fiction

[REVIEW] Headlong by Ron MacLean

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(Mastodon Publishing, 2019)

REVIEW BY WENDY J. FOX

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Well into Ron MacLean’s Headlong—originally published in 2013, and reissued this year by Mastodon Publishing—Nick Young, needing something to help him channel his anger and worry, does what he says he used to do in the old days to get through it: he writes.

Nick is a washed-up journalist who has returned to his hometown to help his father after a stroke, and it is with a journalist’s nose for uncovering a story that MacLean develops this novel over a hot Boston summer. Middle-aged and divorced, it’s clear Nick would probably not have left his life in LA (despite there not being much to leave) if he thought he had any choice in the matter. He’s unemployed bordering on unemployable, and not a single women enters his orbit without her appearance being commented on. He’s grossly fond of the word “sexy.”

Yet, MacLean’s steady hand manages to balance the floundering, can’t get out of his own way, occasionally lecherous Nick with an important story about activism, friendship, and family.

The novel follows the thread of a labor dispute that ignites into violent protest, pitting radicalized youth against corporate scions, and ups the already high stakes of what it truly can mean for families when workers are striking by weaving in the unsolved murder of two union janitors, a complicated friendship with a close friend’s son, and a police department who protects their own.

Against this backdrop, Nick is coming to terms with what it means to him to be a journalist again, and while he fights it, his muckracker instincts will not allow him to let go of any lead, and he begins to cover the story in earnest, landing a feature and a column. At the same time, he’s sleeping on a futon in his father’s neglected home, the medical bills from the nursing facility are piling up, and his dad, who is not improving, regularly mistakes Nick for Nick’s dead uncle.

Headlong is a kind of modern—and decidedly literary—take on hardboiled crime and detective stories. MacLean’s careful pacing and thoughtful character development lends a novel that could easily veer into the didactic or cliché a layer of empathy, while still keeping the elements of the genre that keep the plot exciting and the pages turning.

Ultimately, though, Headlong is a book about what it means to have idealism, to lose it, and to start to find the thread of it again. It is a novel about having been young and not being young any more, and it challenges readers to consider mortality and their own choices. What do we think justice, whether it is social, environmental, meted out by a judge or a family member, really means? MacLean doesn’t have all the answers, but he pushes us to understand what we’d give, or give up, to get it, and he writes through all of these questions with an assured, steady grace.

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Wendy J. Fox is the author of The Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories (winner, Press 53 short fiction contest & finalist for the Colorado Book Award), The Pull of It (named a top 2016 book by Displaced Nation) and the forthcoming novel If the Ice Had Held, selected as the Santa Fe Writers Project grand prize winner by Benjamin Percy. Writing from Denver, CO and tweeting from @wendyjeanfox.

Friday Feature: Interview with Gabino Iglesias – Reviews Editor and Contest Judge

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Editorial Assistant Erinn Batykefer sat down with [PANK]’s very own Reviews Editor and Fiction Contest Judge Gabino Iglesias to discuss all things writing!

Gabino is the author of Coyote Songs, a novel in which ghosts and old gods guide the hands of those caught up in a violent struggle to save the soul of the American southwest. A man tasked with shuttling children over the border believes the Virgin Mary is guiding him towards final justice. A woman offers colonizer blood to the Mother of Chaos. A boy joins corpse destroyers to seek vengeance for the death of his father.These stories intertwine with those of a vengeful spirit and a hungry creature to paint a timely, compelling, pulpy portrait of revenge, family, and hope.

Buy Coyote Songs Here!

Erinn Batykefer: I found your novel, Coyote Songs at the library and it had one of those big HORROR stickers on the spine. Your fiction has been published in anthologies that specialize in horror and crime fiction as well. How do you see genre functioning under the broad umbrella of fiction?

Gabino Iglesias: I see it as non-functioning. The only thing genre does is give you a set of rules and expectations while simultaneously limiting your readership. I’m fine with my work being called horror or crime or bizarro or magical realism (reviewers and readers have called it all those and more), but I won’t stamp a genre on it. That’s why I made up barrio noir. It’s its own thing. I think writers should tell the story they want to tell using the elements and styles that appeal to them the most. And they should do it without thinking about genre too much. That can come later, and only if it’s needed.

EB:  You’ve also read for contests like Best of the Net and judged genre awards like the Shirley Jackson Award and this year’s Splatterpunk Awards. What excites you most when you’re reading through the slush?

GI: The gems! There are always gems. Anyone who reads through slush at any magazine will agree. You read good and bad and decent and mediocre and that’s part of it. Then, from time to time, you read something that shakes you to the core, something that blows your mind and makes you wish you wrote it. I love finding those books and stories.

EB:  What excites you about reading for [PANK]’s Big Book Contest this year?

GI: People generally don’t know me, but they know [PANK]. [PANK] is a household name. Folks know [PANK] publishes top-notch stuff. Will some writers send work that isn’t ready? Sure, there is always some of that going on, but I think writers will look at the Big Book Contest and they will work hard to send in their best. I get to see all that goodness before anyone else and than I get to give someone some great news. There is nothing about the process that doesn’t appeal to me. I love all of it.

EB: Your work– particularly Coyote Songs– uses elements of horror and suspense, magical realism, and even fantasy to pry open and make viscerally immediate narratives about the Frontera, including migration, border crossings, and colonization. Unless you’re living them, these are narratives that often get distanced and dehumanized on the news, but the experience of reading horror is the opposite: it’s spiked heart rate and
the anxious turning of pages, the satisfaction of vengeance and the squirm of terror. Do you think that immediacy is corrective?

GI: Yes, to a degree. I think horror, or almost anything else for that matter, work best in the presence of empathy. It doesn’t have to be frontera fiction. It ca be a narrative about a poor, uneducated single mother struggling to survive in this country. She can be white, brown, black, whatever. Her pain, if you have a heart, becomes your pain, her anguish and desperation affect you. If that happens, that piece of fiction is successful. It can be literary fiction or noir; it doesn’t matter because it works. What I try to do with the things my characters go through is to make it universal. Any parent in any country will do whatever they can to not have to bury their kids. If I make some folks realize that that is exactly what happens at our border from time to time maybe they’ll realize that distance doesn’t matter.

EB: What are you hoping to feel when you’re reading a winning submission for this contest? What, in your opinion, should a Big Book of fiction do?

GI: A Big Book of fiction needs to accomplish two things. First, the storytelling has to be there, and it has to be amazing. It has to make me feel things. If I smile or nod, a book has me, has my attention. It can make me cringe or laugh or clench my fists. Whatever works as long as I’m feeling something. The second thing it has to do is have style. [PANK] publishes amazing work. I want to read prose that can stand next to poetry in terms of beauty but that never falls into the trap of trying to be pretty at the sake of being meaningful. A Big Book of fiction should make me say, “Wow, this narrative is amazing! And the writing is superb!”

EB: You’ve translated work before, and your books have been published in other languages as well—what’s your take on the same story in different languages, with different nuances, connotations, and references at work? Are they the same story when all is said and done?

GI: I don’t think so. Translation is rewriting in a way. I’m fine with that. I recently wrote a piece for LitReactor about the importance of work in translation. It opens the world to you. As long as book retains its essence, translation works. I’ve read books in Spanish and English. That has made me appreciate the role of outstanding translators. Thankfully we have more or those working now than even, and they usually take the time to research, talk to authors, and offer a translated version that is almost identical to the original, but we all know that copies are never exactly the same. My first novel is about to come out in Turkey this June. I exchanged emails with the translator. We had to discuss what a ferret was…

EB: If you could encourage fiction writers to read one thing before sitting down to write their next piece– a book, a genre, a craft manual—what would you give them for homework?

GI: I wouldn’t assign them anything! Haha. Too many books come to mind: David Joy’s The Line That Held Us, Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Taiga Syndrome, Cynan Jones’ Cove, Laird Barron’s Black Mountain, Juliet Escoria’s Juliet The Maniac, Brooke Bolander’s The Only Harmless Great Thing, Brian Evenson’s Song for the Unraveling of the World…too many! They come to me because they inspired me, they made me want to write. What I would do is tell them to think about a book that matters to them, a book they enjoyed. The first one that comes to mind is the one they should go get, crack open, and start reading. Feel inspired again. Remember the power of storytelling. Remember why we do what we do. That is homework, now and forever.

EB: Anything else you’d like to share with [PANK]? [PANK] suspects you know where to go for breakfast after an all-nighter spent reading scary stories.

GI: I love [PANK]. Share? Two things: 1. if you read anything lately that you loved, talk to me about a review. I’m always looking for more reviews. Indie books strongly encouraged. Bonus points for reviews of indie books written by minorities. Take trans people. They need to be represented and celebrated now more than ever. Give me all your trans poetry! 2. Come to Austin. I’ll make you some of the best breakfast tacos you ever had. We can read more scary stories while we eat.

 

An Interview with Alex DiFrancesco on their forthcoming book, All City

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(Seven Stories Press, 2019)

INTERVIEW BY JESSICA MANNION

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Alex DiFrancesco has had a busy year. Their essay collection Psychopomps was released  by Civil Coping Mechanisms in February, and their novel All City is being released by Seven Stories Press on June 18. While both books are excellent, this interview focuses on All City. It is an important book, and very possibly a prophetic one. All City speaks for the people whose stories do not often get told, much less told with nuance and compassion.

All City takes place in a New York City of the near future. The chasm between the haves and have-nots is wider than ever, and climate change has sent superstorms of increasing violence to the shores of the city, tearing it down with wind and water. Those with the means always leave before the storms hit, but those without resources and means, those who have nowhere else to go, must remain and hold on to what they can by sheer force of will.

The book primarily follows three people, their struggles to survive, to regroup and find security after Superstorm Bernice, and to build new lives in a world that’s a mere muddy remnant of what they knew before. Even after the waters recede, life doesn’t get any easier; there is no new food being shipped in, medical care is practically nonexistent, roads and bridges are destroyed, and the wreckage of the storm is everywhere, bringing with it vermin and sickness. As resources diminish, violence increases, and there are few places where one can feel safe.

Alex lived in New York for about 15 years, but has since moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where they are an MFA candidate at Cleveland State University.

Jessica Mannion: Having just read All City for the second time, I loved it even more. There’s a lot to unpack. In part, I see it as a kind of hybrid love letter to and eulogy for New York City. Can you talk about the changes you saw during your time living in NYC and how living here influenced your writing, and your life as an artist?

Alex DiFrancesco: So now, when I think back to when I moved to New York in 2000, I realize I was a shock-wave gentrifier in Bushwick. I was a white, queer, artist who was specifically moved into a very affordable space at the time by people looking to develop it. I didn’t understand that at the time! I was just out of a small town in Pennsylvania, and thrilled that I could work part time as a lunch server in a little Middle Eastern place, write most of the day, and still pay my rent and have money to party a little. It was the dream, for me, to move to NYC and become an artist. I lived in a dirty loft and had a desk made out of a couple boxes and an old door, and I wrote every day. I was highly suspect about going back to school, and NYC provided so many ways other than that route to become a writer.

I remember in around 2005, I was working at some film-release party on a boat moored in the Hudson (those were the days when Craigslist still had the best odd jobs), and someone way slicker and cooler than me asked me where I lived, and then proclaimed Bushwick as “up-and-coming.” I had this sudden, distinct understanding that I would no longer be able live there, and that I had been the beginning of that process for people who had been there much longer.

I lived in NYC for around 10 more years after that. First I had to move all the way to the end of Brooklyn. Then I moved to Queens. Then, finally, just before I left, a friend was letting me pay way less than she could have charged for a room in the apartment she owned because there was no way I could live there and afford it anymore. What I made had stayed the same, and my rent had tripled.

But ultimately, living and scraping by in New York made me the artist I am today. I went to school at the New School, and learned from some amazing professors. I joined a writers’ group with some of the most talented writers I’ve ever worked with in it. I went to lectures, worked in bookstores, interned in publishing. It’s helped me build my life around the written word in so many ways. I’m sad every day that there’s just no place for me there anymore.

JM: What does All City mean and where did the idea for the book come from?

AD: The term “all city” is old graffiti slang for an artist who has painted in all 5 boroughs of New York. When I wrote the anonymous artist character into the book, I thought about how nearly impossible this would be to accomplish if you were working in the post-collapse conditions of the book. I decided to make him do it anyway.

The book was a mash-up of what ifs, really. I started writing a list of them after Superstorm Sandy destroyed parts of New York City, and also shortly after Bansky did his month-long NYC residency where he guerilla-installed a new project in an undisclosed location every day for an entire month. I’d also been reading a lot about Hurricane Katrina. The ideas just sort of melded together.

JM: The novel is primarily told through 3 characters: Makayla, Jesse and Evann. There’s so much going on with the characters: they are all affected by this Superstorm Bernice, and they all experience displacement and a certain degree of trauma, but because of their social status and circumstances, each experiences / survives / processes that trauma differently. Why did you choose these characters to tell this story?

The first draft of this novel was a super sloppy 40,000 words written during NaNoWriMo. I didn’t really participate in the community aspects of it, but I did challenge myself to write the proposed amount in the month of November. Once I had the list of what-ifs, I started to look at them from different angles. Makayla came first, because I wanted someone who would likely be without many resources besides her sense of community and her relationships. I added Jesse in because it’s very important to me to portray trans lives in the larger context of the world — in such a way that they’re not isolated, but also not in trans-only spaces all the time. Evann felt necessary, too, because you can’t show the have-nots without showing what it looks like to have it all.

JM: Another character – a mysterious mural artist – remains unseen, but his Art starts showing up everywhere in the devastated city like crocuses in the spring. What role does Art play in All City? How have the visual arts influenced or inspired you as a writer and artist?

AD: There are a series of works of visual art in this novel that are all carefully chosen and all mean different things.

Evann, the art collector, is given a Basquiat when she graduates from design school. This kind of started as a joke, because I made her collect Basquiats and first editions of Ayn Rand books. What kind of awful person wouldn’t get the irony there? Then, like a lot of the things I do to amuse myself in my writing, I started taking it seriously. Really, what kind of person wouldn’t get that? Certainly not one like me, or anyone I’d care about. But someone. So Evann was born out of love for Basquiat and Ayn Rand.

There’s a scene where two trans street punks go into The Met to look at Van Gogh paintings, and one of them starts crying because they’ve never seen Van Gogh’s sunflowers and never realized how dead they were. The other one says, no, they’re dead but they’re still moving and full of life, that’s how much life Van Gogh saw even though he was so sad. It’s one of the few times in the book that art is just enjoyed and not commodified.

Then, Evann owns two more paintings that play symbolic roles in the story. She owns Richard Bosman’s woodcut “Full Moon” and John Lurie’s absurdist watercolor “Bear Surprise.” The role of “Full Moon” (which shows one man beating another to death in a boat) is to show Evann looking into a world she has no idea about, but the other characters are all to familiar with. The role of “Bear Surprise” (which shows two people having sex in the woods and a bear yelling “Surprise!”) is because it’s Lurie’s most famous but probably least-skilled painting, which Evann totally doesn’t understand. It’s a little poking fun at her, to have it in there. I also learned while doing research for the novel that Lurie was one of Basquiat’s early mentors, so I felt compelled to write him in because of that connection.

Art is really commodified almost every time it appears in  the book. It’s made for the right reasons, but it’s consumed, often, in ways that are more about the owning it than the divineness of it. I have very silly and almost spiritual beliefs about art and where it comes from, but the art world and the world of the novel are both kind of ugly and gross and highly capitalist rather than about communicating the thing that makes art worth making.

JM: How does All City explore ideas of ownership?

AD: I’m thinking of the ownership of space as the main way it works. There’s a luxury condo, and when it’s not something that the rich want, it’s good enough for the poor. It’s a place they can make a utopia. But then it becomes something that the rich want again, and it’s too good for the people who have made it their own. This is a microcosm of the gentrification of New York, in the book. So really the way ownership is dictated is on the desires of those who have the money to protect their “rights” to a space, not those who work to make it their own.

There’s also something there about the use of graffiti as a way to take and remake public spaces as something belonging to everyone, for everyone’s use and enjoyment. It’s ecstatic and community-based, much like the true community-building that happens in the luxury condo. I don’t think I could’ve told this story without the addition of graffiti.

JM: How does All City explore the concept of hope – about the future, about a better life, about belonging – and who ultimately will see their hopes realized?

AD: Hope is fraught in All City. There are people like Evann who have implicit access to it, when they choose it. There are people like Makayla who make it out of what they have. But I want to say that the last scene is my probably depressive final take. Who gets to see that which is supposed to bring us hope? Who doesn’t? And who are the few people who believe that hope is a starting point, something they saw once, and carry that fire as far as they can?

JM: In part, All City is a story of survival. How do you explore survival and the things some people must endure in order to do so?

AD: Without giving too much away, I think the biggest traumas in the book are one character’s rape, one’s loss of a parent, and one experiencing a hate crime committed against the person they love. These characters all rally, at least for a while, or eventually, to use the trauma they’ve experienced to make the world around them better. It creates empathy in them rather than destroying them — but sometimes it destroys them too. I think the idea that some people choose to make sure that no one goes through the horrible things they’ve been through is the driving idea behind a lot of these characters. They’re not saints, and they’re not perfect — but they’re driven by the fact that traumatic things have happened and they’ve turned them into compassion, which then turns into community and survival.

JM: The characters Makayla and Jesse in other circumstances would often be seen as outsiders of society, but you put them front and center in the book. Why did you choose to tell this story from their perspective?

AD: This is always my goal, to put the outsiders at the inside. I think I have always felt like a bit of an outsider myself, so I’m not really sure how I could sustain an emotional and moral core to a novel without it being heavily focused on characters who see and feel and experience things outside the norm or the default.

Also, it’s a highly political act to write the stories that people say shouldn’t be told. I knew Jesse had to be in there because I’m a trans person, and queer representation means something to me. I was really a bit hesitant to write Makayla because she’s a minority I’m not a part of, she’s a woman of color. Certainly, a woman of color could have written Makayla in another way, and it would be entirely more appropriate for her to tell a woman of color’s story. But I also had been reading so much about the aftermath of Katrina, and the poor people left behind, and it struck me as absurd to try to tell a story of gentrification and climate change and survival from multiple perspectives without characters of color. I took as much feedback as I could get from folks more aligned with her perspective.

But it was incredibly important to me, outside of specific demographic, to tell the story of those who had been left behind, and, more terrifyingly are being left behind. All City is, in some ways, a warning. But it’s also the story of those who’ve been pushed so far out that they’ve had to make their own way, and know what they’re doing when things really go down.

(photo by Emily Raw)

JM: In many ways, Evann is a controversial character; she is probably the least sympathetic and the one who causes the most harm. Yet she would certainly not view herself that way, nor would much of society. How is her perspective important?

AD: I wrote Evann about 16 times. You might recall from when we workshopped this book in our writers’ group, people were referring to her in Snidely Whiplash terms, because she was just that bad. The somewhat less dastardly Evann who ended up in the final pages was born largely out of my wonderful editor, Sanina Clark, pushing me to make her less villainous. Sanina had asked me early on if Evann was a cipher, a stand-in for gentrification, and I said that no, she was a villain, for sure, but I also wanted her emptiness and need for consumption in place of being able to feel anything to be real and human. Sanina pushed me through rewrites to make Evann less of a complete monster, and more of a asshole human, if that makes sense.

In some ways, Evann is the most important character I’ve written thus far (at least to me), because she’s the life most outside of my own, which is what writers are supposed to be creating, I think. With every other character I was able to find something inside myself to return to like a compass when I started to go astray with them. I really had to work to find this place with Evann. I used to take walks in Green-Wood Cemetery to Basquiat’s grave all the time, talking to his ghost and think about Evann doing the same.

But she also plays an important role in the story in that we have to see the other side of this huge divide in the future world. If we see Jesse nodding out in a dirty IRT station from scrounged opiates, we also have to see Evann fucking a guy with pearl studs in his dick, you know?

JM: Your essay collection Psychopomps came out in February of this year. How do these books inform each other?

AD: I think people who read both will see bits and pieces that reflect each other. Sometimes I kind of feel like writing creative nonfiction can be like pulling back the curtain and seeing the little dorky man in a suit working the controllers. That’s me, the little dorky guy in Psychopomps, and All City is like the illusionary Oz.

I’m only half-way kidding. Anyway, read both; keep my cat in her favorite wet food.

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Jessica Mannion is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer. Her writing can be seen in The Literary Review, Alliteratti, and other publications. She also does copy-writing on a variety of subjects.

[REVIEW] Great American Desert by Terese Svoboda

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(Mad Creek/Ohio State University Press, 2019)

REVIEW BY JODY KENNEDY

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Terese Svoboda’s Great American Desert is a collection of twenty-one short stories linked by a common geographic location in the Middle West. The stories examine our relationships to one another, the land, and the natural environment beginning with the prehistoric era “Clovis Camp” and ending with the post-apocalyptic “Pink Pyramid.” Svoboda is the author of five collections of poetry, five novels, a memoir, a book of translation, a novella and stories, most recently the biography Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet.

I had never read any of Terese Svoboda’s work and was immediately captivated by the light-hearted, humorous and often stark poetic prose found in “Clovis Camp” and in the stories that followed. One of the book’s most prevalent themes, echoing the Biblical Adam’s dilemma, is touched on in “Clovis Camp,” and the following “Major Long Talks to His Horse,” but its the third story, “Dutch Joe,” that seems to sum it up perfectly:

“Lands sakes is what we’re always exclaiming because land is all we’re good for, all the sakes there is or ever will be. Each of us, fifty or so strong, have fled a country crowded with kin or else lorded over, every inch of the land spoken for down to the last hop of hare, or squawk of fowl. We settlers have pushed all the way into the pockets of Lady America, hoping to take her wealth for ours, her endless waving grain and her cattle in abundant herds. Through our boot soles, thin as they are, we perceive the urgency of the land’s fecundity to be ours, it is so empty and waiting. Even the clouds suspended above us are our clouds, borne in the reflection of our great desire. We slake our thirst for our own land by possessing Lady America with the plow. We are homesteaders.”

The love story, “Bomb Jockey,” contains a series of fantastic events offered up in Svoboda’s lyrical and often startling poetic imagery:

“The waitress at the cafe? remembers her well enough to have a conversation but she’s short, more interested in the mercury spill she saw on her way to work. How beautiful and strange the great gobs of liquid metal were, slithering all over the ground in amongst the snowed-in crocuses.”

In “Ogallala Aquifer” a man-made mountain of toxic dirt begins to grow out of a government-sanctioned garbage dump reminding us of our own present-day Great Pacific Garbage Patch (an estimated 1.6 million square kilometers of trash and plastics floating somewhere between California and Hawaii) or the ugly chemical pesticide wars going on in the Arkansas Delta farming community or any of the other numerous transgressions we continue to commit for personal or collective gain or convenience and against our better environmental interests.

The final story, “Pink Pyramid,” one of my favorites, is a post-apocalyptic vision of America made more bearable through Svoboda’s deft poet’s heart:

“She sneezes. They’ve raised a cloud of pink dust. There’s a couple of other clouds in the distance but theirs is the thickest, the most recent. The dust coats her throat, the little hairs on her arms.”

Despite the difficult subject matter, “Pink Pyramid” like many of the other stories in the book, shares a mélange of personal struggle, longing, and tenderness which left me strangely hopeful for the human race.

While Great American Desert delivers a sometimes harsh critique of America’s relational and historical trajectories, its lively mix of humanity, absurdity, and insanity might leave some of us to wonder if we aren’t actually enjoying every current episode or rerun of our great American experiment, passion play and not soon to be forgotten dream.

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Jody Kennedy is a writer and photographer living in Provence, France. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fairy Tale Review, DIAGRAM, Tin House Online, Electric Literature, and The Georgia Review, among others.

[REVIEW] If the Ice Had Held by Wendy J. Fox

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(Santa Fe Writers Project, 2019)

 

REVIEW BY MARK H. STEVENS

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We are deep into the If the Ice Had Held, a brisk novel told from seven points of view across more than three decades, when 14-year-old Irene thinks about her mother, a woman she never really knew.

“Irene was not sure she had any true memories of the woman,” writes Wendy J. Fox, “only scraps and fragments she had pieced together from a handful of ragged photographs.”

As a whole, If the Ice Had Held comes to us in those same brisk, jagged scraps and memories. We are given pieces. Shards. And we have the pleasure of seeing the pieces come together as we understand how they connect, as we see the players react, interact, and impact each other’s lives.

Irene, however, is not alone. This is primary Melanie’s story. Of the 37 chapters and seven points of view, Melanie’s story gets 16.

When we meet Melanie, she is working in a non-glamorous corner of the dot-com world. She works in Colorado Springs in “the ground-floor wing of a crumbling office park where the air-conditioning was troubling and unreliable.”  Melanie is restless. She has a constant “feeling of spinning.”  On a road trip, she breaks one of her rules, to never sleep with a co-worker or a customer. She dubs him San Antonio Man. He’s a co-worker. Melanie thinks hard about the quality of her life, her work environment, her home, her relationships. She is a professional adult in a professional world and she is also adrift and searching.

We learn that Melanie is Irene’s daughter and that Melanie’s father was Sammy, Kathleen’s brother. Sammy is the subject of the title—if the ice had held, if Sammy had not fallen in the cold river to his death, Melanie might have been raised by very young teenage parents and then, well, who knows?

Think I’m giving away too much? I doubt it. There is much more to Melanie’s story—what we learn about Kathleen and why she stepped in to supplant Irene’s role as mother, what we learn about the relationship between Kathleen and Irene, what we learn about the stories that were concocted because it was the 1970s and stories were required. What we learn about the first responders to Sammy’s accident, too.

In fact, It was when Fox switched to the one chapter told from the point of view of Simon, the father of a character named Brian, that the novel really clicked into place and I marveled at the kaleidoscopic effect that Fox gives readers of the connections across time, across families, across life.

This is Melanie’s story—maybe? If the Ice Had Held starts and ends with Kathleen. It’s her gesture (much too small a term) that gives the story its spark and its heart. Well, at least, one of them. In a novel riddled with accidents and tragedies, there more than a few lump-in-your-throat moments when fox reveals connections and encounters you won’t see coming.

The story starts with Sammy plunging into an icy river and water seems to ooze its way, in one form another into every scene. The cascading effects from this one accident ripple across time, the proverbial pebble in the pond but the pebble is a human being and the pond is life. its Fox’s writing is cool, serene and stripped clean of sentimentality. She is a dry-eyed documentarian with a keen eye and a terrific ear. The construction of this novel carries an almost David Hockney quality—the farther you step back, the more you see. But it was a singer I heard as the novel layered in connections and details. David Byrne.

If The Ice had Held asks us to wonder, well, how did I get here? “Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground…”

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The son of two librarians, Mark Stevens worked as a reporter for The Christian Science Monitor in Boston and Los Angeles, as a City Hall reporter for The Rocky Mountain News in Denver, as a national field producer for The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour (PBS), and as an education reporter for The Denver Post. He is currently president of Rocky Mountain Mystery Writers of America and hosts a regular podcast, The Rocky Mountain Writer, for Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers.

 

If This is Freedom, Enslave Me (a preface)

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BY BRIAN ALESSANDRO

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If we can’t write with complexity and a jaundiced eye about ourselves, what good is representation? If we can’t discomfit our readers and compel contemplation, why endeavor any artistic or intellectual pursuit? These questions began to weigh on me after reading a 2017 New York Times interview with the literary luminary Edmund White about the state of homosexuality in literature and popular culture. In fact, I was so moved by White’s thoughts that I wrote a short story inspired by them called “Please,” which has just been published in PANK print issue #14.

White, author of the 1982 classic A Boy’s Own Story, the seminal biography of Jean Genet, and most recently, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading, is also a good friend. In the NYT article, he contemplated a question the journalist had put to him about what he’d like to see more of in queer fiction. His answer: bad gay guys! White’s concern centered on the newfound preciousness of homosexuals, that they have come to be treated with such PC delicacy that they are rarely written about as real people. We are permitted either hero status or victimhood, in effect reducing us to saints or sufferers.

The reductive tendency smacks of apologist condescension. For too long media, and in particular, cinema—the 20th century’s most popular and influential art form—has portrayed gay people as perverse, self-loathing, or flat out evil. The infractions range from Rodrigo Santoro’s swarthy queen Xerxes in Zak Snyder’s 2006 release 300 to Peter Hanly’s promiscuous ruler Prince Edward in Mel Gibson’s 1995 Braveheart to Ted Levine’s transgender-homosexual (a conflation?) fetishistic serial killer Jame Gumb in Jonathan Demme’s 1991 The Silence of The Lambs. There were also Matt Damon’s meek, brutal Tom Ripley in Anthony Minghella’s 1999 Patricia Highsmith adaptation The Talented Mr. Ripley and Sharon Stone’s sociopathic, calculating Catherine Tramell in Paul Verhoeven’s 1992 Basic Instinct. Hitchcock was perhaps guiltiest of the malevolent misrepresentation, his  Rope (1948) and Strangers on a Train (1951) both featured mincing, effeminate, cunning gay men executing sadistic agendas, while his sissy momma’s boy Norman Bates in 1960’s Psycho created dangerous fear and loathing of transgender people, confusing cross-dressing with gender identity and psychopathology. While these depictions were certainly bruising, we homo folk are now the sacred darlings of dishonest, frightened writers. I’m not entirely sure which is worse.

Farley Granger and John Dall in Hitchcock’s Rope
(1948)

I’m not suggesting we make a full return to the queer-as-subversive-revolutionary themes extolled by Genet or Pasolini (Genet’s 1943 novel Our Lady of The Flowers and Pasolini’s 1975 film Salo were unapologetic in their celebratory sordidness), but a realistic and objective treatment, absenting social context and history, could be a productive change of pace. For the sake of challenging art that doesn’t feel neutered, if nothing else. But there is something else: developing homosexual characters, and by extension, homosexuals, themselves, into flesh-and-blood humans capable of flaws and cruelty and selfishness. We homos didn’t come all this way just to demand free morality passes. We are as capable of bad behavior as any nuanced, gray-zoned hetero.

“Please” is about a nameless gay man—young (early twenties), cynical, and troubled—from Chicago who finds on Craig’s List an affluent older (fifties) gay couple working as physicians in Tucson. Upon invitation and the promise of full-time rock climbing (his great Transcendentalist passion), the young man moves into the doctors’ outsized home in the desert. The couple soon take advantage of the young man in myriad ways, including shaming him into sexual favors, restricting allowance, curtailing career opportunities, impeding social outings, and what eventually amounts to indentured servitude. The young man doesn’t mind being kept as the lifestyle they afford him satisfies his pompous entitlement. But he turns the tables on them by the end anyway through blackmail. To the manner born, the student becomes the teacher—all idioms apply.

Owing to White’s admonishment of identity politics running amuck, “Please” is an attempt to refuse absolution to the marginalized. The historically oppressed get no free passes for their transgressions, no matter how disillusioned they may be. We have earned our rightful place in the bittersweet spectacle that is our gruesome, gorgeous humanity.

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Brian Alessandro is the co-owner and editor-in-chief of The New Engagement (TNE), an online and print literary journal that has published original work by Edmund White (his first poem in sixteen years), Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poet, Richard Howard, Murzban F Shroff, MG Stephens, Seamus Scanlon, Nadia Ibrashi, and Sue Kaufman Award-winner, Michael Carroll, whose memoir explores his marriage to White. His debut novel, The Unmentionable Mann, was published by Cairn Press in September 2015, and received favorable reviews from the Huffington Post, Examiner.com, The Leaf, and was excerpted in Bloom, the Edmund White-advised LGBTQ literary journal. It was also featured at the 2016 Tucson Festival of Books and nominated for an Independent Book Publisher Association (IBPA) award for Best New Voice. Alessandro is also the writer and director of the feature film, Afghan Hound, which co-stars Matt McGorry, and has been screened at the Left Forum and The Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy as part of its trauma training series. Additionally, HiConcept Magazine recently nominated his short stories, Mandarin Slang and The Commands of Class and Carnage for Pushcart Prizes in 2016 and 2017, respectively. Alessandro holds a Master of Arts in clinical psychology from Columbia University, and has taught psychology, film, and literature classes at high schools in New York and at Pima Community College (affiliated with the University of Arizona) in Tucson. He is currently adapting White’s 1982 classic, A Boy’s Own Story, into a graphic novel for Top Shelf Productions with Carroll and teaching American Literature at a charter high school in the South Bronx.

[REVIEW] Sixteen by Auguste Corteau

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(Etruscan Press, 2019)

REVIEW BY ANN ANDERSON EVANS  

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Sixteen is a work that touches the fringes of magical realism while portraying a story that feels a hundred percent true. Perhaps that is because it takes place in Russia, a land of extremes and miracles. The quintessential Russian element of the story is that the fate of a piece of classical music can touch the national soul. That would never happen in America.

The characters in this story are full blown. They are foul-mouthed, self-destructive, sometimes fawning—but they carry the story on their strong, loveable shoulders. Corteau’s characters would be comfortable keeping company with the Dostoyevski brothers.

Brutal, earthy humor flashes throughout. “I never let the cleaning ogre into the study, so you’ll really be sitting on a plush layer of what I’m told is mostly defunct skin cells. Your disrespectful buttocks will be effectively lying on top of my dead body,” says Rabinovich. English speakers don’t say such things. Corteau has caught the Russian idiom in an enveloping embrace.

Without searching the archives, I wouldn’t know whether such men as Alexei and Rabinovich existed or whether the story told by Alexei bears any relationship to actual events, but it happens in the very real framework of the demise of the Soviet Union, and feels authentic.

The author writes that Alexei suffers from “taciturn dysphoria,” a Russian disease. It is the terror that followed every Russian in whatever station of life who lived under either the czars or the Communists. Every step Alexei takes is an anxious one: people are watching, threatening, undermining, maybe ultimately killing him. Death or the threat of it is such a constant companion that it loses its sting. One gets tired of fearing it when it is always just around the corner. Just Mother Russia folks, the “uncouth motherland.” Putin’s Russia doesn’t seem so different. Today’s America resembles it more than we like to acknowledge.

There are wild temporal and geographical plot swings, harking back to the shenanigans of Grand Duchesses and Czars of earlier days, traveling to the hoary and sumptuous environs of Switzerland, Florence, and elsewhere.

Alexei presents himself as a simple chronicler of his mentor’s life, but the author, an authority slightly higher than Alexei, slips in sly observations on human nature. “Kruschchev wasn’t as tall as photographs made him seem, but that had been true of Stalin as well. Power worked as slyly as elevator shoes.” Again, contemporary Americans take note.

Sixteen is the tale of a great love between mentor and protegé. Alexei is saved from death by being deprived of his mentor’s most closely held secrets and intentions, thus deceiving, misleading, and cheating him. A broken heart is exchanged for salvation. It is left to the reader to determine whether it was worth it.

I paired this book with Julian Barnes’s take on the life of Shostakovich, The Noise of Time. Shostakovich was also a survivor threading his way along the perilous peaks of cultural life under a vicious, greedy government that prized “social realism.”

None of these characters would be my preferred choice of company, but Corteau inhabits them, clothes them, listens to them with such close attention and compassion that, to sum up, I’d follow Alexei anywhere.

—

Ann Anderson Evans is the author of the award-winning memoir, Daring to Date Again (SheWrites Press 2014). Other work has been published widely in the literary and academic press.  She enjoyed her eight years teaching freshman writing at Montclair State University , and continues to give writing workshops.  Ann comes from Montclair, New Jersey, spent a decade in Europe, and now lives in Hoboken, New Jersey with her third and final husband.

 

[REVIEW] The Story I Tell Myself About Myself by Sarah Layden

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(Sonder Press, 2018)

REVIEW BY DHEEPA R. MATURI

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A woman without skin. A man with a womb. A person who is also a house. Sarah Layden’s flash fiction collection, The Story I Tell Myself About Myself, evokes ghosts of Sherwood Anderson’s well-known “grotesques” in Winesburg, Ohio. Layden’s characters, too, are flawed and broken, grappling with isolation and desperation, attempting to endure their pain. And like Anderson’s, Layden’s characters are deeply worth the time and effort to understand them.

During a time in which public discourse consists of simplistic labeling, which in turn generates quick classification and easy hatred, Layden insists we resist the impulse to evaluate and judge others quickly. Layden’s cleverly crafted and complex morsels of flash fiction soundly reject the notion of monolithic identity. Rather, she illustrates how identity is an accumulation and amalgam of the perceptions of others, our perceptions of ourselves, and of course, the (many) stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. I found myself reading each story and examining each character multiple times, watching Layden expose all of those layers with subtle and precise scalpel cuts.

But Layden does more than expose these layers. Through her cuts, the heartbreak and loss of each character’s experience, emerge and emanate. In bringing these to light, she guides the reader from witnessing the unpalatable messiness, unappealing imperfections, and sheer strangeness of people — toward empathy. Like Anderson, Layden makes us relate to the characters, feel for them, look under their layers for what they are: fellow human beings experiencing the human struggle to live well.

In short, by revealing the complexity of identity, Layden brings the the reader closer to the truth of human life. Just as she destabilizes the notion of a monolithic identity — and for the same reason — Layden disrupts her story settings, carving out spaces and imbuing them with power to reveal truth. An elevator consultation with a gypsy, (“The Rest of Your Life”), a church service a character does not normally attended (“What Mary Did”), even the silences within a telephone conversation (“Hang Up”) — all tear the characters out of their regular lives. At the same time, they provide the characters a glimpse of truth and readers a more accurate view of those characters’ foibles and self-deceptions.

To the same end, Layden even disrupts the structures within which her stories are constructed. A fill-in-the-blank tale (“Fulfilled”) shows us the potential for variability within her story based upon the respondent. Another story (“Collision Physics for the Math-Averse”) parses a crash into its physical components while simultaneously presenting mirror image realities. A story told in a numbered sequence (“Marv’s 11 Steps”) shows the human need to superimpose order upon the wild disorder of life.

Layden’s skillful destabilization of identity, of setting, of structure make the reader searingly conscious of the fragility of each, and thus able to perceive the truth underneath more clearly. Often, Layden’s skillful storytelling made me lose my bearings, left me a bit raw. Like the woman who removes her protective suit (“The Woman With No Skin”) in order to absorb fully the realities around her and despite the painful bombarding that results, I felt the need to understand life and truth through Layden’s eyes.

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Dheepa R. Maturi, an essayist and poet, is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago. Her work has appeared in The Fourth River, Tiferet, Entropy, the Brevity nonfiction blog, The Offbeat, Tweetspeak, Wanderlust, Defenestration, Here Comes Everyone, Wild Musette, The Indianapolis Review, Dear America: Reflections on Race, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Indianapolis. www.DheepaRMaturi.com

Friday Feature: Dinah Cox’s The Canary Keeper

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The Canary Keeper

Editorial Assistant Erinn Batykefer sat down with [PANK] author Dinah Cox to discuss the ins and outs of her new book, The Canary Keeper.

The Canary Keeper himself is a failed actor, the kind of person no one wants to listen to at parties, but the eponymous play he stars in features characters eking out existence while in search of their own curtain calls, a chance to hear the applause before the silence sets in. Artist-citizens from the fictional Market Town look to the dimming spotlight and cannot decide its meaning: are they destined for burn-out or blinded by fantasies of themselves as small-town stars? They mark time by way of darkened, lonely highways, indifference from people in power, and the search for opportunity beyond the boredom of Oklahoma’s borders. They step forward, clear their throats, and laugh at their ability to wait in the wings forever, longing for escape to the green room and anticipating that fateful moment when the stage manager says Go.

Erin Batykefer: Names are slippery in these stories. I’m thinking of “Leo’s Peking Palace,” where friends sing Happy Birthday to Leo and half of them sing “Tiger” because they don’t know his real name, or the way Laura’s middle name, Ashley, is used as a slur in “Snowflake.” How so you see names relating to identities?

Dinah Cox: One of my favorite parts abot writing a story is the moment when a character lets me know her name. Her name tells me much about how other characters will perceive her. Rarely have I written nameless characters—though I think I have a story in which one of the characters is named “The Boss”—because a name is not just a marker but a fixture, a place where one’s origins and one’s future might converge. I’ve become accustomed to people messing up my own first name. In a way, that’s given me a kind of namelessness I sometimes resent and sometimes enjoy. But because my own name is somewhat unusual, perhaps I give more attention to names than I otherwise might.

EB: The stage and the idea of performance is a recurring theme in this collection: politics, plays, talk shows, ballet. Were you a theatre kid?

DC: My parents were very heavily involved in theatre; my father was a professor of theatre history, and my mother did a great deal of acting and directing. My sister, in addition to some other, juicer roles, had the honor of portraying one of the no-neck monsters in Oklahoma State University’s production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. At first, I resisted the family tradition in favor of “making my own way in the world,” but as an undergraduate at Earlham College I majored in theatre, and in my twenties I interned and then worked as a stage manager at an Equity theatre in Michigan. I also spent a memorable summer interning at the Peterborough Players in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

EB: In “Blackout,” I was struck by this line, when the narrator has a moment of panic while arranging props between scenes in a production, only to find the prop cake replaced by a real one: “Had he picked up the wrong cake by mistake–maybe someone working backstage, a real person with real feelings, was having an actual birthday?” There’s real anxiety over real-life consequence of staged performance. How blurry is the line between truth and story?

DC: I worked as an assistant stage manager in a production featuring a birthday cake made of cardboard. It was such a convincing fake, everyone who saw it wanted to eat a slice. So I wrote some version of that cake into a story. But to answer your question, the line between truth and story is blurred enough that, like spun sugar on a real/fake birthday cake, it’s delicious until it gives us a bellyache. Maybe all cakes are made of cardboard after all.

EB: There are a lot of birthdays in these stories–two 21st birthdays, a birthday party not on an actual birthday. What’s your ideal birthday celebration?

DC: I had a pretty nice birthday celebration last year. My partner and I drank elaborate cocktails and cooked an elaborate dinner, drank and ate, and were very merry, indeed. Because all comedies end with a party, I try to have as many parties—throughout the year—as I can; however my parties often include only two people and four dogs: the perfect way to celebrate.

EB: Market Town, where these stories take place, is fictional, but it’s state is real. Why Oklahoma?

DC: The short answer is because I was born in Oklahoma and live here, still. The slightly longer answer is that it’s a sad, haunted, strange, out-of-the-way place, worthy of storytelling.

EB: If you could upload one text into the brains of your readers Matrix-style before they opened your book, what would it be?

DC: How about the American Heritage Dictionary? Or maybe a Post-It note that says, “read a book, robot.”

EB: Anything else you’d like to share with [PANK] about The Canary Keeper?

DC: [PANK] loves you.

Dinah Cox’s first book of stories, Remarkable, was published as the winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize in 2016. Her stories have appeared in a number of literary magazines and journals, including Prairie Schooner, StoryQuarterly, Cream City Review, Copper Nickel, and Beloit Fiction Journal. She teaches in the creative writing program at Oklahoma State University, where she’s an Associate Editor at Cimarron Review.

[REVIEW] The Way We Came In by Kelby Losack

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(Broken River Books, 2018)

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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There are two kinds of crime fiction. One kind is written by authors who think people do bad things because they are bad. The second kind, the kind that matters, is written by writers who understand that there is a plethora of reasons why someone would commit a crime. In the latter group, the authors producing the best, most authentic narratives are those who have been in direct contact with people like that and have experienced those situations. These authors possess a deep, nuanced understanding of the psychogeography of crime. Their work is generally devoid of judgement and representations that border on caricatures. Author Kelby Losack belongs to this group, and his work is a raw, visceral representation of desperation, hustling, and lives where there is no space to even fathom upward social mobility.

In The Way We Came In, Losack’s latest novel, a couple of brothers get together after one of them is released from prison. They have to make money to pay their rent, but regular work won’t give them enough, and they’re running out of time. What they need to do is clear, and it involves drugs and guns. It’s a path followed by many before them, and it’s supposed to happen smoothly, but things go south. They come up with a plan to stay afloat, but that also goes bad. Without the money they needed or the drugs to sell and after a failed attempt at fixing everything at once, the brothers end up in the hands of a man who plans to take their life for what they tried to do to him.

The Way We Came In is a tense, too-real story about coming up with a hustle when every other course of action is impossible. It is a narrative about need and desperation, but also about trying to do the right thing first and brotherly love. Losack explores the special relationship between brothers who love each other and trust each other in a way you can’t trust most people. These men share a gloomy past and the loss of their mother, and that pain brings them together above and beyond their blood. As with his previous novel, Heathenish, there is an unexpected emotional dimension to The Way We Came In that pushes it into an interstitial space between hardcore crime fiction and literary fiction.

There are many elements that work together to make this a required read for crime fiction fans (or fans of the unique type of narratives Losack writes, which I’ve always called hoodrat noir), and tension is at the top of that list. This novel moves forward at breakneck speed, and the action and tension ramp up at the same pace. Short chapters, explosive action sequences, and superb economy of language add to that:

“I jumped at the sound of knuckles rattling the screen door. You grabbed the burner off the table and for a few seconds, we sat motionless, staring at the front door. The rapper said, “Me desperté sintiéndome como si estuviera en la luna.” The second knock came heavier, more tenacious. I jumped again. You whispered, “Hide it,” waving a hand over all the yayo. While you crept to the window to cop a glance behind the bed sheet curtain, I held the unzipped lip of a backpack to the table’s edge and swept up all the contraband with my arm, then I shouldered the bag and spun around, ready to follow if you bolted, but you had tucked the gun in the back of your jeans and were reaching for the door knob, scratching your temple and shaking your head the way you do when you’re trying to suppress a laugh.”

While there is nothing quite like what Losack is doing in contemporary literature, the mix of real life struggles and keen observations are somewhat reminiscent of underground literary legend Peter Plate. Just like Plate did with San Francisco, Losack is a chronicler of the everyday struggles of folks on the verge between the right and the wrong side of the tracks. In The Way We Came In there are guns and drugs and people doing bad things, but they are not cutouts of criminals; they are people forced into illegal hustles. This lack of judgmental writing makes Losack’s work shine. He knows poverty, humanity, and doing whatever it takes while ignoring potential consequences are the holy trinity of crime in real life, and he brings that to the page beautifully. Furthermore, he does so while showing that the streets have many levels, and not everyone is on the same one despite sharing the same spaces:

“A vagrant who’d been begging at the intersection shuffled in on concrete-spattered tennis shoes. The toes of his shoes were split open so it looked like they were yawning when he walked. The old lady humming gospels smiled at him as he passed. The vagrant spent a good long minute in

the restroom and came out with beads of water dripping down his dreadlocked beard. He sat on a stool beneath a small analog television that hung from the ceiling. He watched a sitcom, laughing every time the studio audience laughed, and even when they didn’t. His laugh was a raspy cackle that was often followed by a red-faced coughing spell.”

Three quarters of the way into this books I was thinking: “Watch out, crime writers! Heathenish announced the arrival of an exciting new voice, but The Way We Came In proves Losack isn’t here to play.” Then I kept reading and reached the last two pages of the book. Losack had been holding out, keeping a piece of surreal magic in his pocket, like a desperate man trying to tell a story while holding an ounce in his fist. When I read the ending, my mind changed and my warning morphed into a decree: “Go home folks, the king of hoodrat noir is here and the game is over.”

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist and book reviewer living in Austin, Texas. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs. He is the book review editor for Pank Magazine, and a columnist at LitReactor. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.