What Doesn't Kill You: An Anthology (A Review By Gale Martin)

Press 53

$17.95

Editors: Murray Dunlap & Kevin Morgan Watson

When the premise of an anthology is compelling, reader expectations are high. Upon receiving a review copy of collected stories and narrative non-fiction called What Doesn’t Kill You published by Press 53, I plowed into it. Who wouldn’t want to read tales about inner demons, stereotypes, loss, and psychotic neighbors that foiled and nearly felled other human beings? As the editors remind us in poet Terri Kirby Erickson’s quote prefacing the book, “It isn’t every day we pass a scene like this.”

On top of themes such as suffering, despair, and life-lessons-hard-learned augured in the title, the reader then learns in the introduction that it was a real-life event in writer/editor Murray Dunlap’s life that inspired the collection. He was a marathon runner before someone running a red light pushed him into the path of an SUV and put him in a wheelchair for the rest of life, which Dunlap mentions in the introduction and revisits in a stirring prose poem “Times I Nearly Died,” appearing midway in the book.

Before the first word of the first story is read, an evocative title and moving back story about the anthology’s origins are introduced. How fortunate that most of the stories selected for the collection turned out to be great reads.

In his comments, Press 53’s founding editor Kevin Morgan Watson explains that they received more than 2,000 entries, all of which were gamely read by Dunlap. In paring roughly 60 stories down to the final 10, Watson and Dunlap selected pieces that would give the reader a thematic mix.  Besides the decided skill of the writers showcased, it was their attention to “mix” that made this anthology particularly strong. To my mind, there’s nothing more disappointing than an anthology in which every story reads like every other story, which all mirror the editor’s favorite kind of story. Credit both a dual editorship and solid if not daring literary taste for including darkly funny and painfully whimsical pieces as well as others underscored by ironically affirming and mindlessly tragic acts. That is, in addition to a range of prose styles—from enigmatic to folksy to confessional. These are stories with heart and heat, with guts and grit that are neither effete (the kind that leaves you feeling either slimy or dyspeptic or scratching your head after you’ve read them) nor overly sentimental.

Of the invited contributors—authors Jane Bradley, Laura Dave, Michael Knight, George Singleton, and Curtis Smith—Bradley’s, Dave’s, and Singleton’s storytelling particularly resonated with me. In real life, we so rarely experience happy endings, more likely emotional ambivalence or heart hurts we are forced to stuff for the rest of our lives. Or very occasionally, shockingly violent conclusions, though I won’t be a plot spoiler and tell you whose story I’m referring to.

George Singleton’s short story “All Those Little Prongs” is a gem. It centers on Hubert Foy, a lowly everyman/insurance bilker whose ex-wife is a little money grubbing and a lot indifferent. Hubert’s college age daughter is a lesbian opportunist studying forestry with one redeeming quality—she has a refined eco-conscience. The fact that the daughter’s studies have made her an expert in flora become critically important to Hubert’s personal fortunes after he finds the likeness of the Virgin Mary’s face in the middle of his aloe plant. Perhaps Singleton was raised in the church, because in this tale no one whose behaviors bend the standard-issue Judeo-Christian code of morality goes unpunished.

As a writer, I admired the literary craft in Michael Knight’s story “Ellen’s Tale,” which deftly interweaves past and present using a device that recounted how the same scene would appear in a book about his estranged wife’s abandoning him while reminding us that sometimes people we love don’t or can’t ever care about how much they’ve hurt us no matter how much we want them to.

Julie Gard’s “Thin Bits of Evidence” is also ingeniously crafted. It lists an assortment of objects from a thrift shop—a Smiling Squirrel Pin for 40¢, JC Penney Button Covers also for 40¢, a Wooden Smokey the Bear Ruler for 10¢–and then ties them to the story of  how their deranged neighbor tried to burn their house down in the summer of 2006.

“Island” by Rhett Iseman Trull is a brave recounting, expertly told, of her real-life descent into madness as an English major at Duke University and how she clawed her way back from a psychotic break to a somewhat normal life beginning with immersion studies on an island dedicated to marine research.  Trull devolved into a pathological liar just before her nervous breakdown, which cost her many friendships. in addition to her own will to survive, her parents’ steadfast love was also critical to Trull’s eventual recovery.

With a title like What Doesn’t Kill You, I expected to read stories about losing the family home or enduring a personal, hard-fought brush with insanity. For some reason, I didn’t expect (at least) two pieces to muffle serious emotional wounds in favor of embracing irony. Two of these stories, “Looking at Animals” by Josh Goldfaden and “Between the Teeth” by David James Poissant turned out to be my favorites.

“Looking at Animals” thrusts the reader into the solitary life of Raymond, a retired photographer for National Geographic, who learned how to become invisible in order to do his job shooting wild animals. Raymond has never cultivated the interpersonal skills to reach out to other people directly but sneaks into their yards and homes to observe them instead. Then using the stealth he acquired for his profession, he does odd jobs to improve their quality of life—fixing things for them—when they can’t observe him. Ironically, while the retired photographer is casing his neighbors, the neighbor boy is observing him, though the boy makes a clumsy voyeur and has a lot to learn before he himself can become invisible. Why is the boy stalking him? Because he believes that Raymond needs some personal fixing.

“Between the Teeth” is a darkly funny story told from the point of view of a man who marries not merely a woman but a woman and her beagle. It’s almost as if the beagle is prescient, remaining her dog throughout their sham of a marriage, because the beagle treats the man like an interloper in his own home. Ironically, that is exactly how his faithless wife comes to regard him, too. In a mostly subconscious act of passive-aggression, the man runs over the beagle while backing his Jeep out of the driveway, crushing the beagle’s chest until his ribs are the consistency of finely smashed potato chips. If you are inclined to think a hateful beagle tottering on the brink of death can only surrender at this point, then you must read  “Between the Teeth.” It’s worth the price of the anthology alone.

Press 53 has described themselves as publishers of quality short story collections. While I found the quality in this anthology occasionally uneven, if you enjoy prose—fiction and creative non-fiction, there are more than a half-dozen stellar pieces in What Doesn’t Kill You that might make you a better writer and perhaps a stronger person for having read them.

~Gale Martin has published fiction and essays in The Christian Science Monitor, Sirens Magazine, Duck & Herring Company’s Pocket Field Guide, and The Giggle Water Review and in several anthologies. She has a master’s degree in creative writing from Wilkes University and lives in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.~