Oversights, Omissions, Snafus, and Other Growing Pains
As a (very) new small press, we are still on the incline of a pretty steep learning curve. Despite many years of individual and collective experience in the editing, design, and publishing world, it is a whole different ball of wax when, as the saying goes (and to mix a few metaphors), the buck stops here.
We are persnickety proofreaders, detail-oriented design-makers, and we are obsessive about the minutest details, but of course everyone makes mistakes and we are hardly immune to them. No matter how much we double- and triple- and quadruple-check at each step, there are things that we miss - sometimes minor, sometimes not-so-minor. An important part of our job is also repair work - to admit when we’ve stumbled and to do what we can to course-correct.
So, in this installment of Oversights, Omissions, and Snafus, we present two such corrections. In our most recent issue of kerning, we failed to include the bio of one of our contributors, Lisa Jones, the author of the short story “Hot Air Balloon” (on page 42 for those who have a copy).
Lisa Jones is a student in SFU's Writer's Studio program, and has had short stories and poetry published in various literary journals. She lives with her partner, daughter and two goobery dogs in Uxbridge, Ontario. Lisa enjoys short hikes, long kayaks, and finishing the cheese before company comes.
Our second correction is that we inadvertently printed editorial changes on Jennifer Craig’s creative nonfiction piece, “Watching” (on page 18 of kerning) without getting her prior approval. It is certainly NOT our policy to publish pieces we have made edits to WITHOUT first consulting and getting the approval of our writers, and we can fully understand how disappointing - even distressing - it is to see revisions of your work that you did not authorize.
The unedited version of Jennifer’s piece lives below.
We humbly apologize to Lisa and Jennifer for these errors, and look forward to future opportunities to practice the kind of consistent care and attentiveness that is the foundation of our relationship with our writers and readers.
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WATCHING
by Jennifer Lynn Craig
When the weather was fine, my father liked to take my brother and me out to one of the wild rivers of central Florida. On those days, he packed the Johnson outboard motor of which he was so proud. He packed hats, bathing suits, sweatshirts, life jackets, fishing rods, bug repellent, and sunscreen. The standard picnic lunch was Saltines and Vienna sausages from a can. There might have been other food, but I don’t remember it. At the fish camp where we set out, he bought some bottles of grape Nehi, as a treat. We fished them out the cooler, sticking our arms down into the icy water. He probably carried water for us, too. He was no dope.
The idea was that my mother would have a day to herself, but I think it was more that he wanted to be out there on a river. He was good in a crowd, but I think he was most at peace when he was outdoors, watching birds. His second wife loved shells and orchids, and he got interested in those, too. But when he took us out on the river, his mind was absorbed with birds, water, and the cumulus clouds that rose up in the afternoons. Or maybe he was thinking about a bit of writing that he intended to do. Maybe he was lonely; my mother rarely came on our excursions. Maybe he was just happy to be with his children. I didn’t know. Do we ever ask our parents about themselves when we are children? Parents are intimate strangers whom we love but hardly understand in all their fullness. Yet they are the stuff of which we are made, and I don’t mean biologically except yes, that, too. We are also made from their attitudes, beliefs, pursuits, and their quirky habits of mind and body. We unconsciously absorb so much, but we don’t ask about them because, I think, we don’t want to know. We are trying to grow up, to be our own selves. We are determined to be different. What we have left behind---or thought we did--- sinks out of sight, but only for a while.
There was one river that my father liked in particular. These days, that river is thick with day trippers, but then we rarely saw other people, maybe a distant boat with fishermen, sketched onto the horizon. When I look at maps of that terrain now, I see a broad web of rivers, black water swamps, fresh water springs, creeks, and sinkholes. But there were few maps then. It’s likely that the river looked much the same as it had when native people fished there. My father drove there on a small highway and then a narrow back road and lastly on a dirt track surfaced with crushed shells. The fish camp was a dilapidated building made out of concrete blocks under the big oaks, and there was a splintery dock sticking out into the river. There was a bar, but we didn’t go in there. The man who ran the camp got to know my father. I imagine he was a curiosity in that he showed up with two young kids and binoculars slung around his neck. He wasn’t there to fish, and he didn’t drink and swap stories with the other men. But my father knew his manners, and after some friendly conversation with the camp owner, he rented one of the aluminum skiffs that were tied to the dock. The skiff was scuffed and had a few smears of fish guts that someone had tried to clean up but not successfully. There were three hard seats in the prow, the middle, and the stern. A bit of bilge water sloshed around the bottom of the boat. There was a frayed rope at the prow, not a new one, but strong enough.
We stood around on the dock while our father put the outboard motor on the transom and loaded the skiff with our gear. My brother and I put on life jackets and sun hats, and my brother jumped into the prized seat in the prow. The motor started after several yanks of the cord and the adjustment of something small. The man on the dock called out advice, as men do. He cast off the line, raised a hand in good bye. With the motor roaring, we set out across the flat, gray-green river. The skiff bounced on the currents, and we hung on to the seats, happy to be going somewhere and doing something with our father.
For God’s sake, sit steady. Don’t lean from side to side! he shouted over the sound of the motor.
We had a favorite creek. My father, squinting under his canvas hat, watched to find the mouth of it, just a soft fold in the river bank. Then we left the river, entering the small water. At first, the creek was wide but as we followed it, the motor throttled down as low as it could go, the water narrowed. Trees arching, creek banks rising, close growth of green tunnels, sun shooting through trees in straight, pale beams, then a flat plain of pine scrub with wild cattle galloping away. We saw armadillos, feral hogs, fish rising, startled egrets. My father hoped to see a panther, and he was so enthusiastic that my brother and I thought it might happen at any moment. Once on that creek, a large chunk of the bank fell in with a startling splash. The collapse exposed the bare roots whose web originated at a great distance, a tangle of grass, palmetto, and pine roots, and left a dark hollow under the lip of the bank. I imagined myself, fantastically small, living there as herons waded by.
My father followed the creek as if he was intent upon finding the end, following the clear, tea-brown water with its golden lights as if it was a path. We never found the end. The water wound on, but the way was blocked by a fallen tree or perhaps there were shoals. Often my father let my brother and me, in turn, crawl back and sit with him and steer the boat. His hand wasn’t far away, but he let us figure out how to guide the boat toward a landmark he’d point out. Sometimes we pulled into a fishing hole and took the rods out. My father rolled balls of white sandwich bread in his fingers and put them on the hooks, and my brother and I fished for crappies. My brother caught most of them even though my father joked,
Don’t catch all the fish; leave a few for your sister!
We swam at a sandy spot after my father beat the water and the bushes with a branch to frighten off snakes. We ate our lunch.
Then it was the end of the day and time to motor back the way we had come, watching for landmarks, curves, and then suddenly out onto the wide river and the sky with pillowy cumulus clouds. Sometimes, a hot wind blew, spraying us with brackish water. The unseen currents came together beneath the skiff, dragging and pulsing against the aluminum. Then, the fish camp was in front us, our skiff nosing up to the narrow dock, the man coming down to catch the rope. We never remembered the way home. We slept in the back seat until our father carried us into the house and our smooth beds.
When I began to look at birds myself, I realized that my father always had been watching. Birding wasn’t such a commercial pursuit back then. He had an old pair of binoculars, a floppy hat against the sun, and his beat-up Peterson guide. That was it. He watched wherever he was and without much ceremony. After dinner, with a cigarette in his hand and his binoculars around his neck, he walked slowly down our suburban block, circled a small pond, and then walked back up to our corner and home. My brother and I clattered along with our bikes, a neighborhood dog or two. Sometimes he stopped and cocked his head back to see a hawk flying high. At the pond, he studied the reeds, hoping to see a heron. Sometimes he tried to teach us, and we tried to pay attention, but we were restless students.
You’re never going to see a bird if you wag the binoculars around like that, he often said, exasperated.
Birds were his chief passion, but he was interested in the natural world, too. I realized this when I sorted through his boxes of books after his death. There were stacks of poetry, drama, and fiction, of course, but what caught at me were the duplicates of books that I owned myself. Guide books on insects, trees, rocks, flowers. His Peterson Birds of North America with its checklist in the back, a lot of it inked in. Dates in margins next to specific birds. I was startled. I caught sight of myself, my habits unexpectedly mirrored. Flipping to a random page, I saw that he had underlined
" . . .flight of the hummingbirds is no less wonderful than their refulgent plumage."
I imagined him explaining the Latin root. "Refulgere," I was sure he would have said. "To radiate light." It was this sort of thing that made us roll our eyes behind his back.
After WW II, my father (a playwright) and my mother (a set designer) left New York and settled in a sleepy college town in central Florida for reasons that my brother and I could never puzzle out, and then it was too late to ask. But in short order, my father had a wife, children, an old car, a poorly paying job, and a mortgage. He had little time for hobbies. We took him for granted. He was just a suburban dad albeit one with an unfinished novel or two, a taste for Wagner and Jim Beam bourbon, and opinions that he liked to explain at length. Our family began well enough, but then it came apart with heartbreak and chaos and drunken fights. I made it my business to get as far away from all that as I could.
But now that I am older, I see what I learned from him. He was always watching and I suppose that I am, too. Watching, tilting my head back to see a hawk fly over. Writing which is a kind of watching. My father and I never watched birds together unless you count the times he pointed out a bird to me. Brown pelican… egret…. But if my father were here, I’d be sure to tell him about the peregrine falcon who struck the pigeon on the railing of a tall building in Boston and the way that the bloody feathers drifted down over the people having coffee in a garden below. I would tell him about great blue heron flexing the considerable muscle of its neck on the edge of a Florida canal. I wish he had seen the bee hummingbird I saw in Cuba. I would tell him that I often recall his admonition
Look down at your feet before you look up at the bird!
This habit has saved me from some nasty tumbles, and that, of course, was his intention.
Like most parents, my father wanted to protect us, and he also could not resist an opportunity to teach us about something whether it was steering a boat or watching a bird or looking at clouds. I wonder if my father knew about the earliest guide book, Pliny’s Natural History. Pliny intended to document all learning as far as it related to natural history and in 77 CE, that might have seemed possible. Topics range from astronomy to zoology and cover mining and mathematics on the way. But he did not write about birds. I would like to think of a good excuse for this, but I can’t. Pliny is now thought of as quaint, but I still have to admire his writerly intention to document and to instruct. My father would have liked that, too, since he was given to holding forth on obscure facts, and I suppose I have learned this from him, as well.
My father didn’t live long enough to enjoy his grandchildren and great grandchildren. He would have instructed them, to be sure. Perhaps they would have been impatient students as my brother and I were. Yet even without my father’s presence, his legacy has stretched down through the generations. His habit of watching the natural world has been like those roots that I once saw on the river, roots that were unseen until the bank fell away, and then I could appreciate the tenacious nature that had been there all along, trailing back to a beginning that I could not imagine or locate. The traces of his legacy persist. I see it often:
- In the Maine summer dawn decades ago, camping with my three year old daughter, and she whispers in my ear, I am glad we are alive.
- Watching my toddler granddaughter as the ripples of a mid-western lake come closer and closer and then onto her feet for the first time, and she says softly a new word she has learned, cold.
- Seeing the photo of my grandchildren on a lake in northern Maine in a skiff with the outboard kicking up a rooster tail behind them. My son is within arm’s reach, but my grandchildren are steering the boat.
My guess is that my father did not know about Natural History because if he had, I think he would have quoted a motto in Pliny’s preface, Vita vigilia est. I am sure we would have rolled our eyes. However, the translation--- to be alive is to be watchful ---- would have reminded us of him always.