Don’t Go Out!JORDY LAWRENCE STEWART The deepest isolation is to suffer separation from the source of all light and life and warmth. –Dante’s “The Inferno” i took a candle through the snowdragging trenches with my feetcraters no one had driven beforeand whispers of unhappy yearscame to mind with no one to listen what would i say … i could see the black birds waitingfor me to die of something coldwaiting for a reply and my decayand my laughs made them wait milesflying reapers of the hollow timbers what would i say … in a cave i made fire of iciclesleft my candle there to rest calmlyaway from the mountain shadowsof the black birds of the white nightnaked in the darkness with myself what would i say … morning did not come for yearsbut there was no moon – no starswould-be-light reflection in the snowmy candle long gone but with companystill burning with me somewhere in the trenches.

SPRING WONDERLANDMARISA RENCE


TONY DEGENARO

eatnik poet Jack Kerouac once said on the fringe of his adventures on the road, “Somewhere along the line I

knew there’d be girls, visions, ev-erything; somewhere along the line I knew the pearl would be handed to me.” Kerouac was very zen about his adventures, which is why they were so precious to him. Everyone is zen about something; I am Zen about Fortune Cookies. Bizarre as it may sound, I am religious about how to handle the fortune cookie, for example: I will always force my dining companions to choose their cookies first, leaving me the cookie that I was destined for. The purpose of this practice: receiving the cor-rect fortune. Like Kerouac, I believe that we all have our own pearl; while his was waiting on the high-ways of America, mine was located in a vanilla coated cookie. Have you given up deciphering my fascination for Eastern reli-gions, Beatnik poets, cookies, and aquatic gems yet? A pearl is defined by dictionary.com as “a smooth, rounded bead formed within the shells of certain mollusks: valued as a gem when finely colored.” To us, they must be more. To you a pearl could be some long term goal, some desire, something you crave to have and will stop at nothing to get. As difficult as it may be to dive into the sea and wrestle certain mollusks for their treasure, so must finding our own pearls. The most important thing in the world, which may seem

so insignificant to the rest of the universe, your personal little pearl is the macrocosm that may define who you are as a person. That is the best way to describe a pearl: the thing that defines who we are. I mentioned earlier that I found mine inside a fortune cookie. On my fifteenth birthday, as I crossed the bridge from awkward innocence into definite manhood, I found myself dining with my grandparents at the grungiest Chinese buffet you could imagine. It was here that my pearl was uncovered, and my future was laid before me. After a fulfill-ing meal of wontons, dumplings, lo mein and stir fry, the waitress brought the bill and customary for-tune cookies. I eyeballed the three as my grandmother and grandfather grabbed theirs. Mine sat alone, slowly and surely I reached and grabbed the golden cookie. Before unwrapping it, I smashed it into little bits, revealing the small white scroll. I opened the plastic baggie and dumped out the remains. In my hand was my pearl, a fortune that read: “You are a lover of words, someday you will write a book.” We all have our pearls, and when we find them, we can find ourselves. The funny thing is I don’t even like fortune cookies; it’s all about the pearl inside.

DEAD WRITEALYSSA MAZEY

beautiful things crammed onto pale walls

pale silence hangs between.

between our words, i’ve found my religion.

have faith in the fifteen mile per hour curves,

those curves that are ruin.

worship the starved late nights,

the hungry hours where they sleep.

sleep well, for you’ll need tomorrow.

tomorrow, you might fix your beautiful hair.

trim your beautiful words,

remain

to me

the torn gash

of your mouth

that haunts

my eyes.

so many inches of polished condescension –

the back of your neck rips a canyon in me.

THE ZEN OF FORTUNE COOKIES

B

Q&q


YIN AND YANGBRITTANY IVY DOROW

HIGHWAY PRAYERTONY DEGENARO

These roads know your name,hugging the wet pavement like suns slipping intothe satin blankets of a night’s sky,this is ubiquitous: gravel, sunset.

Your name could mean anything,written in Hebrew or English, there are gods on the highways, Yahweh, God, Allah,He is on the dashboard, dartingbetween pickups with Confederate flags,around minivans and convertibles,He is the black bird in your heart, do you let Him sing?

Highways always know our nameson the outerbelt of every city,asphyxiated by monotonyI tell you each ounce of earthcrafted to make these highways breathes with life.

Keep your eyes open brothers,hands on the wheels sisters, the sun hardly sets on our liveskeep going around and ’round and ’round ’n’ ’round,sing it like a prayer,because all of these roads lead home.


VIAN YOHN

did not grow up in Appalachia, unless the foothills count. I didn’t even grow up in the country, on a farm, or in a trailer. I grew up

in and around one of the largest and most diverse cities in Alabama, a city that may be the best example of the idyllic American Melting Pot that I have ever seen. But when I hear a Southern accent, no matter how poorly rendered (and trust me, the Southern accent is more difficult to fake than you would think), my immediate reaction is to then think of home. After all, my best friend from home and her family have it; most of my teachers had it; my stepfather and his fam-ily have it. But even though I was surrounded by it, I don’t have it – at least, not one that anyone can hear.

I don’t remember how old I was – somewhere in the nine to twelve ballpark, when I was just start-ing to get really metaconscious or whatever – or how the topic of The Accent even came up when my dad made his opinion on it known, but I think it had something to do with my having just said “y’all.” He’d laughed and said something about talking like a redneck, and, indig-nant, I’d told him that my accent could be worse. He’d then said I didn’t have The Accent and that if I

ever picked it up, he’d “kick me out until I learned to talk like an intel-ligent woman again.” Or something like that. He meant it in jest, of course, but I believed him – or, at least, the part about how intelligent people don’t “sound like hillbillies.” Or how hillbillies aren’t intelligent?

Either way, I hung on to “y’all,” but that’s about as Southern as my accent got. “Ain’t” in particular was anathema, though if I’d said “cut” instead of “turn off” the lights or that I was “fixing to” instead of “going to” do something, my

parents prob-ably wouldn’t have caught it. After a few years, it all starts to sound pretty natural – especially to my mother, for whom English was her second

language. Although, considering how each accent in America can sound like its own language, she could be on her way to multilin-gualism.

Speaking of which: I think it catches people by surprise to realize that there isn’t just one Southern accent. People in old plantation country sound different than people in Appalachia, who sound differ-ent than people in the bayou, who sound different than people on the ranch. Even people in the same region can speak different dialects;

on the southern accent from what I can tell (and I’m no linguist, mind you), older Hunts-ville natives speak in the Southern Appalachian dialect, while newer Huntsvillians speak something closer to the Highland Southern dia-lect. Add to that this phenomenon of Old versus New Southern Ameri-can English, and you’ll find that a Huntsville teenager thrown into the mountains – the real mountains further north, not the foothills that barely reach into the city – would probably have a hell of a time understanding what an Appalachian man was saying. Each of their ac-cents would be distinctively South-ern, but they would also be distinct from each other.

Anyway. The history of the Southern accent doesn’t really explain why I didn’t pick it up, and let’s face it – kids don’t always do what their parents tell them to do (or not to do, which is sometimes even better; that’s where all the fun ideas come from). And even though I usually followed my parents’ or-ders as though they’d been deliv-ered to me from an angel on high, that still wasn’t justification enough for me to reject the accent that was all around me – was it?

My mother was born in South Korea, just outside of Seoul. My father was born in Pennsylvania (or maybe New York) and raised in Columbus, Ohio. They met in Ver-mont, lived in Minnesota, had their two kids in California, and even-tually settled down in Alabama, which – despite their divorce, their individual bouts with unemploy-ment, and their children going to

college out-of-state – they have yet to escape. But the South was, to them, all business and no pleasure. They couldn’t afford to live in Cali-fornia, for one thing, and Dad had just been offered a job at the Valley Hill Country Club for another. They had had no desire to move anywhere east of the Mississippi River and south of the Mason-Dixie line, but there they were. And there they stayed.

Technically, then, I didn’t grow up in a “Southern” home. Southern homes take generations to build; you aren’t a real Southerner unless you’re born there, and your worth as a Southerner is evaluated par-tially (maybe even largely) by how many generations of your family lived in the South before you. My family, two people who travelled so much they didn’t know where home was anymore with two kids who were too young to attribute their identities to their surround-ings, was implanted there. But the reason Southern homes develop is because the South is a sort of black hole, a vacuum that sucks people in and refuses to let them go. It warps them into Southerners whether they like it or not, and then their kids become even more Southern than they, and then their kids …

My father owns a restaurant on the south side of Huntsville, a fine dining joint. I worked there for a few years through high school and into college, and although my fa-ther and I aren’t “Southern,” a good deal of the staff was (and continues to be, of course). That restaurant is my father’s ball-and-chain, the locus of the black hole. I can’t count how many times he’s told me how badly

But when I hear a Southern accent, no matter how poorly rendered, my immediate reaction is to then think of home.

I


he wants to sell the place and get out of there, and during one such conversation, a fellow server – a born-and-bred Southerner – jumped in with the black hole observation. Dad laughed at the time, but there’s something tragic about laughing at a truth that verifies your sense of entrapment. But that’s another tale altogether.

Sometimes I still wonder what it even means when we call someone’s accent “Southern.” By extension, I also still wonder what people even mean when they talk about “the South.” There are a few states on which almost everyone can agree – Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, the Carolinas, Louisiana, Arkansas and, of course, Alabama – and are there-fore known as “the Deep South.” Then there are states that other people might debate – Texas, Okla-homa, Missouri, Virginia, Kentucky – but are usually included, more for the similarity in their dialects than a unifying culture. And then there’s Florida, the southernmost contigu-ous state, that almost no one con-siders “Southern” – and they usually mean this in a “good for Florida” kind of way. What’s so great about not being Southern?

I won’t insult you by assuming you’ve never heard of the Ameri-can Civil War. Of course you have, if you live in the US. So assuming you received a more-or-less unbi-ased education of said war, let me ask you this: if we based all of our value judgments on past transgres-sions and only on past transgres-sions, how many of us would still have friends? A job? A family? How

would Robert Downey, Jr., have made his great artistic comeback and Kobe Bryant still be considered a basketball great? Yes, the histori-cal South pushed for institutions that most people consider … well, bad. But that was then, and this is now, and I’ve never met a slave-owner or a Ku Klux Klan member (only the first incarnation of which, by the way, was almost exclusively Southern; as it resurfaced in the early 1900s, it became a nationwide phenomenon), so why is it so great that I don’t “sound Southern,” that I’m not easily recognizable as a Southerner?

In a way, it’s almost not for me to say. The South I know is differ-ent from the South a Louisianian knows is different from the South a Texan knows. Even a person from Birmingham, Mobile, or Bug Tussle (it exists; look it up) knows a differ-ent South than I do. I know a South that does not look back to the past but towards a future in aerospace – a future in the stars. I know a South where I call you “ma’am” or “sir” not because I’m sexist or trying to make you “feel old” (I even address children as “sir” or “ma’am,” so don’t give me that) but because I respect you. I know a South where everyone says Hi to everyone, waves to everyone, asks everyone how their day is going – and then stops to listen because they genu-inely want to know. I know a South where family comes first, before even an individual’s own work and/or education, but where parents will do anything they can to guide their children toward the job and/or education they wish they could have had. I know a South where

black and white and Korean and Indian and Middle Eastern people have coalesced into one community, though each one maintains its own identity – each community a coral in a reef. In short, I know a South unlike the South non-Southerners seem to know.

I’ve spent quite a few years being proud of how I talk. One sum-mer while I was home from college, years after the black hole discus-sion, a man I was serving at the res-taurant asked me where I was from. I told him I was raised in Huntsville (he wasn’t expecting to hear that, I could tell in the way he sat back in his chair, raised his eyebrows, and set down his fork), and then he asked if my parents are from the area. No, they aren’t, and I told him

so, to which he replied, “Oh, that’s why you sound so Midwestern. You have a very neutral accent; I guess you never got the chance to pick one up from around here.” And I agreed, and we laughed, and I felt good…ish. After hearing, over and over again, “You don’t sound Southern” every time the subject has come up at in college, I was suddenly aware of how detached I was from my home. I’d never lived in the Midwest until I came to Ot-terbein; I had never lived anywhere

except northern Alabama. It didn’t make sense that I was so proud of not carrying any vestige of home with me, of not having anything about me that said, “This is where I’m from, and I’m damn proud of it.”

It wasn’t even until I left home that I realized that it was, in fact, home. People talk differently in Ohio, I realized, and if I had to put my personal vernacular on a spec-trum between Ohio Midwestern and Alabama Southern, it would almost certainly waver more toward the latter. I mean, come on – doesn’t “the car needs washed” sound weird to anybody else around here? Since when did “crayon” have only one syllable? How can anyone not know what “humdinger” means? I couldn’t believe that I was speak-ing a new language when I left the South and entered the Midwest, but I couldn’t deny that I was strug-gling more to understand some things people in Ohio say than I’ve ever had to struggle anywhere back home. Of course, there’s more to home than the way people talk – there’s the way springtime smells like wild onions, the way lightning bugs (or fireflies, if you’re a Yan-kee) light up stretches of woods like Christmas in the summer, the way grass stays greener longer and comes back to life sooner, the way cicadas can replace humming refrigerators and midnight planes as white noise and no one thinks a thing about it. But I can’t carry any of that with me like I can my own voice.

Someday, I hope I think of something witty and charming to say when someone says, “You don’t

IT WASN’T EVEN UNTIL I LEFT HOME THAT I REALIZED THAT IT WAS, IN FACT, HOME.


sound Southern,” in that surprised way in which a “good for you” sen-timent is implied (or, in one case, explicit, and I think she was just as flustered as I was when she real-ized what else she had said without saying it). It took me long enough to recognize that there’s no shame in “y’all,” in dropping g’s and add-ing vowels, in emphasizing the first rather than the second syllable in “Thanksgiving” and “ibuprofen” (although, strangely, I don’t keep to this pattern in the more common words such as “cement,” “um-brella,” or “insurance”). And one of the last things my junior English teacher said to me before I gradu-ated high school was along the lines of, “I’m proud of you for leaving, not because you need to escape the South, but because you need to show the rest of the world that the South isn’t what they think it is. You can break the stereotype; you have a potential about you, unrelat-ed to being or not being Southern, for going far.”

I hope so.

BOBCATKATIE ZABORSZKI

Q&q


BRITTANY IVY DOROW’S ideal life would be living on a quiet beach, creating art, writing, and making music. For now, she’s finishing up her last couple months of undergrad at Otterbein University as an art major (with concentrations in photography and digital media) and English minor. Next stop: the real world.

YIN AND YANG, 11 ENTRANCE TO A DREAM, 33 ABOUT A COLOR., 39 FOR ANITA, 46 COMMON GROUND, 74 THE KITE, 78

HANNAH FARLEY is a first-year art major with concentrations in com-munication design and drawing. She’s from Johnstown, Ohio, and she com-pleted the skull drawing in her Drawing 1 class this spring.

DRAWING WITH SKULL, 66

MEG FREADO is graduating in fall as an honors psychology major. She spends her summers writing, traveling, and exploring rooftops. Her schol-arly and creative work has been published in the journal Reclaiming Chil-dren and Youth.

CHOKE, 28 THE FULL MOON’S SUICIDE, 42

BORIS HINDERER is a senior majoring in creative writing and psychol-ogy. He is a member of the psychology honorary society Psi Chi and is involved in Aegis as well as the Otterbein outdoor adventure club. Artisti-cally, he works primarily in (unapproachable) poetry and after leaving Otterbein, he would like to pursue graduate studies in psychology.

CHEWING WATER, 34

ALYSSA MAZEY just wants to sit in the grass with her dog, read books, make art, and drink Earl Grey. She also wants to teach and travel, and maybe, just maybe, be the change.

DEAD WRITE, 9

BIOSandAUTHOR

ARTISTThe 2012 spring mag includes work by the

following Otterbein students. Listed in alphabetical order.

MIKE CIRELLI is a junior journalism major and art minor at Otterbein University. He is the editor-in-chief of the Tan & Cardinal student newspa-per and the page designer for Quiz & Quill. He wants to design newspapers and magazines for a living and dreams of one day being a designer for a music publication.

UNCOVERING MY DAD’S SECRET PAST, 52

TONY DEGENARO is a senior creative writing major from Youngstown, Ohio. In the fall, Tony begins an MFA program in creative writing at the University of San Francisco. He is a poet.

THE ZEN OF FORTUNE COOKIES, 8 HIGHWAY PRAYER, 10 ORANGES, 44 WORDLESS, 72 THE LIGHTHOUSE, THE TREE, 76

96 | QUIZ&quilL

ON THE COVER

A Close RelationshiP by Marisa RenceA round of applause for Marisa Rence’s A Close Relationship, the first-place winner of our campus-wide cover contest. Rence said her inspiration for the piece was her relationship with a very close friend. They were going through a rough patch at the time, and painting was a way for Rence to come to terms with it. She represented her own feelings and thoughts with yellow (her favorite color), his with red, and their relationship with the colors in between. Rence has three other works in this magazine.

mike cirellitony degenarobrittany IVY dorowhannah farleymeg freadoboris hindereralyssa mazeyandrew millerwhitney reed marisa rence jennifer rishlindsey rowlandjordy lawrence stewartemily swank vian yohnkatie zaborszki

WRITING AND ARTWORK BY:(IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER)

QUIZ quill&2012 SPRING WRITING AWARDS

OTTERBEIN UNIVERSITY’S STUDENT LITERARY MAGAZINE | VOL. 93 | SPRING MAGAZINE 2012 QUIZ quill&SEE Q&q SWAG TABLE!NOW AVAILABLE!

THANKS TO THESE Q&q SUPPORTERS! Mrs. Roy A. Burkhartfor funding the Burkhart Poetry Prizes Mr. Donald L. Williamsfor funding the Louise Gleim Williams Writer’s Prize

THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENTfor funding Q&Q’s events and magazines

PROGRAMWelcome Spring Mag Cover Contest WinnerSingle-Author Chapbook WinnerNonfiction Prize WinnersRoy A. Burkhart Religious Poetry PrizePlaywriting Prize WinnersPoetry Prize WinnersNewspaper Writing Prize WinnersFiction Prize WinnersLouise Gleim Williams Writer’s Prize2012-13 Editorial Board Announcement

YOU A WRITER?RESUME OPPORTUNITIES. LITERARY DISCUSSION. VALUABLE EXPERIENCE. WHAT’S HOLDING YOU BACK?

join now!see reversE FOR MORE INFO.

OTTERBEIN UNIVERSITY’S STUDENT LITERARY MAGAZINE | VOL. 93 | SPRING MAGAZINE 2012 QUIZ quill& 6666

QUIZ&quilL

6

PRESENTS...

PLAYS

THEN WHY HAVEN’T YOU JOINED QUIZ&quilL YET?

QUIZ&quilLQ&Q is always looking for students to join our staff. Earn valuable experience editing a real literary magazine. All years and majors are welcome. We meet every Thursday from 5-6:30 to discuss literary and artistic works, plan events and publications and just have fun.

If you are interested in joining next year’s staff, send an email to [email protected] or fill out and return this card to Dr. Shannon Lakanen’s office, Towers 228, and we will send more information your way.

NAME YEAR MAJOR/MINOR EMAIL FAVORITE GENRE OF WRITING OR ART

OTTERBEIN UNIVERSITY’S STUDENT LITERARY MAGAZINE

&&&&

This certificate is presented to

Jessica Bryantin recognition of excellence in creative writing.

first place, poetry PRIZE

QUIZ quill&2012 Spring Writing Awards

spring mag portfolio

Education