Student of the Month November 2014
Featuring: Abbey Mayer
University of Hawai’i at MÄ noa
A Note on the Series Our Student of the Month series features on our website stellar student writing and visual art from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, the institution where our roots dig deep. In print for more than 40 years, our journal has been an established voice in the Pacific and beyond for decades, featuring work from emerging writers alongside literary heavyweights. The Student of the Month series is our latest effort to expand Hawai‘i Review’s reach in local and far-reaching literary communities.
Introduction
Abbey has a nice way of making myths feel both aloof and close to us. The austere language has a kind of stark beauty to it: it’s elemental and basic, but in a wonderful way. The sensory language creates great images--downy falcon underfeathers and strips of red ceder woven into armor--and the simplicity makes these descriptions rough and smooth, soft and hard, cold and wet, but always tactile. The myth itself feels like one close to our hearts, but it eludes us a bit, always just a little out of our grasp. It’s not quite a puzzle, because I think we do take something from the piece when we’re finished, but it lingers with us in a way that begs reevaluation. When we do come back to the piece, those wonderful images and descriptions are waiting for us all over again. I really enjoyed this piece and think it shows both a knowledge of existing forms and a desire to transcend them. —Dave Scrivner, Hawai‘i Review Fiction Editor
Copyright © 2014 by the Board of Publications, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa If you are a student and would like to feature your work in Student of the Month or an instructor for a creative writing course and would like to submit exemplary University of Hawai‘i student work to Hawai‘i Review’s Student of the Month initiative, please send submissions to our Submittable account at bit.ly/submit2HR Contact us at hawaiireview@gmail.com
Abbey Seth Mayer is a Master’s candidate in English, Creative Writing at the University of Hawai‘i. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Art, Painting Concentration from Yale College. Drawing inspiration from myth and canonical works from around the world, his work is often consumed by the beauty, inadequacy, fragility and light of human and animal skins.
Whale Teeth and Skyblanket
Excerpt from
In the Time Before… They were both born to a good family, they said. He would grow to be a marriageable man. He had a twin sister, they said, who was born beautiful, of no clear race, they said, She was the daughter of Grace and Wealth. Her skin was neither white, nor yellow, nor red, blue, black or brown, they said. Her eyes were large, elongated and black. Everyone loved her, they said. The children lived together in a forest on the edge of a great ocean. They were given all that they might need. The Forest wove her a cloak, they said, made from the downy underfeathers of blue falcons. Then they sewed for him seal and otter skin armor. And wove two cloaks for him, one from strips of redcedar, and the other from a skyblanket of mountain goat wool. Then one day, when the two were still quite young three common crows that were not ravens were blown to their woods by a far-away storm. They said the crows gave the boy some treats. He told them the tales from his ocean and forest. He had no reason to distrust them. He ate their foods and fell asleep. Then the crows took off their crowskins and revealed themselves to be three men. Each had a great hole in his chest, they said, and their left limbs were all withered and useless. They stood watch over the sleeping boy.
When the boy’s sister tried to wake him, one of the crowmen approached her. He tried to clutch her, they said. She slipped through his fingers, and flew away. Some say she was taken by a killer whale. They say that she lives in a wooden house at the bottom of the sea, surrounded by seals and otters. The angry crow threw his black hat on the Earth, they say. All around it seeped a black poison. The poison, they said, began draining the life out of the land. There was much death, great forests were erased. Then the poison leeched into the sea, they said, and smothered the creatures in the oceans. The crowmen took the sleeping boy and went away. First they destroyed his special clothing. Then they tried feeding him to the other crows. They pecked at him, all day, everyday, never resting, never tiring. They were still angry they couldn’t have the sister. They said that for many years, they pecked at the boy, even when he was asleep. At last they had pecked a great hole in him, in the space between his heart and his mind. The boy had only three things, they said, with which he could refill the hole. Memory, words, and time. He had no other belongings. He put these in the hole, but after, his head was left strangely empty. He had trouble remembering things, they said. Things like his beautiful sister, their special forest and the sea.
The boy became unruly and difficult to handle. So the crowmen tried to fill his mind with their own concoctions. They tried milk, then sugar and sand, then loveless stories. They tried alcohol, then tea, and molten copper, silver and gold. Nothing held, they said. It all ran out his ears, they said. Finally they poured grease into his mind, which held fast. This was all so much trouble for just a little bit of food. The crowmen grew weary of the boy. They decided to send him away. They found him work on the plains, in an oilfield. He could no longer remember much of anything, they said. Not his beautiful, beloved sister. Not even his own true name.
www.hawaiireview.org Hawai‘i Review Staff, 2013-2015 Anjoli Roy, Editor in Chief Kelsey Amos, Managing Editor Donovan Kūhiō Colleps, Design Editor No‘ukahau‘oli Revilla, Poetry Editor David Scrivner, Fiction Editor
bit.ly/submit2HR