The Inevitable June Is A Black Octopus That Wants To Touch Your Hair

So I was reading Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, and it reminded me of The Inevitable June.  Malory’s ten-pound tome is bonkers— it’s almost biblical. Events just pile onto each other, and adopt their own logic of inevitability. In Malory, Uther Pendragon covets the wife of the Duke of Cornwall, so Merlin magic-disguises Uther so that he can sneak into Lady Cornwall’s locked-away chamber and impregnate her, which is just bonkers. The thing is, this lead to the birth of Arthur. Arthur was necessary; he was the greatest king of Britain in history, and whatever events that led to his birth, however . . . questionable, are justified and even made heroic because of this inevitability.

The Inevitable June does not tell tales of Arthurian heroes, but it does smack of the mythic: “This morning I crossed the river on a horse made of lightbulbs.” This is the speaker’s entry for June 4th. The Inevitable June chronicles the birth of the speaker, and a subsequent journey through the month of June. There is an entry for every day. Some entries are longer than others, and entries are often bridged by illustrations which do as much to drive the narrative as the prose does.

Last year I wrote a recommendation for The Newer York, a literary magazine that took it upon itself to catalog art and literature that was unconcerned with the parameters of genre or mode. I raved about how exciting, how exhilarating, my experience from front-to-back cover was, and how refreshing it had been to experience a collection of work that was identifiably “new” in the face of a preponderance of modern and post-modern literary history that had already branded itself as such. The Inevitable June is the first single author release from that same press, and, like the magazine before it, this volume provides an experience that I cannot find anywhere else on any of my five or so book shelves, or in the piles around my desk.

I’m reticent to talk specifics when it comes to The Inevitable June. It begins with an epigraph, an “Old Zen Proverb” that has monks proclaiming “Oh Shit!” That moment, I think, sets a tone where the work can engage fully with the mythic in a way that leaves plenty of room for personality. There is, more often than not, a pleasant surprise on the next page, and I’d rather not do my readers the injustice of ham-handedly relating them myself. Instead, here is a bit of the beginning:

“This morning I am swollen in my mother’s belly.
It creaks like a door in the lamp post. I imagine
a coat rack built in an iceberg. There are clouds
above it. A black octopus touching people’s hair.

I can’t hide from it anymore.”

I do the text injustice by presenting it without its wonderful line drawings. Even so, Schofield manages to squeeze some wonder into the surreal.

The Inevitable June is a black octopus that wants to touch your hair. You can’t hide from it, and if you try, you’ll miss something incredible. Rather, sit back and turn pages as each muscular hydrostat encircles you in a damp, suction cup grip. It’s even more fun than it sounds.

An Interview with The Fog Horn's Quinn Emmett

LaTanya McQueen: What was the impetus for starting The Fog Horn? Who else makes up The Fog Horn and what do each of you do for the magazine?

Quinn Emmett: I was lucky to be raised in a family where reading was a fundamental part of everyday life. My parents, brothers and sister were the original Goodreads community, if Goodreads was like Fight Club and you were willing to bleed to get your hands on a novel before anyone else. Flash forward twenty-plus years, and I found myself doing digital product development, and then becoming a working screenwriter. I wanted to find a way to merge the two worlds. I worked at ESPN for a number of years and they do a great job of hiring folks within their demographic. We were the first to use a new product, and were tougher than anyone else on it. In tech, it’s called dog-fooding. So last year I considered the growing pile of New Yorker mags in my home and decided to build a reading experience I would use: curated, consumable, no murdering of the rain forest.

Next thing was finding great help on the tech and creative side. So we have Conor Britain, a young, smart, SUPER attractive developer who built our app on top of the TypeEngine platform, and Bryan Flynn, our art director. Bryan drew our masthead, creates all of our covers and handles our images. He and I worked together previously on other, more inappropriate (but charitable!) projects, and though we’ve never met or even talked on the phone, I trust his eye and instincts completely. Lastly, Chris Starr (one of our original writers) contributes with a careful and thorough copy edit that gets things up to snuff and preserves the author’s intention.

LM: How are you distinguishing yourself from not just other literary magazines, but also from similar digital platforms like Kindle Singles, for example, or Narrative that use a subscription model?

QE: It’s not easy. There’s a boat load of websites, magazines, journals and other writing outlets out there. Which is awesome for new writers. The issue is, very few of those places pay writers, or pay writers well. Maybe readers don’t care about that as much, but it does affect quality, and we wanted to both pay writers really well, and find a way to stand out. So we offer $1000 a story, and we accept submissions from both Hollywood screenwriters and the general public, and then we publish them together like some sort of crazy literary pro-am.

We can never offer the volume that an Amazon best-seller does, but it’s also getting incredibly difficult to make a dent in those ranks. Look at the top ten right now: David Baldacci, Sarah Dalton, Lee Child, Lee Child, Nelson DeMille, etc. I’m positive that a well-reviewed Kindle Single could fetch more than our $1000, but we guarantee that dough, a small but growing audience and a fun publishing experience. We’d love to become a beacon for quality short fiction — for writers and readers, the same. That said, anything that gets writers paid and readers interested is a positive for us, and the new world order. Traditional publishing (like TV and movies) is broken. You’re a blockbuster, or you’re nothing. Viva la Revolution!

LM: Can you explain a little bit more about how The Fog Horn works (someone downloads the app then purchases the subscription? If someone subscribes can they get back issues as well? Do all four stories each month come at once or once a week over the course of a month?)?

QE: Absolutely. We’re actually very similar to Netflix (name dropper). You download our app for free, and then after a 7-day free trial, you pay $3.99 a month for access to both new and back issues. We publish four original stories a month, and twelve issues year. Sometimes there’s a theme (like our Valentine’s Day issue), sometimes less so. But we spend a lot of time curating a quality reading experience — always our number one goal. Everything we do — the app, the website and the content — serve that objective.

You didn’t ask, but the business is very transparent and tied into the model above. We treat The Fog Horn more like a bootstrapped tech start-up than a literary journal, because that’s what it is. None of the three of us gets paid until we get into the black. More subscribers equals more revenue, and with more revenue we can keep paying for original stories. We keep our costs streamlined and predictable and say no more than we say yes. Hopefully that gets us to sustainability.

LM: Your submissions system is a little different than from literary magazines. Along with a few questions, you ask for a pitch of a person’s story. Why the decision to have writers submit pitches and not submit the story itself?

QE: You can usually tell if someone can write pretty quickly. But yes, it’s a bit strange. More than anything, it lets us really get to know the writer and see if they’re a good fit for The Fog Horn. We’ve received very few complaints, if anything just a little confusion because it’s not standard practice. But we don’t want to be a story factory or just a mysterious email address on the world wide web. It’s impersonal. Nobody actually expects Santa Claus to respond to their letter. But if you knew he was checking out your cooking blog and getting to know you from afar, you’d feel like maybe he was gonna bring you that lizard for Christmas. . . . What was the question?

LM: Based on the pitches how do you decide if you’re interested in the story or not?

QE: More than anything we look for voice. It could be a well-developed voice, or a kernel of something special, but short stories leave very little room for heavy plot. I want YOU to tell me a story, and I want it to burn a hole in the page. Which isn’t to say it needs to be horror or action; those are, in fact, two of the hardest to pull off. It can’t just be about scaring people or writing gore — that doesn’t work quite the same as it does on the screen. You need compelling characters, and what’s what we want. Otherwise, there needs to be an unpublished, existing draft, and it’s gotta be good writing. We typically do one or two passes of my notes, and then it’s off to copy edit. If it doesn’t seem like two passes will get it done, we’ll pass. We don’t have a full time editing staff or the resources to develop stories for months on end.

LM: What kinds of stories are you hoping to publish in The Fog Horn? For writers looking to submit what do you suggest they do to get a sense of what The Fog Horn is looking for?

QE: Again — we’re looking for a voice. Be your own voice. If nothing else in the story works, make sure it has an opinion. Whether you’re established (you wrote a movie or write for a TV show) or not doesn’t matter. Sure, big names help sell subscriptions, but those people are extremely busy making actual money (haha), so they’re much more difficult to wrangle. That said, writing screenplays is a fairly miserable existence and the format blows, so we provide a nice alternative to endless studio notes. I’m a huge sci-fi nerd, so the classics do it for me — they say something about present day, the future and society. But when you read George Saunders, you realize the devastating potential in a very personal short story. The potential to live in the life of a person (or animal, or vegetable — anything goes!) for a very brief moment and experience their love, or pain, or terror, or even a downward spiral. It’s incredible. For examples, I’d read what we’ve put out so far. Read the greats. And then say something.

LM: How do you curate each issue? Do you imagine each story working together thematically or are they meant to play against each other?

QE: We generally work 1-2 issues ahead. It’s none of our primary jobs, and we don’t have a crack team of editors, so we work with the bigger writers that are interested and the public submissions we receive and try to think about what fits together, or what makes for a compelling contrast. If a theme emerges or makes sense on the calendar, great. Otherwise we look for a variety of lengths and try to keep making sure it’s a magazine you’ll look forward to every month.

LM: You’re one of the few literary journals that pay for work accepted. How do you imagine keeping that model sustainable in the future?

QE: We definitely make it harder on ourselves by paying so much for content. But we wouldn’t have such great writing if we didn’t. And nobody wants to pay for subpar writing. We also don’t have much of a marketing or advertising budget, so quality and word-of-mouth are going to be our biggest helpers. We’ve done some selective advertising on Facebook and with a few podcasts (totally different audiences, and totally different measurability), but it’s hard to make a real impact with the equivalent of your lunch money.That said, we’re converting downloaders-to-subscribers at over 40%. The digital mag standard is about 3.3%. So people are loving what they’re reading. They’re choosing to stick around. We’re super proud of that. We just need a push for downloads. More downloads = more subscribers = money to pay the bills. There’s nothing better than publishing someone’s hard work, except sending them a check.

LM: Do you foresee opening up The Fog Horn to other genres in the future?

QE: Not right now. There’s other great mediums for non-fiction (Epic, Longform, etc) and we love this format. If people know the structure of what they’re getting every month, they can better imagine themselves spending time and money to fit it into a busy lifestyle (and busy home screen).

LM: Are there any other features for The Fog Horn that you’re working on?

QE: We say no more than we say yes, but I’d say our next goals are web subscriptions and audio versions of our stories. Web subscriptions enable us to be a little more device agnostic, and allow people to read more discreetly at work. I’ve got a lot of friends that haven’t read a page since kindergarten, but they listen to a book a week on tape. Commuters, our bread and butter, are part of that group. Audio reads are easier to implement technically, but the actual recording requires a little more effort and money. Nobody wants to listen to me hack and cough my way through a robot love story. It’ll ruin it.

LM: So are you the only reader that goes through all the submissions?

QE: We have some volunteer slush readers, but it’s fairly manageable at this point. We considered hiring an editor early on, but to keep the business streamlined and efficient, I retained most content curation and editing duties. Once the stories are in our development queue, we all read them and talk about how they fit the overall scope and design of what we want.

LM: Once someone subscribes to The Fog Horn which of the stories do you suggest they check out first?

QE: I just want to preface this answer by saying it’s like picking among my children. So the blood’s on your hands. We love every one of the twelve stories we’ve published to date, and the four we have coming up soon. I think any reader will love NOISE (Issue #1), THE RED WHEELBARROW (Issue #2), or DREAM ME (Issue #3). They’re not similar, but all feature killer new voices. That said: because the stories and issues are so consumable, we feel like new readers can start with either Issue #1 or the newest issue and enjoy the same awesome experience.

LM: What is the average response time for those thinking about submitting a story?

QE: We say on our submission page, and in a message after you submit that if you haven’t heard from us in 30 days, consider it a pass. We feel like that’s fair. We’d love to process submissions quicker, but extra staff is expensive. And I’d rather keep paying for great stories, instead.

LM: Do you think you’ll ever in the future do a print version (like a print anthology or a special print issue) of any of your content?

QE: Great question. We’ve got the ability through the app to produce single issues that are Best Of, or themed, and we definitely have plans for that, once the content builds up and it becomes appropriate. I have a very special place in my heart for print and would love to put something out there, but it’s not cheap. Our first goal is keep the business alive and profitable by providing a killer core reading experience. Once we’ve done that and hit our subscriptions goal, the world’s our oyster.

A Delectably Linguistic Read, for Poetry and Prose Readers Alike

In his famous essay “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” Gary Lutz writes that the books he fell in love with were the ones “in which virtually every sentence had the force and feel of a climax, in which almost every sentence was a vivid extremity of language, an abruption, a definitive inquietude.”

Robert Vaughan’s newest book, Diptychs + Triptychs + Lipsticks + Dipshits, which manages to pack thirty pieces in fifty-five pages, is a beautiful example of the kind of attention to detail that Gary Lutz admires.  Some stories are stronger than others, certainly, but the language jumps out on almost every page. Take, for example, the following sentences from “Lawyers, Guns & Money”:

He bust a button on his blazer. The testimony reeled in his head, churned, too many cracks.

Say that out loud. They’re sentences you can taste, clicking through your lips and teeth and tongue. Throughout the book the language rarely feels heavy-handed, but rather miraculously obvious, as if these words were always meant to go together, pairs and triplets of words working to create a phrase that feels just right, as in “influx of dwellers” and “sucker lists.”

Although he calls them stories, Vaughan’s work reads more like poetry. Perhaps the pieces are somewhere between, a kind of prose poetry that has found room to stretch out and get comfortable without the need for straight narratives. Most of all, Vaughan succeeds in conveying a mood in each vignette, aided by the titles and categorizing system he uses to arrange most of them. For example, the story “Hexagon of Life” is divided into six single paragraphs that are each headed by a number from one to six. “The Three Stooges” is divided into the sub-titles “Shoebox (Larry),” “Steps (Moe),” and Sidebar (Curly).”

The tone as a whole is deeply personal, and whether you imagine yourself, the author or an anonymous narrator within the stories, you are sure to be moved. The characters tend to be unnamed, lending them an everyman feeling, so that the described occurrences feel painfully familiar, as in “Modern Day Symphony”:

The lingering questions came in the form of water, piss, trees, green, trade. Everyone said live for the moment, but have you ever tried to do that? Forget about the past, no such thing. Holidays? None. No religion either, except in some climactic nightmares.

Some stories are definitely weaker or less satisfying, but it is unsurprising that within a collection of so many short pieces some would stand out more than others. On the whole, however, Vaughan’s book is a delectably linguistic read, for poetry and prose readers alike.

To Feel What Only Humans Feel: A Review of Vanessa Blakeslee's Train Shots

As life gets busier and busier, I find myself reading a fair amount of short fiction lately. Story collections offer perfect mini-reads to occupy my mind in airports, doctor’s office waiting rooms, and in between periods during a hockey game. Accordingly, I enjoy short fiction published in Cimarron Review and The Southern Review, as well as story collections by Alice Munro and other storytelling masters.

Most recently, I read an advanced copy of Train Shots, collection of eleven stories by Vanessa Blakeslee, an emerging short story writer whose work has appeared in various literary journals. While not a themed story collection per se, the tales in Train Shotscollectively show how people deal with whatever life throws their way.

Shorter stories in the collection offer readers an opportunity to eavesdrop on young adults working minimum wage jobs or sharing quarters with “quirky” (crazy) spouses or roommates. “Clock In” brilliantly captures the rhythmic patter of a server at a Mexican restaurant training a newbie to use the computer-driven ordering system, replete with snarky digressions about the managers and staff. Same with a married couple bickering in “Ask Jesus.”  In “The Sponge Driver,” a sponge diver tries to persuade his girlfriend to (ironically) try a contraceptive sponge (described as a “miniature inflatable raft”) as an alternative to condoms, with hilarious complications.

Yet another story, “Princess of Pop,” explores a young entertainer’s suicide attempt with insight and—at times–wit. The setting is the hotel where Janis Joplin OD’d and died. A dancer-turned-pop-diva contemplates her sense of self and self-worth (or lack thereof) and decides to off herself by mixing Xanax and Ambien with Fruit Loops and milk. The “Princess of Pop” survives, but her tale evokes Norma Jean/Marilyn Monroe and other ordinary-people-turned-celebrity who feel like strangers in their own skin, at odds with attention and acclaim.

Other pieces in the collection probe torment and angst prompted by disquieting events in the lives of  adults at or approaching midlife: An expatriate’s disillusionment with life in Costa Rica after her rescue dogs are stolen (“Welcome, Lost Dogs”). A divorced woman facing life (or death) dealing with an emotionally disturbed teenage son (“Barbecue Rabbit”). A young woman is torn between loyalty to her fiancé and looking out for herself when he is busted for securities fraud as the couple vacations in New Orleans (“Don’t Forget the Beignets”). A cancer survivor keeps his excised lung at home in a bucket as a gimmick to help him quit smoking once and for all (“The Lung”). And last, the stunned emptiness a train engineer feels after his freight train fatally hits a suicidal young woman (“Train Shots”, the title story).

As I read each of their stories, I couldn’t help wonder, What would I do? If indeed literature shows us what it means to be human — to feel what only humans feel — then this story collection is masterfully revealing. Peppered with wry and witty zingers, the dialogue and narrative of each story show humor and irony in even the darkest circumstances. Combined, the stories in Train Shots leave you wanting to read more from this talented emerging author.

Night of the Living Bildungsroman: A Review of J.R. Angelella's Zombie

Of all the subsections and structural variants that have graced the literary landscape over the years, the bildungsroman (coming-of-age story) is perhaps the most treasured and adaptable. These pieces vary greatly in terms of intended audience, genre, and tone, and you’ve no doubt seen examples both in classic works (Great Expectations, Candide, Jane Eyre, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Catcher in the Rye) and newer fiction (The Kite Runner, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Persepolis, Harry Potter,  and yes,  even Twilight to some extent. Sorry.)

Zombie, the debut novel by J.R. Angelella, earns its place on the list easily, as its narrator (Jeremy Barker) is all too happy to discuss his jaded outlook, troublesome adolescent experiences, and quirky family, friends and enemies with superficial humor and touching emotional subtext. His is a tale we can all relate to (well, sort of. You’ll see.) In fact, Barker is clearly a spiritual successor to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield — both deal with “phony” adults, sexual inexperience, violent psychopathic fantasies, confusion about love, and anxiety about life. The chief difference here is that Barker also has to deal with snuff films, an emotionally void, drug addicted family, and plenty of psychical altercations at school. Oh, and zombies. Lots and lots of zombies.

Interestingly, the book begins with Jeremy discussing his father’s penchant for and judgment of neckties:

According to my father [Ballentine], there are three types of necktie knots: the Windsor, the Half-Windsor, and the Limp Dick.

Afterward, we are privy to various subtle yet revealing discussions and interactions between them, including overly explicit details about how said knots imply masculinity, the whereabouts of Jeremy’s mother, and hypothetic zombie survival scenarios (it’s with these details that Angelella evokes Palahniuk and Ellis). It’s here that we get a strong sense of their complex relationship, as their wildly different personalities (Jeremy, a perverse, talkative kid ripe with imagination; Ballentine, a stubborn, quiet and disinterested adult who treats his son like a soldier) get in the way of their bond. There’s a love between them, but it’s masked by secrecy, cruel expectations, and unreturned affection. Jeremy spends much of the novel trying to get closer to and make sense of his father, and this struggle shows how Angelella manages to place touching human conflict underneath superficial humor, obscenity, and gore.

It’s also in this first chapter that we learn of Jeremy’s five Zombie Survival Codes for a zombie apocalypse:

ZSC #1: Avoid Eye Contact
ZSC #2: Keep Quiet
ZSC #3: Forget the Past
ZSC #4: Lock-and-Load
ZSC #5: Fight to Survive

Of course, he acknowledges that he stole these rules from the film Zombieland (in fact, the book is full of allusions and commentary on actual zombie films, which is a nice touch). As you’d expect given the context, these guidelines protect him from, well, everyone else, and the way he uses them as psychological and emotional defensive mechanisms is tragic yet relatable. If you’ve ever dealt with a broken home and/or high school bullshit, you can understand his perspective.

As for the rest of his family, well, we see a bit of his drug addicted mother, Corrine, her peaceful new man, Zeke, and Jeremy’s womanizing, avant-garde brother, Jackson. Honestly, we don’t see much interaction between them, so they serve more as archetypes than actual characters.  Nevertheless, further exemplify why Jeremy feels so bitter and disenfranchised.

Fortunately, there is a bit of hope for Jeremy, as he finds three objects of teenage attraction: Tricia, Franny, and Aimee. The former is college age and lives next door to him; she essentially offers him advice and then flashes him through her bedroom window at night (you know, the typical neighborly bond). As for Franny, she’s a bit older, and she seems to find a kindred spirit in Jeremy. Aimee proves to be the most important of the group, as she gives Jeremy the confidence and affection (eventually) that he so desperately needs (that is, when he isn’t getting nose bleeds every time she walks by). She comes from a Mean Girls background yet finds Jeremy’s awkwardness and genuine sincerity endearing. They share many charming moments, such as the following:

We stand shoulder-to-shoulder, holding hands, looking out into the abyss of the harbor. I can see Federal Hill across the way and the lights of ‘The Prince Edward.’ Sailboats and speedboats drift along, spotting the black hole with dots of light.

“I wish I could press pause right now,” I say, putting ‘Little Man’ on the floor.
“That’s sweet.” Her fingers lace further into mine.
“I want to be happy,” I say.
“That’s not asking for much,” she says.
“And I want you to be happy too.”

As for the advertised subplot about “a bizarre homemade video of a man strapped to a bed, being prepped for some kind of surgical procedure” that leads Jeremy to “a world far darker and more violent,” well, it’s not as crucial or established as you’d probably expect. There are a few remarks about it, and it does put even more distance between Jeremy and his father, but overall the core of the story revolves around the aforementioned relationships. The end of the novel, however, deals with it directly, and while the resolution is a bit too quick, it’s still a satisfying exploration of cultism. Also, the irony of Jeremy loving zombie films yet being disgusted by real violence is a clear statement on how desensitized people can be to torture.

To be honest, Zombie is not without its faults; the profane and immature language Jeremy uses feels inauthentic at times (you can tell it was written by a man trying to write the voice of a teenager), and just about every one of the plot points I mentioned earlier is underdeveloped.  In other words, we have glimpses of a dozen ideas instead of a dedicated and fulfilling examination of, say, three of them.

Still, I haven’t finished a book this quickly since I first read American Psycho (in three days). There’s just something about the narration and events that suck you in and keep you reading. Despite all of these flaws and the narrator’s repetitious thoughts (how many times can we be told about the ZSCs?), Jeremy is a very likeable protagonist. You root for him, laugh at him, and most importantly, feel his pain every step of the way. In the end, Zombie isn’t an especially complex or rewarding read, but it is a vastly entertaining and charming one. It stays with you long after you’ve read it, and really, that’s the ultimate goal for any work of art.

You Can Let Go: A Review of Ben Tanzer's Lost in Space

Given that I’m a person who has never really wanted to have children, you might wonder what got to me about Lost in Space (a book of essays by Ben Tanzer relating to his fatherhood). Admittedly, Tanzer managed to hook me with similar themes (though fictional) in his novel You Can Make Him Like You. Still, I have no kids and no real interest in having any . . . but I was interested in checking out this book.

I tried to figure out why Lost in Space intrigued me. It’s not just as simple as me realizing that I’m at least the child of a father and wondering what it might have been like on the other side, though that’s certainly part of it. For one thing, it isn’t like I haven’t had to consider the possibility I could become a father. There’s always that. Actually, now that I really think about the topic, I could probably keep listing reasons as long as I keep pondering. Motherhood or fatherhood (potential or actual), what was it like for one’s parents, or whatever, there are any number of reasons why people with or without children might be interested in someone’s thoughts on being a parent. Bottom line: this is a huge part of human life and I want to see inside.

Getting to the book itself, Tanzer delivers marvelously in these essays. I think of books on fatherhood and I immediately worry about schmaltz, oversentimentality. I worry about Todd Burpo. Whether it’s fair or not to have that as an immediate concern when sitting down with fatherhood writings, it’s what I worry about. However, I didn’t find that to be a problem in Lost in Space. There is sentiment, but not excessive sentimentality (this selection from “Towers”):

From the start, your relationship with him prompted you to feel things you had not allowed yourself to feel before. Emotions you had hoped to bury or avoid. The idea of them embarrassed you. You were above all that, and not because you were better than anyone else, but because you were not willing to embrace any of it. It was all too messy and real.

But not with him, never with him, you can tell him you love him all day long.

You can also imagine shaking him, though. Some- thing you never think about when dealing with adults. You know you’re not supposed to feel this way, much less actually say it out loud, and it’s not that you can truly imagine doing it, it’s just that you can’t not imagine doing it either.

He stops moving around so much.

“You can let go,” he says.

Parenthood essays also leave me cold when an author tries to hard to seem like a perfect parent, or when an author sounds like a parental version of Gomer Pyle. We all know no one is perfect, and we also all know that no one is really prepared. The big problem for me with either of these extremes is that they feel like poses, a mask the author has decided to present instead of his or her actual emotions. However, Tanzer makes clear that he is only doing the best he can at the same time that he doesn’t overplay it. The approach doesn’t end up feeling like a pose to me. To the contrary, it feels honest and real (this selection from “The Unexamined Life”):

Children are different of course. The shadows come later, but even talking about having children makes the chance for adventure seem less likely, and Debbie and I have definitely not been on enough adventures together. And yes, I know, people go on adventures when they are parents, but will we? I don’t know, which makes me think even more about regret and shadows, which leaves me spinning.

It also makes me want to run away.

Not that I want to run away from the idea of parenthood or Debbie, but for at least one last time I want to think I can be someone who takes chances and can live in the moment.

Debbie is not interested in any of that.

“Go, go somewhere I have been,” Debbie says, supportive, though maybe hedging her bets a little, “but go, and then come back, cool?”

My main impression from Lost in Space is being next to a confiding friend on a barstool.  Mind you, not just a ‘bro’ with whom conversation only goes so far: sports, women, and no more. Instead I mean one of those close friends who really need to talk and let it all out . . . to tell you things that have real, personal gravity (this selection from “I Need”):

I need sleep, long and deep and full of dreams about love, sex, pizza, Patrick Ewing, and Caddyshack. In these dreams I will be so happy, smart, funny, and full of esprit de corps that interns will float by my office in low-cut blouses begging to hear my innermost thoughts on Game of Thrones. I will not worry about bills or love handles, and I will not think about my children, not for even one moment, yo. If they happen to make an appearance they will say “excuse me,” “yes,” and “please,” eat over the table using actual utensils, and not constantly bang their heads or mysteriously find their hands around the necks of one another.

In the end, Tanzer hooked me just as much with Lost in Space as he did with You Can Make Him Like You. He manages to hit a lot of different topics in these essays: whether or not he does the right things for his boys, worry about what could happen to them, concern about who they will become, desire to share in their lives, the need to have life of his own, trepidation about having children, and the decision to go ahead with surgery finalizing what children he will have. There are a variety of different aspects of fatherhood in here, approached in a variety of different ways. I still don’t think I truly know what it is to be a father after reading, but I think I have shared some of what it’s been like for Ben Tanzer.

I found Lost in Space to be intimate, insightful, and vulnerable. It has a weighty subject, but the writing doesn’t rely on the subject’s weight to get by. Whether you have kids or not, I can’t imagine someone reading this book and not being affected. In short — it’s good, yo.

Anything Is Possible Here: A Review of Dan Powell's Looking Out of Broken Windows

“Imagining fiction without family is like imagining life without a head. There’s so much organic tension, drama, joy, confusion.” Ben Marcus said this in a recent Salon interview with David Burr Gerrard, and I can’t think of a better way to sum up the themes in Dan Powell’s debut collection of short prose, Looking Out of Broken Windows (shortlisted for the Scott Prize). Confusion. Joy. Drama. And above all, organic tension — friction even, and the moments when friction becomes impact.

Powell builds up to these moments so well that my reaction to each narrative is, without exception, physical. My chest tightens, my heart begins to race. I care about what happens to these characters, and a lot happens to these characters. In fact, Powell’s style finds its roots in a story arc in which surprisingly active, explosive moments urge the narrative along toward a well-conceived climax — a traditional element of good storytelling lacking from much writing today.

This is not to say that Powell’s collection is conventional. It’s anything but. The opening and title story, “Looking Out of Broken Windows,” tells the reader that anything is possible here. It tells the reader this will be a collection that deconstructs metaphor in so many creative ways through magic realism, but it will also be a family of stories that fearlessly goes where most writers have gone before, exploring infidelity, relationships in crisis, children’s complicated relationships to their parents. Loss.

To say merely that Powell “explores” these issues wouldn’t explain exactly what the author is doing with this collection. He’s not exploring so much as inhabiting. A few of these tales are told from a child’s point of view, a few from the vantage point of a male; but many of the 27 stories are told from a female character’s point of view. Powell’s women are dealing with the stress of pregnancy, betrayal or grief — or all of the above—but most often they are simply taken for granted in their roles as wife, mother or sexual partner.

The wife/mother in the story “What Precise Moment,” who wakes up one morning to find she’s become a vending machine to her family, represents this unappreciated woman most concisely in this collection; the wife/mother in “Demand Feeding” is so unappreciated — so pale — that we never even know her name. She’s also a sort of vending machine for Andy, her viciously insatiable newborn, and Chris, her sex-starved husband. All the while, she feels her self vanishing:

Looking at yourself in the mirror, hair in need of a stylist, the maternal uniform of joggers and sick-stained tee hanging off you, it’s like staring at your life disappearing into the distance, the woman you were blinking out at a vanishing point, leaving behind this shambles, this outline.

Bleak, yes, but the women in these stories are astoundingly assertive and self-confident considering their situations; Powell’s men, on the other hand, tend to be weak, ill, dying or already dead.

Take Calvin, the 40-something, overprotected protagonist in “Did You Pack this Bag Yourself?” He never really finds the strength to free himself from his unhealthy relationship with his mother, though he struggles. Powell keeps the central mother/son conflict one breath away from implosion, keeping Calvin distanced from his raw, real emotions until the very end. And even then, we get merely a smile of satisfaction.

In fact, most of the male characters in this collection live lives at a safe distance from their feelings, as in the acclaimed “The Man Who Lived Like a Tree” and “Baggage,” a brilliant tale of magic realism about a man who buys bags to store his facial expressions.

So many of these stories surprise and delight with elements of magic realism, the most endearing of which is when the foetal twins in “Ultrasound II” turn and see their parents for the first time through the ultrasound. In “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Cancer,” the main character’s illness becomes a character with a voice. The death scene in this story is emotionally crushing.

Simply put, these characters and their stories are memorable. Powell’s ingenuity proves that we’ll never be done with the family as motif, that we haven’t yet exhausted the possibilities fiction holds when channeled through a superb mind. By blending solid, well-developed familial dramas with magical realism — as well as the occasional experimental post-modern twist — Powell offers his readers a visceral, sometimes troubling and ultimately satisfying reading experience.