Trailer Park Tuesday: Wilderness by Lance Weller

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.

I normally reserve this space for trailers highlighting new and forthcoming books, but today I make an exception by reaching into the near-distant past to look at a novel which came out in 2012 (on the same day as my own Fobbit, as it turns out). Wilderness by Lance Weller is well worth a backwards glance. It’s been on my To-Be-Read list for a shameful amount of time. As this new year is now underway and my reading resolutions are still sharp and gleaming, I finally got around to cracking it open—partly because next week I’ll be driving my daughter to her new home in Washington state (Weller’s home turf and the setting for part of the novel), but mostly because I was in the mood for some writing that would sit on my tongue rich and delicious as a chocolate truffle. Wilderness, which moves effortlessly from the rugged Pacific Northwest coast in 1899 to a gore-spattered Civil War battlefield three decades earlier, is indeed dense with evocative language. I am moving slowly through the pages because there is so much to savor here. Take this paragraph, for instance, describing the reaction of a Confederate soldier—cold and weary on the battlefield—to a shirt he’s just received from his mother:

The thin cotton kept within its fiber and its weave something of the handmade smells of home and home life. Old cooking smells of buttered corn and boiled cabbage, of great bleeding flank steaks and potatoes, carrots, onions, all smothered in gravy and served on thick platters engraved with blue Chinese scenes of cherry blossoms, fog-wrapped pagodas, strange, umbrella’d maidens. He could smell fresh blueberries and cold milk. And there was, also, his mother’s smell: matronly, womanish, and as distinct as her florid signature or her sharp, cool whisper at prayertimes and candlelighting. Her scent was as though woven into the shirt and now a part of it and never to be separate from it ever.

That’s just one passage, plucked at random. There are plenty more like it in this gorgeous Wilderness. The trailer itself shows Weller at his desk and out walking along the rocky coast of Washington, along with some graphic illustrations from the Battle of the Wilderness, which is the setting for the unforgettable trauma suffered by the main character, Abel Truman. The video does a good job of telling us what the novel is about, without giving away too many details. It’s the kind of trailer that would make me want to pick up the book and start reading it. If only I’d seen it four years ago.

My First Time: Ryan W. Bradley

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. Today’s guest is Ryan W. Bradley, author of the short-story collection Nothing But the Dead and Dying, the novella Winterswim and the poetry collections The Memory of Planets and Mile Zero. Over the course of his many careers, Ryan has pumped gas, changed oil, painted houses, swept the floor of a mechanic’s shop, worked on a construction crew in the Arctic Circle, fronted a punk band, and managed an independent children’s bookstore. He now works in marketing. His latest book is Nothing But the Dead and Dying, a collection of stories set in Alaska. He lives in southern Oregon with his wife and two sons. Click here to visit his website.

My First Week in the Arctic

May 25, 2006
      We land at the smallest airport ever. It’s tiny. A step above a dirt runway and a hut. Deadhorse is what passes for a town in the construction wastelands of the Arctic Circle, aka the Slope. The area is better known for Prudhoe Bay, but names don’t matter. All the buildings are on stilts or made out of Conex containers. All the signs bear the names of companies like BP and Haliburton.
      It’s sunny and forty degrees, a big change coming from Portland a week earlier where it was already marching too close to the nineties.
      The foyer of the airport is cramped with thirty other guys, all of us waiting for our luggage to be unloaded. Why we’re not just waiting under the belly of the plane for our bags is beyond me. Instead a couple of guys in gray jumpsuits are tossing bags from behind a half-wall onto a battered metal trough.
      Fragments from the handbook and week of training play in my head. When going to the Slope employees must have the following: a cold-weather coat, steel-toed boots, gloves, and other cold-weather apparel or you will not be permitted on the plane.
      The walls of the airport were white once. The trademark orange-brown of Carhartt gear worn by literally every man in the building contrasts the dingy surroundings. I spot my olive green army-style duffel as it leaves the hands of a baggage handler. Before it even lands I know it is going to burst open, it is just the sort of thing that would happen to me. Sure enough it lands at the bottom of the trough and the top pops open. My clothes and toiletries spill across the linoleum floor. No one pays me any mind as I try to gather my stuff, they just step on my belongings as they grab their own luggage.
      Welcome to the Arctic.

May 26, 2006
      I exit the bus and follow the crowd into a small trailer—the break shack. They call it a toolbox meeting. A few people are already inside, seated around two plastic tables. I find an empty spot and sit down. There are a dozen men and two women. Everyone is dressed the same. Some wear overalls instead of jeans, some leather steel-toed boots rather than rubber. The men haven’t shaved, representing a gradation of stubble throughout the room. For my part I shaved my head and my goatee before leaving Portland.
      The foreman is my brother-in-law and he introduces me and two other new guys to the rest of the crew. Then he starts in on the morning’s safety topic—a daily refresher. We discuss the proper handling and storage of power tools, the importance of checking electrical cords.
      All tools must be fully inspected before use.
      Before getting in a truck employees must perform 360-degree inspection of the vehicle.
      It is not yet muscle memory, but the youthful encyclopedia of the newly trained.
      We are divided into teams of two or three and turned loose to tackle various tasks. My brother-in-law takes us newbies for a grand tour of the pump station. We are at Mile Zero of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Pump Station #1.
      “We have four thousand feet of trench to dig this summer,” he says. “There’s going to be a lot of dirt work.”
      He’s not kidding. As the new guys on the crew, the three of us are stuck with the most trivial work possible, spending our first three days shoveling dirt off the top of snow.
      Safety and environmental regulations in the Arctic are some of the strictest in the world and the EPA requires there not be more than an eighth-inch of dirt on top of snow banks on the tundra. But as a storm hits it ends up being a lot of shoveling snow off of snow. We are just outside the back fence of the pump station, the pipeline emerging from the ground just fifty yards away and stretching across the tundra to the horizon. The air is sliced by the whip and crack of the pump station’s vapor flare.
      Seventy million dollars worth of oil passes through Pump Station #1 every day.

May 27, 2006
      The two other newbies are brothers and a bit younger than me. They punch each other and wave their shovels in the air threatening to bash one another’s heads in, like they live in a cartoon world. They complain about everything. They are freezing. They don’t like shoveling. It’s annoying that I’m not complaining.
      I ignore them as best I can, concentrating on my own shovel, and the pile of dirt and snow. The brothers shovel in minute-long spurts, stopping between each and griping about how they want to quit. They are eighteen and twenty and have never had jobs before. One of their uncles is our other foreman, and another uncle and a cousin are also on our crew.

May 28, 2006
      On day three of shoveling a fox stalks across the tundra in our direction. It darts up and down through the snow and grass until it is at the base of the snow bank. One of the brothers has gone off to use a port-a-potty, so I point out the fox to the other one and we retreat to the pump station gate, fifty yards away.
      If you encounter wildlife report it to security or to your foreman. Do not harass the wildlife.
      I leave to track down someone with a radio. When I ask the mechanic for his he makes fun of me for running away from a fox.
      “It’s a little early for me to start ignoring my training,” I say.
      The mechanic laughs some more and hands me his radio. I call it in and return to the gate. The brothers are wrestling. The fox is standing defiantly atop the snow bank.
      Ninety percent of foxes in the Arctic are rabid.
      After ten minutes no one has shown up so I grab my shovel and head back toward the snow bank, fox be damned. The brothers whine. The air reeks of fox, sour and furry, and it turns my stomach. I tie a handkerchief around my face.
      At lunch the rest of the crew relentlessly prods us for being afraid of a fox. I don’t bother defending myself.

May 29, 2006
      After thirty-six hours of shoveling, I’ve managed to suffer a pinched nerve in my right wrist and my hand is numb most of the time. I wake up in the middle of the night from the pins and needles spreading under the skin. By the end of the day I can’t hold a fork at dinner or even a pen.
      All injuries must be reported to your foreman.
      I don’t say a thing to my foreman, knowing I’ll be sent back to Anchorage for it to heal. I have a plan and it involves working, earning money. I ignore the pain when I can and when no one is watching I hit my hand against my thigh, trying to stimulate blood flow.
      Everyone is encouraging me to take time off, to scrap my plan of working three months straight. A loader operator tells me I’m going to get sick of everyone on the crew, or they’ll all get sick of me. Both end up being true by about the ninth week. He tells me if I wasn’t crazy before I got to the Arctic, I will be when I leave. And one of those things was probably true as well.

Postscript: January 5, 2016

      I wouldn’t be the same person without my time in the Arctic, and I certainly wouldn’t be able to write the way I do. The “write what you know” cliche abounds, but it’s much more vague than people give it credit for being. Even when I’m not writing about something I have personally done, my stories are informed by the people I have known, the jobs I have worked, and the places I have been. I have considered writing a memoir of my time in the Arctic, but it has felt more vital to write fiction about the struggles of everyday life, about how we manage to keep going every day despite the bumps, both big and small, in the road. That is why I am so inspired by blue-collar men and women. If I hadn’t suffered the pinched nerve in my wrist I would have kept a journal while I was working up there, but instead I tried to mentally catalog the days, the people, and the conversations, and years later I have filtered bits and pieces into short stories, ones I hope do justice to the people who are still there, toiling away.

Sunday Sentence: Confession by Bill Roorbach

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

She was an eyeful, clothes like skin.

Confession by Bill Roorbach

Friday Freebie: The Expatriates by Janice Y. K. Lee

Congratulations to Benjamin Clark and Bart Zimmer, winners of last week’s Friday Freebie contest: Wilkie Collins: A Brief Life by Peter Ackroyd.

This week’s book giveaway is a galley copy of the new novel by Janice Y. K. Lee, The Expatriates. I don’t normally include galleys or advance reading copies (ARCs) in the Friday Freebie contests, but since the publisher is packaging The Expatriates in a fancy box (see below), I couldn’t resist. Read on for more information about the novel...

Janice Y. K. Lee’s blockbuster hit debut, The Piano Teacher, was called “immensely satisfying” by People, “intensely readable” by O, The Oprah Magazine, and “a rare and exquisite story” by Elizabeth Gilbert. Now, in her long-awaited new novel, Lee explores with devastating poignancy the emotions, identities, and relationships of three very different American women living in the same small expat community in Hong Kong. Mercy, a young Korean American and recent Columbia graduate, is adrift, undone by a terrible incident in her recent past. Hilary, a wealthy housewife, is haunted by her struggle to have a child, something she believes could save her foundering marriage. Meanwhile, Margaret, once a happily married mother of three, questions her maternal identity in the wake of a shattering loss. As each woman struggles with her own demons, their lives collide in ways that have irreversible consequences for them all. Atmospheric, moving, and utterly compelling, The Expatriates confirms Lee as an exceptional talent and one of our keenest observers of women’s inner lives. Marie Claire calls it “The first must-read of 2016” and Vanity Fair writes: "We imagine we know these [expatriate] women, who are distanced from their work, friends, and family, but we don’t. Janice Y. K. Lee does. Set in Hong Kong, The Expatriates looks inside the lives of three women...all in crisis, all needing one another in ways they, and we, can’t imagine.”

If you’d like a chance at winning a copy of The Expatriates, simply email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. One entry per person, please. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on Jan. 14, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on Jan. 15. If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words “Sign me up for the newsletter” in the body of your email. Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning?  Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter. Once you’ve done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying “I’ve shared” and I’ll put your name in the hat twice.

Elizabeth Marro’s Library: Every Book Has a Story

Reader:  Elizabeth Marro
Location:  San Diego, CA
Collection Size:  Between 500 and 600.
The one book I'd run back into a burning building to rescue:  Sorry, I can’t pick just one. But now that you’ve got me worried, my picks will be grouped together on a shelf near the door along with a fireproof satchel big enough for all 21 novels in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series, Volumes I through III of the Dictionary of American Regional English, AND a very beat-up 1936 edition of Gone with the Wind. While each is replaceable, they are from or linked directly to a person I love. The stories and those connections will comfort me when my home is in ashes.
Favorite book from childhood:  Johnny Tremain by Esther Hoskins Forbes. My copy is gone now, dropped too many times in the bathtub when I was growing up, but I read it so many times I can conjure scenes from memory. It was the first book that treated me like an adult.
Guilty pleasure book:  I never feel guilty about reading any book. I do feel an almost sinful pleasure when I escape into the calli of Venice with Donna Leon’s Commissario Guido Brunetti. They are not so much mysteries as an excuse for Leon to describe the relentless assault on the “beautiful and civilized” life of Venetians. In the process we are treated to elaborate descriptions of food, wine, walks, and the fading beauty as well as the resilience of the city.

The central library in my home are the shelves that wrap around our bed and spill onto the additional shelves we’ve stashed along the walls of the room. There are branch libraries in my office, the bathroom, the guest room, the car and in a bag that holds books I want near me just in case. A growing number of books populate my Kindle and iBooks libraries.

I do have an issue right now with organization which is to say, I don’t have any. Jorge Luis Borges’s Collected Fictions are separated from Cortazar’s Cronopios and Famas by several novels by Cormac McCarthy who can also be found across my room on another shelf. Early Richard Ford shares space with the The Well Dog Book and later Richard Ford can be found squeezed between Jane Austen and Amy Tan and not far from a book called Super Brain. It wasn’t always thus but thanks to a massive “decluttering” campaign in advance of a move we never made, a huge number of our books were stashed under our bed for a long time. When I retrieved them I behaved like a woman in a fever, ripping open bags and stashing on the shelves as the came out of the bags. I was just happy to see them once again.

There is something to be said, though, for the random shelving of books. The hunt for Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel uncovers the long-lost edition of Carol Shields’ Collected Stories. I discovered Le Carre’s The Tailor of Panama, Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, Anne Tyler’s Noah’s Compass, and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior clustered together and I recalled how I’d grabbed each of them once to just to study their opening pages. Each offers a different version of the perfect way to start.

The books I have are linked to periods of my life, projects I’m working on, and the crushes that follow when I discover or rediscover writing I love. The ones that I hold closest to my heart are linked to the people who brought them into my life.

My father, who taught me to read at the age of four and then left big adult books around for me to tackle, turned me on to the Patrick O’Brian’s series about twenty years ago. I knew why he loved them—he went to sea when he was seventeen and has never gotten over it. I love the ocean but cannot conceive of a life on it—or even contemplate a ferry ride without reaching for motion-sickness patches. I went to sea, though, with Aubrey and Maturin many many times, and each time, my father was with me or waiting for me to emerge so we could chat about the latest adventures. I cannot look at the books on my shelf without hearing my father’s delighted laugh or remembering the time we took a family walk, so deep in discussion of how the final novel might have ended had O’Brian lived to complete it, that my sister stopped us and said, “Who the hell is Jack?”

My husband gave me the first three volumes of the Dictionary of American Regional English. Each birthday or Christmas holds the promise of another volume. I can open any page and find something to delight me. The “lopsy lows,” a term uncovered in New Jersey around 1968 for example are joking names for imaginary diseases while “lopsy-wise” is something folks in New Hampshire and Maine used to say around 1900 to describe something askew, or a lopsided manner. The other day, I opened up the third volume to a random page and found the term “jimberjawed.” I’m not sure how but I will find a way to use that word.

My husband knew that these books would delight me. He has mixed success when it comes to picking out other kinds of gifts but he never fails when it comes to books. Our early dates often wound up with us walking the aisles of a bookstore. He would find something and bring it to me and it would be perfect. We would sit for hours with stacks of books, deciding which ones to buy. When I once shared this with my aunt, she asked, “Would you rather have a man who knows your dress size or a man who knows your mind?” The answer was obvious. I don’t wear dresses much anyway.

Then there is my copy of Gone With The Wind owned first by Anne M. Wild of Rochester, New York whose family owned the old New Hampshire house our family moved into in 1966. The house was empty of people but bookcases all over the downstairs were filled with leather-bound volumes of Dickens and Shakespeare and a single copy of Gone With the Wind. When I was fourteen and driving my mother crazy with my moods, my boredom, and my insecurities, she grabbed it off the shelf and told me to read it. If nothing else, it would give her a few days of peace.

I began to read. And read. And read. I sat in the back of algebra class, the text book propped up on my desk, GWTW hidden below on my lap. I remember finishing it late one spring afternoon, almost suppertime. I wandered to the kitchen in a fog and sat down at the table while my mother stood at the stove making dinner. It was just the two of us, a rare moment on a busy school night in our large, chaotic household.

“You finished,” she said.

“Yes.” I could barely speak I was still so full of the story.

She came over a put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “Just sit a minute.”

Although there is much I have come to question about GWTW, and my view of what the story is about has dramatically changed since I was fourteen, I’ve never forgotten the desolation I felt when I finished the final page. I’ve never forgotten that moment of silent, shared understanding with my mother. I’ve never forgotten that she let me sit there as long as I needed to even though it was my turn to set the table.

These small stories live on my shelves along with the books. Perhaps organizing them makes sense. Perhaps, in the end, it only matters that they are there.


Elizabeth Marro is the author of the debut novel, Casualties. Her work has appeared in The San Diego Reader, The Gloucester Daily Times, LiteraryMama.com, and elsewhere. A long-time resident of the “North Country” region of New Hampshire, she holds degrees from the University of New Hampshire and Rutgers University, and now lives in San Diego. Read more about her at her website.

My Library is an intimate look at personal book collections.  Readers are encouraged to send high-resolution photos of their home libraries or bookshelves, along with a description of particular shelving challenges, quirks in sorting (alphabetically? by color?), number of books in the collection, and particular titles which are in the To-Be-Read pile.  Email thequiveringpen@gmail.com for more information.

A Year of Reading: Best Novellas of 2015

Last year, I read seven books which were more than 700 pages long. I also read thirteen collections of short stories whose words were compressed hard as gems. In the foggy terrain between the huge door-stoppers and the fit-in-the-palm-of-your-hand stories, there was a healthy handful of novellas, those enjoyable works of fiction whose page lengths sprawl somewhere between the longer and shorter forms that the majority of readers are used to. Novellas are comfortable in their own skin and know exactly what they want to do in the time allotted to them. Though their popularity has been on the rise in recent years—thanks in part to publishers like Nouvella and Melville House—they remain some of our most under-read literature, just behind poetry in popularity (I have no statistics for this; it’s just my gut instinct talking). I weep for the readers who blithely ignore novellas.

Some of the very best fiction I encountered in all the thousands and thousands of pages I read in 2015 came from novellas. They took my imagination to new and exciting places in less time than it took me to read, say, City on Fire; and yet, they allowed me to spend more time with their characters than the quick dash-in-dash-out shorter fiction (which I also enjoyed in its own way). Here are the very best ones, my picks for the Best Novellas of 2015, in no particular order.

Mesilla
by Robert James Russell

Spare, unforgiving, relentless, beautiful. Those words describe three things: the New Mexico desert landscape in 1863, the plot of Mesilla, and Robert James Russell’s language which never seems to break a sweat on this novella’s pages. Mesilla is a welcome return to the western novels of Elmore Leonard, with a cinematic touch of Sergio Leone along the way, as a bullet-riddled man flees his former friend bent on exacting vengeance, no matter the cost. Laced with a neo-noir style, Mesilla is an old-fashioned western which crackles with the sharp ricochet of a bullet off a boulder. You may come for the exciting chase scenes, but you’ll stay for the thoughtful way Russell probes the human condition. There were some indelible images and scenes in these pages which have stayed with me to this day, five months after reading it. Mesilla is the perfect blend of artful storytelling and cinematic action.

On the Island at the Center of the Center of the World
by Elizabeth Kadetsky

Faintly echoing the title of William Gass’ In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, Elizabeth Kadetsky’s novella from Nouvella, set on the Mediterranean island of Malta, reminded me of another great mid-20th century writer, Paul Bowles. On the Island at the Center of the Center of the World is about disorientation in a foreign land and how we survive when we’re set adrift from the familiar and routine. Netti and her precocious eleven-year-old son Ian have come to the island from America, hoping to find a new beginning: “Malta seemed a place to start over. Clean up. Dry out. Drink less.” When, in the opening pages, she witnesses a hit-and-run on the street outside their apartment, Netti will find the Mediterranean has a dark underbelly behind the veneer of sapphire-blue seas and sparkling fireworks at night. Kadesty held me tight against the page as I followed Netti on her dangerous quest for the truth.

Camp Olvido
by Lawrence Coates

Like the other two novellas I’ve mentioned, Lawrence Coates’ Camp Olvido builds an entire universe on the head of a pin. I’m blown away by how all three of these writers sent me to vivid, fully-realized landscapes of the imagination in such a short space. Here, in Camp Olvido, Coates took me to a migrant labor camp in California during the Great Depression. This is John Steinbeck territory and, frankly, Coates out-Steinbecks Steinbeck himself. I was completely taken in by the simple, yet wholly entrancing, prose in these pages as Esteban, a bootlegger and traveling salesman, gets caught up in a conflict between migrant workers and the landowners. There are so many memorable passages in Camp Olvido that it would be impossible for me to list them all; but let me leave you with this one where Coates manages to find beauty even in the most violent of scenes:

      The vendor dropped the knife and put both hands to his throat, trying to gather up his lost blood and bind up the rent flesh, trying to find a way to keep breathing the earth’s sweet air.
      He fell to his knees, then his muscles sagged and he toppled over, and the great bag of skin that had contained him slackened and emptied.

There are some books when, after you finish them, leave you breathless, quiet, and thoughtful. Camp Olvido stunned me into silence. I sat there with this universe in my hand for the longest time.


Related posts:
A Year of Reading: Best Books From Other Years
A Year of Reading: Best Poetry of 2015
A Year of Reading: Best Gift Book of 2015 for Bookworms
A Year of Reading: Best Short Stories of 2015
A Year of Reading: Best Book Cover Designs of 2015
A Year of Reading: Best First Lines of 2015

Glancing Back at Pete Duval’s Rear View

On the first day of this year, as I was cleaning, organizing and otherwise fondling my massive book collection, I came across a slim paperback that quietly, almost shyly, squeezed its way between larger, louder book-spines. I recognized an old friend. My breath caught and a memory hiccuped to the surface.  I pulled out the book from where it was lodged between John Gregory Dunne and Stuart Dybek and stared at the pine tree air freshener on the cover of the advance reading copy I’d received more than a decade ago. Rear View: Stories by Pete Duval.

I reviewed the collection for the San Francisco Chronicle in 2004 and though I found fault with a few of the stories, overall I loved it enough to have these happy memories well up in me when I stumbled across the nearly-forgotten paperback on my shelf. This is one reason I love organizing my 11,000-volume library: it allows me to touch past favorites, now dusty and page-wrinkled from humidity.

I immediately set about searching for Pete Duval, starting with Amazon, that long and winding river which delivers all books to our shelves.

Nothing, apart from Rear View.

I Googled, I Facebooked, I sent homing pigeons into the skies.

I learned this about Mr. Duval: Rear View is the only book he’s published (though he’s been writing other short stories and working on some novellas), he lives in Philadelphia and teaches writing and film studies at West Chester University and in Spalding University’s Brief-Residency MFA program, and he takes outstanding photographs. By now, I’d hoped that Rear View would have other company beside it on my bookshelf; but alas, it stands alone. Hey, I understand: life happens and crowds out your writing time, or maybe publishers pass on the next manuscript, or maybe you’re still diligently working hard on that next book and the words are marinating to perfection. After all, my own Fobbit (released in 2012) waits for a shelf companion. As a writer, I know how these things go; as a reader, I wish Duval would put another book out into the world.

For now, all I can do is tell the rest of you about Rear View, in hopes you’ll add it to your own collection. And maybe give Mr. Duval the tiniest encouragement to keep on writing stories that, as Jay Parini says in his Foreword, have “a holy hush.”

Here’s my review as it appeared in the Chronicle:

As the title suggests, hindsight permeates Pete Duval’s short-story collection Rear View. In these dozen stories, characters are always casting nervous glances in a metaphorical car mirror, checking the surrounding traffic and gauging the distances they’ve traveled down life’s highway.

In the collection’s opening story, “Impala,” that highway is a literal one as Roy and Maysle Potts head south on the interstate toward New Orleans in a borrowed convertible. Roy hopes to recapture the Mardi Gras exuberance of his college days, Maysle wonders whether or not she should tell her husband that she’s gone into menopause; but as the silences stretch like miles between the couple, they both know their journey is a futile one: “I’m forty-two years old, he thought. Jesus Christ, what the hell have I been up to for twenty years?”

That epiphany could be injected into nearly every one of the other stories in Rear View, a collection that’s alternately bleak and optimistic (though, granted, much of that optimism is forced). Selected as the winner of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize, Rear View tiptoes into Raymond Carver territory (what bleakly optimistic fiction doesn’t?), but then quietly stakes out its own parcel of land.

Duval pulls us into the lives of his characters by filling the book with closely observed details—like a church full of parishioners who murmur Mass “like furniture being moved around on another floor of the building” (“Midnight Mass”) or the hush of a nursing home, TV volume on low: “Jeopardy! ended in a whisper of applause, and the drums and trumpets of the evening news filled the room” (“Wheatback”).

The author writes about “a world coiled mean-tight and waiting to go off in your face if things got too good” in “Something Like Shame.” Wives berate husbands with the cold snap of icicles in their voice, bakery workers get hands caught in machinery, short-tempered bullies brawl in a hospital emergency room. For these characters—predominantly men—it’s a hard life lived in trailer parks, bars, barbershops, burnt-out factory towns and, in the best of the bunch, an industrial bakery. Their collars are blue, their beer is warm and their sex is passionless.

Like another of Duval’s literary forefathers, Andre Dubus, the stories are also streaked with occasional flashes of redemption as lapsed Catholics seek out the solace of the confessional. Rear View closes with “Pious Objects,” in which an aging priest hears the confession of a man responsible for a box of Virgin Mary statues being dumped in the river. The man’s spiritual agony over the tossed-out icons causes the priest to reflect on the simpler days of his youth, a relatively uncomplicated world that now seemed to have vanished forever. The priest gives the man his penance; but after he leaves, the burden remains: “For hours the heaviness stayed with him. It was evening before Father Gaston emerged from the curtained stall of the confessional, long after he had sent the other man out into the world with a clear conscience.”

Each of Duval’s characters is weighed down by something—unrequited love, faded dreams, alcoholism, dying parents—and even though lip service is given to the redemption of religion, people like the narrator of “Scissors” can never truly be happy in their circumstances: “I was sitting in Renny St. Cyr’s barbershop, looking out at the textile mills across the highway and the big clock without hands. I hadn’t been home to New Bedford in years. But I was out of work. My wife had left me. I had no savings, and at the age of thirty-one no choice but to move in with my mother until—her words—‘something turned up.’”

As interesting as these down-and-depressed characters are, Rear View doesn’t always live up to its early promise. Some of the stories are, frankly, flat as beer left out overnight, and the collection would have benefited by the author or his editors dropping stories such as “Welcome Wagon,” a vignette featuring a volatile character from another, better story; or “Fun With Mammals,” which finds the narrator baby-sitting for a narwhal strapped to a flatbed heading north toward Canada. At times, Duval doesn’t trust his writing enough not to shove epiphanies down our throats.

However, when he’s relaxed and running at full throttle—as in “Bakery,” “Impala,” “Pious Objects” and the title story—Duval is able to get under the grimy fingernails of working-class Americans and capture exactly what it is about contemporary life that drives us to distraction, drink and depression.

Rear View is a confident, hard-muscled debut from a writer who knows how to handle the wheel even while flicking glances up at the mirror where all those miles recede behind us.

Sunday Sentence: Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

A casino can make an average man lovely.

Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins

The Top 10 Quivering Pen Posts of 2015

This was the Year of Resurrection.

In late 2014, after more than four years of continuous blogging here at The Quivering Pen, I was rapidly approaching burn-out. My own novels were not getting written, short stories were languishing, and my cats were occasionally going unfed—all in service to this blog, which remains a one-man sweatshop operation. So, after long thought and many nights of troubled sleep, I decided to kill The Quivering Pen. On January 13, 2015, I nailed the shutters over the windows and chained a padlock across the front door, then turned my back and walked away down the road.

Only to come scurrying back in April. Jesus may have been sealed in His tomb for three days, but it took me three months to realize I couldn’t live without The Quivering Pen. (Well, I can—and I will eventually, someday—live without the blog, but I think you know what I mean: it’s an enjoyable part of my daily routine.)

After the hiatus, I came back to the blog with gusto...but also with a new attitude: if I didn’t post something each day, if I decided to take a break and just RELAX, that was okay. No one’s world was going to end if The Quivering Pen didn’t pop up in their news feed. Though you’d never be able to tell by the number of posts I’ve written since April, that’s been my mantra for the blog in 2015. I’ve gone all que sera, sera on the Pen.

And you, faithful readers, have continued to read the blog. I’ve written it, and you’ve come. You will never know how much I appreciate your clicks and shares and encouraging comments, whether at the blog itself or through email and social media messages. While overall page views were down from those in 2014, I chalk that up to the blog’s three-month slumber. Since the Resurrection, however, you have clicked and clicked and clicked, and for that, I thank you.

Here’s how the 2015 stats shook out. I compiled this roster of Top 10 blog posts from the shaky science of Google Analytics, so take that for what it’s worth. I left off things like the weekly Friday Freebie book giveaways and the Soup and Salad news compilations. I also limited myself to posts which first appeared in 2015—otherwise, older content would have dominated the list: posts like the one about Tobias Wolff’s short story “Bullet in the Brain” (which is consistently one of the most-visited posts—primarily from students doing term papers on Wolff, methinks), an appreciation of Barry Unsworth’s novel Morality Play, and a post titled “Having Sex With Madame Bovary” (not hard to see why that earns so many search-engine clicks). So, without further ado, here are the champions of 2015 with snippets from the original blog posts:

#1: The Best First Lines of 2015
A roundup of the best opening sentences in books published in 2015, including this one from All This Life by Joshua Mohr:  It’s another brittle day, all of them inching over the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco, their typical trek to cluttered desks, schlepping with their hangovers, their NPR, carpools and podcasts, prescription pills and nicotine patches, their high-def depressions, Lasik so they can see all their designer disaffections, lipstick smeared on bleached teeth, bags under their eyes or Botox time machines, bald spots or slick dye jobs, bellies wedged in pants or carved Pilates bodies, their urges to call in sick, their woulda coulda shouldas.

#2:  In a World Without Mockingbirds: What if Go Set a Watchman was Harper Lee’s First and Only Book?
In 1957 the J. B. Lippincott Company purchased Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee. Editor Tay Hohoff, although impressed with the story, thought it was by no means ready for publication. During the next couple of years, she led Lee from one draft to the next until the book finally became what we know as To Kill a Mockingbird. But what if the publisher had accepted Go Set a Watchman and printed it as submitted? What would the reaction have been at the time? Would Mockingbird ever have happened? This is how I approached my reading of Go Set a Watchman. It wasn’t easy to read this new book in a world without Mockingbird—which is such an unstoppable force of culture—but I blocked it out and concentrated on Go Set a Watchman as a singular work of art. I penned a hypothetical review as it would have been written in 1960.

#3:  The Last Word.
Apparently, y’all like to rubberneck murder scenes. When I tried to kill the blog, enough of you were there to make this the third-most popular post of 2015. Here’s how I concluded that now-slightly-embarrassing message: Now, I’m off to finish this draft of the novel I’m calling Crossing Baghdad. After that, it’s on to a revision of Dubble, the satire about a Hollywood stuntman. Beyond that, other novels wait their chance to be written....like the one about the 12-year-old girl who falls in love with the actor playing Judas in a touring production of Jesus Christ Superstar; or the one about the obese butcher who, in the 1930s, swims the Yellowstone River to prove his love for a woman who has scorned his advances; or the one about the married couple, paralyzed in a car crash and now lying side by side in hospital beds, who realize they’re still in love even though they can never touch each other again (working title: Married, With Broken Necks); or the one about the small town in Montana trying to piece itself back together after a bus accident which kills nearly every member of its high school wrestling team; or....well, you get the idea. My head is an aquarium full of fish, each one with a story to tell.

#4:  My First Time: Lincoln Michel
There are two literary success stories we like talking about: the prodigy who shoots to stardom after getting her first big break and the underappreciated writer who toils away in obscurity until suddenly finding success (often after death). It’s easy to see why. The former allows emerging writers to imagine writing success will be easy and quick, and the latter allows writers who haven’t found success yet to believe it’s still in the cards for them. And both of those things do indeed happen. For me and most writers I know, though, the journey is bit more of a long but steady slog.

#5:  The Best Book Cover Designs of 2015
As it turns out, you can judge a book by its cover...or at least I do. Unfair or not, the art and design of book covers can sometimes be the one factor that either persuades or dissuades me from initially picking up (or clicking on) a book with which I’m not familiar. True, I’ve read some really great books which were dressed in lousy clothes; but the opposite is also true: some truly beautiful jacket designs turned out to be window dressing for some meh writing inside. These were my favorites which hit bookstores for the first time in 2015, including the design for Find Me by Laura van den Berg: The words on the cover are just fuzzy enough to make me think I’m looking at something trapped under lake ice. Everything harmonizes here—color, typeface, size and placement—to make this one of the outstanding covers of 2015.

#6:  Writing is a Marathon Sport: Virginia Pye and Her Patience
     At the age of twenty-seven, I sat in the impressive 57th St. office of one of New York’s top literary agents and listened as she described how Meryl Streep should play the mother and Judd Hirsch the father in the movie version of my first novel. As we stood to shake hands, I couldn’t quite grasp what was happening so I asked outright if she was going to represent me and oversee my book’s publication. She smiled, because how my future was intended to unfold looked apparent to her. As I left the shiny chrome and glass building and walked up Fifth Avenue towards Central Park, I let it sink in that my life’s dream was about to come true, right on schedule. I would soon be a young star on the literary scene. I felt elated and satisfied and it all seemed too good to be true.
     And it was. Because neither that agent nor anybody else could have told me that I would be lucky enough to write books for the rest of my life, but I would have to wait until I was fifty-three years old—almost precisely twice the age I had been when the impressive agent took on that first manuscript—until my debut novel was finally published.

#7:  My First Time: Erika Swyler
     I don’t have a desk drawer novel or a shelf full of false starts. My first book lives in e-book purgatory and wears an imaginary author’s name. I am a debut novelist who isn’t really a debut novelist.
     It was a write-for-hire novel for a startup publisher of—wait for it—feminist erotica. In a standard startup nightmare, the publisher folded after I’d delivered my manuscript. My paycheck never materialized. The book is my biggest achievement and greatest failure. It’s a terrible piece of writing, but the circumstances under which I wrote it changed my perspective on who I am and what writing work means.

#8:  My Favorite Books of 2015 (So Far)
The best books stick—sure as spaghetti thrown at a wall or oatmeal to the ribs—and the first eight months have been filled with books which have attached themselves to me and show no signs of ever letting go. I’ve winnowed the list of books I’ve enjoyed down to nine and they run the gamut from a Bigfoot hunter to a fictionalized F. Scott Fitzgerald.

#9:  The Best Short Stories of 2015
Guest blogger Jodi Paloni listed her favorite short fiction published in 2015, including one by Bill Roorbach: Lucky for us, Bill has a new story out through a delightful invention from Ploughshares—a top-notch literary journal based out of Emerson College—called the Ploughshares Solo series. For $1.99 you can hold a paperback single, like Roorbach’s “Confession,” in your hand or download it to your e-reader. You never have to throw off the blanket or leave the house! “Confession,” like all of the Solos, is a “longer” short story. It’s about a first date between a pastor and a skeptic and a conversation held in a bar. “Confession” maintains what we’ve come to expect from Bill’s work—great heart, brainy wit, and down-to-earth sexiness, all wrapped up in prose that’s music to the ears. If a story could be a hot toddy, well, this is the one to drink.

#10:  The Return of The Quivering Pen

Then Jesus shouted, “Lazarus, come out!” And the dead man came out, his hands and feet bound in graveclothes, his face wrapped in a headcloth. Jesus told them, “Unwrap him and let him go!”
          John 11:43-44

As it turns out, this blog was not dead, merely dormant. Or, in the words of The Princess Bride, it was only mostly dead.

Friday Freebie: Wilkie Collins by Peter Ackroyd

Congratulations to Betty Jeanne Nooth, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie contest: Academy Gothic by James Tate Hill.

For this week’s book giveaway, I have two copies of Wilkie Collins: A Brief Life by Peter Ackroyd to put into two lucky readers’ hands. Wilkie Collins is one of the many authors on my Reading Essentials list and I hope to finally get around to cracking open The Woman in White this year. Ackroyd’s short biography will be the perfect companion for that read. To learn more about the new book, keep scrolling...

Short and oddly built, with a head too big for his body, extremely nearsighted, unable to stay still, dressed in colorful clothes, Wilkie Collins looked distinctly strange. But he was nonetheless a charmer, befriended by the great, loved by children, irresistibly attractive to women—and avidly read by generations of readers. Peter Ackroyd follows his hero, “the sweetest-tempered of all the Victorian novelists,” from Collins’ childhood as the son of a well-known artist to his struggling beginnings as a writer, his years of fame, and his lifelong friendship with that other great London chronicler, Charles Dickens. In addition to his enduring masterpieces, The Moonstone—often called the first true detective novel—and the sensational The Woman in White, he produced an intriguing array of lesser known works. Told with Ackroyd’s inimitable verve, this is a ravishingly entertaining life of a great storyteller, full of surprises, rich in humor and sympathetic understanding.

If you’d like a chance at winning a copy of Wilkie Collins: A Brief Life, simply email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. One entry per person, please. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on Jan. 7, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on Jan. 8. If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words “Sign me up for the newsletter” in the body of your email. Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning?  Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter. Once you’ve done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying “I’ve shared” and I’ll put your name in the hat twice.

A Year of Reading: By the Numbers

This year saw the passing of the legendary reader/reviewer Harriet Klausner who allegedly finished four to six books per day. While I could never reach Klausnerian heights (short of being sentenced to prison or shipwrecked on a desert isle), I did read my fair share of books in 2015.

I’m not one for making resolutions (or, at least, I’m not known for keeping them), but if I was, I doubt I’d be lifting a glass of champagne tonight, vowing to read more books in 2016. As I approach the border between these two years, I realize it would be pretty hard to consume more books than I did in 2015. These past twelve months, I exceeded even my own high expectations.

As faithful readers of The Quivering Pen know, I’ve kept a book log every year since returning from my deployment to Iraq with the Army in 2005. In a Word document on my computer, I write down author, title and page count; at my Library Thing account, I also record the date I started/finished the book, a rating, and other details. Here’s how it's gone for the past ten years:

2005:  50
2006:  40
2007:  61
2008:  66
2009:  46
2010:  54
2011:  55
2012:  56
2013:  81
2014:  106

This year, however, the grand total of books was....drumroll, maestro....

114 books
(cymbal crash, applause, triumphant bows)

Given my work schedule (40 hours at the Day Job, slightly-fewer hours at the writing desk, and seven hours a week helping my wife at her shop, The Backyard Bungalow) and my domestic life (cooking, cleaning, shoveling snow, etc.), I honestly don’t know how I can do better. But maybe I’ll surprise myself a year from now when I look back at my 2016 book log.

Here’s how it broke down numerically in 2015:

• The average page count was 304 (up from 254 pages in 2014, which was up from 231 the previous year).
• The shortest book was Approaching Winter: Poems (50 pages) by Floyd Skloot, the longest was It (1,376 pages) by Stephen King.
• 29 of the 114 were e-books.
• 48 were published in 2015, 6 were advance copies destined to be released in 2016, and the rest were from prior years.
• 71 were written by men, 37 by women, 6 were a mix of both (anthologies or collaborations), and 0 were written by dogs or other household pets.

All in all, I’d have to say 2015 was a very good year of reading, indeed. And now, on to the next page, the next chapter, the next year...