Long Story Short

Hansel and Gretel: Expendable Objects

2011-12-20T13:07:00.000-08:00

Although I don’t remember how or when I first came across “Hansel and Gretel,” I cannot recall a time when I did not know the tale. As a child, what I understood about the story was that a pair of young siblings, a brother and sister, were lost in the forest and needed to find their way home. There were bread crumbs, birds, and disastrously, the candy house. Inside lived the kind old lady who was in fact wretched, lost in a different way. All my life, I thought the story was about the importance of not being fooled by anything too good to be true. When I read it a couple of weeks ago, though, I discovered other layers: the world Hansel and Gretel inhabit is gravely unsympathetic to them, and every character in the story is either touched or motivated by hunger.

The story begins in “a time of famine” (56), and the step-mother wants to get rid of the children because there is not enough food. She says to the children’s father, “All four of us will starve. You may as well start planing the boards of our coffins” (56). She forms her plan to abandon Hansel and Gretel in the forest.

Worried about her own starvation, she wants to dispose of children she could love and who could love her in return. The famine, her poverty, kills her sympathy. The father doesn’t want to lose his children, but he’s too weak or practical to convince the step-mother of any other course. Once the decision is made, he reflects, “But I still feel badly about the poor children” (56).

Perhaps hunger has made him impotent, or prevented him from behaving in any other way.

When the father and step-mother finally succeed in depositing the children in the forest, when Hansel and Gretel are lost and abandoned, the siblings naturally grow hungry. A sense of being forlorn is the first pain, and hunger is the second. We are told, “they were getting deeper and deeper into the forest, and unless help came soon, they were sure to die of hunger and weariness” (59). Is it any wonder they are drawn to a house made of bread, cake and sugar? The old woman who lives in the house must be hungry, too, for she “kill[s], cook[s] and [eats] any child who f[alls] into her hands, and that to her [is] a feast day” (60).

Has famine and the resulting hunger deranged her? Or was she deranged to begin with?

Something else to observe is how none of the adults in the story experiences pity for the children. Instead, the adults cruelly manipulate Hansel and Gretel. The one adult who feels sympathy, the father, is too pathetic to act on it. Around the time the story was first told, children were not regarded the way they are now, and after putting the story away, I consoled myself with the thought that such events could never happen today.

But then it struck me how monstrously children can be treated in our present world- employed, sold, starved, lead into conflicts as child soldiers, murdered, abused, neglected, and worst of all, forgotten. And then my heart began to break. Greedy, confused and indifferent adults today still treat children as if they were expendable objects. Hansel and Gretel escape, find their way home to their father, and enjoy a happy ending in which the step-mother is dead. If only the same were true for vulnerable children today—if only there was one single person to outsmart.

Grimm, Jakob and Wilhelm. “Hansel and Gretel”. Grimms’ Tales for Young and Old. The Complete Stories. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: Anchor Books, 1983. 56-62.

2011-12-03T05:41:00.000-08:00

"Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis that we set the real meaning of things." Georgia O'Keefe.

2011-11-30T14:02:00.000-08:00

What a lovely, inspiring interview.

"Take the time to be brief." Edith Pearlman

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/debra-ollivier/edith-pearlman-pen-award-_b_1117158.html

2011-11-30T04:35:00.000-08:00

"One must learn to read as a writer, to search out that hidden machinary, which it is the business of art to conceal and the business of the apprentice to comprehend."
Margot Livesey.

2011-11-30T04:18:00.001-08:00

"A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is." Flannery O'Connor

It really is true that stories express meanings that cannot be expressed in other forms and that each word counts. Because each word counts, we need to read stories in the same way we read poems.

EU Literature Prize Recognizes Short Stories

2011-11-29T16:17:00.001-08:00

http://euobserver.com/851/114435

2011-10-26T14:37:00.000-07:00

Onion Man, Kathryn Mockler’s forthcoming poetry collection from Tightrope Books, is a series of untitled, linked poems that take on the force and breadth of a novel. The eighth untitled poem depicts a typical evening of a teenage girl working at a corn-canning factory with her boyfriend, Clinton. Throughout the poem, Mockler explores a conflict between the unnatural setting of the factory and the narrator’s yearning for connection and comfort.

Mockler first hints at the desolate environment of the factory. The narrator notes, “Lights and no/ windows trick me/ into thinking/ it’s day” (1-4) The narrator is “tricked” or deceived by an environment that does not provide windows and is brightly lit. Removed from the regular, predictable cycle of the day, she is “tricked’ by the other, false day of the factory. As the poem progresses, the narrator’s longing for a more natural environment emerges. When she leaves the factory for her cigarette break, she remarks that “the air/ is cool compared/ to the air inside” (8-10) and that “the sky is clear/ because we’re/ outside city limits” (11-13) She takes special note of the difference between the air in the factory and the air outside, and also of her location outside the city. The differences are meaningful to her. She also attends to sounds: “I hear the crickets the / way I imagine my/ mother did growing/ up on my grand-/parents dairy farm” (16-20). She imagines the way the crickets sounded to her mother in a rural, sensuous setting, revealing her desire to connect with such a setting and perhaps even her mother. Finally, she observes that “corncobs are piled/ in pyramids” (21-22); she remarks on the corn in its natural state, before it is canned and denatured.

Spending time with Clinton after work, she seeks both intimacy and comfort. She tells the reader what will take place at the end of the night: “Clinton/ and I will stash an/ A&P bag full of/ fresh corn to eat/ when we get home” (26-30). At home, they eat the corn as well as “garlic/ bread with cheese” ((31-32). The narrator and Clinton share in the intimate, comforting act of eating a meal together, a meal fit for hungry adolescents. That is, the meal contains little real nutrition, yet is full of rich, delicious taste and texture: the meal is sensual. After eating, the narrator reports that she and Clinton will “fall asleep/ in front of the TV” (33-34). They find physical closeness replete with intimacy: only trusting, close creatures can sleep in each other’s presence. The narrator, in the final image, compares the air from the “window fan” ((35) to “wind” (38) and her and Clinton’s hair “blowing…on/ and off [their] faces” (36-37) to “weeds” (38). When she compares the mechanically manufactured air flow to wind, something of the earth, we receive a hint at her need for comfort, since wind blowing upon one’s skin feels tender, even consoling. Her comparison of their hair to “weeds” (38) startles, since weeds are thought of as ugly and unwanted. The comparison could indicate her desire to imagine that she and Clinton are of the earth. It could, at the same time, reveal her perception that she and Clinton are in the category of “weeds” (38)—unwanted, unnecessary. Perhaps the larger world, full of false days and denatured food, has not given her a reason to believe otherwise. It is interesting to note, too, that while she finds intimacy with Clinton, this experience is accompanied by a screen, remote events happening in remote places, wind that isn’t real, and food that will leave her hungry for more.

Kathryn Mockler has an incredible gift for voice. The adolescent narrator of the eighth poem reports what is around her in a calm, childlike tone, but also one that is perturbed at the bleak, soulless aspect of her various settings. When the narrator remarks, “Lights and no/ windows trick me/into thinking/it’s day” her sentence structure suggests that she is not yet an adult, but the word “trick” suggests her mature awareness that something has deceived her out of something rightfully hers: daylight. Another of her gifts is for detail and imagery. Images such as “lights and no/ windows” (1-2) and corn “ready/ to be husked, de-/cobbed and sealed/ in cans” (22-25) and “garlic bread with cheese” (32) are full of implication. The factory is not only a factory, but a world completely removed from the regular cycles and rhythms of time; the corn is not permitted to remain as it is: rather it must participate in a larger process in which it is robbed of its most natural characteristics; finally, the delicious, late night meal doesn’t really feed the narrator or Clinton.

The images also create a world that can be richly apprehended, lived and breathed by the reader. In few words, Mockler creates a world as layered and characters as multifaceted as those found in a novel.

The poem reaches deeply. What could be more universal than a young person estranged from the pulse of life, wanting to locate and feel that pulse? Ultimately, the poem left me remembering my own long, treacherous and lonely youth.

The poem discussed is untitled and appears in Onion Man published by Tightrope Books, 2011.

Kathryn Mockler is the author of the poetry book Onion Man (Tightrope, 2011). Her writing has been published most recently in Joyland, The Antigonish Review, Rattle Poetry, and CellStories, and she has poems in upcoming issues of The Capilano Review, Descant, and The Windsor Review. Her short films have been broadcast on TMN, Movieola, and Bravo and have screened at festivals such as the Toronto International Film Festival, Palm Springs International Festival, and EMAF. Currently, she teaches creative writing at the University of Western Ontario and is the co-editor of the UWO online journal The Rusty Toque.

2011-10-26T14:22:00.000-07:00

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/10/this-week-in-fiction-george-saunders.html
I enjoyed this interview.

2011-10-07T14:11:00.000-07:00

I have tried in various moments to imagine how difficult it would be for a child to learn that a parent is dying. Most of us would wish that such an event would never need to occur because we know how unbearably alone the child would feel, become. In her poem “Moths”, from her poetry collection Winterkill, Catherine Graham explores just such an event: a young daughter’s growing comprehension of the fact that her mother is ill and dying.

In the first stanza, Graham establishes the relentlessness of the mother’s illness. The cancer is described as “white cells” (1) that “move as if stocking feet/ heel and toe to bone and pancreas” (2-3). Graham creates an impression of the disease at work, moving without hesitation and with thoroughness, entering one part of the mother’s body and then another.

Later, Graham hints at the disease’s power over the mother’s mind and emotions. The mother is first depicted simply as “lamp-lit” (4) as “she sits smoking” (4). But we then learn that “she looks out at nothing because it’s dark” (6). The fact that she “looks out at nothing” (6) suggests her bewilderment. The mother is afraid, stunned.

Graham at last delineates the mother’s approach to the territory of death. The narrator observes that “the window is breaking/ the sound of waves in the quarry” (7-8). The glass separates the mother from the sound of water that can otherwise be heard. The narrator then informs us that “moths keep hitting the glass to get to her” (9). According to the imagery, the mother is dying: she is separated from water, or life-sustaining elements, and the target of moths, insects of the evening, and in this way, death.

The poem possesses startling paradoxes. The image of the cancer as “mov[ing ]as if in stocking feet” (2)creates an image of the disease, destructive and progressive, as gentle and childlike. Later, the “window” (7), nothing more than a transparent pane of glass, becomes a terrible barrier, and “moths” (9), weak and sickly pale, become unrelenting, almost mechanical in their efforts to “get” (9) to the mother. Fragile forms wield terrific powers. Also, Graham’s handling of time enriches the poem. The poem begins with “No pain yet” (1), indicating that the moment the narrator then represents is in fact the past, and that she already knows another time, when the disease caused memorable pain. In addition, key images, layered with meaning, pull the reader deeper into the poem. For instance, it is almost impossible not to see that the word “moth” is only a suffix away from the word “mother”. We imagine, then, that the mother is of the moths, and even pay more attention to her “lamp-lit” state. When the mother stares out at “nothing” and the “dark” we cannot help but be sensitive to the words’ connotations, and their connection to death; ultimately, we sense that the mother faces more than a literal dark evening. Finally, the stance is complex. The poem is spoken in the observer’s words, but nowhere does the pronoun “I” appear, a poignant clue to the narrator’s smallness or invisibility as she watches her mother wrestle with mortality.

A child is supposed to grow up under her parents’ watch until she can stand on her own. In “Moths”, Graham employs her tremendous gifts to portray a child’s world—her mother—slipping out of reach, helplessly.

“Moths” is from Winterkill, published by Insomniac Press, 2010.

Catherine Graham is the author of Winterkill , The Red Element, Pupa and The Watch. Her poetry has appeared in literary journals in North America, the United Kingdom and Ireland and has been frequently anthologized.

"Highway" a poem by Laura Lush

2011-09-16T05:42:00.000-07:00

A long time ago, when I was going through a particularly difficult time, someone told me, “You need to be one with the road.” When she said this, she meant that life is like a road, and that we cannot escape or fight against its basic nature—the twists, curves, hills or lengths or weather we find. Rather, we must endure. Reading Laura Lush’s poem “Highway” brought the advice to mind. In the poem, the speaker confronts the “brute” (3) nature of the road before her. If we view the road as a metaphor for existence, then we could surmise that the poet is really facing or delineating the more difficult aspects of being alive.

The speaker describes the road she is on with words and images which suggest its difficult nature. The road is “broken” or “scarred by wrecks” (1). Later, she notes, “so much of that road/ nothing” (5/6), and that it is “bustling/ with transports, the incomprehensible speed of life”( 6/7). The road is also “terror-capable” (6). She sees disruption and death, emptiness, danger and unfeelingness. She then reveals her stance, or relationship to the road. She reports that she “walk[s] this road” (4) and that she “stop[s] to unlodge a stone” (4) and that this action of pushing the stone “hurts” (4). The image of the speaker walking the road suggests that despite its terrors, she travels it. The fact that she tries to “unlodge a stone” (4) could suggest a need or will to alter or at least explore its random, senseless obstacles. But the action “hurts” (4) “the way nothing has ever hurt” (5). The resulting pain from her participation is more serious than any other hurt, suggesting that her relationship with the road is essentially a struggle. By the end of the poem, the narrator proposes that the road is more powerful than the sun, the natural body we associate with strength and life. She notes, “Not even the sun, orange and fierce,/ can tack this road down.” (13/14) She creates an image of the road as so powerful it is unalterable. Still, she must nevertheless navigate it.

Reading the poem, we sense the similarities between the road the speaker sees and life, and can read in her response to the road her response to existence. The road, like life, is something we travel or follow. We find ourselves on it. Just as the road is “scarred by wrecks” (1) so can our lives be “scarred” by sudden, irrecoverable losses and misfortunes. Also, as the narrator “walk[s] this road” (4) , so, too, do we walk or travel through our lives, encountering bewildering pain. When she reflects, “not even the sun… /can tack this road down” (13/14) we see another similarity between the road and our existence—nothing can prevent its twists and turns or emptiness. Nor can death or loss be prevented.

Lush creates startling images. The images of “deers bunting/ into windshields” (1/2) and “brute of a highway brooking soft shoulders” (3), allow us to see the chaos and sudden deaths, but also the gentleness of life on the road with “deers” (1) and “brooking” (3). Her line breaks add power to the poem, underlining themes. The speaker notes, “so much of that road/ nothing”(6). In placing “road” at the end of the line and “nothing” at the beginning of the next, she emphasizes the endlessness of the road and the weight and size of the “nothing”. Also, she writes, “bulrushes---quiet and reed-necked, sluicing/ the gutters” (10/11). Ending with “sluicing” Lush intensifies the cleansing aspects of the bulrushes, then, beginning the next line with “gutters” intensifies the lowness and ugliness of their habitat. Lovely actions take place in lowly locations. Ultimately, her line breaks create a force and rhythm that the reader can hardly escape. It is as if we are behind her eyes, and completely inside her sensibility, the way she sees things. The depth and honesty in the poem resonate powerfully. Nowhere does Lush attempt to portray the road in an optimistic light; she sees it for exactly what it is: “terror-capable” (6). Lush allows her grasp of it, her comprehension of its nature, to be the only solace, and great solace it is, for this reader, to have truth told.

A powerful, brave, complex poem, from one of Canada’s finest poets.

Laura Lush is the author of several poetry collections including Hometown, Softly in German, Darkening In, Fault Line, The First Day of Winter, and Going to the Zoo . She has received the Bliss Carman Award for Poetry and has been nominated for a Governor General’s Award. “Highway” is from her forthcoming collection Carapace.

Lush, Laura. “Highway.” Carapace. Kingsville, Ontario: Palimpsest Press, 2011.

2011-07-15T13:33:00.001-07:00

It is interesting how families live not in the present tense but in the present perfect, the tense which connects the past with the present. This inability to exist without the past is what makes being in any family so difficult, so complex, so maddening.

Billie Livingston’s “Clown Lessons”, from her award-winning collection Greedy Little Eyes, depicts a relationship between twins—Clarisse and James--- shaped by a tragedy that occurred long ago, at the very moment of their birth.

The first hint of the past’s intrusion onto the present is that Clarisse and James are adults living together in their childhood home, though their mother is dead and their father lives in a nursing home. They reside in their childhood home physically, and also emotionally. Clarisse works in a bank but also takes care of James who works as a clown in Stanley Park. When he loses his vending permit and can no longer sell animal balloons, Clarisse suggests he get another vending permit or return to clowning at kids’ parties. Also, she must remind him to pay his half of the bills:

“James, I can’t carry you this month. We just got our third warning and they’re going to cut us off. I need your half.”

“I told you, you should get a raise. Or a different job.”(102)

Though James does give her a “cloth sack” (103) of two dollars coins, he first attempts to pin his financial problems on her, seeing her as a kind of guardian or even mother. In many ways, she does behave like a mother.

After establishing the present, Livingston explores the consequences of the twins’ birth, a birth that took place at home, unexpectedly, rapidly and chaotically.

Clarisse emerged from the birth canal first in a “slippery rush” (107), but James held onto Clarisse’s ankle, one arm out of the birth canal, the other inside. When James was born, he pulled his mother’s uterus out with him in a ”tide of blood” (108), leading his father to believe from that moment on that James caused his wife’s death, when James could not have caused her death at all. This fact, though, was ignored by James’ father. Believing James to contain ”everything terrible he’d had to carve from his own soul before he was good enough to meet someone like [their] mother” (108) he, after many years of either neglecting James or nearly murdering him, abandoned Clarisse and James, leaving them in the care of his sister.

Given their births, it is no wonder that Clarisse comes to be viewed as the “saint” (111) in the family whereas James is viewed as a kind of a hapless, “rotten” (111) boy. It is also no surprise that they play these parts their entire lives. Furious James is the picture of disorder and even Clarisse admits his dependence on her is “financial…and emotional” (101). Clarisse remains in control, managing her life and James’ life.

As Livingston shows, James’ choice of career connects to a moment in the past, but a softer, kinder moment. After neglecting the twins for years (the father is “a nine-to-five, depressed, alcoholic ghost who avoided [them] at all costs” p.109), their father, in disguise, clowned at one of their birthday parties, thrilling their friends by producing “a dizzying array of balloon creations” (108). After this, the children begged for clown lessons and their father provided them. As an adult, James clings to something his father taught him, perhaps the only thing he ever taught him. But just as tragedy can reverberate through time, so can an act of love.

In the final scene, Livingston shows that though James and Clarisse have been shaped by the past, they can move on from it if they choose.

Having escaped from the nursing home and clearly suffering from dementia (a loss of the past) the twins’ father finds his way home. He fails to recognize his daughter or son, but moments from his past randomly surface. He calls Clarisse Suzette, his sister’s name, and then he believes that she has been murdered, something that happened to another relative. When he sees James in his clown make-up, he mistakes him for his “papa” (114) and begs him in French, the language of his childhood, to not hurt him. At this, James comforts his father, teaches him to chop an onion as they prepare dinner, scolds the director of the nursing home for not providing regular reports on their father’s condition. James, in contrast to earlier, is composed, generous, graceful. Clarisse, refusing to indulge James’ initial anger at their father’s presence (“Fuck you, James” p.114), steps out of her nurturing role.

The story left me quiet, contemplative. Maybe the past and our grief over it never end, but as Livingston shows, neither does the possibility of solace and clarity.

Livingston possesses a unique gift for visual description. The death of the mother, for instance, is made unforgettable: “his wife’s pelvis began to buck, guttural howls wailing from her body, as Jame’s head emerged in a tide of blood, his body lurching out, dragging the walls of his former home with him” (108). Later, the father is described as “an old man, small and curved, in a rumpled suit” (104); the image easily evokes our pity. The depth and sensitivity of “Clown Lessons” illustrates Livingston's power and maturity as a writer.

Also by Billie Livingston: Going Down Swinging , Cease to Blush and The Chick at the Back of the Church.

Livingston, Billie. “Clown Lessons.” Greedy Little Eyes. Toronto:Vintage Canada, 2010. 97-116.

2011-06-09T04:33:00.000-07:00

When I first read Michelle Berry’s story “I Still Don’t Even Know You”, from her collection of the same title, I was struck by the raw, honest moments in the piece. Some writers shape lovely stories that avoid difficult moments, and some writers weave lovely stories that confront pain and confusion. Michelle Berry is in the second category of writers.

In “I Still Don’t Even Know You”, a couple celebrates their tenth wedding anniversary by going on a ski trip. Poignantly, this is the first trip they have taken alone in ten years.

The vacation, though, does not go well. During lovemaking Rebecca tries to hold her stomach in and “grunts” (53) with the effort; a romantic evening is ruined because “Jack trie[s] to light a fire and c[a]n’t”, becoming “huffy” when Rebecca, a former camp counsellor, takes over (52). On the ski hills, Rebecca’s “chatter” (52) irritates Jack and Jack’s quietness perturbs Rebecca. Jack takes an interest in teenage girls, and when one of them is rude to Rebecca, Rebecca pushes her over, marking the story’s climax. Rebecca skies away, and Jack stays with the girls. Still, Jack and Rebecca join up later in the lodge with new realizations: Jack is really afraid that they are growing old together, and he “blames” (59) Rebecca for it. He asks himself if “Rebecca feeds him, washes his clothes, makes the bed—can’t she control the aging too?” (59). Having skied alone for most of the day, Rebecca concludes that it was good not to have to talk and “fill in the blank spots” (59).

The small, subtle conflicts reveal that Jack and Rebecca do not fully know each other. Jack does not know of Rebecca’s concern with her weight, or that she talks so much because once their children were born “his eyes and mind were always occupied” (57) with them, and “she wanted some of him” (57). Rebecca couldn’t know of Jack’s worry about aging.

Berry’s skilled manoeuvring between the two viewpoints lights up the story underneath the story: within togetherness there is also isolation. In marriage, there are always two minds, two views, two worlds. And the individuals who make up the couple struggle to be fully known to the other, but cannot really be.

The setting beautifully supports the meaning of the story. The cold terrain is like Jack and Rebecca’s marriage: they can find time alone in the present geography, but cannot really escape each other. The ski hills have borders and night always falls-- they must meet up later in their room. In marriage, spouses can turn away from each other, but the only way not to be together is not to be together.

In the end, having come to a deeper understanding of themselves, Jack and Rebecca put the day behind them. Rebecca says, “I didn’t even know we were fighting ” (59) and Jack says that he didn’t either. Their desire to be together, finally, is stronger than their desire to be apart. Forgiveness and forgetfulness help.

Berry has written a richly detailed, layered story worth reading slowly and carefully, and reading again.

Berry, Michelle. “I Still Don’t Even Know You.” I Still Don’t Even Know You. Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 2010. 51-60.

Upcoming Features

2011-06-04T07:11:00.000-07:00

This summer, I will be writing about stories by Michelle Berry, Zsuzsi Gartner, and Billie Livingston.

2011-05-11T05:41:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite passages in Canadian Literature:

"I placed the book face down and looked out the window. The yard glared. On the west coast, in Vancouver, we weren't accustomed to snow. Like a long spell of fair weather in summer, it was unusual, worthy of attention and respect, an omen. I watched a tabby cat follow its breath across the white crust. Every few feet, the cat sank, then kept perfectly still and waited for fate. I couldn't tell if it was scared stiff or smart."

From "Boxing Day" by Linda Svendsen.

What makes the passage so powerful is the sharp yet fluid language, and the levels the moment contains. Adele, the narrator, watches as the cat "wait[s] for fate" but without fully realizing it, watches herself. Pure poetry.

Svendsen, Linda. "Boxing Day". Marine Life. Toronto: HarperPerennial, 1993. 48.

2011-05-11T05:05:00.000-07:00

Visited Strand while in New York City. Loved it.
Bought Edna O'Brien's Saints and Sinners. Can't wait to read it.

Krista Foss's "The Longitude of Okay".

2011-05-02T08:57:00.000-07:00

Krista Foss’s “The Longitude of Okay”, which appears in the 2010 Journey Prize, made me afraid of the moments when we are reduced to who we are and who we are not, when we are made all too clear to ourselves. The story is about Katrin, a college teacher who must try to protect her class against a disgruntled student with a gun. Whether she succeeds or not is uncertain, and this question reverberates through the story.

The alarm sounds, and Katrin asks her students “That fire?” (82), indicating that she is not familiar with the various tones and signals the alarm can produce. Cody, the “smart ass” (82), casually informs Katrin that she should have “read the memo” (82). We learn, though, that she only “glanced at it” before throwing it out, her “small rebellion against scare-mongering and bureaucracy” (83). Not only does Katrin not really know the correct procedure for dealing with an armed intruder, she also finds it difficult to remain in her role of teacher or leader. Once she begins to take action, taping a test to the small window in the door, so that gunman cannot see inside the classroom, she “feels the concavity of her will” (83) and reflects “this is not who you are, Katrin. You don’t save the day” (83). Her voice, when she directs the students to “get down, get back” (83) is a “pant” (83). Also, as the scene unfolds, she cannot help but think about her own potential losses: she hears her daughter’s laughter and feels her husband’s “lips vibrating on the back of her neck” (85). Later, she “regrets …that she is middle-aged, that she is not strong, that she has let disappointment chip away at the better part of herself” (86). Katrin becomes a sort of hero only when, as shots ricochet, she awkwardly pulls off her tights so that she can wrap them around a wounded girl’s arm, to stop blood from “gushing” (88). The fact that the door fails to lock, forcing Katrin to push desks and chairs up against it, hints, perhaps, that the bureaucracy itself is remiss.

Ultimately, the students must help Katrin keep the gunman out. Esam, “her quietest student” (85) removes his belt and “loops it around the door knob” (85), tightening it so that the intruder cannot open the door that won’t lock. Ole Bill, an injured steel worker with his “bum leg” (85), becomes the strong man, helping Katrin push desks out of the way. Warbly, “a tall awkward boy” (85) helps Katrin stack desks against the door and she thinks, “Him, of all people?” (85). It’s as if no one present can remain who they are or who they imagine themselves to be.

After the shooting, Katrin grows depressed. Having failed to protect her students, she now sees other failures, how she has neglected her daughter, for instance. Encounters with her students, though, begin to lighten her. Coming across Esam in the convenience store where he works and perceiving that he is the same as he always was, that he hasn’t been changed by the incident, she asks him, “This isn’t the worst thing to happen to you is it?” (93). For the first time, she is able to see Esam not only as a well-behaved student, but also as human being who knows worlds of violence she does not know. Later, Katrin visits Giovanna, the girl who is shot, and Giovanna challenges Katrin. She is furious that the newspapers call Katrin a hero for pulling her tights off, and don’t mention that she did not “read the fucking memo”(94), implying that if Katrin had read the memo, and had acted quickly and effectively, disaster and Giovanna’s own terrible pain might have been avoided. After this moment, Katrin feels released: “Giovanna’s version of events feels familiar, akin to her own.” For the first time in weeks, she eats and “her stomach throbs with its new fullness” (95).

Finally, Katrin runs into Cody at the grocery store. He is the muscly “smartass” (p.82) who during the shooting “toppled into the shoulder of the girl next to him in a dead faint” (p.89). He, like Katrin, was not who he was supposed to be. He was not strong, nor was he the capable hero his physique and demeanour suggested he would be. He tells her that he is ashamed that he was not brave.

The threat of death reduces teacher and students to their most basic selves, making it impossible for them to maintain their usual roles. Esam can no longer remain the quiet, passive student; Bill can no longer remain disabled; Warbly can no longer remain awkward. The teacher fumbles and shows fear, and Cody cannot become the superman he thinks he should be.

In the final moment, Katrin remembers Cody fainting, and is somehow grateful for the awful vulnerability she witnessed. He stands in direct contrast to the armed student, who wants to express his vulnerabilities through murder.

Foss's writing is robust and inventive. Every sentence contains an original, resonant image. When the gunman breaks the window Foss writes “The glass shatters and tremolos like a harpsichord” (87). Also, Foss finds the exact, telling detail, so that every character who comes on the scene is somehow fully known to the reader. Katrin’s daughter is described this way: “ the girl’s shoulders curve over a fleshy continuum of breasts, the belly pushes against an outgrown T-shirt and busts out at the waist of her sweatpants” ( 89). Finally, Foss sees well past her characters’ surfaces. Here is Cody during his encounter with Katrin in the grocery store, a moment after she “brushes his shoulder” (96): “she feels him deflate, right there between the Magic Baking Powder, coconut milk, and instant frosting tins. Weeks of something sour and uncomfortable escape through the invisible puncture made by her touch” (96). She finds the very heart of him.

Foss, Krista. “The Longitude of Okay.” The Best of Canada’s New Writers The Journey Prize. Ed. Pasha Malla, Joan Thomas and Alissa York. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2010. 82-87.

Response to "Lawns" by Mona Simpson

2011-04-05T15:49:00.001-07:00

The narrator of Mona Simpson’s “Lawns” draws the reader in with her very first words: “I steal”. The words are meant to provoke but also hold the reader. The narrator’s voice, angry and lonely, did hold me, although there were moments when I wanted to turn away from the horrible truth she told.

A first year, pre-med student at Berkley, Jenny steals mail from the dormitory mail room where she works on Saturday mornings. She steals cash, presents, and cookies, among other items, and she reads letters her former high school classmates receive. After stealing, Jenny feels a “rush” and “like she is even for everything she didn’t get before” (80). When the thefts are reported to the police, Jenny stops.

We soon learn what Jenny “did not get” or how she herself has been stolen from. Jenny’s father, in beginning a sexual relationship with Jenny when she was a small child and continuing that relationship into her young adulthood, could be said to have stolen Jenny’s childhood and adolescence, her very happiness. But Jenny is in college now, and the story explores her attempt to end things with her father and to begin a relationship with Glenn, a young man she first sees riding a lawn mower “on a little hill by the infirmary” (82) She loves him and he “thinks” (82) he loves her.

Jenny’s desire to be free of her father moves the story forward, but her attachment to him and his manipulative neediness become the obstacles. When her father drops her off at Berkley, he weeps, and Jenny reflects that though this “ was the moment [she] was waiting for, him gone and [her] alone", she is "sad” (82), indicating that while she longs to be away from him, she is still attached to him. When he visits her, she doesn’t want to see him, but so that he does not simply mope around her dorm room, embarrassing her in front of her roommate, she decides to “get it over with” and “go with him” (88). Still, when he takes her to the Claremont Hotel, rents the bridal suite (“makes me sick” is Jenny’s response) and Jenny wakes up with her “legs hooked over his shoulders” she says, “Dad, stop it.” (90) Soon after this point, Jenny’s anger begins to win out over her pity and her need for him. When he phones her the next day, she tells him to “leave her alone” and when he asks if they will “end up together” (91) she tells him that they will not. Nevertheless, she is “scared” because she doesn’t “know what’ll happen” (92) suggesting that in spite of her father’s behaviour, she needs him. Given the fact that he is her father, and that the abuse has been going on for so long, I cannot really wonder at Jenny’s mixed feelings.

At the same time that she longs to be free of her father, she wants to begin a relationship with Glenn. But her past intimacy with her father intrudes on her intimacy with Glenn. During Jenny and Glenn’s first sexual encounter, Jenny is afraid she smells, because her father told her when she was “fourteen or fifteen”(82) that she had an odour. Also, feeling that she is “bad” and not like others, Jenny doesn’t want Glenn to know about her past; in fact, she'll "die" (82) before she tells him. When she has sex with Glenn, she must tell herself that it’s “OK, this is just Glenn” (86).

Finally, Jenny gets so “mad” (94) that her father will not leave her alone, that she tells her mother about the abuse. After this, she tells Glenn, who breaks up with her, a heartbreaking consequence. He tells her that things are “always so serious” (95). Later, the narrator reflects: “I keep thinking of Glenn ‘cause of happiness, that’s what makes me want to hang onto him” (95). Her recollection of riding on the handlebars of Glenn’s lawn mower is poignant:

I was hanging onto the handlebars, laughing. I couldn’t see Glenn but I knew he was there behind me. I looked around at the buildings and lawns, there’s a fountain there, and one dog was drinking from it……I want more days like that. I wish I could have a whole life like that. (96)

Jenny wants carefree happiness, love. But the moment she tries to show Glenn who she really is, the moment she makes a move toward this happiness, it becomes impossible.

Not surprisingly, once everything is out in the open, and Jenny's sexual relationship with her father seems to be over, Jenny “feel[s] more alone” (98) and she begins to steal again, to fill herself with love and attention meant for others. She limits herself to one letter a day, and refuses to steal letters of anyone she knows. In the last moments of the story, Jenny spots a letter with her name and address typed on it, and after putting it into the trash and then fishing it out, sticks it in her mailbox so that she can “go like everybody else and get mail” (98). The lack of return address leads me to believe the letter is from her father, that Jenny senses this, and that she cannot yet break the attachment. The letter she finds with her name on it is the first piece of mail she receives.

When Glenn breaks up with Jenny, she feels “like [her] dad’s lost [her] everything” (95). We know what she means: he has taken not only her childhood and adolescence, but now her hopes for happiness as an adult. When a person has lost everything, where does she turn? This is one of the questions “Lawns” asks, and I suspect the answer is that a person turns to love or any of its substitutes.

Simpson, Mona. “Lawns.” The Iowa Review. 14. 3 (1984): 80-98. Online. 5 Jan. 2011. [http://www.jstor.org/stable/20156080]

2011-03-29T07:49:00.001-07:00

New posts coming soon!

Response to "The Golden Key"

2011-01-06T12:13:00.000-08:00

I've always loved this very short story about a boy who must go out into the forest in winter to gather wood. Whenever I read it, I feel as cold as the boy does.

After the boy gathers wood, and before he pulls his sled home, he decides to light a fire because he is “so cold” (614). He “scrap [es] away the snow” (614) , finds a golden key, then, digging into the earth, an iron box. He discovers a lock in the iron box that the key fits. The story ends as the boy begins to turn the key, and the reader never learns what the box holds, whether it will provide treasure or something malicious, something the child will not want.

It doesn’t really matter what the box holds, though, for the story is about how badly the boy needs the “precious things” (614) he believes he will find. The story contains few details, but we can speculate that the boy’s father is working or, worse, is dead or sick. The boy is too young to be charged with the responsibility of collecting wood for his family. Also, he does not seem to possess warm enough clothes. The only adjectives used in relation to the boy are “poor” and “cold” (614).

When I read the story, I imagine an overcast sky and a low, pressing, assaulting wind, the kind that makes you think the world will always be cold. I see the boy pulling his sled across the snow towards the forest. He worries, I think, about his family, and he might wish that he had toys and money, that he could rest. His scarf and mittens are not warm enough. The wood takes a long time to gather, and he is alone as he does his work. The sky through the trees is like grey milk. After he has gathered the wood, and discovers the key and the iron box, he inserts the key in the lock and turns it because he wants what could be inside—what is supposed to be inside--riches, relief, power. He is young, so he is certain the box, even though it is iron, contains the treasure he needs. The golden key would have mesmerized me, too, but I am sure that there is nothing at all good in the box—the iron warns the adult. Likely, the boy is tricked by the golden key, its lovely promises.

He first digs into the snow so that he can find warmth. I wonder if in times of great cold and poverty, especially emotional cold and inner poverty, we are like the boy---pulled away from the warmth we actually need, distracted by the golden keys we find to people or places or things that could bring relief. But the worst that can happen, perhaps, is to become so mesmerized that we forget that we are cold.

Grimm, Jakob and Wilhelm. “The Golden Key”. Grimms’ Tales for Young and Old. The Complete Stories. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: Anchor Books, 1983. 614.

Kelli Deeth's Response to Junot Diaz's "Fiesta, 1980"

2010-10-23T18:30:00.000-07:00

In the back seat on car trips, my older brother and I sat looking out our respective windows, and our younger sister sat between us. Our parents sat in the front seat, my father driving with one hand, my mother blowing smoke out of a window rolled down a crack. On one car trip, for some reason, only my brother, me, and my father were in the car. The whole trip, as we traveled east along the 401, my father counseled my brother on how to play better hockey, how to shoot and pass like a star. For a long time, I followed the moon with my eyes. Then I said I was going to be sick, and my father pulled over. On the gravel shoulder, I bent over and waited to see the contents of my stomach land on the ground, but nothing came up. I can remember seeing my brother’s worried face as he sat looking at me through the window, and sensing my father’s irritation at having pulled over for no good reason. When we arrived at our destination, my father’s friends’ house, I was made to sit on the end of the couch with a green, plastic bowl in my lap, a bowl to catch the vomit that never came.

Yunior, the narrator of “Fiesta, 1980”- so tough and yet so helpless— reminded me of how it can feel to be a child.

The story is set in New York where Yunior’s parents have immigrated to from Santo Domingo. The father’s recent purchase of a “lime-green” (92) Volkswagen van suggests struggles for status within their new community. According to Yunior, the van is “bought to impress” (92 ).

Yunior, though, cannot ride in the van without vomiting, perhaps because of the smell of the upholstery, perhaps because he is so afraid to vomit he cannot help but vomit, or perhaps because he will take any attention he can get from his father. When the father takes Yunior on short trips in the van, so Yunior can practice not vomiting, Yunior enjoys the time alone with his dad.

Still, we cannot mistake the father’s cruelty, however unconsciously it is acted out. When he finds out Yunior has eaten before the trip to the mother’s sister’s house, the father pulls Yunior “up to [his] feet by [his] ear" (91) and reprimands him. The ultimate cruelty is the father’s very solution to the vomiting: preventing Yunior from eating before trips in the van, even if it means Yunior must go hungry.

The key moment in the story occurs at Tia Yrma’s party --“everything” (97) Yunior loves to eat is laid out, but the father is so worried about Yunior vomiting in the car on the ride home that he forbids Yunior to share in the fiesta; that is, as his cousins and aunts and uncles eat, he must not. If he does, his father will “beat” (97) him. As his mother is unable to stand up to the father at the party, Yunior’s Tia Yrma sneaks him “three pastelitos” (97). In the end, on the drive home, Yunior vomits again.

Diaz creates a picture of a boy being starved by his father, not only of food but also of sympathy. The mother’s inability to defy the father without suffering a consequence, his brother’s inability to protect him, and even his teacher’s dismissal of Yunior’s essay, “My Father the Torturer” as a joke, leave Yunior more alone.

I wonder if there is a connection between what happened to me that night in the car and what Yunior experiences. The moment before I said I was going to be sick, I remember wondering what it would be like to have everything stop because of me, if I could get my father to focus on me, the way he focused on my brother. The threat of being sick in a car accomplished it: I took a slight feeling of nausea and ran with it. For a while, visibility was mine. At one point in the story, Yunior says that even though his father is cruel, “I still wanted him to love me” (91). Perhaps during their rides, when Yunior is to practice not vomiting, he feels loved; if he were to stop being sick, what would be left for him?

Burroway, Janet, Elizabeth Stuckey-French and Ned Stuckey-French. “Fiesta, 1980.”
Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. Boston: Longman, 2011. 90-100

Anis Shivani

2010-10-17T15:32:00.000-07:00

I do think the difference between stories and novels is worth discussing. As we all know, a story is shorter than a novel, but is it less deep, less powerful?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-shivani/short-stories-vs-novels_b_696403.html

Collections Appear on Giller Shortlist

2010-10-05T14:09:00.000-07:00

Sarah Selecky's This Cake Is For The Party and Alexander MacLeod's Light Lifting appear on the Giller Prize shortlist.

Tove Jansson's "Snow"

2010-09-25T09:26:00.000-07:00

Tove Jansson's "Snow" is strange, haunting and magical. The story got underneath me.

"Snow" is from A Winter Book, a collection of Tove Jansson's short stories, selected by Ali Smith.

http://www.theshortstory.org.uk/stories/downloads/jansson.pdf

Response to Lydia Davis's "Lost Things".

2010-09-01T05:08:00.000-07:00

In Lydia Davis’s “Lost Things”, from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, a character speaks of several items she has lost—everything from a button to a ring to a dog—then reasons that while the possessions are “lost from [her]…they are also not gone” (275). She insists, in a way, on the existence of things that are no longer with her, suggesting her permanent attachment to these lost objects and beings. She remembers what has been lost and continues to search for what is missing, even if that search involves only trying to imagine that the objects are “not gone” (275) but persisting somewhere in the world.

Davis’s story reminded me of a watch I lost when I was fourteen, a watch my father gave me for Christmas, the first I owned as an adolescent, and the first I really cared for. He visited on Christmas day, sat in our kitchen for an hour, drinking coffee and munching on cookies, before he drove home in his red Rabbit. I stood in the doorway to witness the leave-taking, the bottoms of my socked feet cold on the threshold. The wave good-bye in the doorway was a ritual, no matter what the air was like. I stood there until the car was gone. My mother said, “Shut that door.” Someone left in the snow, but something was staying, and I could feel the new weight and precise hug of it on my wrist.

Although the watch looked gold, nothing on it was gold, and that did not bother me because the watch, whatever its materials, emphasized my wrist, no longer the bony wrist of a child, but the delicate wrist of a girl. All that day and night, I held my arm out to better admire my wrist. I slept with the watch on. The watch was from my father. After the holidays, the first day I wore the watch to school, I made sure my sweater sleeve was pushed up, just a little, just enough for me to be reminded of the watch, and I checked the time discreetly, always with good reason, as someone who did not think a watch was a big deal would. The Monday after the Sunday my friend got her ears pierced at the mall, she wore her hair in two high, tight ponytails, so the silver studs would shine, and kids made fun of her, for showing off. But no one noticed my watch, and I was not made fun of. I wore it as if it had always been mine.

The watch was mine, though, only for a short time. The watch was not the life-long possession I thought it would be. One day after school, I poured a glass of milk, preparing to go downstairs to watch The Young and the Restless, and I saw that my wrist was bare. The clasp must have come loose on the walk home, because when my friend nudged me as we left through the school doors, and asked me to go to her house, I pushed up my coat sleeve and checked the time. Going to her house would mean watching her fight with her sister. Sometimes they threw things- a bottle of nail polish or a brush. They shared a room and a queen-sized bed. She would also play Rat’s “Round and Round” until my brain felt sick. I checked the time because I wanted to tell her I had somewhere to go, but I could not think fast enough. And she knew as well as I did that I never really had to be anywhere. I told her simply that I had to go; I said, “Not feeling well.” She said, “Right.” We parted, and I didn’t doubt, and she probably did not doubt, that we were still friends.

I put my glass of milk in the fridge. In the front landing, I pulled my coat and boots on. I went back out into the winter afternoon to search for my watch, and I felt like I was going in the opposite direction in every way-towards uncomfortable rather than comfortable, towards cold rather than warm, towards school rather than home. I followed the path I walked every day, but with my eyes on the ground. The wind made my neck and ears ache, and the air smelled frozen and lifeless. When I did glance up, the lake in the distance looked cold; if I had fallen into it, I would have died. They would have to drag the lake bottom to find me, and they might never. I zipped my coat up as far as it would go- the coat was a gift from my mother, but a different kind of gift than the watch was. In the hot, bright, crowded store, I picked it out and demanded she get it for me, or, I said, all the kids would go on thinking I was poor. The coat, a soft, army green, made me look perfect in the various gleaming mirrors, but the material was thin, as she warned me. I said I needed it and she pulled out her Visa and the coat was mine. Now, the wind moved through it, the coat that my mother told me wasn’t enough of a coat.

I turned up Breezy street, and I kept my eyes on the sidewalk because if my watch was not buried in a drift, I refused to overlook it. I slowed my step, but the watch was not anywhere on the sidewalk I had walked along just a few minutes ago; it did not appear near anyone’s fence line, beneath the mailbox, near the bus stop; the fake gold did not glimmer near any curb. I arrived at the gate to the school yard, and I stood still. The yard of our school was probably the widest and longest of all the yards of all the schools in our town. They made us run the perimeter in gym. But my watch might have been there, waiting. I would see it, pick it up, and close it in my hand, and slip my hand into my pocket. I would hold it tight. I entered the school yard, and I walked the path I thought I might have taken. There was only snow, though, and all the footprints in it. And I was the only one in the field. It was always strange to be near the school when the teachers were gone. I couldn’t imagine their other lives. Without them there supervising, I felt eerily alone, like I could have been anywhere, a place no one knew about, and would never know about. I walked to the other side of the yard, across the pavement to the door I’d unwisely emerged from after school- unwisely because I had no idea what was about to happen. I was going to lose my watch, it was going to slip from my wrist, and I wasn’t going to know the loss was happening when it was. I was not going to be able to stop it.

There was no snow by the doors because the area was sheltered by an overhanging roof. We stood here on rainy days, trying to duck from the worms that boys still pelted at us, the boys who loved us one minute and hated us the next. Now, my companions were a soggy, yellow and black package of matches, a red mitten with a frayed, open thumb, and dead yet lovely leaves left from the autumn. I leaned against the brick wall, and I stared ahead. There was the school yard before me, the houses beyond, and the sky that would, I knew, almost suddenly be dark. That was winter. That was always winter- almost suddenly cold, almost suddenly terrible, and never over, until it almost was. My face was cold, and I put a gloved hand on either icy cheek. My mother would be home soon, and she would say, coming into the kitchen, “All I ever ask is that you peel the potatoes.” It was all she asked, but I disliked the chore as much as she did. Still, I tensed, imagining her voice -- didn’t I know how hard she worked? Was peeling a few potatoes so bloody hard? Didn’t I appreciate all she did? Not peeling the potatoes was like letting our sky fall- the sky that belonged to my mother and me, the one that was always about to fall, to crush us, defeat us. The guilt I felt over not peeling the potatoes, making her long day an even longer one, would have the exact, endless weight of that sky.

I started back across the field, keeping my eyes out, trying to see better than I had. The snow seemed to fold into itself and to fold away from itself. The sky shadowed it oddly, and the more I looked, the more I wanted to find it, the blurrier everything became. The wind was freezing my eyes, even my mouth, and the day wasn’t day anymore. I probably wasn’t going to find the watch, and that would mean that it was lost.

I walked down Breezy Street again. I passed some younger kids who were in snowsuits and carrying sleds. They would be on their way to the ravine, where there was a steep hill that ended in frozen marsh. Darkness was okay when you were sledding, but not when you were searching for something lost, something stubbornly gone. At the end of the street lay the bay—solid, bluish, white ice, and perfect for skating on. When I was seven or eight, my friend and I tried to skate across it to the nuclear power plant. We always said, not trying to be original, but truthful, that the plant looked just like an elephant. It always seemed possible to reach it, but the closer we got to the beast, the farther away the power plant grew; it was an optical illusion I fell for over and over. I could not see how something could get farther away, the closer you got to it. There had to be a way to trick things, rather than to have things tricking you. Then months and years passed, and we grew up, and I no longer cared about the nuclear plant- the farther away the better.

I slid my hands in my pockets. I was almost home, almost at the turn, and my wrist was bare; really, my wrist was more than bare; it was forlorn. I had been beautifully adorned, and so adorned, I had changed, or I thought I changed, or that life had changed. But I did not now need to pay anymore attention to my wrist. The watch that was given was no longer mine, and if I didn’t forget it, it would own me, the one who loved it. I wasn’t cold anymore. I wasn’t hot or cold or warm, I was simply walking home, feeling nothing. The watch was gone, and I was done looking for it in the snow.

"New Stories From the South: 2010: The Year's Best," (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill), edited by Amy Hempel

2010-08-16T06:59:00.000-07:00

http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5i_Dz0CTQgTNH_JuH7zBarVVRaXug

Greedy Little Eyes, by Billie Livingston

2010-08-08T13:54:00.000-07:00

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/bookreviews/article/844588--greedy-little-eyes-stories-of-observance

"The Bracelet" by Colette

2010-08-03T15:04:00.000-07:00

In her short story “The Bracelet” Colette presents Madame Augelier, a woman of fifty whose desperate wish to re-experience the wonders of childhood becomes intensely poignant.

We come upon Madame Augelier as she is “mechanically” (297) counting the twenty-nine diamonds in the bracelet her husband, away in Algeria, has sent her for their twenty-ninth wedding anniversary. While she tells herself that she is “pleased” (297) with the diamonds, she must finally admit that the bracelet bores her. Her black onyx ring and her sapphires also fail to satisfy. She then recalls a blue bangle she possessed as a child, how, when she held the bangle to the light, “objects” (298) grew “distorted” (298) and the bracelet “held in it a new universe, shapes not the inventions of dreams, slow, serpentine animals moving in pairs, rays of light congealed in an atmosphere of indescribable blue” (298). Peering through the blue glass, she saw wonders. Awaking after this brief “vision” to “reality”, Madame Augelier feels “bruised” (298).

Colette sculpts the story out of Madame Augelier’s urgent, hopeless desire to see the world as she saw it that day through the blue glass that she held up to the light. Such a bracelet will provide her with the “nameless pleasure” (298) she hungers for. Madame Augelier madly searches, visiting shop after shop, entering disreputable areas of town, parking her car on unfamiliar streets. When she does locate a similar blue bracelet, such is her delirium and excitement that she “stammer[s]” (298) as she buys it.

At home, though, peering at the bracelet under the lamp, Madame Augelier realizes that the bracelet she has bought is “a trinket of a child” (299). It was not the blue glass, then, that allowed Madame Augelier to see wonders, but her young mind, “the sensual genius who creates and nourishes the marvels of childhood” (299). There will be no marvels now because the “genius”, she sees, “dies mysteriously within us” (299). Madame Augelier grieves the fact that she is “old” (299) and that the girl within is “beyond her reach” (299). Colette allows her grief to sharpen in the final moment: Madame Augelier sees “ a being detached from her forever, a stranger, turned away from her, rebellious and free even from the bidding of memory: a little ten-year-old girl wearing on her wrist a bracelet of blue glass”. (299)

Colette adds facets to the story by establishing Madame Augelier’s emotional impoverishment. She is obsessive, alone, and idle; she fears she does not love her husband, and her hair is prematurely white. In this way, Colette hints at the desiccated terrain that Madame Augelier’s wish for the “sensuous genius” of childhood grows from. Collette also details Madame Augelier’s various sensations; the smell of apples makes her “sick” (298); she feels “restless” and “hungry” (298). We cannot misunderstand that her sense of lack is so acute, it becomes physical, an ongoing torment.

I cannot say that I have ever felt how Madame Augelier feels- that my ability to see wonders is gone and that my adult life is desolate. But I know I have had the occasional moment, recalling swimming in the lake when I was young, when I do see the widening “plain” (299) between childhood and adulthood. The long days at the lake, when I felt the water push and pull me, seem so long ago, so irretrievable. I can remember once floating on my back, and tricking myself that all that existed was water and body and sky; I am not sure I could believe such a thing now, even for a brief moment; and if I could, I am not sure I would not be frightened, as I was not as a child.

I wonder if, as we get older, we might miss the presence of the “being” (299)or self that could see not a rigid, fixed world, but one capable of wonderful, somehow necessary illusions.

Colette. The Collected Stories of Colette. Trans. Mathew Ward et al. U.S.A.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux , 1983.

Translation copyright 1957, 1966, 1983 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Translation copyright 1958 by Martin Secker and Warburg Ltd.

Kathryn Mockler's "Sealed Containers"

2010-07-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

http://iphonetester.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cellstories.net

www.cellstories.net

"Ninety-three Million Miles Away", by Barbara Gowdy

2010-07-19T11:16:00.000-07:00

The other afternoon, I found myself rereading some of the stories in We So Seldom Look On Love. One that caught my attention was "Ninety-three Million Miles Away", a story exploring a woman's compulsive need to expose herself to a stranger.

Ali is married to Claude, who works all day as a plastic surgeon. Since she has no specific occupation, Ali tries to fill her time with various pursuits. Dissatisfied with most of them, she at last decides to take up painting, and specifically, to paint a portrait of her naked body. To do so, she must stand nude before a mirror as she paints her reflection on canvass, and, of course, painting beside a window allows her the best light.

On her second day of painting, Ali notices a man in the opposite building watching her. At first, she conceals herself behind the curtain, but then she allows the man to observe her, and as the days pass, she begins to perform various sexual acts, wanting him to watch, needing his attention more and more. And she herself knows, “her episodes …seem to have nothing at all to do with lust” (95). Her need for his fixated gaze is simply “expressed through the sex act” (95).

Very soon, she grows obsessed, learning that he is a general surgeon, one who rids the body of illness, unlike her husband Claude, who carves and alters. Dreaming one night that he performs surgery on her, she grows compelled to bring this about in her waking life, even though, on one level, she understands the absurdity of the desire. Finally visiting him in his office, she is faced with his “adenoidal voice” (98) and “garlic breath” (99), but her psychological darkness fails to entirely break, at least not enough for her not to be heartbroken when he tells her that he is moving.

At home, she tries to recover; she takes her clothes off, but realizes that “without Andrew’s appreciation or the hope of it (and despite how repellant she had found him) what she saw was a pathetic little woman with pasty skin and short legs. (99)

Ali is completely diminished, but how did this obsession come about?

The last few lines provide a hint:

As Claude was always saying, things looked different from different angles and in different lights. What this meant to her was that everything hinged on where you happened to be standing at a given moment, or even who you imagined you were. It meant that in certain lights, desire sprang up out of nowhere.(100)

The story, I think, could easily have become cliché , but because Gowdy renders the woman's obsession with tenderness and depth, the story is engrossing- dark and yet funny, strange and yet real. Ali, an otherwise healthy, smart woman, charges down the bleakest and most dangerous of paths; and in the end, she can only marvel at what has happened.

Gowdy takes on a subject- a woman with a terrible, painful need for attention-and unflinchingly details her crisis, a crisis which, as Ali knows, may or may not seize her again.

Gowdy, Barbara. "Ninety-three Million Miles Away". We So Seldom Look On Love. Somerville House, 1992. 81-100.

"Rat With Tangerine", by Greg Hollingshead

2010-07-15T06:32:00.000-07:00

Greg Hollingshead’s “Rat With Tangerine”, from his collection The Roaring Girl, affectingly portrays a family suffering from a profound disconnection and loneliness. Bill and Diane, and their son, Adrian, live together, yet painfully apart.

Hollingshead first shines light on how isolated the family members are from each other. Bill, the protagonist, fills his days with sleep or television---all the while keeping “the morning’s last dream rolling like a tangerine around the periphery” (85). Adrian spends most of his time studying rats in the basement, discovering that the rats that eat whatever they want are the “worst diseased” (87). When Bill and his son do interact, discussing Adrian’s research results, Bill muses “wouldn’t it be nice to just crawl back under the covers and hello dreamland” (87). In the meantime, Diane attends a “primal therapy” (87) meeting, as Adrian informs Bill. Bill prefers dreams to his family and loses track of his wife; Adrian, in the psychological underworld of the basement, searches for connections between appetite and illness, and Diane attends mysterious meetings (86). The only time the family is together in the kitchen, debating whether or not mammals should eat everything they want, even if doing so leads to disease, a conversation encouraged by Bill, Adrian and Diane argue fiercely, and Adrian leaves.

Hollingshead then points to the quiet catastrophe at the centre of the family, Bill and Diane’s open marriage. In fact, the marriage is so open that the man Diane pursues walks her to her back door. Still, Diane, at the same time that she pursues the man, seems hardly interested in him. Bill observes that “as she talks, she seems to become more and more confused, as if the guy has sounded more and more ordinary in the telling” (90). Also, the marriage is open only for Diane. Bill sees no one, though his depression could be seen as a counter-attack, a different sort of betrayal. Bill and Diane’s marital problems touch Adrian, too. If Adrian is not experimenting with rats in the basement, he finds himself in the middle of his parents’ problems. Bill, seeking advice from his son, asks Adrian, after midnight, in the basement, what he thinks of open marriage.

Although each family member leads a separate life, Hollingshead cannot complete the story without exposing the depth of their need for each other. Ultimately, Bill gives his television to his son, so Adrian can, as they discussed at dinner, observe the effect of television’s blue light on rats. Also, as Bill mentions at dinner, he is “almost drowned” in television’s “blue world” (89), indicating, possibly, a brave step toward the real world of his family, his wish to connect with them. Adrian continues to study the behavior of caged mammals, as if in search of clues to his parents problems, since not only appetite but “drowning” is at the heart of them. Diane comes home to Bill, showing that whatever or whoever else she wants, she depends on Bill, or at least the life they have built together . In the final moment, Bill sleeps close to Diane, spoons her, so that we cannot mistake any of his previous behavior as lack of longing for her.

At the close of the story, Bill dreams of “a white rat walking on hind legs down the hall to the bedroom, tangerine held high in thin ecstatic paws” (91). A white rat on hind legs conjures, for me, a starving human, and the tangerine, the possible answer to that starvation. The final image might capture, all at once, the family’s “disease”, their hunger. Naturally, the hunger is not for food, in the family’s case, but for someone or anyone else, somewhere or anywhere else, and answers for the consequent hurt and confusion. The story, in the end, makes me think about family; we depend on family to fulfill us, but as it fulfills us it encloses us, and that very enclosure can lead to a desire to escape.

There is much to admire in the story: the taut yet evocative language, the sharply written scenes, the unity of imagery. “Rat With Tangerine” is also impressively complex, not because of a convoluted plot or an extraordinary subject, but because Hollingshead, in depicting how a family can long to be together and apart simultaneously, produces a story that points one way and then another, refusing to settle on facile or pleasing half-truths.

Hollingshead, Greg. “Rat With Tangerine”. The Roaring Girl. Toronto: Somerville House Publishing, 1995. 85-91.

A "quietly gorgeous writer", Mary-Beth Hughes, celebrated in The New York Times Book Review

2010-07-07T06:34:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/books/review/DErasmo-t.html

"Passing On" by Patricia Stone

2010-06-29T09:10:00.000-07:00

Patricia Stone’s intricate and vivid “Passing On”, from her collection Close Calls, examines how a mother “pass[es] on” her anxiety about health and premature death to her daughter, and how her daughter tries to cope with this inherited "dread" (7).

Stone sets the story up skillfully: “Nan Adams sat in the bathtub and solemnly stared at her toe” (6). Having accidentally dropped the “sharp side” (6) of a knife on her toe two days earlier, she fears she has “blood poisoning” (6) or that her toe will require “amputation” (6) and has hidden the condition of her toe from her mother.

As Nan takes a bath, Stone exposes the possible causes of Nan’s worry. We learn, for instance, that when Nan received a tuberculosis test at school and her “circle of pin pricks remained red a day after her test” (10), her mother concluded that Nan had tuberculosis and might need to spend “a year in a sanitorium” (10). On a different day, a pain in Nan’s leg lead her mother to tentatively diagnose rheumatic fever, a disease that could leave girls “crippled” (11). If only slightly ill, Nan must surrender to “shining half-moon bed pans, thermometers, a bed to feign sleep in all day” (12). Furthermore, if Nan needs a drink of water after playing outside all afternoon, she hesitates, “because once her mother...explained that excessive thirst was a symptom of sugar diabetes” (11).

Perhaps as a way to escape her mother’s vigilance, Nan spends a lot of time in the woods near her house:

She had been coming up from the woods after running all day along the paths pretending to be galloping on an unbroken black Stallion; and then to be running faster than anyone had ever run before, down hills never losing her footing” (12).

In her mother’s absence, Nan temporarily becomes an unstoppable force- energized and agile. Still, even on this particular day, as Nan climbs through the slats on a fence, “it was as if the whole world clicked off, jarred to a sickeningly permanent halt for just an instant-and she thought of death again” (12). Nan realizes in this moment that the “thought of [death] would always effect her life” (12). By exploring how Nan descends from feelings of empowerment to powerlessness, Stone allows Nan to emerge on the page in her full complexity: although Nan can escape her "dread" (7), the “thought [of death]” (12) can find, catch and overwhelm her at anytime.

The story ends as Nan’s bath ends. Before bed, as Nan makes (and burns) a piece of toast, Mrs. Adams discovers the condition of Nan’s toe and calls in Nan’s father to assess it. When he says that it is “just a little cut” (14), Mrs. Adams says, “Look at that red streak; that’s the first sign of gangrene” (15). The father wins out, and Nan goes off to bed.

Rather than neatly exiting the story in this moment of clarity and relief (15), Stone takes the time to show that Nan’s knowledge of her mortality cannot simply vanish.

In the final moments of the story, Nan experiences a “peculiar, familiar” (16) sensation that she is “tall” (16) and then “tiny” (16) and then that she is “melting taffy” (16). Stones gives the impression of a young girl whose borders are painfully flexible, whose shape is not yet definite, whose sense of herself is open and undefined.

Just before sleep, Nan thinks of how her father “rescued’(17) her, suggesting her belief that she has been spared death not simply because there was nothing wrong with her to begin with, but through his intervening hands. Or perhaps Nan believes that her father has “rescued” (17) her from her mother and her conviction that death will come unexpectedly and horribly. In any case, Nan lies in bed, not wanting to enter “dizziness and black sleep” (17). I cannot help but think, given Nan’s avoidance of sleep, that her rescu[e] (17) is temporary, and that “the thought [of death]” (13), is one that has permeated her thin, adolescent skin and that belongs to her now whether she wants it or not.

Patricia Stone, the author of three superb collections, of which Close Calls was the first, has been designated by Kenneth J. Harvey as one of Canada’s “finest short story writers”. What constitutes such a designation? The kind of stories that Stone consistently produces- stories in which every word is the right one, where characters live and breathe, and where the stories, over and over, strike true and profound notes.

Stone, Patricia. “Passing On.” Close Calls. Dunvegan, Ontario: Cormorant Books, 1991. 6-17.

An Interview with Mary Gaitskill

2010-06-12T06:34:00.000-07:00

The interview appears in narrativemagazine.com.

http://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/spring-2010/mary-gaitskill

Kelli Deeth's Response to Amy Hempel's "In A Tub"

2010-06-03T06:50:00.000-07:00

I eyed my grey, suede moon boots and my white ski jacket in the front closet, smelled snow on the draft seeping through the front door, then climbed the steps of the landing and lay on my back– overwhelmed. When she pushed open the front door at five-twenty, her hair windblown, my mother would say through tight lips that the school called again and that she didn’t know what to do with me. But nothing would change how awful school was. Most days, I believed I was alien and wrong, and this belief paralyzed me so much that in a couple of months, having missed so many days I could not pass a single subject, I would quit grade ten altogether- pull my coat from my locker, then step uncertainly across the frozen lawn of the school to the intersection.

On this particular day, as I lay on my back, gazing at the white stippled ceiling and planning excuses that would satisfy my mother, but that wouldn’t really, my heart skipped a beat. I sat up and pressed my palm against my chest, but by that time the gulping emptiness in my ribs was gone. Still, in the second that my heart skipped a beat, I somehow saw trees upon trees and experienced the weird thought that I did not know what they were, that I was witnessing them for the first time. I filled with agony that I could not remain in the world, that my time was up.

“My heart—I thought it stopped” (3). So begins Amy Hempel’s “In A Tub”, a story that reminded me of that morning I decided to skip school. Hempel’s story gathers around the “scare” (4) the “missed beat” (3) causes the character. While the character’s moment of fright is of a different nature than mine, Hempel articulates the moment beautifully. The unnamed woman “head[s] for God” (3), to better hear her heart, but then discovers that the best way to hear it is in a tub of water, rather than inside a church.

It’s not surprising, given the story’s title, that images of tubs hold the story together. A clay pot on the patio is “filled with water like a birdbath” (3) . When the narrator is young, she sits in a concrete mixer that she has pulled from a construction site down to the shore of the lake; she sits in it, imagining floating across the water, “hearing nothing, for hours” (4). Her cat sleeps so deeply in the flower box that a gentle knock on the window does not disturb her.

The animals or humans contained in the “tubs” experience moments of rest and closeness with their bodies—moments that seem somehow outside of time.

Later, the narrator suggests how a person may best hear the heart:

Here is what you do. You ease yourself into a tub of water, you ease yourself down. You lie back and wait for the ripples to smooth away. Then you take a deep breath, and slide your head under, and listen for the playfulness of your heart. (4)

The narrator’s need to hear her heart sheds light on what she needs, what she’s lacking—connection with her quieter and more hidden self , the self she might have been closer to as a teenager, as she sat in the concrete mixer by the lake.

Reading “In A Tub” , it occurred to me that Hempel’s stories, gaining so much power through use of image, among other techniques, are complete in fewer words than are other stories. Hempel expects readers to turn images every which way in the light, and by doing this, to access a story’s full meaning. If the reader searches for the usual clues—exposition, dialogue, telling actions, gestures—, presented in the usual way, she may feel defeated by Hempel’s work. In “In A Tub”, the tubs or tub-like structures form part of the story’s spine or plot; the plot of the story would weaken without them.

Even after my heart skipped a beat, I knew only that there was another way to see the world, and that I had to be frightened I would die to see it that way, but that I did not want to see it that way again. I wanted to stay home and watch One Life to Live or General Hospital, and I wanted to love the world the way it usually seemed.

Hempel’s character wants to hear her heart, while I, at fifteen, would have preferred to go through life without one. In both cases, though, the heart is central, as it always is.

Hempel, Amy. “In A Tub.” The Collected Stories. New York: Scribner. 2007. 3-4.

"Temporary" by Marisa Silver, published in The New Yorker

2010-05-21T14:26:00.000-07:00

In “Temporary” Marisa Silver braids together two seemingly separate stories, and, in doing so, explores a young woman’s transition from childhood into adulthood, a transition that compels because the past, it turns out, is not so easily left behind.

During a period when teenage Vivian’s adoptive mother is “on the verge of death” (2) with cancer, Vivian makes an unplanned trip to the mall to meet up with her adoptive father, the owner of a jewelry store. However, in “the dead weather of the mall”(5), Vivian is the one who discovers something unexpected: her father touching another woman’s hair and placing his hands on her shoulders as he helps her to better see a necklace she is trying on. As she observes unseen, Vivian’s “throat [goes] dry” (5) but she says nothing because “she knew that if she did her life would split open and she would slip through the crack” (5). As an adolescent, Vivian experiences the shock of her father’s betrayal, and at the same time, the potential loss of her mother.

The central action begins in L.A. where Vivian moves after completing two years of community college. She lives with Shelly, a promiscuous young woman illegally renting an “industrial space” (1) attached to a ribbon factory. Though Shelly appears to have no attachments to places or people, Vivian admires the way “Shelly slithered through her days and nights, shedding the most outrageous experiences as if they were simply the air she passed through” (1). In contrast, Vivian’s own “care felt like a disfigurement” (4). In wanting to go through the world like Shelly, someone seemingly shatterproof, Vivian might be searching for ways to avoid the consequence of caring or, in other words, the pain of attachment that, during childhood, she came to know well.

As part of her job at an adoption agency, Vivian transcribes taped interviews between prospective parents and social workers, and, though she is not supposed to, adds her comments on the files, reasoning that “a life was at stake”. One husband, a man Vivian has already noted “was unkind to his wife” (2), dismisses his wife’s remark that “[they] have a lot of love to give” as “stupid” (3). Later, he appears at the office without an appointment and Vivian learns that his wife has left him. When he asks her, rather desperately, what social workers look for in prospective parents, Vivian informs him that they look for people who have “a lot of love to give” (6). Vivian’s “cruelty” (6) could be seen as a correction of the prospective father’s selfishness and even of her own father’s past selfishness, since her feelings toward the stranger are strikingly personal.

One night when Shelly is out, Vivian sleeps with Toby, a young man Shelly has discarded. Vivian likes him for “his seriousness and his self-restraint” (3). During sex, though, Toby tells her that it is “just for now”(5). Afterwards, as he lies “spent in her arms” (5), she wonders if she really cares for Toby, and asks herself if it “was possible to care and not to care at the very same moment, the way it was possible to be a husband and not, a parent and not” (5). Even her encounter with Toby leads her into the past. Still, as a young woman experiencing her own complicated desires, she begins to examine the nature of caring, and whether or not it is necessarily constant.

The final scene of the story takes us once again into Vivian’s adolescence. Though Vivian’s mother recovered from her first experience with cancer, the disease returned and could not be treated .Vivian’s mother took up smoking in her final days, but because a brain tumor left her blind, she did not know when she had pushed the smoke completely out of her mouth, and made a strange face as she tried to expel it. Silver renders the moment beautifully:

When her father came home that evening, he watched his wife enjoy her cigarette.
“What is that you’re doing” he said, as she exhaled.
“What?” she asked, her thin voice made even thinner by the stress of the
smoke in her lungs.
“You look like a fish, sweetheart,” he said, and he put his face to hers and
blew out puffs of air onto her cheek until she giggled. For a second, Vivian
caught a glimpse of what her mother had looked like as a little girl. (7)

In this scene, the father demonstrating such unbearable tenderness for his wife, Silver suggests that betrayal can co-exist with love, that a person can be a “husband and not”(5).

Silver’s language, in this scene and elsewhere, is exact and lovely and penetrating. She puts words, sentences and images together in such a way that I felt, reading the story, that someone had called me in the middle of the night, wanting to tell me everything that was wrong, wanting me to listen.

Instead of shaping the story into the traditional arc, with one scene leading us causally into the next, the author works in pieces, placing each in such a way that the reader, ultimately, discovers the whole. Vivian’s relationship with Shelly, her encounter with Toby and the man at the adoption agency, her mother’s illness and her father’s transgression all point to Vivian’s awareness that so much is temporary and inconstant. Considering the story’s title, I could not help but make a list of all that is temporary in the story: parents, adoptive or biological, trust, living spaces, sexual partners, occupations, health, life. Still, as Silver seems to suggest, the temporariness of things does not make love impossible. Love, with all of it’s attendant pain, might be, whether we like it or not, the one thing that won’t let us go.

Silver, Marisa. “Temporary.” TheNewYorker.com/fiction/features/search. 28 Sept. 2009: 1-7. Web. 14 May 2010.

"Graveyard Day", by Bobbie Ann Mason

2010-05-14T05:34:00.000-07:00

Reading any of the stories in Bobbie Ann Mason’s Shiloh, I become aware that I am in the hands of not only a tremendously gifted writer, but also an impressively skilled and intelligent one.

“Graveyard Day” revolves around the dramatic question of whether or not Waldeen will marry Joe McClain; as the story moves toward its resolution, we sense the potential for tragic consequences for Mason’s richly evoked protagonist.

Though Waldeen is recently divorced and needs to move on, she believes that families cannot “shift membership” (167) and that Joe McClain “will turn out to be just like” (173) her first husband. While her daughter, Holly, views Joe McClain as a father, and gets a thrill when they sleep at his house, Waldeen compares a step-father to a “sugar substitute” (166). Waldeen does not want to repeat mistakes or to redefine family, but she loves Joe and wants to do what is best for her and Holly. Filling us in on Waldeen’s history and doubts as well as her daughter’s emotional needs, Mason complicates the dramatic question, creating tension, holding her reader.

If Waldeen marries Joe McClain, the marriage could end in another divorce; if she does not marry him, Waldeen may wither in a world that permits no risk or evolution. As it turns out, every other character in the story embraces change. Waldeen’s friends have recently returned from Florida; Waldeen’s ex-husband took flight all the way to Arizona. Holly longs to “go anywhere” (166) or to “go somewhere” (170). Waldeen, however, is “unaccustomed to eating out” (167) and has never flown in an airplane. Joe comments that she is “afraid to do anything new” (175). The question of whether she will allow her life to evolve becomes a critical one because Mason hints at what lies in store for Waldeen if she remains standing still: stagnation and loneliness, not only for her, but for her daughter.

Early in the story Waldeen suggests a picnic, and when Joe declines because “Saturday’s graveyard day” (167), the day on which he must tend to his grandmother’s grave, Waldeen suggests a picnic amid the tombstones. On the day of the picnic, in the presence of her daughter, friends and Joe, Waldeen experiences the “comforting” (177) revelation that the grave is the true symbol of marriage; that is, there is no escape from family, whether that family stays together or not, and particularly if the marriage produces a child. The marriage completes itself in the “burial plot” (177), and one must give in to this. This insight, added to her memory of an adventure at the lake with her first boyfriend, helps Waldeen to make her choice: at that moment, she jumps into the pile of leaves that Joe has raked; finally, she acts with abandon. Mason resolves the dramatic question, but without alleviating Waldeen of her doubts; Waldeen’s “flying leap” (178) might only indicate that Waldeen has surrendered to the ever-present possibility of loss.

If Mason’s skill is her ability to write suspenseful stories in which the stakes are high, what are her gifts? Behind the mastery of technique, I think, lies the what. What truth will the author communicate with her skills? In “Graveyard Day”, Mason gives us a woman, so fully on the page we feel we know her, who is afraid of fracture, of family falling apart -the many and various unknown consequences of attachment. But what can Waldeen do? What can any of us do? In going so deep, Mason tells us our own story, even if the details differ.

Mason, Bobbie Ann. “Graveyard Day.” Shiloh. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc, 1982. 165-178.

"Temporary" by Marisa Silver, published in The New Yorker

2010-05-13T16:34:00.000-07:00

I really enjoyed this story by Marisa Silver.

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/09/28/090928fi_fiction_silver

“The Wind Blows” by Katherine Mansfield

2010-05-07T17:22:00.000-07:00

In Katherine Mansfield’s “The Wind Blows” Matilda wants urgently to flee her mother’s superficial, stifling world of appearances. So acute is Mansfield’s understanding of her adolescent protagonist’s need to have her inner world recognized, and so skillful is she in portraying this desire, I felt I was reading a story set in the present day, or in any day for that matter.

An autumn wind disturbs Matilda’s sleep, pulls her into a tumultuous day, and the story begins.

After getting dressed, Matilda, on route to her music lesson, tries to leave the house without having her appearance assessed by her mother, but her mother sees her: “Matilda. Matilda. Come back in im-me-diately! What on earth do you have on your head? It looks like a tea-cosy. And why have you got that mane of hair on your forehead?” (107).

A moment later, Matilda tells her mother to “go to hell” (107) and “run[s] down the road” (107). Matilda’s defiance could not be more intense, decisive, or directly portrayed.

At her music lesson, Matilda grows warmly fond of her music teacher, Mr. Bullen, a man honoring music and soul rather than appearances. Mansfield tells us that “[Matilda’s] fingers tremble so that she can’t undo the knot in the music satchel” (108). She blames the autumn wind for her unsteady hands, or, in other words, for her excitement in his comforting presence.

Later, in her bedroom, confronted with the stockings “knotted up on the quilt like a coil of snakes” (109) that her mother wants her to darn, Matilda refuses and then wonders if anyone has ever written poems “to the wind” (109), suggesting that she, unlike her mother, who is annoyed by the wind, is thrilled by its wildness; because poems emerge from one’s core, her desire to write a poem gives us the strong sense, again, that she prefers the inner world to an outer world of socks and bedrooms and hats and chores.

A minute later, she takes up an invitation from her brother, Bogey, to visit the sea; once they are outside, she says to him “ ‘This is better, isn’t it?’”(109). Down at the sea, with drops of sea water in her mouth, her hat off and “her hair blow[ing] across her mouth”(110), she spots a steamer in the harbor, and enters a reverie in which she is on the ship, departing the island forever. In these few lines, Mansfield demonstrates exquisite sympathy for the young girl’s chronic vulnerability- her need for a rich, alternate world empty of silly expectations and preoccupations is so intense, she slips into dreams.

Matilda wakes, though, and discovers “the wind—the wind” (110). She is not on the steamer; rather, she stands on the esplanade with Bogey. Ending her story with Matilda’s recognition of the wind, Mansfield gives us the sense that just as the wind never ceases, neither, perhaps, will Matilda in her need to find a place where her inner world will be recognized, where she will be recognized. The wind, throughout the story, can almost be viewed as a second Matilda; that is, Matilda and the wind have so much in common, particularly restlessness and ferocity.

Mansfield’s characterizations are detailed and nuanced:

“Shall I begin with scales,” she asks, squeezing her hands together. “I had some arpeggios, too.’
But he does not answer. She doesn’t believe he even hears…and then suddenly his fresh hand with the ring on it reaches over and opens Beethoven.
“Let’s have a little of the old master,” he says. (108)

In this short sequence, Mansfield portrays Matilda’s fragility, her sensitivity to Mr. Bullen’s physical presence, and Mr. Bullen’s paternal ease with her.

Also, Mansfield does a wonderful job of showing us Matilda’s feelings: “Mr. Bullen takes her hands. His shoulder is there—just by her head. She leans on it ever so little, her cheek against the springy tweed” (108). In a few strokes of her pen, Mansfield draws Matilda’s longing to be comforted by the closest person she can find to a friend, and this longing veering into desperate, poignant action.

When I finished “The Wind Blows”, I wondered how Mansfield could have known, when she wrote this story, what I was like when I was young. She died so many decades before I was born; in fact, she died decades before my mother was born. Certain experiences must be universal to the adolescent girl: confinement of one sort or another, reverie and longing for a world in which she is understood and where she is not stifled.

Considering all of the stories Mansfield wrote in her short life, I wonder if it was her ability, along with her eye for physical detail and her musical writing, to penetrate the heart of any character without closing her eyes to what she saw and felt there, that explains why she is read today, and why I felt, at such a distance of time and geography, that I was reading a story about me.

Mansfield, Katherine. “The Wind Blows.” The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield. London: Penguin Group, 1981. 106-110.

"Theft" by Katherine Ann Porter

2010-05-01T09:42:00.000-07:00

Whenever I read “Theft” by Katherine Ann Porter, I find myself mesmerized, as I was by certain horrible fables and nursery rhymes when I was a child. The protagonist, referred to only as “she”, is a writer struggling on the margins with no one but herself to attend to her needs; rather than collecting and holding onto possessions-concrete or abstract- she chooses to “let [them] go” (83), putting herself at risk of becoming not literally homeless (although such a situation is almost foreseeable) but homeless in the sense that everything from books to love is “missed” (85).

The curtain of the story rises, and Porter’s protagonist emerges from her bath to see that her “gold cloth” purse is no longer on the bench where she spread it out to dry the night before. As she recalls the previous evening, trying to discover when it may have gone missing, we learn that she has been robbed several times either “material[ly] or intangib[ly]”(85), but not of the purse.

The subtle yet critical thefts of the night before take place, as so many petty thefts can, under the guise of friendship. As they leave a cocktail party together, her friend, Camilo, insists on walking her through the rain to the Elevated and in doing so ruins his hat; still, she thinks, he will “associate her with his misery” (79), as if his offer to walk her through rain puts her at fault. Roger, another artist friend, spots her on the steps to the Elevated and offers to take a taxi with her, but then borrows ten cents, a quarter of all the money she possesses, to pay his fare. Once in her apartment building, she runs into a playwright who owes her money for writing the third act of his play, but he won’t give it to her; instead, she is supposed to understand that his money goes toward alimony payments to his wife and child. “Let it go, then,” (83) she says. In every interaction she is, in one way or another, complicit with the thief.

The character then recalls that the janitress entered her apartment while she was in the bath in order to check the radiators and reasons that she must have taken the purse. The woman’s response is to “let it go, then” (84), but then “there rose…in her blood almost murderous anger” (84). When she confronts her, the janitress explains that she stole the purse to give to her seventeen-year-old niece who has got “young men after her maybe will want to marry her…[and] oughta have nice things”(86). The janitress adds that she did not think the protagonist would mind because she “leave[s] things around and [doesn’t] seem to notice much” (86). When the protagonist attempts to repossess her purse, the landlady says: “It’s not from me, it’s from her you’re stealing it,” (86) as if in asking for the return of her purse, she is ruining the prospects of the janitress’s niece. Also, the janitress cannot resist pointing out that the protagonist’s romantic opportunities have passed; she does not need lovely accessories with which to attract men.

The purse, possibly a gift from an ex-lover and certainly containing her last thirty cents, is something the protagonist feels the momentary loss of more than anything else. The janitress’s trespassing and robbery jolts her awake. She sees that the “general faith” (85) by which she operates (not locking doors, for instance) and her “rejection” (85) of the “ownership” (85) of things have prevented her from shoring up all kinds of essential belongings- everything from simple objects to sustaining relationships. Porter allows us to feel the full weight of her realization: “In this moment, she felt that she had been robbed of an enormous number of valuable things, whether material or intangible…all that she had had and all that she had missed were lost together…in the this landslide of remembered losses”(85). Later, she concludes that she is the thief. In being permissive of various kinds of potential belongings, instead of possessive, the protagonist has participated in every robbery, small or large, superficial or deep.

I enjoyed how the images of cold and wet work in the story to identify the character’s unmet needs. Over the course of the evening (the evening takes place off stage, before the story begins) the rain alters her more and more. Roger describes her as “looking as though she’s going to catch cold” (82) and encourages her to take a bath. Bill says she is “perfectly sopping” (82). At the moment the story begins, the character is walking across her apartment “holding her bathrobe around her and trailing a damp towel in one hand” (78). In the final moment of the story, just before the curtain falls, she sips “chilled coffee” (87). The impression is of a woman who is somehow careless, and too cold, too open. She seems to have difficulty finding shelter and warmth, critical possessions.

In “Theft” Porter presents us with an unsentimental, almost grueling picture of this woman’s inability to tend to her life. Rather than mitigating her character’s desperate circumstances or rescuing her from herself, she allows her the full consequence of her choices, the realization that she will leave herself with “nothing” (87).

In sparing her characters so little, Porter writes a tale that burns in the mind as dire warnings always do.

Porter, Katherine Ann. “Theft.” Flowering Judas and Other Stories. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers. 1990. 78-87

"In the White Night" by Ann Beattie

2010-04-24T10:16:00.000-07:00

I was so struck by this story when I first came across it.

“In the White Night” begins as Carol and Vernon leave a party that their long-time friends, the Brinkleys, have thrown; after saying good night, they drive home, then prepare to sleep in the living room of their four-bedroom house.

In perfect three-act structure, Beattie unearths the characters’ history, in particular, their daughter’s death of leukemia and its continuing impact on them.

As they leave the Brinkley’s, Beattie creates the sense--with the snow and the slippery steps--that the couple is entering dangerous territory, a treacherous night. But the actual dangerous territory is not the snow; it is the memory of Sharon. The party has reminded the couple of their absent daughter, as Sharon and Becky, the Brinkley’s daughter, once played together. Both couples must have believed the children would grow up together. Soon, we learn that Vernon, unable to help Sharon, might hold himself responsible for her death, but Carol thinks “he was the last person who should be punished” (14), leading us to wonder if she feels that she is the first. While Vernon tried to entertain Sharon on the night she died, Carol, at the moment of her death, found herself “backed up against the door, for some reason” (14). Beattie portrays a couple overwhelmed with helplessness.

At home, Carol enters the bathroom to try to stop crying; otherwise, she knows, Vernon will want to comfort her. Upstairs, seeing that Vernon is asleep on the couch beneath her coat, she lies on the floor next to him, beneath the protection of his camel’s-hair coat. Perhaps the four-bedroom house, and all the hope it represents, is too much to navigate on such an evening. In this "tableau" (17) Vernon and Carol are together, yet alone.

Hours before the party, Carol experiences exhaustion brought on by emotional stress. Finally, perhaps as a way to end the exhaustion the party has triggered, she conceives of her daughter as an “angel” (17), who might “be drifting past” (17). She will see her parent’s choice to sleep in the living room as “a necessary small adjustment”, a surrender to grief. Creating an image of the daughter as an angel at the window, Beattie conjures a family of three. Now, we know the story: missing the third part of their trinity, the couple’s longing for their daughter will be ongoing. They must mourn, in whatever way each will.

Beattie’s lyrical language resonates, and the simplicity of the plot gives her room to shine light on the crisis.

Beattie, Ann. “In the White Night.” Where You’ll Find Me and Other Stories. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1987. 11-17.

Letters to a Young Writer

2010-04-23T05:29:00.000-07:00

I really enjoyed this thoughtful discussion:

http://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/spring-2009/letters-young-writer

RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers

2010-04-22T04:47:00.000-07:00

http://www.writerstrust.com/Awards/RBC-Bronwen-Wallace-Award-for-Emerging-Writers.aspx

Elizabeth Bowen

2010-04-20T17:24:00.000-07:00

Afterthought: pieces about writing, by Elizabeth Bowen

A great book.

"Childcare" by Lorrie Moore, published in The New Yorker

2010-04-19T15:00:00.000-07:00

A terrific story by Lorrie Moore.

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/07/06/090706fi_fiction_moore

"Found Objects" by Jennifer Egan, published in The New Yorker

2010-04-18T11:52:00.000-07:00

I love this story by Jennifer Egan. The protagonist, Sasha, cannot stop stealing small, seemingly insignificant objects from friends or strangers. Her world narrows and she becomes more and more depleted. The story makes me think of all the ways grief expresses itself.

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2007/12/10/071210fi_fiction_egan

The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, Edited and Introduced by Richard Ford

2010-04-17T12:35:00.000-07:00

A wonderful collection of stories. Each one is mouthwatering in its own way. I particularly
admire "The Farm" by Joy Williams and "The Management of Grief" by Bharati Mukherjee.