Katie Jean Shinkle performs extraordinary feats of emotional and narrative funambulism. Her linguistic high-wire dexterity is gorgeous and devastating in equal measure. It is, in fact, the painful deadpan beauty of the prose that will knock you to your knees and allow you to feel things you may never have felt

 

Katie Jean Shinkle, Our Prayers After the Fire. Blue Square Press, 2014.

katiejeanshinkle.tumblr.com/



"When I finished reading Our Prayers After the Fire I saw that my fists were clenched tight. I’d been trying to grab a fistful, punch my way in. I wanted to get inside this book, figure out how it did what it did. I felt grateful and jealous, two of my favorite emotions when reading. Now my fists are open, my palms out. Katie Jean Shinkle is a writer who makes you beg for more, more, more.”

 - Lindsay Hunter



"Our Prayers After the Fire exquisite discontinuation lays waste to the tired turns of conventional fiction. Every sentence is a wonder here, every gesture is fresh, and Katie Jean Shinkle has given us a book that’s as wacky, consecrated, and as unsettling as a fever." - Paul Lisicky



"Katie Jean Shinkle performs extraordinary feats of emotional and narrative funambulism in Our Prayers: After the Fire. Her linguistic high-wire dexterity is gorgeous and devastating in equal measure. It is, in fact, the painful deadpan beauty of the prose that will knock you to your knees and allow you to feel things you may never have felt. Prepare to be happily shat. - Kellie Wells



There Are So Many Things That Beg You For Love  (Patasola Press, forthcoming 2014)




Baby-Doll Under Ice  (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2014)



*Excellent review of Baby-Doll Under Ice at The Volta blog: https://thevoltablog.wordpress.com/2014/08/15/baby-doll-under-ice-by-katie-jean-shinkle/

Charlotte, dear, dear, Charlotte. This crate of lemons on the shore
is rotten.
Charlotte, this December, it is so cold we cannot smell the stink.

-- from Baby-Doll Under Ice - See more at: http://hyacinthgirlpress.com/yearthree/babydollunderice.html#sthash.18SLO7yW.dpuf

In Katie Jean Shinkle’s brief and beautiful Baby-Doll Under Ice, address to the beloved is equal parts lyric and fable.
Shinkle’s poems navigate a lyrical and often erotic tension between submergence and emergence of the self and the other. Throughout the poems, the speaker/s are not constant in their pronouns and antecedents, pushing the reader to consider unified identity and embodiment. We encounter I, you, she, we, the eponymous beloved Baby-Doll, and a figure called Charlotte, whose organs are dangerous, who might be a shadow of the speaker or the beloved.
While the title and many of the individual poems bear out the conceit of submergence, the poems also dance with the thrill of the reveal, with nakedness and vulnerability. One example of this erotic tension is the poem Baby Doll’s Cry for Help, in which the speaker pleads with the beloved to “come sit next to me:”

no closer still, on my thighs you are
on my chest on my face o Baby-Doll
you are on my hips we are no please

come closer until you are invisible
until you shadow your shadow your
watery shadow until this shadow

Like a fable, in these poems the physical is metaphysical. The body is the site of viscera; the body is the site of metaphor. Organs are fruit, are weapons, and also are just organs. In these lines from “Baby-Doll’s First Examination,” we see the layered truths of the body:

What is right here, fingers beneath

bust line. Here is where we disintegrate,

here is where we burst.

Shinkle uses sonic resonance and recurring image to draw the reader through the whole sequence. These are poems to enjoy in immediate material pleasure, and to unfold over multiple readings in moments of concealment and disclosure. - Kathy Goodkin




The Sadness of July  (dancing girl press, 2012)
(prose)





As Close to Smiling as You Can Get (The Cupboard, 2012)







The Arson People, Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2015.
copingmechanisms.net/mainline

       
Wicked Alice (2012)    
Nano Fiction (Vol 6, #2)
tx’s Supermodel Summer (2012)


_________________
(Our Prayers After the Fire, excerpts:)
"There Are So Many People Who Beg You For Love" FLAUNT Magazine  (Issue 124, Nov. 2012)

"When You Are Everywhere"     Ghost Ocean Magazine
"When Holding You Isn’t Enough"   Everyday Genius
"In the Clearing, a Doe"                 Dark Sky Magazine
"A Labor of Love"             Puerto del Sol
"When All You Want Doesn’t Want You"  >killauthor
"For All the Space in the World"      elimae
"Days Like These"                   Hobart
"Shadowbox"                          alice blue review
"You Make Much Better Decisions Than Me"   Bluestem Magazine
"Most of the Time You’re Fine"     Corium Magazine
"Everyone’s Velocity"   Monkeybicycle



Koharu-Mei lives on this road with her humongous family in a humongous house right on the lake with private beach front access. Koharu-Mei goes to private school and drives a brand new Audi, as does the rest of her brothers and sisters, they do not car pool. Koharu-Mei looks so good in a bikini, which Elsie Davis will never be able to wear. Elsie Davis wore a bikini once in middle school when she was running three miles a day in order to go to the woods far away from her grandmother’s house to smoke exactly four camel wide light cigarettes. That was the first and last summer of Elsie Davis’s life that she wore a bikini. Koharu-Mei lives in a bikini in summer and Elsie Davis, now knowing who she is, sees her at the gas station with all of her equally as beautiful and skinny friends that have glimmering skin and dark hair. Koharu-Mai has a summer uniform: oversized tank top and very small cut-off shorts that make Elsie Davis sink into her skin. Elsie Davis is going to set Koharu-Mei’s Audi on fire.


Excerpt:
from The Toast

99 Jerico Loop
Elsie Davis and Nathan are making out in the back of Nathan’s truck and the curved metal of the truck bed is digging into Elsie Davis’s back. She gets on top of him and he reaches up, grabs her breasts, her rounded stomach fat, wriggles up face as if smelling something bad, says, “Your titties are too saggy, there’s nothing to them,” pushes her off. Embarrassed, she gathers herself, making the truck bed bounce. “Fuck you,” she says under her breath, lighting a cigarette. “I want to go home,” she says. Nathan obliges her and they do not speak until

6701 Buell Street
until Elsie Davis runs into Nathan at a party across town at a mutual friend’s house. After a couple of beers she finds the nerve to say,
“Hey, what’s up,”
and Nathan refuses to make eye contact.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
There is a girl next to him she recognizes but doesn’t know.
The girl is tiny with bleach copper hair because her hair so dark true blonde won’t happen, a black velvet choke chain with a metal rose pendant hanging from the middle, a chevron patterned bikini top with an oversized black tank top over it.
“Can I talk to you?”
“No.”
Elsie Davis looks at the floor, ceiling, bites her lower lip until it bleeds so she doesn’t start to cry.
“I’m going outside,” the girl she recognizes but doesn’t know says to Nathan while giving her a sad, pathetic look, poor stupid fat girl what is she even thinking?
Nathan watches the girl step out the sliding glass doors, looks Elsie Davis in the eyes.
“Look, leave me alone. Whatever happened the other night was a fluke thing. I am trying to get with Koharu-Mei, alright?”
Whispers: “I’m sorry but you’re gross.”
Loudly says: “So stop trying to talk to me OK? God, I don’t like you.”

3333 Aiden Terrace
Elsie Davis starts with the back deck area which has a Hawaiian theme. Nathan’s parents are renown for their tiki parties and the backyard is always set for a party.
She pulls all of the decorations off of the enclosed fence area, cut outs of ukuleles and hula-dancers. There has to be at least 100 of them and she carries armloads, piling them in front of the door leading to the backyard. She stealthily douses the entire two tier deck in gasoline, three cans from Nathan’s parents’ shed and two cans she clumsily brought with her.
Once that is done, she hops the fence. Before she hops the fence, she throws all the unlit tiki torches over with her. She lights each one individually and throws them like a javelin back over the fence and into the yard. She watches the first one as it hits the edge of the stairs, it makes her heart jump, makes her palm sweat like she is kissing. She throws the rest of them, one right after the other, and doesn’t matter where they land—whoosh—whoosh—whoosh.
She runs to a very small patch of trees the alleyway behind Nathan’s house to watch the entire back of the house go up in flames. This is the best part, the watching. It is so beautiful and the beauty is what kills her the most.

8900 Circle Road
Koharu-Mei lives on this road with her humongous family in a humongous house right on the lake with private beach front access.
Koharu-Mei goes to private school and drives a brand new Audi, as does the rest of her brothers and sisters, they do not car pool.
Koharu-Mei looks so good in a bikini, which Elsie Davis will never be able to wear.
Elsie Davis wore a bikini once in middle school when she was running three miles a day in order to go to the woods far away from her grandmother’s house to smoke exactly four camel wide light cigarettes. Her grandmother was convinced that she was doing it to get fit but really she was doing it to smoke. After she would spend the morning smoking, she would come back to the house and lay out in a pink halter hand-me-down. That was the first and last summer of Elsie Davis’s life that she wore a bikini.
Koharu-Mei lives in a bikini in summer and Elsie Davis, now knowing who she is, sees her at the gas station with all of her equally as beautiful and skinny friends that have glimmering skin and dark hair. Koharu-Mai has a summer uniform: oversized tank top and very small cut-off shorts that make Elsie Davis sink into her skin.
Elsie Davis is going to set Koharu-Mei’s Audi on fire.

Author Spotlight: Katie Jean Shinkle

by Kelsie Hahn

From “A Labor of Love,” by Katie Jean Shinkle in Puerto del Sol Vol. 47, No. 1:

Mother pretends there is a little extra money and brings home lovebirds from Andi’s parents’ pet store, LUV YOUR PETZ. LUV YOUR PETZ is going out-of-business and they are trying to get rid of Absolutely Everything In The Store MUST GO!!!! says the ad in the Sunday newspaper so Mother went and bought two.
We named ours Cherry, our brother named his Freddy Kruger.

Katie Jean Shinkle is the author of The Sadness of July, forthcoming from dancing girl press, and Julysleep, an echap forthcoming from Gold Wake Press. Other work can be found in or forthcoming from Sonora Review, Salt Hill, Super Arrow, and Ghost Ocean Magazine, among others. She is currently a doctoral candidate in creative writing at the University of Denver.
Below, Katie discusses resonance, the things that haunt her writing, and the perils of pet ownership.

I love the darkly funny images in this piece, though I don’t want to get too specific and risk spoiling the story for those who have yet to read it. Hopefully without giving too much away, where did this story originate?
I was obsessing about the family dynamics when a pet cat dies, as creepy as that is, but then the obsession moved to domesticated animals and household pets, in general. Really, I am interested in the ways in which human beings simultaneously love and hate their pets, the ways in which the pets bare the brunt of the dynamics of human interaction in a domestic space, especially when the dynamic in the domestic space is destructive or im/ex-ploding. I was thinking about how pets can be the first thing to be neglected or abused in a space that is crumbling and how this neglect and/or abuse can change everything somehow, acting as a mirror to the situation in a lot of ways.
In thinking about the ending structurally, it uses a repeated root sentence that each iteration builds on. It seems risky in such a short piece, where each word’s weight is magnified, to use repetition in this way. I have my own ideas about what this is doing, but why did you choose this structure?
I love this idea of the “root sentence” and building iteration as resonation, like a haunting. I feel like this structure allows the diction to haunt and occupy in a full-on sensory way. This building is a signature of the voice of the narrator, a collective We, in the larger manuscript and it seems key for the overall architecture of the larger manuscript this one chapter-story comes from. This repetition at once nourishes and is cyclically violent, unrelenting as the voice of We. In this chapter-story, the repetition from the root serves the same purpose on a smaller scale, providing momentum, building a curious sense of haunting through syntax, a half-ouroboros of sorts, the sentence beginning to eat itself, the voice beginning to eat itself, a ghost of some sort, that creates the voice of the narrator.
This piece does a lot of what I think a great short should do: it builds strong tension, projects resonant images, and leaves me thinking about the piece long after I’ve read it. What challenges and benefits do you see in using the very short form?
The challenge and the benefit is the mere constraint of brevity. In life in general, I am a wordy mother fucker and a lot of those words are garbage. I am long-winded, I love lots of detail, I love digressions and gossip and interruption and stories-within-stories and talking shit, I love lots of large, sensory images, I love dialogue, I love messy resonations and connections, so keeping things “brief” and “short” was not my strongest attribute. There was a time in my process where I felt like I was simply wasting words and page space. I cannot do, let’s say, what Kellie Wells does, this absolutely gorgeous maximalist prose, which is what I thought I was doing, but I absolutely was not doing that. The challenge for me was to learn to rein those words in, learn where the heat in the writing was for me.
I understand that “A Labor of Love” is one part of a larger series. How does this piece fit into that, and where can we read more?
“A Labor of Love” is a chapter-story in my novel entitled The Show Must Go On. This chapter-story falls in the middle of the manuscript; each chapter-story is no more than 3 pages and can all stand alone as individual pieces while building the overall narrative of the novel. An excerpt of several chapter-stories from the novel won the Calvino Prize 2011 from the University of Louisville and appears in Salt Hill 29 and other chapter-stories have appeared online at Dark Sky Magazine, Mud Luscious Press (Issue 18), elimae, alice blue review and elsewhere.
Your work as an assistant poetry editor over at DIAGRAM brings up the tight relationship between poetry and short short stories (or very short fiction, flash fiction, micro, and what-have-you). How does your work as an editor inform your writing, particularly your fiction?
The most important aspect of my work at DIAGRAM in relation to my prose is the exposure to so much innovative writing that lives inside (and beyond) this hybrid cusp of genres, work that largely cannot be defined, work that we are, on occasion, defining as it is being published and experienced, and those definitions are largely slippery, loose, light. This is a powerful thing. In regards to my prose, I carry these reading experiences around with me like ghosts, I think about constantly the ways in which I want my manuscripts and pieces to not be definable all the time, the ways I want them to be slippery and loose and light in their categorization in the world, in the very act of being. It is so absolutely exciting to be able to read and experience what so many other hundreds of writers are up to on a regular basis and be moved, haunted, invigorated, humbled, and wildly inspired by it. I am sort of always in a state of awe.
What other projects do you have in the works?
I have two poetry chapbooks forthcoming, one called The Sadness of July, forthcoming from dancing girl press and one called Julysleep, an echap forthcoming from Gold Wake Press. Right this second, I am currently completing a new novel-in-stories about a pair of conjoined twins named Dina & Darlene Tunnel, which began as a collaboration (with writer Randy Lee) in a significantly different form and has continued to morph into a singular project of my own. (One chapter-story from this novel will make its debut in xTx’s Supermodel Summer: notimetosayit.com.)
Follow Katie and her writing at Twitter: @ktjeanshinkle or on tumblr: girlunderice.tumblr.com (it has been described as a “museum of wank” by Gene Kwak). - puertodelsol.org/wordpress/2012/06/author-spotlight-katie-jean-shinkle/
Polaroid of How to be a Radical When Your Parents Pay For Everything

There is a shore/here are our bodies/what more to say than that

We are an inlet lake, boat launch, trails that lead to nowhere

*

How to be a Radical when

money comes and goes and comes and mostly comes

*

Do you remember the last night we had together

17th floor hotel room, so exhausting

we watched the fog lift off the city/here comes the wave,

            the big one, can you see it

*

Our crossroads space—

do you run to shore (a figment) (a figment)

or do you stay where you are—either way

it’s over. (It’s over)

Either way, it’s over, isn’t it?

*

I am driving the vehicle of you
from here to there/across the city/
back again/what words do I have/
when you say

*

You say that I am
suddenly a very different person
than who you knew

*

We are on a rooftop, in a city overlooking Lake Michigan,
and you say that the love in your dreams is not the love
you can ever pursue in real life

*

(It’s over) isn’t it
            do you run to shore or do you stay with me

*

How to be a Radical when you take a life so precious

*

The first night I did not put my mouth
            on your genitals

*

Here is a California king size bed that you refused to get comfortable in

as if we would ever have another night together

*

as if this is it, I am sorry but I am human

*

and if you are reading this

*

If you are reading this know that I loved you more than

any human has ever loved another human before

*

but I am also a monster

*

resigned to live like other monsters for eternity.

Polaroid of a Teenage Wedding, and the Old Folks Wished Them Well
If I should topple a table,
            legs in air, too much space in room. Back to door.
I never sit with my back to the door
            except with you.
Three men enter with lips, gold chains, red knuckles.
                        I am telling you about vomiting
in the corner of the basement
            of the church of my youth.
I am telling you about my first basement apartment,
                        how I fell in love with a girl for the first time.
If for flies
If for the skeletons of mice in the back of an electrical outlet
If for things coming through the pipes of the toilet
            What if I asked you to kiss me on top
of the toppled table. What if you refuse. Do I turn
my back to you.
                        Paddle in this space in this room,
like a dog in sleep, you wonder what are they chasing
what are they chasing. 

Polaroid of a Teenage Wedding, and the Old Folks Wished Them Well
When we are in leather, in plastic, in latex, you love me.
            I write you in smoke letters,
                        Sunday arrhythmia.
How old do you have to be to understand
            a heart is a piece of decay.
Muscle and flesh are surprisingly different shades
            of the same color.
You are asleep in a foreign bed with new upper arm definition
            and eyelashes that lightly blink
when you sleep. I love these arms, detach them.
            Let me carry them with me in a suitcase
as baggage. Let me let them hold me when I feel.
                            My dear, what muscularly defines you.
A voice gone deeper, the colors run. When I pin your arms
            down by the heels, what more than weather
                                    in the shape of a flog.
What more than weather in the holes of every letter
            in the alphabet. What happens when you leave
out one word, only use 6 letters.

Polaroid of a Teenage Wedding, and the Old Folks Wished Them Well
For Tina Brown Celona
In three months, the warranty will run out.
My fingers as pinking shears, fifteen stings attached to your back,
body suspension, organ suspension. Cut the lover
in half to have more for later. Stripes of lacerations
above water, how and what pornography.
Our favorite porn star’s favorite meal
is kedgeree. Can there be more of an uphill/(stream)/+
tug battle? How to verb and adjective struggle.
In three months, tell me about how you act,
how you are going to England to watch football,
how when I dribble champagne from the sides
of your mouth and lick it off your clavicle,
you remember. In the bottom of the flute, a ring,
a bit of sand, a small piece of plastic
big enough to choke an animal at play. 

Polaroid of a Teenage Wedding, and the Old Folks Wished Them Well
Can knees understand repercussion
if they understand weight.
Replace one. For a fish.
Salmon run upwards behind bonecap,
watering sockets, a video screen
or two behind you that you
keep staring at. Lately,
where have you been
but distant. What kind of limbs
set themselves on fire.
Broken architecture thrown
into the river. How many more
houses gone before there
are no houses left. I am on my knees
in question marks, in holy positioning,
a fish’s backbone, dried white.

'Most of the Time You’re Fine'

'Polaroid of How to be a Radical When Your Parents Pay For Everything'

What does your book do and how does your book do it?

Our Prayers After the Fire is a haunting disappearing act, documenting what vanishes eventually and indefinitely. The cartography of the book maps violence, queerness, childhood and childhood trauma, poverty narratives, despair and disrepair. It is also a mapping of the smallest moments of joy, of vast human-ness, of what it means to survive and to be alive. There are spaces where ghosts reside, both real and imagined. There are spaces of magic. There are spaces of suffering and mess. It is dirty, domestic realism. All of this is explored through the lens of a shared consciousness, a “we,” a duo of girls whose identities and roles (sometimes older/younger sisters, sometimes conjoined twins, sometimes lovers) shift consistently.  A “we” not as an in sync greek chorus of voice/s and experience/s but an interacting collective, anchored and fluid, creating and carrying the shape and echo of the narrative.

Having identified your book’s comportment, could you bring it into focus by describing its relationship to other texts? (By “texts” I mean any relatable objects.) Put another way: if we think about a book as a star in a constellation, or a node in a circuit, I’m interested in hearing about the constellation or circuit in which readers might find your book. Put yet another way: if we think about your book as contributing to particular conversations, could you describe those conversations and their other participants?

The book’s creation is profoundly rooted in Fluxus art. While the work itself is not in direct conversation with Fluxus, the book was created, in part, by a Fluxus influence based practice. I was in heavy research around the Fluxus movement throughout the entire creation of the work. I ended up engaging in experiments and “happenings” both solo and in groups and the “results” ended up being a significant substantial part of the work. (Some experiments were less Fluxus based and more akin to CA Conrad’s somatic poetry rituals.) I was highly influenced by artists Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, George Maciunas, and Alison Knowles. As far as conversation with writers and writing goes, I feel that Our Prayers After the Fire is in direct conversation with the work of writers such as Katherine Faw Morris, Amelia Gray, Lindsay Hunter, and Alissa Nutting. The work of these writers explores all the problematic elements of its own course and study of dirty, domestic realism, work that is in itself in deep conversation on so many levels with magic, trauma, suffering, joy, and humanity. - Christopher Higgs