[REVIEW] Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet, edited by Clifford Garstang

234 pages, $19.95

Review by Denton Loving

“You just don’t know who your enemies are. And your enemies are so often your friends, Molly. It will always be like this, I fear,” says Lana, the narrator of Alden Jones’ “Heathens,” one of twenty stories collected from twenty different authors from around the world and edited by Clifford Garstang in Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet.

Lana is an American teaching in a village in Costa Rica. She is well loved by her students and the community, but in the story, she is caught up in teaching a lesson of a darker kind to Molly, a teenaged innocent visiting Costa Rica as part of a group of fly-by Evangelical missionaries.

Lana discovers that the world is dangerous, which is also Garstang’s first thought in his introduction to the collection. These diverse stories range from every continent, from toothless bikers in New Zealand to young women approaching adulthood in the Congo, from a boar attack in a German park to a suicide bomb in Israel. If these stories share a single theme, it is of this danger that permeates our human existence, regardless of our geographic location.

Though I wouldn’t describe it as thematic, the other commonality between these stories is that they are written by writers deeply engaged with the places they write about. From a pool of 650 submissions, Garstang has curated twenty stories that shatter the surface of storytelling. Jocelyn Cullity (“Visiting Chairman Mao”) taught in China in the 1990’s. Jeff Fearnside (“A Husband and Wife are One Satan”) lived and worked in Central Asia for four years, part of the time as a Peace Corps volunteer. Teresa Hudson (“The Art of Living”), like the characters in her story, worked at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. These are authors who are profoundly connected to the countries in which these stories are set. These writers care for the people who live in these places.

Perhaps my favorite story from the collection is Richard A. Ballou’s “A Difficult Thing, a Beautiful Comfort.” In this story, a young man named Marion disappears while living in Buenos Aries. Ballou describes Marion this way:

There was something about Marion that people naturally liked. But not the kind of affection that led to friendships. It was hard to get to know him, and he was not particularly outgoing. In fact, almost painfully private. But he was such an honest and genuine young man. And there was an aura of tenuous hope about him.

It’s clear from the beginning of this story that Marion will not be found. But Ballou isn’t writing a story about Marion’s search and rescue. Rather, this story is an exploration of the world in which Marion’s absence becomes greater than his presence, and in its unique way, Ballou is exploring the losses we all feel in this perilous world.

“There was an aura of tenuous hope about him.” This same tenuous hope defines so many of the characters in Everywhere Stories, maybe because “tenuous hope” is simply elemental to the human condition.

Clifford Garstang is the author of What the Zhang Boys Know, winner of the 2013 Library of Virginia Literary Award for Fiction, and the prize-winning linked story collection In an Uncharted Country. His work has appeared in numerous literary magazines, and he is the co-founder and editor of Prime Number Magazine. A second edition of Everywhere Stories is in the works with a projected publication date of October 2016. With Garstang at the editor’s seat, we know it will be a collection worth exploring.

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Denton Loving is the author of the poetry collection, Crimes Against Birds (Main Street Rag, 2014), and editor of Seeking Its Own Level, an anthology of writings about water (MotesBooks, 2014). He serves as editor of drafthorse literary journal. Follow him on twitter @DentonLoving.