We Are Conditioned, We Are Conditional: On Cassandra Troyan's Blacken Me Blacken Me Growled

‘If we’d only stop flailing
we’d realize we float.’

I first read Blacken Me Blacken Me Growled in pdf form while at my desk at work under the glare of one thousand fluorescent lights, Cassandra’s words fantastically magnified on the computer monitor. I felt odd and more than a little disoriented. Where did the poems start? Where did they end? And were the black pages poems too, or titles, or something else, some other, unnameable art form altogether? I scrolled and read, the poems blurring together into an kind of melancholic state. After “Shells,” part three of four (following “Carriages” and “Chambers,” and preceding “Hides”), I needed a break. Plus, my shift had ended at 11 pm and I was the only living person still sitting in the office.

My fiancé had been writing in a Burger King down the street, and on our way home he asked me about Cassandra’s book. Was I enjoying it? How did the poems compare to Cassandra’s poetry circa 2011 (an energetic and exciting time for me in the internet writing scene, during which I devoured anything and everything Cassandra Troyan had published online and wildly and more often than not drunkenly asserted to anyone who would listen that she was one of THE BEST poets I knew)? Responding to these questions was difficult. They were different, I said. I didn’t know, I said. What did these poems make me feel? I couldn’t say. Was I different now? Was Cassandra? Maybe we had both changed in ways that disconnected us as ideal writer / reader. I felt sad.

First thing the next morning, I sat in bed and read “Hides” on my laptop, and everything changed. Here it was, for me. I found purchase in these poems, was immediately drawn to the space they took up on the page, their breadth and their intensity. Cassandra begins:

Now I would like to play the role of provider / inviter
of supreme romance supreme terror

Yes, I thought. Yes, yes, yes, I continued to think as I binge-read the last 50 pages of Blacken Me Blacken Me Growled. What was so different about “Hides”? Or, what was so different about my reading of “Hides”?

1. I felt more comfortable while reading “Hides.” Sitting in my bed, my house enveloped by rain clouds (I live at the top of a hill overlooking the city), reading off my laptop in natural lighting gave me sense of control over my environment I hadn’t had in my office.

2. “Hides” begins with an epigraph from Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs that made me feel ‘same’:

The juddering of climax, as involuntary as a death rattle, I took to be a statement of hopeless attachment. Why, I don’t know. I didn’t think of myself as sentimental, I thought of myself as spiritually alert.

3. The sexuality and brutality in this section felt like a huge throwback to Cassandra’s poetry circa 2011, which I had felt connected to then in a very intense way (I had ‘taken a lover’ who was mentally and physically exhausting me, in unequal parts dangerous and wonderful. Cassandra’s writing made me feel like I was part of some kind of club of poets writing about sex and sexuality in an empowering way.)

4. Everything fell into place, aesthetically. The black pages felt less like title cards here and more like poster poems, like,

I WANT EVERYTHING TO HURT MORE THAN IT NEEDS TO AND SOMETIMES YOU JUST GOTTA BEAT THAT PUSSY UP

stands alone, I think, but also acts as a kind of conversation starter for the poem that follows, which begins:

“What does that mean in terms of / sexual gratification / exchanges of diversions / distracted tongue”

5. There is so much scary beauty here.

Hides made me feel nostalgic and excited. It also made me want to immediately reread Blacken Me Blacken Me Growled, which I did, which felt like an entirely different experience than it had when I read the first three sections.

People change. But the thing is, we don’t just change over long swaths of time (which is what three years can feel like to a 26-year-old human with a heightened sense of her own impermanence), we change from setting to setting, from day to day, from condition to condition, and these conditions can drastically change something as simple or as difficult as reading a pdf of an old friend’s new book. These conditions can change our connections to the world and our home and ourselves. Find your right conditions and Blacken Me Blacken Me Growled will meet you there.

Trigger Warnings: A Review of Alana Noel Voth's Dog Men

How real do we want our stories to be? These days, readers go in with their eyes open. We know how the writer plays the reader, how we by turn relax our guard, suspend our disbelief, pull back, check and recheck. We know we’re being taken for a ride — fuck it, if we bought a book, we’ve paid to be taken for a ride. But how far can we trust the author?

Reading Dog Men felt like walking on a melting ice sheet, everything slippery underfoot, liable to crack apart. Voth plays with images and snatches of song, with cultural scraps and genre tropes, like she’s making a jaggy, unpredictable landscape — cityscape, in fact — these stories are nothing if not man-made. Violence erupts instead of happy endings. References are scattered through the trailer parks and litter-blown streets — Georges Bataille, David Bowie, Pulp Fiction.

Plots occasionally break apart, or break down to reveal the tender longing of the heart. Just when I thought I’d fixed the writer’s motivations, they’d shift. Voth seems aware of every potential resonance within her work. Stories like “Reservoir Bitch,” with a protagonist that bleeds (literally), sweats and struggles, and an ending subtly and strongly underplayed, really got under my skin. By the end of the book, I was ready to believe in the fallen saint of Black Tina — a whore who “carries a knife in her bag.”

At times, these stories are hard to read. Voth is not afraid to make us confront the dark, weeping underbelly of the worlds we live in. These stories linger in your guts — I caught echoes of them every time I watched the news, read about rape or persecution, the powerful subjugating the vulnerable.

Willing to write gritty, hard-edged reality and swirl it with supernatural flair, Voth’s writing is supple and relentless. She doesn’t let the reader off the hook easily. She’ll show you the submerged, unarticulated desires of the collective unconscious — however trashy and shallow — and force you to confront your complicity as a reader, and as a human being.

The action here is deep and meaningful — characters make difficult choices, and endure the consequences. Not many writers would have you feel genuine, wrenching pity for the plight of a brain-eating zombie, or the most beautiful man in the world, or a loser who works in a porn shop. But there’s nothing straightforward here — nobody is exempt from the hard pinch of life. “Everyone was a piece of meat in this world.”

The stories are sex-soaked — hustlers, porn shops, trysts that are messy and hot and explicit. People risk everything for sex (“love was holy”) — their reputations, their bodies, their lives. And the sex is not straightforward. This is as about as far from vanilla as I can imagine. Sex with an edge. Failed sex, masochistic sex, salty, painful, difficult and real.

Dog Men disturbed me. Darker than Tarantino, bleaker than fairy tales, Voth’s characters are united in suffering. In here are souls who have slipped through the cracks of contemporary America: people who suffer for who they love, how they look, what they want.

Some of them learn to transcend — flying zombies, a loving hustler, a suicidal beauty. But these are not easy stories. They compel, they demand from the reader. The rewards are: fragments of beauty, scattered through the book; moments of underplayed humour; a faint, warm glow underlying the darkness, that you might recognise as hope of redemption.

I Am Beside Myself: A Review of Ashley Farmer's Beside Myself

Recommender’s Note: I haven’t read a whole lot of microfiction in printed, collected form. For the most part, what I’ve read in this genre — or in short shorts, flash fiction, whatever you’re calling it today — has come through digital media, through an online lit mag or journal’s website. Ideal in the digital space, microfiction is short enough to read ‘like a poem’ (obvious generalization) but feels a lot more like reading a short story without putting in the time commitment — something I can’t always be bothered to do online. But what happens when the microfiction is taken out of its natural habitat and collected in a printed volume? PANK sent me a copy of Ashley Farmer’s book of microfictions, Beside Myself. This is what I thought about while reading it. . . .

I remember the first time I read Jo Randerson’s microfiction. I was on a bus, probably going to the job I held at the time as an after school carer in Thorndon, a neighborhood in Wellington. Thorndon is past the CBD, but only just, and sometimes in winter if I was feeling rushed or it was raining hard I would take the bus to get there, but Wellington is small and the bus ride from the bottom of Courtenay Place to the final stop at the train station is only about 15 minutes long. Anyway, I remember reading Jo’s book The Spit Children on the bus a couple of times that week and getting through four or five stories, maybe more, just in that bus ride. The first time or two I did this, I’d get out of the bus and be thinking about the last story I read, or maybe the most vibrant one, but never all of them. I’d lose at least 80% of what I read pretty much right after I’d read it. And it wasn’t just bus rides that would do this to me; it would happen any time I picked up Jo’s book.

Eventually, I started reading each story two, three, four times right in a row, back to back to back. If I was on the bus, I would spend the whole bus ride on just one or two stories. This was better, but I still wasn’t remembering everything. What was the problem? I wanted more from the worlds of the stories, more on the page, more from my imagination, more more. But it simply wasn’t there. I wasn’t going to find it because it wasn’t there for me to take. If I want to think about The Spit Children now, I go back to the book on my shelf. I can’t carry it around with me in my mind like I can with the stories from The Lottery or, The Adventures of James Harris, another short story collection I read and loved that same year. The Spit Children wasn’t meant to be read in the same way as The Lottery.

Microfiction isn’t meant to be mentally carried. In the way Google has taken the place of my childhood obsession with memorization, pocket-sized microfictions endeavor to remove my desire to preserve fictional worlds in my mind. I still carry my first impressions of Jane Eyre (age 15), The Secret Garden (age 8), King Bidgood’s in the Bathtub and He Won’t Get Out (age 3), despite the decades separating me from them. But there is a certain luxury in the microfiction: a back pocket-sized book meant to be picked up and carried with you like an external hard drive for your brain. Read Parker Tettleton or Lydia Davis and you’ll see what I mean. Stop thinking about it like a longer narrative, and the attraction grows.

Pick up almost any Tiny Hardcore Press title and not only will you feel this change in your brain as you read, you’ll feel it immediately in the shape of the book in your hand. These books are small and square, perfectly tailored to fit in your pants or your coat. The stories inside are a little bit weird and a little bit relatable. Ashley Farmer’s Beside Myself is no exception; her stories contain quick flashes of horror and siblings, relationships and occasional creatures from the black lagoon. They sit comfortably between xTx’s Normally Special and Brandi Wells’ Please Don’t Be Upset, filling equally important spaces in the external hard drive I now carry as a part of myself.

I Would Never Want to Spit Them Up: An Open Letter to Brandi Wells

Dear Brandi Wells,

It was night and we were in my room and my mattress was on the floor. A friend was sitting on it, talking about his fractured heart. Another friend was there too, licking her fingers over an empty box of pizza, empty except for the residue of grease. I was leaning up against my desk, which had a stack of books on it. On the top of the stack was yours, Please Don’t Be Upset. I remembered how I had taken it all in in one gulp. I remembered the way your words felt when I read them out loud — to myself — how they had at once made me feel too small and too big.

I wanted to read them again.

I wanted everyone to listen, to know what your stories could do. So I picked up your book and started reciting a story I’ve since nearly memorized, “Seven Things I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You.” I called out the title to the room and my friends got quiet and I started to read what you had written. “I want to put my fingers in your nose,” I said, “so I can feel where the life goes inside you.” I continued: “When I am trying to fall asleep, I think about flattening you with a giant iron and wrapping your carcass around me like a blanket. When the blood turns cold, I will wear you anyway.”

I finished reading and the room stayed quiet.

My friend with the grease on her fingers reached out and took your book like she was defending it, started over like it was the most important thing on earth.

This is what your stories do.

This is what your stories have done.

This story is true.

Brandi Wells, your book is one that transcends genre. The narrators of your stories are so honest, I wonder if they are really you. They are often unsentimental, other times brutal and yet they are tender. I’m thinking of an excerpt of your story “Bald”: “I find myself drawn to balding men . . . those men in process. I think it’s the idea that they have a chance to say goodbye to their hair. It’s a slow parting.”

So really, the book transcends itself, too.

After reading it I could no longer call it a book, but instead knew it as only a part of me, like a new lung, or an extra arm. Did you plan for that to happen? Did you know I would swallow your words whole and never want to spit them up? Are you hearing what I’m trying to tell you? I’m trying to say that I hope you are happy even though your stories are sometimes sad. I hope that before you sleep each night you pause to think about how your book is out in the world, that people are reading it, reading it again. I hope you are somewhere warm, but not too warm, and that you are still writing.

But I was talking about “Bald”:

“I sit by myself in diners and watch them drink their coffee and fiddle with their toast. Balding men are slow eaters. They are awkward. They do not know what to do with a piece of toast. It’s a flirtation. They see the toast, they are getting to know the toast and then the toast is inside them. This is the way with all relationships.”

This, too, is the way of your Please Don’t Be Upset: suddenly inside me, twisting, showing my guts what they’re made of.

Thank you, Brandi Wells.

Always,

David

"Normally Special is like a diary, but it's not the kind of diary you would keep writing for years. It's the kind of diary you would burn after one entry."

xTx’s Normally Special is a collection of the painful stories women tell themselves to make it OK for the stories to have happened in the first place. Each story is an open secret. The kind strangers will read right off your face.

When I was little, I begged my parents to buy me a diary. They said I had to call it a journal. “Boys don’t have diaries.”

I asked my parents if I could still tell secrets to a journal. I had a secret I didn’t have words for yet. My parents humored me. I know they laughed later. We lived in a small house. “Ha ha. Boys don’t have secrets.”

I trusted my parents not to look at my journal. I left it out. I drew a penis on the first page. My parents found it and had a fit about how genitals are a private thing and I shouldn’t be drawing them in my journal. My journal was also supposed to be a private thing. I learned there’s no such thing as privacy, even though Americans sometimes have that illusion because the United States is so big. Everyone spread out and hide!

Normally Special is like a diary of different women’s secrets. It’s more complex than that, though, even if these are some of the shortest stories you’ve ever read. We live in a culture where small is supposed to equal simple, but reading Normally Special makes you feel like you’re in a closet that’s somehow bigger than the house around it.

In “The Duty Mouths Bring,” a woman is breaking down boxes in a factory while trying not to break down herself. She feels a duty that seems like pride, but by the end of the story we realize she’s a mother struggling to feed her children, her “smaller mouths.” As she says early on, “There are no choices in poverty.” You do the things you have to do, and you have an audience, and each member of that audience has a mouth telling you its own painful story. There is no privacy because everyone is connected.

Normally Special refuses privacy even as the characters in each story cling to it. In “Water Is Thrown on the Witch,” a woman is hoping to drown the fantasy she has when she sees her husband’s empty clothes laid out, as if he melted while getting ready for work. The woman isn’t afraid her husband will find out she has this fantasy. The woman is afraid to acknowledge the fantasy even exists, as if by accepting the fantasy, she’s accepting she’s the type of person who would have the fantasy to begin with.

There’s a relief in confession because the secret is no longer a secret; it’s a shared piece of information. But the woman in “Water Is Thrown on the Witch” doesn’t confess her fantasy. She buries it. The horror is that you can give something so empty a meaning so uncomfortable you refuse to confess the secret even to yourself. You can’t read your own diary because of what it might say about you.

Normally Special is full of these small potatoes that turn out to be rocks when you try to eat them. The people in these stories aren’t just scared of revealed secrets. They’re scared that other people might be unfathomable too. This is more explicit in some of the longer stories, like “The Mill Pond,” where fascination with a stranger and implied child abuse are different glasses of the same Kool-Aid. People will agree to be together in hideous ways before they’ll ever be alone.

I said Normally Special is like diary, but it’s not the kind of diary you would keep writing for years. It’s the kind of diary you would burn after one entry. These stories walk the line between keeping things to yourself and keeping things from yourself. There’s fear and denial in that, of course, but there’s also relief and surrender. You made your mark. You survived. Now move the fuck on.

"I’d want my sweat to show you what it means."

““I’d want my sweat to show you what it means. I would like the cramp of each of my muscles, and the withering of my fat, and the grind of my bones, and the blisters of sunburn to show you how I strived.””

— xTx, "Because I Am Not a Monster"

I cajoled my way into this write-up; my self-promotional skills are both effective and shameless. I wanted to write about Normally Special, the short story collection by xTx. When granted to me after much cajoling [re: harassment], I stalled, contemplating the task. I dislike book reviews which attempt to pull money out of my wallet, or stuff the debit card back into my shirt pocket. Yes or no, withered thumb up or smooth, supple thumb down: Normally Special demands more.

When I corresponded with xTx about, among other things, Normally Special and its creation, our conversation turned sharp left into an alley, fell into a sinkhole and splashed into the blood and amniotic fluid and chlorine of literature, of memory: longhand for Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water. As writers, as people, we both loved the memoir -- love feels inadequate, here -- we honored the text and the subtext.

In talking about The Chronology of Water, I said to xTx, “I’m trying to find my own language here.” I said this as a man who hadn’t seen other men write about The Chronology of Water; I wanted to engage the book on my own terms, with my own words. No dice, so far. All I could utter was love as in “I loved it,” though meaning so much more: the interminable itch of wanting to be honest, even at the expense of clarity.

"I’d want my sweat to show you what it means."

Tiny Hardcore produces tiny books; Normally Special felt infinitesimal in my hand, as though it needed a blanket and a lullaby. Others have compared its diminutive size to the relative hulk-like musculature of the prose, the voices deployed, the text and the subtext. A fair comparison, I suppose, if not well-worn by now.

Let us, then, speak of women -- a specific type of woman, I mean: slow, quiet, internal burn; examining stones and the stray eyelashes dangling from her children’s cheek; brilliant, though hunched over by nameless weights or, god forbid, boulders engraved with the cursive of assailants. Stay with me.

"I would like [. . .] to show you how I strived."

There is punch, power, to the stories in Normally Special; they are, indeed, hulk-like, incredible. In our discussion [and in retrospect], I unfairly described the collection as, “a wink, I suppose, to the absurdity of everyday living and all that entails.” Unfair as in “dishonest” or, better yet, “clear.” I felt myself rustling up the usual rhetoric used to extoll the subtlety of a work, to say it is more than braun, to suggest it has soul.

I needed a better, dirtier language -- something messy and hacked to pieces -- for to say without saying, “Normally Special has soul” is to say the obvious. Moreover, there is nothing absurd about everyday life. Absurdity used in stories and essays and poems is mere salve to sooth the very-real scars literature, the good kind, reflects back to the reader.

What, then, is the wink? It was there, I swear it. xTx winked at me, I know it. If the overarching opinion of Normally Special is true, that it is terrifying and haunting, a clutch of the throat, then the fears and ghosts and disembodied hands reaching from beneath the subtext -- all of it -- is preceded by a wink, which is typically followed by a nod: the conflation of eye/head coordination says, “Maybe these women, these voices and characters, are your women, sir. How does that grab you?”

How, indeed.

Normally Special brought to mind, first, my wife, then my mother, grandmother, sister, nieces, aunts, cousins -- and certainly the trail of ex-lovers left behind me, scattered across the forgotten path like sun-bleached bones. In thinking about these women, I didn’t feel guilt -- rather, I felt compelled to consider them in whole, as individual universes made of matter so complex, applying my intellect to their makeup’s decoding seemed absurd.

What could I ever say about them? How could I ever devise or discover a language which serves as true communication of who they are in this world? How could I possibly use the word love -- past, present or future tense -- as commemoration of what they mean to me and, more importantly, what they mean to themselves? Perhaps that is the true nature of xTx’s wink, its subtext. “Shut up and read,” her wink said to me. “Shut up and listen. Just watch.”

"[ . . . ]the cramp of each of my muscles, and the withering of my fat, and the grind of my bones, and the blisters of sunburn [ . . . ]"

I am an unreliable narrator. Yes; brown thumb up; money pulled from wallet: buy and read Normally Special.

On xTx’s Normally Special

Some books are a surprise. Some books come at you like a bullet out of nowhere striking through some core part of your brain where you store vital information. Vital feelings. Normally Special by xTx is one such case. For whatever reason it took me a while to get sucked into the universe of xTx. This was before Normally Special. This was before I bought Normally Special at AWP back in February. Before I read the whole book on the flight home to Oregon from D.C. And definitely before I spent weeks with Normally Special by my side when I was up late writing, as if it were a companion of sorts.

xTx has a way of twisting emotions to their breaking point, bending the reader to her will as she does so. And I was prepared for none of this. I don’t know why. Maybe because I’m inclined to be dubious to hype. Maybe because in so few instances is the hype deserved. But it’s not like I hadn’t read xTx’s work. I had. And it was good. But the difference is between seeing good paintings by an artist and then suddenly seeing them pull a Van Gogh out for you. Yes, Normally Special is a masterpiece, but the beauty of it is that its a masterpiece that only hints at the possibility, the potential, held in xTx’s words.

More than anything I would direct everyone who loves good writing, who loves a great short story, to read “The Mill Pond.” For my money it is one of the best short stories in the last year. At least. She breaks your heart, right from the opening line: “All of my tank tops are striped the wrong way for a girl my size.” Stories like “The Mill Pond” remind me in the best way of some of my favorite writers, and some of the best writers out there today, such as Bonnie Jo Campbell, whose short stories share the same devastation as “The Mill Pond.

I constantly find myself championing short stories to non-writers, who so often tell me that if they read at all that they prefer novels. Even with my my wife I have to sell the short story as a form. But it is because of writers like xTx that I love the short story so passionately. When I fell in love with writing it was due to Hemingway. When I have fallen back in love with writing continuously over the years it has been due to the short stories of people like Campbell, or Pete Fromm, Jack Driscoll, Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor. So many writers who exercise the greatest skill of precision a writer can, by encapsulating something meaningful into so few words. And xTx does that. And if there’s one thing I took away from Normally Special it is that xTx has the power within her to be a Bonnie Jo Campbell or even a Flannery O’Connor. The readers are just waiting for the rest of her words to show up. And I know they are coming. Until then read Normally Special again and again. Hold it close and feel what it’s trying to tell you.