Eat A Peach: An Excerpt from Jen Michalski's THE COMPANY OF STRANGERS

Lynn always waits near the far end of the farmer’s market in West Hollywood, in the food court. That way, she can see the women before the women see her. If Lynn gets a bad vibe, or just a case of bad nerves, she can slip out to the parking lot and drive away. Her sister Lucy thinks it’s strange that Lynn treats these outings more like drug deals than the blind dates they actually are, but given Lynn’s bad luck, it’s the only way she can get herself (halfway) out there.
“She doesn’t sound like a catch,” Lucy said on the phone last night of Rachel, the woman who Lynn is meeting today. Lucy is married and lives in the Atlanta suburbs with her husband and children in a five-bedroom house, the kind you see on cable shows, clean but soulless, with quartz countertops and en suite master bathrooms.
Lucy is usually right about most things, and as Rachel enters the food court and navigates the maze of tables, both hands gripping the strap of her purse, eyes squinting, body closed, like a tourist in a Tunisian marketplace, Lynn presses her sandaled feet on the ground, ready to bail into the throng of Saturday shoppers. Rachel’s online profile was full of red flags—widower, young daughter, not necessarily ready to date but feeling like she should wade back in a little. But then again, Lynn’s own life on paper—massage therapist, maxed credit cards, barely affordable studio apartment in Echo Park—is nothing to crow about, either.
Lynn watches as Rachel scans the faces of those in her immediate area, her lips slightly parted, and something about her expression, the soft glassiness of her green eyes, the haphazard way her hair curls over her ears and a little in her face, makes Lynn stay a minute longer. She knows this is a mistake—but this private moment of Rachel’s vulnerability tugs at her. She lets Rachel find her, watches her face lock into a smile, one hand unattaching itself from her purse to give Lynn a quick, enthusiastic wave.
“I was just coming to meet you,” Lynn lies, standing up. She leans over and hugs Rachel with just her fingertips. “You look exactly like your picture.”
“You too.” Rachel holds onto Lynn’s forearms. She keeps her close for a second. “Your hair’s even redder in person.”
“It’s the sun,” Lynn says. The picture she used for her profile was taken indoors, her face shadowy, lit by candle. Her friend Michael said it made her look mysterious and artsy.
Then, she doesn’t know what to say. It’s been a long time since she’s let it get this far. There was Yuki, who she slipped out on, fearing she was too trendy and possibly shallow, and Kim, who had too many tattoos. And Sandra, who she simply stopped talking to on the dating site because she’d discovered a sixth degree of separation between Sandra and her ex.
“Something came up, by the way,” Lynn lies. Even when she lets it get this far, she always builds herself an out. “A last-minute appointment—so I only have about forty minutes. I hope that’s okay.” 
“Well, we’ll just have to make do,” Rachel says a little too brightly, and Lynn can’t tell whether she’s disappointed, whether she knows Lynn is lying. “So, do you have time to grab lunch, or just walk around?”
Rachel wears real perfume and not essential oils. Her makeup is so bare Lynn can see a light smattering of freckles, the faint lines of crow’s feet around her eyes. She’s definitely in her late thirties, as listed on her profile, five years older than Lynn. Her TOMS look like she’s walked a thousand miles in them, and Lynn gives her bonus points for thinking ratty canvas slip-ons were fine to wear on a first date.
“We can do both, I think,” Lynn reassures her. Maybe she should have given herself an hour. She has aborted so many trips to the Farmer’s Market she’s never actually shopped here. That, and Ralphs is more her price point. She puts on her straw hat and sunglasses and walks beside Rachel toward the Littlejohn English Toffee stand. The girl behind the counter offers them hard, flat, sample squares of toffee. As Lynn bites into hers, she watches Rachel wrap her sample in a napkin and slip it in her purse.
“For my daughter, Maggie,” she explains. “I always feel guilty, going out without her.”
“How old is she again?” Lynn asks. She hears Lucy, slightly nasal, on the phone. You’ve never wanted children, Lynn. You’re going to take care of someone else’s?
“She’s seven,” Rachel answers. Her skin is pale, like Lynn’s. She hides it under a faded denim button-up, her neck swaddled in a scarf. “She was five when Deborah passed away, and she still worries when I—I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be talking about this.”
“Why?” Lynn’s throat is still thick with sugary toffee. “It’s your life.”
“So, you’re a massage therapist?” Rachel glances at a text on her phone before dropping it into her purse. She smiles at Lynn. “You’re a healer.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Lynn laughs. “More like a body mechanic.”
She did a semester at community college in North Carolina, then massage therapy school in Studio City. She was surprised that she liked massage, touching stranger’s bodies, kneading their pressure points, freeing them from pain, their own self-imposed stresses. She was worried she’d have to offer words of comfort, of understanding, but most people don’t want her to talk at all, only listen. Most of the problems—cheating spouses, budget overruns at the studio, the actor who is a liability—she wouldn’t know how to solve, anyway. Her friend Michael, who she moved here with, says the only problems people have in LA are the ones they make for themselves.
“You’re the healer,” Lynn says after a moment. “Working in oncology.”
“I always thought I’d be a concert pianist,” Rachel answers. “But life took some detours. I would have never met my partner if I’d been a concert pianist.”
“Was she an oncologist, too?” Lucy is almost screaming into Lynn’s ear now. Run, don’t walk, away.
Rachel looks straight ahead. “She was my friend.”
“I’m sorry.” Lynn touches Rachel’s wrist lightly. She doesn’t have to date Rachel, she thinks, but she can be sympathetic. She understands loss. She understands things being ripped away from you.
“I knew she was terminal.” Rachel says the word ‘terminal’ like ‘left-handed.’ “And I thought at the time there was no way I would get involved. I mean, what did I think…but I wouldn’t have had Maggie if I hadn’t.”
Rachel stops in front of a produce stand.
“Want a peach?” She holds one in each hand. “First of the season.”

---

Editor’s Note: “Eat a Peach” was originally published in Chicago Quarterly Review.

Far-ranging and Intimate: A Review of Tara Lynn Masih's HOW WE DISAPPEAR

Tara Lynn Masih’s impressive second collection, How We Disappear, encompasses a range of time periods, locales, and styles: two-page flash to novella, realism to ghost story, historical fiction to modern American myth. Luscious descriptions of the natural world help to illuminate a theme bonding these thirteen diverse stories: the mysterious human heart in search of itself and its place in the world.

In the perceptive “Those Who Have Gone,” a weary Elizabeth travels from New York to Arizona in search of something different. Almost immediately she meets Blaze, a local man who looks like her ex-husband and has her pegged from the start. More dialogue than is usual in Masih’s stories effectively develops Blaze’s character, while Elizabeth’s inner life is stated in quiet, compelling prose, “The signs of death and violence before and behind her told her to leave. But something about the man told her to stay. So she stepped sideways in her mind, tried to accept his casual demeanor as her own.” As Elizabeth contemplates the land she’s getting to know, the story’s setting and circular structure deliver even deeper meanings. Some disappearances are forever; but once you know how to look, you can spot their traces.

Traces left behind are a major part of “Notes to THE WORLD,” the story of Grigori’s first hunting season, mere weeks into a months-long contract with a co-op. Told with convincing detail, the survival skills learned from his mother and his neighbors will be tested, nothing euphemistic about what it takes to stay alive in the Siberian Taiga. After a near-fatal accident, recovering in a cabin he’s stumbled upon, Grigori discovers a stack of numbered notes written by Desya, daughter of a family of persecuted Old Believers. He’s drawn into her story of having to live in hiding. He shares her losses and her aching loneliness. “His fear was with him each morning when he woke up in his village to the birds and white sun that fought to penetrate the northern mists. It settled on his chest so hard sometimes, he struggled to breathe and be part of life once again.” Grigori’s growing relationship with Desya’s unseen presence parallels the reader’s experience, a complex blend of immediacy and time-travel.

Even more complex in themes and imagery is “An Aura Surrounds That Night,” an immersive account told by Mercy, the oldest of so-called Irish twins, the dynamic of their farming family an echo of the Biblical Esau and Jacob. The short opening section deserves to be fully quoted, but here’s a snippet: “One memory was once locked up, hidden, in the same way these small colored bits of rectangular prophecies are folded into doughy shells. These papers that stay curled up…until we…tear them out of their protective shelters and examine them privately or read them aloud.” The narrator’s memories are replete with sensory details, such as a childhood outing with the sisters wearing “…dresses ironed so recently that you could still feel the warmth where the iron last passed over the cotton.” The wise woman of their coastal Long Island community hints at a solution for those who leave and for those who stay, applicable to other characters in this collection. The whole last section is a lyrical, place-laden resolution of healing, a way to move forward after tragedy; a rare and precious thing, for the reader as well as for Mercy.

Rarer is the writer who leaves no traces of herself, allowing the characters to wield their own singular voices, yet Masih has achieved it in each of her far-ranging yet intimate stories. Some characters yearn to disappear, some for only a time, ultimately realizing their paths follow or align with another; some characters have no choice. But they all do what the best of fiction does, they stay with the reader.

Semblance of History, History of Semblance: A Review of Christopher Linforth’s THE DISTORTIONS

With his third story collection Christopher Linforth returns to his past in Zagreb as a source for fiction that probes the literal and psychic fragmentation of Yugoslavia. In twelve stories, including two works addressed to each an erstwhile lover, The Distortions stages ethnic Bosniaks, Croats, Serbs and others as they attempt to piece their relations sometimes to family and sometimes to interlocutors on the world stage. Piecing entails reading history even when history’s evidence seems distorted or at least too much to bear.

Characters are often readers of history in one guise or another—photographers, gravesite dwellers, philosopher-hopefuls, a “preservation assistant,” and a ghostwriter—all trying to make the pieces fit. The titular story pits the choice of immigration to the choice of staying behind insofar as one fails to grasp the other’s sacrifice. Here a failed journalist struggles to motivate his great uncle to move to New York over twenty years after the disintegration of his Sarajevo and family both. Together they face an immigration bureaucracy which, far from a Kafkaesque withholding of knowledge, asks that they search archives on and on to equally fruitless avail. This previews a returning theme implicit in the collection’s title: characters search to reconcile the rifts between past and present. History and family trees distorted, the missing pieces feel often beyond reach.

Fast forward to the capstone story: “May Our Ghosts Stay With Us” features a film scholar ghostwriting his murdered grandfather’s autobiography after having found a diary. Compared to a previous story lamenting that communication is fraught—“words are just black marks on a page”—our scholar turns toward and away from nihilism and a Derridean anxiety, by his own admission, that representation is “adrift in time.” “Life” one character says “has nothing to do with theory,” yet how can one make sense of “flecks of gray” or “grainy images” without speculation and when meaning invests them only half-way? Grayness for narrators often refers to distortion as well as backdrops of cities in which “Communist concrete” is a characteristic trait.

Against an absurdity that history is bound to eternal recurrence, characters hope they can—perhaps maybe—intervene in its rush if only to save a single person from vanishing. While for those of whom the wars are a thing of the past, the prospect of losing another loved one still tends to shake the past loose to the present. The effect is that dissolution never goes away.

Linforth crafts time and place subtly. A peripheral character’s age, a gesture to a sitting president, an iPhone. The literal distance from the wars becomes instead a task for characters and readers to take on. Rather than confront warring headlong, Linforth writes conflict around war’s periphery and aftermath. Forgotten landmines and wounded animals astray become points of contact whilst war looms in background or memory. Reunited with news reportage, archival files, passports, letters, dolls, postcards, maps, diaries, and more, characters in one extreme try to “restore them to their pure, original state” or, in another, interpret in them futility. 

The trauma of killing or failing to save one’s countrymen is less rendered through militancy than vicariously through the rescuing or doing-in of an innocent animal. In “Fatherland,” for example, a new father searches for a metal spade once used to bury a bird he had bullied a boy into killing when they were tasked with defending a border. This echoes back to “All the Land Before Us” in which a teenage boy attempts to save face with a Hungarian traveler to whom he is attracted while she fails to save a dog he had shot. Similarly, this motif of freeing or ignoring the embodied pain of others lines up with Linforth’s scrutiny toward preservation. There is an insight that photographers contemplating the past frozen into an image also question whether photography saves bodies from time’s indifference or simply records their powerlessness, at times their perversion.

Another subtlety not to overlook is Linforth’s writing of split commitments. It is not just the immigration-versus-staying-behind of the first story on display. Folded into stories is a tension between committing to various sides: one continent over another, one family over another, one economy over another, between an old and new millennium, between analog and digital even. These contradictions cling to a dialectic of enchantment and its loss.

One would be remiss to discuss this collection without attention to its characterization. Each story contains wholly new people, whether nostalgic or forgetful, cosmopolitan or national. One memorable foil is of a veteran of the Croatian army who begrudgingly hosts an emigrant-cum-businessman around town. Their restrained animosity begs them to reconsider how they can each be “men of the world” in their own way. Some characters are jaded with intellectualism yet ready still to cash out its clout in an academic or artistic career. Through bold decisions others even show vanity, infidelity, impudence, and as the collection progresses, a ghostliness “impervious to those around” them. While though some stories rely on a character’s flaw to hurl forward their plot, one could not say Linforth falls into the illusion that an isolated human agency is what makes a story.

To put it otherwise, Linforth focuses craftsmanship into the relation between character and world. A relational approach also informs the logic of his endings. The arc of many stories aims toward a homecoming, and each ending makes an iteration of one, be it partial or thwarted. These endings resist a clear or sentimental homeliness. Instead they destabilize what grounds here from there, teaching readers to contemplate dislocation. One gathers a sense the English language lacks words to echo back ‘homecoming’ in its proper fullness of color, so it is good then how Linforth’s stories fill in this gap if only ineffably so.

All the while thematizing distortion, Linforth writes with a clarity that, in service to characters, never need slip in some smokescreen for clever effect. Time’s passage, will, intellect—for characters these are bound to their terms in an honest-heartedness recalling Andre Dubus. It is with this balance between character and concept that The Distortions invites rereading. Between imperfections shading the histories that characters traverse in gray, there are still moments of clarity to be found, moments sometimes rendered in landscape or “reds and whites” brimming to fullness.  In the lives of Linforth’s characters, what can seem fragments of a worldly cipher might instead be a sign—that wholeness has little to do with appearances and a lot to do with reappearing for others.

A Review of Paula Coomer's Somebody Should Have Scolded the Girl

Paula Coomer adopts a unique approach to character in her magnificent collection of short stories, Somebody Should Have Scolded The Girl (Fawkes Press, 2019). Anyone familiar, or even those unfamiliar, with the stoic and unapologetic nature of the Midwesterner will appreciate the attitude of these folks. They don’t walk around walls; they don’t climb over them; they just push straight on through.

Setting most of her stories in small-town Indiana, in places “where Petty’s Fork meets Cabin Branch at the Granite Boulder betw. A Black Oak and a Sugar Tree apart from the Sugar Bush,” the geography is almost as colorful as the people themselves. These outsiders make no excuses for their behavior.

The time is the 1970s, and the issues, ironically, are not at all distant from the issues of today. There is a failed war, women are second-class citizens, inflation is high, and poverty and racism rule the majority of this country. In spite of all of this, Mercy Grace discovers that the bunkhouse she wishes to build can be built by women. Her old friend E-Z returns to town just in time to help her. Mercy Grace tells E-Z, “At first I thought I’d do it for hired hands, for the boys who right now are coming back from overseas in droves, but just about the moment I saw you had driven up, I decided I want women to build it.” And E-Z replies, “What’s the big deal about that? It’s not like no women in this country never built a building. How many chicken coops you build in your life? How many you seen built?”

Coomer’s women can do anything they set their minds to do, and they often do it with a skillful turn of phrase. Their self-esteem, however, as Coomer recognizes is true for many women, often does not match their capabilities. A young girl considers a sexual rendevous with a stranger and reflects, “An ache lower in her belly rises in an instant, tries to tell her that what she feels is small, inferior, like she’s a blank page and Stetson’s a walking dictionary.”

Chipper is an adolescent boy of mixed race. His father has told him that he “should be proud of his parents’ inter-racial marriage, and particularly of his mother. It was brave in the 1970s to marry someone from another race in the United States, especially since some states had only recently made it legal.” Trying to discover who he is after the unfortunate death of his Black father, and looking for some adventure before attending college, Chipper joins a friend to ride out west to pick grapefruit. When he extends his trip on his own, riding the rails and exposing himself to the other side of life, Chipper is thrust into a new reality around the campfire.

In the title story, Marlette’s day begins at 4:30. “Cows to milk, eggs to fry, sack lunches to make.” The fact that Marlette’s life is filled with keeping a house for her husband and children, along with the daily tasks of a farm with animals, does not mean that her intelligent, albeit uneducated mind is not always thinking. When she hears on the news that a famous woman poet has committed suicide, “Marlette guesses somebody should have scolded the girl early on for expecting too much of herself and of life.” But Marlette isn’t finished. She goes to some interesting lengths to find out about this woman poet who has piqued her curiosity.

The final story in Coomer’s collection traces the incredible couple of years in the life of Charlotte Dodge. This woman gives new meaning to spirit and tenacity. She wastes no time complaining about the misfortunes in her life. Although she does wonder about them in the diary she writes that no one will ever read. With a husband in prison for statutory rape, a newborn daughter in the ICU, a farm and home to support, no one could blame Charlotte for complaining. Instead she writes, “The priest said that I  need to see a counselor, that I have too much, too much, too much on my plate for any one human. I hate the idea of that. It makes me feel weak.” And we begin to believe that no matter what befalls Charlotte Dodge, she will prevail.

These characters all have important life lessons to teach us, if we will only listen to them. As Coomer comments wisely in her acknowledgements, “Next time you feel inclined to make fun of a hillbilly woman, don’t. Give her a bouquet of flowers instead.”

Goals, Detours, and Persistence: A Joint-Interview with David Borofka and Caitlin Hamilton Summie

Caitlin Hamilton Summie: David, we have known each other a long time, meeting when I was handling your publicity for your novel, The Island (MacMurray & Beck, 1997). Before that, though, you had published a story collection called Hints of His Mortality (winner of the 1996 Iowa Short Fiction Award). Now your latest collection of stories, A Longing for Impossible Things, will be published in March 2022 as part of the Johns Hopkins Poetry and Fiction Series. We both can take a lot of time to write our stories and novels, something like 25 years. I know why I end up working at a slow pace, but what in your process takes you a long time to complete your projects?

David Borofka: I don’t know if I really work that slowly… Sometimes, I feel as though I’ve been a victim of my own laziness and sloth, and other times, subject to life interruptions—parents who were dying, children who were growing, a teaching schedule that became more demanding. Maybe I was subject to a mind less able to juggle disparate obligations and assign them their proper place. There were too many days, weeks, months, and years when the writing wasn’t being done at all, at least not on paper. Thinking, yes; writing, no. (Sometimes even that thinking made me preoccupied, much to my daughters’ or my wife’s frustration. Then again, my wife named the upstairs room where I work “Clarissa” [after Clarissa Pinkola Estés], as though every time I climbed the stairs, I was going to visit a mistress. Maybe I was…) I also know that I’m not the most fastidious writer in the world. If it’s a question of sending something out before it’s ready or revising overmuch, I’m guilty of the former more so than the latter.
You have a collection of stories that came out in 2017, and now you have a novel, Geographies of the Heart, coming out in January of 2022. That’s a gap of only five years, but before the collection came out, you were a student in an MFA program and you were working in the publishing industry before you branched out as owner of your own publicity and marketing agency. Were you writing that whole time? How much of your time was spent in your various “day jobs” or family obligations as opposed to writing? What about your MFA experience—was it solely dedicated to writing fiction, or did you find you were distracted by other obligations there as well?

CHS: I began writing pieces of this novel in my MFA days so with breaks and years spent doing other things, it has been a twenty-seven-year journey to see this novel into print, if my math and memory are correct.
I wasn’t writing that whole time. I was writing between work and parenting, all of which I celebrate. Even during my MFA, I couldn’t write the whole time because we students had to pass a comprehensive literature exam before defending our theses, so I was taking literature courses and reading.
The MFA at Colorado State is three years long, and it was a wonderful three years. I’d majored in Middle Eastern History in college and was not as well read as some of my colleagues in the program, and I’ve often thought that I landed at exactly the right school for me, pursuing the best MFA for me.
Also, during my MFA, I made time for fun, hiking or eating Sunday brunch out at one of the lovely small restaurants in Fort Collins on the weekends. Things like that. A favorite memory is riding down Poudre Canyon on the back of my friend, Dave’s, Harley.
Do you think our work benefits from our pace? If so, how?

DB: Seeing one’s work from a distance of time is an odd experience. That telescopic perspective can be a reminder of how much historical as well as personal time has passed; it can also be a reminder that the writing that one did so many years earlier had something of value, a little like looking at a snapshot of yourself from twenty years ago and being shocked to realize that you thought you were fat then. I like some of the writing I did twenty-five years ago. I like it much better now than I did then. All that stuff that went into the drawer? Pull it out… It may not be as bad as you once thought, just written by a younger you.

CHS: Would it bother you if, after spending decades working on a book, it was not published? I ask because the marketplace is so tough, even tougher lately, and it is a real possibility that some beautiful books may not see print. I know it would disappoint me if my dedication and time did not merit publication.

DB: My honest answer? I know myself well enough to admit that I’m craven. I want publication and I like (no, love, who doesn’t?) external validation; there’s nothing like the thrill of someone else telling you that your work has value. However, I also know how cringe-worthy it can be to see something in print that is not one’s best work.
I had a novel manuscript that I finished around the year 2000. On the strength of that manuscript, I got the attention of an agent with an outstanding track record. However, I don’t think we were a particularly good match. She liked the novel well enough to take me on, but she didn’t like it as it was; she wanted the book to resemble another recent bestseller. Without getting too much into the specifics—the agent’s name, the subject of the book, etc.—I will say that I never felt comfortable making the changes that she suggested, nor do I feel that I was very good at turning the story from what I had originally envisioned into the story that she felt would be more marketable. After about a year and a half of mutual frustration, we parted ways. But for several years after that I kept trying to repair it. I took what I thought were the best parts of the revision and the parts of the original story that I was loathe to discard and tried to stitch them together. Did it ever work? Not according to the publishers that she sent her version to and not according to the small presses to whom I sent my cobbled-together version, subsequent to our divorce. Finally, I stopped tinkering and submitting, but it was a tough project to let go and let die. Was it “beautiful”? I don’t know, but I am still fond of the story I was trying to tell, and I still grieve the fact that it didn’t see the light of day.
That’s probably the biggest reason why I’ve continued to churn out stories as opposed to working on novels. I’m a chicken at heart, and while I can stomach the cost in time of a story that goes sidewise, the thought of investing a decade in another novel that turns into quicksand scares me to death.

DB: How quickly do you send your work out? When do you know it’s time? What does it take to convince you that a story is ready to be sent out to journal or a novel manuscript out to an agent or publisher? Have you ever talked yourself out of submitting work that you later decided was publication-worthy?

CHS: I don’t send much out anymore because I don’t have stories I want to share right now, but when I was younger I talked myself out of sending out some pieces. Later, far later, I decided life was short and if I was going to try to publish ever again (I had had some acceptances in my twenties), I needed to try again. I started submitting and had a handful of stories accepted, which inspired me to revisit my invitation from Marc Estrin at Fomite Press to send him a story collection for consideration.

DB: Given the length of time before you published To Lay to Rest Our Ghosts, what is the time span of your writing life that the stories represent? What do you think of the writer who was responsible for those earliest stories?

CHS: I spent 25 years on To Lay to Rest Our Ghosts, from beginning to end, with breaks and distractions (all happy ones). I think the writer who was responsible for the earlier stories unwound her stories faster, but then again, they had clearer conflicts as well. I think my later work shows more clearly the messiness of life, the way conflicts can multiply.
After such a long time away, how do you feel about the publishing industry of today?

DB: Gosh… after being away from book publishing for twenty-five years, it feels like an alien world to me. Does it seem that way to you as well? In the early- to mid-1990s, most everything was printed manuscripts, snail mail, and postage for return envelopes. Now nearly every facet of the submission process is conducted online, which is easier but also even more impersonal. What we don’t have to pay to the post office or Kinko’s, we’re paying in contest fees and Submittable charges. I have to confess to a slight case of masochism; I miss going to the mailbox and seeing what’s there. Emails are not the same.
The marketplace that writers, editors, and publishers are collectively facing also feels significantly tougher to me, and it’s not as though the 1980s were a book paradise. Forty years ago, we were bemoaning the dwindling numbers of readers and the nearly impossible business model of publishers and booksellers. Has that improved in any way?
You, on the other hand, know publishing from several perspectives: author, a small publisher’s marketing/publicity director, a Big 5 imprint’s marketing/publicity director, and for eighteen years as owner of your own marketing agency. What do you think of the publishing world that first-time authors are hoping to enter? What about the grizzled veteran, who is hoping to rejoin the party after some time away?

CHS: I think in some ways this industry is harder to be a part of than ever before, and in some ways it is more welcoming than ever before. I’d tell any writer to be strong. Publishing a book is not easy and takes a lot of perseverance and grit and hope.
As a former writing professor, what advice did you give to students who also wrote at a slower pace?

DB: For about the last twenty years of my career at Reedley College, I taught mostly online. (It is an abiding irony to me that I retired and then a year later the entire world was online.) I told students in my online classes of the past that they had the opportunity to know truly what writing is like—you’re alone in your office, nook, carrel, or closet, and you only periodically come up for air. The real world does not give a shit if you can crank out a 500-word essay in forty-five minutes—that’s an artificial skill that only academia seems to care about—but readers do care about whether or not you are willing to think hard. In an online class, the students had the opportunity to manage their time in the way that was most workable for them. Life always hands us deadlines of one kind or another, but you have the autonomy to do the work that needs to be done and the timeframe in which it must be completed. If it takes sitting at one’s desk for three weeks in six-hour chunks, then do it.
During our grad school years, my wife made cross-stitch samplers as a way of relieving stress. She made me a small one that still hangs over my desk; the message is simple: “Never work quickly but always work.” It seems as true now as it did then, maybe more so…

CHS: Your new book is due out in March. Can you tell us a bit about it? How long have you been working on it?

DB: In one form or another, I’ve been working on A Longing for Impossible Things for about twenty years. A collection of thirteen stories, Longing has gone through several iterations. Under the title My Life as a Mystic, it was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award, and under the title Christmas in Jonestown, it was a finalist for the inaugural Donald L. Jordan Award. That last near-win forced me to reconfigure the book one more time. I took out several stories and added several others. Rather than taking the title from one of the stories, I found a passage from Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet to use as an epigraph and took the title from that. The passage is as follows:
The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd—the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.
In one form or another, it seems that I keep coming back to this notion: that sense of longing for, yet never finding, that transcendent “thing” that hovers on the edge of perception. The word that refuses to swim to consciousness.
When did you begin writing Geographies of the Heart? Before or after the publication of Ghosts? What was the gestation process for the novel? Do you feel as though you have a better idea of navigating the publication process now as opposed to when you were writing the stories in the collection?

CHS: Three of the stories in the collection inspired the novel, made me want to finish the character’s stories, but one chapter was written long before the story collection. “Cleaning House” was written in 1994 or so, and I revised it to be chapter two in my novel. A number of other pieces not included in the collection were written before I decided to pursue the novel. I’ve spent half of my lifetime to date writing Geographies of the Heart. A heck of a long time, but I was compelled by these characters.
The novel is about how much of an anchor family is in the life of my main character, Sarah, and what happens when family stress and loss develop. It’s about how our hearts guide us, and fail us, literally and figuratively. It’s also about getting overwhelmed and resentful and learning to let that go, to forgive others and oneself.
I think what taught me about the publishing process has been work more than publication. I have been a book publicist for nearly two decades. That experience has certainly helped me navigate publication. My publicist is my husband and business partner, Rick, and that has been wonderful, having someone else handle my campaign. It lends perspective and also is a great support.

DB: What new projects are you working on currently? Do you set yourself anything like a timetable for a project’s completion? How do you measure a good writing day’s work?

CHS: I’ve never had the privilege of having time to write each day, and because my writing takes ages to complete, I never have a timetable. Right now I have a middle grade novel which I have worked on for ten or eleven years that I hope to revise again and send out. But other than that, there is nothing in the hopper and nothing in my mind, and I am enjoying the silence. We are finally getting some household projects done. That feels great.
How about you: what's next, and, if I may, how long do you think it will take to complete?

DB: What’s next may be a relative thing… Since my retirement in 2019, I’ve written another novel (Wanting) and a slew of other stories, all of which are currently making the rounds. Who knows what will become of them? Now, I’m starting to dance around the next novel idea. I have to be careful though; I’m Medicare eligible, and I don’t have the time (nor do I have the energy) to extricate myself from the sinkhole of any further failed projects.

Beautiful and Contemplative: A Review of Ellen Birkett Morris's Lost Girls

Ellen Birkett Morris’s first collection centers around the lives of women—some lost, some found, and all searching for more. It’s this thread of longing woven through the stories that pulls them tighter and tighter, fine-tuning the tension and exploring the different ways women discover who they are as individuals, beyond their restrictive places in society.

Morris shows great range with her characters, from young girls to older women who “never planned to be obsolete.” As seventy-year-old Abby Linder says in “Harvest,” “The years had slipped away, and the person she had been disappeared with them, replaced by an old woman with wrinkles and bifocals, who men opened doors for or offered a hand up but nothing more.” In the story, despite everyone’s efforts to make her confront that she’s old, Abby finds a way to recapture her youth while visiting a friend at the nursing home.

By contrast, there is the teenager in the titular story, who lives in the same town as a thirteen-year-old girl kidnapped from a strip mall. Even though “creeped out,” the main character imagines her own disappearance would be a welcome surprise—one less reason for her parents to fight, and for her, “a change of scenery.” Dreaming about her new life she imagines captors who look like Archie Bunker and serve her cake, the worst aspect of it all being life “in some commune, forced to mix batches of granola and make homemade yogurt day and night.” Even as she ages, she sees the kidnapped Dana as “somebody’s prize.” This teen’s mindset—the naivete, the selfishness—leaps from the page, with the story ending at a startling moment. What’s impressive as well is that Morris is able to convey all of this in three pages.

One of the strongest stories in the collection is “Skipping Stones,” which is also the longest, at sixteen pages. Here we follow Terri through her last year of high school and her relationships with a boy she thinks she might like, his older brother, and a third boy who believes he’s entitled to take what he wants. Shadows of violence haunt the story, along with a depressed mom and the father who has abandoned Terri and her mother. At graduation, her father “sat alone in the last row and handed her an envelope with a $50 bill inside.” These are such small details—the last row, the fifty-dollar bill—but point to one of Morris’s real strengths: presenting understated moments so clearly they resonate with the reader. The reader knows from the details how awkward the father feels, and that handing over fifty bucks is no small act of generosity for him.

Another standout story, “Religion,” follows a thirty-year-old virgin who stumbles into a Lactation League meeting, and becomes so enamored with the bonds between babies and moms that she rents a breast pump in hopes of capturing the magic. Morris goes well beyond the story’s creative premise and into the loneliness, desperation, and hunger this woman feels. Once again, Morris has fine control of tension. As the story moves forward and the protagonist bonds with these new moms, one of them asks her to babysit, and while doing so, the character attempts to breastfeed. The instability of the woman, combined with the narrator’s empathy toward her, leaves the reader shattered at the end of the story.

Many of the stories here clock in at three or four pages, and the majority are under ten. While all showcase Morris’s talents for details, some of the shorter feel less fleshed out and more like character studies, albeit well-drawn ones. Overall, this is a beautiful and contemplative collection, exploring the supposedly simple lives of complicated women who survive grief, loneliness, and love, and emerge on the other side having found themselves.

Sense of the Strange: An Interview with Chloe N. Clark

Chloe N. Clark holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Environment. Her chapbook, The Science of Unvanishing Objects, was published by Finishing Line Press and her debut full length poetry collection, Your Strange Fortune, was published by Vegetarian Alcoholic Press. Her poetry chapbook, Under My Tongue, was published with Louisiana Literature Press in early 2020. She is founding co-editor-in-chief of Cotton Xenomorph. She teaches multimodal composition, communication, and creative writing. Her poetry and fiction have appeared such places as Apex, Bombay Gin, Drunken Boat, Gamut, Hobart, Uncanny, and more.

In Chloe Clark’s new short story collection, Collective Gravities, published with Word West, she takes us to the stars. She takes us to the zombie apocalypse and to mysterious research facilities. She frequently bends genre, putting horror side to side with sci-fi. It was a true joy to read Chloe Clark’s new collection, and I was privileged enough to have the opportunity to chat with her about the process of writing the book.

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Dana Diehl: Please tell us a little bit about how this book came to be.

Chloe Clark: On one level, there’s the simple answer: I had a lot of stories and wanted to collect them up. On the truer level though, I kept finding that I’d circle back to similar themes and ideas, often seeing them in different ways, throughout the course of my writing and so I began to see a collection taking shape based on those qualities. 

This collection spans ten years of writing: the oldest story in the collection was originally drafted while I was still an undergrad. Which is weird to think about because I now teaching writing to undergrads. So the stories in this piece have gone through a big, important chunk of my life.

DD: I see images repeat themselves in several your stories. The image of the bruised woman. Space travel. Mysterious illnesses. The images have different significance in each story. It was fun for me as a reader, because I felt like I was seeing alternate realities play out. It was also fun looking for the ideas that strung your stories together. How intentional were the similarities between your stories? How do you think reoccurring images might strengthen a collection?

CC: Often the similarities were very intentional, in my mind a lot of my stories exist within the same universe (or slightly altered versions of it). I’ve always loved writers whose work invites conversation between pieces (it’s a bonus for people “in the know” who have read the other stories and see the connections, and it also feels like a reader can see the world of the stories more fully). Sometimes, they were less intentional when I was writing the stories, but then when editing I’d see that I’d done it and it was because I had felt that the stories shared some connection. 

I’m a huge proponent of novel-in-stories, so I think that continuity strengthens and redefines the way we read the pieces when we notice the connections or when we go back for a reread. They feel somehow “truer” when there are those connections that help us see the story beyond just the one frame.

DD: Another prevalent theme I see in your stories is isolation. One of your stories, “Bound,” explores a plague that sweeps the planet and forces the speaker into isolation. As we do this interview, we’re approaching the third month of quarantine in the US. When I read “Bound,” I found it to have chilling similarities to what we are experiencing today. Have recent events changed the way you view these stories? Has quarantine changed the creative work you’re doing now?

CC: This is a multilayered question to me. I’ve always been fascinated by isolation and how it affects people. Many of my favorite writing and movies, growing up, dealt with this. In some ways, I think isolation is one of the ultimate human fears.

I think recent events have, if anything, made me feel more strongly about the need to deal with isolation in writing. I think voicing the fears and anxieties of isolation, for people, is important. Writing and reading help us feel less alone.

DD: So many of these stories take us into the stars. What draws you to outer space as a setting for your stories? 

I’m not sure I have a great answer for this. For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved space. The unknown and the thought of all that exploration that has yet to be done is so compelling. Plus, what has been discovered through the reach for space has been so important and profound.

In my heart, I’m a wanderer and what better to go towards than the stars?

DD: Is there a movie or novel that has especially fueled or inspired your interest in space?

CC: Oof, that’s hard to narrow down. But I think the main media of my childhood were three distinct space pieces of art: Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, the BBC radio production of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the film Aliens. I think that mix actually kind of perfectly sums up my writing about space: A lot of hope and exploration, a distinct sense of delight, and a dose of fearing the unknown.

DD: In Collective Gravities, you explore a huge range of genres, from realistic fiction to science fiction, horror, and even zombie apocalypse. What do you like about playing with speculative fiction? What genres are your favorite to consume in your everyday life?  

CC: I think I think in multiple genres. It’s very hard for me to stick in one, even within the scope of a single piece. I’ve said before that I think speculative is how we live our lives—everyone has a sense of the strange about how they view the world and it makes sense to imbue our stories with that, too.

I read pretty widely. I’ve always had a love of sci-fi and horror, but I also read tons of domestic fiction and literary fiction. My favorite writers tend to be the ones who have feet in every genre like Colson Whitehead, Helen Oyeyemi, and China Mieville.

DD: In your bio, you mention that you have an MFA in Creative Writing & Environment, which is a degree I didn’t even know existed! What is your relationship with the environment and space as you’re working through a story?

CC: It’s a very cool and unique degree, from Iowa State University, that I wish more people knew about!

I think environment is extremely important to every piece I write—because environment encompasses so much: it might be a small town, but it also applies to the reaches of outer space or a haunted apartment building. Place influences character and story as much as any other element. 

We all have places that center us—be it our homes or a spot that makes us feel something. And I think that’s true of most good works of fiction too—there’s some distinct sense of place that makes the reader understand or feel the piece in a way. 

Because I’m a very visual writer, I usually know exactly what a story’s environment looks like. But I also hate describing that stuff in too much depth—because I want the reader to have input in the place they conjure up as they read. So one thing I always try to be cognizant of is finding the key detail that brings me into an environment and that’s what I’ll include. Sometimes I know that key detail right away, but it’s often one I eventually find in revision and pull into the forefront as I strip the other details away.

DD: One of my favorite lines in this collection can be found in “The Collective Gravity of Stars”:

“’Well, everything will be better now,’ her mother said. Callie wondered if anyone had ever said that and watched it come true.”

For me, this line captures the way your stories seem to pendulum-swing between pessimism and optimism. However, they tend to more often than not end in a moment of hopefulness, of light. Can you speak to this

CC:  I often describe myself as an optimistic pessimist. I think there’s a lot of importance to knowing and understanding how much is flawed and terrible about this world. But hope is equally as important, because that’s what helps us strive to actually make change.

And from a storytelling perspective, I think pessimism has its place, but it’s a lazy device. Hope is an active choice to be made and that’s far more exciting to me.

DD: If you could take off into outer space with your characters, where would you most like to go?

CC: Honestly, I’d be overjoyed just to go to space at all. But if I had the means to go anywhere, I think Mars would be a good start. There’s such a build up of Mars in my head from all of the sci-fi of my youth that imagining feeling the ground of Mars beneath my feet would be as close to living inside my dreams as I could get.