Table of Contents Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Editor's Note Review of Bliss Review of Atheist Manifesto Review of The Stones Cry Out Film review of "Karov La Bayit" Creative Nonfiction A Reverence for Words By Virginia Hendry For the Wife of Bath and the Wife of Yeats, I Give Thanks By Sara J. Ford Birth By Clint Pearson Poetry Gong Fu By Tim J. Brennan Phases By Tolu Ogunlesi They Are Driving Their Cars Again, They Are Driving... By Anne Cammon Death of the Travelers By Abigail Grant Leaves By Matt Gee Fiction The Wood Splitter By Michael Phillips Boogie & Sarah Leigh By Sandra L. West What Happened to Matt Dillon By Chris Drangle Red, Manhattan, 523 By Beth Hogan Titanic Hat By D.K. McGill About the Contributors © 2007, River Walk Journal and respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. Do not use or reproduce without permission. River Walk Journal, Inc. Board of Directors Chairman - Elizabeth Ross Vice Chairman - Joseph Koch Secretary/Treasurer - Geri Stock-Ross Editorial Director - Patti Kurtz, DA Literacy Director - Vacant Policy Director - PA State Rep. Jess Stairs Advisory Board Chairman - Patti Kurtz, DA Asst. Chairman - Dan Lachenman, PhD Samuel Hazo Christopher Leland Edwin Yoder Joseph Bathanti Journal Staff Publisher - Elizabeth Ross Editor-In-Chief - Joseph Koch Senior Editor - Patti Kurtz Senior Editor - Neeldhara Misra Senior Editor - Mike Munsil Assistant Editor - Steve MacNeil Copyeditor - Kathy Skaggs Blog Contributing Editor - Maggie Koster Publicity Director (PA) - Geri Stock-Ross For information about submissions, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/subs.html. Questions about promotions, subscribers' services, and advertising should be sent to publisher@riverwalkjournal.org. River Walk Journal, Inc. is a non-profit corporation run entirely by volunteers. For information about volunteer opportunities and internships, visit VolunteerMatch.

For the Wife of Bath and the Wife of Yeats, I Give Thanks By Sara J. Ford When students are preparing to take major exams in graduate school English departments, they don't pay heed to a great many wives. Before we enter the room in which our knowledge of the English and American canons is to be tested, whether in writing or through conversation with those whose knowledge is already firmly established, we pay much attention to books and to their writers and assume that the topic of wives is about as likely to come up as is the topic of apricots. Sure, we are aware that some of the writers were wives, and some of them had wives. On our way into such rooms, for example, we are likely to be aware that a lot of the writers we are prepared to talk about didn't get the wives they wanted and that Ernest Hemingway got more of them than he wanted. We are aware that Hester's problem in The Scarlet Letter is that she was not properly wived and that everybody except Emily Dickinson seems to think that this was her problem too. We know that T.S. Eliot's wife went nuts, and as we've read the Four Quartets, we are not surprised by this. And we know that no writer has ever loved having a wife as much as Gertrude Stein. In the main, though, such details are extraneous to our primary focus. The greatest exception to this rule is a character writ by Geoffrey Chaucer known as the Wife of Bath. Both the character herself and her wifely status loom importantly in the field and any student sufficiently prepared for these exams is ready to talk about her. This particular wife from a place called Bath enjoys herself immensely and is just plain fun to be around. Her name is Alison, and in The Canterbury Tales, she uses her experiences with five husbands to support her argument that sex is good and virginity overrated. About this subject she waxes on for some time. Even better, she makes waste of the myth that men ought to be in charge of everything, a clear indication that not enough people in charge today have read their Chaucer. She's saucy, and I like her. Alison marries husband #5 who is a pretty young fellow and seems nice, only to discover after they are married that he's one of those guys who wears his undershirt around the house and enjoys regular bouts of slapping his wife upside the head. As he does so, he is particularly fond of reading aloud from a book written by the fourteenth century ancestors of Rush Limbaugh, Andrew Dice Clay, and Howard Stern, about how stupid, awful, and dangerous women are. The method by which Alison trumps husband #5 and teaches him his lesson is somewhat troubling by today's standards, but it hardly seems fair to judge her that way. Fed up, she rips his book apart and tosses him into the fire. He recovers, rages, and hits her head so hard she remains forever deaf in one ear. She pretends to be dead, winning his remorse and a pledge of nonviolence. Then for good measure she hits him again, winning his agreement that from now on, she'll be the one in charge, thank you very much. All of which is kind of cathartic in the same way a talk show is cathartic for its viewers. The outrageous teenagers or abusive fathers get to come on stage and strut their crude, uncaring stuff, but at the end of the show, as we all know, their victims will muster up some kind of defiance and, most importantly, the audience will get their chance to scream at the self-proclaimed freaks on stage, making everybody at home feel, well, better about their own, comparatively normal lives. But still, The Wife of Bath is probably not a good advice manual for women in abusive relationships. After all, once the show's over, the self-righteous audience goes home and the victim has to face her abuser alone. Thanks to millions of accounts of men like husband #5 we've read since this one, we now know a bit more than Chaucer did about this husband's remorse and how much we ought or ought not to rely on his repentance. By now we've come to be more than a little suspicious when a fellow says to his bruised and bleeding beloved, "As help me God, I shal thee nevere smyte." And so we wince when dear Alison believes him and lets him stick around. But given that Alison is likely to have seen far fewer public service announcements and billboards urging battered women to get out than I have, I forgive her this dangerous and ill-informed move. She didn't know any better. You deal with what you've got, you know what I mean? Anyway, Chaucer's Alison is a woman to be reckoned with, and the point is that if you're taking a major exam on English literature, you know who she is. After two years spent preparing for graduate school and two more in graduate school doing little more than reading and rereading books, I prepared to take my master's exams. We had to take a written exam first, to prove we were in the ballpark, and then an oral exam, to prove that we would not soil our pants under great pressure and thereby bring shame to the field. During both exams all questions regarding American and British literature were fair game. Holding Beowulf and Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain and Toni Morrison and everyone in between in one's head all at the same moment is not an easy thing to do, let me tell you, especially if one's head is about the size of mine. But I was ready. I made it through the written exam fine, except for the minor problem of forgetting the name of the heroine in a novel called Mrs. Dalloway. So throughout an eighty-minute essay I wrote over and over again about "the heroine in Mrs. Dalloway." It was only on my way home later that day that I remembered her name actually was Mrs. Dalloway. The faculty reading the written exams may have gotten a laugh, but they didn't hold it against me, and I was cleared to select my orals committee. My committee was made up of my Chaucer professor, my feminist theory professor, my Renaissance poetry professor, and my nineteenth-century novel professor. As I asked each of them to participate, as I reviewed all of my notes, as I showered that morning, and as I sweated with near panic on my way into the room that day, I fully assumed that the primary question of the day involved how things would go for me. If that sounds a little self-interested, it was. From my perspective, which was the only one available to me at the time, the day's single and great significance was that it was the day on which I might have failed attempting to do the only thing I really wanted to do with my life. It never occurred to me that the day might go poorly for anybody else, or that I might profit from such a turn of events. But profit I did, and here's how it went. When we got started, my Chaucer professor, being a very kind person, began the questioning by asking about something she knew I knew. In fact, she had just finished reading a paper I'd written on the topic. She asked me to talk a little bit about the Wife of Bath. This should have been a sweet moment. It should have been the moment that the cloud of tension, which had been hovering over my head for weeks, floated away in the cool breeze. It should have been the moment I realized I was fine, that I started talking intelligently, that I impressed the committee, and myself and charged ahead like I'd intended to. But it wasn't. Because the gods must be both crazy and mean, when Chaucer professor asked me who the wife of Bath was, the only thing I could envision was white space. My recollection of dear Alison and husband #5 was completely gone, wiped away in a moment. I squirmed in my chair and held my mouth open, so that should a thought come to me, I'd be ready to spit it out quickly. But nothing came. Where only an hour before there had been confessional poems and slave narratives and sonnets and one-act plays, now there was nothing. And the white space wasn't light and airy either. What I saw in my head were dirty white walls. It was like being in a small windowless museum gallery with all the paintings taken down. There were smudge marks and faded lines outlining the spots where the paintings had hidden the walls from dirty hands and light, but the paintings themselves were gone, as were the little white cards on which was written the names of the artists, the titles, and brief synopses of the significance of the works. The Chaucer professor felt bad—she'd only wanted to help after all, and what more could a person do than ask about a character the student has just finished writing about? So she tried to stop the hemorrhaging, and asked me to simply identify Chaucer himself. After all, that's all she and I had talked about for the past two months. It was an embarrassingly easy softball of a question, but it didn't help. I had no idea what she was talking about and could think of nothing to say. The cloud of tension over my head was gaining in density and ferocity, and it appeared more and more like a cloud of doom than of mere tension. This was the end, I thought. It all stops here. Right here on this stupid plastic chair in this old office, I've been undone by somebody calling herself the Wife of Bath. I scanned the horizons of my memory in desperation, but could think of not a single thing that was ever written by anybody. There was just nobody home. The cloud rumbled, threatening to strike at any time, and I wished I had brought an umbrella or that I had at least had the foresight to sit closer to the door. I couldn't look anyone in the eye, so taken was I by the white walls crowding up my consciousness. I could only hear the hum of failure in the air. I felt naked with self-consciousness. Finally, nineteenth-century novel professor decided he'd have to act. He seemed to think I was still worth one last rescue attempt. Rather suddenly he leaned back and exhaled, as if to relieve the tension for all of us, and said in a lighter, easier voice than the situation called for, "well, let's talk about Yeats, then." I was surprised by this question, which came from a man who spoke far more often of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Wilkie Collins, not that those names would have meant anything to me at the moment. So surprised, in fact, that something inside of me shook loose, which I suppose was the intent of the question. The white walls didn't go away, but the room they encased became slightly cluttered. And among the clutter was a poet by the name of Yeats. An Irish guy. I knew that. Hey!, I thought, I know something! The guy is Irish! I didn't see much, but the slight improvement gave me hope enough to raise my gaze from the floor and look at this kind man, my nineteenth-century novel professor. "Yeah," I said. "Ok. Let's talk about Yeats." "What can you tell me about Yeats' gyre theory?" he asked. I looked around in my gallery some more, only slightly more hopeful, and was more shocked than anybody to see Yeats' gyre there sitting on the floor of the room. "Well," I said. "He had this idea, see that western culture was finished with something, Christianity, maybe, and that we were turning further and further away from what held us together before." I sat back in my chair, looking at the geometrical shape that was Yeats' gyre, now fully developed in my mind. I continued: "Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer." I smiled because I knew most of the rest of the poem was there too, because I knew something about that poem and the guy who wrote it and what he was getting at and why we still read it. My shoulders relaxed and everybody in the room sighed a collective sigh of relief. I was not quite finished, after all. At least not yet. After I went on for some time about Yeats and his gyre theory and modern thinking and how god was dead and all the poets thought they'd write the new religion and all of that, after I'd talked for some time, feeling more and more like a human being, Renaissance poetry guy piped up. Now the tone was changed. The committee members, seeing that I was back in the game, switched from emergency technicians trying to keep me alive into the fairly tenacious examiners they had come into the room in the first place to be. Renaissance guy's tone did not suggest he was throwing a softball. And he wasn't trying to change the subject to see if he could get me on a more productive track. "And where," he asked somewhat threateningly, "did Yeats get this idea for the gyre?" He sat smugly in his chair, arms newly folded across his chest. I sank again into humiliation. I'd been moving so nicely along the tracks for such a short period of time, and then this guy had to go and ask where someone had gotten the big idea. I hadn't studied where people got their ideas. I had studied the ideas, and that had seemed like a lot at the time. "I don't know," I said, returning my gaze to the floor and slouching down in my chair. I felt the dark cloud descend to engulf me, and I was ready to accept defeat. It's important to note that by this point in the exam, the only person who had not yet spoken was feminist theory professor, by far the most aggressive personality in the room. During the Sara-appears-to-be-brain-dead phase of my exam, she'd sat back and let the other more nurturing members of the team ply their people skills. I wasn't looking up to know, but my guess is that she raised her eyebrows and looked at her watch several times during that episode. Feminist theory professors in the nineties were aggressive by nature. They had to be to survive as scholars in a field that prided itself on nastiness, and besides, they were the embodiment of an ongoing battle between an older canon examined in traditional ways and something altogether new. The only two things guaranteed about English departments during this period were that they had at least one such person on their faculty, and that some other faculty members did not like them. So they walked around and wrote their books as if ready for assault. Well Renaissance guy was no feminist scholar, that's to be sure, and he and feminist theory professor were good examples of the great divide that split many an English department during that decade. He was a man studying old dead guys. She was a woman with the gall to suggest that there was more to it than that. One had tradition on his side. One had a chip on her shoulder big enough to house Anita Hill, the witches of Salem, and the Wife of Bath herself, not to mention characters and stories and poems written by actual women. These two colleagues weren't intellectual soul mates, if you know what I mean, though they got along fine at social gatherings as long as there was enough wine to go around. Anyway, back to my moment of doom. When I ceded the question about where Yeats got his idea, nobody jumped in to carry the conversation forward. So Renaissance guy provided the answer to his own question, I suppose so that I could be better educated on my way into a career in the fast food industry. Nice of him, I guess, though I don't know as the origins of Yeats' gyre theory dominate the conversations over the drive-thru headset airwaves. "Well he got it," Renaissance guy said with a huff, as if what he was about to say was somewhat far-fetched, "from his wife." "Huh?" I said, not sure at all what his point was. At the time, the only thing I knew about Yeats and wives was that he didn't get the one he wanted. In his poems, Yeats goes on and on and on about a woman who married someone else. I didn't know a single thing about the wife he actually got. The cloud hovered, ready to spill. "Yeah," he said, sarcastically, "I guess she, like, pulled it out of a hat or something." He chuckled at this and rolled his eyes, assuming we'd all find this fact quite amusing. And it happened just like that. I knew immediately that things had changed. The others turned their heads away from me and toward him, with serious concern. Nineteenth century novel guy actually shook his head helplessly, as if his friend had just walked out in front of a speeding car and it was too late to return to the safety of the sidewalk. Feminist theory professor snapped her neck up as if being awakened from a deep sleep, which is actually quite possible, and the dark, dense storm cloud of doom that had threatened for forty five minutes to wash me out of the ranks of the educated altogether, left me alone. It shot straight across the small office, where it lodged itself just north of Renaissance poetry guy's ears. Over my head was a cloudless, sunny sky, broad and wide as the heavens over the prairies. Everything seemed possible again. In that one instant I moved from subject of doom to observer of same, and that is no small move, let me tell you. Renaissance guy stammered. He knew as well as the rest of us that he'd just let a really big one fly and that it would take a long time to move past this: "Well, I mean, I only mean, she was some kind of a psychic or at least she thought she was. It's not to say she wasn't intelligent or anything, only that she was kind of, well you know…" "She pulled it out of a what?" feminist theory professor wanted to know. "Did you just say Yeats' wife pulled the notion of the gyre out of a hat?!" I don't recall the conversation after that, except that it was tense and angry and I knew it had nothing whatsoever to do with me. The cloud remained over Renaissance guy's head and paid me no further attention. Once feminist theory professor and the others were through with Renaissance guy, at least for the time being, they returned to face me, but by then the pressure was off. The hot seat was no longer mine. I was just another pleasant if nervous graduate student ready to answer some more questions, and so onward we went, happily together. We talked about the romantic poets, and about labor writers from the 1930s, about Shakespeare and James Fennimore Cooper and even about Chaucer and the Wife of Bath, who was back in all of her saucy glory. The last half of the exam marched along quite pleasantly, so much so that I noted a slight hint of sorrow that the period was over, as delightful as it was to know some answers and chat with these fine people. Don't get me wrong, I was also happy to leave. I left the room with a future in English and in teaching, and knew exactly how close I'd come to leaving with something very different. And I left more fond of Yeats' wife, a woman I'd known nothing about two hours previously, than any other character either within or married to the English and American literary canons.