Mag Watch: One Teen Story, Vol. IV, Issue X: “Momentum” by Kris Dinnison

Kris Dinnison’s “Momentum” in One Teen Story is a model of concise writing that is as tight as a cube of garbage pulled from a trash compactor.

That’s probably a poor analogy since Dinnison’s story is hardly garbage. No, it’s full of beauty and truth and humor and danger and thrills and romance—all in the small space of fifteen pages of large print. It’s a coming-of-age story and a coming-out story which all unfolds during one night’s drunk, careening drive in a Pacer. Narrated by Leo on the eve of his departure for college as he’s driven through the moonlit countryside by cool tough guy Sid, “Momentum” quickly peels back the layers between the two young men as they play a revealing game of Truth or Dare. I say “quickly,” but it’s done so subtly that I hardly noticed the emotional evolution taking place in the front seat of that Pacer. Kudos to Dinnison for understanding the precision of words and the way they can shift the balance of a story to the left or to the right in the space of just one syllable. There is so much at stake in “Momentum” that the wrong word—too heavily-weighted—could have sent the whole thing tumbling into a messy pile. Instead, we get succinct passages like this:

I hated momentum. But I loved Sid. And I was leaving. And he was staying. And I didn’t know what that meant yet.

It took me less than twenty minutes to read “Momentum,” but that was long enough for me to lose my breath on a ride that sent me hurtling through the pages. It was only when I reached the end, gasping, that I was able to look back and see all that had flashed past the windows.

If you aren’t already a subscriber to One Teen Story, you should be: it’s great literature for all ages. Click here to get OTS in your mailbox every month.

“A Little Bit of Everything” in Glimmer Train Stories

I have a new short story appearing in the latest issue of Glimmer Train Stories (Spring/Summer 2016).

Yes, you can file that last statement under “Dream Come True.” I’ve long harbored hope, a small flickering flame, that one day I’d have a short story in its pages. I did have an interview with novelist Allen Morris Jones (Last Year’s River) way back in Issue #46, but this marks the first time my fiction has landed at Glimmer Train. “A Little Bit of Everything” is an 850-word catalogue of circumstances which lead to one woman’s death, based on a line I read from an obituary in The Montana Standard which said an older woman had died from “a little bit of everything.” Here are a couple of lines from the story:

It was the two husbands, one of whom gave her true love while the other gave her a child. It was the divorce of the right husband and the heart-attack death of the wrong husband. It was the hard work of single-parenthood, putting everything into her child, only to find, when he was a teenager, it had been like pouring water through a sieve.

Getting to this publication day comes after about 25 years of submissions—not every year, of course, but enough to make me feel like Charlie unwrapping the Golden Ticket when I opened the email from editor Linda Swanson-Davies which said they were interested in my story. So, I guess if there’s a takeaway lesson for other writers out there, it’s this: keep stoking that flame of hope with kindling because your Golden-Ticket day will eventually come. (And, it goes without saying, keep reading Glimmer Train to get a feel for the kind of stories they publish.)

Part of what makes Glimmer Train Stories so appealing to its subscribers is the fact that you can see the fingerprints of Linda and her sister Susan Burmeister-Brown on every page. They read every story that comes their way (“We have no assistants”) and they make sure their authors aren’t just a name and a short biographical note. Apart from the quality of its fiction and interviews, the thing I’ve always loved most about Glimmer Train are the two pages—one accompanying the story, and one at the back of the issue—where authors share childhood photos of themselves or their families and give some backstory to their piece of fiction. When it came time for me to submit supplemental material, this is what I chose to include for the “story behind the story” portion of “A Little Bit of Everything.”

     This is the earliest known photograph of me. A little bit of everything lies in wait for me over the course of the next fifty-plus years. But for now, peaceful slumber and memories of the recently-evacuated womb.
     I wrote a complete draft of “A Little Bit of Everything” on the day I read an obituary in my local newspaper, The Montana Standard. I was struck by the wording of the death notice (which I’ve used verbatim, changing only the woman’s initials and the date, out of respect for the deceased). We all basically die of the same thing—“stoppage of breath”—but this woman died of an accumulation of “things.” Because I am a writer, I started imagining bits and pieces of her cluttered life. The Hostess Sno Balls and the ozone layer were obvious suspects, but the daughter-in-law pouting in the parking lot was a surprise.
     Made-for-fiction moments like this are why I read the obituaries in The Montana Standard every day. The writer in me sits up alert when I read someone died of “a little bit of everything” and I immediately want to fill in the blanks. Other priceless obituaries include the one for the “party-hearty” dude who asked to be buried with a six-pack of Budweiser in his casket…or the man who was born on a Wyoming ranch in 1937, weighing just three pounds: “He was a tough little scrapper from the start. He was put in a shoebox, surrounded by heated bricks as a makeshift incubator and was given the name ‘Humbug.’”

I haven’t had a chance to read all of Issue 96, but what I have read, has been tremendous. Adam Soto’s “The Box” follows the titular container as it passes from owner to owner across an epidemic landscape in Africa. Its first line is “A box is crafted with no consideration to its contents.” The same could not be said about Soto’s story; there is excellent craft on display in every paragraph. Aurora Brackett’s “Beginnings” also takes some daring narrative loop-de-loops as it follows two “hippies from a commune” and their daughter across the decades. It is inventive and surprising as it gets to the heart of why and how we love the way we do. Family ties are also at the core of Lillian Li’s “Parts of Summer.“ Here, narrator Benji travels back to his Chinese homeland with his mother and his sister. To say he and his sibling are having a Cold War is an understatement. I really do love the first sentence of the story: “The summer they find my grandmother’s stomach cancer, all the feral cats in her courtyard are gassed to death and I turn twenty-one.“

Other highlights (and their sample lines) I’m looking forward to in this issue: “Waterside“ by Marni Berger (“My body keeps on without me. I see it, running alone through the dark and white world: the navy blue night and the sparkling snow.“), “My Brother is Back“ by Rowena MacDonald (“Fran is being her usual self. Completely furious with me. All the time, I’d forgotten how constant she is with her fury.“), “The King of India“ by Eric Thompson (“This was the beginning of an endless series of rash decisions about what their unborn child would and definitely would not be.“), and—most especially—the interview with Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly, husband and wife co-authors of The Tilted World (“Tommy and I have always brainstormed ideas to solve plot problems and marked up each other’s pages so extensively that they have more pen ink than printer ink.“).

If you’re not already onboard Glimmer Train, you should be. Click here to subscribe, and enjoy the literary ride.

Mag Watch: Pete Fromm's "Ballet" in Narrative

Pete Fromm's "Ballet" in Narrative magazine might just be the best thing you read about marriage this year.  It's sure to be one of the most heart-breaking.

It's an efficient, cleanly-told story about a teenage boy trying to save his parents' faltering relationship one Christmas Eve.  It opens with the young narrator (unnamed except for the jaunty appellation "Flash" by his father) stringing lights outside his Montana home, nickel-sized flakes of snow coming down all around.  When he sees his father's truck idling along the curb halfway down the block, he walks to it and climbs in.

      The radio was on low, the Stones, no satisfaction, blah, blah, blah. “How long have you been sitting here?” I asked. It wasn’t like I couldn’t have used a hand.
      Dad stared straight ahead, picking apart his reflection in the black glass. Down the block our house was completely dark, unshoveled, like no one had lived there in a long time. “I got watching you,” he said. “The lights are my job.”
      I nodded, but Christmas Eve was kind of leaving it for the last minute.
      Dad said, “Do you think I’ve gotten distant?”

We learn the father and mother have recently separated over the fact that, as the father puts it, "I let my heart run loose."

Fromm immediately draws the reader into this small domestic drama--all of it set against the already-charged background of Christmas Eve, a night full of expectations, grace given/grace received, and the sentimentality of The Nutcracker Suite which the parents traditionally played as the boy came downstairs to open his presents in the morning.  Now, however, they're all older, wiser and feeling betrayed by the father's philandering.  This Christmas morning will no doubt be an unhappy one.

The teenager's comic, bitter voice is central to the success of "Ballet."  He's caught in the center axis of that ongoing male teenage teeter-totter: to be desirous of sex and yet want nothing to do with its realities.  Intimate love remains a tightly-budded flower to him, the petals haven't yet fully opened, but he wavers between hormonal rage (catching a glimpse of his school's popular girl inside a steamed-up car on lover's lane) and the ick factor (he bolts out of the truck the instant his father starts to confess his affair).  This doesn't stop Fromm from getting in a delightful moment of masturbation that practically out-Roths Roth, making full use of the proximity of a Minuteman missile solo to the kid's town and his fantasies about a local beauty named Kimberly and Darryl Hannah in Splash:

But the idea of Kimberly Kosteleki sweat slicked pretty much blew the lid off my silo, knocking even Daryl Hannah aside, and I walked down the hall to the bathroom, my ICBM straining for a launch code. It wasn’t near long enough before I mushroom-clouded, Moscow nothing but an ashy smudge, Siberia a vast plain of melted glass.

"Ballet" could have slipped easily between the covers of Richard Ford's Rock Springs with its stories of dysfunctional families abandoned by deadbeat dads.  Fromm has his own distinct voice, of course, and he can fill even the most agonizing moment with linguistic beauty.  Look, for instance, at this sentence when the narrator's father leaves the house by the front door after coming back briefly to pack his duffel bag: And with a little curl of snow blowing in behind him, he was gone.

At the risk of giving away too much of "Ballet," I can't resist showing you just one more moment from near the end of the story.  In an attempt to reunite his parents, the boy has hidden his father in the house while the mother is away drinking wine at her girlfriend's house.  Believing she's too drunk to drive, the boy goes to pick her up and bring her back home to where the father waits:

      I thought that maybe tomorrow morning I’d get up before anybody, which would be a first, and I’d turn on our Christmas music, stand waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs, and maybe they’d come to their senses on the way down, some Christmas miracle, stop at the bottom of the steps holding hands, smiling that way, like they’d won the prize again.
      But even before I picked up Mom, saw her not all tipsy or stumbling or anything TV but just hugging the other women at the door while I stood out in the drive, looking too big and too male, too bundled against the world, I doubted a miracle was going to happen. When she broke away from them and came out toward me in the snow, I opened the truck door for her and heard her say, “My, what a gentleman.” I got in myself then and backed us out into the street, pointing down the miles toward our house, and when she put her hand over mine on the stick shift and said, “Thank you for coming. I was afraid you’d decided to leave me too,” I knew for certain that there was going to be no happy reunion at the banister in the morning, that believing in that was like believing in Santa Claus, believing we were the only house in the world where the Nutcracker Suite played on Christmas morning.

I'll leave it to you to find out what happens, but believe me when I say this is one of the most perfect short stories I've read all year, right down to the last, heartbreaking word.

You can find "Ballet" at Narrative by clicking here.  Don’t let the sign-in requirement stop you; just give them your email and whatever password you want, then go on to read this wonderful story.

Mag Watch: Tin House, Vol. 12, No. 3 ("The Mysterious Issue")

"Scare me."

"So you think it's that easy, do you?  Scare me, right, I'm going to put on a pig mask and jump out of the bushes when you walk down the street at night.  Of course, that might be pretty scary, but not, I think, for any of the obvious reasons."

That's the start of the conversation between Benjamin Percy (The Wilding) and Peter Straub (A Dark Matter) in Tin House's "Mysterious Issue."  Though it came out this past Spring, I thought I'd pull it off the shelf, take a second look at its scarifying contents (through cracks in the fingers clapped over my eyes) and give you a report in time for Halloween.  Read on.  If you dare.

Benjamin Percy's interview with Peter Straub ("You Have Nothing to Fear But Fear Himself") is the candelabra centerpiece of this issue of Tin House--a spooky chat between two novelists who know a thing or two about making the words on the page hard to read for all the trembling of our hands. It's a wide-ranging conversation touching on the craft of writing ("a novel [can] be both horror and art"), the underestimation of Stephen King, and frank revelations about Straub's sexual abuse as a child.  Through it all, horror drips across the Q & A like a crimson rain.  I like to think they conducted the interview in the dark with lit flashlights held beneath their chins.  After Percy's "Scare me" challenge, Straub goes on to tell a pair of creepy vignettes too long to repeat here, but trust me when I say they'll set your mind at unease.

Straub finishes his answer by saying, "What would be frightening about me jumping out of the bush wearing a pig mask is not the sudden surprise, not me, and not the pig mask, but that the ordinary world had split open for a moment to reveal some possibility never previously considered."  Later, he adds, "When I speak of a crack in the world, I mean a fissure from which unease can leak, because all of a sudden, things are operating the way they're supposed to operate, and when you see that in your own world, you can't count on anything anymore, nothing works."

A split seam?  Oh, you mean like the one in Luis Alberto Urrea's short story "Chametla"?  The story opens with these sentences:

      The last shot fired in the Battle of Chametla hit Private Arnulfo Guerrero in the back of the head. It took out the lower-right quadrant, knocking free a hunk of bone roughly the size and shape of a broken teacup. This shot was fired by a federal trooper, who then shouldered his weapon and walked to a cantina on the outskirts of town, where he ate a fine pork stew with seven corn tortillas and a cup of pulque.

The crack in the world?  Hold on, I'm getting to that.

Private Guerrero doesn't die right away after getting shot in the head.  He falls into a sort of sustained epileptic fit, "the ugly black cavern" in his head leaking "slow and watery blood."  He's pulled off the battlefield by his best friend, Corporal Angel Garcia, who attends to him--with the help of their dog Casan--all through the night.  Then things take a turn for the horrific, magic-realism-style:

      [Garcia] must have drifted off to sleep, for it was Casan’s whimpering that awoke him. The big dog had worked himself free from the rope, and he stood over the prone body of Guerrero and whined.
      “What is it, boy?” Garcia whispered.
      Casan tilted his head and stared down at Guerrero. The dog yelped. Then he backed away.
      Garcia crawled over to Guerrero and said, “Arnulfo? Are you awake?”
      The wounded man didn’t stir.
      “What the hell is wrong with you?” Garcia chided the dog. “Nothing here.”
      Then he heard it, too. The faint whistling. He inclined his head. There was a plaintive hooting coming from under Guerrero’s bandage. Were poor Guerrero’s sinuses blowing air out of his skull? Christ. What next? Garcia pulled open the wrapping and was startled to see a small puff of smoke rising from out of his friend’s head. He crossed himself.
      “Ah, cabrón!” he said.
      The whistle again, then another puff of smoke. Casan barked. Garcia sat beside the dog and stared. Then, was it? It couldn’t be! But—a light—a small light was coming out of the ragged hole in Guerrero’s head.
      Garcia bent down, but then had to leap back because a small locomotive rushed out of Guerrero’s wound. It fell out of the wound, pulling a coal car and several small cattle cars as if it were falling off a minuscule bridge in some rail disaster. The soft train fell upon the ground and glistened, puffing like a fish. Casan pounced on it and took it in his mouth, shaking it once and gulping it down.

When a scene like that jumps out of the bushes at me, I tumble back from the page, tripping over my shoes, then scramble back along the sidewalk, trying to get away from a nightmarish vision spawned from an imagination as fertile Urrea's.

Fiction like "Chametla" is one thing, but what about when the unthinkable is unavoidably real?  That's the case with "Johannesburg Underground," Richard Poplak's startling account of "The Suitcase Murder" which plagued South Africa at the height of apartheid in the 1960s.  Never heard of it?  Trust me, after reading Poplak's reportage, you'll never forget it.  Here's just one of the paragraphs you'll read with a dry mouth and thumping heart:

      Bekker notices a suitcase washed up on the shale. He opens it and finds a hock of waterlogged meat wrapped in plastic, butcher paper, and a filthy sheet. The flesh is pocked with knife marks. He removes the sheet. A woman's breast, areola dark against a pallid mound, falls from the suitcase. An arm follows. Organs spill out like a chicken's giblets.

My apologies if I've ruined your lunch.  Not all of the mysterious goings-on in this issue of Tin House are as graphic and gruesome.  Many of the essays, stories, poems and reviews are the sort of reading that creeps up slowly on slippered feet in the fog, lightly touching the back of your neck with cold fingertips.  In her poem "Fear," Robin Beth Schaer writes: "Nothing is there, but you will never believe that."

John Crowley doesn't believe in ghosts, and his explanation for this ecto-atheism in "New Ghosts and How to Know Them" is a practical one:

      I was very young when I proved to my own satisfaction that the ghosts described in stories or appearing in movies didn't really exist. It was their clothes. I could entertain the idea that our spirits might live on after the death of the body, and appear as spectral selves before the living, but how do they come to be wearing clothes? It's usually by their clothes that we know them: the faded wedding dress, the bloody shirt, "my father in his habit as he lived." So how do they come to be dressed in clothes--often not even the clothes they were interred in? Are the clothes ghosts, too? What about the armor and swords and crowns and other things they bear? No, it was clear to me that such apparitions are not spirits of the departed but the guilty imaginings or irrational fears of the living made visible.

Lately, Crowley says he's been seeing a trend in "new ghosts" appearing in fiction (like that written by Kelly Link, Hilary Mantel and George Saunders): "They come from new afterworlds or underworlds; they have different ways to haunt the living, and the living have new ways of dealing with them.  They're usually wearing clothes."

One of this issues finest revelations for me was the ghost story by Maurice Pons--firmly in the "old ghost" tradition of M. R. James and Algernon Blackwood.  Looking at the contributors' notes, I was surprised to find "The Baker's Son" was the first of Pons' stories to be translated into English.  As Edward Gauvin tells us in his introduction to the story, Pons is something of a cult figure in France where he has been writing steadily since the 1950s: "Uniformly in the first person, the stories often turn on some macabre or mysterious coincidence, sometimes not disclosed until the final line or paragraph, when both reader and narrator are faced with the blunt fact of it, impossible to dismiss."

Such is the case with "The Baker's Son" in which the titular character's father disappears from their small French village one snowy, fogbound January 4, never to return home.  Over the years, the baker reappears to his son in various places in different guises (a traveler, a referee at a soccer game, a waiter, etc.)....and always on January 4.  The story builds swiftly and tightly to its final, inevitable conclusion.  In the end, I was left wanting to brush up on my French so I could read the rest of Pons' work in the original language.

Other highlights of "The Mysterious Issue" include a story by Andrea Barrett ("The Ether of Space") in which science clashes with superstition, and a story about troubled new parents by Kenneth Calhoun called "Then" which consists of a series of short sections all beginning with the word "Then" (sample: "Then he was so tired that he vomited. There were things in it that he didn't remember eating.").  You'll also be treated to a brief history of UFOs by Chester Knapp ("True Enough"), an appreciation of film noir by Eddie Muller, and a look at twentieth-century domestic thrillers by Sarah Weinman ("The Dark Side of Dinner Dishes, Laundry, and Child Care") which revives the novels of Marie Belloc Lowndes (The Lodger), Elizabeth Sanxay Holding (The Death Wish) and Celia Fremlin (The Hours Before Dawn)--three writers who "peered into the never-discussed abyss of family and home life and lifted rocks that revealed a pit of crawling worms."

Another fine selection from Tin House's "Lost and Found" section comes from Hugh Ryan who begins his essay with this:

      I’m a sucker for a good monster-origin story. What’s Cujo without the rabies, Godzilla without the bomb?
      So how about this: Imagine a man born at the end of the nineteenth century, the all-American son of a traveling preacher. He drives a French ambulance in World War I, gets gassed, and receives the Croix de Guerre. He becomes a reporter for William Randolph Hearst, but something is wrong. He can’t sit still. He travels–Arabia, West Africa, England, Timbuktu. He becomes obsessed with the supernatural and befriends Satanist Aleister Crowley. He moves to France and cavorts with ex-pats. Gertrude Stein writes about him. His sex life is the stuff of morbid pulp novels: bondage, sadism, wife swapping. He samples human flesh, which he categorizes as “like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef.” His drinking spirals out of control, and for eight months he has himself institutionalized. When that doesn’t work, he plunges his arms into a vat of boiling water, hoping that by immobilizing them, he will stop himself from drinking. Eventually, at sixty-one, after writing nearly a dozen books, he kills himself, destroying the monsters in his mind.
      All but one.
      That man was William Buehler Seabrook, and though he’s forgotten now, his book The Magic Island midwifed into existence a monster that lives on in undead fecundity, reaching out from beyond the grave to top the New York Times bestseller list, meddle with Jane Austen, and routinely scare the crap out of me: the zombie.

What, he couldn't simply attend a local AA meeting instead of boiling his arms to keep from drinking?  Still, Seabrook's work intrigues.  Methinks it would pair nicely with a marathon session of The Walking Dead or even a George Romero-fest one night in my basement home theater.  Shades drawn and doors bolted shut, of course.


Click here to purchase Tin House's "Mysterious Issue" (or, better yet, click here to subscribe)

Mag Watch: One Story, Issue 154 ("Who Cycles Into Our Valley" by Benjamin Solomon)

I have an unfair prejudice against stories which are little more than dense paragraphs with few discernible breaks for dialogue.  I think, This is a story which will be heavy on description, boggy with exposition, and will drag my eyes along the page like they've got leaded weights attached.  Like I said, it's completely and irrationally unfair and I realize many great stories are light on dialogue ("The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," "Big Two-Hearted River," and "The Swimmer" among them).

So, it was with wariness and a slight sinking of the heart that I opened the latest issue of One Story and saw continent-sized chunks of text.

It took only two pages, however, for me to realize that, while not perfect, Benjamin Solomon's short story "Who Cycles Into Our Valley" is engaging and deeply effective--enough to make me think once again about the prejudices we carry as readers which can make or break an otherwise good piece of fiction over the smallest and silliest of "rules."

Here's a summary of the plot in this issue of One Story: a father and his son ride a tandem bike around the hills of Spain one afternoon.

That's it.  The only movement you'll find here is the uphill-downhill momentum of the bike.  "Who Cycles Into Our Valley" concentrates on the inner lives of these two characters who find themselves at crucial crossroads: the father is newly divorced, the adult son is falling out of love with his girlfriend.  But, as with all good short fiction, it's the interstitial pockets of insight where you'll find the true movement.  Solomon glides back and forth between the heads of the two nameless characters, revealing the nature of their relationship through idle musings and flashbacks.  Here's one from the father's perspective:

He was twenty-two years old when his son was born, still in college, and nights he worked as an orderly in the burn ward at the hospital, and one night he had to wheel a little burned boy his son's age down the hall.  The boy's face was covered in bandages, his arms, his legs, all burned under circumstances the father would never know, and yet as he wheeled the little burned body down the hallway and stared at the perfectly unmarred fingertips protruding from the bandages, the father imagined scenario after scenario of his own son getting burned, and with each one he felt it heavier and more intense, the utter pain of loving a child, and how that pain would only grow and multiply were he to have more children as he and his wife had planned, and suddenly he was surrounded by burned children, all of them his own, little boys and girls bandaged and festering and crying in pain, and at that moment he knew he couldn't bear to have any more children, and that doing so would be like striking matches beneath a cradle and hoping everything would be okay.

The story is characterized by silence--minimal dialogue between father and son, the stillness of the countryside, the singular ambition to pedal forward over the approaching hills with only the sound of breath and wind filling the ears.  Without the clatter of speech, we pay attention to the loneliness of the characters and Solomon's symbolic use of the countryside and the tandem bike (the story begins with the father in front, but a shift in power occurs at the end as the son takes the lead).

If "Who Cycles Into Our Valley" has a fault it's in the fact that we never get intimate enough with the unnamed father and son, despite the startling emotional details of their lives we're privy to.  For whatever reason, Solomon holds them from us at arm's length.

It's the one drawback to a story which, despite the heavy blocks of paragraphs, carries us along with clear and beautiful language.  By the end, I felt like the son as he pedaled across the Spanish landscape: "giving himself over to the bicycle and the road and the hill."  As a reader, "Who Cycles Into Our Valley" allowed me to abandon all my wrong-headed notions and be briefly propelled by the author's momentum.  It was quite a ride.

(If you don't already subscribe to One Story, you can order a copy of Issue 154 on this page.)

Mag Watch: One Story, Issue 152 ("The Joy of Cooking" by Elissa Schappell

The last few issues of One Story left me feeling like a faucet with both taps turned on full: neither hot, nor cold.  The stories were competently written and I certainly admire any writer who is able to land the coveted, once-in-a-career appearance in the pages of the journal which does exactly as it says, delivering one story in each issue.  But the selections didn't move me the way I'd come to expect One Story to make me leap up from the dinner table when I heard the mailman lift the rusty hinge of my mailbox and drop a new issue inside.  Lately, I'd been finishing everything on my plate before I excused myself to go get the mail.

Elissa Schappell's story in the latest issue, "The Joy of Cooking," restores my faith in One Story.  It's a table-leaper.  It also whets my appetite for Schappell's forthcoming collection, Blueprints for Building Better Girls (from which "The Joy of Cooking" is taken).  The story has a simple premise and setting: a 24-year-old girl calls her mother and asks for "the family recipe" for chicken.  Over the course of the phone call, the mother leads her daughter, step-by-step, in the preparation of the bird.

"Where's the drama in that?" you ask.

What if I were to tell you the daughter is anorexic and the mother is self-absorbed and jealous of all the attention her child gets?  What if I were tell you there is another (unseen) daughter who is in competition for the mother's affection?  What if I were to tell you the daughter is disgusted by touching the "slimy" chicken, but she's desperate to cook it "perfectly" because she's entertaining a new boyfriend that evening?  What if I were to tell you she burns her fingers on the salt she rubs on the chicken because she has chewed her cuticles to bloody shreds?  What if I were to tell you both the mother and the daughter are obsessive-compulsive, especially when it comes to numbers?

You want drama and conflict?  "The Joy of Cooking" is a cauldron of narrative tension in 29 pages.

Schappell has chosen to tell the story from the mother's point of view and that makes all the difference in the world.  The conversation and a series of flashbacks (counting down young Emily's birthday cakes, all the way back to 1 years old) are filtered through this slightly manic and occasionally funny voice.  These are the thoughts parading through her head as she takes the call from her daughter, Emily:

I looked at the clock: 4:00. Yoga started at 4:30. After yoga, provided I wasn’t bleeding or paralyzed, I was planning to pop into the drug store and buy new lipstick. Something youthful but sophisticated, with shimmer. My mother always said that a woman should have a signature lipstick the way a man had a signature cocktail. I’d married and divorced Emily’s father, Terry, in Cherries in the Snow. After the new lipstick, I was going to treat myself to an overdue haircut. Something new, possibly even a little racy. I’d been toying with the idea of bangs. Then, at 6:30, I was meeting Hugo, the new man shelving the philosophy section at the bookstore where for the last fifteen years I’d been working as a cashier and bookkeeper. I had shaved my legs. It was just coffee, but let’s just say it had been a long time between cups of coffee. 1,825 days to be exact. Five years. Not that I was counting.

As the conversation continues and we learn more about the two women by means of the chicken recipe, the character of the anorexic girl becomes as visible as (dare I say it?) sharp bones pressing against skin.  She is demanding, naive, impulsive, and theatrical in everything she says and does.  "When Percy Shelley, the poet, drowned, Mary Shelley carried his burnt-up heart in her handbag for the rest of her life.  In her handbag!  That's real love.  That's what I'm waiting for."

This is no soft-focus, disease-of-the-week movie geared toward earning our sympathy for the victim.  It's a fierce portrayal of a very complicated relationship between two women, centering around what is probably the most divisive issue of today's society: food.  The chicken is both sustenance and death, the hope of good things to come (a "perfect" date with the boyfriend) and the catalyst for disaster.  Everything we see, smell, hear, taste and touch these days implies that food is one of the central "blueprints for building a better girl."  Schappell cuts right to the heart of that idea in smart, concise language.  Here, for example, is her description of a support group for families of girls with eating disorders:

Later, at the coffee urn that had been set up down the hall away from the meeting room so we couldn't hear our daughters, we talked about their spines, and the way their clavicle bones stood out like Victorian ruffled collars, and how we counted their ribs. What poor protection they seemed for their heart and lungs. We called our daughters skeletal. Skeletal. A word that, when spoken, felt like eating something soft with bones. One mother described the sight of her daughter in a bathing suit as Auschwitz on the Jersey Shore. Out of courtesy, I laughed, though no one else did.

I could go on at length about the pleasures of this issue of One Story--and perhaps I've already said too much--but, wait, I haven't even mentioned Terry, the ex-husband who was a notorious philanderer and probably the cause of Emily's painful yearning for love.  Even in this minor character, Schappell gets off a wonderful zinger in this flashback scene:  "Terry's phone rang in the middle of singing 'Happy Birthday,' the sound of a funky jazz trumpet coming from his pants pocket."  The symbolism of that trumpet in the pants is spot-on.

In fact, everything in "The Joy of Cooking" is spot-on perfect.

(If you don't already subscribe to One Story, you can order a copy of Issue 152 on this page.)

Mag Watch: Connecticut Review, Fall 2010

Last Spring, writing in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Michael David Lukas asked:

After nearly a decade of U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, it seems reasonable to ask: where is the literature of our current conflicts?  Brian Turner’s poetry collection Here, Bullet, garnered praise when it came out in 2005, and a number of veterans have published memoirs (Melia Meichelbock’s In the Company of Soldiers, Nathaniel Fick’s One Bullet Away, and John Crawford’s The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell, to name a few).  But aside from these and a smattering of shorter works, the literature of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has yet to emerge.

For evidence of combat caterpillars emerging as literary butterflies, I would suggest that Mr. Lukas grab a copy of Connecticut Review which dedicated its Fall 2010 issue to a "Special Section on Veterans of War."  Here, in addition to Brian Turner, he'll find more than 25 veterans of combat ranging from World War Two to Operation Iraqi Freedom.  (Full disclosure: I'm one of those veterans who has a story, "The Things He Saw,"* published in this issue of Connecticut Review.)

Literature on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars continues to be on the rise, starting at the fringe borders of the smaller literary magazines like this one, but slowly seeping inward--like a reverse bloodstain--to larger mainstream publications.  As Lukas points out, sometimes the best writing about a war doesn't begin until long after the shooting stops.  It can take time for the combatant to get some necessary distance from combat and emerge with a readable, compelling account on the other side.**  "A Farewell to Arms came out in 1929, more than a decade after the armistice treaty, and Catch-22 wasn’t published until sixteen years after Japan surrendered on the decks of the USS Missouri," Lukas writes.  Soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines--all trying to filter and process what they saw and did overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan--are now turning to the written word to work out the dark knot of those experiences.  Speaking personally, I've been trying to channel my own creative energies in this way--first with my novel, then with a series of Iraq War stories that have been coming off my fingers, rat-a-tat-tat.  To borrow a phrase from The Rumpus, I've been writing like a motherfucker.

Judging by the contents of Connecticut Review, I suspect I'm not the only one doing so.  In the opening essay to the special section, "Soldier-Artists: Preserving the World," Donald Anderson writes:

Of course war needs to be written about, and, from time out of mind, it has been.  From the earliest rendition of the Iliad to the latest showing of Blackhawk Down or Jarhead or Generation Kill, war and art have reflected one another. War frames our lives. Look behind or ahead and war will find you. Though war has been convincingly written about by outsiders, I believe we turn to insiders--combatants--for our weightiest insights. A soldier's response to war lays claim to a special visceral authority.

This issue of Connecticut Review is full of that kind of authority, coming in the form of short stories, poems and personal essays.  Ever wonder what it's like to be standing in a rainstorm of mortar shells?  Brian Turner is the one best suited to describe it to you, as he does in "Firebase Eagle":

       We're being shelled on close to a daily basis. In military parlance, the "enemy" is "bracketing" our "position." Studying the concept of bracketing and experiencing it first-hand in a combat situation is a vastly different thing. Basically, an Iraqi mortar crew is, day by day and round by round, discovering the proper distance, elevation, deflection, and explosive charge necessary to start firing rounds directly into our camp. Yesterday, it was a round exploding one hundred meters south of the camp perimeter. Today three or four rounds fall roughly one hundred meters north of the camp's front gate. If they adjust correctly, there's a good chance mortar rounds might just explode inside the wire tomorrow. It's a matter of mathematics. And patience.
       And, in fact, that's what begins to happen. After bracketing our firebase for several days, the mortar crew has locked onto our position and is now beginning to "fire for effect." It's something that defies description, being shelled. The sound of the detonations, the crack and airy breath of it. Sometimes a distinct explosion. Other times the rounds land nearly simultaneously with an overwhelming god-like finality. The soft architecture of the brain registering each concussion as a type of conversation. The extension of an idea expressed in the very physical language of shrapnel, fear. "Someone is hunting for your soul."

Want to know how it feels to be on foot patrol in a crowded marketplace in Al Qa'im near the Syrian border of Iraq?  Let Dario DiBattista lead you in his essay "On Patrol":

       Bad vibes creep about me like fire ants on skin.
       In an effort to create a psychological deterrent against possible enemies in this crowd, which I sense are many, I raise the goggles onto my helmet and look very assuredly at anyone who meets my gaze with angry eyes that say I want to kill them. I point to particularly conspicuous Iraqis, as if to say "I see you motherfuckers--bring it."
       We have intelligence that the enemy wants us to get close. They want to capture one of us. They want to chop off our heads on film.
       The standing order for the entire 1st Marine Division in Iraq is "make yourself hard to kill." I snap open my grenade pouch and fondle the machine gun's trigger guard. "Come on motherfuckers. It's either you or me--or both."
       I am trapped in this thought.

To get a bitter taste of how the isolation of being in the military can corkscrew your soul by artificially separating you from the ones you love (I speak from personal experience here), turn to these two stanzas from "A Korean War Veteran Ponders Death" by William Childress:

Who does not ponder his demise
when life closes like an old valise?
My years were already spiraling down
in Sasebo, when I heard the sounds
of a butt-can's scrape, a bunk spring's squeak.
A sergeant lay smoking on bloody sheets,
his razored juices filling a can,
a Dear John letter in his hand.

But he was seen, and in a breath
MPs rushed in. Sarge fought for death
with all his might, a furious dance
on a blood-slick floor without his pants,
just medals on a shirt of tan.
"Hold him! I can't get the tourniquet on!"
They held him. He died anyway,
murdered by his fiancee.

And none of us would ever, ever, EVER want to be there at the liberation of the concentration camp at Buchenwald, but Richard Daughtry was, and--though horrified--we cannot turn away from the account he gives to Henry F. Tonn in "Buchenwald Diary":

       Bypassing the cermatorium momentarily, they steered us first to a nearby building. We immediately found ourselves in a room something like twenty-by-forty feet, with a large number of prisoners seated on the floor, backs to the wall, shoulder to shoulder, staring vacantly into space. They were all wearing nightshirts that fell just below their knees. They were incredibly thin, seeming to be no more than four feet tall, weighing no more than sixty pounds, and their eyes were sunk deeply into the sockets of their heads. We were absolutely stunned. We asked our guides what had happened and they responded that all of these men had been starved into this condition. At the camp you either worked or were shot, so the men had worked to the point of death.
       We offered to give them food but the guides shook their heads and said their bodies could no longer accept nourishment. Upon liberation of the camp the previous day, several of them had been fed and they had died instantly. The guides estimated that most of the men in the room would expire in several more days. We asked if we could give them cigarettes and they shrugged their shoulders and replied that it was unlikely they had enough strength to inhale the smoke. They were barely able to get enough oxygen in their bodies to survive. Nonetheless, we approached several of these people, whose eyes followed us in their dark sockets, and placed cigarettes in the mouths of those who appeared to be interested. As our guides had predicted, however, they were unable to puff, and the cigarettes just dangled there unsmoked.

This then is the unique power of words: they take us to places we only want to experience vicariously.  This issue of Connecticut Review is soaked with the sweat and blood of what results from human against human, nation vs. nation--those terrible atrocities, those governmentally-sanctioned murders sterilized down to three little letters.  Even those of us who have been to war--like me and the rest of the contributors to this special issue--even we are still troubled by the stories we hear.  It's amazing how another man's nightmares can top even our worst tales we bring back from the battlefield.  And yet, we are compelled to tell the stories we own.  How else will we be able to deliver the news of war to those who have never heard its horrible thunder?  How else can we speak of the unspeakable?  We have no choice, those of us who have donned the uniform and taken up weapons.  We must write like motherfuckers.


P.S.  The cover image of this issue, which at first, long-range glance I dismissed as some sort of ancient hieroglyphic, gave me the dry-mouth sobers when I read the story behind the photo taken by Benjamin Busch:

This is an insurgent's footprint on a sidewalk, left in blood, as he fled from a failed attack on a U.S. Marine position in Ar Ramadi. He died 27 steps from this one. The photographer took this photograph on the morning afterward.

*Which begins:
       They said he was lucky.  The eye had not lost all its internal fluid, which would have led to its permanent collapse.  Another millimeter to the right—one piece of shrapnel colliding with another to alter the course of his history—and the puncture would be bigger.  Probably would have gone all the way to the brain.  It was all in how you looked at it.  Could have gone either way.  Let’s keep things in perspective, they said.  He was one lucky soldier.
       Lucky.  Yeah, right, motherfucker.
**In my own case, I've been working on Fobbit for six years.  Though, granted, most of that has been foot-dragging, rather than "processing."

Mag Watch: Daniel Woodrell's "Oceanside" in Narrative

Vietnam War fiction has been done, re-done, and nearly done to death.  You would need multiple hands to count all the great works which have burned large swathes of napalm-fire trails across our literary landscape.  A very short list of the novels that put you in the midst of jungle combat would have to include Tree of Smoke, Matterhorn, The Short-Timers, and just about anything written by Tim O'Brien.  For fiction that focuses on stateside soldiers coming home from, or about to be shipped off to, the conflict in Vietnam, standouts include The Barracks Thief, The Stunt Man (which was a better movie than book, but still worth reading), Dirty Work, and In Country.

I have been to the jungle and back so many times, my imaginary camo fatigues are salt-stained and wrinkled.  So it was with some wariness that I downloaded Daniel Woodrell's short story, "Oceanside," from Narrative and started reading.

To paraphrase Jerry Maguire, he had me at "hello."  Here's the opening paragraph:

Those marines with the worst loneliness put on longhair wigs once the bus stopped in Oceanside. They kept their wigs hidden during the ride from Camp Pendleton, stuffed into brown paper sacks, rolled up inside a beach towel, or shoved down their skivvies. The bus was packed and loud, everybody revving their hopes for magical moments to occur during the brief liberty that began as soon as the wheels stopped turning. Those bearing wigs rushed down the steps, across the bus station lobby past sagged civilians waiting on benches, and shoved into the head to crowd the mirror. Marines wearing bell-bottoms with fluttery stitching along the seams and peasant shirts elbowed one another aside to better study their reflected disguises. A little boy standing at a urinal stared in disbelief that grew toward panic as he absorbed a new, deep confusion about men while spattering his sneakers. The veteran marines slipped the wigs over their high-and-tights and yanked them back and forth, searching for the fit that looked most natural. None of them looked natural. The wigs were the cheapest you could buy, synthetic pelts that looked fake at any distance. The blond rugs were stiff as straw and held a plastic sheen, and the black ones were the desperate black that old ladies or fading actors favored to draw eyes away from their sinking faces. The wigs didn’t fool anybody in Oceanside, where jarheads were so plentiful, but there was hope they might somehow succeed up the coast in Laguna or Long Beach, and enlisted men could pass as hippies among hippies for a weekend of communion before returning to base for a 6:00 a.m. formation, three-mile run, and mess duty.

In truth, that paragraph was the teaser sent to me in an email from Narrative; to read the rest, I had to cough up a $4 "donation" to the magazine.  It was worth foregoing the proverbial double-shot venti cappuccino at Starbucks.

"Oceanside" is actually an excerpt from About Face, the next novel by Woodrell (who also wrote Winter's Bone and Tomato Red).  At least I can only assume it's his next novel, since I wasn't able to find much more about it on-line.  Narrative also has two other slices from that novel: "Shitbird" and "Blue Norton" (which opens with this line: "They woke us about three to go into the jungle and find the sergeant’s foot.").

Woodrell stays stateside in "Oceanside," set in the titular California coastal town, just south of the Marine base Camp Pendleton.  The story is narrated by a green "boot" who is so naive, it hurts to read about his day of leave in the balmy resort town.  He ships out in a week where he'll see duty as a forward observer--which is practically a suicide job as a seasoned Marine tells him: "Average life expectancy for them under fire is thirty seconds. Chili farts last longer’n that."

There's not a lot of plot involved in "Oceanside" (which, admittedly, is pretty short for your $4)--Marine recruit spends a day in town, walks along beach, talks with sexy war protester, watches fellow Marines puke, walks along beach some more, The End--but its strengths lie in the way Woodrell tells the story. 

The sights, sounds, and smells of a small town in the 1970s are all captured with succinct, quick-flowing language which proves Woodrell has mastery over the short form.  He's equally adept at telling us all we need to know about characters in a remarkable economy of words.  Here, for instance, is the first description of that protester handing out pamphlets:

A tall, red-eyed girl with a haircut like Moe’s from The Three Stooges shoved a paper at me, touching my chest. She dressed a lot like Grandpa: brown trousers held up by black suspenders over a faded blue work shirt with the cuffs turned back. Her paper was the kind that explained how to desert and sneak to Canada, and why you should. She was pretty loose under that work shirt when she gestured. She said, “Ever think about not killing? Have you?”

That one sentence--"She was pretty loose under that work shirt when she gestured"--tells me a lot about who she is and how the narrator sees her.

Or consider this detail about the narrator's squad leader, which Woodrell tosses into the stream of the story as casually as a boy throwing a pebble in the water: "He had such confused eyes and a dark crater low on his leg from Nui Kim Son."  We hear nothing more about that "dark crater" (at least not in this story), but it's something I carried with me through the rest of the story.

Even when Woodrell steps across the line marking the boundary between restraint and trying-too-hard, he does so in a beautiful manner--as in this sentence where the narrator stares at the ocean and ponders the weight of his future: "Every wave that broke made me imagine what force had shoved it so far across the world to splash my feet in America."

Based on the strength of "Oceanside" alone, I'll be first in line when (hopefully not "if") Woodrell releases About Face.  I won't even mind going back to the jungle one more time.

If you'd like to purchase "Oceanside," you can do so HERE.


Photo by Bruce Carr

Mag Watch: Fugue, Winter-Spring 2010

There's something going on in the woods of Idaho's northern panhandle.  That's where you'll find a reliable cadre of writers producing meaningful, quality fiction, essays, and poetry in an often-overlooked region of the Pacific Northwest.  Seattle and Missoula may have (rightfully) earned reputations as literary epicenters in the West over the past three decades, but they had better watch their backs because Idaho is fast becoming a more visible contender.

In Boise, you've got Anthony Doerr (Memory Wall), Brady Udall (The Lonely Polygamist) and Alan Heathcock (Volt); in McCall, there's Brian Hart (Then Came the Evening); and in Moscow, you'll find Kim Barnes (A Country Called Home), Robert Wrigley (Beautiful Country), and Mary Clearman Blew (Jackalope Dreams).  I'm sure there are others, but those are the prominent writers who spring to mind.

In the bull's-eye of Idaho's literary surge is Fugue, a biannual produced by the University of Idaho in Moscow.  Though it's been around since the 1980s, I had never heard of Fugue until Benjamin Percy happened to Tweet about one of his essays appearing in a recent issue.  As I turned the pages of Issue 38--which also happens to be Fugue's 20th Anniversary Issue--I grew more and more impressed by what I read.

Not all of the writers in this issue were from Idaho, but each of them wrote from a Rocky Mountain sensibility, while maintaining the kind of universality that could embrace readers from Dallas to Bangladesh.  This is writing that's as steadfast as a century-old pine and refreshing as a cold splash of mountain water to the face.

Here are some of the highlights from the 20th Anniversary Issue:

Three poems by Richard Hugo ("High Grass Prairie," "Trout," and "The Towns We Know and Leave Behind, The Rivers We Carry With Us"): As I've said before, Hugo is perhaps one of our greatest chroniclers of landscape--whether it's Montana, Washington, or Italy.  You can find these three poems elsewhere, but it's always good to have a daily injection of Hugo for whatever ails you.  I especially love the opening of "High Grass Prairie."

Say something warm. Hello. The world
was full of harm until this wind
placated grass and put the fish to rest.
And wave hello. Someone may be out there
riding undulating light our way.
Wherever we live, we sleep here
where cattle sleep beside the full canal.
We slept here young in poems.

On Language: A Short Meditation by Kim Barnes: This delightful essay reminds me I really need to read more of Barnes' books (I've only read her memoir).  Here, she struggles with conflicted feelings between her role of an academic and someone who still longs for the lost vernacular from when she was growing up in logging camps:

I'm a tenured college professor with three degrees in English, the author of several books, but it feels as though in attaining my educations and career I've lost some essential part of who I am, some last connection to the forces that shaped me.  My people's language was crick and ain't and every g dropped from ing.  We went huntin and fishin and shootin.  We drug rather than dragged our deer out of the woods and said of new stomping grounds that we'd never went there before.

In Two Nights, Anthony Doerr goes on a solo camping trip in the mountains near Boise and reflects on an inglorious battle fought between the Tukudeka Indians and the U.S. Cavalry in 1879 on the very ground where he's pitched his tent.  He's overwhelmed not just by history, but by the literal weight of the world:

       For me nothing is more compelling in this country than the night skies: on winter nights the stars flicker white and red and blue, twisting and glittering in their places.  In the same moment they can seem both astonishingly close and impossibly far away.  This is not typically comforting: you feel the size of the Earth beneath your back, which is massive enough to hold all of its cities and oceans and creatures in the sway of its gravity, and on the far side of the Earth is the sun, 300,000 times more massive than the Earth, and slowly your thoughts begin to bump up against the enormity of the Milky Way, in which our entire solar system is merely a mote.
       I close my eyes; I think of the brook trout in the lake beside me, quick and sleek, little sleeves of muscle suspended in the black water, their fins and bellies fringed with orange, their backs aswarm with patterns.  The snowy peaks gleam in the moonlight.  In a few days this lake will be frozen over, and I wonder if the fish turn up their eyes, if they watch the lights traveling through the sky, if they sense that this could be the last time they will be able to see them.

The New Frontier by Jess Walter: The author of The Financial Lives of the Poets is in fine fettle here in this hilarious short story (is it even possible to write about Walter without at least once using the word "hilarious"?).  Nick, the narrator, is coerced into going to Las Vegas with best friend Bobby in search of Bobby's sister who may or may not have been kidnapped and turned into a sex slave.  Much gonzo hilarity ensues (see? there it is again).

In Invasion, Benjamin Percy laments how his hometown--Bend, Oregon--has been infested with Pandora moths.  And Californians.

       In the late 1980's, the population of Bend was 18,000.  There are now, in the metro area, more than 200,000 people.  Some of them come from places like Portland and Seattle--but most of them come from California.
       The men wear Izod golf shirts and Ecco leather shoes with no socks.  They part their hair and stink of cologne and smile white toothy smiles when talking about how fast the greens are at Widgi Creek golf course.  The women wear white pants and bright blouses and carry small black purses from which they are constantly withdrawing pink cell phones.  Their brightly blond hair appears flattened out of gold.  All of them drive Saabs, Audis, Volvos, BMWs, Land Rovers that have never left pavement.
       [....]
       Our parents didn't like the Californians, so we didn't either.  Our clothes and our cars didn't match theirs.  They brought with them wine shops, clothing boutiques, white-linen restaurants that served sushi and arugula salads that cost too much.  Golf courses spread into the desert like green oil slicks.

Kim Stafford could very well have been writing directly to those Californistas in his poem For My Friends, which begins:

When a river is a border on a map, and not a place to swim;
when a mountain is a postcard you could get;
when an otter is like music in a special on TV,
and not a whiskered stranger you have met;
when smoke from campfires is something known from books
and not a pungent remnant in your clothes;
when forests are but fables, and caves in fairy tales,
and deserts empty places no one knows;
when children learn from Mickey of the mouse,
and think they know the world but never leave the house;
when from busy cities the wilderness feels distant as a star--
then we have lost our treasure, and missed the means to measure
     who we are.


In Why I Stay, Brandon R. Schrand describes how as a young family man fueled by inspiration from Montana literary deity Rick Bass, he got a teaching job in Idaho and threw caution to the wind to move to a remote town nestled in "a verdant place of rolling hills and forest."  Schrand perfectly captures the feelings I once had as a young writer/father/husband:

       Becoming a writer...is a crackpot notion.  Something best left to madmen who are single, skinny, and who smoke a lot.  Sane people don't prod their families into the woods so they can become a writer.  Who was it that said, "I'm going to the woods with a typewriter and a gun, and it's going to be one or the other"?  So there ensued a war between the concerns and the daydreams.  The daydream itself would keep me from rooting around in parts of my head where logic took up residence and issued forth reprimands, reproaches, and recriminations.  Logic said that it would be easier to become a pilot, surgeon, or astronaut than it would to be a writer.  Logic said that I had a family to think about.  Logic said just getting one thing published would be next to impossible let alone a book, or many books.  Fools gold, pie in the sky, pipe-dreams, the lot of it.  Better to get a job and settle down.  Then if the fancy strikes, sharpen the pencil and amuse yourself with the little stories you'd like to tell.  Just don't make your family suffer while you chase rainbows.  That's what logic said.
      But the daydream arrives at night like a lover.  Like a drug.  Like hypnosis.  Before you know it, you're afloat in its crystal waters and you can see yourself.  Yes, you can see yourself writing in a studio tucked in a grove of ponderosa and throwing hunks of wood on the Bassian fire that fuels your wonder.

Perhaps Schrand should have cocked an ear toward Marilynne Robinson (Housekeeping) who dispenses this advice to writers in an interview with Mary Clearman Blew:

Ignore eveything you hear about what is publishable and write from the center of your imagination.  Discipline your prose to make it clear and strong.  Do research--it will get you out of the narrow corridor of what has been your knowledge and experience.  Expect difficulty, failure and rejection.  They're just part of the life.

In a literary magazine full of fine writing, I think the finest I encountered here was by a writer named Joshua Foster.  His short story Inside Out was a taut stretch of fiction reminiscent of Annie Proulx, Richard Ford, and Andre Dubus.  The story is narrated by the son of a rancher and devout Mormon who skips church to help a ranchhand--an older boy with a swaggering reputation--round up stray cattle during calving season.  One heifer in particular seems to be having difficulty giving birth.

       The cow thrashed through the moldy straw and crashed against the walls.  She seemed gigantic and desperate in that small space, panicked and ready to eat us whole.  At the head catch, I pulled the rope and snapped the gate shut behind the cow’s ears.  She yanked back hard, stressing the wooden joists, and then stepped forward to take the pressure from her throat.
       Jarrett had his coat off.  He’d sweated through his checkered shirt.
       “Get her tail,” Jarrett said.  He rolled up his sleeve.
       I grabbed the tail and pulled it out of the way.  When Jarrett buried his hand inside the cow, her tail went rigid as a tree branch.

I'm loath to quote any more out of context because the story works so well as a whole and looking at its individual parts doesn't give you a good sense of its harsh beauty.  Do yourself a favor, read the whole thing HERE.

Elsewhere in Fugue, you'll find fiction by Pete Fromm and Bryan Di Salvatore; poetry by Robert Wrigley, Joy Passanante, and Ripley Hugo; interviews with William Kittredge and Thom Jones; and essays by Rick Bass, Debra Gwartney, Annick Smith, and Susanna Sonnenberg.  There's even a eulogy for an Idaho sportsman written by Ernest Hemingway in 1939.

But really, there's not a bad page in the entire issue.  And how many publications can boast that kind of per-capita quality?  This Idaho literary magazine stands as one of the tallest pines in the forest.

To order a copy of Fugue, CLICK HERE.


Cover art by Catherine Chauvin.