Neil Serven

At Farrar Strauss Giroux’s Work in Progress blog (via Matt Bell), author Nelly Reifler (Elect H. Mouse State Judge) on her disdain for neat endings:

We writers have the urge to wrap up our stories, to provide our characters, ourselves and our readers with a sense of completion. For a while I had trouble ending my stories because I thought that I needed to somehow contain or recap everything that had unfolded in the preceding pages; I thought an ending had to be the end. It was befuddling for me. I hoped that in my fiction I was talking about the awkward, ineffable, eerie, and unresolvable aspects of life, and coming to a conclusion felt contradictory to what I understood as fiction’s purpose. It felt like lying.

To my mind, a story’s ending ought to acknowledge the ever-moving quality of life; that is, I want it to engage change rather than finality. Your final word and the void following it on the page are as close as you’ll get to conclusion. The best endings to stories have a sense of hovering in space and time; even a dark ending can be uplifting, exhilarating, as long as it seems to hover in space and time — because then it reflects life to us as it is: unresolved, eternally unresolvable.

One of the lessons I took away from the Barrelhouse workshop is that a story should be a journey—it should take the protagonist (and reader) to a situation different from where they started. There needs to be something important at stake for this to happen—you can’t just have a character quit a job or end a relationship when they can then just as easily go back to the starting space in either circumstance. But it is also naïve to think that there will not be ramifications to the decisions made during the course of the story after the story has ended. It is still a challenge I face as I confront my parking lot problem in my own writing.

Booth #5. I already wrote about my two favorite stories from this issue, Matthew Baker’s “Tête-á-Tête” and Andrew Hudgins’ “Raymond Snow,” here. “Raymond Snow” is a part of a series called “Winesburg, Indiana,” that also includes stories by Michael Martone, Claire Vaye Watkins, Lee Marvin, and Porter Shreve. There is also an enlightening series of mini-essays called “How I Write” by Chris Offutt, Kim Addonizio, Pam Houston, Josh Neufeld, Katharine Rauk, and Matt Bell, as well as interviews with Chuck Klosterman and Charles Simic. Most importantly, the front and back covers feature an awesome painting, by Kevin Cyr, of a graffitied ‘80s-era GMC Vandura, by far the best cover I have seen on a literary journal, ever.

Fierce Attachments, Vivian Gornick. I came very close to throwing this book away before I read it, and I probably still will. But it’s not a bad book. It sat in a box of books I meant to give away for a long time (I received it as a giveaway long ago at my old bookstore job), and in that time it got mangled and twisted, but it seemed like a straightforward read, and after enjoying Renata Adler’s Speedboat, I guess I’m on kind of a kick for books about women making their livings as journalists in New York City.

Fierce Attachments is a memoir about Gornick’s growing up in Bronx tenements with her mercurial mother, with whom she has a challenging but loving relationship. There is also an unstable but influential neighbor who takes to a life of prostitution after her husband is killed at war. The second half of the book chronicles Gornick’s relationships with three different men in her twenties and thirties. It is admirable that the male characters in the book don’t provide its fulcrum, but it is strange how they seem to appear with some resistance on the part of the author—we don’t even realize that Gornick’s father has been living with the family until he dies, her brother is a nonentity, and we don’t meet her first husband until they are getting married in her mother’s living room. The tension arises as the teenage Gornick matures into an educated, well-spoken independent adult woman opposite a mother and neighbor who each fell into roles as young widows that, in disparate ways, dictated their later paths.

I am chronically suspicious of memoir, particularly as writers like David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs have made careers out of managing storehouses of impossibly acute micro-memories, all wax-sealed with the bonus points of having (supposedly) legitimately happened. And though I didn’t find this out until after I finished the book, Gornick apparently received criticism after some of the content of Fierce Attachments was revealed to be less than true:

Gornick admitted she had “composed” some of the walks and conversations with her mother in the memoir, and had also invented a scene that involved a street person and her mother. She said this matter-of-factly, and said she considered memoir to be in the genre of “personal narrative,” not journalism.

I can’t say this surprises me, and not because the conversations felt “staged,” but they were so impossibly specific in their line-by-line detail, and in their swift, convenient narrative propulsion. I cannot remember much about the conversations I had yesterday, though I suspect they involved a lot of roundabout talking, tacit nods, and irrelevant digressions. Which is why when I read an author’s remembered take on something from the past, whether recent or long ago, I automatically have to think some adjustment for the reader has taken place. It has to be, or else every other writer in the world is leading a much richer and more interesting life, one more worthy of acute observation, than I am.

One More Year, Sana Krasikov. A blurb on the back of One More Year calls Krasikov “as good as Junot Diaz and Jhumpa Lahiri were at this stage of their careers,” and the obvious tie to those two writers manifests itself in the mixed-American immigrant experience, with most characters originating from the Ukraine (where Krasikov was born) or Soviet Georgia (where she grew up) and now making new urban identities for themselves in the United States. There are the same imperfectly rounded speech patterns; there is the same incongruity of characters that arrive at each other through bent circuits—relationships of necessity and abuse and their own rules. People marry for green cards; mistresses meet the wives whose marriages they are wrecking. Krasikov has an ear for lyrical, non-interfering prose and gentle metaphor, making this a fluid read.

The Furies, Janet Hobhouse. I read most of this book while sitting in an inflatable rafting tube off Hero Island in Lake Champlain, and it is somewhat miraculous, in more than one respect, that the book didn’t end up at the bottom of the lake. It is another memoir , this one disguised thinly as a novel, about a woman growing up in New York to become a writer (cf. Adler, Gornick; I swear I am not doing this on purpose), though it also takes place in England (the protagonist attends Oxford) and focuses primarily on her relationship with her mother. It was left unfinished when Hobhouse died of ovarian cancer in 1991 at the age of 42.

The title led me, perhaps unfairly, to expect a narrative guided by cosmic mystery. Helen’s childhood is spent trying to please and keep up with her loving but often delirious mother, whose wish to be her daughter’s everything is foreshadowed by Hobhouse with fit apprehension:

“All at once she’s there, opening the taxi door, which hits the sun so light smites like a hero’s wound on the windowpane and on her, sunlight and shining blackness breaking into the swaying greenery as she gets out and crouches and opens her arms. I walk and then run, colliding with her and taking in the feel of her cool cheeks and warm dress, of her glossy dark hair, her mouth and neck, warm and damp and scented faintly with Blue Grass. And she, in her ritual of repossession, removes from me this warm May day my beret, my sweater, my bloomers (“Why are you so bundled up?”), my shoes and socks if she could. But she stops there and holds my clothes in one hand and me in the other as we get back in the taxi together. She smells the top of my head like a mother cat, brushes my hair out with her fingers, tousles me, unpins me, unbuttons me as far as she can and then, only then, she  says, “Where shall we go?”

Helen’s family is not rich, but her education is endowed, and she struggles to explain herself to the families of her wealthy friends from boarding school. Later, Helen’s adolescence is shaped by tacit complicity with an artist grandmother and clashes with a father in London who expects her to live “Britishly” when she comes to live with him. As an adult, she pursues relationships with men that feel like they are there to fill holes, including an affair with a writer in her building whom we know to be Philip Roth. (“I admired the sparseness of his living arrangements, the just so and no more of his furnishings, the blandness of what he had on his walls.”) Apropos of nothing, guess which writer has a long quote on the back of the book.

The ending mudslides beyond the grasp of cosmic power into unconscionable misery: an ill mother who, feeling herself a burden to her daughter and others, commits suicide; a house that gets mysteriously torched; and a fatal cancer diagnosis. Hobhouse, fortunately, seeks out comfort in domestic metaphor: at the boarding school she is frightened of “being left in a puppyhood of confusions”; adolescence “set[s] up inside me a disturbed housekeeping, not quite upheaving the works”;  the hospital is “a place that would take you out of your garden-party clothes, hide your lipstick and turn you into gray, rumpled bedding.”

Aside from an introduction by Daphne Merkin for the NYRB Classics edition, there is a 34-page prologue by Hobhouse that details her (Helen’s) family history dating back to her great-great-grandfather. By this and other decisions of curious attention, we are reminded that The Furies is Hobhouse’s attempt to tell her story with the sense of completeness and urgency that is to be pressed out of one’s final words.

Red Weather, Pauls Toutonghi. Red Weather continues the theme of immigrant identity in America, and could easily be taught in a course alongside One More Year, though Toutonghi’s book has more comic indulgences. The narrator, Yuri Balodis, is the 16-year-old son of Latvian immigrants settled in Milwaukee in 1989. The Berlin Wall is falling. Yuri’s father, an overnight janitor at a car dealership, has become a true believer in American capitalist democracy, so when Yuri falls in love with an intelligent girl peddling The Socialist Worker outside of Milwaukee’s remaining factories, his heart is easily persuaded to forsake all that Rudolfi has proselytized about the American dream.

The book is backed up by some comprehensive research. Toutonghi gives us an informed lesson the history and geography of Milwaukee. I also like that the book isn’t afraid to name brands—we get talk about the corporate histories of local companies like Pabst and Tropic Banana. But at times the first-person narration is too intelligent for even precocious Yuri, and again, the dialogue from the non-native English speakers trickily invokes a lot of the roundabout phrasings expected of someone who has only recently mastered English.

A good amount of muscle hangs on the skeleton of immediate plot, which hinges on an impulsive and irresponsible decision that Yuri makes partly to impress Hannah. The resolution is only delayed when relatives from Latvia come to visit. But Yuri finds maturity (and comes to accept complexity in his beliefs) though his developing bond with them, particularly his cousin Eriks, an aspiring rock musician who relays the cruel realities of collectivism in his home country.

While I was out of town, safely removed from the noxious gases of the Internet, I learned secondhand of the passing of Seamus Heaney.

I came to his work via a course on New Critical Theory at Merrimack. I would like to think it says more about Heaney’s power of image than it does any of my teenage sensibilities that the poem of his I remember best is the one about the drowning cats, the ‘scraggy wee shits.’

Matt Bell ends his tenure as editor of The Collagist with an exclamation point of an issue as Gabriel Blackwell and Matthew Olzmann are set to take over as co-editors-in-chief.

For the Fiction section Bell invited past contributors to the magazine to submit new work, and so Issue Forty-Nine contains stories by Brian Evenson, Tina May Hall, Robert Kloss, Sarah Norek, Amanda Goldblatt, Brian Kubarycz, Evelyn Hampton, David Hollander, Amber Sparks, Robert Lopez, Kate Petersen, Jonathan Callahan, and Kate Wyer, as well as the usual rich selection of poetry, nonfiction, novel excepts, and book reviews.

I have always liked The Collagist for getting right what many electronic lit journals do not: the value of selection. It has a clean design that segregates out each month a handful of stories, poems, reviews and essays that are chosen not just for their merit but for how they fit with each other. The issue then becomes a product of its own, as opposed to a continuing aggregate that isn’t much different from a blog.

Three stories I’ve got bookmarked from The Collagist are Tessa Mellas’ “Dye Job,” from Issue Forty-Four; Sarah Malone’s “Bridal Discount,” from Issue Thirty-Six; and Tara Laskowski’s “The Etiquette of Arson,” from Issue Thirty-Three.

American Short Fiction has posted the winner and finalists for its Camera-Flash Fiction Contest.

People who stopped by the ASF table at AWP Boston were given their choice of one of eight vintage photographs on which to base a piece of flash fiction. The winning story is “After Taking on the Milk Challenge the Earth Bear Learns Something About the Nature of Human Experience” by Caleb Curtiss:

This is what cattle looks like before it becomes a carcass, his father, who’d just finished using what looked like a machete to peel primal cuts of beef from the bone and tendon that held them, said. It was the Earth Bear’s duty to sort what was left of the animal into three metal cans labeled Edible, Inedible, and Bones. These buckets and their contents were what he thought about as he sat watching cowboy after cowboy being thrown to the ground like plaid handkerchiefs.

The other finalists are Lauren Becker, Joanna Kenyon, Kevin Fink, Amy Butcher, and Shawn Huelle.

I selected number 8, the only color photo in the bunch, with the people doing the jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table, because it reminded me of photos from when my mother was young and raised my older brother as a toddler, but then I never got around to writing my story because I left the photo at the bottom of my tote bag, amongst the beer coozies and promotional cards, and forgot about it. Maybe I’ll still give it a whirl. I’m a little disappointed that one didn’t prompt any of the finalists, though it is interesting that the same photo was used for three of the six featured stories.

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.