Beautiful Flesh: A Body of Essays

262 Pages·2017·1.82 MB·English

by  Stephanie G’Schwind (ed.)

Beautiful Flesh

Beautiful Flesh a body
of essays
Edited by Stephanie G’Schwind
The Center for Literary Publishing
Colorado State University
Copyright © 2017 by The Center for Literary Publishing
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
page x: “Hearts and Bones,” © 1982 Words and Music by Paul Simon.
Because this page cannot accommodate all copyright notices, pages
245–247 constitute an extension of the copyright page.
The Center for Literary Publishing
9105 Campus Delivery
Department of English
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, Colorado 80523-9105
coloradoreview.colostate.edu
Typeset in Sabon by the Center for Literary Publishing
Manufacturing by Integrated Books International
Printed in the United States
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: G’Schwind, Stephanie, editor.
Title: Beautiful flesh : a body of essays / edited by Stephanie G’Schwind.
Description: Fort Collins, Colorado : Center for Literary Publishing,
Colorado State University, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references
and index. Identifiers: lccn 2017008187 (print) | lccn 2017012982
(ebook) | isbn 9781885635587 (electronic) | isbn 9781885635570
(pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: American essays--21st century. |
Human body in literature. | lcgft: Essays.
Classification: lcc ps689 (ebook) | lcc ps689 .b43 2017 (print) | ddc
814/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008187
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Contents
Introduction ix
stephanie g’schwind
Field Notes on Hair 1
vicki weiqi yang
Gray Area: Thinking with a Damaged Brain 10
floyd skloot
The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, 26
or How I Learned to Love
My Paranasal Sinuses
dinty w. moore
Looking Back 35
danielle r. spencer
Elective 44
peggy shinner
Speaking of Ears and Savagery 58
steven chur ch
A Living Structure 73
lupe linares
The Spine 85
sarah r ose etter
Drawing a Breath 93
kaitlyn teer
Shock to the Heart, Or: 103
A Primer on the Practical
Applications of Electricity
katherine e. standefer
Blood Type 119
samantha simpson
Mos Teutonicus 141
matthew ferrence
Wolf Biter 157
sarah viren
The Private Life of Skin 169
hester kaplan
Beautiful Flesh 189
wendy call
The Belly of Desire 194
sarah k. lenz
The Population of Me 205
jody ma ce
Pre-vasectomy Instruction No. 7 210
matt r oberts
Taking Shape 227
amy butcher
Once, Then 239
angela pelster
Contributors 241
Permissions 245
Acknowledgments 248

stephanie g’schwind
Introduction
in the beginning: heart and bone.
Still exhilarated by the thrill of putting together my first
nonfiction anthology, Man in the Moon: Essays on Father and
Fatherhood, I began to look for another project. It didn’t take
long to find the inspiration: in Colorado Review, the literary
magazine I edit with my colleagues and several amazing
graduate students at Colorado State University, we’d recently
published Matthew Ferrence’s “Mos Teutonicus,” titled for
the ancient practice of removing flesh from bones in order
to transport a human body long distances, and Katherine E.
Standefer’s “Shock to the Heart, Or: A Primer on the Practical
Applications of Electricity,” on her experience of living with an
internal cardiac defibrillator. And there it was: an anthology of
essays on the body! It would embrace the body’s whole, its parts,
its form, its function, its spirit, its nature—exploring through
many voices a variety of concerns and obsessions—in memoir,
personal essay, and lyric essay, inviting a range of traditional
and experimental approaches. I put out the call to the creative
nonfiction community, and the essays began to come in. Soon
I had eyes, and then a nose, and then blood. And here, the
focus changed ever so slightly. With an oblique nod to Victor
Frankenstein, I decided to build a body. Out of essays.
So collected here are twenty essays, each taking on a different
anatomical part, combining to create a body of neither one gen-
der nor one ethnicity. Neither one ability nor one shape. It is a
body that celebrates and grieves, remembers and forgets, injures
and heals, loves and laments itself. Between a full head of hair
rendered patchy by radiation and a pair of feet that run from
ix