Three Ways of the Saw: Matt Mullins’s Walk on the Wild Side

It’s not hard to imagine the seamier side of life: it is, after all, shoved in our faces day after day in the papers, on cable news networks, and in late-night dramas aired at such an hour when all good children have supposedly gone to bed. Drugs, hookers, bikers, gangs — all seem to have their mysterious attraction as if we, the viewers, secretly wish to experience the thrill of it all without risking the danger of its very stark reality.

Growing up in the sixties in New York City, these realities were a daily part of everyday life, at least for some of us. Want to cop an ounce? Head to Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village where you’ll either score what you came for or, more than likely, get ripped off. Sex and the city? In those days, the phrase referred to a lot more than just the name of a Hollywood movie. Peep shows, prostitutes and pimps ruled the streets off of 8th Avenue which was lined with hardcore bookstores and triple X theaters.

Fast forward to Los Angeles in the eighties and life became even grittier. Punk rock ruled. Bands with names like The Germs, Black Flag, and The Circle Jerks rankled the airwaves with their music while films like The Decline of Western Civilization documented their often squalid lives. East Hollywood, in those days, was grungy and hip, another nod to middle class kids who wanted to experience the seedier side of life. Mosh pits were the rage, elimination dancing was hot and rowdy, and dark, smoke-filled nightclubs were the norm.

Perhaps the best book to capture the grit and grunge of the underground is William S. Burroughs 1959 classic Naked Lunch. This gut-wrenching book does more than just describe the sordid side of life. Unlike CSI: Miami and the like, it forces the reader to experience it almost first hand, so that, by the time you have finished with it, you have come as close as possible to the underworld of sex and drugs. In the end, you are left so sick and numb that it is as if you have directly encountered the reality-bend of hallucinatory life.

Three Ways of the Saw, by Matt Mullins, is, in some ways, similar though you will not come out of it with the same raw feeling that Burroughs leaves you with. The stories are often gritty and in-your-face, mustering up Midwestern street life in Detroit and its suburbs. There are the inevitable manifestations of sex, drugs and rock and roll and the not so inevitable Catholic school girls whose religious upbringing seems to push them to the opposite of what was intended by those good priests and nuns.

Yet, unlike Burroughs, these stories are page turners, creating tension in the reader which can only be mitigated by reading on. And, unlike Burroughs, there is redemption: characters whose lives have often been formed by a staid upbringing (Catholic school, solid middle class parents, etc.) who, unwillingly or not, fall between the cracks only to discover their own vulnerabilities and, in the end, are reduced to the common thread that binds us all: a humanity struggling with the reality of what it means to be alive in modern-day America.

There is guilt here as well — Catholic guilt stoked by Irish irascibility — a lot of soul-searching and, in the end, a confrontation with self which sometimes, but not always, leads to deliverance.

The book is divided into three sections, each containing longer stories as well as shorter, experimental pieces. Curiously, this format lends structure to a landscape of setting and character which often does not seem structured at all. And, like the Winnebago in “No Prints. No Negatives,” we meander through towns and deserts, through cemeteries and cities, through the lives of those who populate this landscape in a Travels with Charley-like journey that takes us through the wilderness and delivers us in tact back to our comfortable lives.

Readers will find Three Ways a bumpy ride, as it jolts them out of tranquility and takes them through the ups and downs of its characters’ lives. From the nameless guard in “The Way I See It,” who exhibits empathy towards a hooker while he comes to terms with his own guilt and failure, to Danny in “Dead Falls” who is forced to confront his sexuality and his self-doubt through a friendship that straddles staid suburban life and urban grit, readers will find themselves in unknown territory that smacks of familiarity: a familiarity that we are all, in the end, capable of the worst and the best that life has to offer.

Sometimes Ridiculous, Sometimes Funny: A Review of Ravi Mangla's Visiting Writers

I grew up in Rochester, New York. Telling people that sometimes results in condolences. In 2006, then-governor Eliot Spitzer compared the area’s economy to that of Appalachia. The unemployment rate has been high for decades, with no end in sight. One urban improvement project after another fails spectacularly. The snow is as awful as you think and the local pro football team is, well, the Buffalo Bills. But I love the place. I miss it, a lot.

As an expatriate, I have a particular fondness for writers who are influenced by western New York. Their stories are infused with fatalism and the resulting grim humor that seemed to permeate my own childhood. Reading stories by writers like Nicholson Baker, Joyce Carol Oates, Shirley Jackson, and George Saunders is satisfying. For me, sometimes it’s also like going home. I have the same experience when I read stories by Rochester’s own Ravi Mangla, and especially his new collection, Visiting Writers.

Visiting Writers consists of twenty-four stories in which a nameless narrator encounters well-known writers. The encounters are unstuck in time, and all over the globe. J.D. Salinger buys gummi worms at the grocery store. Thomas Pynchon rubs perfume samples from magazines all over himself. Harper Lee goes bowling.

The situations these writers face are sometimes ridiculous, sometimes funny, and often both. But Mangla’s subtle positioning of the characters within these absurdities lets us experience vulnerability that feels authentic, especially when the circumstances do not. For example, “1988’s” Richard Yates:

“I sat next to Richard Yates on a plane to Los Angeles. He was knocking back glasses of bourbon. One, two, three, four. . . . Nervous, I asked. About what, he said, unwrapping a pair of saltines. The Times was folded, tucked between his leg and the arm rest, and I asked if he was reading it. He said he would be, but first he wanted to sleep.”

Ravi Mangla could have written these pieces in such a way that the Visiting Writers took the center stage that the collection’s title suggests. We could laugh at Flannery O’Connor in a bumper car or Italo Calvino asking for directions at a gas station, and get on with our lives. But little comes easy in a part of the world that politicians once believed could be saved by a high speed ferry. I like to think that’s part of the reason Mangla always seems to know, whether in Visiting Writers or his other work, that humor is truly cherished when it also shows us something we’ve always worked hard to keep a secret.

An Interview with Meg Tuite

Robert Vaughan: I heard the “Linus & Lucy” instrumental song from Charlie Brown during the holidays. I realized how much I related to Charlie Brown and those characters as a kid. I played piano endlessly like Schroeder. Sucked a finger and carried a dingy yellow blanket everywhere like Linus. Do you have any fictional heroes from childhood? If so, how did they impact you?

Meg Tuite: My mom gave me the book Little Women when I was a kid and said “there’s a Meg in here.” I was mesmerized by Meg March, because she was such a tough ass and said it like it was. She was a writer and extremely flamboyant. I loved her. I read that book over and over. I was blown away when I realized that Louisa May Alcott had brought this fictional character to life. Meg March was alive, for me, and everything I wasn’t. I didn’t want to believe she existed only through the imagination of some woman writer. I was very shy, except at home when I bugged the hell out of my siblings with my endless dialogue to no one. Yes, I was in awe (still am) of the magnanimous Meg of Little Women.

RV: Families, functional or not (and what family is? I want to poke out the eyes of those who say their family was “purrfect!”) seem important to you as a writer. In your remarkable first novel, Domestic Apparition (love that title), the chapters are all little gems, vignettes, each barreling the story forward through complex family incidents. How did you arrive at the main character? This family? What prompted you to tell a story about this particular one?

MT: Oh, Robert, didn’t I tell you? Family Health and Overzealous Mental Balance, Inc. is just now pouring the bronze for the monolithic sculpture of our nuclear nucleus in homage to our raging consummate genetics. (Did that even make sense?)

Domestic Apparition is a novel-in-stories. Most were published individually and then I decided to put a collection together, altering content so it was the same narrator throughout, and the same family. My protagonist, Michelle, was based on many different personages rolled into one. But, most of the chapters / stories are based on a memory, a feeling or a character from my past. I had to put a piece of myself in there to bring this family alive.

My family did go to a Catholic grade school and there’s a hell of a lot of material to work with there. And my siblings are all wonderfully eccentric so I played with some of their idiosyncrasies like the character, Nathan, who had some of the same habits as my older brother, Kevin, when he was a kid. But no matter which chapter / story I wrote, it always ended up fictional, every piece took on a life of its own.

RV: Every piece certainly does have its own breath, and even more so when one collaborates. We have had the great fortune of our paths crossing not only through social networks, but also through the monthly Exquisite Quartet column you write at Used Furniture Review, and your stories appearing on Flash Fiction Friday, which I co-host monthly on WUWM’s Lake Effect. We also had the great fortune of reading our work together, thanks to fellow writer, Susan Tepper, at the KGB Bar in NYC in October, 2011. Then, there are the multiple places our work appears together such as Stripped, A Collection of Anonymous Flash. Can you address collaboration, what you like (or don’t) about it and the impact on your writing?

MT: I am thankful for all of the collaborations with you, Robert! You’re amazing and I love Flash Fiction Friday on WUWM. I was honored that you read one of my stories on air. That was a special occasion. And our reading in NYC was exceptional. I always love reading with other writers and NYC was remarkable because I got to read with some of my favorites. I’ve just worked on two collaborations with photographers and really enjoyed it. Jennifer Tomaloff’s anthology is Bending Light Into Verse. She’s sublime. The other is Lost in Thought Magazine; Kyle Schruder is the editor and the photographer is Valerie Chiang. I was totally inspired when working with someone else’s images. They evoked these whole new worlds for me.

Exquisite Quartet is an extraordinary experience. I collaborate with three other writers on a story each month. I start a narrative and then pass it on. All four of us pull together the strings of a tale and then I do some final editing each month to make sure it works cohesively. It’s exciting to see where each writer will take the story. Some writers really flow with it. The Exquisite Quartet Anthology of 2011 is now available. All thirteen stories were published by the stellar Dave Cotrone, editor at Used Furniture Review. It’s been a surprisingly gratifying year working with all 38 outstanding writers.

RV: I’ve ordered two copies of Exquisite Quartet already — can’t wait to read it. I’m also collaborating on Jennifer and Kyle’s projects, so I relate to that same sense of awe that comes from combining two artistic mediums: photography and writing. The act of writing can be so insular, and that our paths lead us to so many other talented artists is certainly a highlight. Can you tell me about the ways you like to craft? Music or silence, public or office? What is the ideal set-up for your pen to fly (or is it the keypad?)

MT: I am always curious about the diverse scenarios that are necessary for someone to write. Some writers need a TV on in the background in order to concentrate! Wow! While I was writing during NaNoWriMo last November, I met a group at a coffee shop, but all the conversations drove me crazy. I followed them instead of what I was writing. I’m a writer who needs solitude to really focus, go deeply into the story. I prefer to write with a pen first and then the computer to type, editing as I go.

RV: I’m the same way, pen first, then computer. And I know what you mean about too much noise, it can be so distracting. We both have the luxury of quiet space. I have woods surrounding my house, and I don’t take that for granted. I’m wondering if you have any literary mentors, or writers past or present, who you feel may have shaped your writing?

MT: I can’t say that any of these writers have influenced my writing, but I do return to them again and again for inspiration. I love Flannery O’Connor for her inimitable metaphors and her dark sense of humor. I used to study her collection of stories and actually counted how many metaphors and similes she had used. I was obsessed. Bruno Schulz, a Polish writer, only wrote two small collections before he was killed by the SS during WWII, but those two books hold entire worlds inside them. His work is sublime. Djuna Barnes is one of my favorite writers. Her dialogue is genius. Flann O’Brien, an Irish writer, wrote at least four novels and I go back to those repeatedly. A brilliant writer and so incredibly funny. And I’ve always loved to read and memorize poetry: Dickinson, Rilke, Sexton, Dylan Thomas. I could go on and on with this list of writers I adore. And of course there are many current writers out there that I admire: Lidia Yuknavitch, Kristine Ong-Muslim, Michelle Reale, Mary Stone Dockery, Robert Vaughan, Len Kuntz, Jim Valvis, Howie Good, Sara Lippmann, Susan Tepper, Julie Innis. . . . Like I said, it really is endless! I’ll stop now.

RV: I think it’s healthy to have mentors, or writers you like to read at the very least. We share many similar tastes. I know from our conversations in NYC last October that you expressed a desire to write more poetry. Funny how from there, you leapt right into that NaNoWriMo novel writing month! But looking ahead, what writing turf might lie unexplored? You’ve published Domestic Apparition, your excellent first novel, have a chapbook collection coming, collaborate on the Exquisite Quartet monthly column. You are quite the busy gal! Not to mention being nominated for not one, but FOUR Pushcart Prizes in 2011. So, what is the scariest thought of writing you might take on? Is it a play? Non-fiction or memoir? Everyone seems to be dabbling in that currently.

MT: I’d like to finish that novel I started for NaNo. The first draft is almost complete and then, of course, the deeper work begins after that. I have a collection of short stories that I’ve assembled. I’ve never written a play, but was asked to write a screenplay for someone. I didn’t get very far, but will continue to attempt it. I keep dabbling with the idea of memoir, but it hasn’t taken off like I was hoping. I do always come back to the short story. I love writing them and I have a list of magazines I’d like to get published in. I am writing some book reviews also, so there’s a bit of NF writing, but haven’t written an essay in years. I think the scariest notion for me would be if someone asked me to write a sci-fi story or a western. Ha! So maybe I should just go for it and do it! Face my fears!

RV: Yes, the poet Howard Nemerov, brother of fantastic photographer Diane Nemerov Arbus, once wisely said, “The only way out is the way through.” Sage advice. But before we get all scholarly and shit here, how about some quickfire questions . . . our buddy, Anna March has started up her excellent music column at The Rumpus, so in her honor, what are five of your fave songs from 2011-12?

MT: Oh, this is a great question!! Thanks to Anna March for her amazing columns! I’ve picked five, Robert, but now I can’t stop listening to music. And it was a tough choice!!

Amy Winehouse singing “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow.” Kills me every time I hear it. I love her and miss her desperately!!!!

Patti Smith singing “Dancing Barefoot.” One of my all-time favorites.

Radiohead performs “Creep.” I love all their work!

KD Lang performs Neil Young’s song, “Helpless.” I get chills every time I hear it!!

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings perform “Red Clay Halo.” I wanted to be Gillian when I first heard her. They never cease to blow me away!

RV: All excellent choices, complete with video links! How about five “secret” celebrity crushes?

MT: Hehe!! Okay!

Any kind of sex with Denzel Washington!

Oral sex with Oral Roberts!

Make out session with Dame Judy Dench (wait, she was already spoken for, wasn’t she? Damn)!

Heavy petting with Dr. Phil!

Missionary position with any Mother Superior!

RV: Oh what fun this would all be! How about . . . I know you are originally from the Chicago area. So five things you miss about the Midwest, or Chicago in general? (And you can’t say Liz Phair because she’s mine!)

MT: Damn, you get Judy Dench and Liz? Hmmm.

I’d have to say I miss the Cubs games. We’d sit in the bleachers, soak up the sun and drink beer. It was the general meeting place before internet dating sites.

Going downtown with my mom when I was kid to see the tree, shop and have lunch at Marshall Fields.

Summers we’d spend in Michigan swimming and causing trouble wherever we could.

I liked that we could walk to school and to our friends house or take the el to get somewhere in the city. We didn’t rely on cars as I do now living in NM.

I miss the great Blues bars downtown. We heard amazing music. Most of the good bands don’t have NM on their itinerary when touring, but always Chicago.

RV: Ahhh . . . the blues, so we are back to music. Which reminds me, there was a recent trend on Facebook: track down the #1 song of the week that you were born. Mine was “Itsy, Bitsy, Teenie, Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini!!!” How perfect for a writer (those commas!) and a poet to boot! What is yours? And how might it relate to you (or not? You can Google it via Billboard or Wikipedia)?

MT: My song was “The Letter” by the Box Tops. Ha!

I love their outfits!!! I have to say it’s all about the letter from his baby to bring him back home. I had no baby. I’ve been traveling forever but never got a letter to come back home. I think I was writing a letter that I wasn’t coming back home!

RV: “My baby, she wrote me a letter!” How cool! Okay, now I am going to give you a first sentence as a prompt. You can incorporate it, and continue . . . or you can take off wherever it sends you:

“A woman fell in love with a man who had been dead a number of years.”(From “Love” by Lydia Davis.)

MT: A woman fell in love with a man who had been dead a number of years.

He was a disappearing act in the cafe they both went to and out on the streets of the city. Once a lady sat right on top of him, drank her coffee, made phone calls on her cell, read the newspaper and then left, without excusing herself or acknowledging him in any way.

The woman loved him for this. He abided many things. He got to the cafe at 9AM prompt for years and she sat at a table nearby. He drank his coffee with two packets of sugar that he stirred in slow methodical swirls while he stared off into space.

The woman thought of approaching him. He wore impeccable suits and his shoes were always scuffed from the long walks he took and all the people who stepped on them. He never spoke to anyone. Death hovered around him like a vaporous camouflage. It was a hazard. He was pummeled on the streets by crowds that ignored him. He never became annoyed.

The woman loved him so much that she would walk in front of him and part people like the red sea to keep them from damaging him anymore than he already was. After all, he was dead. She would sometimes walk backwards in front of him, stare at him intently, but he didn’t notice. He might have been a philosopher or someone who had suffered much loss.

After years of obsession, watching decay fester his eye sockets further into his skull and his rugged skin turn to gray stone she picked up her coffee and muffin and went to sit next to him at his table. His bones swam inside his suits. She was afraid there would be no trace of him soon. She had rehearsed many things that she might say to the man, but now was at a loss for words.

At some point he looked over at her. He smiled. She didn’t mind that his lips were a memory and his teeth were brown as his beverage.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.

Her heart was entombed in some kind of mausoleum, expanding with each breath she took. She didn’t know that he saw her too.

“We have a lot to catch up on,” he said.

She merely nodded, buoyant with the potency of the moment.

A loud group of boys came up to their table. One sat on top of the man and another sat on top of the woman and the other two boys pulled up chairs. The one lodged in the woman’s lap was quite globular, but the woman didn’t mind.

The man looked over at the woman and smiled. “You see, nothing is ever as uncomfortable as you imagine.”

RV: You are a master crafter, Meg! I say submit it! One more little glimpse of your talent with another way to open up a flash piece? We’ll play word bank! Here are five words and you use any of them in a piece, 50 words or less (thanks, Joseph Quintela, of Short, Fast and Deadly!) And the words are: loose, coarse, unnecessary, chunk, rope (all taken from From the Umberplatzen: A Love Story by Susan Tepper).

MT: She kept falling. The coarse chunk of a rope was too damn loose. Why didn’t they have some manual on how to hang yourself? This was just embarrassing and an unnecessary waste of time.

RV: Those darn loose ropes, I’ve had a few! Haha . . . now some quickies: Do you sleep naked or in pjs? Boxers or briefs?

MT: I love the pjs in winter and ass to the wind in summer. Would definitely go with the boxers!

RV: No pjs here, naked year round. If you had to live one other place than the good ‘ol USA, where would it be?

MT: You’re HOT, RV!!!! I’d choose one of the Greek islands. Paolo and I like to fantasize about what our life would be like there. We’re still waiting for some unknown rich-as-hell relative to drop a load of cash on us and then will be on our way. Any day now, I’m sure.

RV: Lucky you, Miss Mykonos! Hurry up and move, you two, so we can come visit! Now, tomorrow morning, you wake up and discover you have turned into an insect (a la Kafka’s Metamorphosis!) What insect are you and what is your destructible character trait that might be your untimely end?

MT: No question, I’d like to be a preying mantis. And I must be a male, because once the female mates with me she bites off my head.

RV: Yes, those female preying mantises!!! What supreme power they have. Now we are in sixth grade . . . and all the girls are, well, gaga over you-know-who. But you have a secret crush. Mine was Alex: brainiac, so quiet, nerdy. Blushed during lunch when I stared. Yours?

MT: Gene. He’d come over to my house and sit on the steps. My mom asked me what the hell we saw in each other. I blathered on about god knows what and the poor guy just sat there listening. He never said a word and then after about an hour he’d say “alright then, see you later,” and that was our love thing. He ended up becoming a cop in L.A. You think I pushed him into it?

RV: Maybe he was that cop in L.A. who used to come over and . . . oh, never mind! Say you’re a man, maybe even became one through a sex change. And you’re about to meet your first date from an internet site at a local pub. What happens next?

MT: Oh yeah, I saw that porn flick about the cop in LA, hehe!!

Okay, if she giggles or has stuffed animals in her house, I’m out of there so quick! If we get past that and she has no girly bullshit we order beers and since I’ve had a sex change I’m wondering if she notices my last-of–the-mohican chest that I’ve been working to get rid of with hormone injections. We have a few beers, then decide to go to her place. She’s ready for the action, but discovers I’ve got different apparatus. “Oh no, oh dear,” she cries and then realizes she hasn’t had much happening on e-Harmony and says what the hell. We go at it and the rest is either history or historical.

RV: Or both! So, lets wind this puppy down, even though I don’t want it to ever end. Which brings about this: how do you feel about endings? Both in writing, and in life?

MT: It’s always a great time hanging with you, Robert!

I love to write endings in stories. Sometimes they arrive easily. I’ve also sat with a story for months before an ending erupted out of the fog. I find it satisfying when endings show up as a complete surprise to me.

In life, I’ve dealt with a lot of endings. I work in hospice and so I know that with each person I am spending time with, an end is inevitable. Sometimes I have years with them, but usually it’s less than six months. I’ve met the most extraordinary people over the last ten years and what a gift to hang with them during that time of their lives. They are open and introspective and I get to hear their amazing life stories. I love the work and some of the endings are difficult, there’s always mourning that accompanies it, but there’s so much truth that shines through these wise folk before they go.

Thank you so much, Robert, for a sublime interview! Your questions were exceptional and once again, I never knew what was coming next from you! You are the bomb!!!

RV: Right back at you, Meg. This was a blast.

More Than Anything, This Searing Collection Offers Us Hope: On Barb Johnson's More of This World or Maybe Another

Barb Johnson, author of More of This World or Maybe Another, worked as a carpenter for more than twenty years in New Orleans. I suspect Barb Johnson was a fine carpenter and built great things. She certainly created nine exceptional stories in this debut short story collection.

More of this World or Maybe Another traces the lives of several unlikely friends and loves living amidst the poverty, violence, and marginalization of New Orleans’s underclass. Through these excellent stories, Johnson offers us a welcome window into a place and people that are all too often overlooked and devalued.

Johnson has a great talent for titles, and the stories behind them consistently live up to their promises. Throughout this collection, Johnson displays an enormous gift for storytelling, characterization, and fresh, evocative language. More, the tenacity and individuality of the collection’s heroine, Delia Delahoussaye, jump out even in the opening lines:

“Delia has to walk past A.J. Higginbotham and his crowd to get to the gym, which is where the dance is. The boys are installed on the railing under the long breezeway like they’re at a livestock auction, cans of Skoal wearing their way through back pockets. Delia raises her right hand and shoots the bird at the line-up for the entire fifty-foot walk.”

By the end of this gripping title story, I was inside the page, urging Delia to “Do it. Now. Now.”

The collection’s second story “Keeping Her Difficult Balance” further reveals Delia’s torment: vacillating between how she is expected to behave (get married and settled) and what she knows to be true (her homosexuality and need for emancipation). Johnson draws her characters with enormous honesty and compassion, and even as I cheered for Delia and Maggie in this story, I also felt great sympathy for Delia’s fiancé, Calvin — further testimony to Johnson’s lavish skill.

By the end of the next three stories, “If the Holy Spirit Comes for You,” “Issue Is,” and “Titty Baby” I felt a growing tightness in my chest and heightened pain in my throat, similar to the sensations that come from swallowing a too large lump of ice-cream. My discomfort, alas, from far less innocuous causes. Rarely before have I felt such an overwhelming ache to reach inside the pages of a book and comfort characters. Yet that’s just how I felt for Dooley and Reet, Delia and Maggie, and Pudge and Belinda respectively.

As I read on, my emotions continued to take a beating as mastery and truth resonated from these pages (from “The Invitation”):

“I hand Luis the old valentine, proof of some bygone love. ‘Bring this to your Mama,’ I tell him. ‘Girls like to know they’re wanted. Even big girls. Especially big girls.’”

Even the one story that I found least powerful, “Killer Heart” (where Dooley leaves his baby daughter, Gracie, inside his car in searing temperatures), has stayed with me. Indeed, I found that I missed Delia when she was absent or played a small role in a story. Perhaps because I am so connected with her from the outset. It may well be a drawback in interconnected short story collections to unevenly represent recurring characters, particularly the hero or heroine. Regardless, this collection is stellar.

The collection closes with “St. Luis of Palmyra,” and ends as it began with a young protagonist, this time Luis, struggling to break free of shackles. However, this is a much darker, more violent and disturbing tale than the opening story. As this final story unfolds, we again witness great suffering and savage cruelties, and how even the oppressed will in turn oppress. Yet this story, like the rest of this collection, is also about transcendence, redemption, and ultimately a belief in the human spirit. More than anything, this searing collection offers us hope, however slim the crack of light.

A Few Words on Corey Mesler’s Notes Toward the Story & Other Stories

Appreciation for the female form, in many manifestations. Appreciation for language. A cunning wit and endearing style. Boundless creativity. The presence of a well-read author who makes an original contribution. That about sums it up.

Don’t ask me why Mesler, who has both novels and poetry collections published in addition to story collections, has not gained larger distribution in terms of a big agent and a major book deal with wide distribution, but yet again I find myself grateful for the risks independent and academic publishers are willing to take.

What we have with Mesler’s new collection is exactly the kind of gathered stories I like to read — varied in style, theme, and content. Elegant and guttural. Full of the flavor of life and the lyrical beauty of literary work. More sensuous but similarly ironic to Vonnegut. More accessible than Roland Barthes for those who like story more than essay, but also as comfortingly aching in elegant prose as a latter-day Nabokov — with the same sort of flair for unexpected language combinations and a symphonic melody of sounds rendered together like a culminating force. Mesler’s work has been compared to Brautigan, but I sense metafictional traces of John Barth, too — as well as what I’ve always found to be the enjoyably surreal facets of many excellent early T.C. Boyle stories.

Coincidentally, this is also exactly the kind of story collection I like to read from a male writer, if we let gender play a role in this discussion. The men in these stories enjoy women. Frankly, I like that.

Not to be sexist, but when I read a book with powerful sexy female characters and that book has been written by a man, I am almost tempted to check his pants to verify gender. To gilt-edged frame him. To send him up with a parade. Were he not married, I’d likely ask for a phone number or a sample life-primer to allow distribution to less fortunate men in airports. Certainly, Mesler excels with longing — in many of Mesler’s stories, specifically, female longing plays a part — but what I enjoy is that he explores not just the act of wanting — but also the fulfillment of feminine desires. Three cheers for that!

The story that opens this collection entitled “Monster,” for example, discusses a woman with a cheating husband who decides to stop her pattern of sadness and violation via having her own affair; before she can consummate this however, her husband comes home, discovers her intent, and treats her violently until she is rescued (and later sexually satisfied) by the “Monster” in the story, who is an unusually large, well-endowed, yet ugly man. There are so many things I love about this story — the breaking of patterns. The story beyond the story. The idea of an ugly man as a monster who is large yet possesses such tenderness that he allows the smaller woman all sexual power in the story.

I really enjoyed the collection’s experimental title piece as well, “Notes Toward the Story,” since it is a wonderfully escalating narrative that moves skillfully between the author composing notes for a desired fiction and the undesired but progressive authorial reality entering relentlessly through these notes. Mesler applies his humor and savvy here too.

If I had all day, we could talk about the themes this collection houses, the sweet piece about two twin sisters who dye their shadows because it’s sexy (and communicate with a strange sort of ESP), or the meaning of the minimalist near flash “Strangers In Love,” where Mesler applies a more distant style yet still makes relationship commentary.  We could talk about these or any of the stories in this collection. That’s why it is so good.  It really doesn’t matter where you open this book; all of it is smart, funny, appealing, well-written — the kind of book you keep hoping to buy and sometimes feel disappointed to realize you are not holding. This is why reading people, thinking people, should buy this book — because that sort of disappointment is terrible and recurrent in a lot of collections out there, but not part of Mesler’s gathered offerings.

Pamela Ryder's A Tendency to Be Gone

“I had him once to hold. I have a stone to hold. From this day forward. We go forward, we watch the road, we listen for the hills. I listen to the stone: there is no singing. Once there was singing; we were singing. We were kneeling and we sang the words we knew. There was a ringing bell, fingered rings, him never to be slipping through my fingers, my folded hands. There was a hymn, a hollow sound. There was a joyful noise. There was a moon-white paper marked with my name, his name. The paper was unfolded, unfrayed. We were not afraid. We would take a chance. We would last. We would stay awake, see signs.”

The words move you and the stories carry you away. That’s what they’re for, to take you somewhere else, maybe somewhere new, whether it be down the road or a thousand years ago. Stories create new worlds or they make our world new, imbued with magic, with wonder.

My mother asked me for the hundredth time in the almost month since I’ve been back what I want to do, what interests me. I told her, Nothing matters so much as stories.

“My father is out on the curb, picking through the throwaways. He is what I have folded. He is holding a shirt to his shirtlessness. He is showing me what to save by taking a stitch in time.”

Pamela Ryder’s A Tendency to be Gone offers stories that matter, the kind that transport you, that move you, emotionally, geographically, temporally. No two stories are the same in terms of style or even content — from lyrical to declarative to almost Victorian, she builds reality around us. And though the collection is diverse, it is cohesive.

The title sticks in my head and it’s very appropriate for the collection. There is a strong sense of things past, of something gone, of leaving, as well as a greater force at work, whether it be god or devils or the enormity of nature, the insistence of Time. Within these she weaves lives, sometimes broken, other times breaking, but always searching. For what?

Ritual and repetition, signs, significance of any kind: these are people possessed. They need something, anything, and maybe they don’t know what it is. Maybe they never knew or will never know. Maybe they had it and can only hope it will come again. The enormity of their surroundings swallows them as the prose hits all senses and we fall into it, into these worlds, these places, completely consumed by a collapsing house, the neverending wilderness, the countless rocks and hills.

“She takes me under. Pushes me into the place she wants my mouth. She wants me drinking from the river. She wants me head-down in the water, mouth to stone and split-legged in the dark. She finds the pebble of me, the slippery banks of me where I am winged and unescaping. Where I am sliding stream-bottom stones, stirred on by the scent of something wounded. I am face down and willing. I am unfolding, unstruggling, undone.”

Her ability to describe settings, to allow that setting to seamlessly become a body, a human body, to be sexy and profound at the same time continually impresses me. I read the collection again this last weekend, and it’s better than the first time — richer, fuller. The stories opened up to me in new ways, differently than the first read where I was mostly just riding the prose, enjoying its sound, its texture. But this time, this time the stories are more than just beautiful: they’re real and they matter.

“I will have a bed. I will make an unmade bed of stone. I will pretend a pillow for my head. I will pretend the stones will keep me safe and where I am: face down to the rock, powdered with the ashes where the rock was burning.”

"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.