Holy shit, are we ever not in Winesburg, Ohio anymore.

In the mid-Nineties, I started actually trying to be a writer. I had long cultivated a kind of writerly aesthetic -- I carried paperbacks around, argued about books and writers, looked down at people who read Tom Clancy books, aimed for a generally rumpled but semi-intellectual kind of look -- but had rarely if ever actually sat down to write. That started to change around about the time when, loafing off at Dupont Circle’s Second Story Books on my lunch hour, I stumbled upon Mondo Barbie.

The cover stood out right away: the word "Barbie" in signature pink. But not normal Barbie -- Mondo Barbie. What the hell did that mean? I wasn’t sure, but it definitely sounded like the kind of thing a writer would dig. “An Anthology of Fiction and Poetry.” Definitely the kind of thing a writer would be reading. “Edited by Richard Peabody and Lucinda Ebersole.” I checked the back cover. They looked like some kind of new wave punk band -- tough but smart, vaguely futuristic, a little angry about something. They looked kind of like the Eurythmics. In any case, they didn’t look anything like Sherwood Anderson or Larry McMurtry or William Kennedy or any of the people who had written any of the books I was reading at the time. Even from the cover, it was clear that Mondo Barbie was something different.

I read the first story, “A Real Doll,” by A.M. Homes. It begins simply enough: “I’m dating Barbie.” Oh, a story about a guy dating a girl named Barbie, just like the doll, right? But no, that’s not what it was at all:

"I popped her whole head into my mouth, and Barbie’s hair separated into single strands like Christmas tinsel and caught in my throat, nearly choking me. I could taste layer on layer of makeup, Revlon, Max Factor, and Maybelline. I closed my mouth around Barbie and could feel her breath in mine. I could hear her screams in my throat. Her teeth, white, Pearl Drops, Pepsodent, and whole Osmond family, bit my tongue and the inside of my cheek like I might accidentally bite myself. I closed my mouth around her neck and helf her suspended, her feet uselessly kicking the air in front of my face."

Holy shit, are we ever not in Winesburg, Ohio anymore. Everything about this was so different from anything I had read before -- the mingling of pop culture and “real” literature, the use of brand names (just like in real life!), the deadpan humor, the very bad things the narrator is doing to his sister’s doll, all of it (along with George Saunders's CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, which I bought in the same store, if not on the same day) simply blew my mind. Holy shit, literature could be fun. It could be funny. It could be really, really weird. It could be a whole bunch of different things, all at once.

From “A Real Doll,” the anthology goes off in a million different directions. There are poems, essays, literary fiction that stays in more familiar territory, and a lot of fiction the likes of which I had never read before. There were familiar names like Alice McDermott and Julia Alvarez, and names that would become familiar, like Denise Duhamel and Richard Grayson. There were people who were possibly never heard from again alongside none other than the future Poet Laureate of the United States, Philip Levine.

There was a lot of talk about Ken’s unfortunate nether region, most of it laugh out loud funny and somehow sad at the same time, like this segment from Richard Grayson’s amazing “Twelve Step Barbie:”

"A Cambodian girl asks her about condoms, and Barbie’s mind flashes back to Ken. With Ken, of course, condoms were never an issue."

At the time, it was the craziest book I’d ever read. Now, almost twenty years later, I recognize it as a Richard Peabody project. (I should note here that Richard is a friend, a former teacher, and all around literary role model. My first published story appeared in Richard’s Gargoyle, and it was written to a prompt in his Experimental Fiction class). Richard has been doing this for decades, first with Gargoyle and also with the many anthologies he’s edited (including Alice Redux, which gives Alice in Wonderland the Mondo Barbie treatment, Kiss the Sky, which features work about or inspired by Jimi Hendrix, and many anthologies celebrating the work of DC-based writers and poets). A Richard Peabody project will be eclectic, stuffed to the brim with work of all flavors and styles, a crazy goulash of poetry and fiction and essay and unclassifiable stuff all blended together in a way that somehow just works.

A quick digression: Gargoyle recently printed their fifty-seventh issue. Fifty-seven! We’re finalizing Barrelhouse issue ten and we can’t believe that we’ve been able to keep on doing this as long as we have. Richard and Gargoyle have us beat by forty seven issues.

One of the cool things about Mondo Barbie is seeing what a disparate group of writers can do when you give them a subject and no restrictions at all. They can take something as vacuous as an omnipresent plastic doll and turn it into art that is personal, funny, real, creepy, unexpected, and affecting. And a hell of a lot of fun.

What Makes These Five Chapbooks All Belong Under One Cover?

Early in his short story “The Black Cat,” Edgar Allan Poe has his unreliable narrator declare, “And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of Perverseness.”

“Who,” he asks, “has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not?”

This spirit of perverseness -- this counter-intuitive yet irresistible impulse toward the icky, the ridiculous, the self-destructive -- is at least part of what cannot be contained in the collections that make up the anthology They Could No Longer Contain Themselves.

In each of the five chapbooks that comprise this book, various characters find themselves engaging in activities which might make the reader agree with Poe that “perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart -- one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man.”

To wit: In John Jodzio’s Do Not Touch Me Not Now Not Ever, the narrator of “The Two Malls” says, “Sometimes at the expensive mall, I buy a cup of soda from the hot dog stand and then balance it on the aluminum railing.  I walk away to the other side of the mall and I wait until someone below is about to walk underneath the cup.  I hit the railing as hard as I can and the railing vibrates and the cup dumps onto the person below.”

In Mary Miller’s Paper and Tassels, the narrator of “My Old Lady” says, “Mama likes it when you slap her, I said, and his eyes narrowed like he didn’t remember mama liking that but he reared back and did it anyway.  My eyes leaked into her pillow.  Then it hit me: the pillowcase had been washed in Gain.  When he finished, he pulled out and said daddy didn’t really like that and I said mama didn’t really like it either, she just wanted to see what it felt like.”

In Elizabeth Colen’s Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake, the narrator of “Rule of Thirds” says “Today my girlfriend and I had sex while a man took pictures in the back yard, I start, in a letter to my mother. This letter is not really intended for her, though when I start I pretend it is.”

In Tim Jones-Yelvington’s Evan’s House and the Other Boys Who Live There, the narrator of “Slime Me” says “Abner was a child who wanted to get slimed. He hungered for the spread of slime across his skin, his favorite the viscous kind that crept to cover, coat, encase. He oozed homemade do-it-yourself Mad Scientist slime though his fingers and hoped someone would cover him in goop.”

And finally, in Sean Lovelace’s How Some People Like Their Eggs, the narrator of “Wal-Mart” says “‘I don’t know a girl named Kristen!’ I shout. (I do.) ‘I never touched her!’ I shout. (I did.)”

The pleasure of reading each section of this book is inextricable from the pleasure of knowing what’s good and choosing what’s bad, of knowing the right thing and doing the wrong one. Poe called this compulsion “the imp of the perverse” and the characters in these stories are certainly driven by this demon. But in the hands of Jodzio, Miller, Colen, Jones-Yelvington and Lovelace, this impulse is revealed to be an inseparable piece of what makes humans so human.