short stories

Author Interview with Melissa Ragsly of We Know This Will All Disappear

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Order WE KNOW THIS WILL ALL DISAPPEAR HERE

PANK Team Member Emily McLaughlin sat down with our 2019 Fiction Contest Winner (as selected by Gabino Iglesias) and 2020 PANK Books Fiction Contest Judge Melissa Ragsly to discuss the incredible stories in her debut collection We Know This Will All Disappear.

Emily McLaughlin: A strange time to have your book come out . . . What has the book launch during a quarantine experience been like so far?

Melissa Ragsly: Honestly, I have nothing to compare it to, but it’s definitely felt restrained, happy to have it out in the world and a network of friends and writers to share it with. I don’t think it can replace some of the traditional elements of a book launch. A launch in quarantine might be less expensive, no traveling required, but I think it’s limiting in terms of who has access to a book. If you are promoting through your own social media, there is less chance of breaking through to someone new. I’ve done some virtual readings and some more are coming down the pike, but I’m also imagining next summer, I’d be able to do more in-person readings in bookstores and bars. The intimacy of what I write seems best experienced in dark rooms, not screens. Maybe it would be best if I recorded bits of stories in sound files instead of Zoom events. I’d rather you hear these stories in that context. It’s been a challenge to think creatively in any context as our lives have changed so much in the past few months. Adding to that pile by coming up with solutions to creatively market a small press book? It’s surreal.

EM: When you read “Bio Baby” for the book’s launch at AWP, does feel of another lifetime. That story is even more moving read aloud. Since then, the more time I have spent pouring over the sixteen stories here, the more I am floored by how perfectly crafted and polished each one is, how you pack so many exquisite details into short spaces, how each one performs the tricks only stories are capable of. I could bring each story into my creative writing class and hold up as an example to students: “this is how you write a short story” and then point out, and this is how much work you can expect it to be. Can you walk us through your drafting and revision process, maybe how much time you spent on revising one story versus another?

MR: I’m not one of those people that writes a whole draft through knowing I need to go back and fix everything. I like avoiding the fixing. I start a story with an idea or an image, a feeling really, so I don’t really know what it’s about or where it’s going. I write a page, print it out, edit it for voice and in doing so, usually find the next beat. Write that, repeat until I get to the conclusion. For flash, sometimes, that conclusion or the point of it is hiding in the first draft, but I still try to coax it using the same process. Drafting feels very back and forth, like playing an accordion.

EM: And how do you decide that the story is complete, ready to send to journals?

It’s difficult to write a story and think it’s perfect and it being done is not the same as being perfect. So you just have to accept it’s done when it feels done. When I put it down and pick it up again and it still feels done. It can try to fool you into thinking it’s complete, fake you out a bit, or maybe that’s something that happens to me because I’m lazy and I just desperately want it to be over. You write it and then you have to sneak up on it again after a few days. It would terrify me to write straight through and then go back to the beginning and tackle all its mistakes from the first paragraph. I need to know some of that work is done so that when I am done with it, it’s ready to go out on submission. 

EM: I love so many of your lines. This one, in “Napkin of Death Metal” is amazing: “Sometimes just sitting in a bar makes men think girls are waiting for them to come. A girl is a frozen toy mouse marking time until a paw bats them across the floor.” This seems like the kind of line a writer gets in her head and thinks, I have to put this in a story. But maybe not?

MR: That line was added on the last pass through. To go back to the earlier question, how do you know when a story is ready to send—without that line it wasn’t ready. Sometimes a line can only come out once you know better what the story is about and you can either say it straight out, or you can try to allude to it. A line like that is almost for me as much as for a reader, I’m telling us both what it’s about.

I think that the only time I came up with a line first before the story was the opening line of Bio-Baby. “On the morning of my abortion I watched a Teen Mom 2 marathon.” That was going to be a completely different story. More essayistic, more personal and it turned out the complete opposite. But I kept the line.

EM: Each story seems to do its own thing, invent its own way of how it’s going to tell the story, and compiled together, this gives the collection a sense of unpredictability, excitement. Yet there’s a feeling of stability reading them, in that you know each one is going to deliver some kind of feeling of peace. How did you assemble the stories, or envision the structure for the book?

MR: In ordering the collection, I went with intuition, all feel, but the specific feeling I tried to create was something like a wave, so in and of itself, something peaceful, yet unpredictable; delightful, yet destructive. Something whose strength can surprise you. Having both longer stories and flashes, you just want the pattern of them to make sense. You want some pieces to feel like a breath, some like an anchor. A table of contents is like this puzzle you get to play with, shuffle around the order. I did that until I felt I’d translated that feeling of tides.

EM: The majority of the collection uses first person narration versus the five stories told in third. Did you ever feel pressure to write in third for variety’s sake? Does one seem more natural to you than the other, and what do you notice changes about the story when you write about the character in third? For example, in “No One’s Watching” why did you ultimately decide to approach the character from third, not first, as opposed to a story such as “Bio Baby?”

MR: I can full-throatedly say I prefer first person. Writing it and reading it. I want the intimacy of it. When I hear criticism of it, that its navel gazing or self-indulgent, I don’t get that at all because it’s like criticism of first person seems to come from people thinking it’s someone talking to themselves in their own head when to me it’s someone talking to someone else, it’s like a one-on-one confession. It feels like the only way a writer and a reader can bond. I’m also just a very one-on-one person. Third person feels so group to me. Like no one is being honest here, it feels polite, like as if not to offend. I tend to think of third as more appropriate for longer, more traditional stories, almost as a default.  

“No One’s Watching” was very different on the first draft. The story as it is now was the flashback in a longer story, so third made it feel distant from the rest of the story. I kept that, I think, because the story itself, emotionally deals with distance that isn’t quite understood by the characters yet. It’s almost like an origin story, maybe you’ll find that character again later in a first person story dealing with the ramifications of those feeling and events in this one.

EM: All of your stories have these meditative poetic lines buried in the paragraphs, as if you or the characters are humble, trying to hide them.  Just one example, I could pull so many out as examples: “I wanted to know I had a place that I wouldn’t have to exist for anyone but myself.” Is this intentional to not draw attention to the writing? Does more self-congratulatory writing bother you?

MR: I think if you reveal something vulnerable, or a truth that you realize, you do it in a non-calculated way. Your body just opens up to the truth and it’s a portal that can slam shut quickly. Most people stumble on the truth and then can turn their backs to it without realizing it or wanting to, because it appears randomly in a moment. It makes sense to have those moments appear and then the characters move on. It’s not conscious on a writer level, but more on a character level. I think I write about the types of person that thinks this way. Like, there it is, I see it, and I’m going to blink and it might not be there when I look again.

EM: That’s a very nice way to put that. So what was the first story you wrote here?

MR: “Tattoo”. That was started probably in 2014? 2015? And then most of the longer short stories after that. In the last year, it’s been mostly flash. Flash really opened me up in a way longer stories didn’t. They feel rule-less or more freeing in their containment.

EM: Is there a story you feel closest to?

MR: It changes. At the moment, I feel a connection to “Napkin of Death Metal” and “All You’ve Heard is True.” It goes back to the idea of flash. I think there’s so much of me in both of them and if I tried to write these as longer pieces, they would feel diluted. I feel like these are four-dimensional. I like to joke my favorite is writing in the fourth person and I think this is what I mean. I think!

EM: So obviously you are writing a novel in fourth person.

MR: I am writing a novel and I have been for many years and I haven’t quite cracked how to do it. I know people have opinions on how to do it. And many people have done it, so I know it’s possible. But I haven’t yet!

EM: How do you approach keeping your character’s level of perception of her world consistent in a novel versus in a story? (to clarify: do you struggle with interiority in the form of novel versus in the story?)

MR: I actually started writing this novel in third person and it never quite worked. I switched to first but then it wasn’t working then because it was about more than one person, so I found the groove using several different POVs. And while I have not completed this one, of course I have already started formulating the next and I also am thinking of it as several different POVs. I feel comfortable with telling the story that way. Multiple POVs feels like you’re telling an oral history and I’m obsessed with them. Like reading a documentary. And yes, I do think that is also a way for me to keep handle on the character’s interiority, because I’m finding ways to use different character’s thoughts and happenings as companions and comparisons to others. In a way, it feels a little like trying to formulate that collection order. Finding ways for the story as a whole to feel like teeth on a zipper gnashing together. And again, it’s not always about interiority for me, so much as the conversation between the character/writer and the reader. The characters are not talking to themselves so it’s more like an open interiority. Like the roof’s off the room.

As far as being productive, lock-down with children has made me feel like my hands are tied. But the goal is to have it finished this year. 

EM: That’s ambitious — even for a writer not locked down with children!

I was trying to figure out how you wove such suspense into the story “Lilith,” when we already know the ending at the start – Lilith is not coming back. Can you tell me your secret? When writing this one, did you find yourself not wanting to conform to tropes about missing women? Is this why the character thinks in terms of time tables, lists of facts, even math equations here?

MR: I wanted there to be an element of logic as a way of containing your feelings. Some people don’t know how to feel. But they do anyway, so what are ways that feeling emerge? I was obsessed with thinking about those crime solving brainstorm boards. Pictures of people and places connected by strings. I wanted to play with how logic and feelings can work together.

This story came together on one of those days where I just felt depressed and like I couldn’t think and I just felt like watching Dateline which is like a once a year, falling into a depression, brain-clean. Just sit there and watch stories about murder and crime and how people figure out these puzzles. I saw one about a missing woman. She was never found. It’s a pretty famous one, although I can’t remember her name. You didn’t get the benefit of the arrest at the end. A question you don’t get the answer to. It was frustrating for me, sitting there depressed on the couch, not knowing what happened to her. How is it going to feel for someone who is actually invested. I just wanted to try to understand how that felt. I felt like there were so many questions within my family that were never answered. Or answered much later. So I also wanted to think about how sometimes you can’t have an answer, you can’t solve something and so how do you move on? Do you make up an answer and accept it or do you keep trying to solve it? Or do you just get stuck?

EM: Do you want to tell us about the book’s cover and your vision for how this melancholy image correlates to your title?

MR: The cover is a picture I took that is actually larger. You don’t get to see the whole image and the whole one is actually more hopeful. That hooded man — that’s my husband and that’s a park in our town and one of our kids was in the swing. So, the sort of gloomy hood of death is next to a kid in the swing, but turned away. So it’s actually kind of funny.

The black and white, the hunch, yes, it’s melancholy as I think my stories are, but I do think that the title also reflects an acceptance. Everything will disappear in time, but that means the bad things too. Any pain or crisis, lockdown. All that will be over at some point. The effects of all the things we live through, good or bad, remain. That’s what stories feel like—the stubborn invisible.

EM: How did you maintain confidence or stop yourself from succumbing to self-doubt when working on this project, or maybe your next project? Any special powers you tap into in order to dig your feet in?

MR: I don’t have self-doubt about my ability, but I am so lazy when it comes to time and I’m absolutely a late bloomer so it doesn’t bother me to take a long time to get a project done. I feel like if it’s worthy and meant to be in the world, I will finish it.

Any writer’s special power is reading. But I’m a bumble bee reader. Maybe because my name means “honey bee” or I feel like I’m missing out if I don’t, I have to be reading like 15 books at once. The best thing is to have a big pile of them and read 10 pages in each until you cycle thorough and start over again. It’s kind of like flipping through channels. I look for similarities and connections and see if the different books speak to each other in some way. Yesterday, 2 things I read mentioned Zeno’s Paradox. I’d never heard of it before and then twice in one day, Zeno and his philosophies come into my hands. Reading and thinking give me the confidence to write because I want to be that brain exercise for someone else. Just a link in the chain.

ORDER WE KNOW THIS WILL ALL DISAPPEAR HERE

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Melissa Ragsly is a writer living in the Hudson Valley. Her work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best Small Fictions, Iowa Review, Hobart, and other journals. More can be found at melissaragsly.com.

We Know This Will All Disappear by Melissa Ragsly

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We Know This Will All Disappear - Melissa Ragsly - Fiction Book Award Winner - Short Stories
Order We Know This Will All Disappear HERE

Even in a catastrophic world, still we seek the solace of stories. You won’t be disappointed with our April release We Know This Will All Disappear, a first collection by Melissa Ragsly and our 2019 [PANK] Fiction Book Winner selected by Gabino Iglesias.

We Know This Will All Disappear is a collection of short stories and flash pieces that explore the chaotic and exhilarating inner lives of women and grief. The sense of loss they navigate does not always stem from the death of a loved one, but rather the loss of something dear, something familiar. What do we put in that empty place when something is gone?

These stories create a beautiful and devastating atmosphere for the reader to follow characters as they play an emotional hide-and-seek. Looking for answers as well as questions in dark surprising places. Replacing a lost thing, you can make your world more chaotic and claustrophobic—adopt a mannequin with your friends, sing the entire karaoke catalog, sell your story to a momager—or you can shed things around you to make more room for the grief. You can rent a secret room, you can grow your baby outside the womb, you can sleep in your childhood bedroom under your Bruins posters. These are the ways these characters survive.

These sixteen stories are not about defeated people, but people that are in a pause, a crossroads, that only they see before them. These characters are intimate with themselves; intimacies are raw but not always truthful. These are stories of adaption.

“We Know This Will All Disappear burrows under your skin looking for answers to questions you didn’t know you’d asked. These stories are dirty, brilliant, painfully human, fast, and strangely sensual. They were pulled from somewhere between a drunken phone call and a half-forgotten childhood dream. Read them.” – Gabino Iglesias

Order We Know This Will All Disappear HERE.

[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] 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

[REVIEW] Ice Bar by Petra Kuppers

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(Spuyten Duyvil, 2018)

REVIEW BY SARAH NANCE

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What must stories do? asks the voice of Petra Kuppers in the background of her first collection of short stories, Ice Bar. In her closing remarks to the collection—aptly titled “Field Notes,” positioning the author as a kind of sociologist—she suggests that the ethical charge of a story is to approach the “contours of the world you want to see” (176). The stories in Ice Bar are thus configured to face a world on the brink of environmental, commercial, and industrial collapse, carving out a space for queer lives, disabled lives, and intersectional lives. It will take a new kind of hybridity, Kuppers proposes, to face some of the potential future paradigms we have set ourselves up for: the collapse of infrastructure, large-scale environmental destruction, heightened violence at borders between countries and worlds.

It’s not all doom-and-gloom, however; Ice Bar also imagines other possible futures that present new versions of human life and existence: bodies that merge with machines and plants, otherworldly beings that take form as trolls, dinosaurs, and dolphins to curry favor with humanity and escort us to alternative dimensions, and cracks in time and space that offer challenges to current models of power and privilege. Ice Bar passes no moral judgements, offers no consolation in the face of oncoming disaster, but instead taps into a different kind of potential energy: what are the possible worlds we may face, and how can we recognize every kind of person who can and should be a part of these futures?

The collection’s title story and opener, “Ice Bar,” is set in a near moment of apocalyptic collapse. Alissa, a survivor of sunlight and radiation—a heat that killed—navigates the ravaged cityscape of Oslo until she finds a door to an underground lair: the Ice Bar. Here, a former tourist-trap made of ice is repurposed as a space for interactive performance, friendship, and living. “Dance on the volcano. We will survive,” one patron says to her, “Dance the freaking music baby” (6). In this bar at the end of the world, Alissa joins in a rotating group of performers, navigating a space where binaries of the former world fall away, leaving in its place a queer space of possibility, of paradoxes that the stories which follow complicate, investigate, and celebrate. 

Kuppers transforms prose stories into lyric meditations in ways that are convincing and disarming in their beauty. “The Road Under the Bay” takes the storied history of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, tracing the human and natural costs of infrastructure innovation through the underwater world, where a bridge worker lives on, suspended in water in a new hybrid bodily form. Meanwhile, a woman named Doris feels drawn to the water, having heard a hum calling to her since childhood. As the story reaches a high lyric pitch, Doris’s body shifts in a flurry of scientific description: “DNA strands unweave and reweave, a mitosis of a new embrace. Small cytoplankton organisms wander in, and find their home in new pools, rooting deep through her flesh. Cells burst gently, opening like flowers. Tiny fragments of mitochondria unspool and align themselves with the sticky ends of Doris’s older strands, new pearl strings clicking into place” (120). The story merges the individual worker with grand cultural mythos of the bridge, creating the possibility of a parallel world where he and his labor abide beyond the longevity of humans: “I shall not pass over,” he asserts. “All my nows are down here now, and will ever be. My wages are still waiting to be paid, I shall have my recompense, my promised land, a warm bed” (113).

The collection’s strongest innovations come from its ability to insert the reader into what appear to be conventional settings or situations, and then drop the bottom out from the story in thrilling and unexpected ways that reconfigure what it means to be human, or to have an identity. Ice Bar’s most memorable stories play off of stories new and old, “reinvent[ing] the myths of otherness” to “claim old ground,” as Kuppers describes it (174).

In “Dinosaur Dreams,” a student and an activist both disappear on a seemingly ordinary day, finding each other in a dark underground world where voices beckon them for help. “[W]e need you,” they say, suggesting the world that is to come and beckoning the reader alongside the bewildered women. “They need you, too, after the bombs and fires. We need to build. Are you ready?” (71). Similarly, “Grave Weed” also follows two strangers who meet by chance, this time in a bookstore as they search for the same dusty botanical tome; they become “grave weed” scavengers together, gathering lichen growing on graves in asylum graveyards, tinged with “some mixture of madness, medication and exposure” that “created mineral-rich bones, a special fertilizer” that endows psychedelic qualities when consumed. Their drug trips create interdimensional spaces where they both follow the contours of their institution-related traumas. And, in the fantastically imagined “Vicki’s Cup,” the owner of a coffee shop harbors a magic-infused secret recipe for a drink that keeps her shop afloat; however, in training another woman to help, disastrous outcomes result, suggesting the tenuousness of creation, craft, and supply chains.

The possibility of this break in the supply chain—whether on a personal, institutional, or national level—becomes one of the book’s guiding critiques. Where are we left when guiding institutional structures break down, when the environment’s destruction turns against us, when we are forced to compete for furiously diminishing resources? Stories such as “Dumpling’s Pillar” situate us within the crossroads of destruction, suggesting new ways of forging connection in an era of scarcity. The story’s first-person narrator, a bike messenger, notices something odd about the public transit system one day during her delivery schedule: “All the trains in Southern Norway were down, standing still, their massive engines cooling in the early fall sunshine” (43). As the weeks progress, networks fail one by one, until even cell phones become useless, charger cords repurposed as “garlands in old Christmas trees, slung like off-white offal into the green plastic branches” (44). As the narrator and her companions find new ways of interacting in the world—forming groups for safety, enacting trading economies, jumping on local internet networks that broadcast like old short-wave radios—the story itself shifts from a near-future science-fiction infused tale to one of unexpected fantastical dimension, taking readers in one direction, then abruptly folding in on itself, becoming something else entirely. The narrator meets up with an old friend, Kristin, and the two follow the electronic echoes of an open network where anonymous users exchange mysterious messages. A crack in a tree takes them down a tunnel and underground; there, they happen upon something they could never have expected to find.

In this, one of her most imaginative and unexpected stories, Kuppers suggests a pattern that the rest of the collection builds upon: the current models of networking, infrastructure, and power dynamics are failing us, and possible solutions only lie in unexpected—often unassuming—places. The state of our current cultural moment requires us to imagine alternative worlds that privilege dynamic, hybrid, and intersectional bodies and minds, that promote a sharing of experience instead of hierarchies. It’s no wonder that so many of the stories in Ice Bar take place underground or underwater; these alternative possibilities are not available to us at surface level. Ice Bar’s speculative stories refuse singularity or continuity, offering instead a range of possibilities for rebuilding, reevaluating, and restructuring our world.

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Sarah Nance holds a PhD in English from UCLA. Her work examines the intersections of illness, environment, and violence in literature, and she’s at work on a book project on the varying micro and macro scales of illness as represented in contemporary culture. Her writing has appeared in The Crab Orchard Review, Belletrist, Faultline, and elsewhere. She lives, writes, and teaches in Colorado Springs.

[REVIEW] Read by Strangers by Dean Walker

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(Lethe Press, 2018)

REVIEW BY JOHN COPENHAVER

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Philip Dean Walker’s new short story collection, Read by Strangers, tests, blurs, and breaks boundaries. These boundaries are literal: a group of kids burglalize an abandoned house. They’re intellectual: a professor steals inspiration from her student. And they’re emotional: a mother obsesses over a virtual reality game rather than caring for her child. At times, Walker’s writing is transgressive, wriggling toward experimental: In one story, he employs syntax that mimics the didactic lines of Proverbs and, in another, he experiments with the structure of a playbill biography. His choices are bold and compelling, urging us to question our truths and our desire to push boundaries, to cross a line.

In the preface to Winesburg, Ohio, early American modernist Sherwood Anderson defined what make people “grotesque,” a term the great short story writer Flannery O’Connor would later put her southern Catholic spin on. According to Anderson, it’s when characters cease to be able to hold multiple truths in their hearts and instead adhere to a single, uncompromising Truth. A concept in keeping with our current political moment, but also in line with Walker’s Read by Strangers. Many characters in Strangers latch on to an idea of themselves or the world around them and make decisions based on that idea: “my mother doesn’t love me” or “my boyfriend is out of my league” or “other women are the problem in a male dominated workplace.” Embracing these absolutes leads these characters to make choices that take them beyond a common social or moral framework, leaving us to ponder and scrutinize their actions: Would we behave as they do? Are their actions redeemable?

The opening story of the collection, “Unicorn,” is narrated in the first person plural by group of kids who explore an abandoned house. They are hunting for evidence of the family who lived there, a family who deserted it after the tragic death of their child. What begins as teenage curiosity shifts as the story unfolds; a chilly, dispassionate timbre emerges, as if these kids can’t quite understand the magnitude of what they’re exploring. It’s an appropriate introduction to the collection: Walker invites us to look in, but warns us that we might not like what we see: It may baffle us, offend us, or implicate us. Later, we return to this theme in “Habitat,” which cleverly employs collective narration through group email chain. In it, the correspondents follow the disintegration of a mutual friend, but their concern is clearly rubbernecking in disguise. They want to know the story, but not because they care about the tragic figure at its center. In the penultimate story, “Versimilitude,” a college writing professor, who fears her creative powers are waning, reads a compelling student story and retraces the student’s steps to the source of his real-life inspiration. She then harvests his experience for her own writing, a disturbing step beyond plagiarism. In Read by Strangers, the characters are driven by their singular Truths, often the product of their deep insecurities, which they combat by crossing a boundary, whether it’s breaking in a house, gawking at someone else’s tragedy, or stealing a student’s material for your own. Like Anderson’s characters in Winesburg, Ohio, they’re a menagerie of grotesques, trapped by their Truths.

In several stories, these trespassers realize the horror of their actions and make a gesture back toward the realm of acceptability, attempting to step back over the line they crossed: “I will put my child first,” “I won’t endanger my coworker,” “I am loved.” Whether, as readers, we agree to let these characters back over the line is up to us. Walker leaves us hanging in most cases, bracing ourselves for an impact that we imagine will come, making us as complicit as he is in the outcome of these characters’ lives. If we judge, what does that say about us?

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John Copenhaver is the author of the historical crime novel Dodging and Burning (Pegasus, 2018). He writes a crime fiction review column for Lambda Literary called “Blacklight” and he is the four-time recipient of Artist Fellowships from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. He is also Lambda Literary Fellow and Larry Neal awardee. His work has appeared in Lit Hub, Electric Lit, Glitterwolf Magazine, and others. He grew up in the mountains of southwestern Virginia and currently lives in DC where he chairs the 7-12 grade English dept. at Flint Hill School.

[REVIEW] Darker with the Lights On by David Hayden

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(Transit Books, 2018)

REVIEW BY STEPHEN MORTLAND

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David Hayden writes stories that feel like magic tricks. They begin with something familiar, an object, an experience, a relationship. Then the stories shine, they distract the eye, they muddle the familiar to the point of its disappearance. The reader is left suspended, unsure, waiting, until, finally, the familiar returns. But it has been changed. What was once familiar, an object of disregard, has been made new, a rabbit pulled back from the invisible world of the magician’s hat. Reading Hayden’s debut collection, Darker with the Lights On, is both a visceral and an intellectual experience. The stories occupy the space of dreams. The fiction is unbound by rules, or at least unbound by the rules that dictate our experience. It is, in fact, the boundlessness and unpredictability of the stories that allow them to so adequately reflect our experience of living in an ever fluctuating and tenuous world.

“Many years have passed since I stepped off the ledge.” So opens Darker with the Lights On. “Egress,” the first story in the collection, is a monologue from the mind of a man perpetually falling from the top of a building. This unruly marriage of motion and permanence is representative of the rest of the stories in the collection as well. They evoke the dream phenomena of immobility, our legs churning and yet nothing really changes. The stories are filled with a sense of mystery with no direct object. We piece together clues to solve a dilemma we have not been able to articulate.

I expected to be cold but the air was mild, the speed delicious, the freshness vast and edible. I remember looking up briefly to see my fellow directors staring with alarm through the boardroom window. All except Andrew, who pinched his tie, smiled and waved.

I stopped of a sudden on the air, all my mass returned to me, seemingly in the pit of my stomach, my arms and legs flopped forward, and I gazed down to see a woman with a chestnut bob staring up – I was definitely too far away to tell it was a chestnut bob. She looked away, down at her feet or towards the door of the yellow cab that had just pulled in to the kerb, and I began falling again as quickly as before; and the cab door opened and, as she stepped in, she glanced at me again, and again I paused, juddered in the sky, and I heard the door thump closed – I was probably too far away to hear the door thump closed – and I began falling all over again with fresh delight. I sang, and the stale, old words tore away from my mouth and up towards where my life had been. (“Egress” excerpt)

The collection, put out by Little Island Press in the UK and Transit Books in the US, is beautifully rendered and meticulously crafted. Each sentence is a labyrinth, each word in conversation with the words surrounding it. Vocabulary is liberally appropriated to fit the purposes of the imagery. The resulting language is entirely innovative and startling—symbolic without submitting to easy analogy, metaphors built entirely of association. The language resists mere interpretation and is hell-bent on gaining its own autonomy. It becomes a moving, acting force in the stories alongside character and scene. The stories are as much about the shifting and capricious movements of the language as they are about the decisions and impulses of the main actors. There is no sentence in the collection that is without a trace of Hayden’s singularly distinct eccentricity or off-kilter idioms.

The radio comes on loud in the yellow bedroom. I feel like my teeth are going to fall out. My teeth fall out and then fall back in again. I get up and the sofa’s skin stretches and snaps back to itself. I stumble for the stairs. Light is washing and blinking around the trembling frame of the bedroom door. The handle rattles. I know I will be shocked if I touch it. There’s a rushing sound behind me and I run into the bathroom waving steam away. The shower is on, yellow, green, red, silver sweet wrappers spray from the head into the tub and onto the floor. I close my eyes and grab the tap turning and turning, and when the flow stops I stand up and hear silence where the radio’s clamour was. I undress and get into the bath, the heat and sweet perfume soothes me, frees me of the need to sleep that I have had for as long as I can remember.

In many of the stories, Hayden presents a version of a traditional horror or mystery story, immaculately stripped to its barest essentials. In this narrative minimalism, the absurd is highlighted and space is created wherein Hayden inserts strange emotional energy and a sense of vulnerability. Often the central horror of a story is obscured—introduced quickly and just as quickly forgotten in the flutter of linguistic flourishes. A home invader is hiding throughout a house, but we watch as a loaf of bread scuttles and presses itself against the side of a bread bin. A woman is sobbing on a sofa, but the reader is carried along a wintry beach with the sky, a vast anvil, hovering over it. Nowhere is this obscured horror more severe than in “The Bread that was Broken.” A charred corpse with an accompanying place card labeled “Thomas” is carried out and set on display amidst a dinner party. The body is introduced without explanation, Hayden’s exacting language employed in service of the truly horrific.

A fierce, continuous hissing came from the great platter and a dense weave of odours: scorched wool, bad fat, warm urine and excrement, and the bitter, chemical stink of blood. The bearers stepped away from the table. There on the platter was the blackened, smoking corpse of a man.

Moments later we are lost in the absurdist dialogue of the guests, bantering in ways that feel fraught with peculiarity about domestic matters of marriage and children. Just as the body is nearly out of mind, it returns to the narrative for updates on its cooling and cracking, its shifting and bending, the pooling of its fat and the smell of the smoke rising off of it. Given the absurdity of the charade and the strangeness of the characters, one is tempted to read the story as a sort of surrealist satire leveled at the entire human endeavor, a pained mockery of guests and corpse alike. But midway through the story, Hayden reflects on the corpse with a sincerity that makes tragic what had previously been merely symbolic.

His wrecked eye and his good eye both blind, his brain complete and darkened, all electricity gone and with it the mind. The mind that knew, or thought it knew, the purpose of taking a daily walk, of a regular haircut, of holding open a door to a woman and nodding slightly as she passed to own, momentarily, whatever faint perfume might be on the warm air closest to her hair or neck. The purpose of being Thomas.

Nineteen stories make up the collection, and, even though death and danger are constant themes, it should not be assumed that all are as macabre as the story above. A large talking crow, godlike in its abilities and its self-conception, descends to save a man in “Remains of the Dead World.” The crow goes on to (maybe) usher in the apocalypse. In “Hay,” the mine in a small town is nearly ruined with flooding when anyone who steps inside is inexplicably overcome with torrents of tears. Reading, a story about a man with a theory of a sort of literary afterlife, is a Borgesian romp that turns in on itself, forcing the reader to question the very shaky boundaries of the story’s reality. Two of my favorite stories in the collection are buried near the end, no more than a page and a half each, “After the Theatre” and “Light” are strange and poetic love stories, in celebration of commitment and in fear of love vanishing. Hayden is an expert at crafting unsettling opening sentences and endings that reframe the entire story preceding it. Often in a sentence, sometimes with only a word or two, he provides a reinterpretation that demands a second and closer reading of the story.

The collection boasts a great versatility in content, but what is most impressive from this debut is the distinct singularity and confidence of Hayden’s voice and style. The stories are not overly-beholden to his influences, and they set themselves apart by their lyricism, their minimalism, and their bold strangeness.

I found myself returning to a sentence from the story of the charred and burning man. The language encapsulated for me what I find so unique and moving in Hayden’s writing and the result of his obvious toiling over the text.

“The guests were calmed and charged, they luxuriated; the dinner enlarged what was already there.”

It would be both honest and misleading to say that not very much happens in these stories—that the rabbit, once pulled from the hat, is still a rabbit. Perhaps a more apt way of explaining it, though, is to say that David Hayden’s stories take and enlarge what is already there.

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Stephen Mortland lives in Indiana. His book reviews have appeared in or are forthcoming from Entropy Magazine, Necessary Fiction, 3:AM Magazine and Full Stop Magazine. His fiction has appeared in XRAY Literary Magazine, Faded Out, and Five:2:One (forthcoming). You can find him online @stephenmortland.

[REVIEW] Of This New World by Allegra Hyde

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(University Of Iowa Press, 2016)

REVIEW BY TIMOTHY DeLIZZA

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Allegra Hyde’s debut short story collection Of This New World is one of those rare collections that, despite not being interconnected, manages to cumulatively add up to far more than the sum of its parts.

Each piece is looking at humankind’s centuries long quest for the creation of a utopian communities, large and small, and a compassionate look at how our inherently flawed nature prevents us from sticking the landing in any of these attempts.

You don’t think of it often, but this utopian urge is really an ever-present trait that is under-discussed as an innate urge, and which is better displayed through disparate stories: from creations myths to the shakers to now to colonies on Mars.

Typically in Hyde’s collection– as in life – a male egotist visionary with rigid views, a belief inspiring belief that if his way is followed it will work this time. Others then get caught up in this idea and develop collective blindspots. My favorite in the collection, Shark Fishing, follows an eco-society on an island in The Bahamas founded by one such visionary ex-military man turned idealist. The resulting attempt exactly captures both the earnestness and cynicism that goes into study-abroad “service trips.”

In fact, as I read, a long forgotten memory resurfaced from high school — I couldn’t have been more than fifteen, maybe younger — but I set about trying to write a manifesto for the creation of a Utopian society. I wish I could find it now, but I recall it was full of incredibly poorly thought out and scattered ideas.?? To name a few: there would be no central government at all, just local (town level) organizing boards and every person would be required to have a gun so that if a foreign country tried to invade they’d need to go door to door — there was no head to be cut off but the protection would be purely defensive because there were no standing armies. Also, most of childhood would be spent learning art or classes purely of students choosing, sometimes taught by other children just a few years old. Like I said, these were terrible ideas. I named the whole thing after a woman I barely knew but had a crush on. This woman, mind you, wasn’t even particularly political, and would have most certainly and wisely disagreed with all its contents. I never showed the manifesto to anyone and abandoned the project when I couldn’t figure out who, in my new system, would take on the job of sanitation worker (my epitome of a lousy job at the time).

The writing in the collection also provides a masterclass in realized moments: A haggard Vet in a Santa hat wanting to get out of a conversation, using the pretext of hearing a small ruckus behind him to leave a conversation and never come back. A former friend is met, surrounded by a row of her ex-boyfriends “each an unknown upgrade of the next” who she has managed to stay friends with and who that hang around for the rest of the story like a Greek chorus as the plot explores the tight, near ideal bond of teenage female friendship and the pains of the bond’s dissolution at adulthood.

All these touches happen without losing sight of the main theme: that so fixed is the idea of utopia in our bones that we keep searching in poorly considered ways, with often well-intended (at least to start) motives and that those brief communities are almost always doomed. This unifying idea for a collection really interconnects and reinforces itself much more deeply than collections with mere reoccurring characters or localities.

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Timothy DeLizza lives in Baltimore, MD. During daytime hours, he’s an energy attorney for the government. His novella ‘Jerry (from Accounting)’ was published by Amazon.com‘s Day One imprint. His work can be found here: http://www.timothy-delizza.com/

[REVIEW] Night in the Sun: Stories by Kyle Coma-Thompson

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nmightinthesun

Dock Street Press, 2016

REVIEWED BY CALEB TRUE

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Reading Kyle Coma-Thompson feels somehow universal, as though he were writing in a tradition of philosophical inquiry and his writing just happened to take the form of short stories. The pursuit of big questions, a sharp sense of humor, and sly skepticism unify the stories in Night in the Sun, Coma-Thompson’s second collection. Diverse in form, structure, tone, and perspective, and employing an eclectic host of characters and situations, these stories provide functional answers to the meaning of life, answers sometimes neither pretty nor conclusive, but always elegant.

The first two stories in the collection inhabit their subjects through memory, anecdote, and comparison. “Idaho” observes Djuka, a Hungarian history professor. Coma-Thompson’s unnamed narrator synthesizes Djuka’s character through various evidence—Djuka’s own offhand admissions, his history, his battle for career and marriage—with the ultimate goal of understanding Djuka’s impulses following a street massacre he witnesses in Florence. Memory is used similarly in “New Delta Future,” a short piece about a return to old haunts, but in this case memories are reanalyzed in an attempt to understand a town forsaken by time. Both “Idaho” and “New Delta Future” paint their resolutions circumspectly. In “Idaho,” the narrator reconciles Djuka’s academic elitism—and all elitism, possibly—while Djuka and the narrator drink at a workingman’s bar in an unnamed Midwestern town. The narrator’s consolations act as an answer to Djuka’s trauma of witness. “New Delta Future” employs a more intimate anecdote, poetically drawn, to point optimistically at the title, suggesting there is indeed a future for the dying town.

In “Back Pay (& Other Vagaries)” the character under scrutiny is fortune itself. This story tracks the ironies of economic success and failure of city planning and the dashing caprices of society’s striving dregs. It ends with a vagabond’s binge after hours in a Kroger grocery store. A folk hero, he is found the next day covered in vomit and dozing happily in the ceiling, having “sle[pt] it off above the heads of shoppers, swimming like a dead king in the circuits of their haloes.”

In a handful of stories in this collection, narrative is constructed seemingly out of history itself. For instance, in “Dread Elders,” a triptych story, a handshake between a cop and a young man holds an entire misunderstanding and potential for positive communion. At the end of “Judges,” the second piece in the triptych, when the ‘judge’ and the newlyweds are no longer furniture in each other’s tangential lives, one can sense a heavy emptiness in the intersection of strangers. In these vignettes, and more singularly in “Story for Fire,” the narrative reaches its critical point only beyond the page, as though Coma-Thompson has suspended the final piece of the puzzle, preserving in these stories an ouroborical permanence.

The collection closes with two excellent form plays; “Spite & Malice” and “Andrej Lives.” The first is a sixteen-part mosaic associating the risk-reward strategies of the card game Spite & Malice with a wide array of cultural and historical curios. This masterful story marries Coma-Thompson’s essayistic, analytic penchants to formal structure.  A narrative forms from this mélange as once-seeming coincidences are inextricably interwoven. “Andrej Lives” is written in the form of a reply letter to a friend who has asked his friends to provide him with reasons why he should not commit suicide. It’s meandering and beautiful, and as funny as it is touching; the sincerity of it makes the humor in “Andrej Lives” all the more biting. Perhaps we could decide, given the title, that Andrej does not in fact kill himself, but the heart of the story lies in the ambiguity through which it is written, all the way to the final aporia, in the final paragraph, which also happens to be the last line of the collection itself: “Tell us[, Andrej,] about Vitamin D, how prolonged exposure to sunshine is as dangerous as it is vital to your health.”

The stories in this collection where the author is addressing the reader feel the most original, the most unique. There are, by contrast, a handful of stories written from different perspectives and without the strong presence of the author coloring our understanding one way or the other. These more conventional stories are, on their own, excellent, and if I were to discover them in journals rather than in this collection, they would shine from the pages. However, next to Coma-Thompson’s more personal, weirder stuff—where the intense authorial presence elevates the stakes—these ‘normal’ stories feel comparably ordinary.

Coma-Thompson is at his strongest when he is working in this omniscient, essayistic mode, just kind of talking, pondering, all the while slyly assembling a narrative before our very eyes. It is difficult to accurately describe this unadulterated, unmanipulated form of narrative without getting messianic. In a way this type of storytelling feels like pure narrative, motive free. There is so much formulaic elicitation in modern short fiction, so much effort towards and emphasis on locking in a reader’s emotion early on in the hopes of hedging against a reader’s flimsy attention span. This strategy becomes tiresome; the real thing—what feels like honest storytelling—can feel like a good friend telling you a story, and that makes for effortless reading. In many of these stories, Coma-Thompson achieves something like that.

The stories in Night in the Sun ponder outsize questions. The ruminations of the author—on history, his subjects, narrative trajectory, the purpose of narration in general—seem at least as important as the stories themselves. Some have compared Coma-Thompson to Danilo Kiš and Alexei Remizov. I would add Bolaño to that list, for the Chilean’s preoccupation with the meaningfulness (or lack thereof) of art; and Kundera, for Coma-Thompson and Kundera are both explicit ponderers of the meaning of life. There is something very global in Coma-Thompson’s fiction, even when he’s addressing the pitiful tribulations of provincial America, one of Thompson’s preferred arenas for grappling with life’s penetrating absurdities. This philosophical grappling is crucial, and is part of the reason this collection stands out. Without this kind of grappling, modern fiction risks irrelevance, becomes twee. At the same time, Coma-Thompson understands that fiction must be an escape from certain realities, an opiate against life. Coma-Thompson has navigated a middle ground to that paradox of literature: Night in the Sun feels simultaneously like an escape from certain realities and an intensification of them.

[REVIEW] Pool Party Trap Loop by Ben Segal

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pool

Queen’s Ferry Press

136 pages, $16.95

 

Review by Michael Vegas Mussman

 

 

What is up with palindromes? Seems like any palindrome longer than “racecar” is unwieldy both to sense and to sound. Plus, they’re fake. “Able was I, ere I saw Elba,” Napoleon never said. “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama” makes sense only for advertising copy. And who is this Panamanian man, anyway?

And yet. Certain palindromes like “radar” do shine a pretty light. I bet we invented them to feed our craving for symmetry. It’s like they’re taunting us – what if, instead of randomly combining 26 letters, we follow some logic to build our words? It’s a nifty trick.

I want you to read Pool Party Trap Loop, by Ben Segal. The stories that Segal writes reflect each other, sometimes in mirrored pairs. But where palindromes create an illusion of order by deforming words, Segal assembles elegant words to evoke a fucked up reality. Continue reading →