Manhattan Group Publishers

Time

Brian Skinner

While on errands into town, I take a detour along County Trunk Z, winding beside the shore of Castle Rock Lake, in order to pass a certain field and mark its progress through the seasons. It is planted in wheat and surrounded on three sides by uneven woods on a steep rise toward the east. The irregular shape of the field and the ragged embrace of the woods are both pleasing and practical, following the curves of natural contours and undoubtedly intended to prevent the formation of gullies by slowing down runoff from the incline above. On the fourth side, in a gesture to geometry, runs the band of county highway and a deep grassy-banked ditch.

Early in the year I watch the snow shrink and patches of bare earth appear in the field where the sun shines longest. Soon, snow remains only in the shaded hollows of the woods. The ground thaws and the fertile earth releases its strong aromas on a gentle south wind, smelling of growth and decay, of life enriched by death.

Each time I pass, the fingers of sky reaching down among the bare oaks at the top of the rise grow skinnier. They become tinged with green, the tentative yellow-green of the slowly unfolding leaves. The melted snow floods the lowest spots in the field. The sun emerges after a cloudburst and steam rises from the mud, the last exhalation after a long slumber.

On a warm afternoon before the farmer plows his field, under a curdling sky that threatens a violent thunderstorm, I pull onto the shoulder beside the woods and walk toward the muddy field, intent on celebrating one of my rites of spring. Dressed in worn jeans, torn T-shirt, and taped-up sneakers, I take a running dive into the first mud puddle I encounter, and then the next, not tiring until I am the color of the earth and encumbered by the weight of the mud.

I hear and feel the first rumbles of thunder. The ground trembles. My heart quickens. Raindrops smash into the soft ground, creating tiny craters. As the sky opens up, I stand in the ditch and let the rain wash me off. The rain is cold and gray. I am quickly soaked to the skin and chilled to the bone. By my muddy revel, I acknowledge the earth’s and my own reawakening — and our eventual reuniting.

In the weeks that follow, I note how the hard edges of the sown field soften, how the curving furrows blur, fuzzy with new growth. Where the sun has warmed it and dried it out, the black earth turns brown. The grain sprouts, and soon there is no ground visible, only wheat. By the solstice, it is tall enough to waver in the warm breeze.

By late summer, after achieving its deepest green, the wheat turns yellow, without mortal witness, almost overnight like the leaves of the poplars. Two weeks later, the grain attains the deep golden color of its maturity and the low sunsets of early autumn give the ripened field a coppery cast. The wheat will soon be ready for harvesting.

And, after two weeks of its inching closer to the front door, at last I remember to bring my camera. I decide I can run my errands in town and make it back to the wheat field in plenty of time before sunset. Then I will dawdle, waiting for the perfect moment when the field and woods, the sky and the rising moon, each and together, could not be more beautiful. And if I do not stop today, then I will pull over beside the ditch tomorrow. The weather will be clear again, a nearly endless summer. There will always be another chance to take my photo of the wheat field at its perfection.

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On my way back, errands run, I catch flashing glimpses of the sun through the plantations of white pines along the Wisconsin River. Even when the sun is still well above the sandstone cliffs on the opposite shore, its light is noticeably redder, softer, hazy. The perfect moment is nearly at hand. But the field and woods will not remain ablaze with the sun’s light for long. Nor will the wheat remain forever the color of perfect ripeness, that alloy of gold and copper that is the true color of autumn’s fire. The sun slips behind the cliffs so quickly this time of year. My heart races ahead to the next turn where I will behold the field of amber grain at its peak.

Instead, my heart sinks. Nearly a dozen parallel swaths have been cut across the irregularly shaped field by a thresher. Its blades whirring, the dust of chaff hangs like smoke behind the machine. The field, half shorn, is ugly; the light harsh. The perfect moment passed while I took care of things that could wait. The moment went unwitnessed, unrecorded, and would never come again. I hope only that the old farmer doffed his hat and acknowledged the culmination of his and nature’s labors before starting up his machinery.

I stand at the edge of the pond with a clear view from east to west. A tangled skein of geese circles overhead, looking for a place to bed down on the marsh beneath Quincy Bluff. Their laconic honking bluntly announcing the final days of autumn, I realize there remain only a few afternoons as ripe and golden and unblemished as this one.

These are not the first geese I’ve heard this season, but they are the first I acknowledge. I watch them until their ragtag formation dips behind the misshapen spires of the jack pines, already four miles further south than when I first heard them. Quiet returns. I continue watching the sky, still tinged with rose at the western edge while the first pinpoints of light appear in the deep indigo of the eastern horizon. In the dome of heaven, large enough to encompass both light and darkness, one melds seamlessly into the other.

Tomorrow, when the geese next circle down to rest, they will dip toward a small lake near the Illinois border surrounded by oak woods down to the water’s edge. The geese will have flown not merely ninety miles further south, they’ll have gone backward in time to an autumn seven days more youthful, where the oaks’ fire is still in the treetops. By the time the geese reach their winter lodge in Texas, the smooth, dark surface of the lake will be littered with leaves and the oaks will stand nearly naked to the wind.

Two days ago it had still seemed summery, with plenty of time for chores before the ground freezes. Now, as I plunge in after the day’s work, the pond is cold enough to take my breath away. Even before sunset it is noticeably cooler in the long shadows of the pines. It will not take many chilly nights before a thin skin of ice forms, even though it will melt in the next day’s sunshine. A few cloudy days in a row, however, will keep the pond frozen until March. If there is sufficient snowfall to insulate the ice from spring breezes, it may take until April before the water is again unbound.

As I stand thinking these melancholy thoughts, watching night fall quickly, I comment to myself, in an epiphany of the obvious, that the flow of days and seasons is in one direction. This day can be neither relived nor unlived. It has come into being and passed away, as everything does, leaving a record on our lives.

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It is easy to fool oneself on a warm afternoon, oblivious to the subtle signs of coming changes. In my mind it remained summer until I heeded the geese. There may yet be a few days of autumn warmth when lazy hornets drift beneath the eaves and swarms of languid ladybugs gather on the sunward side of the house. All nature enjoys this reprieve from winter’s sentence of death, but only the foolhardy think it’s a commutation. Because the light diminishes and is replaced by darkness so slowly, we can tell ourselves it is not happening. Yet at some time for each of us comes a moment of recognition, an acknowledgment of our mortality, of a winter not followed by spring.

One can be mindful of what is to come without fretting over it. We may delay but never defeat the progress of fate or the cycle of seasons. The most we may do is brace for the inevitable changes. It seems best to live fully the day at hand and not rely on the promise or hope of all the time in the world, of an endless summer. Each day stands exactly as it has been lived and we cannot add anything to it once it slips from our grasp. Though the geese will return this way, the moment never comes again.

It seems only two weeks later that winter sets in. The pond freezes, thaws briefly where the afternoon sun touches it, and then freezes again within minutes of its setting. The long shadows of the white pines, once distinct, merge into a single darkness. The stars sparkle with a clarity that emphasizes their distance. The moon’s reflection no longer shimmers on the water. Its image is fixed, frozen. A few days later I take a shortcut across the pond to get the mail.

Brittle oak leaves tumble down the embankment and skitter across the ice as I approach the opposite shore. The sun’s yellow light is misleading; it is cold. One oak leaf remains motionless despite the stiff northwest wind. It glows with the last of the sun’s light, its stem frozen in the ice.

It proves a dry winter. What little snow falls is whipped by the wind into drifts, while in other places the ground is scraped bare. There is no snow on the pond except in the reeds and tall grass along the banks. The ice is scoured smooth, burnished by sand and snow crystals.

Each time I pass, I check the progress of the oak leaf through the ice. On the rare afternoons when the sun shines, the dark brown leaf absorbs a tiny fraction more of the sun’s radiation than the pale ice surrounding it. As it warms to just a degree or two above freezing, the leaf settles to the bottom of the thin pocket of tannin-tinged water it has thawed in the ice. When the sun goes down, the leaf is encased in the quickly freezing meltwater like a specimen in amber. Each sunny day, the leaf sinks a little deeper into the ice.

One day there is more ice above the leaf than below it. Rain and melted snow float on the surface of the pond ice. At night the rainwater congeals, merging with the ice, forming another stratum. Geologically slow, as though there were all the time in the world, the leaf passes through the ice.

On a warm afternoon in mid-March, the last fragment of ice, rounded as a stone in a stream bed, dissolves. The oak leaf, held only by its stem, is released. It floats freely for a moment before spiraling in wide arcs to the sunless bottom of the pond. On its calm surface are reflected the naked oaks, newly tinged with green. The cycle of seasons is complete. Time has advanced by an infinitesimal degree, putting down one more layer no deeper than the film of pollen on the still water.

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The Red Dress

Brian Skinner

Rafael rides his bike to work even when it’s ten-below and the frozen slush is criss-crossed with deep ruts. His friends make fun of him, asking Raf why he needs to be in such good shape. Doesn’t Rita give him a workout at home?

All of Rafael’s friends have cars, even if it’s only a rust-bucket held together with gray duct tape and novenas to the Holy Mother. His buddies are still single. They have nothing to worry about but their cars, and no one to care for except sometimes each other. None of them knows about saving money and keeping the same woman happy for longer than one summer. They shoot pool and drink beer and buy silky shirts as if they will still be doing these things when they are old men who put their teeth in a glass.

In February, as the streets become icy with melted snow, Rafael lets more air out of the big balloon tires on his old red-and-white Schwinn. He calculates how much he saves on his way to work. The thought keeps him warm . He pictures the cream-colored blouse he is going to buy for Rita’s name day and the Golden Book he will get for little Madelina. She will sit in his lap and read it to him, making up her own story for the bright pictures. And the next time she reads the story to him, it will be different. That is how Rafael knows what Madelina is thinking about. He does not have to ask; he needs only to listen.

Rita knows Raf does not listen to her when she tells him he should get a new bike, a racer with hand brakes and skinny tires. "I like the old one," he says. "I don’t have to worry someone will steal it. It’s good enough." His favorite words.

He is a good man, a good husband and father, but his attitude makes Rita crazy. He wears his blue jeans and torn sweatshirts until they are too thin to wash the floor with them. Rita tries not to complain too much. Her friends laugh at her when she tells them she wishes Rafael was more selfish. They tease her, saying they will be happy to trade husbands with her, although Lucie probably means it. They tell her they are ready, whenever she is tired of being treated like a famous actress.

She knows her friends talk about her. They think Raf spoils her. And sometimes, when she and her friends sit around the kitchen table squabbling like hens, one of them teases too far and it comes out.

Rita thinks Rafael is not always honest with her. She watches him when they meet his friends outside El Gato Negro. Their chests out like roosters, they lean against Roberto’s lipstick-red Mazda, rubbing their hard thighs against the flawless metal skin.

Rita wonders, Do they think no one sees them?

She knows Raf wants a fast and flashy car like Roberto’s. He is a man. But Rita cannot persuade him even to look at a new bicycle. She wonders if he does this to hurt her; because he is already tired of her after five years of marriage.

Five summers ago Rafael bought her a sleek red dress of material so shiny it looked almost metallic.

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Rita loves the dress. It is cut low and rides up on her thighs, conforming to her like the cool, damp towel she wraps around herself after a shower. She puts on the big chrome earrings he gave her for the Fourth of July, the ones that look like little hubcaps.

After dark she and Rafael go out for a stroll on Clark Street to enjoy the breeze that bypasses their sweltering apartment. Heads turn like compasses. The men leer at her like she is a red Corvette.

But Rita loves the shiny dress and the chrome earrings Rafael gave her. That is the whole problem. And whenever she thinks of the red dress, she slips into the memory of the first time she wore it.

It is the last sultry Saturday in August. Rafael comes home from his job at the cabinet factory on Ravenswood Avenue soaked with sweat. Rita knows he has driven his bike straight home without stopping to refresh himself at El Gato Negro.

Rita pushes him away with her fingertips. He smells vinegary from the oak shavings in his tousled hair and the sawdust stuck to his sweaty skin. He looks tired, but Rita has waited all week to go dancing in her new red dress.

While Rafael showers and shaves, Rita braids her thick chestnut hair in a single plait down her back. She watches Raf put on a clean pair of jeans and a white cotton shirt. He would be embarrassed if he knew how handsome and sexy she finds him.

Rita slips into the red dress. The shimmering fabric is cool and sleek like water, like water that’s on fire.

Raf slowly pulls the silver tongue of the zipper up the curve of Rita’s back. His fingers linger at the nape of her neck, playing with the damp wisps that have escaped her braid. His rough hands slide over her shoulders and down her arms, the downy hairs prickling where he touches her. Rita shudders. A chill inches up her spine.

They slide to the floor and roll onto the carpet her mother gave them as a wedding present, overtaken by the fever of a summer night. The air grows muggy, liquid, so thick it is audible, the molecules rubbing against one another like lazy beetles.

Rafael pulls off his cotton shirt and unbuttons his jeans. Rita pulls down her soaked underpants and Raf slides the shiny red dress up her thighs. They do not undress any further; they are in a hurry to make their love last all night.

When the fever has burnt through them, they do not have the strength to get up from the floor. Rita and Raf lie against each other on their backs, their skin now cool, the carpet prickly. The curtains, translucent with streetlight, flutter over them on the breeze like the languid ghost of summer’s night. They fall asleep among the shadows of the billows and folds. Floating around one another gracefully, the lovers lie submerged in slow dreams.

That night they made little Madelina, there on the carpet from Rita’s mother, wearing her sleek red dress and earrings like tiny chrome hubcaps. Rita loves that dress so much there are times she’d like to burn it, especially when Raf’s friends look at her like they’re looking at themselves in her showroom gleam.

Don’t flatter yourselves, Rita thinks. You are only men. All men are in love with their cars. Do you think a shine lasts forever?

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Rita puts Madelina to bed and stands at the window. She melts a hole in the leafy frost with her warm palm, and looks down the street for Rafael on his bike. But it is too early. She sits on the sofa, her feet snuggled under the worn velvet cushion.

She feels something compact and square-edged with her toes. Maybe it is one of Madelina’s little books. Rita lifts the cushion.

Nestled in a valley of collapsed springs is a small white box tied with a satiny red ribbon. Rita tugs on the ribbon and the knot falls loose. She lifts the lid.

On a bed of cotton lies a silver heart on a fine silver chain. In the center of the heart Rita’s and Rafael’s names are engraved in flamboyant script. Rita turns the pendant over.

The front of the small heart is bright red enamel with the word Siempre emblazoned in silver letters.

Unhooking the tiny clasp, Rita lifts the heart to her throat when she hears a noise. She puts the heart back in its box, hastily reties the knot and replaces the box beneath the cushion before she realizes the old steam radiator in the hallway is clanging. Her heart pounds.

Again Rita thinks of the red dress and the first time she almost went dancing in it. She wiggles her toes beneath the sofa cushion, keeping them warm until Raf gets home.

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Three Positive Reviews

Brian Skinner

Darlington, Tenaya
MADAME DELUXE
Coffee House Press (96 pp.)
$13.95
August 2000
ISBN 1-56689-105-1

Darlington, who lives in Madison, Wisconsin, is the managing editor of Beloit Fiction Journal. Her work has been published in both anthologies and literary periodicals. The heroine of this debut collection, Madame Deluxe, is the flamboyant friend you want to kick under the table for telling the truth in public. But there’s no use. She’ll only embarrass you further by calling attention to your efforts to silence her. Besides, as vexing as her pronouncements may be, they are also howlingly funny, as only dead-on-the-mark observations can be. Madame’s kvetching becomes addictive. When the poet is not engaged in being rambunctious, irreverent, scathing, or acerbic, she is just plain silly, as when she occasionally lapses into the kind of word-play and potty-humor that would delight most forty-year-olds. Her observations—which are equal parts folklore, whimsy, and sarcasm—may seem slightly askew, but that is because we are not used to hearing unprocessed truth. In one diversion, she likens trendiness in poetry to changing fashions ("shorter lines with less anaphora"), and complains that "mating is a game for hackers" and that "beauty has gone virtual." All this is not to indicate that Darlington’s work is concerned merely with the glitzy, fluffy, or fuzzy. Every now and then she lets loose with truths that resonate more deeply, as when she proclaims, "Illness is hatred spoken through bone." Despite the streak of artificiality and triviality running through all things marketable, including mortal love, Darlington has not become cynical. Courageously, she continues in her search for that "one word that is still sacred and bright."

"All anyone wants to do is knock off a good poem by the time they’re thirty." Darlington has done that, and then some. When’s the last time anyone was caught laughing aloud while reading a book of poetry?

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BEOWULF
A New Verse Translation
Trans. by Seamus Heaney
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (208 pp.)
$25.00
February 2000
ISBN 0-374-11119-7

Written more than a thousand years ago in the Germanic tongue from which the pre-Norman core of modern English is formed, Beowulf is the epic poem of the warrior hero who survived a succession of fierce trials only to languish in the entombing clutches of university scholars. This sacred text of the Old English canon, the bane, or at least the emetic, of English Literature students for generations, has been dusted off and revived by Irish poet Seamus Heaney, a name familiar to many American readers. Educated at a Catholic school in Ulster, he knows first-hand what it feels like to participate in competing historical, cultural, and linguistic traditions simultaneously, as did the ancient author of the epic who, a millennium ago, straddled the narrowing gulf between paganism and Christianity in northern Europe. Heaney, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, began this labor of love in the mid-1980s. He draws upon his own considerable skill as a poet and his love of the sound of language to effect this brilliant translation which, despite his predilection for "weighty distinctness," verges on melody. Overall, he has a tendency to avoid Old English’s appositional syntax and prefers that a line make sense rather than adhere strictly to alliterative conventions. For the modern reader, these are improvements over earlier translations.

Mr. Heaney does a most creditable job of stripping off the layers of venerable varnish and letting the classic tale resound in the "big voiced" style of its mortal heroes.

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Ryan, Kay
SAY UNCLE
Grove (96 pp.)
$13.00
September 2000
ISBN 0-8021-3717-2

Ryan has received two Pushcart prizes for her poetry. In addition to inclusion in the Best American Poetry, 1995, her work has appeared in numerous publications, The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly among them. This is her fifth collection of verse and, despite such credentials, her work is neither banal nor unfathomable. Her treatment may seem more traditional than most readers are used to encountering, but her themes are quite unconventional. Ryan employs the occasional rhyme — often several in a single poem — yet her verse is assuredly neither trite nor sappy. Her rhymes seem natural, neither stretched nor constrained to fit the poetic idea, but arising from it. She has a refined musical ear and handles the elements of her compositions adroitly. There are internal rhymes, assonances, alliteration, iterations, and other devices rarely encountered these days. In Ryan’s treatment, they are not merely stylistic overlays. They are integral to the poem. Language and thought merge, or at least peaceably coexist, as in days of yore. The short lines and quick images — they’re almost snapshots — are elemental. She puts them together, pulls them apart, and twists them in playful fashion, as though she were an alchemist with a modern experimental attitude: I wonder what’ll happen if I mix these two. The seemingly disparate elements meld, as when she speaks of the "nutrients in failure—deep amendments to the shallow soil of wishes... the dark and bitter flavors of black ales and peasant loaves." Her metaphors work because of the consanguinity of the images, which she selects with care, rather than plunking down a stream-of-consciousness gallimaufry and leaving it up to the reader to develop a taste for it.

These are truly short-line, one-stanza (for the most part) wonders. Ryan offers full-brained poems in a largely half-brained world.

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Three Negative Reviews

Brian Skinner

Corman, Cid
NOTHING DOING
New Directions (160 pp.)
$13.95
February 2000
ISBN 0-8112-1425-7

When praise for a poet’s work gushes like water through a sluice gate, yet repeated readings fail to offer so much as a single drop to a parched tongue, the natural impulse is to ask oneself, "What’s wrong with me? What am I overlooking?" Then, just before you are about to hurl yourself off a cliff in despair, you happen to glance up and discover the emperor is naked, or at least stripped to his skivvies. And though there is plenty of ink pouring onto the page, it appears Mr. Corman is mostly busy doing nothing in Nothing Doing. Certainly no one knows how to say so little in so few words. These poems are overflowing with abstract intellectual aphorisms masquerading as deep wisdom or, more precisely, as a sort of Hollywoodish Kung Fu version of Eastern religious philosophy. Emptiest kettle makes loudest noise, little cricket. It is paucity of content masquerading as austerity of style. Though often compared to Zen koans, Corman’s verse offers the set-up but fails to deliver the punch of enlightenment. "Which dream is the dream — the one we awaken from and go into or from which we never emerge?" the poet asks. Huh? But lest you drown in such profundity, try "Death always reminding us — a breath is a breath." Perhaps it is the clothes that have no emperor. Perhaps it is all trappings.

While it probably never did anyone serious damage to contemplate his navel, that does not mean his surmises ought to be endorsed. As the poet himself remarked, "There’s enough shit in this world without our adding to it."

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Davison, Peter
BREATHING ROOM
Knopf (80 pp.)
$23.00
September 2000
ISBN 0-375-41104-6

Peter Davison, who lives in Boston, is the poetry editor of The Atlantic Monthly. He has published ten previous books of poetry and several volumes of non-fiction. Not so surprisingly, some of the work in the present collection has appeared previously in The Atlantic Monthly, the Boston Globe, The Paris Review, and other notable magazines in the in-bred literary daisy chain of uninspired versifiers. One wonders, if the playing field were truly level, whether most of these poems would have seen print in other than the small press backwaters. In a foreword concerned with hair-splitting over fatuous terms like "audiographs" and Pinsky’s regrettable "technology of the breath," it would be easy to overlook the fact that these poems are intended to showcase the poet’s "mature work," in this instance merely a euphemism for "old and tired." In a piece about aging, the best he can offer is the observation that if "you’re over sixty and you don’t hurt anywhere you must be dead." Like hearing a Henny Youngman joke for the tenth time, his is a wearisome shtick. But the very publishing success of Davison and his fellow poetasters militates against their taking any chances with the formula, which calls for the piling on of metaphors and similes as if that were the purpose of poetry. In "Under the Language Sea," he speaks of darting nouns, "their gills pulsing like adjectives." On another occasion, having spotted a vixen, he observes that "rather foxlike in concentration she pursued a faint trail across the road under a fallen tree." He may wish to believe this work was hatched in "a juicy swamp of invention," but it reads as though it had been "jammed in hardening concrete."

These are poems about poetry, not about life.

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Friedman, Michael
SPECIES
Figures (80 pp.)
$10.00
February 2000
ISBN 0-935724-75-3

Astonishingly, Mr. Friedman is the author of four other published collections of poetry. Born and raised in New York, he received his education at Columbia, Yale, and Duke. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The American Poetry Review and New American Writing. He now lives in Denver where he is an adjunct member of the faculty of the MFA writing program at the Naropa Institute in Boulder. There is a difference between these short prose poems and the sophomoric piffle cranked out by tortured adolescents throughout the industrialized world. For one thing, Mr. Friedman is thirty-eight years old. For another, the work of his classmates, after having been used to impress hapless friends and family with their unrecognized genius, was allowed quietly to slip into the trash while moving from dorm room to first apartment. Friedman chose instead not only to hang onto his ravings, but to broadcast them. But what was excruciatingly clever the night before is considerably less so once the smoke has cleared. The formula seems to be: take two or three clichéd expressions, tie them loosely together with non sequiturs into a stupifyingly disjointed narrative, and hope the reader will equate inscrutability with profundity. Some of us do not. In a piece entitled Bronze, the author states, "In the Bronze Age bronze was on everyone’s mind. The office park is just where I left it. What was forged in the smithy of whose soul? Not much. Meanwhile, in ancient Rome, it’s one long siesta after another. Seventh inning itch."

This is the sort of stuff one might expect from a trust fund hippie who, unable to find gainful employment, writes poetry for an MFA program.

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Brian Skinner 140 Cabrini Boulevard Apartment 87 New York, NY 10033 212-928-3737 Gaelic@Mail.com

Click here to download résumé.

CURRENT
AND ONGOING
EMPLOYMENT

Manhattan Group Publishers
Own and operate a small publishing company that specializes in short press run editions of fiction and poetry titles sold through independent booksellers, and full color informational booklets for community, tourism, and arts organizations.

David Hamsley Photography
Work part-time as a photographer’s assistant and general studio factotum. Duties include lighting, set construction, digital image manipulation, and website updating.

Manhattan Literary Review
Became editor of this literary magazine in early 2003. In addition to selecting and editing work submitted for inclusion, I handle most aspects of design, layout, and advertising, and frequently contribute original artwork, cover illustrations, and short fiction. I also prepare all electronic files required for third-party printing.

Original Artwork
I compose original digital artwork which is then transferred to fine art papers, canvas, and other fabrics as giclée prints. I exhibit and sell these works both online and at galleries, art shows, and stores throughout the city.

PREVIOUS
EMPLOYMENT

Kirkus Reviews
Became poetry reviewer for this biweekly magazine of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction critiques from 1999 through 2003. In addition to reading, and writing reviews of, pending poetry titles, I wrote occasional op-ed pieces and also reviewed non-fiction titles for this pre-eminent journal.

Chicago Quarterly Review
Was one of the founding editors of this literary magazine, and worked as co-editor from 1994 through 2002. I contributed original illustrations and cover art, as well as poetry, reviews, and short fiction. My duties further included both publication design and layout.

Scientific American Newsletters & Alexander Communications Group
For most of 2000, I worked as the assistant to the art director in the design and layout of over a dozen biweekly publications, related resource manuals, and marketing materials. I also worked closely with editors in the U.S. and Europe, updated the company website, and scheduled subscriber e-mail alerts.

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Brian Skinner

Transport Technology Publishing & Bioinformatics Publishing
Worked as computer graphic artist in 1999 and 2000. I was the production editor for six biweekly newsletters. My responsibilities included publication layout and text editing, preparation of electronic document files for delivery to printers, and design of new publication graphics and logos as needed. Related duties included posting of articles, updates, and e-mail alerts to the company websites.

Adams County Visitors’ Guide
Compiled 1997 and 1998 Visitors’ Guides for the Adams County Chamber of Commerce. This entailed design work on every aspect of the project, including photography, original artwork, advertising layout, articles, and computer graphics.

Roche a Cri Writers Workshops
Developed and implemented desktop publishing workshops and related projects for junior and high school students from 1995 through 1997. I also conducted summer nature writing workshops for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources from 1997 through 2000.

EDUCATION
AND OTHER
QUALIFICATIONS

My formal education included three years of college, majoring in language arts. I continue to take individual courses in several areas related to writing and publishing, most recently at DePaul University and the University of Iowa.

My own short fiction, poetry, illustrations, and music have appeared in over one hundred twenty commercial and small press periodicals and anthologies in the United States and Europe, and for which I have received numerous awards.

I am used to working alone as well as with others on group projects as the situation demands, and feel comfortable in either setting. My writing and editing skills, in addition to my graphic arts background, enable me to integrate all aspects of a publishing project.

My computer skills and familiarity with the latest versions of graphics and Web authoring software on both IBM and Macintosh platforms (Microsoft Word, Microsoft FrontPage, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Quark Xpress, etc.) enable me to see projects through from earliest conception to final presentation.

I have also worked as a freelance graphics designer, and have produced numerous flyers, advertisements, brochures, postcards, T shirts, letterheads, logos, etc. for the Wisconsin State Parks, as well as for tourism bureaus, small businesses, and community organizations in Chicago and New York. I have also been hired as a computer system consultant and troubleshooter for several small concerns.

REFERENCES

I will gladly furnish pertinent references and samples of my work upon request.

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The Rocks of Adams County

Brian Skinner

One of the first things a visitor will notice about Adams County is that our scenery resembles what one would expect to find only in the American West. Rising above the surrounding plains to a height of several hundred feet are flat-topped mesas (Spanish for table) and rounded buttes (French for knoll).

The reason these impressive features are found here has to do with the fact that the same geological processes were at work in both places. And a later fluke prevented these formations in sandstone and dolomite (limestone) from being scraped away by the advancing glaciers during the last ice age, which ended only about 10,000 years ago.

These "rocks" and "mounds"were formed 500 million years ago in shallow inland seas that covered much of North America. Due to continental drift, Wisconsin lay at the equator during that era. In fact, in some of the cliffs and rock outcrops at the top of Quincy Bluff, fossilized ripples can be found in the harder layers of exposed stone, witness to the action of waves. Also compressed in stone are the fossilized remains of ancient tropical corals, trilobites, and shelled invertebrates. As layer after layer of sediment was laid down, eventually, under great weight and pressure, it became rock. In Adams County, this layer is 650 feet thick and only the top few hundred feet protrude above ground level.

When the ancient seas evaporated, the newly formed rock became subject to the forces of erosion caused by wind, water, and countless cycles of freezing and thawing. Grain by grain, over millions of years, the surrounding sandstone and limestone was carried off in floods, downpours, and great wind storms. What remained, in just a few places where the rock was slightly harder and more resistant to erosion, were the early sharp-edged outliers we see today.

Spared by the Glaciers

Much of the upper Midwest, from the Great Lakes across the Great Plains, had geologic formations like those found in present-day Adams County. In most other areas, however, the buttes and mesas were simply scraped off the landscape by the advancing glaciers which leveled, gouged, or abraded everything in their paths. What spared these monuments of stone in Adams County was the fact that the two most significant lobes of the great ice sheet in Wisconsin diverged and spread apart. Most, but not all, of Adams County lies within the Driftless Area, the portion of the central plains that the last glaciation never touched. The glacier slowed and retreated just as it reached the extreme eastern and northeastern parts of the county. Though not affected directly by the glacier, the rest of Adams County was nevertheless permanently changed by its presence nearby.

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Lake Wisconsin

When the climate began emerging from the last ice age, torrents of water cascaded from the mile-high face of the glacier. The force of the water formed new channels where the old rivers could not handle the flow. But south of what is now Wisconsin Dells, the rivers of glacial meltwater were impeded by a dam of ice. The waters backed up, forming glacial Lake Wisconsin, covered 1,800 square miles. It soon inundated the western third of Adams County to a depth of about 150 feet at Quincy Bluff. This meant that Quincy Bluff, Rattlesnake Mound, Lone Rock, and other outliers became islands in the vast lake.

When the ice dam broke, the impounded water was released. Lake Wisconsin was drained in a matter of weeks, carving the channels and gorges at Wisconsin Dells and leaving all the buttes and mesas of Adams County high and dry.

Dyracuse Mound & Hamilton Bluffs

The quartzite at Dyracuse Mound, between Rome and Big Flats, and Hamilton Bluffs in Leola is the oldest surface rock in Adams County. Dyracuse, a corruption of D’oro Couche (French for "Layer of Gold"), lies within Dyracuse Motorcycle Recreational Area.

The Seven Sisters

These seven low hills are located in northeastern Adams County. They contain banded quartzite, a metamorphosed sandstone of Precambrian origin that is an exceedingly durable rock. Nevertheless, the Sisters have been worn down by the elements and are referred to as "teepee buttes," owing to their conical shape.

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Roche-a-Cri Mound

Contained within Roche-a-Cri State Park, this centuries-old natural landmark has the sheerest cliff face in Wisconsin. Its 300-foot summit is now accessible by a stairway of 303 solid white oak planks and affords a breathtaking 120-mile panorama. The name, which is French, has been interpreted variously as either "crevice in the rock" or "the crying rock." It had long been in use as a natural landmark even by the time of the French voyageurs.

On the southeast rock face are inscribed petroglyphs (rock carvings) and pictographs (rock paintings), the oldest of which date to around 900 A.D. In addition to the markings which may have indicated distance and direction are figures and symbols of a more mysterious nature. Sheer rock faces were regarded as doors to the spirit world, and the site certainly held religious significance for native peoples. It was very like a place from which to embark upon a vision quest.

Among the rock art at Roche-a-Cri are moon symbols, star bursts, thunderbird tracks, and a pictograph of an underground water panther.

This unique archaeological treasure has earned Roche-a-Cri (French for a listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

Rattlesnake Mound

Named for both its shape and the presence of its namesake, this formation was called Chicoongrah, Window-in-the-Rock, by the native Ho-Chunkgra. It is also suspected that this crevice was used by native peoples as the gnomon of a rock calendar which pointed to the rising or setting sun during the solstices and equinoxes.

Quincy Bluff & Lone Rock

The two-mile-long, 200-foot-high summit of Quincy Bluff permits a stunning view of the Wisconsin River to the west and the wetlands and the broad Lone Rock mesa to the northeast. Hiking trails follow the crest, affording views of some of the most varied terrain in Adams County: oak and pine barrens, wetland, savannas, and forest.

Friendship Mound

Located at the intersection of County Highway J and State Highway 13 (an old Indian trail), this mound has long been used as a landmark. It towers above Friendship Lake to the east. On the west side of the mound is the Skyline Ski Area, one of the premier ski hills in central Wisconsin and, at 47 degrees, also the steepest.

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Other Natural Monuments

Dozens of other rock formations — fantastically shaped spires, pinnacles, and castles, both large and small — dot the countryside. Many, such as Rabbit Rock, near Big Flats, Pilot Knob, at County J, and Ship Rock, northeast of Friendship, are so-called because of a resemblance to the objects their names signify or their uses.

They survived to the present because of a capping hard enough to resist weathering. Erosion by wind and water eventually wears away the softer sides until the weight of the overhanging cap causes it to fall. The mounds decrease in size until all the capping is removed and they slowly blend into the plain.

The Prairie at Roche-a-Cri

The appearance of Adams County when the first European settlers arrived was very different from what it is today. The landscape maintained by the native inhabitants was an open terrain broken by oak or pine woods. Fire, started largely by lightning strikes, played its part in maintaining the prairies, sedge meadows, and wetlands.

In 1850, there was an average of two to eight trees per acre in most areas. By 1950, that figure had climbed to between 160 and 250 trees per acre, with some sections averaging nearly 700 trees by 1990.

Beginning in June 1996, the volunteer group Friends of Roche-a-Cri State Park embarked upon an ambitious program of prairie restoration. An area south of the mound was planted in stages, primarily in the fall and winter, as nature does. The ground is prepared by disk tilling, burning, and the application of herbicides to eradicate non-native species. Seeds of big bluestem, Indian grass, prairie fire, and wild lupine, among many others, are purchased or collected along roadways. A footpath leading from the winter parking lot on Czech Avenue encourages visitors to gauge the progress of the restoration.

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