My three poems in this issue, “All nighter,” “From New York to Austin,” and ”The arrows,” all attempt to address the thrill, problems, and ambiguity of competition. As it says in my bio to this issue of the journal, I was raised in Texas but lived in Manhattan while my wife’s family lived in Rego Park. By going back and forth to these three places—Texas, Manhattan, and Queens—I’ve seen how competition plays out in its different phases with its different faces.

“All nighter” could be set in any Manhattan office building. A project team works all night, messes up the room with pizza boxes and papers, and feels they have discovered something extraordinary by morning, only to have the next inhabitant of this conference room erase the white board of their work. But this is New York in so many ways. New York City is a pressure-cooker of competition where everyone competes for a good apartment, for walking space on the street, for a place in line at the deli counter, and for attention. There may be true breakthroughs during these all-night meetings, but these may just be ways of self-congratulations in a city that can seem to dismiss everyone by its overwhelming largeness.

I explicitly compare two places, New York and Austin, in my poem “From New York to Austin.” I imagine the image of spices—fenugreek or kafir lime—emitting from behind a closed door in an apartment building in Rego Park, much like the one my mother-in-law lived in. The diversity of people in New York, and Queens in particular, is unmatched anywhere in America. But the poem quickly turns to nervousness that New York’s greatness may come to an end. The woman who discovers that her “legs are her Bentley,” which is to say that she has a competitive edge for a young women in New York, knows that her physical advantages will end. It’s perpetually invigorating and stressful. One inhales New York’s greatness while trying to proclaim a place in it. Then the poem shifts abruptly to Austin where the ethos is different.  Austin’s story is less about its diversity (like Queens) and more about its need to be counter-cultural. No less competitive than New York, Austin’s methods are different. In this poem, some unnamed boss ”fires a lazy guy” and still ends up inviting him to join the minstrel band that same night. Austin hides its impersonal competitive face behind its quirkiness.

“The Arrows” is a scene from a bowling alley and this type of scene should be familiar to anyone who enjoys bowling alleys. I love them and they are filled with a motley crew of characters. Unlike any other sport, bowling attracts all types.  The two young men in this poem are trying to get the attention of the young woman in the next lane and she, by dressing too provocatively, is trying to get their attention. The third party is the young girl’s grandmother who inserts herself into this mix. In this poem, the people are competing for attention in the silliest ways—big hair, strange antics, sexy outfits. But this is just another example of the same theme. Namely, people must assert themselves to get noticed, to make headway. The woman who discovers her legs are her Bentley is doing the same thing that the young woman at the bowling alley is doing. The all-nighters in the Manhattan office building are trying to build themselves up as is the young Elvis at the bowling alley as are the naked, dancing, mandolin-playing hippies in Austin.

My thanks to Tim Fredrick and Newtown Literary for publishing these three poems.

Relationship to Queens:
I have been a proud resident of Queens for the last seven years.

Where in Queens do you live?
Sunnyside.

How would you describe the writing you do?
I write diplomatic speeches and journalistic stories that focus on international politics and culture for work, academic papers on conflict and security studies for graduate school, and creative non-fiction and short stories for pleasure.

How did you come to writing?
I have always enjoyed writing, but one of my other passions, soccer, helped me get published for the first time and led me to consider writing/editing as a career. I covered Senegal’s historic run in 2002 World Cup for a now defunct weekly newspaper in Harlem and eventually landed a regular gig covering politics, music, and sports on the strength of my first soccer pieces.

What inspires you?
The sights, sounds, tastes, smells, unconventional beauty, and simultaneous notions of marginality and centrality that Queens, as the most global part of the globe’s most global city, offers as a daily backdrop. Also, al pastor tacos.

What does it mean to be a writer living in Queens?
Being a writer in Queens means being a part of something that is both emerging and established. Something that is local, yet inherently global. Something that is still being written, edited, and revised as a result of the migratory patterns, economic shocks, and political instabilities that often only seem like dissociated headlines in far away places. It means feeling a connection with, and paying respect to, the many others who have written in Queens over the years such as Jacob Riis, Jack Kerouac, and Nas.

If I had taken this photograph from a broader view, you would see the three piles of stuffed folders sloppily stacked near the wall, and the large, cumbersome toys still neatly kept in their packaging. The former is some of my teaching material that I’ve yet to organize and file properly, and the latter are gifts that were given to my daughter Sophia for her first birthday a few weeks ago.

What has remained as a fixture of my life as a writer is what you see in this picture—my not-entirely comfortable swivel chair, the two computer screens that make revisions easier, my plants that keep me company and the basket of paper that I take some bizarre relish in stuffing to the brim. Amidst the chaos and the space I jokingly refer to as “the new storage room,” I write.

Although the room suffers the typical ebbs and flows of clutter, the bright light that shines through the window is my portal and makes the outside world tangible from where I sit. Within the storm blue walls I can see the possibility of another story, a new character, and ignore the periphery of life’s disarray.

What is your relationship to Queens?

I met my husband at a bar in Jackson Heights, which was pretty random for both of us since I was living and working on Long Island at the time and he was living and working in Manhattan. When it came time to look for a place to live together, we ended up renting an apartment in Kew Gardens because we liked the pre-war buildings and the location was an easy commute to work for both of us. Eight years later, we bought that apartment, and we’ve come to appreciate the neighborhood even more.

I work in Manhattan now, and it’s great to come home to a quiet neighborhood where you don’t have to fight for space walking down the street, but there’s still an urban feel. It’s very culturally diverse. Walking around town, you’re as likely to hear people talking in Russian, or Spanish, or Arabic, as you are to hear people talking in English. There’s even a little enclave of French-speaking residents, which always perks up my curiosity since I’m an unabashed Francophile. Many gay and lesbian couples have settled down in the neighborhood, so it’s a comfortable place to be “out.”

How would you describe the writing you do?

I mainly write fantasy, and I write contemporary pieces like “The Trouble with Finklesteins” from time to time. For short fiction, I try to portray just enough in a few scenes to bring a character or two to life, and hopefully by the end to leave the reader feeling satisfied that this was a story worth peeking in on.

My longer-form fiction veers toward retold legend and fantasy. My two main projects right now are an e-novelette series called Werecat, and a series of books based on the legend of Atlantis.

How did you come to writing?

I was a shy, introverted kid so writing came pretty naturally to me as an escape. I may have actually been my most prolific in grade school and junior high when I wrote a lot of mysteries and plays that imitated the authors I was reading—Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse, and, later, J.D. Salinger and Anton Chekhov.

But I didn’t take up writing professionally until my 30s because it didn’t seem like a practical career. I still have a day job that pays the bills, and I eke out time to write in the evening and on weekends.

What inspires you?

I’m inspired by the complexity of the world, and I think mainly what that means for me is the complexity of human nature. There’s so much paradox in our lives: the messages we receive about what’s “right” and “wrong,” and the things we feel and think versus the things we do.

I like to try to unravel that paradox in my writing. In “The Trouble with Finklesteins,” I drew on two sort of typical “characters” from Kew Gardens: a flight attendant and a housewife. It’s a smallish story, with a bit of parody, but the theme that kept me moving forward with it was the modern bind of creating some security for ourselves in the form of marriage and family versus the need to maintain a sense of individuality.

I think that many of us are pulled in both directions and wondering where our true happiness lies. That’s not such a new theme in literature. Thinking about it now, I was definitely channeling some Chekhov. But it’s an enduring theme I think. Telling that kind of story with Kew Gardens as a backdrop felt like an interesting way to take the issues from a different point-of-view.

What does it mean to be a writer living in Queens?

I think writers are inevitably influenced by their environment. So to the extent that there’s a shared experience of inter-cultural encounters and all the joys and discontents of living in an urban center, that lifestyle finds its way into what we write about. My fantasy projects are far derived from the characters and places I deal with on a daily basis. But however indirectly, I would venture to say my writing reflects an urban sensibility.  For example, when writing about Atlantis, an ancient civilization, I was curious to explore the mix of cultures that I feel must have existed in the world’s earliest urban center. When fleshing out the setting, I wanted to touch on the social and political life of Atlantis as well.

Andrew J. Peters likes retold stories with a subversive twist. He is the author of the paranormal adventure series Werecat (Vagabondage Press). His début novel The Seventh Pleiade (upcoming in November 2013 from Bold Strokes Books) is the story of a young gay prince who becomes a hero during the last days of Atlantis. A 2011 Lambda Literary Foundation Fellow, Andrew has written short fiction for many publications. He lives in Kew Gardens, NY with his husband and their cat Chloë. For more about Andrew and his writing visit: http://andrewjpeterswrites.com

Name: Susana H. Case

Relationship to Queens: Grew up in Queens.

Where in Queens you live/lived: Grew up in Forest Hills and lived there until I was 18. Graduated from Forest Hills High School.

How would you describe the writing you do? Poetry and the occasional short story

How did you come to writing? I always wrote, even as a teenager. My father was an English teacher and wrote radio plays so writing was a part of my early environment. Originally though, I thought I’d be a journalist, not a poet.

What inspires you? My life, other people’s lives. I’m trained as a researcher, so sometimes something historical inspires me. Sometimes it’s my own history. “We Never Told Anyone Who Wasn’t Also a Kid” is loosely based upon several memories of mine from grade school and private music lessons. Though we were children, we were very aware of predatory adults and also very aware of sex, mostly from movies. “Omega” was generated from an incident in which I took a dead horseshoe crab from Rockaway Beach, my favorite beach growing up, and stored it in my parents’ house in Forest Hills and then forgot about leaving it there. It turned out to be less disgusting than it sounds.

What’s your name and what is your relationship to Queens?

Where have you lived in Queens?
When I was born in 1951, my family lived upstairs from their retail store on Grand Avenue in Maspeth.  The construction of the Long Island Expressway in the early 1950s cut a diagonal swatch in the fabric of the Maspeth landscape uniquely affecting our building; only a slice was removed from the front of our Fisher’s Men’s Shop, allowing us to remain in business.  We moved to a newly constructed brick, attached house on 69^th Place near Eliot Avenue, also in Maspeth, when I was 3 ½ years old.  I lived there growing up until I got married in 1976.  Returning to Maspeth after our short stay in Atlanta, my wife Rosanna and I rented an apartment; we had a son in 1982.  We bought a two-family house along with my in-laws in 1987, across Eliot Avenue in the adjoining community of Middle Village, two blocks from where I grew up.  But our apartment was more spacious so we chose not to move there, at least not at that time.  Instead, in several years we bought a house in Middle Village.  But when my father-in-law passed away, we did move in with my mother-in-law, Carmela Ippolito.  We live there still.  In short, I’ve resided in Maspeth/Middle Village for most of my life.

How would you describe the writing you do?
That’s a tough one.  I like to think that my stories capture some aspect of life that is humorous, or perhaps more accurately, contains irony.  They usually document experiences that are true.

How did you come to writing?  What inspires you?
That’s easy.  I write because I have such a poor memory.  In not trusting myself to remember things, I rely on writing and photographing to help me to recollect the details of my experiences.  And the inspiration comes from my family.  I began writing for my son, Andrew.  I wanted to pass on to him my memories.  I started creating hand-made illustrated books that told children’s stories, like “The Flying Candy Store.”  Whenever we travelled, I kept a journal and upon our return home I’d compose stories and essays of our journey.

What does it mean to be a writer in Queens?
This may sound strange, but I don’t consider myself a writer, per se.  As a retired architect, I keep busy with a number of activities.  I not only write, I paint and photograph as well.  I enjoy walking around my neighborhood of Maspeth and Middle Village almost on a daily basis, always with camera in hand.  And if I see or encounter something that interests me, I either photograph it or write about it.  I find Queens a land rich with images and stories.

Steve Fisher’s piece, “Homage to Mrs. Manzella,” appears in the second issue of Newtown Literary.

Buy your copy of the second issue of Newtown Literary!Click to view slideshow.

I wrote my piece, “Apricots,” in a quick burst but shelved the draft to deal with the little things of life: work, family, the usual suspects. Consumed with the day-to-day, my interest in refining the piece waned—until inspiration struck when I happened upon an odd story collection while browsing Google Books.

In researching late 19th and early 20th century women writers, I discovered A House Party, to which Sarah Orne Jewett (as well as Winston Churchill and Booth Tarkington, among others) was invited to contribute. A publisher, presumably as a marketing gimmick, compiled a dozen of their stories and asked readers to play a game: who wrote each piece? You were to detach a coupon and send your best guesses to the publisher, which offered a $1,000 reward for accurately matching authors to stories.

I didn’t have a spare grand to provide similar incentive but sensed there might still be something to the idea. Again and again, I came across people who voiced the same frustration: lacking professional obligations to produce new work, projects remained unfinished, half-formed pieces relegated to a hard drive or the tattered pages of a notebook.

Writing may be a solitary act, but engaging with a community of like-minded artists—if only to commiserate—plays an important part in the creative process. And so, working with my co-conspirator, a literary agent, we set out to throw a house party of our own.

We invited a small group to participate and published a limited run of our collection, a book of about 70 pages, using a print-on-demand service (we opted for Lulu; if you want to stay local, McNally Jackson’s Espresso BookMachine is a good option). Submissions, including fiction, poetry, and graphic art, ran without author credits; contributors received the book a few weeks before the party, and when we gathered to celebrate in my Astoria garden, the guessing game was spirited, with discussion, for example, of whether a piece’s style revealed its writer’s gender. (Verdict: not reliably!)

Cocktails, food, and friends old and new are a reliable recipe for a good time, but the party also provided powerful motivation for all of us to get our work in publishable form—and to hear from a friendly audience what was and wasn’t working. I pulled out my essay and polished it up, pairing it with a few other vignettes on city living.

The references to my neighborhood and the fruit trees in my front yard gave me away near instantly; I may not have maintained the air of mystery I wanted to cultivate, but the get-together forced me to focus on editing my neglected work and helped build a circle of local writers—one that will continue to expand at our second event, which will be held next week.

On the process of completing my poems, I’m very much a poet of Place. As such, my poems result in an invented presence: what my own mind determines as the emotional resonance of a place—what reverberates in image, or emotion, with potential editors and readers. Image is particularly important for me.

What has always captivated me are the ruined and abandoned places of America, and the people that inhabit them—real or imagined. These are richly evocative to me as a writer. As with Richard Hugo, who said he knew very little about the towns that triggered his poems, I know very little about those places or people I write about. Yet, to continue with Hugo—a major influence on my early poetry writing—I take emotional possession of what obsesses me. Yet not all my poems are set in these places; often they are places I write about after visiting them, and somehow they compel me to write about them.

“Gunner George Passing Starbucks the First Monday in July” was written about a World War II veteran I used to see nearly every day at the coffee shop I frequent. I’d seen him around for three or so years before I was ever moved to write about him, and when I finally did it was centered on watching him stand on a sidewalk by the café while he gazed down the street. “Gunnison Beach, Sandy Hook,” was written about a popular shore area in New Jersey, near where my parents live. “Hotel in Milwaukee, Early July,” and “Sunday Morning Blues Played Through a Blown Amp” were written by visiting other places, while “The Shipyard Anglesmith, Terminal Island, 1943,” was triggered by one of those abandoned places I mentioned above, this time the former Bethlehem Steel shipbuilding plant on Terminal Island, a part of the Port of Los Angeles complex, and a few miles from where I live.

For each of these poems I learned something new, whether raw facts about an obsolete occupation, such as an anglesmith, or a common enough street musician.