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Issue 4 contributor Migueltzinta Cah Mai Solís Pino and writer Luke Dani Blue dialog on community censorship and the problem of “invulnerable writing”. MCS: So let’s go on the homo-holodeck for a second. LDB: OK. *makes appropriate gay Star Trek noises* MCS: OK, computer, initiate program where Luke has just published a short story in The Paris Review, she’s posted it on Facebook, everyone has Liked it. LDB: I’m digging it. MCS: Computer, Luke and I are now at a brunch with our queer friends and I am boasting to them about how great her story is and isn’t it amazing that she got into TPR. Surprise! They offer half-hearted congratulations. They only read part of it. They give Luke weird ice stares and frost-misted shoulders. LDB: Bitches. And also, yep. I know we’ve both received plenty of those looks. But it’s more than the look. It’s the ring of silence that surrounds any creative achievement/expression that isn’t packaged as a political fundraiser or consciousness-raiser. And you know, if it was one time, it wouldn’t matter. But that icing-out has infinite microaggressions. It makes me think about when I was in my early twenties and every time I’d...

Ann DeWitt read "Old Maid" (Apogee Issue 04)

Apogee Journal

07 Dec 2014

Ann DeWitt reads “Old Maid” Ann DeWitt is a fiction writer, essayist and critic. Her writing has appeared in Granta’s New Writing, NOON, Tin House, The American Reader, Guernica, The Believer Logger, Esquire.com, BOMBlog, Electric Literature, art+culture, elimae, Dossier Magazine, Two Serious Ladies,Publishing Genius and The Faster Times, amongst others. Her story, “Influence,” which first appeared in Esquire’s Napkin Fiction Project was recently anthologized in Short: An International Anthology, edited by Alan Ziegler (Persea, 2014). Ann was a Co-Founding Editor of Gigantic, a literary journal of short prose and art distributed throughout the US and abroad. Ann holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University School of the Arts. She teaches in the Undergraduate Creative Writing Program at Columbia and recently completed her first novel, an excerpt of which was just released in the 15th anniversary edition of NOON. She currently pens a bimonthly nonfiction column about art, literature, film, and criticism for The Believer, called “Various Paradigms.”

Fiction

Old Folks, by Bernard Grant

Apogee Journal

05 Dec 2014

Old Folks Bernard Grant At Wal-Mart, while I wait for Mamma to put my new video games on layaway, an old lady with tennis balls on her walker sits next to me. She smells like cleaning soap. Hair sprouts from a mole on her cheek. And there’s more hair on her lip, and on her chin. That hair’s black like her, like us, but the hair on her head is white and short and stands up like a cartoon character that’s stuck a fork in the toaster. She’s fat, so every time she moves, her arm, stretched and wrinkled, touches mine. I move a seat over. I miss Granny. Kids at school say they have pretty grannies, but my granny was pretty for real, with big cheeks and big eyes that got bigger when she saw you. And she didn’t smell like anything but the grape candy in her purse. She liked purple. Purple dresses, purple makeup over her eyes, and she never scared me, never made me think about death. Not until she got sick—a stroke—and died. I know old people are supposed to die. Just not her. — BERNARD GRANT is an MFA candidate at...