Neil Serven

In workshop we talked a lot about two recurring themes: at-stakeness in fiction, the importance of putting of something on the line for a character so that his or her situation had undergone a change by the end of the story, and the narrative appeal of a character that is—to use the word we used—unhinged.

Meaning the character is not always going to make the right decisions for him/herself in the pursuit of a goal or happiness, and that flaw adds an intriguing layer of complication to the plot. And that is the kind of behavior that is going to have irreversible effects that will linger after the conclusion of the story. The reader expects to be taken to a different place, to see something sacrificed or gained or both.

One reason this came up is that my own stories tend to come off feeling very safe, with little change after the picture is over, or the kind of change that can simply be undone with an apology or the guy moving on. It’s like the sitcom plot effect; no matter how tightly you squish the sponge, eventually it reverts to its original shape. Even in my stories that have “worked”: the boys in “Where the Sun Don’t Shine” are still going to play ball tomorrow, and the worst that Petey got in “Return Policy” was a little humiliation in front of a cute ex-co-worker. (I suspect this may tie into my Parking Lot Problem, too.)

I thought about this when I was reading the stories in the current issue of Booth (Issue #5), put out by Butler University. There is some exceptional work here throughout, including a series of stories under the heading of “Winesburg, Indiana,” all set in that fictitious Middle American locale (a regular feature of Booth).

Andrew Hudgins’ “Raymond Snow” is my favorite of this quartet. Right away it puts us in the limited third-person view of a character that can’t keep his shit together:

I was wearing mittens because the warehouse was cold as hell so maybe I didn’t have as good a grip on the forklift’s wheel as I thought I did when I slipped my blades into the skip, and somebody must have got the load off-center because when I lifted, the forks hadn’t gone all the way in, and the TVs—the flat screens, plasmas break if you just fart in their general direction—sort of slouched on the pallet at about three feet up. So I sped up to try to force the fork all the way in. That’s when I kinda tossed ‘em into the shelving unit that tipped and hit another shelving unit that tipped too, but luckily there was a wall next, so it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been.

Well, that’s what they have insurance for.

Raymond gets fired, an act which is he forced to own up to later at a family reunion when he is trying to make a good impression on his new girlfriend. His limitations (of patience and intelligence) get the best of him. Raymond does not start a fight, but seems like the kind of person capable of starting with one when he is cornered or outsmarted.

Then there is Matthew Baker’s “Tête-á-Tête,” written in the convincing first-person voice of a young female sculptor-barista who is prone to overreaction and neediness and finds herself running away from responsibility as a response to a perceived slight from her new boyfriend.

Carlo C. calls. “Hello?” he says. “Hi,” I say, and explain who I am, in case he forgot. We met once at the supermarket—Carlo C. asked for my number, then gave me his. “Oh, that’s right,” he says. “Sure, sure, I’ll come over.” Carlo C. is a renowned attorney with a firm here in town.

I put on my orange dress and mid-thigh stocking striped stockings. Next I try and fail to clean my apartment. Next I accidentally drink an entire bottle of wine. I call my sister but she doesn’t answer. I hook on hoop earrings that are très hip, take them off, hook them on. Carlo C. is at the door and I’m holding it open, been holding it open—how long? Not sure. I decide no more wine for at least twenty minutes.

Baker’s unnamed narrator isn’t just unhinged, she’s at a loss in her pursuit of happiness. The healthiest option is would be for her to simply move on, focus on the tasks in front of her, and not let her spite inflame her other relationships, but of course that inflammation is the drug hit she seeks; it is her only motivation. Hence her piling on lies and excuses to her work, landlord, and boyfriend; it is why she calls for her sister’s approval while at the same time is revolted by her need for it, and why she makes a straight line for a rebound while feeling the need to tell us, the reader, about the guy’s successful career. It is why she winkingly asks us to condone her wine-guzzling and poor work behavior and shitty apartment management.

When the sister doesn’t answer, the narrator imagines that “she’s probably mad at me or busy getting skewered by her super nice husband on one of the counters of their super expensive flat. To which I would say—mad at me? Whilst thou are skewered by a dreamboat husband, and thy unfortunate sister doth suffer outrage after outrage at the hands of lesser men?”

But irresponsibility alone cannot propel narrative drive; these characters are at least seeking something of value through their backward ways. Conversely, there have been books I’ve read that felt overextended by a character’s seeming refusal to face up to his/her desires or responsibilities, leading to a frustrating plot surrounding a juvenile individual you aren’t convinced to root for. The characters of these books weren’t unhinged or broken enough to follow through with a change in life direction out of impulse, misguided or otherwise. They were just kind of mopey and sad.

The Normal School, Volume Six, Issue One. One great thing about The Normal School: I come away from each issue feeling like I’ve learned something. There was Ned Stuckey-French’s superb Elvis essay a while back, and now Joe Bonomo (This Must Be Where My Obsession With Infinity Began), in “Mama Loved the Ways of the World,” writes about a subject of charming serendipity: old country music 45-RPM records that approach the subject of topless dancing. There are apparently enough of them out there, if you look in the right places, to form a cottage industry, and WFMU disc jockey Greg Germani is an avid collector who shared some of his treasures with Bonomo. The jewel of these recordings is “Please Don’t Go Topless, Mother,” a novelty performance tune written by Ron Hellard and sung by 7-year-old Troy Hess:

“You’re ruining your reputation, and I can give you two big reasons why.”

Bonomo tracks down Hess, now 48, to recall the story behind the record and its aftereffects: its limited run of 750 copies; its suppression by radio stations that refused to play it and consequent aftermarket among collectors who found gold in its kitschy ribaldness; industry journalists who caught up with Hess later in his young career and portrayed him as an example of a child star being exploited by his record-producer father. Bonomo’s writing is fluid, fun and engaging; he is in on the joke without piling on to it further, and his exposure to the adult Hess gives him access to some withering anecdotes, including one of the boy, his singing career having cooled off, being dropped off at his local school in the custom van in which he once toured, with his name still in fading letters on the side.

This issue also includes a short story by Peter Ho Davies, who had a story appear in Harper’s in January 2001 called “What You Know.” That story concerns a writing teacher who must cope with the news of a deadly shooting committed by a student at the school where he teaches. It was probably one of the first pieces of post-Columbine fiction to address the subject of in-school mass violence, and it foreshadowed later novels on the subject by Jim Shepard, Richard Russo, and Lionel Shriver. Coincidentally, this issue also includes an essay about school violence: “Boys Least Likely To,” by Colin Rafferty. According to an author’s note, Rafferty had originally begun the piece in the wake of the Columbine shootings but shelved it, and picked it up again after the recent tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary. The essay interlaces a timeline of the events at Columbine with a hypothetical third shooter’s first-person account of the tragedy:

I am about to become real with a muscle’s twitch, a hammer’s fall. From my vantage point, I have watched them walk from the cars (the bombs I’ve built, the things I’ve known) to the top of the hill. People eat lunch, waiting, mouths moving slowly in contemplation. Rachel Scott is laughing at something her friend has said; her hair is falling back onto her shoulders. Down the hill, the cafeteria doors open, and I can see the toe of Dan Rohrbough’s sneaker edging out.

It is a beautiful day; this is why we start outdoors. Part of me is glad the propane does not catch fire.

The fact that a piece like this can still be fresh tells us how few of our questions about youth violence, and the rage and giving up, have really been answered.

Zoetrope: All-Story, Spring 2013. Each issue of Zoetrope is a showcase of design, not just new writing, and this issue is no exception with edgy cutout art by Geoff McFetridge (some of it tied to the stories in the issue). There is a reprint of Daphne Du Maurier’s “The Birds,” the basis for the Hitchcock film, and a clever story called “AP Style” by Dan Keane, ostensibly about beauty pageant scandal in Bolivia and set against the backdrop of that country’s crumbling infrastructure. The story is alternately told in official dispatches from a journalist stationed in La Paz and balanced out with terse, insensitive exchanges with the press agency.

The summer issue of Zoetrope is designed by Michael Stipe and includes stories by Karen Russell and Chris Adrian.

Look! Look! Feathers, Mike Young. Received this book as a gift from the author at AWP. Young’s writing is electric; in these stories he finds new and inventive ways to paint modern landscapes, dotted with new fusion restaurants and salvaged buildings and old bingo halls. His verbing of words (“tried to karate a guy”; “slump to bed, blear up at noon”; “started to windmill the dude”) creates a frantic pace that slides the reader past the obvious next step and into the sublime. A good number of his metaphors invoke food, which allows for a vicarious participation of the two least-invoked senses in fiction. Character is not skimped on; each story brings together a community of eccentrics and semi-frustrated observers who know each other and are comfortable letting their familiar quirks do the communicating for them. This is one of those books I’ll be coming back to more than once.

Fourteen Hills, Vol. 19.2. For some reason I received two copies of this issue in the mail, about two weeks apart. For the second time in three issues of Fourteen Hills my favorite piece was sports-related: the narrative poem “What people have against sports,” by Joe Sacksteder. It is ostensibly about two cousins on opposing junior-varsity hockey squads facing off in a championship game, but Sacksteder sets the lyrical scene against alarmingly on-point generalizations:

They have a problem with hockeymoms / with pennies in a milk jug, cowbells—though by the time hockeymoms get to the college level they’ve abandoned these noisemakers / They have a problem with their harpy screeches / with their unbridled aggression / with their absolute knowledge of the rulebook

May We Shed These Human Bodies, Amber Sparks. The back cover of this book has a blurb by Ben Loory, whose book I read last September, and it’s appropriate, because before I noticed the blurb I was thinking that some of the early stories in this collection reminded me of Loory’s fables. Sparks is not as deliberately elementary with her language, however; in some of these tales the plot fades off the page so that the reader’s attention is directed to sentence rhythm, the echoing of sounds, and in many cases close character is shunned in favor of a helicoptering over an arrangement of actors, as in an anthropological study:

There comes a point, always, where the wolf-child or the goat-child or the bear-child or the monkey-child is discovered by humans. There is power in the inverse of the usual myth: A child is found, is a foundling, will be the founder of a new civilization or dynasty or world. There is power in the second beginning, the tumbling out from the wild woods’ womb, the original loss glossed over and made to disappear.

 I Am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe. It is as tone-deaf as any novel about the modern college experience written by a sheltered elderly writer who refuses to listen to his editor can be. The events depicted here with the intent to shock—the hooking up in place of meaningful relationships, the gaping athlete-student divide, the cheating and plagiarism, the fraternal entitlements, all in prose as subtle as a train derailment—have been going on in the American university system for decades, and I honestly think Wolfe wrote this book thinking he was doing the public a favor by letting us know about it all.

Because all stories are old stories, right? It’s just finding a new way of telling. I do tend to gravitate toward the fantastic, towards myth and fairy tale, I think partially because it’s what I know, what I grew up reading, and partially because it’s what I’m interested in—I’m not very interested in what can happen, most of the time, but rather what can’t—and I think partially because fairy tales, myths, these are the oldest stories, the stories that humans have been telling each other since the beginning of humans. And I like the idea of starting with the primeval, the basic building blocks, and then applying that framework to our modern lives and machines. I feel like then these stories do two things: say something about us now, and say something about us always, this weird young race that’s just hanging out all alone in this corner of the universe.

I’m in the middle of reading Amber Sparks’ collection of fably and far-out stories, May We Shed These Human Bodies, published by Curbside Splendor, and now she is the featured author at Atticus Review, with an interview with Jamie Iredell, along with three new stories and an excerpt from her novel in progress, “Only the Winter Stars.”

Last month I attended a dynamic poetry installation constructed by my friend Christopher Janke at our friend Daniel Hales’ house in Greenfield, Massachusetts. “How the World Wears Its Words” deconstructed a single poem written by Janke, titled “Of the of of the of,” and isolated different parts of it at several stations throughout Hales’ yard, on sheets of clear vertical Plexiglas, so that words would align with the scenery on the other side. There were also sheets of large words whose shadows projected up the side of Hales’ white house as the sun set for the evening. Hales also recorded several pieces of music to be listened to at different stations around the yard.

The preposition prominent in the title repeats throughout Janke’s poem, and the positions and arrangement of the installation give physical weight to the relationships of space and time denoted by “of.”

At Coldfront Magazine, Crystal Curry has descriptions, photos, and impressions.

The All-Star Baseball Issue of Cobalt is up today and I’m excited to have a new story, “Duster,” featured among a powerhouse “Home Team” alongside Aaron Burch, Ben Tanzer, Kimberley Lynne, Jenny O’Grady, Clara Changxin Fang, Mark Pawlak, Marjorie Maddox, Courtney Preiss, and Ray Morrison. There is also an interview with Stewart O’Nan (Snow Angels, Last Night at the Lobster).

The “Away Team” lineup went up yesterday and features work by Sampson Starkweather, Henry Alley, David Press, JM Huscher, Andy Fogle, Richard Jordan, Lou Gaglia, Amanda Bales, Megan Pugh, and Gillian Osborne, along with an interview with legendary sportswriter Frank Deford.

Many thanks to editor Andrew Keating for putting this fun issue together and letting me be a part.

At The Guardian, Renata Adler emerges for an interview in light of the re-release of her novels Pitch Dark and Speedboat by NYRB Classics. She is now 74 and apparently unable to find a comb anywhere in New York. As usual, there is a lot here about The New Yorker, as Rachel Cooke revisits all the bridges Adler burned with her 1999 book, Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker. In that book, she calls Adam Gopnik “a ‘meaching’ brown-nose and arch manipulator.” Her friend Michael Wolff, comparing her career to something millennials might understand, calls Adler “Lena Dunham many times over”; Cooke says Adler “might have been Joan Didion’s younger and slightly more pugnacious sister.”

Apparently we have David Shields (Reality Hunger) to thank for Adler’s fiction being back in print:

Following a campaign by the National Book Critics Circle and by the super-fashionable writer David Shields, who claims to have read Speedboat some 24 times, her two novels are finally back in print, a development that has been widely welcomed even by the New York Times.

Elsewhere her many fans have lined up to acclaim her particular brand of what Katie Roiphe calls Smart Women Adrift fiction (according to Roiphe, who shares her contrarian instincts and a good deal of her bravery, Adler is the absolute mistress when it comes to conveying “the exhaustion of trying to make sense of things that don’t make sense”).

Adler warmed up for her re-emergence at a friend’s book release party back in March, as documented by Boris Kachka in New York Magazine:

“This is slowly panic-making,” Renata Adler says with a husky tremor. Out at her first cocktail party in months, the 74-year-old writer wears, as always, a single thick braid of hair, now gone a straw-tinged gray. “There’s Amanda Burden,” she says of the wellborn chair of the City Planning Commission. “I know Amanda. But see now, either you embrace somebody, thinking, Oh God, maybe they have no idea who I am, or it’s someone who’s my oldest friend and I forget. Should I go over?”

Speedboat and Pitch Dark, Renata Adler. Had to shell out for both of these titles after all that’s been written about them. More than one person I follow posted photos of the clown-makeupped covers, side-by-side.  Their re-release by NYRB Classics seemed to be such a roiling underground event, like a flash mob, that by the time I got around to buying my copies I feared the cachet had already worn off.

Before now I only knew of Adler as a journalist and critic. Speedboat and Pitch Dark are of an era the way Joan Didion’s books (fiction and non) are of the same era. It is impossible not to read them comparatively: both books feature female journalists as protagonists and are told in first-person patchwork narratives. Jen Fain of Speedboat lives in New York and works for a tabloid, the Standard Evening Sun, where she hangs around power brokers and hops down to Washington, D.C. She lives in a brownstone and is friendly with her neighbors; someone has murdered their landlord, but that’s not treated as a story. She also dates a series of men and doesn’t seem too attached to any of them.

Unlike in Pitch Dark, the vignettes in Speedboat do not always tether to a narrative; at times they feel like excerpts from Fain’s reporter’s notebook. In this way the book reminded me of much of Nicholson Baker’s fiction, for the way these ad hoc observations seem to stand in for the history, desires, and vulnerabilities of the character.

More than one critic describes Fain as ‘neurotic,’ which feels to me like a projection; I was more struck by her moments of laid-back urban bemusement, her near-stubborn determination not to get too impressed:

Last night at dinner, a man said that, on principle, he never answers his telephone. Somebody asked him how he reached people. “I call them,” he said. “But suppose they don’t believe in answering, either?” I thought of phones ringing all over New York, no one answering. Like people bringing themselves off in every single adjoining co-op of a luxury building. Or the streets entirely cleared of traffic, except ambulances.

Pitch Dark feels threaded with more angst, perhaps because its relationships are doomed from the beginning. The narrator, Kate Ennis, is in a relationship with a married man. While he is celebrating his anniversary, she travels to the Pacific Northwest, then to Ireland, where, on a dark rural road, her rental car is involved in a traffic accident with a truck. She is worried the truck driver is trying to scam her, but he’s actually trying to scam the rental company, and she is, in a way, complicit. The introduction to this section gives away the inclination to neurosis:

This is the age of crime. I’m sure we all grant that. It’s the age, of course, of other things as well. Of the great chance, for instance, and the loss of faith, of the bureaucrat, and of technology. But from the highest public matters to the smallest private acts, the mugger, the embezzler, the burglar, the perjurer, tax chiseler, killer, gang enforcer, the plumber, party chairman, salesman, curator, car or TV repairman, officials of the union, officials of the corporation, the archbishop, the numbers runner, the delinquent, the police; from the alley to the statehouse, behind the darkened window or the desk; this is the age of crime.

 The Common, #s 4 & 5. The Common is quickly becoming one of my favorite journals, a must-have, and easy to get since it’s put out by Amherst College and carried by a lot of local bookstores. These two issues continue the tradition of brilliant writing demonstrated by Issue #3, written about here.

Two stories in Issue 5, Virginia Reeves’ “Maygold” and Earle McCartney’s “Lukas and Elsa,” complement each other well, though I most liked a series of poems by David Lehman, including “Remember the Typewriter”:

Remember rotary phones?

What did we do back then

if we didn’t have a phone

and had to walk a mile

to get to the bus stop?

Remember telephone booths?

Remember when the question was

how many college kids can fit into one telephone booth?

Let’s say I wanted to get a message to you.

Do you  remember what we used to do?

Remember the typewriter.

Remember the haiku

on the wine-stained menu.

Remember the answering machine.

American Short Fiction, Spring 2011. Picked up this back issue at AWP, mainly because I wanted to put my money where my mouth was. I let the students at the table know I was glad to have ASF back, and for a discounted price picked up the issue with the old camping trailer and broke hippie couple on the cover.

Damage control seems to be a theme in this one, which is funny because the Spring/Summer 2008 issue, which I also glanced at, includes a story called “Damage Control.” Ann Claycomb’s “Marie Tells All” is a story of its time—a young woman looks back at her stint as a contestant on a Rock of Love-style reality show.

The structure of the story allows for a narrative of insertion; it assumes we have seen the show before, and plays off the disparity between what we have purportedly seen on TV with what goes on behind the scenes.  This attempt to re-enact a narrative already presumed to be familiar to an audience with new annotation is a meta-echo of the commentary and outtakes we expect to find on DVDs nowadays. The narrator’s twin sister is also a contestant, and that’s the angle they are encouraged to play off:

Then later, we’re back at the house heading for the hot tub and he stops Teena—at least, he thinks it’s Teena—and says, “I haven’t tasted those sweet lips yet tonight, have I?” and kisses her. Only it’s me. I think you can tell it’s me because I melt into him again exactly the way I do in the limo. But of course, to most people Teena and I look so much alike that maybe the melting looks alike too.

In “The Steam Room” by Shannon Cain, the wife of a mayor of a “midsized American city” is caught pleasuring herself in a public sauna by two teenage girls. Her husband is up for re-election, and a PR consultant is brought in to script the apology and spin the aftereffects while angry parents hold vigils on the couple’s lawn. While that picture is sewn together, the reality underneath, including the welfare of their teenage daughter, comes apart:

Jerome rubbed his hands over his face, a condescending gesture. “The YMCA, Helen? For Christ’s sake! All those kids running around? All those old people?”

“Don’t forget the cripples,” she said.

“Irresponsibility—“

“Wait! I get it. I have orgasms without you!” She clapped her hand to her chest. “That’s it, isn’t it? I got myself off, without you. Nobody respects a candidate whose wife—“

“Has a criminal record?”

She found her glasses and put them on. The streetlight outside the window shone behind him, the backlight erasing his features. “Don’t think it’s not a sickening feeling,” she confessed. “I’m sickened.”

Mythologies, Roland Barthes, translated by Annette Lavers. Regarded as the lighter side of Barthes, it includes essays on such disparate yet approachable-sounding topics as wrestling, soap powders, and the Citroën, all viewed through the lens of modern myth and semiology. A longer essay at the end ascribes the value of myth to the separation between the signifier (the symbol) and the signified (what it stands for). The book seems to yank the reader back further into abstruseness than Sontag, who in her essays always comes back to the beauty of things, and so feels consistently accessible. This one didn’t flow as well, and I don’t think the translation is to blame, but an updated one has been released nonetheless.

Grist #6, 2013. Not to be confused with the environmental-news web site of the same name. This annual print journal comes out of the University of Tennessee Knoxville, a city with at least one interesting bookstore where the journal staff throws dead-writer costume parties.

Grist is billed is as “a journal for writers” and combines fiction and poetry with essays on the writer’s craft. Maud Casey’s essay examines the “narrative clock” in fiction and how its ticking creates tension, comparing three examples: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, and Paul La Farge’s Haussmann, or the Distinction. Nicky Beer’s “On Metaphor in Poetry” manages to say a lot in seven paragraphs on what would seem to be a cloudy subject:

Language is a lovely prison. We use it with the intent to build a bridge to meaning, and yet we inevitably erect a wall instead. We are plagued by the fact that our lives can never be perfectly, exactly rendered by language—there is always some subtlety, some nuance that suffers in translation.

…

Metaphor, it seems to me, is our way to rebel against the restrictions and limitations of language, against its literalness. One might even say that the very tradition of love poetry, with all its woo-pitching associations and comparisons, springs for the sheer inadequacy of the statement “I love you.”

On the whole I enjoyed the nonfiction much more than the fiction in this issue. There is also an interesting narrative essay by Baron Wormser on Willem de Kooning. I wouldn’t complain if the typeface were larger, but I imagine that would have added to the cost.

Friday’s Final Jeopardy! was near and dear to my heart. I knew the answer right away:

1950s Novels
John Updike wrote Rabbit, Run partly in reaction to this more carefree novel that was published 3 years earlier.

A: What  is On the Road?

In his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels, Updike explains his decision to expand on the character theretofore sketched in a short story, “Ace in the Hole,” and poem, “Ex-Basketball Player”:

To this adolescent impression of splendor my adult years had added sensations of domestic interdependence and claustrophobia. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road came out in 1957 and, without reading it, I resented its apparent instruction to cut loose; Rabbit, Run was meant to be a realistic demonstration of what happens when a young American family man goes on the road – the people left behind get hurt. There was no painless dropping out of the Fifties’ fraying but still tight social weave. Arriving at so prim a moral was surely not my only intention: the book ends on an ecstatic, open note that was meant to stay open, as testimony to our heart’s stubborn amoral quest for something once called grace. The title can be read as a piece of advice.

On the Road was published in 1957. The year before, Congress passed the Federal Aid Highway Act that launched the Interstate Highway System under President Dwight Eisenhower. Gas was cheap and cars were becoming cheaper, so it was only natural for fiction to look at the intensity between stations, of running toward and running away and traveling to a place where your past is not a weight on your character. Kerouac’s novel is not absent of moral awareness; through the eyes of Sal Paradise we do see Dean Moriarty abandon his wife and daughter, paths fracture and separate, and there is a message that the rush of going will continually dissatisfy. Rabbit’s wish is different from Sal’s and Dean’s. He doesn’t run to hide from his past, but to find a hole where it can be revisited again, on his own terms.

At The New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog, Ruth Franklin writes about the letters the magazine received after publishing Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” in 1948, “the most mail the magazine had ever received in response to a work of fiction”:

There were indeed some cancelled subscriptions, as well as a fair share of name-calling—Jackson was said to be ‘perverted’ and ‘gratuitously disagreeable,’ with ‘incredibly bad taste.’ But the vast majority of the letter writers were not angry or abusive but simply confused. More than anything else, they wanted to understand what the story meant.

…

There were some outlandish theories. Marion Trout, of Lakewood, Ohio, suspected that the editorial staff had become “tools of Stalin.” Another reader wondered if it was a publicity stunt, while several more speculated that a concluding paragraph must have been accidentally cut by the printer. Others complained that the story had traumatized them so much that they had been unable to open any issues of the magazine since. “I read it while soaking in the tub … and was tempted to put my head underwater and end it all,” wrote Camilla Ballou, of St. Paul.

I know I read “The Lottery” in school, perhaps even junior high. In my memory it was my first definite instance of identifying the foreshadowing of an event before the event took place. The fishiness feels obvious in retrospect:

Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones; Bobby and Harry Jones and Dickie Delacroix—the villagers pronounced this name “Dellacroy”–eventually made a great pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other boys. The girls stood aside, talking among themselves, looking over their shoulders at the boys, and the very small children rolled in the dust or clung to the hands of their older brothers or sisters.

…

The children had stones already, and someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles.

Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head.

Old Man Warner was saying, “Come on, come on, everyone.” Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.

“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

The times they were in his apartment she seemed distracted, as though there were things she wanted to rearrange. She couldn’t believe he didn’t keep any fresh basil on hand.

It was beginning to feel like an audition. The conversation kept slipping away. And he began to sense that he was repeating his jokes and she wasn’t telling him.

I’m very pleased to have a new story, “In the Whore’s Style,” featured as an Editor’s Choice today at Ayris, the literary journal of the New Hampshire Institute of Art. To be included in the 2013 print issue as well. Many thanks to editor Jenn Monroe.