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

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

— xTx, "Because I Am Not a Monster"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How, indeed.

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

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

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

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

On Marguerite Duras and "Writing"

I.

Marguerite Duras’s essay, “Writing,” ends with: “Writing comes like the wind. It’s naked, it’s made of ink, it’s the thing written, and it passes like nothing else passes in life, nothing more, except life itself.”

Marguerite Duras. What a name.

Like Lol Stein.

I am listening to Soley, this song on repeat, thinking about solitude and loneliness, thinking about Friday night and Daylight Savings, how dark it is suddenly, thinking about Marguerite Duras and her essay, thinking about “Writing”:

“Dusk is the time when everyone around the writer stops working.

“In the cities, the villages, everywhere, writers are solitary people. Everywhere, always, they have been.

“All over the world, the end of light means the end of work.

“As for myself, I’ve always experienced that time not as the moment when work ends, but when it begins. A sort of reversal of natural values by the writer.”

Doritos for dinner. A bite-sized Snickers, from Halloween. Chamomile tea. Cold. Now coffee. Milk like normal but also a spoonful of sugar. Indulgence. The need for something stronger.

Wikipedia says Duras battled with alcoholism. I think of her in these dark hours, craving:

“Crying has to happen, too.

“Even if it’s useless to cry, I still think we have to cry. Because despair is tangible. It remains. The memory of despair remains. Sometimes it kills.

“To write.

“I can’t.

“No one can.

“We have to admit: we cannot.

“And yet we write.

“It’s the unknown one carries within oneself: writing is what is attained. It’s that or nothing.

“One can speak of a writing sickness.

“What I’m trying to say isn’t easy, but I believe we can find our way here, comrades of the world.”

She made movies. Is this one? Hard to say but I guess yes. Maybe. I used to want to make movies. Thought, Maybe film. Maybe acting. Directing. I think now, Maybe producing. Maybe one day.

Duras, Marguerite. Before “Durasoff, Steve” and after “Duras, Claire Louise Rose Bonne de Coëtnempren de Kersaint de Durfort, duchesse de.” I know, right?

Marguerite Duras says: “Writing was the only thing that populated my life and made it magic. I did it. Writing never left me.”

I think: I don’t want it to leave me either. It’s my magic, too. I think: Why do it? I think: Why do you — why do we — do it?

II.

“Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome. I believe that the person who writes does not have any ideas for a book, that her hands are empty, her head is empty, and that all she knows of this adventure, this book, is dry, naked writing, without a future, without echo, distant, with only its elementary golden rules: spelling, meaning.”

I am in that strange place familiar to many writers — that weird space in which one book has been written and published and the next has yet to come. This is no easy space to navigate. There is doubt. There is “possibility.” There is “nothing.” And there is also solitude. The door, I know now after so many false starts, must shut tight.

(Who said that? King?)

Solitude — a particular focus of Duras’s “Writing”:

“I preserved the solitude of those first books. I carried it with me. I’ve always carried my writing with me wherever I go. Paris. Trouville. New York. It was in Trouville that I ended the madness of becoming Lola Valerie Stein. It was also in Trouville that the name Yann Andrea Steiner appeared to me with unforgettable clarity. That was one year ago.”

Yesterday, while walking in the rain, I said aloud, over and over: and it was the rain on the leaves and the leaves falling soft on our wet bodies, and it was the rain on the leaves and the leaves falling soft on our wet bodies.

Who knows why. Just words.

I am entering a new madness now. The madness of becoming myself. “I” as character. Another retelling, but this time also a biography of women. A biography of how many women and of myself. An autobiomythography. I’ve heard this term before. Feels silly to use it myself, though. A myth, then. Mythology of myself? And fairy tale, too, of course.

We’re just thinking aloud here, right? These are just words?

The fear of the second book. That it won’t be good, won’t be better. Must be better. Must transcend.

Fear. Fear and paralysis.

I will overcome this fear. I will get up. I will stop being afraid. I will get back up. I will stand up. I will try again. I will shut the door and write another book.

“The person who writes books must always be enveloped by a separation from others. That is one kind of solitude. It is the solitude of the author, of writing. To begin with, one must ask oneself what the silence surrounding one is — with practically every step one takes in a house, at every moment of the day, in every kind of light, whether light from outside or from lamps lit in daytime. This real, corporeal solitude becomes the inviolable silence of writing. I’ve never spoken of this to anyone. By the time of my first solitude, I had already discovered that what I had to do was write.”

III.

I spent two hours yesterday Google Imaging “Shabby Chic.” Fell in love with this table, all of these settings, wanted to take a nap on this couch, wanted this to be my bedroom and this to be my dining room, and decided I wouldn’t mind this one bit.

I have been imagining how I might decorate a space — a space for my characters, the cottage they live in; and a space for me, where writing happens.

“One does not find solitude, one creates it. Solitude is created alone. I have created it. Because I decided that here was where I should be alone, that I would be alone to write books. It happened this way. I was alone in this house. I shut myself in — of course, I was afraid. And then I began to love it. This house became the house of writing. My books come from this house. From this light as well, and from the garden. From the light reflecting off the pond. It has taken me twenty years to write what I just said.”

Marguerite Duras. I didn’t even know of her until this review. Still, I didn’t read her. I watched The Lover on Netflix and skimmed the book, but did not read anything else of hers until now.

I was in NY not long ago. I read with Kimiko Hahn, Tracy K. Smith, and Garrett Hongo who said, Your work reminds me of Marguerite Duras’s. I said, I’ve only read The Lover. No, he said. The writings, the essays.

I began to read. I am reading now. Preparing to write again. And why? Some strange compelling force, unexplainable. A need. A craving. Because it is a madness that will not “leave me”? Because I have found myself in a hole?

“In life there comes a moment, and I believe that it’s unavoidable, that one cannot escape it, when everything is put in doubt: marriage, friends, especially friends of the couple. Not children. Children are never put in doubt. And this doubt grows around one. This doubt is alone, it is the doubt of solitude. It is born of solitude. We can already speak the word. I believe that most people couldn’t stand what I’m saying here, that they’d run away from it. This might be the reason why not everyone is a writer. Yes. That’s the difference. That is the truth. No other. Doubt equals writing. So it also equals the writer. And for the writer, everyone writes. We’ve always known this.”

I’ll end here, with that doubt, and begin, somewhere else. . . .

The Tradition of Pain As Poetic Fodder Continues: The Burn of Loss and How to Cope

The term “raw” is too often used to mean “brutal” or “intense.” If a part of your body is raw, it doesn’t feel brutal; it just hurts. It’s a simple hurt, but one that never stops. You may be distracted from it for a few moments with someone walking by or speaking to you, but the moment you’re stuck with only yourself again, the pain will return. The short poetry book This isn’t about Jon Ross, it’s about art is a true representation of “rawness.”

Jacob Steinberg collected poems, text messages, and even website stats to show multiple facets of a failed connection between the speaker and the object of desire, Jon Ross. Arranged chronologically, these facets build to a tiny, self-referential gem of a relationship that falls from infatuation into pain, and like rawness, the poems are plain, direct, and exposed.

“Everything about you would make me want to plunge my / face into that oil / if I hadn’t turned you into such an object / for my poetic consumption.”

Steinberg uses pieces of Ariana Reines’ Coeur de Lion as an interlude between poems and as an epitaph. I haven’t read Coeur de Lion, so I can’t speak to how the effect of her book influences this one. I asked Steinberg to explain her influence upon the creation of Jon Ross: “I think that Reines’ tone in Coeur de Lion, the way that she describes the full range of emotions associated with falling out of love with such direct words, blunt and rambling and unabashed, gave me the confidence to say what I felt like saying, to not be embarrassed or ashamed of how I felt.”

This lack of shame is evident in Jon Ross, and it supports the assertions and discoveries he reveals throughout the book. For example:

“[I]t felt good to admit that I wanted to cry on the phone a lot / in my own language.”

This directness may give hints of “meta” at times, such as the speaker referring to his own poetry or blog, but these aren’t winking references to the writer being a poet — these are presentations of reality that induct the reader into the speaker’s world, which speaks to Steinberg’s intentions: “I really wanted to capture what I think [Reines] executes perfectly, which is being a kind of madwoman saying absurd and uncomfortable things that the reader ultimately relates to and recognizes in [his or her]self.”

For a short, painful taste of raw emotion and loss of love, see This isn’t about Jon Ross, this is about art.

"Keep This Post-Black-Boy Running": The Problem of James Baldwin

1.

Why Read Baldwin Now?

The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings gathers writings not published in the Library of America’s 1998 volume, James Baldwin: Collected Essays. Far more than a rattle bag of leftovers, scratched drafts, or airy ephemera, the book brings together the kind of rich, bold, and brilliant essays we’ve come to prize from Baldwin even more than his revolutionary fiction.

Edited and introduced by Randall Kenan from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the collection includes some sixty essays, speeches, letters, profiles, and reviews dug out of newspapers, journals, and private holdings and representing Baldwin’s prodigious output from the late 1950s to his death in 1987.

Baldwin’s reflective essays about writers and writing are never merely about literature; or, to be more accurate, they expand and ennoble the idea of what literature is: literature is race is politics is culture is humanity is the future is the world.

As a writer, he saw that after the Second World War, “the ocean, inconceivably, had shrunk to the size of a swimming pool.” Young American writers were therefore “compelled to take it upon themselves to describe us to ourselves as we now are.” He takes his own dictum seriously with every new story and essay, becoming an ever-bolder thinker and writer, as fresh and incisive now as he must have seemed when he was publishing. And that precisely is the problem.

2.

Move Forward or Die

Many of his pieces about literature are prickly and contentious, and he wasn’t shy about criticizing elder white novelists. Looking back, how could it have been otherwise? If Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man bounced the black novel back onto the tracks from where Native Son’s “unsavory” depiction of a black murderer had derailed a decade earlier, Baldwin could hardly avoid chafing under the strain of all the “go-slow” cultural politics coming from both races. He had to clear some ground in order to breathe and write.

So down go Hemingway and Faulkner (with respect and a sense of reverence: “the man who wrote Light in August”), Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and others, along with the celebrated loosening of ties with his former mentor Richard Wright. Critical assessment and dismissal seemed not only right and proper for him at his time of ascendance, but for all American writers, no matter what decade or color of skin he or she happens to be in.

“We are the generation that must throw everything into the endeavor to remake American into what we say we want it to be.”

And what generation isn’t? Even accepting that writers his own vintage would have been overthrown two or three times already, which no doubt he would have relished, his point remains valid. We have to move forward or die.

Was anyone listening? A few, perhaps, but Baldwin was often as ahead of his time in racial thinking as he was in literary criticism. With its brief disquisition on the strain of racial color in American fiction, specifically the opposition of the Redskin (native) with the Paleface (white), a piece like “As Much Truth As One Can Bear” anticipates Toni Morrison’s motif of the white American writer’s fixation on “blackness” in her Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.

3.

That Bitterness Is Our Only Hope

Perhaps because it is so ephemeral, one of the most telling pieces Kenan give us is “The Nigger We Invent,” a transcription of an interview Baldwin gave before a House Select Committee in 1969 in support of a bill to establish a national commission on “Negro History and Culture.” It is a devastating alarum about the near total absence of black history in education after the era of civil rights and the beginning of the Black Power movements.

In response to a question about the lack of education about black history, Baldwin says,

“I think one of the stumbling blocks is that the nature of the black experience in this country does indicate something about the total American history which frightens Americans. . . . It brings up the real history of the country — the history of our relationships with Mexican and slaves. All these points contradict the myth of American history. It attacks the American identity in a sense. . . .

“If we are going to build a multiracial society, which is our only hope, then one has got to accept that I have learned a lot from you [white society], and a lot of it is bitter, but you have a lot to learn from me, and a lot of that will be bitter. That bitterness is our only hope. That is the only way we get past it. Am I making sense to you?”

Apparently not enough sense for anyone to listen. We weren’t listening then and we aren’t now. For as powerful a statement as he makes, after forty years we have done nothing about the problem. In fact, we’ve gone in reverse.

4.

Un-Teaching the Movement

When the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance Program last month delivered its report, “Teaching the Movement: The State of Civil Rights Education in the United States 2011,” the truth of our inattention truly was bitter, though not because the truths told are as hurtful as Baldwin predicted, but because no truths are being told at all.

The SPLC’s report tells the shameful story about our children’s ignorance of civil rights and black history, an ignorance that remains one of the fundamental issues of our society. Thirty-five states received a grade of F on their efforts in teaching civil rights. Sixteen states do not require any instruction at all. Most of those who do, concentrate on “heroes” whose biographical instruction to children tends toward hagiography and is often as useful as a biography of Batman might be. Our education system has failed at precisely the time when living witnesses of the civil rights decades are aging and dying.

5.

How MLK Freed the Slaves

To go a step further, while it’s common knowledge that teachers burdened with lesson plans centered on mandated testing rarely have time to teach the post-World War II era, it’s also true that the roots of the society in which those students live were planted in that same period more than in any other. It’s precisely when people are young and impressionable that the seeds of prejudice are sown, or not, and when they are, they take root deeply. By making history a study of “the past,” no more than a vague lesson plan we teach and put away, we are in grave danger of losing the world that formed us, the adults, and them, our children.

Firsthand data is available as your nearest teacher. I had occasion recently to do a quick and informal survey of teachers and librarians across the country about how civil rights is taught. The responses varied, ranging from there being little formal teaching to reports of excellent student projects. Most telling to me was a response from Arizona:

“I tried, as a school librarian, for two years to impress upon the intermediate students that Martin Luther King, Jr., had NOTHING to do with freeing the slaves. For the most part, they firmly believed that nothing happened between the 1860s and the 1960s . . . and then Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus and Martin Luther King gave the ‘I have a dream’ speech and all the slaves were freed!”

6.

The Time a Black Man Became President

Yet if Baldwin could have imagined our current ignorance, he might not have been able to predict how this sad assessment dovetails so neatly with the concepts of Post-Blackness and Post-Racial identity floated from time to time, and again recently in Touré’s new book, Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?

Now, the concept of a new world of African-American identity is not at all the same as dampening the study of black history in our schools, and yet the dying off of the witnesses to that history put such post-racial trends in a different light altogether. In his review of Touré in the New York Times Book Review, Orlando Patterson says:

“Much has been written on the benefits that accrued to the generation of African-Americans reaping the rewards of the civil rights revolution. But we have heard surprisingly little from those in the post-civil-rights age about what these benefits have meant to them, and especially how they view themselves as black people in an America now led by a black president.”

How does one read this on the eve of an election virtually assured of making the Obama presidency a four-year anomaly? When the euphoria of election night three years ago has dissolved along with everything else in American politics to the recurring and painful image of Barack Obama as the Joker, a landmark presidency of such potential is already being redesigned and relegated into a glitch on the landscape of American political history, something to be taught someday as, “the time a black man became president.”

Where does one put the idea of Post-Racial next to this? How will we deal with multiculturalism when the next lot of bankers muscles its way into the Oval Office, chuckles about how successfully they’ve kept the black/Hispanic/Native underclass running, and buries the poor even deeper?

7.

The Problem of James Baldwin

Baldwin was as much an artist as the next person, black or white. He admired his elder Ralph Ellison’s great novel, though he not so secretly relished the idea of replacing Ellison in prestige. Ellison had the approval of the white press; Baldwin’s support by black journalists and critics was enviable, but less culturally persuasive, and like all writers Baldwin sought the biggest audience for change. But talk about bitter. Baldwin’s main problem was that he was much too hard to listen to.

Had he seen what was happening twenty-odd years after his death and nearly sixty past Ellison’s Invisible Man, he would have seen that its refrain — “Keep This Nigger-Boy Running” — is as bitterly true today as it was then, no matter how veiled it has become. We fail to educate. We practice election sleight of hand. We toy with Post-Blackness. We neither read nor listen. What would Baldwin say?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Kloss On Reading

"I've never really thought about why I read or what it means to me. I've never had the need to justify the action, even when my father or my teachers made me feel like it was a less than healthy activity -- I just sneaked around to do it. Honestly, I think I just fell into the habit when I was very young and I always kept at it. But, then again, I was always good at it and it was one of the few things I was good at so for whatever reason it was a natural activity. It was also one of the few things I liked to do so I did it whenever I could. At the moment I started to read I also started to write and I think the two have always been bound up in each other. Writing was the other thing I liked to do that I was also good at. Had I been able to draw or had I been able to sing or had I been more athletic things may have worked out differently. Slowly I think the writing cannibalized the reading, so now most or all of my reading happens so that I can write -- it's research or its inspiration, searching for power. I read how Melville wrote Moby-Dick while reading Shakespeare and Greek tragedy and Sterne and Rabelais and how those geniuses somehow unlocked his own genius. I have to admit I have always tried to do the same thing, with not quite as startling results. So I suppose if I have any requirement of the books I read, now, its that they should startle me. I don't read for a good yarn or to gain some insight into why people do what they do or some other abstract insight: I suppose I read to be startled and amazed by something brilliant and awesome, like an old time prophet caught in the glow and hum of the burning bush."

On xTx’s Normally Special

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

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

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

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