. Spinning .

In truth, I’m more impressed with the poetry in this issue (Vol. 30, No. 4) than in the short stories.  I am certainly no expert at either writing or critiqueing poetry, but words and form such as this delight me:

Still, for a while the rain seemed
nothing.  We lashed ourselves
to ourselves.  We were a line. Un-
crossable.  The line of us could walk
and weep and believe we were of use.

(Up the Steps of the Capitol, Nance Van Winckel)

Simple, good imagery, powerful picture of hope and human caring.

While it was my intention to breeze through these literary journals quickly, reading just the limited number of short stories, I do tend to check out some of the many poems when walking with the book in hand or just having time for a quickie.

There are some excellent poems in this issue (Vol. 30, No. 4).  There’s one about a teacher who is determined to reach the students and make sure they understand his point in a particular poem, as the students freeze and die. (Cold Reading, Brenden Constantine) and another about who we are and who we thought we’d be, in Taking Out Trash by Charles Harper Webb. 

There are some clunkers (in my amateur opinion) as well, but the majority of those I’ve read are very well done.

Quite excited about this issue, even delved a bit into the poetry.  Read the six fiction stories and all were very interesting and well written.  Also read the two nonfiction pieces and I herein admit that had I not known they were such, I would never have guessed.  Same imagery, sense of story, inviting voice, story arc, structure, etc. that I used to think was reserved for fiction only.  I’m glad I’m wrong.

Let me highlight a couple of the stories for specific reasons.

Refund, by Karen E. Bender, is the story of a couple living in NYC that find themselves financially strapped.  When they get a chance to go down south for a month to earn some extra money they sublease their apartment.  Unfortunately, it is during the 9/11 disaster and the tenant moves out after ten days and demands her $3,000 full refund for fear and suffering and claiming some dirt and silly crayon marks as more reason.  The young wife refuses to grant the full refund, knowing that the money is already spent and also that there are ten days that the tenant was there and she left the windows open to the dirt and soot.  The e-mails back and forth between the wife and the former tenant are very funny and yet turn poignant, even as the tenant keeps demanding more to come up with a grand total of $54,000 due her.  But the twist is too good to leak here.  The characters learn, change and interact nicely.  The element of the e-mail correspondence is a nice touch and the story is just very well done.

Alyson Hagy’s Border reads like a novel that pits character against the odds.  It is exquisitely done and again brings in a sympathetic protagonist, a teenager who steals a puppy and meets up with various characters along the way as he tries to escape and learns how much he’s willing to do for the puppy.  The ending here is powerful and unexpected, yet built within the arc gradually.

The Great Cheese by Luke Salisbury is a story within a story as a father repeats a tale he’s told his son many times of how he and his brother tried to bring the biggest cheese ever made across country as a gift to President Andrew Jackson. There is the adventure of that tale interwoven with the relationship of the man and his son that is structured very well in that one naturally flows around the other.  There is another story being told within the tale, and that is one of racist behavior of others in the south at that time, and that brings in the element of tragedy probably more eloquently for its place within the setting in the drama.

Valerie Sayers’ Sleepwalk is the story of lost love that returns twice in a married woman’s life, and the episodes and backstory blend in in perfectly planned narrative structure so that the final impact is built by many timelines instead of just one.  Nicely written, nicely plotted out.

I must leave you with this excerpt from Ira Wood’s nonfiction piece, Instead of–it is the opening paragraph:

This is a story about not doing; this is a story about everything else.  The trouble with writing is that it’s too easy not to do.  Imagine if eating chocolate was as easy not to do as writing.  Or paying your mortgage.  Or making an eight o’clock class.  Imagine if you were firmly convinced that all the stupid things you do instead of writing were also more important than sex.  Oh, no, I don’t want to take you doggie-style, I have to check my e-mail.  (Ploughshares, Winter, 2005, p.195)

Before I allow myself the pleasure of The Best American Short Stories, I’d like to work on the backlog of lit journals a bit more, especially when I’m so close to clicking the "print" button on one of my own pieces.  This particular issue of Ploughshares has only six fiction, two nonfiction and about a million poems in it; this last which I do not feel obligated to read immediately since nothing’s going to help me there except a new soul filled with poetic and lyrical language automatically attuned to meter and imagery.

Dragged my way through to the end, and found something of real interest in this edition.  Out of twelve authors whose work is presented, only one has never been published.  Most of the rest are published in their own novels or short story collections or have a list of inclusions in some of the other literary journals, and most of them are winners of grants in fiction writing, teach at the college level, or at the very least are agented.

Yet how odd that only two of the stories moved me with both story and writing style.  This is not to disparage the choices presented nor the authors, but rather gives me something to think about if I insist on trying to break into this market.  If the lit journals and publishers are flooded with material, one would think that it would affect the quality of what is being accepted; that indeed, today’s reading would offer nothing but the creme-de-la-creme of writing.  Now this may be it, and although I think I have some feel for exquisite versus amateurish, and I must add that I fall just outside the line of amateur in my own style and understanding in my writing and have a long, long way to go, I might be totally out in left field with my conception of what’s good and what’s just, well, not so good.  Maybe not only in writing, where I know I’m still learning, but in reading as well, which I thought I had an edge on, I’m not there at all.  Something to think about, along with re-looking into the University of Phoenix online degrees…

On to Roxana Robinson’s short story collection as noted in a prior post.  Professor Robinson had been one of the instructors at the Wesleyan Writers Conference and I was very impressed with her methods and manner of teaching as well as the style of writing she seemed to be taken with.

In the next to last story I’m reading in this issue, Lady of The Wild Beasts by Debra Spark, the narrative structure is a case of braiding two stories together.  The opening story is of a man in an office building at a job he dislikes (surprise!) writing the story of twin sisters, one of whom was a schizophrenic cartoonist, very artsy and free and dead; the other a sort of prim and matronly type who appears to be rather self-centered and I’d say a bit resentful. 

One of the problems I found here was the difficulty in understanding that this was indeed two separate stories set in different times and one character in the first is supposedly doing research and actually writing the second.  This was figured out within a couple of pages, but the author (Spark) made it even more difficult by throwing a lot of extraneous characters into each story that made it rather confusing and a lot more trouble than it needed to be. 

The writing was good, the stories were okay, but the first one sort of goes nowhere when the man’s boss fires him and he simply continues writing the story on his own and there is no real conflict nor resolution to this one.  The other story which follows the alive twin to a friend’s house where the friend isn’t home but a neighbor stays with her and she has to walk a dog that she doesn’t like, along with sequences of backstory on the dead sister tossed in (and, more characters) just has her facing the fact that her sister is dead and may have killed her best friend as well.  Nothing really moving in character study, maybe a bit of a twist on the revelation of a possible murder, but without ever returning to story #1, I see no resolution or dramatic closure. 

It’s a difficult maneuver to carry off, taking skill as well as very careful planning to achieve clarity and suit purpose.  With the sudden dropping of the first story without conclusion, that of the writer covering the second story of the twins, I found it a bit sloppy in that respect. 

One last one to go and I’m back to Aristotle and perhaps I’ll let the lit journals pile up one more quarterly’s worth and move to a short story collection by Roxana Robinson, A Perfect Stranger. 

S’um bitch.  One of the stories I really didn’t like because it seemed just another neurotic sitting at a desk with his memories and daydreams and problems with alcohol is included in a newly published collection by this writer. 

While I didn’t have any argument with the writing, the story just seemed cliche in its context of contemporary fiction, and also had one of those head-scratching endings that I tend to dislike.

So I guess that while I will continue reviewing and posting on the stories that hit me one way or another in these literary journals, it must be considered to be from an unprofessional, maybe un-with-it reader.

Why in the name of all that is sacred and hallowed do I feel this great need to finish every story I start to read?  Is it the artist granting his fellows due respect?  Is it to learn how not to write as well as how to?  Is it my father’s DNA of frugality that insists I waste nothing that’s paid for? 

Only two books in my life have I laid aside at least halfway through, and one I know I shall pick up and finish some day.  I have even pulled out the bookmarks that marked not only my progress, but to me, my failure and guilt. 

I am midway through another story here, and I’m very tired of the first person pov of a neurotic office worker who puts himself as well as all around him down in a fast-quipping manner that’s way overdone.  Many of the stories that aren’t set in Kuala Lumpur find themselves in this same office building, with the same Gen X bored and frantic disillusionment of evidently someone who feels his story must be told because it’s gotta be different, and it’s not.

Please don’t tell anyone, but I may just be able to skim through and past a few pages here and there if I summon the Great Literary Spirit to help me.  As an aside, I wonder why I reverse this in my writing, and have fifty stories started but only less than half of them finished–even in the first draft meaning of finished.

Another good one in this same Fall 200 issue, by Randa Jarrar.  Qamar, a young girl who decides at nine she wants the moon for a neighbor boy who marries another before Qamar is fully grown.  She becomes a ballerina, then a tightrope walker and meets Hilal, who loves the moon and rockets and soon, Qamar.  But Qamar is promised in marriage to another.  On her wedding day, Hilal shows up just before the vows are said and Qamar looks out to the street below to see him standing there with a rocket to take her to the moon.

She stood up and walked toward the balcony. 

Her feet reached over the railings.  Her family stopped eating, and all eyes were fixed on Qamar.  She jumped down to the yellow clotheslines.  Hilal saw her then, and a bright smile stretched across his dark face like jet stream in a clear sky.

He started the rocket engine.

She walked the line all the way to the end and jumped onto a lower clothesline.  The People in the street looked up at her and heaved a collective "here she goes again."  They informed the Bawab and told him to check on her.  he was too afraid to climb any clotheslines, so he yelled at her from his post at the front of the building.  "What’s with you, Qamar?"

"I want the moon," she yelled back.  The People began to say something, but Qamar did a back flip onto another clothesline dotted with a fat woman’s underwear, and told them, "And I don’t need your advice this time."  (p. 105)

The image of a young woman flying through the air between buildings, balancing on the clotheslines, the freedom and grace revealed in her ballet of rebellion and reaching out for true love, the "clothesline dotted with a fat woman’s underwear" — very, very nice.  Especially now that I’m intrigued by magical realism and the inclusion of a little nonsense that one desperately wants to, therefore believes. Because daily reality holds a lot of big nonsense; only not of the delightful kind such as this.

Just discovered that some of these stories may be read online, and in finding the link to Ploughshares for the previous post, I’ve found the story by Miles Harvey that I discussed (or, I suppose I should say "held forth" upon since a discussion would involve at least one other person).

Go ahead, read it:

The Drought by Miles Harvey

Sometimes there’s an extra special story in a literary journal and I’ve found one that excels on all counts.  Drought by Miles Harvey (Ploughshares, Fall 2004) is an exquisitely written story based on the simple premise of an adulterous affair between a young newcomer to a town, a weatherman, and the young wife of the local barber.  The third person narrator is the weatherman’s boss at the local tv news station who has seen the potential in his new hire, and as well is informed about the affair and knows about the young woman’s history of marrying as a young nineteen-year old to an older man, and suffering through the loss of her young son in an accident.  The lovers drive out to meet and sometimes go for rides before some passionate sex under the stars in the outlying fields.  In the meantime, the town is suffering through all the devastation and loss of a two-plus year drought.  Then the woman is discovered dead in her overturned pickup truck and the weatherman has survived but is changed emotionally by the event and when the rains finally come, he goes to the barber’s for a haircut and never is seen again.

The choice of pov, the story arc of the weatherman’s showing up in a town, having the affair while the drought worsens, and disappearing, and the underlying stories of the drought, the young woman’s history, and the intent and friendship of the narrator drives a perfect story arc, but it is the voice of the narrator that makes this story shine.

One night, when the grit seemed to glitter in the moonlight, as if they were driving through stardust, the weatherman and the barber’s wife wandered far from town.  Zigzagging through a maze of country lanes, bounding over empty pastures, making one impulsive turn after another, they rushed past any place they could have later identified on a map.  The barber’s wife had been taking more and more risks of late, leaving her seatbelt unfastened as she smashed the truck through barbed wire fences or bounced it over gullies.  Sometimes, the weatherman wondered if she hoped to meet the same fate as her son, but on nights like this, those close calls only seemed to heighten her sense of purpose and desire.

Mr. Harvey uses subtle imagery, hints at changes the relationship brings to the characters (they rushed past any place they could have later identified on a map), and paces the story perfectly to a building climax (the death of the woman in the accident) as well as a gently falling arc that closes with the end of the drought and the possible involvement of the barber in the disappearance of the weatherman.  There is impeccable timing to the story; the tone is somber yet exciting; the background stories of each of the four main characters–the weatherman, the woman, the barber and the narrator/manager–are all placed appropriately within the ongoing story and each reveal their own little mini-arcs that bring them to this point where they collide.

As with my first introductions to Atwood and Munro through short story, I will be looking for more from Miles Harvey, although a quick check with amazon.com rendered this single book by him based on true crime and it shows mediocre reviews, despite my own opinion that even this short story in Ploughshares, The Drought seems to indicate that Harvey holds all the tools for writing a compelling novel. 

I suppose it doesn’t matter; the joy of even this one story among what is so often a slushpile of an anthology brightened my day (though this is the one that brought me to despair over my own abilities).

No great shakes as yet, but this line stood out, from Intimacy and The Feast by Leslie Daniels:

I thought you could see through the black letters on the page to the author, but they couldn’t see you.  I thought that was ideal.  (p. 56)

This reminds me in particular of the study of Sylvia Plath for example, where her poetry is incorrectly approached and dissected using knowledge of her history to interpret its meaning.  It also smacks of my own discarded premise that the author is the story, and we should try to understand what he or she meant rather than read our own interpretations into it.  How very un-Barthes.

Unfortunately, the rest of the story kind of lost me and in facing the pile of books reproducing themselves in the frolic of silent nights in my living room, I skipped the rest of it.  Believe me, I will carry this guilt of unfinished reading with me, but it’s something I’ve discovered I can do as time grows short and my wants and needs in literature expand.

Okay, I’m not afraid; I’ll start naming names.  Rebecca Brown’s The Last Time I Saw You, in Ploughshares, Fall 200four:

"I think the last time I saw you may have been that time near the church.  I still like that church despite this, though the church is also other things to me.  In fact, more and more I wish I remembered those other things that are called permanent, inviolable, impregnable to assault or trespass, secure from violation of profanation, constant and true the way I remember you."  (p. forty-two)

Kind of nice.  But then it goes on this way for eight and a half pages.  I recall Dorothy Parker, but that had substance.  If there is a story here, I missed it because it was sort of like listening to a friend go on and on and on about her broken relationship until you need to tune out and nod at what you hope are the appropriate pauses.  Here’s the wrap-up:

"Maybe, that time, I admitted you were right.  Maybe I said that I knew I had been kidding myself but that I still wasn’t going to do what I needed to do because I was a coward, I was a liar and afraid that I knew that I had stolen something from you like a thief.  And maybe I cannot bear to have said what I said, what I might have said, and to know that it is true.  And maybe I cannot bear for you to know what you know about me.  I cannot bear to know that you loved me once and look what I did to you."  (p. 50)

Has anyone here never written such words in our diary or torn-up (if we were smart) letter to the lost love?  It’s not that this is badly written nor not relative to human nature, but isn’t it a bit cliche?  Instead of Parker, we have teenage angst that never learned to cope.

BTW, I’m actually an issue prior to the one I noted previously, since I found the earlier one unread and am weird about keeping things chronologically organized in my catching up of the lit journals.

One of the stories in the issue of Ploughshares that I’m reading is about a gay man who happens to have troubles with his mother and his lover, and he’s discovered paid spanking.  We don’t really find out why he suddenly comes upon this need, and I’m taking his explanation that he needs to "feel something" as emotional solitude learned as protective barrier from a mother who didn’t really react to his announcement of sexual preference, and a pretty-boy lover who we’re shown often is more involved in what’s on tv than in couple interaction.  (This story is from a well-published author, not a newbie; most of the writers in this issue have quite good publishing credentials.)  And the ending is a letdown. 

We really haven’t a feel for the character, and the only saving grace to me was in just having read Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude to help understand the character’s motive, but Marquez wove a book around this human reaction to life.  A short story without real resolution doesn’t cut it.  This character is forced to dump his mother in a nursing home when she develops Alzheimers.  He goes through his mother’s house and things, but no real sensitivity or recall is given that would add depth and value to his character.  He cries for twenty minutes in a men’s room stall of the nursing facility as he leaves his mother behind and so I would think he’s feeling normal emotion, and maybe we can even stretch our understanding to cover their relationship and her muddle-minded acceptance of his gayness, but there never really was any conflict revealed anyway.  Then he dumps his lover because he hasn’t noticed the welts on his ass and he happily continues his relationship with his sadistic liaison.  That’s resolution?

I’m getting the feeling that contemporary literature is sort of the first-year CW student tendency posted prior, and that some of the the lit journals perpetuate the misconception of value by introducing new words or concepts for mere shock value, testing the controversial limits of good taste just as each new television season is flooded with the latest word to slide by the censors.  Last year it was "ass."  I’m afraid I haven’t watched enough tv in the past month to note the latest addition.  The above story discussed includes gay sex, Alzheimers, sadomasochism and Disneyland.  Yet it still doesn’t seem to have a story.