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ISSUE 01 Contents 03 On mojo (Letter from the Editor) 04 Carl James Grindley - Rocket Car 05 Carl James Grindley - Secrets of the Sea 07 Andrew Bales - Scrawls ad Dots: A Conversation with Heiko Müller 13 Dale Bridges - Welcome to Omni-Mart 34 Theadora Siranian - Persephone 37 Amy Fox - Miluo on Qu Yuan 39 Jamie Wilson - Trusting Story: A Conversation with Tim O’Brien 49 Marit Ericson - Message to the Aliens from this Dude, Isaac 50 Stephanie Wilson - Compartments 60 Mark Petrie - “I miss you, you beast.” Cover art: Study 08 by Heiko Müller Editor Poetry Editor Staff Members Matthew Grolemund Nathan Lipps Katelyn Delvaux Jay McMahan Charlie Edwards Cynthia Moss Assistant Editor Non-Fiction Editor Ryan Gannon Woody Skinner Andrew Bales Brandon Rush Taryn Gilbert Soon Wiley Zac Goodall Fiction Editor Public Relations Becky Hunter Jamie Wilson Robynn Sims Joey Lemon Welcome to mojo – the new online literary journal of Wichita State University’s M.F.A. program. Previous to this inaugural issue, WSU’s recent efforts have focused on publishing influential Wichita writers in Mikrokosmos, the program’s fifty-year-running print journal. And where Mikrokosmos continues to publish the best of the Midwest, mojo represents our effort to move from the regional to the global, to join the printed word’s expansion into the world of online literary publishing. Within you’ll find the blossoming talents of the emerging writer and the reflections of the veteran. You’ll find stories and poems that create their own unique worlds, places that welcome us in and won’t let us leave. You’ll find a microcosm of an expanding literary space - portraits of the past and hints toward the future. And you’ll findmojo itself - an enigmatic spell, cast down on the page. Matthew Grolemund, Editor CARL JAMES GRINDLEY ROCKET CAR Last night, Lora, everyone dreamt About me. Okay, just an ex-girlfriend Who wouldn’t tell me anything And my boss, who claimed I had A cool rocket car. Like in the Jetsons, She said. I suppose that is good Enough. Look: in real life, I have a billfold full of petty Expectations, the currency Of small states in ever reducing Denominations. Here is a note The size of something Barbie Would take out of Ken’s wallet The morning after. If you look Carefully, you can almost Make it out. I think it is worth A third of something that is a third Of something worthless. So at this Point, I am happy to settle for Rocket cars and living The glamorous unknown In someone else’s dreams. CARL JAMES GRINDLEY SECRETS OF THE SEA Science tells us that the common American Lobster, Homarus Americanus, can hold a grudge for two Weeks. After that, all is forgiven. Seriously. Ask The Journal of Animal Behavior. They published C. Karavanich And J. Atema’s article on the subject In 1998, so it must be true. There are, Therefore, no lobster Hatfields or lobster McCoys. And if a lobster archduke Is assassinated by a Serbian Lobster in an undersea Sarajevo, The whole mess boils over In fourteen hardshelled days, And if the plot took longer Than that to hatch, it never took place. That’s why lobsters don’t bother With chemical weapons, none of them Ever get out of organic chemistry, They all fail their midterms and get made Into rolls. Of course if the grudge is Immediate, all bets are off, the little Bastards will pull each other to pieces. Science has no name for this, but cooking Does. A lobster, utterly denuded of all Useful appendages is called a bullet. Surrealism suggests that lobster bullets Must be loaded into special lobster guns. Salvador Dali shot Filippo Tommaso Marinetti With a lobster gun at the Armory Show In 1913, after Marinetti claimed lobsters Had no future. Indeed, Carlo Carrà’s August Manifesto contains no mention of taste And therefore, no mention of lobsters. Scrawls and Dots A Conversation with Heiko Müller Andrew Bales Heiko Müller’s paintings are not only visually captivating, but embrace story through the many creatures that inhabit them. These creatures also highlight his range of talent; Heiko delivers a striking balance of scrawl and detail, of the playful and vibrant with the dark and haunting. Heiko began working alongside his older brothers, who were separated from him in age by 10 and 16 years. Yet together they enjoyed music from Pink Floyd, The Who, Black Sabbath, Led Zepplin and the like while sharing a fascination with surreal Salvador Dalí posters. Over the years, Heiko’s interest in art hasn’t faded, and this cultural immersion shows itself in his work as a stylistic mix of everything from the Renaissance and folklore tales to comic books. After studying illustration and design at Hamburg University, Heiko went on to work as a graphic designer before returning to the university, where he now teaches art. Meanwhile, his art has been displayed in galleries from Saint Petersburg to New York and has been featured in various publications. With translation assistance from Christian Krämer, I corresponded with Heiko about his recent work. Andrew Bales: Your paintings show a combination of influences. How did you come about your pairing of styles? Heiko Müller: I think I basically got that from my brothers. I had to share a room with one of them, and when he wasn’t there I used to rummage through his stuff and look at his comics. My favorites were Mort & Phil, Vampirella and The Phantom. But we had a number of art books too, which I thought as valuable as the comics. I loved the pictures of the surrealists and the old masters. One picture that made a particularly strong impression on me was Arnold Böcklin’s “The Plague.” No wonder I used to have nightmares as a kid. When I was a teenager my approach to art grew much more serious. I discovered so many amazing modern artists. Even today, looking for current artists is a part of my daily life. As I decided against defining my own artistic position, my art is probably a product of all these influences. The Forest appears frequently in your paintings and is inhabited by familiar animals (deer, bears, wolves), but also creatures of your own design. Can you elaborate on these creatures and your interest in “the dark goings-on behind the facade of nature”? My creatures have a symbolic nature. Some of them represent threatened nature or even its death, complementing the Grim Reaper in a sense. Other creatures represent emotions of someone walking through nature, emotions inspired by the surroundings. Imagine you’re walking barefoot through a dense forest. You can’t see exactly what you’re stepping on. You don’t feel at ease because of that. It could be insects or other crawlies, thorns might be in there too, and your imagination starts to run wild; you see things on the ground that aren’t there. A withered leaf swaying in the wind becomes a rat. A short stick becomes a locust. Then you come to a clearing. You see the light shining through the trees and it seems almost palpable. Little insects are hovering in the air like dots of light and don’t seem threatening at all. The grass is wet and warm and your anxiety wears off. There’s something magical in the air; the atmosphere seems charged. If you wanted to capture that in a photograph, you would fail. A painting will manage to get closer, however. This “getting closer” is an important aspect of my work. That’s why I often use scrawls in my pictures. Those represent the threat most of the time while the dots (of light) stand for positive energy. From time to time I find ideas in my scrawls, which I use for separate pictures. The same thing goes for the dots, which have grown into characters by now. Schnabelpercht is a figure from ancient European folklore and also the title of one of your pieces. Tell us about this character and how these stories influence your work. Schnabelpercht or Perchta is an equivalent to Mother Hulda. She visits homes to reward those who are hard-working and helpful and to punish the lazy and selfish. Unlike the Mother Hulda you find in the Brothers Grimm, Perchta doesn’t look like a nice old lady, but rather like Mad Magazine’s Spy vs. Spy or a terrifying many-horned devil. I like scary things and am particularly fond of the Schnabelpercht. It’s a simple but effective disguise. You make a mask out of a sheet, and the dress is old-fashioned women’s clothing. Most of the time young men are underneath. It’s interesting to see the effect the disguise has on people. Both the dressed-up person and the people around them start to behave differently. When I imagine dressing up myself like that or picture a Schnabelpercht visiting me at home to see if I’ve been diligent, I immediately get anxious, as if such an event were really about to happen. That in turn makes me want to delve deeper into the topic, and when I paint such a picture I hope to stir similar emotions in the viewer. You have two young sons. How do they react to your balance of cuddly creatures and scary figures and settings? That’s different from case to case. Usually they prefer the scary creatures. Nonetheless I try not to make them too monstrous to protect my kids from nightmares. For example, when I drew the zombie lieutenant, I thought I’d better not hang it in the living room.