A Sudden and Jerky Way: Unreliable Narration in T&T

I want to talk about the narration in Today & Tomorrow, and about unreliable narrators in general, but first we need to set some operational definitions. What's currently understood to be an unreliable narrator (one whose credibility has been seriously compromised) is too broad, and could very well apply to every first-person novel ever written. I've always thought that an unreliable narrator is more than just a biased one, that he/she tries to deceive or misdirect the reader while telling the story.

The problem with this definition is that narrators who go out of their way to be unreliable are really annoying. They feel like a cheap trick most of the time, an unnecessary stylistic conceit that amuses the author more than it does anything for the work or the people reading it. I felt this way about the two Chuck Palahniuk books I read, and I almost threw Toni Morrison's Jazz into my dad's leaf mulcher out of frustration for similar reasons – not only did the narrator's dishonesty make the book twice as long as it needed to be, but there was this winking arrogance on the narrator's part, like he/she knew the whole story and just wasn't going to tell us.

(Note: this is the first and last time I will ever compare Chuck Palahniuk to Toni Morrison.)

Which brings me, finally, to T&T, which I found charming rather than annoying. I couldn't put my finger on it at first, and wondered if the numerous literary hatreds I'd sustained through high school and college were finally softening. But really, it's two quotes from other sources that brought it into perspective for me.

The first was Hipster Book Club's review of T&T; they suggested that “readers are treated not to stream-of-consciousness speech so much as a stream-of-consciousness imagination.” That made a lot of sense. The narrator isn't dangling a Twinkie over our heads and pulling it away as we try to grab it. She's not laughing at us. She's as unsure of her own observations as we are, and often as bewildered by what she says to people.

Statements like “I talk how I want. That’s part of the arrangement” battle with frenzied changes of subject after she says something particularly crazy. “Let’s talk about something else,” she says, after Aaron disregards two of her violent family anecdotes. “Let’s talk about global terrorism, or fashion-design. Do you like fashion? Do you think I’m fashionable?” This is the voice of mental freefall. She may talk how she wants, but her own scattershot understanding of what that is sets its own limitations, one of which is that she says stuff that creeps her out just as much as anyone within earshot.

(Note: at the risk of derailing this post altogether, I submit that T&T is suspenseful in the purest sense of that term. It's hard for a reader to predict what's going to happen in a book when none of the characters really know.)

The second quote was something Kevin Smith (I know, I know) said in the director's commentary for Clerks: The Animated Series. During the episode where Jay sues the Quik Stop after slipping on orange soda in the store, Kevin remarks that Jay's character is lovable despite his constant obscenity because it's clear that he isn't trying to offend anyone; he just has no social barometer. Similarly, T&T's narrator isn't trying to mislead or complicate things for the reader. If anything, she's trying too hard to make herself understood, but her childish, chaotic responses to reality get the best of her.

Read the scenes with the injured dog again, and notice that the other characters are detached from it while she, who earlier in the book was kidding around about robbing AM/PMs and stabbing baristas, tries to find something else – anything else – to focus on. Moments like those reveal a lot about who she is and how her mind works, and justifies her unreliability as a genuine character trait instead of a self-serving vehicle for the author to jab at the reader.

I feel like there's more that I could say about this topic, but I also feel like there's an unspoken word limit for these things that I should be honoring, and which I may have already exceeded. I guess the point I want to make is that there's a purposefulness to unreliable narration that T&T's narrator can imitate, but never truly inhabit. Her attempts to obfuscate only draw us further in.

So, yeah. What do you guys think about unreliable narrators? Am I talking out of my ass here?

Story Focus: "The Long Way"

This past weekend driving to a party in the countryside just outside of Indianapolis, I was in a mood to be moved by music. I sang loud, I drummed the steering wheel, I grew goosebumps along the skin of my arms. Feeling nostalgic, I put in the CD of my old band No Heroics, Please (yes, we used a Raymond Carver reference as a band name, yes, we were nerds).

NHP still stands to this day as the best music I've ever been a part of creating. Even 5 years later, I can still listen to these songs, still feel the quiet expectation building in my chest as each song swells and rolls into itself, still feel the pride of orchestration prickling along the pores of my forearms. I wish that band had had a chance.

Ten years of my life I spent playing in various bands to various levels of success. I know well "The Long Way," that constant hope and reach for elusive dreams. Putting in the hours at the fret board, sweating in tiny carpet-walled practice spaces, figuring out the Tetris game tactics of packing your band's gear into the back of a van or trailer.

NHP was born out of the dissolution of another band when our drummer and singer quit. The remaining members, Matt, Louis, and myself, all wanted to keep playing together. I forget how we hooked up with Trent on drums, but I'll never forget how he left us. We could each hold a decent tune vocally, but were honest enough with ourselves that we couldn't carry a mic, so we decided to keep it instrumental.

From the first song we wrote, we knew who we were, we knew where we could go. We believed in that first song enough to write a 2nd, and a 3rd, and so on.

We believed so much in those songs, we went right to work booking a tour. We knocked out a couple decent live recordings of our first 2 songs, posted them on MySpace, and spent an entire summer doing what needed to be done: hours upon hours planning the route and booking the shows, designing t-shirts and stickers and other merch, writing enough songs to make an album and getting them recorded, designing a decent looking DIY packaging for the album. Hours. Hours.

We booked an entire tour on 2 shoddy live recordings...having never played a single show. How we believed.

And so did our girls. It's only in reading "The Long Way" (unfortunately not published online, but available in Cut Through the Bone) that I really understand the grace and understanding that each of our girlfriend's (wife in Matt's case) had to get through that summer with us. And ultimately, the grace they had when the tour exploded from the inside, when Trent announced just before the first show of the tour that his girlfriend was being kicked out of her house, pregnant with his child, that he was sorry, but would have to go back home after that first night.

There's more to the story, as there is with any story, but it's unimportant here.

What's important, is how after No Heroics Please, neither Matt nor myself went on to do any other music. Louis played a bit in other bands, and still might. I'm not sure. I've not talked to him in years. But, for myself, the implosion of NHP was a sucker punch from which I've never been able to fully regain my breath. I hardly play guitar anymore.

What's important, is there are a lot of Ways. It isn't just confined to the music industry. The Long Way exists for any endeavor a person believes in and is passionate about. The Long Way for you may be writing, painting, acting. It doesn't even have to be an artistic pursuit. You may be trying to make partner at your law firm. Maybe running for a government office. I've seen The Long Way in a couple friends trying and trying to conceive a baby. I've seen The Long Way in a friend trying and trying to keep his veins clean. My Way now is no longer music, but I have my Ways.

What's important, is you never stop walking The Long Way. If you do, that's when you might as well call it a life. You might switch Ways, but don't stop walking. And if you find someone to walk with you, recognize what you have in that, because looking back at it, I had no idea what I had then until Ethel showed me.

Robots, the Scientific Method, and Dying

Sorry for the radio silence, everybody. Today we have a special five-part guest post from Amber Nelson that takes a scientific approach to T&T, and manages along the way to connect the novel to Susan Sontag and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Definitely a must read!

T&T: Robots, the Scientific Method, & Dying

1. Ask a Question

In season 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we are introduced to a new villain: Adam. Adam is a scientifically engineered monster—part man, and part bits of various monsters—a modern-day Frankenstein's monster. When he wakes, he kills his creator and goes out into the world. In the world he meets a boy. He asks the boy "What am I?" and the boy says, "A monster." And he asks "What are you?" and the boy says "I'm a boy."

In Today & Tomorrow, we are without a mystical guardian endowed with the strength and speed to slay all the monsters. Instead, we have an unnamed narrator on her birthday. A curious girl. Throughout the novel, we frequently flashback to certain memories.

"I'm a taxidermist." He turned away. "I know what taxidermy is."

"You should stuff people," I said.

"What?"

"You should kill people and stuff them and put them in life-like poses in their homes. Like a serial killer. You could murder and stuff whole families and arrange them carefully in their homes. You know, life-size dioramas--like playing Monopoly or eating a home-cooked meal—meat-loaf, or fish-sticks—or arguing about what TV shows to watch. You could be famous, the taxidermurder."

"Why would I want that?"

"Why does anyone want anything?" I picked up my audio-tour head-phones and placed them on the taxidermist's head. (70)

Our narrator asks a simple question. Why does anyone want anything. As human beings, we don't need much—water, shelter, food, etc. And yet we want so much. But to ask the question also admits to lack—she doesn't understand her humanbeingness. People do want things. Even our narrator mediates her experiences and observations around desire. Early on in the book, she admires Julia, the pretty WalMart cashier's, arms. "I want to remove Julia's arms and place them on my body and wear them like I'm Julia and like Julia's arms are my arms." (7)

And somehow, despite her living in the world going to McDonalds and AM/PM and drinking coffee, she is apart from the world.

[Merna, the sister, says] "Tell her about your work. Are you in school? We don't know anything about you. Be a person. Send an email. A card, with pictures. Anything."

"What do you mean? Be a person? What could you possibly mean? I'm not a person? What am I?" (155)

2. Observe

Mother was a behavioral-psychologist. She worked at a university research facility with other psychologists and a thousand white mice and mazes and little white sound-proof rooms. She often told me about the white soundproof-rooms. "We keep the mice in there," she'd say. "I wish I had a room like that. I'd take you with me to the soundproof-room… and stay there until all you can hear is your body-sounds, like your heart and lungs, your pumping blood, your lungs holding air like a machine, you know?" (76)

Several times throughout the novel there is reference to the human as robot, the body as machine, our narrator comparing various body parts to machines or robot parts. That, coupled with her violent fantasies and lies, her awkwardness in social situations, diverting attention away from feelings or talking about feelings, I can't help but be reminded of The Sarah-Connor Chronicles. In this (really atrocious) television show based on the Terminator, Summer Glau (of Firefly fame) plays Cameron, a newer version of the Terminator model sent back by old John Connor to protect young John Connor from the evil Skynet and their evil robots. But Cameron, while she looks human, is often awkwardly not. She has to fake it to get by in a human world and without attracting unwanted attention. Because she lacks  a true understanding of human emotions and human social interactions, she makes several amusing guffaws. And yet, it's in those amusing guffaws that the character does manage to express some kind of feeling, some kind of struggle. She tries to appear more human, and she tries to understand these human feelings. At one point, there is even a reference to her being "in love" with John Connor (and he with her).

Our narrator is not actually a robot (so far as we know). But she does seem, in her interactions with other people, conspicuously uncomfortable, awkward, wrong.  And in being this way, she makes other people uncomfortable.

So she's left with that question "Am I not a person?"

She has family: sister, stepmom/grandmother, grandfather, memories of an absent mother and father and sister. She also has two "lovers." One lover, Erik/Todd, calls her "so fucking hot" and mentions her tits. She has desires, like going to Lisbon, holding up an AM/PM, Julia's arms. She has memory. She lies.

3. Construct a Hypothesis

"It's good. You're a good person," Merna says. "You can be a person." (155)

Being a human can simply mean being a homo sapien—a sack of skin, bones, organs and viscera. Being a good person often has more to do with how you deal with conflict, struggle.

“Well.” Grandfather watches television for a little while. “I think it’s comforting to know that things have an end, small scale, lives etc…, and also large scale, world, universe. It’s good to know that things end completely.” (83)

Her grandfather is sick. He's dying. Imminently. And while this may be a comfort to him, how does somebody who questions whether they are a person try to understand what it means to die—something with which people who are comfortable in their personhood struggle to come to terms?

It's our narrator's birthday. "On birthdays I always feel closer to death," Merna says. (152)

4. Experiment

It's clear, throughout the novel, that our narrator is a liar. But that does not mean there is no truth in the narrative. As Susan Sontag says in Regarding the Pain of Others, "Memory has altered the image, according to memory’s needs." And memory is one of the most direct ways that our narrator's particular...eccentricities... are revealed in their true form: as complexities.

I was eight. A car had hit the raccoon, bisected it. The little raccoon-legs still shivered and pulled forwardly as though, through raccoon-persistence, it could drag its bleeding half-body to the field beyond the road. I thought I should hurry home, half-raccoon slung over my shoulder, place it in Mother's hands or Merna's--hand it to Grandfather maybe, beg him to repair the raccoon, to reassemble it with superglue, rivets, a rivet gun, to get the power-drill from the garage, to drill clean holes through which we could reconnect the raccoon with rope or string, steel wire, something, to sew the raccoon-pieces into one perfect whole, maybe, to resurrect it. I poked the half-raccoon with a stick, flipped it, inspected its fleshy holes and jagged misshapen bones, its little pink muscle-tears and everywhere the thick black blood. I understood that death was normal, boring, particularly for raccoons, and imagined my body bisected, just as the raccoon was, little arms twitching forwardly, a girl in a pink corduroy jumper slowly poking me with a stick, transfixed as a half-lung oozed from my open abdomen. I heard a little gasp. It was Anastasia and Anastasia was small with long brown pigtails, her white crepe dress crinkled near the sleeves and around the lacy hem. Anastasia's mouth was open, her eyes little black dots. "I found it," I said. "It's our new pet." I poked the half-raccoon again. "Come look. It's a mutant raccoon. Look at it's funny waving legs. Look here, what should we name her?" Anastasia stood next to me, hands clasped before her. "We should operate," I said. "We'll call it Flossy, make an experiment. Play with the raccoon-muscles and the lungs and heart and stuff. Remove the lungs, collect lungs, petrify them, put them in formaldehyde, keep lungs, and livers maybe, hearts, petrified in jars on your bookshelf. You'd like that, wouldn't you? the formaldehyde-smell. We could make our own shelves for them. We could eat them. Or take the lungs, sew them together. An experiment, so we can discover things about lungs."  (133)

It's a long excerpt, I know, but important. While her tone is almost cavalier, apathetic, it is not. As Sontag says, "The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration." Our narrator isn't the kid shooting squirrels and torturing cats. Here, we glimpse our narrator as a little girl facing death for the first time, grappling with what it means to die. She wants to study death to understand.

Let's go back to Adam, from Buffy. After the little boy calls him a monster, Adam ends up slaughtering the little boy. He cuts him open and hangs him from a tree, investigating the boy's insides, trying to understand what makes something human.

Our narrator doesn't actually cut anybody up. But we do see this attempt to understand through her rich fantasy life.

...instead I imagine slaughtering a small white kitten, a dozen white kittens, carefully cutting small kitten-pieces and placing the kitten-pieces in a large silver bowl, a billion kitten-pieces from a million kittens. Worldwide suffering must be like that, incremental and ongoing.  (88)

It's not a simple desire for violence. It's the less simple desire for understanding. It's observing something, gathering data and constructing a hypothesis.

"Merna's hand touches my shoulder and we're touching slowly and tenderly. Strange and human, I think. Strangely, I think. "Human," I say." (181)

5. Analyze Data

In the end, Today & Tomorrow is a book about understanding, a book that asks questions in an attempt to understand what it means to be human, and so also what it means to live and to die.

"Artistic expression and stuff. I wanted to show the 'innate ephemerality’ of the human-body as object.'" (142)

She is a person. She feels. She has fantasies. She eats. She sleeps. She can be injured.

But in the end, she is changed. She maybe learned something.

The body doesn't move and the room temperature doesn't change. There's no sound and I don't think or want anything. I watch the digital-clock. I slowly lie next to Grandfather. I look at the body. I close my eyes. (252)

Cut Through the Bone: An Interview with Ethel Rohan

I feel like at this point, Ethel Rohan needs no introduction here at The Lit Pub, so I'll just make with the love here and give you the interview, raw and uncut.

You write as someone who seems pretty intimate with loss. What’s your relationship with loss? Are there specific moments in your life you use to fuel the imagery and pathos in these stories in Cut Through the Bone?

I don’t consciously write about loss or any other subject matter. When I write, I don’t structure or plot and never know where I’m going. I follow the words and am always grateful whenever those words lead to a story I feel good about.I’m constantly surprised by the stories that come out of me and in awe of the writing process and creativity in general. At some point in the revision of every story, I ask of the work, “why would I write you?” It isn’t until I realize why each story matters to me personally that I can even hope to ‘finish’ the work and make the stories matter to others. I do feel intimately familiar with loss and have come to realize I’m everywhere in Cut Through the Bone in that I “know” what it is to have lost loved ones and lost parts of myself.

Obviously there’s lots of talk about the themes of loss and absence in this collection, but as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’ve taken from it more a theme of what is gained in the space left by that absence, space as a metaphor for possibility. Do you feel there’s too much focus on the loss and not what there is to gain?

The insistence on the loss and darkness in this collection was at first intriguing and instructive to me. Now I feel somewhat frustrated by the narrow focus on loss and darkness in the collection. I think the best writing goes into a dark place and brings out some key knowledge and meaning into the light. Readers’ resistance to suffering in fiction fascinates me. It can’t be that we’re so fragile or unconscious? So why does it seem that many can’t handle the truths—however hard-hitting—that fiction can deliver?

I’d go so far as to say the reluctance to acknowledge darkness and suffering in life and in literature angers me. What’s to be gained by denying truth and turning a blind eye to what’s difficult and painful in the world? Why, I wonder, is darkness and suffering so much easier to accept, even revered, in film and on TV versus in writing? I’m confounded by that. It’s one thing if someone feels traumatized by what they read, or there’s some fault with the work, then by all means stop. But to turn away and give up on stories only because they look hard at pain, suffering and life’s difficulties, I don’t understand that. Too many look away from sadness and suffering in literature and in life, and it’s wrong. Yes, absolutely, reading for escapism and entertainment has its value and its place, but our art cannot be limited to such narrow, irresponsible lenses. Art should mirror life and we shouldn’t look away from its harsher images and truths. There can be no change without disturbance and no gain without struggle.

We live in dark, difficult times and I don’t want my work to add to the suffering, I want my stories to acknowledge, confront and examine suffering in the hopes that we can alleviate it.

I love the idea, thank you, of “what is gained in the space left by that absence, space as a metaphor for possibility.” If we’d only look into the dark more often so we can set it afire and try to recover the missing more often, the world would be a better place.

I tried to start a community collaborated interview with you earlier this month, but it didn’t really take off. Molly posed a great question though that I wanted to be sure was asked here: “Ethel blogs a lot about her mother. If she’s willing, I would like to know more about what’s happening in her life. She is so willing to share a touch of the detail, the suffering her mother is going through, but I really want to know what Ethel’s going through . . . maybe for no other reason than to send her virtual hugs.”

At some point, I accepted that everything I write leads back to my mother. I resisted that truth for a long time and it’s something I tried to rid my work of. However, my mother and our complicated relationship both feed and haunt my imagination. When I was a child, my mother and I warred much of the time and we both hated and desperately loved each other. She was mentally ill and I was angry and scared and wanted nothing more than for her to be well, but she never recovered. My mother’s still alive (in her twelfth year of Alzheimer’s and recently diagnosed with uterine cancer) but she’s been long gone. Her absence and great suffering are among my demons and it’s because of her I write. Writing gives me somewhere to put the pain and fear and yearning. Writing offers me opportunities to heal.

It’s been interesting to have read first these stories in Cut Through the Bone, which no doubt had plenty of editorial review during the publishing process at Dark Sky Books, and going back to find earlier versions of these stories published online so I can link to them from my Story Focus posts here, allowing people who haven’t gotten the book yet to read the story. Particularly, I noted a lot of changes in “More Than Gone,” where you were a bit more liberal in your word count and description, whereas in the collection, your language is a lot more sparse. What has your growth been like as a writer, developing this bare-bones language that’s prevalent in your work now? Has the editing process at Dark Sky contributed to that voice?

I think my publisher, Kevin Murphy, would agree that there was little editorial input from Dark Sky on this manuscript. When I first submitted the collection, Kevin rejected the manuscript, essentially saying, “it’s not there yet.” Kevin encouraged me to work more on the stories and to resubmit. Thus motivated, I tried to be merciless with the work and studied every story and word for its worth. Over the course of months, I re-worked the collection and then sent the manuscript to Kevin O’Cuinn, my compatriot, fellow writer, and fiction editor at Word Riot, for his input and feedback. In response, Kevin provided excellent comments and edits that helped me get these stories where they needed to be.

During my MFA at Mills, Victor LaValle always said we should, “know our weaknesses as writers and police against them.” Some of my writing weaknesses are repetition, over-writing, flowery language and sentimentality. These bad habits appear in my first drafts and in revision need to be eradicated. Sometimes, butchering my stories and getting them to that better place can be especially hard because I love description and emotion. I’m still struggling with knowing what are bad habits and what are my style and voice. I want to rid my work of the former, but not the latter. Just as recently as this week, Matt Salesses of The Good Men Project hacked away at a story I submitted and made it so much better. This was an important lesson and reminder that those weaknesses are still clear and present dangers in my work and I need to be ruthless against them. As writers, we are forever students.

You had some really fantastic things to contribute to the discussion regarding men’s vs. women’s literature. Where do you see the future of literature in this regard? What would your ideal publishing/literary atmosphere be in regards to gender?

I’m very optimistic about the future of gender and race equality in literature. Thanks to the excellent marriage of the internet and the printed word, we live in exciting literary times and things are only going to get better. As women writers, readers, and buyers we’re raising our voices and harnessing out collective power. Some of the direct results of that activism and clout are increased visibility for, and accessibility to, the widest and most equitable range ever of writers, voices and works. We also have independent publishers to thank for the exciting state of literature today. Indie publishers are proving to be innovative, risk-takers with their fingers very much on the pulse of writing and works that matter. Indies are committed to excellence and inclusivity in writing and are fast becoming industry leaders and groundbreakers.

You just recently had a new book released by the illustrious PANK, Hard to Say. Can you tell us a bit about this book?

Hard to Say is a tiny collection of fifteen linked stories set largely in Ireland. I’m heartened by the excellent response thus far to this little book because these stories are personal and painful, and I agonized over whether or not I should publish the book. Unlike Cut Through the Bone, where I feel very much hidden inside the stories, in Hard to Say, I feel very much exposed and it was difficult to find the courage and get the necessary distance to tell these stories right and well. Only time and readers will tell if I succeeded in the latter.

Hard to Say is an apt title and I’m still coming to terms with the little book being out in the world. It’s deeply encouraging and rewarding that readers are moved by these stories and I feel buoyed by how many readers and fellow writers have found the work meaningful and worthwhile. To expand on the idea above regarding the opportunities in spaces, I’m excited about the new spaces that have opened up inside me now that I’ve gotten the stories in Hard to Say out of my insides and onto the page, and I look forward to finding out what can be gained in their absence.

Lastly, what’s next for you/what are you working on now that we can look forward to? Have you had any recent publications you’d like to share that our readers can check out?

I have a third story collection I’d love to see published, one that both my agent and I agree is best suited to an indie publisher. I’ve also finished a novel manuscript that I’m about to send off to my agent. It’s a novel I’ve worked long and hard on now over the course of nine years and I’m crossing every body part I can, hoping it’ll at last get to be in the world.

*   *   *

You can find more of Ethel's recently published work in the Highlighted Stories section at her website's Published Works page.

A Fresh Loss

There are spaces in my house where there used to be stuffs. Computer stuffs. Television stuffs. Camera stuffs. They left my guitar stuffs. My book stuffs. Brittany's bike stuffs. Furniture stuffs. Music stuffs.

They left also the door open, so my cat stuffs had gotten into outside spaces. I took the jar stuff that contains her cat treat stuffs into the outside spaces, and I shook the stuffs, and made noise stuffs that sounded like, "BRISBY!" I waited, and saw no cat stuffs, just outside spaces, so after a few minutes, I went back into my home space and looked at all the new spaces.

I called the cop stuffs. They came to my home space and looked at the spaces and took photos of the spaces and dusted the spaces.

I heard scratching. I went and opened my back door and my cat stuffs came running into my inside space. I was so happy, and Brittany was so happy, we were so happy.

*

It's strange to me that Cut Through the Bone deals so much with loss, but not a single story in the collection is about the loss of stuff. I mean, okay, in "Fee Fi Fo Fum," it centers around the main character's dentures being lost, which naturally reflects on the loss of her teeth. But, nothing lost in the manner of a theft.

I don't mean that in a negative way. Really, it makes sense. Stuff is stuff, and I think Ethel knows that. What Ethel goes after in her stories is the body, the relationships, the abstract things like pride and desire and dreams.

It's strange to know what to say today. My mind is wrapped around the things to get done--insurance claiming, my tech writing assignments, phone calls to my brother about our inheritance from my grandmother who passed last year, emails to publishers for Vouched and TLP, press releases to write, the list, the list, it grows and it never stops.

Last night, I let myself go a little bit after finding they had also taken a backpack that contained a few books I was reading. One book, a copy of Travels with Charley by Steinbeck, is something I can't get back. It had passages underlined and marginalia from the first time I read it years ago. I've been reading it to Brittany before bed, and coming home from seeing a movie to distract ourselves, I wasn't bothered about not having a TV or laptop. I thought it novel, the lack of technology. I thought, "I'll read some of Travels with Charley to you and we can go to sleep, and that'll be nice."

Nope.

My shoulders slumped immediately. I almost cried. I said out loud, "The worst thing about this is I know I can't even dismiss it as thinking they 'needed' our possessions because maybe they were unemployed and had mouths to feed." I said out loud, "When a mother fucker needs a loaf of bread, they steal a loaf of bread. You only steal TVs and shit when you want to bankroll a quarter sack or an eight ball or those shiny new rims."

I felt awful about myself. I felt stupid like, "Why didn't we get an alarm system after the last break in?" I felt betrayed like, "I just wanted to trust that our neighborhood is better than this." I felt racist like, "I hate that I immediately assume it's the 2 black guys I saw walking up and down the street before I left for work."

Today, I've not felt much at all.

I'm trying to think about Cut Through the Bone, about what I might be able to say today in light of everything. I think about the things lost now in my home. I think about the things lost in the book. I think about the things the characters in the book think about. I think about the story "Shatter," which you can read online at FRiGG.

This narrator is plagued by accidents, and there's this numbness about it, a nonchalance in her speech and action, which is basically how I've reacted to this whole ordeal (except the blow up last night).

Why get upset about what couldn't be prevented, what was out of my hands? The police office said something last night that stuck with me, "If people want to get to your stuff, they'll get to it."

I want to get mad or bitter or something, but I just can't. I kind of want to just drink beer and eat some potato chips.The stuff will be replaced. Brittany and Brisby are both safe. My writing and photography and necessary documents are all backed up. So it goes, right?

Story Focus: "Gone"

Yesterday, I did Father's Day. Babies are everywhere in my family right now. My sister-in-law is in town this month with her 1 year old. My other sister-in-law is 6 months pregnant with their first. My cousins just welcomed their 3rd into the world last month. Babies. Everywhere.

I will never understand a woman's body. You ladies. You can build another person inside of you. You realize that, right?

I mean, I get it. Sperm. Egg. 46 chromosomes. Embryogenesis. Trimesters. All that.

But, I mean, that's a tiny human splitting and piecing and splitting and piecing itself together inside your bellies. And your bones turn soft. The baby moves around inside of you, through your skin, you can make out feet, elbows, heads. You talk about your bodies unabashedly; you discuss what they crave, where they hurt, what is swelling and stretching.

I think about all this, and my mind reels. I am at once amazed and terrified. I think about all this, and I think about what I wrote earlier in the month about the artist in the story "Gone" in Cut Through the Bone:

“Gone” reads like a retelling of Robert Hass’s classic “A Story About the Body,” in which a woman reflects on the loss of her breasts to cancer, and bares herself to an artist attracted to a body she knows he does not understand.

Have you ever read "A Story About the Body?" If not, you should. It's a quick read, only a few hundred words. Go ahead and read it. We can wait.

Read it? Okay. I just wanted to make sure. There's no quiz, nor am I really going to make any comparisons beyond what I already have. I just wanted to make sure you'd read it.

Onward.

In "Gone," which I unfortunately couldn't find published online for those who don't yet have the book, a lady stares at herself in a mirror, traces scars along "the memory of [her] breasts" and another scar vertical down her belly, which I'm guessing is from a hysterectomy. She gets a phone call from an artist, Jason, who frequents the diner where she works, telling her that he has drawn her portrait, that he wants to show her. Her insides churn, feeling invaded, "he'd no right to draw me without my permission, to take from me like that." This lady, who has already had so much taken from her.

He insists on coming over, and she flees to her neighbor's, where their colicky baby is hurling fits. She encourages the bedraggled mother to take a break, have a shower while the narrator does what she can to soothe the baby. She coos and hums into its soft smell, its harsh shrills, and this line--holy damn this line breaks me--"His large, bald head pushed and rooted at my prosthetic bra and his greedy grunts turned frantic. I had only my baby finger to offer. The force of his suck hurt and frightened me, could rip my finger right off."

The baby quiets, the mother returns refreshed, and she reluctantly goes back to her home, where Jason is waiting on the doorstep. She invites him inside where he shows her his drawing, and she says, "It's not me." In the final lines, which I don't want to reveal verbatim here and lessen the sparse, cool wonder of them for those who've yet to read them, she bares herself to him, and he marvels and marvels with his pencil.

It's this same marveling I feel when I consider the female body. And it's not in a sexual way that I marvel, but simply wondering at the whole human mystery of us. Sometimes when I'm around babies, I make the joke, "Babies are weird, man. They're like little humans." It gets a laugh. But really, there's a lot of truth under the humor. Babies amaze me. Humans amaze me. Bodies amazes me, the way they bend and fold and wrinkle, the way they tear and mend and heal.

It's this amazement I see throughout "Gone," how the narrator marvels at herself in the mirror, at the force of the baby's hunger, the mother marveling at the narrator's ability to quiet the baby, at Jason's initial artistic rendering of the narrator, and the final wonder in the pencil, dancing and dancing.

For Those Just Tuning In

First off, I want to say I'm sorry for the very, very late post today. I was quite hung up in my day job and unable to sneak away with my computer to get some words down for all you lovelies. But, luckily, this post has the weekend for everyone to find it before my next post on Monday.

Today, I wanted to do something of a mid-month recap to bring everyone up to speed, and highlight some of the fantastic comments and discussion we've had in just the 2 short weeks since TLP's launch and my featuring of Ethel Rohan's Cut Through the Bone.

We started off the month as you'd expect with an introduction to The Lit Pub and an overview of CTTB, and some warm welcomes into the world from wonderful and generous commenters.

Cut Through the Bone is a collection of 30 short stories about loss, about absence and wanting, about quiet grief bubbling to the surface. In “How to Kill,” Ann feels the hollowness of an intentionally empty belly. “Gone” reads like a retelling of Robert Hass’s classic “A Story About the Body,” in which a woman reflects on the loss of her breasts to cancer, and bares herself to an artist attracted to a body she knows he does not understand.

But of course, Rohan’s expert storytelling doesn’t leave the reader with mere loss without the realization of what’s gained. Tracy’s humiliation in “On the Loose” gives way to finding it in herself to fight, to breathe, breath as an act of truly living. Similarly, in the titular story, massage therapist Joyce is asked to massage an amputee’s phantom limb, “her heart knocking against her ribcage, and [she] reminded herself to breathe.”

We moved on to "Reviewing a Review" that Amber Sparks wrote of CTTB at Vouched Online:

One of the aspects of Cut Through the Bone I love so much is how Rohan doesn’t provide her readers with some epiphany brought about from the loss in these stories, but allows us to find it for ourselves, or perhaps in ourselves. I’ve always been wary of stories that try to wrap these themes up so neat and tidy with some, “All of a sudden, s/he realized,” sort of moment, because anyone who’s dealt with loss, whether the loss of a pet or the loss of a close friend/relative/loved one, knows it just doesn’t work like that.

Dealing with the grief of loss takes work, dammit, and that’s what Rohan lets us do: work. She doesn’t patronize or coddle us. She trusts us to have the strength and courage necessary to make our own bright discoveries.

To which Amber herself chimed in with this great comment:

There is no “correct” way to respond to a hole in your life, but avoidance of sad things seems to create its own kind of void–I feel very sorry for people who live in that void.

The next post was the one that got us all talking, where I make the case of why it's important for me as a man to read books written by women, and I ask What Is a Man's Literature? in response to a list of the 75 best books of all time, released by Esquire, that was particularly gender biased (to say the least). You guys added so incredibly much to that conversation, and I want to highlight some of the really fantastic comments there:

Victoria Barrett: Though I can’t find evidence of it with a quick search, more than one savvy reader has pointed out to me that the Esquire list is a couple of years old, reheated for that web post, and somehow this time everyone noticed and responded to it.

For me, this speaks to the important work of groups like Vida; we’re primed to pay attention to this now in a way that we weren’t two years ago. Though it doesn’t look like it, this is progress.

Dorothee Lang: Thanks for opening this interesting discussion. And good question: “Like would people have called it out and praised it and encouraged it for being so balanced if it had been?”

Seeing it from this angle, the whole thing makes me think of the big fuzz about the New Yorker story issue last year. The hook there wasn’t gender, but age: “Summer Fiction: 20 Under 40″. The result was similar: huge media coverage, discussions, an alternative list (by Dzanc), which led to even more discussionss, one of them titled: “The Lists We Love to Hate: First the New Yorker, Now Dzanc?”

A thing that went unnoticed about the NY list: it was gender-balanced.

Ethel Rohan: What also saddens me about this growing gender ‘much ado’ is the suggestion that we should just be glad and grateful a magazine of Esquire’s reputation and reach published ANY recommended reading list.

Maybe I’m naive too, Chris, but this ‘at least’ attitude seems flawed and defeatist. It’s not enough to publish ANY recommended reading list and it’s especially grievous to publish a recommended reading list that’s ignorant, negligible, and damning.

Tim Jones-Yelvington: It seems important to me not to isolate Esquire’s list from its context alongside the rest of the magazine’s output, which is also lit — or at least language and cultural/media production, and which regularly plays a role in constructing an answer to this question that is posed of “What are men?” or “What is masculinity?” in some gross, reactionary and violent ways. One way of saying this is, “What exactly did we expect from Esquire?” But probably a better way of saying it is, “Esquire, come the fuck on already.”

Kyle Winkler: Being a man, and reading manly literature is a false dichotomy, b/c, what’s womanly literature? Also, what’s the relationship between your gender and your devotion or allegiance to that gender. Answer: none. Hate it, love it. Your choice. What is there to choose from really? I’ve read Shirley Jackson and had my ass handed back to me on a pike. My masculinity has been severely tweezed, judiciously slit-up, and decidedly analyzed thoroughly, and better in some instances, by women more than men.

Lidia Yuknavitch: as for books like mine, uber unapologetic in terms of being written by a woman through a woman’s body for ANY humans who have bodies and lives, or books of any sort written by women, the call is what it has always been.

stand up.

do not apologize.

do not say things like “it doesn’t matter if i’m a woman writer.”

until it doesn’t matter, it does.

i don’t desire a neutered society or literature. i desire a fully present — intellectually, corporeally, spiritually, ethically — society and literature. that means all the bodies. all the literatures.

Honestly, there are so many fantastic comments on that post, I could spend another 1500 words quoting them, so I just urge you to go read that post and the resulting conversation, as it's a microcosm of what is possibly one of the most important conversations going on in literature and publishing today.

From there, I focused on a specific story, "How To Kill," rehashed some of the previous "importance of man reading woman's literature" conversation, and related my own story of dealing with a miscarriage. I thought I'd share some great insights from that post, too:

Erika: It is interesting how the mirror that allows us the most insight can oftentimes be the most different. I agree with your comment regarding observation. When someone writes about observing someone or something we can relate to, we are able to see ourselves in a different manner. Sometimes it takes a different path to get to a conclusion we were already aware of. But it’s the travelling of that path that makes such a change.

DK: Also of note: a similar discussion about gender is being had in sci-fi/fantasy circles, where women are becoming a greater portion of the audience, often to the consternation of critics and, unfortunately, some sci-fi/fantasy authors. Interestingly, an even greater number of critics still think that genre fiction is, to quote a NYT reviewer, “boy-fiction,” so clearly they haven’t been paying attention to the changing demographics. Either way, SF/F is one area where more “female” narratives are being demanded by the readership, which provides an interesting contrast to big-L Literature’s numerous gender issues.

Again, another post that opened up some really fantastic and important conversation, and if you have time, I'd encourage you to give it a read through, and as always, feel free to post your own thoughts.

Next, Laura Adamczyk wrote a great guest post regarding Ethel's use of metaphor throughout CTTB, and related it to a painting by Modigliani.

Mostly, though, it’s the woman’s eyes that get me—eyes not unlike those in other Modigliani paintings, but wider—as deep and dark as two caves, so black they look dead. Or they make the woman look like she herself is dead. This is what haunts me about this painting. I can’t decide if she is metaphorically dead (emotionally dead, dying, stricken, etc.) or actually dead. A ghost.

I feel this is the painting Ethel Rohan would paint if she could. This dark image of this woman. It’s not just that, like the lines in the painting, Rohan’s writing is clean—though it is most certainly that. There is nothing unneeded in her prose, no word that is not doing something, if not two or three somethings. Tight. But it is more that the metaphor in this painting—showing a woman as actually dead to indicate an emotional/metaphorical death—is one that Rohan herself would use.

I started the next week with another story focus, this time on "The Big Top," and focused primarily on lying, both as a part of the narrative of your life, and the narrative of a work of fiction, and discussed how I respond to reading on a more personal rather than critical or academic level:

Asking “What does it mean?” is a much different question than “What does it mean to me?” If I was still at BSU responding to this story for my comp class, I would write about the longing of wanting a child and not having one. I would write about the themes apparent, what the color blue means searching for why Ethel chose that color for the monkey, possibly about the crisp sparse language.

But that’s not what it means to me. To me, it means lying, it means finding a void to explain a feeling in my life and creating a simple silly fiction to explain it. It means telling that fiction over and over throughout my life until it becomes a part of my story.

And finally, this past Wednesday, I talk about senility and my fear of forgetting in response to Rohan's story, "More Than Gone." I had just given blood, so the last half of my post got a little loopy and disjointed, but again, the TLP community contributed some beautiful anecdotes and discussion of their own:

YDDE: Memory’s such a strange thing, especially because it’s almost completely creatively reconstructed and forever transient, affected by our moods, our current life situation and global outlook. Everything we tell ourselves about ourselves is just a constantly rewritten narrative where the narrator is constantly changing but unaware of the fact. It boggles my mind often, even the fact that this body is the same body I was born in. These hands have always been my hands and this heart has always been my heart.

Ashley C. Ford: I met my father in prison when I was 12 years-old. We’d been writing one another letters since I learned to write. When I didn’t have anything to say, he’d tell me to make up stories for him. Any story. So I did. A lot. When I met him, I worried he’d be disappointed that I didn’t look or act like any of the characters I wrote to him about. They were all so pretty, and brave, and had beautiful hand-writing like his. Some were even artists like him. I didn’t think of myself possessing any of those characteristics and I hoped he knew these stories were just hopes, dreams, not real. But he just held me for so long and kept whispering, “I love you, I love you, I love you”. And then I felt beautiful. All over. It was the first time I HEARD my father say that he loved me, and it made everything right in the world for a long time.

Nettie: My Mam had alzheimers/dementia. My Father is now in the throes of dementia and says he has no children – he has 9 – only lots of brothers and sisters. One day I gave my Mam a cup of tea and a biscuit from a pack half eaten by her. She looked at the biscuit and said Oh she had never tried these before and exclaimed how delicious they were. Long story short wouldn’t it be nice to experience such little pleasures over and over again. My Mam is gone 3 years now and my Father is still looking for her, expecting her to return from work at any moment. I think we obsess too much about forgetting or not remembering – my Dad is happy in his little world he does not remember the pain and grief of my Mam’s passing. Its our loved ones who will suffer when our memories are all gone – we wont remember that we have forgotten.

This post goes to show we've covered a lot of ground in just a couple short weeks! I wanted to thank everyone so far who has contributed to some incredible discussions about literature, life, art, and so many other topics that have sprouted from these posts here.

If you're just joining us, I hope you'll continue to keep up with what's happening here, and feel free to toss your own life and thoughts into the fray! If you are curious about the book that's spawning all this conversation, you can snag a copy!

Thanks to everyone who has made these past 2 weeks amazing here at TLP!