Story Focus: "Watermelon" by Mary Miller

I was a choir geek in high school. Our show uniforms luckily bore no sequins (I'm not as partial to wearing sequins as Tim Jones-Yelvington), but none the less, every year the show tuxedo, the bright red and black stripes of the vest shimmering, the jazz hands, the choreography. It was really nothing like you see on Glee, and for that, I'm glad.

My choir teacher was the stereotypical effeminate male choir teacher. He was not afraid to get involved in the lives of his students, to care about them, to invite them over for voice coaching. In high school, my shoes tended to be on the shaggy side. I would wear Chuck Taylors until the canvas was in tatters. Not because I was poor (though we were), but because that shit was punk rawk in the mid-late 90s. I remember once my teacher, we'll call him Mac since his last name was particularly Scottish, quietly took me aside one day after class and asked me if I needed new shoes.

"Oh. No," I said, "I actually have a new pair at home. I just like these."

Mac looked doubtful, so I wore them the next day to prove the point, and promptly returned to the old and tattered pair until they completely fell apart.

That's just the kind of guy Mac was. But of course, when you have that kind of guy teaching at a high school, you get the stories. I was once told buy someone that they'd gone over to Mac's house for something and saw him in the pool implicatingly close with a boy. I was told by another someone to keep my guard up during my conversations with Mac in an independent study class I had with him for music theory.

You get stories like Mary Miller's "Watermelon" in They Could No Longer Contain Themselves, that begins:

Mr. Fuller was the new choir teacher. He had a round face and a love of boys.Before we sang, he had us lie on our backs and breathe in the icy waters.Feel the waves lick your neck, he’d say, the sting of peppermint in theback of your throat. Your boat’s collapsed and you didn’t think you’dneed a life preserver. Feel the pressure build. It builds and builds, likewhen you love someone so much your heart could burst, your heart could fucking burst under the weight of it.

After he drowned us, he’d make us form a train and rub each other’s shoulders. This went on for months and nobody saying anything.

Miller never goes so far as to say any concrete details about Mr. Fuller, and the story takes a turn to focus more on the relationship between the narrator and another troubled boy. But it's the implication in that last line that brings back all these memories of high school and Mac and how he straddled the teacher/student relationship. "Straddled" was probably a bad choice of wording there.

Mac saw my mother's obituary in the paper a couple days after she died. He made the hour drive to the parlor where her body was shown. He hugged me. He hugged me then, and he hugged me in high school--important moments like after not placing with a solo at Regionals, my breakdown in the hallway after, like after graduation. I never thought anything of it then, and I don't now. Before he left the showing, he extended his hand to shake, and when I took it, there was a $50 bill in it.

"Don't spend this on bills," he said. "Don't spend it on groceries or tuition or anything responsible. Spend it on something that'll help you forget for awhile."

He hugged me again, gave again his condolences, and left the parlor. That's the last time I saw Mac. With the money, I did what you'd expect me to do, what he probably expected me to do. I got to forget everything for a night, and I'll always thank Mac for that.

I know you're probably thinking it. You're probably thinking I'm going to turn this post on its head and tell you next how I saw him in the news a year or 2 later, accused of sexual misconduct or something of the sort. But that's not what happened. Mac is still alive, and perhaps retired now. I could pay him a visit. I probably should. Mac meant a lot to me when I needed a mentor to mean a lot to me.

I'm not sure why we were so cruel in high school, to ourselves or to those who truly want to help us become more than who we were then. I'm sure if Mac is still teaching, he still gets all the same stories told about him in hushed tones. I hope he never hears of those stories. I hope he never finds this post. I hope he stays the way he is, and continues to affect the lives of students like he affected my life, students willing to believe in him more than in the cruelty of classmates.

Flash In All Its Blinding Possibility (Part 1?)

I was a little hesitant to choose They Could No Longer Contain Themselves to feature for July, not because I'm hesitant about the writing in any regard. The book astounds on so many levels in that regard. Each writer brings something really incredible to every page of this book. But because it's yet another collection of flash fiction, and I don't want to pigeonhole myself. Next month, I'll likely snag a novel or if another short fiction collection, then longer form. But, while we're on the topic, I wanted to talk about flash a bit.

Flash seems to be new to a lot of people. Even I didn't really know of its existence as a "thing" until later in undergrad, around '04-'05. To me, it was a natural fit. As a writer, I've always hovered between fiction and poetry, so when my professor introduced me to flash fiction as a form, it was simply that I had finally found a space in which I felt comfortable. It was a form that let me stretch and blend and write the sort of cross-genre play I've always known as a sweet spot.

When people come to my Vouched Books table, I get asked "What is flash fiction?" a lot when I point them to a book like Easter Rabbit by Joseph Young, We Know What We Are by Mary Hamilton, or Cut Through the Bone. I start basic, "It's writing, usually narrative however loosely, usually under 2,000 words. The word count shifts a bit depending on who you're talking to--some believe 500 is the limit, others 1000, etc."

After that, it gets murky. One of the things I really love about They Could No Longer Contain Themselves is how well it highlights the possibility of the form. The book's jacket copy says it best, "The uncontainability of the writers and characters in each of these remarkable collections suggest the exuberance of the flash fiction form itself, including the way in which, despite its small size, it pushes past its own borders and into the territory of something larger and impossible to confine."

And its true: in this book, you have the singsong, surrealism in Lovelace's "Coffee Pot Tree," to the simple, sparse realism of Mary Miller's "Misled." People often ask what my favorite kind of flash fiction is, and I never really know what to say. Last time someone asked, I told them if you don't know what you're reading flash fiction or prose poetry, you're probably reading good flash fiction. But that's not necessarily true either. I would never consider Miller's work "prose poetry," but her work remains some of my favorite of the form. I don't know what constitutes "good" flash fiction. What constitutes a good novel? What constitutes a good poem?

I've come across a lot of people the past couple years who seem to think flash fiction needs a definition, something by which to judge it against not only other flash fiction, but by other genres. This whole concept baffles me. But usually, these people don't really even seem to know they're calling for this definition. To me, it exists as subtext beneath other conversations regarding how much "bad" flash fiction is out there, how people are growing tired of the "fad" of flash fiction.

Yes. Both of these things are true. There is a lot of bad flash out there. There's a lot of bad poetry, too. A lot of bad novels. These people indict the entire form based on its demerits, but yet refuse to see its enormous possibility. No one challenges the novel anymore, nor do they attempt to box it into some tidy definition. Despite their enormous differences, Blake Butler's There Is No Year is considered just as much a novel as Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice; there is no great debate regarding the form.

People seem uncomfortable by flash because it exists to them as something new, but of course, it's nothing new. Sean Lovelace at times quips about the late Jesus Christ being one of the forerunners of the flash fiction form, citing his parables. Hemingway played with flash. Widely regarded as a prose poet, I've heard debate about Russell Edson's role as a flash fictioneer.

Which is perhaps another reason why there is debate, this underlying uncomfort. The need for clear lines, clear labels. The question hangs loose: why is Edson considered a prose poet and not a surrealist flash fiction writer? With such a wide definition, what's to stop a novelist who writes with a particularly poetic flair from writing a "novel-length narrative prose poem?" Why is this poetic piece that doesn't necessarily have a clear narrative arc considered flash fiction? The form hovers on this strange plane that seems to upset prior systems in a way that makes people want to put it in a box.

Of course, to put it into a box, like all forms of art or writing, is to kill the form altogether. Where would the novel be if public outcry declared Ulysses something else? Where would poetry be if the world called bullshit on vers libre?

I guess I'm out of thoughts. I mean, I have more thoughts on the subject, but they don't fit neatly into this ranting.

I want to say how sick I am of people blaming the current "fad" of flash fiction on people's attention spans. I want to say how sick I am of people seeing flash fiction as a fad. I want to say how sick I am of writers who seem to think flash fiction is an "easy" form to write. I want to say how sick I am of the publishers who are willing to publish scrap-rate flash fiction. I want to say how these things ruin the form, but that's of course not true. Just because publishers publish shitty novels doesn't mean the novel is a shitty form. And the same goes for any genre or form, really. Why such scrutiny for flash?

But now, I'm sick of what I have to say. I want to hear what you have to say. How do you define flash fiction? What do you think of it? Do you have a favorite style of flash--more poetic, more narrative, more surreal? Do you think it is a silly thing, a playground for half-baked short story ideas? Do you think people should just write what they want to write without thought of form or label?

I Can No Longer Contain Myself

Today is July 5th, which means I'm am full stuffed on meats, salads of various potatoes and pastas, and America. It is morning. I am in my underwear, the after images of fireworks still dancing in my corneas. And, They Could No Longer Contain Themselves sitting next to me at my desk, waiting to be talked about, to talk to us, to be binged and purged.

Just look at that pretty little book over there, the cover a windswept barren, the quiet hue of blue, the tree stump of possible forest fire or maybe tired and newly-homed beaver, or newly stuffed, as beavers actually eat wood. Did you know that? I never knew if they actually feasted on trees, or just made their homes from it, but Wiki confirms they fill their bellies with it. Just imagine if we humans made our homes of what we fill our bellies with.

This month, I make my home of these words, and I hope you will come party with me.

Here's a quick story about They Could No Longer Contain Themselves, what it is, how it came to be, straight from the fingers of its publishers:

"In 2009, celebrity judge Sherrie Flick chose Sean Lovelace’s How Some People Like Their Eggs as the winner of our Third Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest. Flick said of the book, “Lovelace’s little stories seek out these big-guy concepts and bring them down like in an old movie filled with gangsters, trench coats, cigarettes, and tough-talking women with nice legs—using smart dialogue and wit.” Lovelace’s chapbook spoke to more than just Flick: By spring 2010, the run of 300 specialty letterpressed copies of Eggs was on the verge of selling out.

Around this same time we heard from our Fourth Annual Contest judge Dinty W. Moore that he’d chosen Mary Hamilton’s We Know What We Are as the 2010 winner. We were thrilled, but found ourselves loath to give up the other four finalists—Elizabeth J. Colen’s Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake, John Jodzio’s Do Not Touch Me Not Now Not Ever, Tim Jones-Yelvington’s Evan’s House and the Other Boys Who Live There, and Mary Miller’s Paper and Tassels—to other publishers. All five of the finalists that year stunned us with their precision and heart, their longing and skill. It was the most stylistically diverse group of finalists we’d ever had, and yet all the manuscripts hummed with the same kind of energy and deep humanness. We had to publish them.

And so we decided to bring the four finalists from our Fourth Annual Short Short Contest and the celebrated and sold-out winner of our third together under one cover."

So there you have it. This little anthology of 5 chapbooks, brought to you simply because the ladies at Rose Metal Press simply could not stand to let someone else publish them; they wanted them for themselves, to bring them all to all of our selves.

And last night, while holding this book in my hand, turning it over and over, reading it page and page again, I realized one of the reasons I most like this book, beyond the incredible words inside: exposure.

I'm a victim of name recognition, I'll admit it. When I first came upon the small press community a couple years ago, I knew no one, and it was perhaps one of the most exciting times of my life. I devoured book after book of authors unnamed to me. These new words invaded me and shaped me in ways I've not been shaped in years. They fed me, fed my own words, I grew in them like bones awash in milk.

But now, I've grown to know who I can trust. I harbor to names like Aubrey Hirsch, Matt Bell, Adam Robinson, xTx, and a couple/few dozen others with whom I feel I can trust to bring a thrill to my skin and a warmth to the belly of me with their words. I gravitate to these authors when I see their names in new issues of journals and reviews. This book contains a couple of those names: Sean Lovelace and Mary Miller. Tim Jones-Yelvington as well, though until now I had known and trusted him more as a person than as his words.

So of course, I still gravitate to them, see their work packaged together, and immediately think, "Yes!" click "Add to Cart!" Get this book in my hand, the tactile weight, the smooth gloss of cover, and ruffle of page. I readreadread.

I read first those I know and trust. We stand in something like a circle, sipping and talking and sipping and laughing. Sean is leaning against the counter, beer in hand. Mary smiles warm, her laughter coming out her eyes. Tim owns the room, Tim alight with feather and glitter, everyone notices Tim, wants to touch him, wants to see him shimmer. We talk and we catch up, we tell stories of what we have known since we last met, last shared words.

I become aware of these other couple of people invited to the party, Elizabeth Colen and John Jodzio, standing on the periphery, they sip their gin and tonics, their mint juleps. They wait politely for their turn to speak. And then, without warning they burst on to me, their words move and captivate, and I spend the evening with them, talking about daughters, monsters, mothers, warlocks, glaciers, and panty thieves. Spending the evening with them, reading them I found that same feeling of wonder and discovery I felt a couple years ago. The feeling of finding new voice, of making new friends at a party, that up all night talking and talking feeling.

I hope the same happens to you. Perhaps you snagged this book because like me you recognized Mary Miller, trusted her words to feel true and earnest on the page, and in doing so, at least 1 or 2 of these authors packaged alongside her work in this little number are authors completely new to you. I hope this book opens us all up to someone new, opens us all up to something new.

Let's make some discoveries together. Let's have a party. Let's invite all our friends, and our friends's friends, find people we don't know, fresh faces awash in glow and drink. Let's no longer contain ourselves. Let's talk and talk.