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.

Be Prepared to Travel: An Interview with Clifford Garstang, Author of House of the Ancients and Other Stories

Kristina Marie Darling: Your new book, House of the Ancients and Other Stories, will be launched by Press 53 in May. What would you like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?

Clifford Garstang: First, be prepared to travel. While about half of the stories in the collection are set in the United States, the rest have settings all over the world, including Mexico, Europe, and Central and Southeast Asia. Second, while the stories are mostly grounded in realism, a few of them take a decidedly unreal turn, which I hope readers will find interesting. They’re something of a departure for me.

KMD: You’ve worked with many excellent presses over the course of your career. What drew you to Press 53 for this particular project?

CG: I have a great relationship with Kevin Morgan Watson, the publisher at Press 53. The press also published my first two collections as well as the anthology series I edited, and I worked closely with them on the literary magazine I co-founded with Kevin, Prime Number. The press really understands short story collections—in fact they only publish short fiction and poetry—and when this new collection was ready I knew I wanted them to publish it. Some publishers are all about the novel and short story collections are an afterthought, at best. Not so with Press 53. 

KMD: On the whole, your fiction has a distinctly international sensibility. Tell me what travel has made possible within your creative practice.

CG: Living outside the United States—first in South Korea as a Peace Corps Volunteer, then for a long time in Singapore and later in Kazakhstan—plus extensive overseas travel for work and pleasure has, I think, opened my eyes and strengthened the empathy a fiction writer has to have. Because of that, I’m able, within some limits of course, to write sensitively about people who are different from me. To some extent, I’ll always be writing “what I know,” but pushing the envelope of what that encompasses has meant, for me, looking beyond America.

KMD: In addition to your achievements in fiction, you are well-known for your literary citizenship, making resources available to writers who seek to navigate the ever-expanding landscape of literary journals. I’d love to hear more about what this has opened up within your writing. What has being part of a community made possible for you as a storyteller? 

CG: Years ago, when I was considering a career transition that would allow me to focus on writing, an old grad school professor of mine advised me to enroll in an MFA program because, he asserted, writers need to find a community of other writers. Most of us do our creative work in isolation, but I have found it both comforting and encouraging to emerge from time to time and connect with the community. And the community grows for me as I interact with it—starting with my MFA program, continuing with workshops, conferences, and residencies, and sometimes more remotely such as through the annual literary magazine rankings I’ve been doing now for more than a decade. Being part of the larger community exposes me to different ways of doing things, of telling stories, and relating to readers.

KMD: With the upcoming launch of House of the Ancients and Other Stories, what readings, events, and workshops can we look forward to? 

CG: The book comes out in May, so I’m planning launch events in Virginia, where I’m based, and North Carolina, where Press 53 is located. We’re still working on setting up readings and other appearances, and I regularly update the Events page on my website, which is cliffordgarstang.com.

KMD: What are you currently working on? What’s next? 

CG: I have a novel coming out in 2021 called Oliver’s Travels. As the name suggests, it’s about a man named Oliver who travels, and he’s traveling in search of answers to a question his family can’t or won’t answer for him. And I’m currently working on another novel, this one a blended contemporary and historical novel set in Singapore. It’s been fun to do research for that one.

An Interview with Julie Zuckerman, author of The Book of Jeremiah

In 2011, shortly after I settled in Raanana, Israel, I reached out to American-immigrant-writer, Evan Fallenberg, about writing groups. Evan connected me to Julie Zuckerman, who invited me to join hers. The handful of writers met in my town, a 45-minute drive for Julie. Despite other commitments—four children, a full-time job, mountain biking and running time—she showed up. But never alone. Every meeting, she brought Jeremiah: as a no-goodnik preteen, as a cantankerous retiree, as a contented professor. When anyone questioned Jeremiah, whether his character, behavior, action, intention, or decision, Julie never wavered. She knew him through and through. When anyone asked about the book’s structure, she answered clearly. Julie’s dedication to, curiosity about, and bafflement with Jeremiah shines through each page.

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Jennifer Lang: How long have you been writing about Jeremiah? Did you know from the get-go that you were trying to write about Jeremiah’s entire life or did you craft your first story as a standalone?

Julie Zuckerman: I wrote the first story in 2010. At the time, I was taking a fiction class with Evan Fallenberg, and he gave a prompt to write about someone who is “definitely not you” but who does something in which you’re interested. I wrote about an African-American woman who has her own business as a landscape architect; I like gardening, but don’t know much about it. I enjoyed writing that one so much, I used the same prompt for my next story. This time, it was a bit closer to home: an older Jewish man who takes up baking, which I do know something about. As soon as I wrote “MixMaster,” ultimately the final story in the collection, I knew I wanted to go back and unravel Jeremiah’s life.

JL: Who is Jeremiah? Is he based on anyone in your life? Who inspired his character?

JZ: Jeremiah’s voice was inspired by my father-in-law. My father-in-law is a lovable man, a true mensch, but at times he has a gruff exterior, and I was trying to figure him out. His parents had fled Germany in 1933 for France, where he was born in 1937. Thanks to wealthy friends in New York, the family was able to flee Europe in 1941. Three months after arriving, his father died of a heart attack, leaving his mother with four young boys. I often wondered how this early loss has affected his personality. I figured Jeremiah had experienced a similar trauma.

JL: How did you decide on the chronology?

JZ: I played with the order many, many times; I had at least six different possibilities. When I attended a writers’ conference at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2015, my instructor, Ellen Lesser, helped me strategize, telling me to think of the collection in thirds—younger, older, midlife. I had to balance the stories told from Jeremiah’s POV and from the POVs of others. I made flashcards and rearranged things and wanted to make sure there was a thread that carried through from story to story.

There’s an excellent essay “Stacking Stones” in David Jauss’s book Alone With All That Could Happen, in which he discusses the various ways one can structure a collection. “…we need to find a way to order [stories] so that they ‘expand and elaborate’ each other, and ultimately, become one unified work… Essentially, a successful short story collection is an elaborate system of parallels, contrasts, repetitions and variations that creates unity out of diversity.” Long before I read two of David’s story collections (also published by Press 53) and before he wrote a blurb for my book, I aligned with his advice.

JL: Is the book modeled after anything you’ve read?

JZ: Absolutely. I had recently read Olive Kittredge and loved how every story revealed new layers of Olive’s personality, even those in which she plays a minor role. My hope is that readers will find similar delight in getting to know Jeremiah.

JL: Did any part of this book involve research? If so, what?

JZ: For the stories that take place before the 1980s, I did a tremendous amount of research. There’s a story set in post-war Paris, another one during the tail end of the Vietnam War, another one during Freedom Summer. I read the archives of The New York Times, transcripts of press conferences, academic journal articles, eulogies of historical figures, accounts of what combat nurses and Signal Corps soldiers did during the war, and so on. I Googled things like “Depression-era Bridgeport” to picture what Jeremiah’s hometown (and my own) looked like in the 1930s.

Some of my research was on a lighter note, too: Jeremiah’s older brother Lenny is one of these kids who is obsessed with baseball, just as my own son was at the time. Ask me anything you want to know about Game 4 of the 1932 World Series, and I can probably answer.

JL: How long did it take you before you knew you were done telling his story?

JZ: I thought I was done in 2013/14 but ended up rewriting one of the stories completely. The only thing that remains the same from that earlier version is the year and location. I Googled to see happened in America in the summer of ‘64. Immediately, I found news items about three missing Civil Rights workers – Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney – whose bodies were later discovered in a Mississippi dam. We’d just had a horrific summer here in Israel, in 2014, which began with the abduction and murder of three teenage boys, Gil-ad Shaar, Eyal Yifrach and Naftali Fraenkel. I was struck by the parallels of the missing persons posters and knew I had my subject matter.

At some point in early 2015, I rewrote the last third of a different story. Between writing the first story and finishing the last significant revision, it took about five years to write the entire collection.

JL: What was it like writing about a character of the opposite sex?

JZ: I didn’t find it that difficult, to be honest. That’s one of the things I love about fiction writing, getting into the mindset of someone else and striving to find the connective tissue that bind us together, without regard to gender, race, religion, sexual orientation and so on. That being said, there’s one sex scene told from Jeremiah’s perspective which I was pretty nervous about. What a relief when the male instructor of a class I took through Catapult told me I’d aced the scene!

JL: What was the hardest chapter to write? Why?

JZ: Ironically, the hardest story to write was “The Dutiful Daughter,” which takes place in Israel. It’s told from the perspective of Hannah, Jeremiah and Molly’s daughter, on her first trip to the country, as an adult. The details about the setting in Israel were relatively easy, but it was a challenge to find the right balance between Hannah’s story and Jeremiah’s.

JL: How did you decide when to write a chapter in present/past tense?

JZ: I didn’t think about tense much when I first started writing the stories. Most were written in past tense, but during the revision process it felt more natural for certain stories to be told in present tense. I know some people look down on stories told present tense, but I went with my gut.

JL: Point of view shifts too. How did you decide who was best narrator for each chapter?

JZ: It evolved organically, just as with the varying tense shifts. From the outset, I knew I wanted to explore Jeremiah’s life from different perspectives. There are chapters told from the POVs of his mother, brother, wife, daughter and son, and originally there were more of those. But I found that my favorite stories were the ones told from Jeremiah’s POV; for reasons I’m not sure I can explain, I enjoyed being in Jeremiah’s head more than the others.

JL: What was one of the most surprising things you learned—about yourself, your characters, the craft—in writing this book?

JZ: I remember hearing craft advice about continuing to nurture your characters because if you don’t, they’ll wither and die. The first story in the collection, “A Strong Hand and an Outstretched Arm,” was one of my favorites, but it faced a lot of rejections. I didn’t want to give up on the story, so I kept revising and revising, ad nauseam. Finally, after four years of working on the story, the right ending clicked into place. Writing is an exercise in patience; often, you need to sit with a story for some time. It was a wonderful, gratifying surprise when I cracked that one open.

Shelf Life of Happiness: An Interview with Virginia Pye

It’s rare to open a book, read any given page, and find oneself utterly absorbed. But that’s precisely what happened to me as I read Virginia Pye’s marvelous new collection of stories, Shelf Life of Happiness. With supple prose and truly immersive worlds, I found myself neglecting the dishes, my ringing phone, and refusing to turn off the lamp and get to sleep. Pye’s book simply had more meaning and urgency than any of those things.

I met Pye as a fellow writer in Boston, where we met at numerous readings, events, and gatherings hosted by GrubStreet, an independent writing center. She immediately struck me as sharp-eyed and generous, and before long I got to share drafts with her in a local writing group. I’m grateful to read her fiction, and to pose some questions to the woman whose work swallowed me up.

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Sonya Larson: To me, the great engine of Shelf Life of Happiness is how it juxtaposes life’s tranquil, peaceable, and lovely moments with the dark, sinister, betraying, exploitative, and even murderous. Characters may be attending a theme party, planting flowers in the garden, or vacationing in Italy, but the claws of danger, envy, and manipulation are always on their heels. Do you think about such themes in your work, and how do you manage to have contrasting forces coexist?

Virginia Pye: Thanks for that description! I think you’ve captured well the source of tension in these stories. I suppose I think that in the midst of happiness there’s always the possibility of its expiration. That’s what the title of the collection means to suggest. Even knowing that joy can be snatched away, we have to fully throw ourselves into life anyway. In fiction, I’m interested in those moments that teeter on the edge. They allow us to see into the hearts and minds of characters. We figure out who we are when tested by life. The same is true in these stories.

SL: Your book exhibits wonderful range; somehow you’re able to inhabit many different characters from all walks of life—aspiring young skateboarders, aged painters, slick art dealers, wily adulterers, a dying groom, and a town in the aftermath of a family massacre. Where do you get your ideas for these characters, and how did you stretch your imagination to render each one?

VP: I love writing about people I’m not. To me, that’s what fiction is for. Writing gives me an excuse to imagine the inner workings of strangers. A lot has been written recently about how fiction increases empathy in readers and writers, but to me that seems so obvious: art has always been about stretching and enriching our hearts and minds. My characters may be inspired by people I’ve rubbed elbows with, or by people whose situations I’m intrigued by, but then I enlist my imagination to move beyond the real and create new worlds with their own challenges. I think a good story needs a crux—an inner or external conflict—that brings out who characters really are. By putting them in dramatic situations, hopefully they come to a life of their own.

SL: Several of the stories also manage a remarkable feat of craft: they capture an entire person’s life in a tiny, heightened sliver of time. An artist, for example, reflects on a lifetime of longing and regret while struggling to swim. How did you go about writing a short story that’s so ambitious in its scope? Did you begin with that aim in mind? 

VP: Usually I know where a story is headed, though I don’t always know how I’ll get there. In the case of Redbone, the story you allude to, I sensed a tragedy, but had to write it to discover how it would unfold. Sometimes, in a story, you need to give the reader an encapsulation of a character’s past. The trick is figuring out how much or how little to share. I think reading and writing a lot of fiction over the years has helped me to make an educated guess. I also think about rhythm in my writing—not wanting to get stuck on one note for too long, or bore the reader, but instead keep a story humming along.

SL: Which story was most fun/most difficult? Which taught you the most as a writer? 

VP: My first thought was that there’s only one story, Her Mother’s Garden, that taught me something: it helped me to move on from the grief I felt over my parents’ deaths and the sale of the house where I grew up. But actually, each story in the collection helped me in some unique way. Best Man helped me absorb the loss of a friend who died years ago of AIDS. An Awesome Gap helped me accept my son’s devotion to skateboarding—and therefore who he is as a person—even though I didn’t fully understand it. Each time I succeed at imagining a story, I think I evolve a bit as a person. It’s hard to explain, because these stories aren’t about specific things I’ve gone through. And yet, they each do the job of helping me to move forward in life with greater understanding. Perhaps they do something similar for the reader. To me, at least, this explains the joy I feel when writing each and every one of them.

SL: Describe your process. How do you go from idea to first draft, and first draft to final draft?

VP: These stories come out of small gems of understanding and serendipitous moments when life suggest deeper meanings. One Easter morning, at a brunch in our backyard, my husband and I realized that our young son had dug up a dead bird he and his father had buried a few days before. We were suddenly dealing with a resurrection on Easter morning—almost too perfect a gift—and I had to use it as inspiration for a story.

After considering some specific conundrum or irony of life, I write a draft, then rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, sending out the story to literary magazines and getting it back, then revising more until it’s finally placed. It’s a long process. The stories in Shelf Life of Happiness were written over a dozen years and rewritten all along the way. I even continued to edit on the spot during a recent reading.

SL: You’ve also written two award-winning novels: Dreams of the Red Phoenix and River of Dust. How do story-writing and novel-writing differ for you?

VP: A story can come from a single idea or gem of understanding, but a novel has to have many themes and characters and an arc that can sustain it. A story is more of a snapshot, although I like my stories to have a beginning, middle, and end. By the end of a story, I want my reader to have a feeling of completion. Each one should be a small sculpture—coherent in theme and style and execution. In a novel, there’s more room for elaboration and excess. I like my stories to be tight.

SL: What are you working on now?

VP: I’m working on something very different. A Woman of Letters is a novel set in 1890s Boston, about a woman who writes romance and adventure tales and must fight to be taken seriously in the world of men of letters. She decides to change her writing style to be more literary, upending everything for herself and her publisher, and ultimately allowing romance to leave the page and enter her life. It’s a feminist tale, and a writer’s tale, and a lot of fun!

A Better Kind of Flood: A Review of Stefanie Freele's Surrounded By Water

I’m a firm believer in karma, which means keeping up with the daily transactions of goodwill that proper karma maintenance dictates. So when I received a free copy of Stefanie Freele’s short fiction collection Surrounded by Water in the mail from publisher Press 53, my prize from a contest I’d won, I knew I was supposed to do something with it. You know, new item marked “pending” on the karma ledger. I just didn’t know what that thing would be. Place it in a time capsule, to be found in a near-future devoid of physical books? Or pass it on to someone, perhaps a teenage girl who needed to know that there are other Stefanie’s writing besides Meyer?

I wasn’t a total stranger to Freele’s writing — I’d read the title story in Glimmer Train, and I knew she was Fiction Editor at The Los Angeles Review, so my expectations were already tending toward the high side. But I procrastinated. It may have been last Thanksgiving break when I finally sat down and read this gift of a book and decided that I’d write a review. And since I don’t know her personally, I couldn’t think of a better way to thank Stefanie Freele for several hours of literary enjoyment. Further, if a review could help a few more readers find this book, then so much the better. Pending ledger item closed out.

So, the review. Facts first: forty-one stories of assorted lengths, from micro to full-length short story. Many are prior-published, whether in respected print journals like Glimmer Train (twice!) or Mid-American Review, or online in such fine venues as Pank, Mudluscious, elimae and Night Train. She switches up point-of-view. She can bring the humor (“Feisty Rojo”) and the pathos (“Scantily Clad Submissive Women”) equally well. She wanders from domestic realism (“Kicky Feet”) to absurdism (“Cessation”) to straight-up literary goodness (“Us Hungarians” and “While Surrounded by Water”). She’s a master at that great magician’s trick of storytelling: hooking our interest with a wild notion we think the story will follow, then proceeding to slowly reveal the story beneath the story (“The Father of Modern Chemistry”).Topically, she’s all over the map, but there is a nucleus of flash fiction pieces that together explore the darker underbelly of motherhood, the honest feelings of the sleep-deprived, the lonely-coping, the last-frayed-nerve kind of confessions that a straining woman might only tell her closest friend. Best of all, though, is how Freele wields her words, at the sentence level. “In the Basement”, for instance, delivers a gritty and discomforting portrayal of a young bulimic woman:

You lock the door and assume the hated position. Left hand holds the stomach and right hand is for purging. Your pointer finger is cut up from rubbing on your teeth, it stands aside, healing. Middle finger for this one. At the sight of the toilet, you begin to cry and retch. How did I end up here again? It started ages ago on a quest for gorgeousness, for thinness. Tears blur the pieces of donut and caramel corn. The peanut butter squares catch as expected, too bad, they taste so good, so forbidden. As you choke on a hunk of peanut butter, the tears drain and you press against your stomach to help the vomit flow. Gagging, then a big chunk comes up, of course smaller than it felt in your throat. The roughness of it scratches the esophagus. Whisper and beg to stop. Please let it all come out, I’ll never do it again.

A mere ten pages later, Freele’s lyrical prose is simply mesmerizing in “Blown”:

In that smile, the look takes her beyond the driveway, bringing Jelly into the storm and across the hills to the red-orange paths of fall, toward the rain-slick madrones and the dry streams beginning to fill and spill. That’s occasionally how I see you. She’s listening to the crunch of a hesitating deer, to the dipdip of the quickening rain, to the first mushrooms erupting through the soil like moles coming up for fresh air.

While I enjoyed most everything she accomplished in this book, I was initially troubled by Freele’s tendency toward unresolved endings. Weeks ago I started to write a mixed review, maybe 70/30 favorable, but after stewing on her collection while simultaneously struggling to write an ending for one of my own stories, I stopped. I realized that the breakdown in interpretation was mine. My own predilection towards definitive endings (often my downfall, it seems) was clouding my judgment and tainting my reading of Freele’s prose. I was shortchanging this flood of hers; oblivious to the less-visible positives. After all, didn’t the ancient Egyptians used to welcome floods, because they replenished much-needed nutrients in the soil of the Nile Valley?

So I started over from the beginning, by deleting what I’d written and re-reading her book cover to cover, and that is when I finally felt I might understand her intent. Stefanie Freele, I’ve decided, above all else, is a writer that respects her readers — respects us too much to do all the cooking for us. She’d rather buy the ingredients and leave them in the fridge for us to find, and wonder what we’ll do with them. I believe many of her stories are open-ended because there’s more out there, just off the page-edges of her stories, and it’s our job to seek that out. That level of restraint — it’s something I need to learn from her.

For those who care about such things, there doesn’t seem to be an organizing framework to this collection, but I’ve decided I don’t care about that either. In the end, it makes sense. This mix of forms and lengths, voices and points of view, realism and surrealism, closed ends and open. It’s a surrounding by words, some placid, some roiling.  The mistake I’d made at first was to think I could comprehend an inundation like this from high ground, with dry boots. It has to be experienced up close, face to face with the bloated carcasses of the ill-fated, with luckier others clinging to scrap wood and life, and everywhere the silt-rich currents promising rejuvenation. A benevolent kind of flood — and like the Egyptians of old, we should welcome it.