Katherine D. Stutzman Archives

~by Katherine D. Stutzman

148 pages/$12.00

“Here lies a man who….” Each of the thirty essays in Matthew Vollmer’s Inscriptions for Headstones begins with some variation on the traditional text of an epitaph. From there they spiral outward, memorializing experiences not often mentioned on gravestones: killing copperheads in the driveway with a shovel, tearing pages out of Playboy in a mall bookstore as a teenager, feeling guilty for spending time in front of the computer instead of taking your child sledding. Vollmer (Future Missionaries of America, Fakes) observes with pleasing precision the ordinary moments that make a life; he uses these moments to explore the relationship between memory and identity and to mourn the passing of the many different selves contained within each person’s history.

The essays in Inscriptions for Headstones are brief, usually no more than five or six pages, each written as a single sentence that wends circuitously through a mixture of reminiscence, digression, confession, and contemplation. The pieces all seem to be about the same man, referred to only as “the deceased,” captured at different points in his life from early childhood until he himself becomes the father of a young son. Certain motifs—an obsession with angels, a childhood in North Carolina, an adult life of teaching and writing—recur throughout the collection, binding the essays together and unifying their subject matter. Continue reading →

Editor’s Note: Books We Can’t Quit features reviews of beloved texts in any genre that are at least ten years old.

Amulet Books

256 pgs/$9.95

I first read Aidan Chambers’s novel Dance on My Grave on August 17, 1994, when I was fifteen years old. I know this because it made a big enough impression on me that I wrote about it in the journal that, eighteen years later, I still have on my shelf. Although that journal entry doesn’t say much beyond, “I read a great book this weekend,” it’s impossible to overstate how much Dance on My Grave meant to me. I read it again and again. I knew its place on the shelf, and sometimes when I was at the Bethlehem Library I would go visit it, just to touch the spine and look at it, even if I wasn’t planning on checking it out. I can still remember the cover of that old edition: bright green, with white type and a picture of a newspaper clipping on the front.

Like so many books written for teenagers, Dance on My Grave is both a love story and a coming of age tale. In this case, the romance occurs between Hal and Barry, two boys in a seaside town in southern England. Hal and Barry are typical teenagers; their affair occurs against a backdrop of trouble with parents and nagging questions about The Future, and is marred by the recognizable teenage mixture of bad decisions, impulsiveness, and overreaction. But they are both boys and that’s where the story diverges from the typical, or at least from what was typical in my world in the summer of 1994.

At fifteen I was just coming out, and I was starving for images of queer people in books, in movies, on TV, anywhere. I couldn’t have articulated that at the time–I don’t think I even realized what it was that I was so desperately seeking. But Dance on My Grave was the first book that I ever read about gay characters, and that’s a large part of why it became so hugely important to me. I read it in my room with the door closed, holding my breath, barely trusting the words on the page- was I really reading what I thought I was reading? I got intensely involved in the love affair between Hal and Barry, amazed at the frankness with which Hal expressed his longing for Barry and at the frankness with which Chambers depicted both the emotional and physical aspects of their relationship. Continue reading →

Katherine D. Stutzman

[REVIEW] Inscriptions for Headstones by Matthew Vollmer

Books We Can’t Quit: Dance on My Grave, by Aidan Chambers (A Review by Katherine D. Stutzman)