Tincture Journal, Issue Seven, Spring 2014 by Daniel Young

Tincture Journal, Issue Seven, Spring 2014 Reviews

• 
  Gordon Kuhn

  This is an excellent journal with many wonderful delights waiting for anyone who buys a copy.
  
• 
  Rudi Landmann

  Standard Tincture disclaimer: I have a personal connection to the editor and publisher of this journal. I don’t “get” free verse, so I don’t review it.
  
  ----
  
  This time: 15 short stories, 10 free-verse poems, three non-fiction pieces (one interview and two pieces of creative non-fiction), and a one-act play.
  
  I was a lot less wowed than usual by this issue of Tincture; fewer pieces grabbed me with either their narrative or their writing. But, as usual, the ones I liked best made the investment completely worth it.
  
  Before I get to those, though, I'll note Kayla Pongrac’s one-hand, one-act play “Every Movement Is a Sound”. The subject matter—a young woman waking up, making herself breakfast, and dealing with the end of a relationship by phone—isn’t anything extraordinary, but that’s not the point. The play is constructed so that almost everything that happens on stage generates sound, that Pongrac wants amplified for the audience as “a tribute to the music all around us”. I salute the ambitiousness, experimental spirit, and form-challenging adventurism of this creation.
  
  I loved Merran Jones’ exquisitely observed “A Set of Neatly Folded Pyjamas”. There’s not much plot to this story, but it does scrutinise a man stuck in the death throes of a particularly unhappy relationship. Jones’ approach is frank to the point of brutality. When she writes:
  
  

  With any luck, she’d be in bed by the time he got back, leaving him to eat his cold casserole in peace.

  
  
  we know all about this relationship, itself grown cold. Personally, I also really liked her simile for central character Nigel’s work life, “batting away emails like dogged flies”. I know those days!
  
  I also loved Sue Stevenson’s “Colour Wheel”, a sci-fi piece in which alien beings that manifest as splashes of colour attach themselves to people, and act something like a living (and accurate!) mood ring for their host. There’s a really interesting idea here, as characters come to terms with a world in which there are no secrets about another’s feelings. I was reminded of Douglas Adams’ description of telepathy as “that most cruel of social diseases”. This story touches a little on why. I was initially a little disappointed because I thought this was going to be a Mythos tale of beings from Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space”, but by the time I realised this was not to be the case, I had already been sold on the story on its own terms. (Nice though the Mythos tale was going to be... I was just waiting for the colours to reveal their true, predatory natures...)
  
  By far my favourite piece this time was “The Intersection” by
  Gordon Kuhn. I love its mood, the goosebumps it gave me, and the huge load of ambiguity it delivers. The premise is simple: a man waiting for traffic lights to change talks to a little girl who is not physically present in the car with him. Kuhn created a tremendous sense of atmosphere for me in this story set at a crossroads at which the central character is compelled to stop and wait. Many different readings suggest themselves, ranging from purely metaphorical through naturalistic albeit psychotic, through to various supernatural readings. (I personally favour a Serling-like narrative of a delinquent father doomed to return and return to this intersection forever in some hellish afterlife, but that’s just me.) I didn’t pick up anything in the text that made me feel that Kuhn was insisting on one kind of reading of another.
  
  I know I often say that there’s one piece or another in an issue of Tincture that all by itself is worth the price of the issue to me, and this time around, it’s “The Intersection”. Superb!
  
  
• 
  Curious Reeds

  Of course I've read it. Now you can!