Sugar Evil

When I was a little girl, my father told me many times that he believed there was true evil in the world. It wasn’t until years later that I fully understood him, that I knew people could be evil, would be evil, would do evil things.

The backbone of xTx’s "The Mill Pond," a story in Normally Special, is that unnamed darkness, a violence that can only be hinted at, a horrible act that cannot be spelled out, maybe because anything else would be unbearable.

In "The Mill Pond," xTx fills us with sugar and evil.

We are trapped in our Tinkerbell’s body and small shirts, we are salivating and lusting after rainbow-hued Kool-Aid cups, sweet Suzy Q’s, stolen cookies. All of the treats are spelled out for us, described, they evoke a visceral reaction in us and our Tinkerbell.

The treats are under the light of Tinkerbell’s narrative, they are a clear desire we share with the character.

What we do not share are the awful things. Mister Dean is described, but his actions are mostly a shadow. Mister Dean does things so evil our Tinkerbell doesn’t have the vocabulary to describe them yet.

This story is the pulse of a young girl on the brink of learning the language of the awful, of the horrible, of the worst things in the world.

When did you learn there was true evil in the world?

I love how his characters, more than other authors', feel like real people who really fuck up.

I’m certainly no Updike expert: I didn’t attend the annual Updike conference in rural Pennsylvania, and I haven’t read all of his books (I’ve only worked my way through seven of his fifty plus publications). But, years ago, in a crowded bookstore, I found a beautiful hardcover edition of his Rabbit books, read the introduction, and was won over by his ambition. Since then, it’s been a steady — albeit often questioned — love affair.

Apparently I’m not supposed to like John Updike. At least that is what a friend told me who has a Master’s in English Literature (which I’m pretty sure means he has the authority to declare things like that). Apparently women don’t like Updike. His writing is too masculine, too mysogonistic, too preoccupied with things like politics and unsentimental sex (so much sex!) to be liked by women. You know, because women don’t care to sully themselves with things like the economy and civil rights and realistic descriptions of sex.

Mm. Right.

So here is my potentially contra-feminist confession: I love John Updike. I love how he writes painfully flawed characters. I love how his characters, more than other authors', feel like real people who really fuck up. I also love how, as a reader, I cringe and shake my head in shame when they cause their own tragic downfalls. And you know what? I also really like Updike’s depiction of sex. It is unremarkable, awkward, and impeccably described. (Who could ever forget how Updike describes the specific sensation of anally penetrating a woman in Rabbit is Rich? If you read it, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Don’t pretend like you don’t.)

But the tragically flawed and pervy uncle of Updike’s earlier work has turned succinct and wise in his final collection of short stories, My Father’s Tears. Published posthumously, these stories confront the brevity of life in a way that only an author who has lived his life to its outer edge could. The scope of the stories shows this sage perspective: they span entire lifetimes. They deal with the politics of the Depression and the different perspectives of September 11th. The protagonists, all in their 60s or 70s, struggle with the indifferent nature of life and death. They all seem to be asking in their respective nostalgia for childhood, young love, affairs, divorces, and the births of their children, “[W]hat does it mean, this enormity of having been children and now being old, living next door to death?”

But, where Updike’s earlier work featured characters who reveled in the novelty (and subsequent consequences) of life’s desires (adultery, power, money, etc.), this final collection seems to say something much different: passion only excites us momentarily, while the quieter times (the loyalty and constancy of a dying wife, for example) are what fulfill us. In this collection, the rare moments of lust and desire between characters never come to fruition, and old romances that have been heralded in memory are rendered insignificant in reality.

Intimacy, Updike seems to be saying in these final stories, does not come from brief, intense moments of passion. Instead it comes from shared experiences and survived hardships. Filled with wisdom and retrospect, these stories are some of Updike’s finest. His prose is strong and efficient. The rambling descriptions of town life that he was known for in his earlier work (and that I -- yeah, I’ll admit it -- tended to skip) have been set aside in favor of tight, well-crafted sentences that demonstrate the talent of an author at the height (and, unfortunately, the end) of his brilliance.

xTx Is Not a Real Person but ___ _____ Is Not a Real Writer (Yet)

xTx likes to send me all the great reviews of her book and I yawn, mostly. She thinks I do that because I am not supportive, but it is because nobody is going to tell me something I already know about Normally Special, a book that I am deeply invested in.

Disclaimers: I read early drafts of many of these stories; I provoked her into writing the story about her dad's penis; I took the photo that is on the cover; I take every opportunity to turn the attention to myself. So enough of that. There are more disclaimers but I will not disclaim them, I will just say this:

xTx is a lovely person who cares deeply about the people she cares about. xTx is not a real person. You are lucky if you are xTx's Internet friend. xTx is friends with everyone on the Internet. Her Internet heart is that big. She is honest -- as honest as someone with a pseudonym can be -- and please consider that her fake name might make her more honest than you could ever hope to be. She injected so much of herself -- her hidden, real self -- into Normally Special that to discuss the book or the person is to discuss the same thing.

Some of the stories make you squirm and gag and that is a good thing. Many reviewers gravitate toward the gruesome tales in her collection because, c'mon, what a THING to say! To admit! To confess! Cringe-worthly. She digs deep for those, into places that make her and the reader feel like monsters. She almost named the book I Am Not a Monster in part because she often feels like one. And that is it right there -- we all do. Maybe we do not write stories about it. Maybe we pretend we do not have these feelings. But we do.

The most frightening story in the book is "An Unsteady Place." A woman on an idyllic vacation with her family struggles to love and is maybe losing her mind and it is terrifying. Trapped by the trappings of her life: a husband and children and choices that are chains, and who is not bound and frightened by that? Who would admit it?

xTx is the inside of this woman. _____ _______ is the outside this woman. _____ _______ could not write the stories in Normally Special. If you met _____ _______ you might ask her where xTx is and she would point at a dark corner and you would not see her.

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.

xTx is not a nun.

When I first started getting to know xTx, I thought she was a nun. There had to be a powerful reason why she wouldn’t put her name to her writing. Service to God seemed like a reasonable explanation.

xTx is not a nun.

I don't care who xTx really is. Her pseudonym is the least interesting thing about her. I might, in part, feel this way because I know something about the woman behind the virtual curtain. We’ve spent time together. I know that there is, in fact, no mystery at all. However, even if I didn’t know xTx as a person, the mystery would not be as interesting as her writing.

When I decided to start a small press, I had a list of writers I wanted to work with. At the top of that list, there was one name -- xTx -- not because we’re friends (she published two books before working with THP and will publish countless books long after working with THP) but because her writing is fierce and beautiful, sometimes haunting or horrifying but always, always endlessly interesting and engaging. Her writing exemplifies the aesthetic I wanted to cultivate. Whatever book we worked on would be a book we could always be proud of.

At times, it seems like people forget xTx is a writer. Names are important until they aren’t. With a collection like Normally Special, you know everything you need to know about the woman and the writer because she bleeds on every page and reveals, perhaps, the truest parts of herself.

The power of this collection is that xTx will break your heart while holding it gently. Every single story in this book is one I love and continue to read and re-read. I could pick each and every one of the twenty-three stories that make up Normally Special as my favorite because they are all that strong, that moving, that powerful.

Normally Special is the kind of book that includes, “She Who Subjected the Sun,” a story about a dystopic near future where women are subjected to a stringent set of rules, bought and sold as chattel, trained to please masters. What makes this story so chilling is that we don’t really know how  and why such a circumstance has come to pass. We don’t see what the women are subjected to as much as we are given room to imagine. That freedom to imagine the unseen horrors is probably the most disturbing element of this story -- what happens to the women is only as dark and disturbing as our minds will allow. The potential is terrifying.

Many of the stories in Normally Special are like that -- we know terrible things are happening or have happened, but these terrible things are often alluded to. Rarely are they explicitly detailed. We are given the responsibility of pulling back the curtain to see what it hides. Again, the horror is only as pronounced as we allow.

There are all kinds of freedom in this book -- the freedom to imagine what we are not explicitly told, the freedom to place ourselves in these darker lives of others, and most of all, there is the freedom of the words in these stories about desperate mothers and tormented girls and daring daughters. Ultimately, that is why I don’t give a good goddamn who xTx is -- the mystery of the woman behind the pseudonym is a small price to pay for the freedom she revels in through her writing.

Over the coming weeks, you’ll hear from other writers who are equally taken with Normally Special, the woman, the writer, those three little letters, XTX.

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?