Book Review 2016-003
Dispatches From the Drownings by B.J. Hollars
2014 by University of New Mexico Press, 192 pages

(I believe B.J. might have arranged for a review copy--or I might have bought it--do not remember)

"What you're about to read is not a conventional book." I do not believe B.J. Hollars could have started this work more appropriately. I have read this book straight through at least twice since obtaining a copy back in 2014 and frequently pick it up and skim through to read one or two of the incidents. Part Wisconsin Death Trip (that's the obligatory comparison), part Lee Martin's Turning Bones, part season five of The Wire, all wrapped up into a wonderful 100 stories of less than a page apiece.

Hollars, who has previously published two more straightforward non-fiction titles, sub-titled this one, "Reporting the Fiction of Nonfiction." In his Author's Note/Introduction, Hollars notes that he tells his students in his nonfiction classes that "most facts--even those offered neutrally--are about 75 percent true and 25 percent false." This bringing to light of the "Fiction of Nonfiction" is pretty fascinating and the whole Author's Note should be used as an essay for other nonfiction classrooms.

It seems it's not very safe to be around the rivers of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Numerous drownings over the years. One thing B.J. Hollars does very, very well is research. It was very apparent from his first two works, and comes through loud and clear here too--though in a different path. Where his previous two works led Hollars to research specific incidents and people and the horror that is lynching, this noticing of drownings led him down a path of researching journalism to a degree. That is, while researching area drownings over the years, Hollars noted the various styles that were taken in the reportage of these incidents. While Hollars is sure that no liberties with the truth were intentionally taken, he noticed words like "supposedly" inserted when discussing either how, or why, the deceased might have been in or near the water in the first place. He noticed that the journalists themselves were never eyewitnesses and so at best, at the very best, the accounts were second hand--counting on both the memories of those that did witness things, and the perfect communication between said witness and the journalist.

What Hollars has done is found numerous drowning incidents from the time period of 1875 through 1922. He's researched the drownings, either from single or multiple written sources, read and re-read the accounts and then re-written them, using his own memory of what stuck out from the original reportings. While still essentially nonfiction, it throws in one more aspect of non-reliability. To me, this would be a fascinating enough experiment in writing and thinking about nonfiction and its complete veracity. However, Hollars wasn't satisfied to stop there.

Instead he adds two more elements--the first is photographs. He's found what can be considered appropriate photos from the collection of Charles Van Schaik (yes, the photographer whose work Michael Lesy used for his seminal Wisconsin Death Trip, hence the "obligatory" comparison). and as his author note notes--"...we must remain cognizant that the photographer still decides what to reveal or withhold." Add to that the fact that Hollars has then cherry-picked the photos he wants to use with specific drowning accounts, for whatever reasons he chooses, and you realize that as the reader, you're being nudged by Hollars' choice in Van Schaik's photographs, as well as Hollars' version of the original reporters account of the incident. 75% true seems to be a best case scenario.

Then the second element--in keeping with his own 75/25 theory, Hollars has manufactured 25 drownings. That is, of the 100 accounts of drownings in this book, only 75 come from Hollars specific research. Now, I have no doubt whatsoever that the 25 that he invented also were affected by his research, they were not taken from specific drownings of the past as the other 75 were. And having read this book straight through twice, and dipped into it more times than I can count, I couldn't even begin to try to suggest to you which 25 are the more manufactured of the 100 manufactured works within these covers. Not one jumps out at me, let alone 25.

It's a fantastically creative work, with what I find to be a tremendous germ of an idea--the Fiction of Nonfiction--truly followed up on by hard work, great creativity, and the fact that B.J. Hollars is one hell of a writer.

4.5 stars

"My Black Valiant" and "Lavender Soap" are two of the ten stories in Irene Zabytko's story collection, When Luba Leaves Home (Algonquin Books, 2003). The collection is a linked one set in 1968 in Chicago's Ukrainian neighborhood on Wheat Street. The collection is about Lubochka Vovkovych and her life as a DP (displaced person), her attempts to become more Americanized, and things that slowed that idea down.

"My Black Valiant," the second story in the collection finds Luba (the shortened version of Lubochka), attending Loop University, the all-commuter school in the area. Luba finds herself spending her first year taking classes, eating meals, and hanging out with, her Ukrainian friends. She's also not finding it satisfying. Going into her second year she begins to call herself Linda. She consider changing her last name to Wolf (apparently Vovk means wolf in English), but unless she officially makes the change the University won't let her register with it. But Linda does take hold. To jump start her Americanization, Luba decides to buy a car, and finds a 1967 Black Plymouth Valiant that is owned by another DP, who because he knows her, sells her the car for only $500. Luba/Linda is amazed by how little interest her parents show in the car, even turning her down for a ride on a weekend, claiming they are tired from working all week, and enjoying what appears to be a game show on television instead. The end of the story however, seems to have an incident's importance escape Luba/Linda. It involves her parents and the car, and brings a touch of humor to the story.

"Lavender Soap" falls about 2/3's of the way through the collection and is interesting as it doesn't focus so much on Luba. She's still involved, narrating the story in fact, but it's more about her good friend's (Natalka) mother, Pani Slava. Pani is a tech in the microbiology lab in a hospital where Luba (the name she seems to be going by here) works as well. Pani works the late shift and sometimes Luba waits around, watching Pani do the same thing night after night (dealing with bacteria and slides) so she can give her the occasional ride home. Pani has gone through a mastectomy not so long ago and rapidly goes back and forth between fairly sweet and cranky. What the reader picks up though is beyond still owning that Black Plymouth Valiant, Luba seems to have let the idea of pushing behind her Ukrainian heritage go, at least a little. She's going by Luba, she's hanging out with Natalka. This story is well worth reading if only for the two pages or so where Pani tells the her daughter and Luba a story about lavender soap from her past.

Zabytko, in these two stories, and I assume the other eight in this collection, does a great job of writing from the outsider's perspective. She shows the line walked between family and pulling away and living your own life. The two stories are excellent and I look forward to the rest of the book.

According to the author bio notes, "Money Maker," published in Other Voices 46, was Wendy Duren's first published story. I can only assume she had many finished stories that just didn't find the right homes before this one because the author of "Money Makers" shows a great confidence in her abilities.

She was going to take the money and buy a house.

This begins the story, and the she in question, Mary Ann, is a stripper. What Duren does is dig deep inside Mary Ann's head and a little less deep into the heads of other strippers from The Club. This seems to be a case of a writer wondering--why, and, how, after considering this particular profession. And while Mary Ann is constantly thinking about this house--about furnishing it, about kitchen details, about pool details, Duren also dips into the heads of others that are looking to make their rent, to pay for what they put up their nose or shoot into their veins (often to forget how they made that money in the first place), and others.

Where that original paragraph begins "She," the majority begin with "We," as if the strippers have a collective means for what they do and how they do it. And then there are very specific "Mary Ann" paragraphs that begin as such. As Duren gets deeper into Mary Ann's story than the others, these sometimes feel the most mulled over, but that's not to say that the group paragraphs, or details about other strippers like Phoebe, or Crystal, weren't very solid--just that the Mary Ann sections weren't missing, or using any extra, words.

It's a story that has been rolling around my head all day after finishing it early this a.m. I'll be honest, it's not a profession I've given a lot of thought to in regards to what is going on in their heads as they prepare to do, or do, the job. But Wendy Duren has done such a good job of getting into those heads, that I know I'll find myself wondering for some time to come.

"Red Eye" comes to the reader via Hobart and Kristen Rouisse. It's a short little story, less than half a page in length, but it packs a mean punch.

Seven paragraphs long, and none of these paragraphs longer than six sentences (and only one that long--the others three sentences or less). The first paragraph begins We're, and then the five middle paragraphs begin with some form of you (you, your, you're). That last paragraph does not begin with a pronoun. Even though the sixth paragraph ends with a bit of a hint, I think the last paragraph is meant to be at least a little surprising to most readers. Upon re-read, it probably shouldn't necessarily have been, but it was.

The story this short, I don't see quoting it much. The thing I like is how Rouisse lets the reader see both (we're) characters, but really only through the eyes of one of them. We're allowed knowledge of the one that we know is sick ("You're mildly attractive for an ill man.") via the other character. We learn of the ill man through her repeating things that he said to her ("You say you wanted to adopt a mutt and name her Margo."), descriptions of his actions ("Your fingers fumble with the seatbelt's metal latch."), and her reactions to him (the aforementioned comment regarding his appearance).

It's an interesting way of telling his story--at least his story during this particular red eye flight. The ending will hit hard.

So, Work of the Day seems a poor term as I tend not to do one per day, and when I do get to these there are frequently multiple posts in a single 24 hour span. That admitted, I'm probably not going to change the name of this type of post any time soon.

I had the good fortune of having the Dzanc Books table slotted next to the Poets & Writers table at the Voices of the Midwest last weekend. P&W was helmed by Melissa Faliveno. Maybe because she's originally from Wisconsin, she seemed like the right choice. In any case, it allowed for a few good conversations and I found out her preferred method of writing is the essay.

Now, I try to notice when new issues of Diagram are published and, when they are, do my best to read the majority of the work in each issue. That said, I don't always see everything they publish. And I somehow missed the essay, Of a Moth, by the very same Melissa Faliveno, from Issue 12.1 (an all-essay special issue). Which brings me to today's post:

GO READ THIS ESSAY NOW. Don't waste time reading what I have to say about it. It's online. It's free. It's well worth your time.

I can see how this work made it into a journal helmed (yes, twice in one post) by Ander Monson. Faliveno's work reminded me of some of Monson's essays, maybe just less the playing with form.

Faliveno starts off with a great opening line: "For some months now, my apartment has been infested." I don't see a way you read that and don't continue on barring maybe having lived in an apartment that had been infested yourself. She quickly allows her readers the news that the infestation was by moths and notes that moths are "Small, crawling, fluttering things, whose full-grown bodies look strikingly like butterflies, and whose larvae look devastatingly like maggots." It's a great line that leads into future aspects of the essay.

She describes the effort of she and her roommates, upon discovering some larvae in their pantry, putting forth a massive cleaning effort and moving anything edible into glass jars, cookie tins and "... the few remaining Tupperware containers whose warped lids still fit snugly." I loved this line as it brings some universality to the situation--who has ever used Tupperware and cleaned and dried it a few times that won't understand the bit about the few that can close properly?

There are many great one topic essays out there. However, I'm always more impressed by those writers that can take a moment, an incident, or situation, and write about it but allow it to bring another aspect or two of life into the picture. "When the moths first arrived, I had been living on my own for a little over a year, after having lived with a partner--by all accounts a man I eventually would have married--for five." This might not just be about moths one thinks. It delves a bit into solitude with lines from the next three or four paragraphs including:

For the first time in years, I knew solitude. And I wanted nothing more.

It seemed those days, by early fall, that we existed only in one another's peripheries, living under the same roof, ostensibly together, but in reality floating in and out of an empty house, utterly alone.

I realized, floating beneath the surface, that after years of being so intimately connected to one other human being, and after having that connection severed, I no longer had the desire to interact with anyone other than myself.

Faliveno does get back to the moths though: "The moths first arrived in late October, in the form of small, whitish worms that had somehow, impossibly, made their blind and crawling way into one of my roommates' unopened bags of Japanese rice noodles." At this point, Faliveno shifts a bit to the scientific--a trait in essays like this that I personally LOVE--noting "The moths that live in my pantry are called Plodia Interpunctella, or, commonly, Indian Meal Moths." More moth details come flowing shortly after this:

On close inspection though, the tiny fluttering things are nothing short of extraordinary. A fully-grown adult meal moth is approximately eight to ten millimeters in length, with a sixteen to twenty millimeter wingspan. Its forewings are sturdy and brilliant in color, speckled with various shades of brown, bronze, and copper, the lower wings are thing, fragile and light, an almost pale yellow in parts and grey in others, with small, dark lines like veins running along their perimeter. When the wings are open, stretched wide, the intricate pattern on each appears to be perfectly symmetrical.

I picked up the body and held it in the light of the window. I studied his body--his angles, his shape, his design.

When a moth is at rest, one cannot actually see its body. One can only see its wings, which come together upon the moth's back and encase its small frame.

These insects, I realized, these pests, were carefully and beautifully built.

The bit before about the butterfly slips back into play at this point: "Moths and butterflies belong to the order Lepidoptera. Moths make up the majority of this order, with around 200,000 different species--about ten times the number of butterfly species--with the thousands more having yet to be named." Butterflies will sneak in again before the end.

More about the idea of solitude, kind of, though:

Most moths are nocturnal, but those in my house seem, for the most part, to follow a pattern more human. They fly by day and sleep at night; they buzz around my bedroom as long as the lights are on, and fall silent almost as soon as I turn them off. But when I can't sleep at night--as happens often, particularly when I am alone--and I turn on my bedside lamp, the moths wake up with me, and resume their overhead flight for as long as I lie awake in the light.

And what I guess would be the opposite of isolation: "A month or two after the moths first arrived, I started sleeping with someone new." And the two ideas combine a bit--butterflies and lack of isolation--as Faliveno notes that at age 18, upon leaving home, she got a small butterfly tattoo. It's not something she's still fond of, but the new person sleeping in the bed has a tendency to run his fingers along the outline of it "...causing tiny follicles beneath the ink to stand on end, making the wings seem almost to break forth from my skin, I think that maybe the thing I regret no longer exists. That perhaps, instead, there's been a metamorphosis, and the small, winged thing on my hip is no longer a butterfly--that it disappeared for a time into darkness, and emerged again as a moth."

She wraps everything up: "The moths in my house are still around." Faliveno questions whether they'll ever get rid of them. Maybe they'll still be there when she leaves: "Or perhaps they'll stay here in this house and I'll be the one who goes first. Either way, when their constant fluttering about my head has ceased, when the buzz of their flight has gone, I'm sure I'll remember again how much i loved the quiet. But sometimes, mostly on the rare nights when I'm alone, I still hear that old familiar hum of wings beating fast inside the soft yellow lampshade by my bed. On those nights, I'll leave the light on."

I've read this essay about six or seven times in the past week. I enjoy it every time. I discover that I must read it a bit differently each time as one time I might learn a bit more about moths--the next, a bit more about the author's habits. But I simply love the weaving that goes on throughout.

Book Review 2016-002

Good on Paper by Rachel Cantor

2016 via Melville House Books (eBook purchased)

While I own A Highly Unlikely Scenario, I did not read it right away when I picked it up and in all honesty, am not sure where it is right now. When Rachel Cantor starting posting about a second novel forthcoming, I made sure to pick up a copy (ie, ordered the eBook) and set aside time this past week to make sure I read it. If her debut was nearly as good as this one, I should be downstairs digging through boxes for as long as it takes me to find it.

Cantor has written a novel that is both Academic in nature, as well as a quick-paced, interesting story. Academic in that it involves literary translation, explanations of Dante, as well as delving into Judaism, the Bible from a Catholic point of view, as well as external religious texts. In Shira Greene, Cantor has created a very normal person--selfish, loving, hopeful, negative, and just about everything else that a person could be. The novel starts with her as a temporary worker at a prosthetic limb provider. She's mid-30's,living with her childhood (from age 15) friend who is a University professor, and therefore is provided with a large family-sized apartment as he's the stated (though not blood) father or Shira's daughter, Andi.

Shira has been an English grad student when the love of her youthful life inadvertently exposed himself to be deeper in another relationship than Shira had understood him to be. This led to her to be unable to read Dante at all, let alone continue on with her dissertation and translation efforts. She had even published some short fiction but had pretty much set all of that aside to concentrate on trying to temp her way to a full-time position somewhere.

Out of the blue, a very recent Nobel winning poet, Romei, contacts her to tell her he wants her to translate his forthcoming work from Italian to English before it' is even published in Italian. It's a dream-come-true job and as one might expect, as in many such cases, the job really isn't as dream-come-true as she'd like to have hoped.

A very smart move on Cantor's part was to have Romei send his work to Shira in sections. This allows her to read it, and while thinking about it to herself, explain both Romei's work, as well as Dante's work, to the reader. It's done in a manner that allows the reader to learn more and more about Shira, Ahmed (the friend), Andi, Shira's past, as we read on. We get to understand this unconventional family. By breaking the novel into these pieces though, Cantor doesn't have one big Italian work being translated straight through. Instead, we're there as Shira somewhat selfishly delves into the work deep enough to not notice some issues Andi is having, worries that are hitting Ahmed, and we get to see her budding potential romance with part-time Rabbi Benny, who is also the local bookstore owner.

We get to see Shira go from giddy with how this project would jump start her career, to curious about certain things Romei was doing, to worrying that the work was not translatable, to believing Rome was sabotaging her career intentionally for reasons she couldn't understand. The relationship Shira develops with Benny is useful, not only to allow readers to dip into that aspect of Shira's life, but also because as a very well-read part-time Rabbi, Benny is able to help Shira with some of the translation aspects as Romei drops religious references and brings up other texts that Benny is familiar with.

The fact that Shira is working on a big translation can hardly be considered an accident. One of the bigger themes of the work seems to be the idea of misinterpretation and how simple it is to do so and the many ramifications of such. While not coming straight out and ever pointing such an incident out in the "story" portion of the novel, Shira explains numerous times throughout the Romei-heavy sections just what her process would be as she translated his work, and how to do her best to avoid misinterpretation.

The story has many twists throughout, while there might be early worries that Cantor's going to be too academic, or that not having read Dante thoroughly might detract from the reading, neither could be further from the truth. And saying the story is good is cutting Cantor's efforts short--there are at least 3 or 4 solid story lines being merged throughout Good on Paper and she handles the transitions and mixtures deftly.

4 stars.

Extremely excited to get home today and find a package with a handwritten PGP return address as that could only mean that the amazing Adam Robinson had sent me an Advance Review Copy of Stephen Dixon's forthcoming novella, Beatrice! It's a stellar combination: I love the work of Stephen Dixon; I love novellas; I have loved the vast majority of what I've read that was published by Publishing Genius Press. Adam Robinson has a great eye--makes the books he publishes great objects. Can't wait to dig in.

It begins as many of Dixon's works do--with a succinct sentence of action: "Someone rang his doorbell." More on this title soon.

One of the two authors most responsible for the Emerging Writers Network (the other was Elwood Reid), Alyson Hagy, won the Lawrence Foundation Prize for the best short story published in the Michigan Quarterly Review during 2015. This was a great story, "Switchback", from the Spring 2015 issue.

So, it's the fifth of March and it's my first Work of the Day post after going a near criminal 7 for 29 in February. Let's hope this gets the EWN started back up a little more regular again. I should be using the inspiration of reading Michael Czyzniejewski's story366 every day to get my rear moving better.

Prior to this morning, I'd not heard of Ashley Strosnider, nor New South. I think I narrowly avoided 'strike three' by taking the time to read this wonderful micro-prose 5 or 6 times. "A Few Electric Sounds" hits hard and more than once in its short structure. The story opens, seeming as if it's going to be a simple conversation:

They had talked about dying, the ways they’d prefer it to happen. She wanted to go in her sleep, she told him, to drift off skyward on some cinnamon cloud.

The her and his versions drastically different as he'd hoped for a meteorite to crush him, perhaps while he was out fertilizing his lawn. And more time is spent describing how he'd like to go--in a big and instant manner to finish up the first, and largest of the three paragraphs to this fiction.

Then Strosnider begins the second paragraph slowly:

And it had almost been like that, she thought.

I'm sad to note that it took me until my second time through this work to realize this statement noted the passing of the man in the conversation.

The next two sentences however, beautifully written, hammer home that point:

The supernova that sprouted in the front left corner of his brain, a little sunburst hemorrhage. Infinite like so many light-years it takes for a long-dead star to wink out inside the lens of a telescope.

And the story moves from there, quickly to the end, with another line or two like that above that hit the reader like gut punches. Ashley Strosnider's website has links to some more of her work and you can bet I'll be clicking on those links throughout the day.

Came home to a package on the table this evening--Monica Drake's short story collection, The Folly of Loving Life from Future Tense Press and a lovely "Thanks, Dan!" on the back of the package from (I presume) Kevin Sampsell. This is a lovely book (I opted for the limited edition hardcover that appears well worth the few extra dollars) by a great writer from a great indie publisher that I greatly look forward to digging into (most likely a story or two this evening still).

Sub-titled "Oddball Artists, Twisted Writers, Demented Editors, Office Politics, Hamburgers, and a Dead Stripper, this is the first issue of what is deemed a "mostly true 5-issue series about the whacked-out world of comic books."

Ted McKeever is one of my favorite comic book creators. He has a distinct art style that is not designed to create "pretty" characters. They tend to have odd shaped heads, and squared off teeth with spaces between them. In past works where he's had full creative control (Transit, Eddy Current, Plastic Forks to name some earlier efforts) there was sort of a cross between religious concerns and superhero ideas (with the protagonists often not really having super powers). The characters were people who were at their very closest on the fringes of society.

This time around McKeever is writing about a different type of character on the fringe of society--those in the comic book industry. He describes it as "mostly true" and if that's the case, issue one makes a case that being the writer of a comic book owned by somebody else is at the least a very frustrating position. Poodwaddle, the comic writer in Pencilhead, has a meeting with his editor, a man whose face is about 3/4 mouth--which is fitting as he's mostly there to yell and chew through Poodwaddle's thoughts. Poodwaddle is dropping off the pages for the next issue and on his way out he's given a complimentary copy of the last issue--one that in which he finds the editor has added Batman (the Adam Ward television version) like KAZAMs and POWs designed to suck in the superhero audience--even though the title isn't a superhero title. But that's okay because by the time they figure that out, they'll already have purchased the issue.

There are a couple of other stories lurking at the fringe of this issue--another comic editor trying to bring Poodwaddle over to his company and a strange creature following Poodwaddle around--almost looking like something he'd have created in a past work.

I was excited to see something new with McKeever's name on the cover and the issue didn't disappoint--I'm looking forward to issue #2.

"Sure Footing," by Margaret Malone, comes from her collection People Like You (Atelier 26 Books, 2015). The collection itself is excellent from the half of it that I've had the pleasure of reading so far. Malone has a nice way of writing  stories that may not have that big twist or wallop at the end that has a reader slapping their head and saying Oh! out loud. Instead they tend to bring about memories. They have situations that maybe most of her readers will have found themselves in at one time or another and not always the type of situations they'll fondly remember.

"Sure Footing" has a great opening sentence/paragraph:

Love lasts until the man you love leaves because he wants to drive a truck up and down I-5, hauling for a Central Valley feed company in the blazing hot sun and endless brown miles.

So at this point you're thinking break-up story. But it's not really. It's more of a wrong relationship story as the narrator begins to wonder, and really pretty quickly, whether or not she really was in love. The coffee she makes sort of hammers it home as she loves that first sip, yet when he made it the coffee was watery and nowhere near the same. Sunrise lighting is noticed and windows cracked even though it's cold out.

The story however also delves into the ideas of loneliness and the familiar. A couple of seasons into the future, her hair longer, new life patterns developed and he calls, a very short warning as he's at the local gas station. He shows up and:

He's gained weight. His tee-shirt is tight across his middle and his blue jeans are soiled, stains and creases cover his lap. He's starting to grow a beard or hasn't shaved. You can't tell which.

Malone's writing is like this throughout--pretty spare and quick to her points. A couple of bits that I loved:

"His hands fumble at his sides, then he pushes them into his front pockets, then moves them to the back, like the awkward appendages are brand new."

and after realizing that he had washed his hands and nails at the gas station before coming over:

"That single kindness is a crowbar swing at the clamped shut heart you've come to love keeping to yourself."

I don't think I've seen a reference to the clumsiness of what to do with one's hands put so well before.

As noted, the story's ending doesn't punch you in the gut, it doesn't stun you into a big yelp out loud. Instead, like many of Malone's efforts, it will probably make you think of something from your own past, or maybe that of one of your friends or family. And even if it's not a fond memory, the way she got you to think about it was definitely enjoyable. Look for this collection!

Here we are on February 14, Valentine's Day, and there's only been four Work of the Day posts so I'm a tad behind. With nothing to do today beyond mass, watching three Premier League matches, one college women's basketball game and soon an NHL game of the week, I've been able to fit in some reading so maybe I'll get a little closer to a one per day average by the end of the night.

Last week, I became aware of a four year old posting of a poem on Rattle by Matthew Olzmann. The fact that the title, Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem was intriguing would probably have been reason enough to click on the link. The fact that I LOVE Matthew's work was the real reason I bounced over though.

I've now read the poem five to ten times since mid-week and have to say it hits me at the end every time. The poem begins:

Here's what I've got, the reasons why our marriage

might work.

and then a litany of reasons some forth--I won't get the line breaks right, but here are a couple of my favorites:

Because you yell at your keys when you lose them, and laugh, loudly, at your own jokes.

...and write in the margins about all the people you're mad at and my name almost never appears there.

But it's the last one that hammers home the poem, that makes me think, "Awwwww," every time I read the poem, no matter how many times it's been that I've read it that day.

Now I believe that in general titles mean something. And I have to admit to having been thrown by the title the first time I read this poem, looking at these "reasons" as a commercial, trying to imagine them as film, and they weren't fitting in with my own thoughts of Mountain Dew commercials. It actually took me until the end of the poem for it to him me how the title fit, and wow does it. Olzmann does a fantastic job of writing things, in this case reasons, that feel both very specific to him, and this case a relationship, while also yielding a feeling that these reasons would fit in most relationships. It's something I've felt while reading the bulk of his poetry--all of it enjoyed greatly. His full collection, Mezzanines, is available from Alice James Books and elsewhere.

I don't remember which Lee it was that first drew my attention to Ohio State University's creative writing department--K. Abbott, or Martin--but between the two of them, and then reading Michelle Herman's trio of novellas, and learning about Erin McGraw via a reading where I originally went to see Nancy Zafris, which led to Andrew Hudgins' poetry. Then student Kyle Minor led me to read Holly Goddard Jones and well, it has led me to keep an eye out for that OSU when it comes to reading author bios. It also has me making sure I'm paying attention to Lee Martin's FB posts as he's sure to mention any time a current, or recent grad, student publishes anywhere. Earlier he posted about Cade Leebron's poetry reply over at Rattle. I read that and visited her website and clicked through anything that was published online, including her essay, "Instructions on Your Decay." It begins:

Right now: look up. Someday you will feel anger or sadness or envy or something but right now just look up, and think about how big this building is. And how it is a maze of little rooms filled with people like you and their unfortunate families and they are all getting life-altering news and reacting and questioning and then wandering back down here to the lobby to get their parking validated.

And to be honest, I really didn't want to stop my cut/paste here but if I continued on until I wanted to stop, I feel the folks at Midway Journal would have complained heavily. I usually find that non-fiction needs to be one of three things for me to enjoy it--a well done book about something I know I enjoy (some recent sport-related books fit this bill), a single topic book done so well it doesn't matter that it's nothing I would have thought I was interested in before starting (Mark Kurlansky's Cod is still my best example of this--read in one long sitting), or memoir that gives me a reason to be interested--be it the writing, the topic, or best yet (as in this case), a combination of the two.

Cade Leebron's non-fiction currently available online hits that last scenario. Her writing slides more into memoir and while "interesting" seems the wrong word choice when reading about rape and Multiple Sclerosis, but as opposed to some memoirish writing out there where I find myself wondering why is this person writing about their life, there's never a doubt that Leebron is writing about something important--something I might learn something from. And she's a damn good writer. The style of "Instructions on Your Decay"--the second person point-of-view, fits it perfectly.

Pay attention, okay, because this is going to go faster than it should. The home nurse brandishes the syringe and a stress ball, injects the saline into the blue foam, and now it is your turn. Pinch the skin of the ball like it’s your skin and pierce it with the tip of the sharp sharp needle like it’s your skin and push the plunger in and try not to think about how this is not like anything else you have ever done to your skin. And then the home nurse will leave, somehow satisfied she has taught you enough, and you will be alone with your stack of brand-new syringes filled with something clear that is not just saline. Put them in your dorm room mini-fridge.

The whole opening here of this paragraph, the warning of how quick this seems, the instructions, the idea that the nurse could possibly be satisfied that she's taught enough, and then the little drop of "dorm room" to give the reader a sense of the age of the narrator all work perfectly. It's an extremely well constructed essay from beginning to end and having spent the last hour or so reading her work, I'm really happy Cade Leebron published a poem online today so that Lee Martin could point it out.

Litro: Stories Transport You is a site that is new to me. I've read a couple of the works there now and think that maybe a touch more editing could be employed (some spelling issues, or homonym issues, for one thing---and tense changes that shouldn't be there slipping in) but I've liked the works that I've read so far. One of which is Julia LaSalle's "Aerial Acrobatics."

An early line, "He was standing under the “34^th Annual Model Airplane Contest” banner...", brought this reader to life as it let me know that LaSalle was taking meto a place I'd not been before--neither in real life, nor in my readings. The story also brought shipyard welding into play--another aspect of life I've never encountered physically or in my readings.

In both instances, LaSalle got just deep enough into the subject for me to feel like I understood what was going on, but not so much that I felt like I was being lectured on the topic. There's a nice little thread throughout the story about the narrator's heart running alongside her narrative, and I found myself really liking the ending:  "She watched Mustafa work until she trusted him, watched him until she became a spark herself, flying through the air, first rising then falling, and finally sputtering as her spark-self bounced once on the rubber mat by Mustafa’s foot and extinguished." I'll definitely be looking for more of Julia LaSalle's work in the future and remembering to visit Litro as well.

I think it's much easier to talk about poems from this second collection by Vievee Francis, Horses in the Dark (Northwestern University Press, 2012), by talking about the book as a whole. The poems interact with each other, memories mixing with the present, horses running throughout, a girl coming of age. However I think the opening poem in the first section shows some of what she does very well:

AMARILLO

           Texas Panhandle, 1971

Inland, where no seagulls circled,

     no sea, but storms of dust and dust,

heartland: mouthless heart of thistles,

     and waves of sun, and salt, and fish,

shimmering in their cans of oil,

     as every surface boiled to rust.

This opening stanza does a nice job of showing just how well Francis evokes a sense of the place--the Texas Panhandle jumps out at me while reading her lines (and briefly cause laughter as I think of seagulls circling mall or grocery store parking lots when they're not full of cars, nowhere near large bodies of water).

Francis continues with images such as "Scruffs of scarecrows lined the fence posts, // coyotes with their lolling miens, // their smiles now fixed as any man's."  This is an image that pops up more than once in the collection--coyote heads atop fence posts, scarecrow-like to warn live coyotes--stay away.

It's a fantastic entry into her collection, and as good as this poem is, in my opinion it is only enhanced by continuing on and finishing up the poems behind it.

The work this time around is an essay, Would Dying Alone Really Be So Terrible, from Samantha Irby's collection, Meaty (Curbside Splendor, 2013).  Man, 2013--that means I've had this collection for over 2 years now. In that time it has rarely not been somewhere in one of my main reading piles. It's not a collection I'd suggest one sit down with and three or four hours later put it down. It is one however that I highly recommend.

Irby's writing is both funny and a bit angry all rolled together and takes on topics rarely seen in essay, or even fictional, form. From the middle of this particular essay:

I don't know, man. I'm just not big on spending every waking minute with someone you show your privates to. People are boring. I'm fucking boring. My funny runs out, my cute runs out, my smart sometimes hiccups, my sexy wakes up with uncontrollable diarrhea. I have a fucking attitude.

This really is pretty typical of her writing. There's self-deprecation, dark humor, quick wit. Nothing to not like. You can really open this collection up to any page and get a quick paragraph or two that will brighten your day, make you think a bit, and think that you'd like to hang our with Samantha Irby, watch some television maybe, have some snacks. Just be ready to get up at the end of an hour or two as she's not up for the company staying too long.

The Cortland Review brings a new short story, "G.O.D. Live in Concert", from Robert Kerbeck. It's another author I've not had the pleasure of reading before whose first effort I now have is one that I enjoyed. I'll be sure to keep an eye out for future work from him.

Taking his thirteen-year-old son to see G.O.D. hadn't been Tom's idea. His soon-to-be ex had roped him into it. Natalia said she wanted him to stay connected to Peter, despite their acrimonious divorce, complete with dueling restraining orders. A series of texts and two loud phone calls (she hung up on him once) were required to synchronize a neutral pickup spot, and then drop-off and pickup times spread far enough apart to ensure there weren't any violations.

opens the story and it's a nice, straightforward entry--Kerbeck gives the reader what is needed to get into the story. The next paragraph opens:

Tracey had made it too, herding a gaggle of thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls. Her daughter, Daisy, kept inviting more friends to see the boy band, and Tracey kept saying yes. The girls, all four of them, were a welcome distraction of unbundled energy and fresh-smelling hair. They reminded her of the first days of summer, carefree and almost, but not yet, hot. The audience was made up of similar-aged girls accompanied by their mothers. There were only a handful of boys and no men, except for one.

Which brings into play a woman to sit in front of Tom and set up a bit more about the concert itself. What happens from there is Kerbeck allowing the reader into both Tom and Tracey's heads as they notice each other, wonder about each other, consider their own situations while judging the other, range from attempted flirting right on up to actual flirting. Oh yes, there's also a monstrous amount of female rear-end being flashed in Tom's face as Tracey's new skinny jeans don't seem to quite hold up at the hipline.

I thought for about 95% or more of this story that Kerbeck simply nailed things. Great internal thoughts, just enough for the reader to know where things were going and guess how they might end up, etc.

There are great thoughts expressed--Tracey noticing Tom's leathery skin and wondering about his inability to use sunscreen; Tracey's internal complaints about the youth of today's poor manners; Tom's awareness of the young girls interest in his son, but not of Tracey's interest in him.

There were a couple of times I thought he added a bit more than was necessary--"(and into bed)" for instance--sort of nudging the reader after they've laughed and asking if they know what he's saying? But again, that happened maybe one or two times and it's something that I'm probably an overly picky reader for. I much prefer to concentrate on the rest of the story where again, I think Kerbeck really hit strong. I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for more of his work.

The Masters Review, a Platform for Emerging Writers. Seems like something the Emerging Writers Network should have known about prior to January 22, 2016 doesn't it? Well, we didn't. Stumbled upon it when either Jeff or Ann VanderMeer linked to this:

FALL FICTION WINNER! We’re so pleased to introduce “Animalizing” by Marisela Navarro, the third place winner in our Fall Fiction Contest judged by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. In “Animalizing,” our narrator starts walking a friend’s dog and suspects it sees something dark inside her. As she works with the sea urchins in her lab and develops a bond with the dog, she begins to think differently about the creatures in her care. A sea urchin embryo is a beautiful sight….

I clicked on the link and read the story. And then I cut and pasted it to a Word doc so I could print it out and read it again later on Friday night. And again yesterday. And once more this morning. I am still not completely sure what the freak is going on but I really like the writing, some of the offbeat lines that seem to come out of nowhere but fit very well. Interesting observations.

"Our friendship was very much like coming upon a puddle."

Describing a park area that was closed off once you were inside: "There was a sense someone could emerge from anywhere within the 360 degree angle, that they were on their way, and there was nothing you could do about it."

Describing the process to collect sea urchin embryos: "...by spinning the seawater in a centrifuge we cranked by hand. This was always the most fun part of the process. To me it seemed like I was taking these babies on a carnival ride."

"It is foolish to assume a certain thing could never happen."

There's also an interesting bit that describes how we sometimes converse with each other--the narrator telling a story that begins with a dog ringing his doorbell and going from the point he opens the door to the dog on the porch and beyond. At the end he asks his friend if he really believed that a dog had rung his doorbell and he replied that he didn't, but just assumed somebody else had left the dog there and rang the doorbell. How often do we gloss over a crazy detail so that the rest of a story we're being told makes some sense? We rationalize out the offbeat detail in order to be able to accept the rest that seemed believable, even though that original detail would, in or mind, make none of the story even possible in the first place. Could this be what Navarro is really trying to get across and throwing out some of those crazy, offbeat, details throughout just to prove her point? It's a story that is well worth your time to read.

It probably won't be frequent around here that I'll post up things entirely done by guests, but I'm a big Lori Ostlund fan, a fan of Black Lawrence Press, and when Caitlin Hamilton, my absolute favorite publicist of all-time (there are many others I love but she was the FIRST to believe the EWN was worthy of galleys and introductions to her authors), asks me if I'd be interested in an interview---and I enjoy it as much as I did this one---they just might pop up here:

Genanne Walsh is the author of the debut novel Twister (December 2015), which won the Big Moose Prize for the Novel, awarded by Black Lawrence Press. Twister is set in a small Midwestern town during the height of the Iraq war, and at its core is the grief being experienced by Rose, who is figuring out how to hold onto her farm in the wake of her son’s death in the war. However, in the way of most small towns, no event, certainly not grief, happens in a vacuum, and as the novel unfolds, we are introduced to other members of the community who, in some way, have their own stake in this loss.

Particularly impressive is Genanne’s structure. The novel is divided into three parts: the pre-twister hours, in which we are introduced to the perspective of each character in this small town during the lead up to the twister; the past, in which we learn the back stories about the tensions among them; and the post-twister ending, in which we see both the devastation of the twister and the potential for reconnection.
I met Genanne in 2008 through a mutual friend. Over the course of seven years, I have learned a great deal about how she views the world, about her sense of humor, her intelligence and compassion. While we are both writers, we don’t discuss writing much, so it was a pleasure for me to sit down with Twister and learn about Genanne as a writer, and an even greater pleasure to have the opportunity to ask her questions about Twister and how it came to be.

***

LO: We’ve known each other for several years, and though we talk about writing on occasion, we don’t talk much about process, so I recall being both surprised and intrigued not long ago when you told me that you never draw upon your own life in writing fiction. As someone who draws heavily on my past and present, I would like to begin at the beginning: how did Twister come about?

GW: Well, perhaps I should backpedal that declarative. I don’t tend to write autobiographical fiction that draws a lot of facts from my life. Though I do think fiction comes from a personal place and worries over personal obsessions—so in that respect it’s from my life. Twister started with an image: a woman haphazardly pruning roses in her yard. The voice that came through her head felt very alive to me, very compelling, but also chaotic and troubled. Rose, the central character, was in distress; there was something elemental that she couldn't face.

Rose first appeared on the page in 2002, during the excruciating build up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Looking back, it was a way to grapple with what was happening, and with what was to come. I knew very early in drafting those first pages that her son, Lance, had died in the war. And I think there was something important about her being at the midpoint, the heart of the continent.

People who prefer fact-based fiction might find this suspicious, but Rose just appeared in her yard, in twister country—my mythic version of twister country. Though the book’s setting isn’t “real,” and I’ve never lived in the Midwest myself, I lived there in a sense while I was writing it.

LO: Let’s talk a bit more about setting. As a Midwesterner, I know a good bit about the way that Midwesterners talk and think, and I was struck repeatedly by the way that you captured emotional restraint in your dialogue. For me, much of the tension in the book came from knowing a character’s story or feelings, and then watching the careful restraint with which the character spoke to others, how much got left out. It felt incredibly accurate to me. Can you talk about how you developed such a feel for Midwestern communication? Are there books or films that influenced you?

GW: I’m happy to hear that you think that! I didn’t study how Midwesterners talk and think, though I love the idea of going at it almost anthropologically. For me, that restraint—communication and its misfires and limitations and repressions—came out of the characters and their situation. As I wrote Twister, it became in some ways an exploration of how big events can be both galvanizing to a community, bringing people together, and also extremely isolating.

It comes out of point of view, really. Subjectivity—which I find so mystifying and maddening. The fact that two people can experience the same event and have vastly different interpretations; or know the same person and have wildly dissimilar impressions and feelings about that person. We are stuck in our own singular heads, like it or lump it—the fact that we can live together and build community at all sometimes feels miraculous to me. And needless to say, I don’t think this condition is just a Midwestern thing.

I’m not sure if I have Midwest influences per se, but I think everyone should read William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow (a perfect novel, to my mind) and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson are writers who will, I hope, be studied and read forever.

LO: Given what you say above, about the way that big events both galvanize a community and isolate the members of it, I understand even better your three-part structure: the before and after of the twister, with the backstory of these characters and their community sandwiched in the middle. Can you talk a little more about the structure: did you know all along that you wanted to structure it in three parts, or did the structure reveal itself later?

GW: That structure was thrilling to me, when I found it. Because it gave the baggy thing I had constructed a shape, even a purpose. It definitely didn’t arrive at the outset. The opening Rose chapter was a stand-alone story for a long time. I just loved her voice and wasn’t ready to let her go, so I kept turning back to her world and the people around her. I wanted to understand more about Rose and the nature of her loss—was this elemental crisis she was facing her own doing, or was she a helpless cog in the machine? Would she come through it? What could other people reveal about the things she couldn’t face or didn’t see?

When I started to write sections from other points of view, they roamed all over the map in terms of time and space. I had the Sylvie chapter (Lance’s high school sweetheart) in first person; and where and when the characters were in relation to the storm and to Rose varied widely from one voice to another. All very engaging to me personally, but also a complete mess.

I was in a writing group at the time and in that group was a man who didn’t like my work very much. As writers, I think it’s important to seek out readers who get us—who have simpatico styles and sensibilities, or who understand what we are trying to do on a gut level. But it’s also not a bad idea to find a few people who may not be swept away by your prose stylings or your take on the world. There is a real limit to how much they’ll be able to help you. I mean, seek out critics in moderation, protect your creative spirit and don’t be a masochist—but don’t entirely shy away from contrarians. This fellow leaned over one night after we’d discussed my pages and said, “What’s the point here, other than pretty sentences?”

That stung, of course. You can unpack plenty of sexist condescension in the “pretty” adjective alone—and believe me, I did. But at times this sort of jab can be creatively useful. After running through a color wheel of emotions, I decided I could use his question, at least part of it; it was a question that needed posing. A question that maybe even the work itself was posing: what was the point? What was the story trying to be?

Not long after that I was sitting at my desk one morning and the three-part structure came to me. The gathering and build-up; the storm’s eye that can see things beyond the limits of each individual character and move back and forth in time; and the aftermath, when they pick up whatever pieces are left and move on. A structure that was shaped like a storm, in a sense. A storm that came out of Rose’s perspective but could hold the other perspectives as well.

Though the book did not come quickly or easily after that by any means, the structure gave me a way to work into the action and questions. I don’t think the contrarian’s question to me was the catalyst for finding the structure, exactly, but it galvanized the process. It moved me further down the road. To be clear, it moved me toward what I knew the work was trying to be—it didn’t change the way I write sentences.

LO: I’d like to go back to what you said about seeking out critics. I know that you did an MFA at Warren Wilson. Can you talk about this experience a little bit, maybe starting with your main reasons for wanting to do an MFA and whether you came away from the experience with different ideas about the value of doing an MFA.

GW: I’ve read a little bit about the debates, to MFA or not. I think good writers can learn anywhere, mostly from reading, and a writing program definitely isn’t a guarantee of anything. It’s a problem of access for some people, too. Even with fellowships and scholarships, it’s an investment. Not everyone feels comfortable in school. But for me, I wanted to start to take myself seriously as a writer, and that was the way I chose to do it. I'd wanted to write for more years than I’d actually written—and getting an MFA was a way to make it real to myself, to commit to myself as an artist.

Some of my most necessary readers—people I trust to understand what I’m trying to do and tell me constructively what they think is and isn’t working in a draft—are people I know because of Warren Wilson. You can meet great readers and comrades outside of academia—absolutely!—but you really need to expose yourself to communities of writers so you can find them. And then never let them go.

LO: So where do you go from here? Are you already working on the next project? Can you also discuss the biggest lesson that you (writer Genanne or human being Genanne) learned from Twister that you will take with you into the next project.

GW: I’m working on a project that I think will probably be a novel. I am a superstitious person and believe you can talk the mystery away, so I generally don’t chat about what I’m working on. Have you noticed that writers fall into two distinct camps? Tight-lipped people like me, and the people who are happy to share lots of details about a work-in-progress. There’s no correct approach. I think it’s like being right- or left-handed.

That said, I’ll say that it’s set in San Francisco. I’ve lived here longer than I’ve lived anywhere, more than half of my life. But this is a first. Writing about the city in depth has always felt sort of like writing about a lover; I experience it too intimately to see it quite clearly. But there are issues in San Francisco now that I find fascinating and worrisome and they’ve worked their way in. Boom and bust cycles, issues of transience, income stratification, and the ways city dwellers coexist—with each other and with the natural world—in evolving and sometimes fractious ways.

What lesson have I learned? Some days I have no idea. Other days, I think it must be related to my process. That I really have to write toward understanding who a character is or what a story wants to be. I am never going to be one of those people who outlines or works it all out in my head in advance. Lots of smart people have said that you must learn how to write the next book as you write it—the last one won’t help you. Gnashing my teeth, I concur.

LO: You have the best dogs. How did this come about? Are they aware that you are a writer?

GW: They ARE the best! I have no sense of moderation when it comes to dogs. I just love them. Walking with them is my favorite part of the day. [My wife] Lauren and I have a theory that if you live your life to make your dog happy, you will have a really good life—lots of nature walks and trips to the beach, you get to know your neighbors at the dog park, and many lessons in living in the moment.

Bugsy, our 12-year-old charmer, was at my side for 99.9% of the writing of Twister. So he doesn’t merely know I’m a writer, he is my Muse. A few friends joked (or maybe they were serious?) that they were surprised the book isn’t dedicated to him.

As you know, we’ve recently adopted a new dog named Maggie. She has a traumatic history and some quirky phobias, but she’s coming along really well and is so clearly trying to live in harmony with us, her new pack. We’re taking Maggie to a basic training class at the SPCA. It had been years since we had a new pup and we wanted to brush up on communication techniques. The teacher has a great attitude about progress. Think about it: you’re trying to convey what you want to another species. Dogs study us so closely, but we are still alien brains making weird, confounding demands like “stay” and “leave it.” Why in the world would they want to do that?

So the SPCA approach is: patience. If you are working on “down,” for example, and she just isn’t getting it, don’t say “No!” or even “unh-unh.” Keep your voice and physical cues very relaxed and say, “Try again.” Then you try again. And maybe you need to take a break and go back tomorrow because today just isn’t the day she’ll get it. Frustration and impatience will never bring you closer to your goal. Even when she gets it, it’s never a given or a static thing. You’re never done—you have to keep trying, keep practicing. That’s what I want to keep in mind, in living with dogs and in writing.

Sarah Layden's story, "13 Things Your Mail Carrier Won't Tell You" appeared today in Booth. It's laid out exactly as the title suggests--13 numbered things from one's mail carrier. And while the 13 items may appear to be random, I believe they tell a story--the story of the mail carrier. The first section is:

It’s not about the dogs, but control. That you should learn to tame the untamed. That to let your pit bull ride shotgun is one step removed from handing over the keys. Barking, fine. That can be controlled. As can you.

Of course, I thought, a mail carrier would certainly be commenting upon dogs right off the bat. And that end, "As can you," seemed almost ominous.

It's followed by suggestions to invite the mail carrier into your home, but then a warning that the one time the carrier has been invited still cannot be spoken of even 20 years later. There's commentary on junk mail, and what goes on inside our homes, and tattoos, and the lack of books being delivered compared to days past (obviously not my mail carrier sharing these 13 things).

Again, I think Layden has actually done an interesting job listing these ideas out as separate "things" but doing so in a way that has created a fully realized person in the mail carrier. We know the thoughts rolling around in their head, what they think about our houses, our landscapes, our animals, their boots, their thoughts on the lonely, and more. A very well done story.

Starting off 50 with a nice quiet very early a.m. reading of a short story by Darrin Doyle, an author whose work I've enjoyed before. Passages North has published The Lumping as an extra story and their own Jason Teal notes "Darrin Doyle’s “The Lumping” is a cautionary allegory that thrillingly brandishes the first-person plural to dramatize a public assembly" and that is a great short description.

"The Lumping" begins:

By lumping, he said, we will become. Not by lumping on occasion, only when it is convenient, but with discipline and devotion, passionate at all times, with disregard for lesser obligations (clearly implying that every earthly obligation fell into this category). If everyone lumped three times a day, he stammered and sweated, ours would be a world of transcendence and joy. To lump is to live; to live, lump.

What is lumping the reader wonders, and that is where part of Doyle's genius with this work shines through--it's never really determined (or I'm just one lousy reader--thoroughly possible). It seemingly can be whatever the reader opts to believe.

Doyle's usage of that first-person plural--that public assembly--creates a form of authority to what is being stated from the stage before them as the communal belief they develop help push forward the idea in the reader's mind that what is being said is accurate.

Perhaps, we thought, this was the true meaning of lumping: to finally lay bare our most private selves, to unite through the world of the hidden, the inner place where heretofore none could live but the architects themselves. A playground where lumps could frolic: no names, no identities, no bodily trappings.

It's an interesting technique and one that seems very fitted to a short story of this length.

New work by Elizabeth Ellen? Yes, please. Somebody was kind enough to post a link to her new story, "Straight," at The Fanzine earlier today and I couldn't click on that link fast enough. Ellen's never been shy of writing stories that some would consider edgy. This one starts:

After that I go straight. Or after that I make an attempt at going straight. I try to take photographs of other things. I take photographs of myself. I try to figure out ways of making myself appear interesting as a solo act. I don’t incorporate Adam into my art. There is still Eli, occasionally Eli’s female friends, Coco and Alondra, but the boys are gone. All the boys are now gone, sent out to various ‘alternative’ high schools and juvenile detention centers in the Midwest and, in Saul’s case, a boarding school somewhere on the east coast. I study Darius’s face in the photographs from a year, two years ago. I remember how it could go hard or soft, the carved scars on his cheek, self-inflicted scars on his arms, how he lay his head on my arm in the movie theater, cuddled up to Eli on the couch in the basement. “Damn right I was scared,” he used to say. It was the ending to a story he told about when he was a young boy, hiding behind his father’s legs in the presence of strangers. His father, he said, had been shot four times. But he wasn’t dead; he had survived. Darius and Eli tried to set us up once, before Adam came back. I found Darius’s father good looking, affable, strong, but I couldn’t imagine not looking over my shoulder in his presence. I couldn’t imagine not feeling as though Darius were always watching, listening through walls.

I think there's enough in the opening paragraph to let the reader know to expect the story to head toward the edge, but doesn't jump right into it or hit the reader over the head. Later on some of the implications above are elaborated upon--at times even very bluntly in a way that a critic might suggest that lines (which I don't wish to type as they'd be spoilers) this direct are unnecessary--that Ellen has already given the reader enough information. However, I believe they perfectly fit the narrator and how she would be telling the story. Everything about her has me believing she'd take her time opening up but once she did she'd be as direct as Ellen writes her.

It's not the most comfortable person or story to read--but comfort is hardly what I expect or look for when I see Elizabeth Ellen's name at the top of a page.

I'm a big fan of stories that move forward in small sections--Ander Monson's Big 32 comes to mind as an old example many reading this post will have read. Electric Lit has recently published a story that immediately reminded me of how much I enjoy these types, Jeb Bush is Sinking by Jeff VanderMeer.

Each section of VanderMeer's story begins with "Jeb at..." and a percentage, beginning at 6% and dropping all the way down to -6%. It begins:

Jeb at 6% feels as if he is walking inside an old-time diving suit, but kicks up sand across the bottom of the sea. Knows he is fated to rise like mercury, expelled into the sky through the emulsion of his own silver birthing.

I believe my favorite section is:

Jeb below 3% begins to haunt himself, walks ethereal through a wall. He cannot tell what he’s done/not done. Stops in the middle of tasks believing he has completed them.

VanderMeer keeps things interesting by changing styles from section to section--"Jeb at 4%" begins with a long list of things Jeb is, while "Jeb at -1%" is full of violence. Utilizing a real person in a real situation could lead to all sorts of difficulties--trying too hard to really nail the individual's personality and character; trying to hard to predict specifics; or missing the mark to a point where readers wonder exactly why you used that particular name/situation. I think VanderMeer hits everything just right in this short story. Bits of Jeb appear, bits of George W., some seeming absurdities (or are they?), and a lot of fantastic images. Follow that link above for a great read.

One of my favorite publishers, The Cupboard, recently released The Coupon Thief by Lily Hoang. If I understand the project correctly, she took donations from forty different authors and created micro-fictions around these donations. The donations, again, if I understand, were sentences, or sentence fragments--something that would spur Hoang to an idea that would lead to a complete micro-fiction. The works are not considered collaborations, though she does attribute the donations to the author in question for each piece.

It makes for a fairly quick and interesting read--seeing how different donations might have led Hoang into different modes of storytelling--from quick one or two line pieces that almost seem to be there to create an image for the reader, or to highlight a verbal twist, on up to what seem long (though they still are about a paragraph in length) that develop a little more.

In wanting to include an example, but not wanting to put Hoang's entire story on my site, I looked for the sentence that drew my attention to it each time I read this work (I read the full collection a few times yesterday--just got caught up in basketball and football and let the Work of the Day slide to the next day-sorry).

In the sizzling daylight, we quarry out dirt and sand, travelling lower into the crust, down towards all that magma, and when we see that resplendent devil, we say, It's getting hot.

It's a sentence that propels the story a bit as prior to this there was more talk of parents, along with the devil, and from here forward the story just focuses on the devil. It's the segue sentence to push Hoang's work toward its conclusion. It's the type of sentence, winding all over the place, that really only works in this type, a longer paragraph, of micro-fiction, as opposed to some of the 1-3 sentence pieces in this collection.

It's an interesting story, and collection, and I think Hoang has done a fantastic job of incorporating whatever was donated to her into works of her own that are so fully her own that if one were to try to guess the donation over and over throughout the collection, any that they got right would simply be guesses.