Future Tense Books Archives

200 pages, $12

Review by Ryan Werner

Previous general portrayal of the Midwest has been decidedly not-my-Midwest: Garrison Keillor’s rosy-cheeked shitheads and the good-guys-win-bad-guys-lose world of John Hughes. My Midwest is boredom and its trappings—drugs and sex and Tori Amos tapes—and as those ideas run through Troy James Weaver’s Witchita Stories, it does to Wichita, Kansas what Gummo did to sub-rural Ohio or what Alice Munro did to small town Canada. It shows how those not on the map survive without the map.

Opening jam “Summer” is the best of them all. It doesn’t go far, because nothing in town goes far. “My sister is sixteen and she’s already at that stage in life where she’s bringing over guys that look like Fonzie or Vanilla Ice.” That’s the first sentence, and I wish I had written it. I wish I had written the next part, too, about these guys and their bad music, their misappropriated styles. How the sister is distracted to a point of neglect and how hot it is outside and how you just won’t die one way or the other, won’t melt away in the heat and won’t freeze to death in counteracting it.

And that’s it. 329 words and maybe ten steps off the front porch, a walk into the kitchen to eat what your sister didn’t make you. Continue reading →

Future Tense Books

242 pages, $28

Review by Alex M. Frankel

Wendy Ortiz’s memoir, Excavation, is an outstanding first book. It chronicles how the author, as a middle school student back in the mid 1980s, was seduced by her English teacher, Mr. Ivers, and how he carried on an affair with her over the next several years. The memoir is remarkable not just for its taboo subject, but also for the matter-of-fact tone Ortiz takes as she tells about her most unusual relationship. It is a relationship on which the author has had plenty of time to reflect: now in her forties, she works as a therapist in her native southern California. She has published both poetry and prose (including an essay in the “Modern Love” series in The New York Times) and is the founder and curator of Los Angeles’s Rhapsodomancy Reading Series. Alongside the main story of her teenage years, Ortiz has added vignettes from her personal and professional life as an adult, including her work with at-risk youth. These passages, beautifully interspersed with her adolescent tale, shed light on the person she has become, and also function as brief pauses following cliffhangers, enhancing the book’s atmosphere of danger and foreboding. All the while, the reader keeps wondering, “When and how is Ivers going to get caught?” Continue reading →

Future Tense Books

[REVIEW] Witchita Stories, by Troy James Weaver

[REVIEW] Excavation by Wendy C. Ortiz