House Constructed

This Autumn we invited contributors to send us work on the theme of HOUSE. This theme emerged out of the Beauties and Beasts theme from last season. In Disney’s final scene when the enchantment is broken, the Beast’s castle transforms from something dark and haunted into something bright and colorful. Like the castle, every house can be a shapeshifter. Some houses seem to be constantly under construction, with walls popping up here and coming down over there, and whole new wings and corridors added or removed. I grew up in a house like this. Even houses that maintain a stable form may be bought and sold many times, and eventually come to hold the different stories of their various inhabitants over the years. 

The Mandarin House this season certainly has a lot of inhabitants. We received more submissions than ever and we are publishing twice the amount of work we have in the past. We are so honored to present the work of writers and artists from New York, Oklahoma, New Jersey, Montana, Virginia, Washington, and California (including, of course, our home town of Chico!) In this sense, The Mandarin House is not only a shape shifter but also a teleporter, popping up in different locations across the country to collect the stories of that unique place and time. 

Egg, or Crystal Ball

“How do you like your eggs?” the waitress at The Roost asks you one rainy, hungover Sunday morning. The cooks sizzle sausages in the kitchen, the raindrops tap on the window. “Sunny side up,” you answer in your gooey, nebulous post-booze haze. 

“Sunny side up”: Every day at The Roost we take the egg’s relation to the sun for granted. That bright yellow sphere which seems to have a glow of its own resting in the egg’s gooey center: “the vitellus or perhaps lux solaris” as McHatten writes in her poem “YOLKSHINE.” Keith-Verfaillie’s image illustrates the same spirit: If it were not for the black lines marking the egg white, the golden sphere at the center of the image would appear to be the sun itself. 

If the egg is the space of pure potential, the yolk is the elemental origin–the light from which life springs. The structure of The Mandarin’s new egg zine is itself shaped like the inside of an egg, and so the center of the zine is the yolk–the elemental origin of the whole: a thumbprint inside a tiny book. That oval mark–entirely unique to the individual–contains all potentials.

But what becomes of potential? In my poem “Sitting Inside The Sun” I wrote of the elemental origin: “What emerges then might only emerge almost, is already vanishing.” What does not emerge can never be known, and so is never totally real. Within, the egg is a dream without memory, observation, or goal. “You have to break an egg if you are to know what is inside,” says the man to the girl in Mamoru Oshii’s film Angel’s Egg. This is the terrifying nature of the egg gazed upon from the outside–It is a horrible blankness outside and a horrible blackness within. No light penetrates its shell, so what sits within remains pure mystery. 

To meditate upon the image of an egg, to turn it over in your hand and begin to wonder, you start to project images onto the blank canvas of its shell. “The wandering seeker has stepped inside the dream of the egg.” (Light, “Trickster Egg”) Rene Magritte captures this experience beautifully in his painting La Clairvoyance, in which a painter sits gazing upon an egg as if gazing upon a still life arrangement, but on his canvas he has painted the image of a bird in flight–the egg’s future. 

Driving past Madame Ruby’s on Mangrove after breakfast, you may well wonder, “what does the psychic know that I don’t?” She may only tell you what you are most afraid of. What sort of curse can she cast upon you, with one glimpse into her crystal ball? 

But you have your own tool of divination, sitting lonely in a carton in your fridge. If you look upon an egg with an eye towards the future, that future will emerge. Now that yolk, which was only continuously, harmlessly emerging and vanishing, begins to take form! That monstrous or miraculous form develops muscles, eager to expand…

When an egg begins to hatch, it appears to convulse. What looks like a humble and innocent rocking from the outside, must feel like a shivering, quaking cataclysm within. 

Still–an egg is eager to hatch. She who hatches from her shell is born–born of her own violence. A chick hatches from an egg by pecking at her own shell. Perhaps this feels like the destruction of her own world, like a rebellious act of violence, like the end of everything. But those same motions which crack the shell are the very motion which will keep her alive for the rest of her life. It is an essential part of her nature. A bad egg then is the result of a refusal to violently emerge. 

Emergence is potentially miraculous and potentially monstrous. How are we to think of it, exactly? Roderick and Sheila in Light’s “Miracle Egg Day” demonstrate one method: They accept the emergent event with wonder, they allow for its possibility. And when it has passed over them they contemplate it genuinely, without jumping to conclusions. Roderick says, “I wanna backtrack [...] Back from ‘miracle’ to just, it happened. That I called it a miracle is part of its happening, yeah, but I want to back off so it can bring other words to mind too.” 

Ultimately, to hatch from the shell is only to open up a new world of potentials and possibilities. He who goes inside the mountain crawls out reborn, but perhaps only in more complicated form. 

At last, the wisdom of Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, the proverbial cracked egg, helps us here. When Alice asks if he can really make words mean so many different things, he tells her, “the question is who is to be master, that is all.” I imagine this was a little advice from Lewis Carroll to himself, for his regular states of reeling and writhing, through his reading and writing process. Humpty Dumpty expresses the power of authority. This is something the man in Angel’s Egg did not understand. He thought he had to smash the egg in order to discover its contents. The cracked egg himself knows that it is up to every individual to decide what potentials and what meanings they want to bring into the world. 

The Mind, a Fruiting Body

Several weeks ago, I was sitting out front of Upper Crust when I saw my old Religious Studies professor walking by. I invited him to sit down and we talked a bit about our current projects. When I told him about The Mandarin, he asked, “What made you choose that name?” I described a little of my inspiration before he gave me the etymology lesson: The mandarin orange is named after the region in China where it was first propagated, this region was named for the ruling intellectual class there, called “Mandarins”. The word “Mandarin” can be traced back to the Sanskrit word “Mantri” which means a sage, “a person who thinks and says”. “Mant” in Sanskrit is related to “ment-” in our English word “Mental”. So mandarins are not only fruits which carry tastes and traces of their place and time; they are not just products of nature; they are also decidedly of the mind.

I wanted to use that etymology episode to begin describing how this project has grown and changed. Instead I kept finding myself in coffee shops staring at a blank document. I kept starting with the sentence “The Mandarin has grown so much in the past year,” and then backspace, backspace, backspace. At last I found myself at a party with my new fellow editor, being complimented by the girl with the beautiful smile on the work we’ve been doing. Suddenly I could explain how I felt about the whole thing.

At first I was not interested in publishing my own writing on the website. I felt that to do so would delegitimize it, that it would be more like a blog than a proper publication. I reached out instead to friends, former classmates, fellow writers, anyone I could think of, to ask for submissions. In many ways, starting this project was about solving the problems of landlessness, timelessness, and lack of identity, which I faced mid-pandemic. In fact, as I reached out to all these other people for submissions, I was asking them to tell me where we were and what was going on. It’s no mistake then that Evan Cicoletti’s “How To Be Fabulous During The Apocalypse'' was the second piece we ever published. This was the entire point of the project: to make beauty out of the mess I found myself in, make it fabulous even. 

An apocalypse is the end of one world, the beginning of another. We have the unique opportunity to write that new world into being, to frame the world as we wish to see it. Something that unites the work of every writer we have published is their ability to make beauty out of the mess we find ourselves in. “We Are All The Same” by Kiana Perez and “naming it/Nephilim” by Robin Robinson are just two poems that come to my mind as shining examples. These works weave the experience of chaos into narrative, and make dull or terrifying images beautiful. 

I have begun to publish my own work on The Mandarin. Beginning to establish my particular lens and voice, to add it to the mosaic of voices that create our collective story, has been illuminating and life-giving. The more I write and talk and share, the more I understand. A website can at times feel quite ephemeral: does it exist, or not? The same is true with literature generally. When the book is closed, where does the story go? I am finding that as we publish more and more, and as I continue to write, the voices, poems, stories, and images, poetically collaged into our digital pages, are alive now in my mind, a vivid mosaic depicting the tableau of our particular time and place. 

While indeed The Mandarin has grown in my personal experience of it, it is still quite small. What is now certain, however, is that it does in fact exist. The Mandarin has developed from a vaguely twee literary aesthetic a la The French Dispatch, helmed by one girl puttering about on Squarespace in her off-time, into something much more specific. There are two of us in the workshop now. Alex Light has come aboard, making a total of two editors at our weekly meeting, usually around my kitchen table. The Mandarin could now be called a literary and arts review, often featuring images created by Northern California artists paired with pieces by Northern California writers. The Mandarin proves itself to be ever more specific to our precise time and place. My work on the magazine now stems not from a desire to be part of a “glittering literary world,” as I wrote in my previous letter from over a year ago, but rather from a clear and specific need to find and articulate the story of our place and time. Everything we publish is part of that vision, that story. The Mandarin tells its own story, produces fruits of its own land and in so doing, tells us the tale of ourselves. Each piece we publish serves to strengthen, elaborate upon, and further develop our local legend. 

Origin Story

I’d never claim that a literary magazine is an original idea. The first literary magazine I ever heard of was Seven-Eighths Under Water which was run as an extracurricular club at Chico High School in my hometown. I was a freshman at the time and followed a crush, with her celebratory homemade cake, to the club’s end of year party. I was drawn to the little classroom by equal interest in this mysterious girl with a pixie cut, and the mystery of poetry. 

I spent my sophomore year of high school in Willard, Missouri and while I was there, in something of a creative void, I started a poetry club, which put together an award winning literary magazine at the end of the school year, inspired by my little knowledge of Seven-Eighths Under Water at my former high school. On Tumblr I followed poetry blogs, usually over-saturated with the angst and drama of adolescents, but inspiring to me all the same. In college, I worked on the Berkeley Fiction Review and started paying attention to similar small journals and publications. One publication that comes immediately to my mind is Two Peach, whose fruit theme I admired and have clearly drawn inspiration from. 

But before The Mandarin was created in September 2020, I sat with my friends, one cold Christmas Eve morning in 2019, in a crisp living room sipping on cups of black coffee made lovingly by my dear friend Maira Iqbal, and together we envisioned a similar, more extensive publication which we thought we’d call “The Demarconian” in remembrance of a complicated and loved friend who passed away the summer before. Encouraged by the buzz of caffeine, the hopeful morning light, our ideas and our sincere enthusiasm, we imagined a multimedia platform featuring art, illustrations and cartoons, creative writing and articles, videos and a podcast, from ourselves and from our extended creative community. We’d start in Chico, we decided, and work our way out. We discussed the possibilities of a hardcopy periodical which could be distributed at local coffee shops, first in Chico and the Bay Area where we lived, and then in Sacramento, Santa Barbara, L.A. We talked about these possibilities for our collective creative project with the eagerness of children undeterred by the sort of practical problems that might weigh down people older and perhaps wiser than us. 

Cooper Grosscup, an accomplished musician and my boyfriend at the time, would man the audio aspect of the concept, working on the production of music, podcasts and videos, and writing and editing reviews of local musicians. Quinn Greenwood would do a little of everything, lending his artistic eye (and hands) to images, poetry, and video production. Joseph Demarco (whose art is now featured on The Mandarin) would head the visual arts side of things: the first thing I asked him to start work on was a logo for The Demarconian, and then he would paint or draw portraits of the writers and contributors for our bio sections. Maira Iqbal offered to lend her degree in Computer Science to the project, offering to do any coding work we needed. 

Almost 9 months later, many things had changed. Enthusiasm fell off, as enthusiasm often does.

Only a few months after the Christmas Eve conversation, the Corona Virus infiltrated our lives in full swing. My relationship ended with Cooper, my primary partner in the idea for The Demarconian. I moved back to my hometown, happy to be around friends but feeling a general lack of direction and a huge distance between my current life and the more creative and literary life I felt I’d lost when I left Berkeley. I was interested in working for the Chico News & Review, but as far as I knew they were closing for good. Sitting around in my attic bedroom, trying to imagine a shape for my life, I looked at all my books stacked up lonely in one corner, and felt again that haunting void of creativity. I sulked within that void for weeks. Even as Lola Yang (painter of The Mandarin logo) began work on her mural in my living room, I felt the sense that I would never escape the capitalist spiral, that I would never emerge into a vibrant and glittering literary world. 

I expressed these sorrows, and my friends suggested solutions: one must create unique and imaginative experiences for oneself; one cannot wait to be hired for a job, accepted to a program, affirmed absolutely in some nebulous (and probably unattainable) way. Each night I waited for the Fairy Godmother of Art to come through my window and bless me with some beautiful feeling, or purpose, or opportunity. And when she didn’t, my eyes wandered back to the books in the corner.

I thought of Simone de Beauvoir’s book The Mandarins, which followed a group of French intellectuals as they wrestled with politics and art. I liked the way these companions were described in the beginning of the novel, reminding me of the best parts of my own creative community: the sincere friendships, the inspiration, the understanding looks, the knowing… and their later separation seemed to reflect something that was going on in my own heart. I thought “The Mandarin” made a perfect name for a literary magazine, playing off the fruit theme I liked so much, represented by Two Peach and Peach Pit Press and carrying (in my mind) the blessings of the bohemian French existentialist movement Simone de Beauvoir was a part of. 

What was a mandarin? Something small and sweet, to be tucked in a backpack before school, or found in a Christmas stocking next to gold-wrapped chocolate and candied walnuts, or perhaps peeled in a perfect spiral, pulled apart and savored piece by piece. A mandarin looks erotic without its skin, and when halved, it looks more provocative still. Mandarins, like all fruits, come from flowers, and to eat them is to consume the products of a tree, an environment. Mandarins are filled with all the little particles and minerals which the soils of their home contain. 

Creativity works like this too; writers and artists grow up out of their environments, saturated in the elements around them. Like fruit, the work these writers produce is drier or juicier, bitter or sweet, depending on the environmental conditions in which they were formed. And for readers, work appears on The Mandarin fully formed. They don’t see the messy notebooks of our writers in which the fruits of their labor ripen, just as one doesn’t usually see the dirty gardens and verdant orchards where workers cultivate their harvest. We experience the mandarin, as we experience all art, as a miniature world, self-contained. It seems to come from nowhere, but for careful readers, it reveals the secrets of its conception and of its birth.

This comparison between natural processes and literary processes reflects my education and continued interest in Green Romanticism, a form of Romanticism particularly concerned with nature, which is an especially apt topic during this time of environmental crisis. A professor at Berkeley once posited the question, “How is a poem like a bird’s nest?” while discussing the work of John Clare. We discussed the way that poems were made of collected pieces, brought together, composed, much in the way that Orpheus composes in a circle, creating a world of his own through imaginative power, precious and contained. 

In our About section, we describe The Mandarin as“interested in recording and showcasing the textures and tremors of our shifting landscapes (environmental, political, and psychological), through the richness and diversity of our literary products: poetry, essays, fictional and nonfictional stories.” This last line was inspired by Joan Didion’s essay “Notes from a Native Daughter” (a work I referenced in my previous post) which discusses the Sacramento Valley as a kind of Eden. She notes that in her Sunday school class, teachers made this point continually; the Central Valley is like the holy land “in the richness and diversity of its agricultural products." The Mandarin magazine also comes from this valley. All my life I have been surrounded by the orchards of this area, which I found first fantastical as a child tromping through an enchanted forest running from wild beasts, and then rather provincial, frustrated by the same adolescent cynicism of the titular character in Lady Bird. But as I explored Romanticism further, I returned to a love for the orchards of my childhood; even in suburban homes around my home town, we can pick fruit from the trees left over from the vast orchards that previously occupied the landscape. When the trees hang heavy with the fruits or nuts of a new season, I find myself enchanted by the generosity of nature’s creativity. I think of Dean Young’s poem “Scarecrow on Fire”: “We all think about suddenly disappearing,” he writes, “but first I want to put something small in your hand.” I feel that Mother Earth is whispering this to me all the time, as she slouches toward apocalypse and yet continues to bless us with fruit, and air, and enchanting slants of light. I hope that The Mandarin can perform the same magic act for you, placing into your hand a little piece of art, sweet or bitter, hopefully beautiful, springing from this environment we share. 

Ultimately I started The Mandarin alone. Joseph Demarco continues to contribute art. And my friend Fiona Murphy has also become a contributor. Maira Iqbal expressed great enthusiasm in helping with the website, but ultimately realized that I would need a more simple platform (and probably less sophisticated coding) if I wanted to be able to edit the project easily as it developed. So currently The Mandarin uses Squarespace for our content. The Mandarin in its current form lacks many of the elements my friends suggested so many months ago: we don’t have a podcast or music section, at least for the moment. There is not as much art as we imagined back then. I’ve been tinkering around with Photoshop and learning as I go, but mainly the art on The Mandarin comes from other contributors, artists, friends, and writers.  I hope that one day we will get to experience The Mandarin in paper form, but for now, I hope you enjoy (and contribute to!)  this collage of art and writing from this creative community.

an introduction…

“We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

I have been thinking about what is means to grow up in California…

To bathe in her quick rivers like a kind of baptism…

To be seasoned by the thick smoke of her wildfires…

In her essay “Notes from a Native Daughter,” Joan Didion compares The Valley to the biblical holy land, citing as one example her Sunday school work book which points to the types and diversity of its agricultural products. But these days, as fires rage seemingly endlessly, I most often hear California compared to Hell. And as we wake up to images of orange skies filled with smoke, it feels hard to argue. What is California now? It does not seem like the promised land Joan describes legendary pioneers making the long journey west to settle.

Standing on the edge of the California coast, perhaps on Land’s End at the tip of San Francisco, one becomes aware of a certain reality: you can’t go further west than this. Sitting there at Land’s End, looking out into the great nothing, you really do feel as if you have reached the end of something; the end of the world may well be it.

This place that was once considered a kind of Eden by the likes of Joan Didion and John Steinbeck, has begun to deteriorate. “PARADISE LOST,” headlines read, when the Camp Fire swallowed up a whole town.

Instead, California is a sort of mad house, a sort of oven… And the Sacramento Valley, which, as a child running barefoot through fields of clovers, I felt tenderly cradled in, is now more like Yeats’ rocking cradle which vexes us to nightmare…

yet also to dreams…

I am interested in how romantic and gothic experiences of our strange habitat have shaped our imaginations. The Mandarin is a literary magazine that has grown out of the landscapes of California: its rugged and sandy beaches, its verdant valleys, its forest waiting to catch fire. A heaven and a hell. What rich and strange creative products does land like that yield? 

“In these uncertain times,” so many emails begin these days… yet in spite of all these banal and seemingly routine responses to a level of crises I have never experienced before, I have also found around and within me a renewal of imagination and creative potential. As Toni Morrison said, “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”