[REVIEW] Writing that Risks, Liana Holmberg & Deborah Steinberg, Eds.

Red Bridge Press
$7.99 (Kindle)/$15.00 (paperback), 214 pages

Reinvigorating the Anthology:
Liana Holmberg’s and Deborah Steinberg’s Writing that Risks

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

Most of the time, I find anthologies, especially anthologies of recent work, to be distasteful. Reading them is often an exercise in boredom. There are a few instances that buck this tendency and really produce something worth reading. Lara Glenum’s and Arielle Greenberg’s Gurlesque at the time of its release is one such example. I happen to believe that Liana Holmberg’s and Deborah Steinberg’s 2013 anthology Writing that Risks: New Work from Beyond the Mainstream (Red Bridge Press) is another. I had a wonderful time reading this anthology of unusual stories, poems, and occasional forays into essays and memoir. In the introduction, Holmberg and Steinberg introduce their audience to these pieces:

We put out a broad call for “writing that risks”… [and] received almost five hundred submissions by brand-new to well-established authors. Their work ranged from surreal to experimental and fabulist to slipstream, with some that fit no category. Many of the authors told us these pieces were the closest to their hearts but the hardest to get mainstream publishers to take a chance on.

In fact, one of the best things about this collection is how the riskiness, or strangeness, is so often the driving factor. That these writings were rejected by mainstream publishers speaks more for mainstream publishing losing its nerve than it does for the various pieces, which, most of the time, are fabulous.

One of my favorite stories is Patrick Cole’s “It Happened to Paul Sescau.” It begins with a 30-something man named Paul Sescau panicking over an unnamed event in a bookstore bathroom. While reading the requisite flashbacks that follow, one gets a sense that Paul is going through something like a midlife crisis or call to wisdom concerning the ways in which his life is meaningless (the character’s periodic interaction with Tibetan Buddhist monks leads us in that direction). And while this is, at some level, the deeper intention of the narrative, it is also about something completely unexpected. Halfway through the story, after several nods to Paul Sescau’s head cold and incurable nostril stuffiness, he ends up back in the bookstore looking in the bathroom mirror only to realize that an enormous “worm-snake” is hanging out of his nose. These things are all related, and what ensues as Paul tries to reenter his life while waiting for “that snake to go back inside” or “[come] all the way out” is incredibly, incredibly funny. It’s deftly written as well, and a narrative turn that could end really badly instead becomes a surprisingly successful narrative win. A great example of this is where Paul calls up his boss and asks for a leave of absence:

“I’ve got a worm,” Paul said, unwilling to play games. “A huge black worm coming out of my nose.”

The boss was silent for a long moment. “Worm leave,” he said at last, considering it. “What you’re asking for is worm leave. Of course that’s covered in the employee handbook. You certainly can take time for that. Worm leave is indefinite. So you just relax there, and, well, I wish you luck with that.”

Paul thanked him.

“Let us know how it comes out,” the boss said.

Another memorable piece is the story “We ? Shapes” by Jenny Bitner. Similarly, it starts with a seemingly “everyday” occurrence. A mother is watching her 5-year-old son, Marcus, playact he is an animal in the mirror. What follows is the improbable declaration that he is actually a shape-shifter followed by examples of the incredible anxiety and panic she and her husband experience raising a shape-shifter child. The whole story seems a commentary on contemporary obsessive parenting, and the examples read like a litany of parenting disasters: the time Marcus becomes a scorpion and is locked in the closet by his kindergarten teacher; the time he becomes an ant on a crowded sidewalk; the time he and other shape-shifter children, which he met in their support group “We ? Shapes,” have a “spontaneous unconscious mob shift” into moths at an outdoor party. After they become moths, the ensuing anxiety and terror is hilariously and intelligently written:

I couldn’t be sure that we had Marcus. There had been 10 children with us that day, and now we had 12 moths and a butterfly (just to be sure) in the jar, but what if we had missed one of the children and got a real moth by mistake? The child could be stepped on, caught in a tree, fly into a fire. And then there was the fact that the children could never turn back into children in a glass jar. We rushed to one of the parent’s houses nearby and let all of the moths free in a room with the windows and doors shut.

One of the mothers didn’t want to leave the park. She was sure that we had not caught her son.

There are also many very funny, very clever poems in the collection. Steve Castro’s “Two Full Moons and One Empty Moon Ago” is a hilarious recollection of a random and disconnected dream. It starts out with the narrator knowing the wrong dialect of Chinese in China, moves towards getting Dali’s autograph, and ends with a passive-aggressive communication battle with a sort of doppelganger. Castro writes:

I searched his pockets and found a stamped
Envelope—I took out a pen and paper then I wrote a

Menacing letter to my psyche: “Wake me the fuck up or else.”
I sealed the stamped envelope & addressed it to myself.
Within minutes a loud noise in the form of a

Telephone ringing awoke me—It was my other self.
“I received a really strange letter, we need to talk.[“]

Another poem that stands out to me is Thia Li Colvin’s “Tennessee.” The two line poem about the absurdity of dysfunctional relationships simply reads: “My father was a pretty big guy, but now I got him in a jar in my closet. / He ain’t so big now.” It reminds me of the brusque simplicity of e. e. cummings’ “buffalo bill.”

Christina Olson’s “Dear Monday” also deals with the randomness, though controlled, of certain landscapes. It’s a found poem “composed of lines from emails” within a four year period. It runs the gamut from divorce to shoe shopping to the bible to scooping dog poop. The first stanza reads:

Dear Monday, we are getting divorced. I hope
this Halloween nobody tells you how big
your boobs are, and I hope you get really loaded
and say the word fuck to a bunch of trick or treaters.
In the hallway, I passed some kid complaining
about his roommate not doing the dishes and he said
I was like, I have to do both the wash
AND the dry? What am I, a fucking single mom?

This anthology has many other pieces that deserve mention but for which I don’t have the space to do them justice. One is “What Death Tells Us” but Soren Gauger—a Poe-like story originally written in Polish and translated by the author into English—about a retired veterinarian who seals his fate when he decides to take interest in the severed head his neighbor is burying at the edge of their property. Another is “The Myth of the Mother and Child” by Michelle S. Lee, a multi-part poem that recreates the myths of motherhood and occasionally reminds me of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Screenwriter John Newman’s “Love in Vain,” a classically structured love triangle redolent of the best of Southern literature, is also highly impressive. This is a testament to the incredibly competent editorial choices of Holmberg and Steinberg as well as the general competence, if not brilliance, of these authors’ works.

When reading anthologies, one can often get a kind of exhaustion that comes from reading many pieces that are too similar too close together. This anthology has such an eclectic range of styles, themes, and genres that I never became tired or exhausted with what I was reading. The weirdness is never bothersome while reading this collection. If anything, it is the strange choices that really make the pieces so incredible to read. From aliens who visit someone at the end of their European vacation, to a man who has a mid-life snake come out of his nose, this anthology is a text that should and will be around for years to come.

***
Hannah Rodabaugh received her MA from Miami University and her MFA from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Defenestration, Used Furniture Review, Palimpsest, Similar:Peaks::, Horse Less Press Review, and Nerve Lantern. Her chapbook, With Words: Verse in Concordance, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press in 2014.