Tennessee Williams and James Grissom “Put Women in Their Place"

I stumbled upon The Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog, by James Grissom, last summer. I saw a photo of Williams on the cover, and that was enough for me.

I got more than I bargained for.

I finished the book while sitting on a playground bench, as my husband guided our daughter across the monkey bars. All around me people were living and playing, while I sat frozen, startled, alert. The book had produced a quickening of the senses—a vitality that actors long for and thrive upon. When I searched for reviews, when I asked if others had discovered this strange book, I found little trace of public reception.

A few weeks ago, my sister shared a Facebook post by James Grissom. In it, Grissom recounted the story of discovering he had bladder cancer in 2007, and of his reaching out for the help of his senator—Hillary Clinton. Her support had saved his life. The post went viral.

James Grissom, author of The Follies of God, was suddenly a topic of conversation; his story was picked up by Clinton herself. She thanked Grissom for his post and her campaign created a video to feature his story.

Grissom next created a hashtag: #puttingwomenintheirplace. He began to publicly recount stories of other women who had been champions in his life, and he encouraged others to do the same. The connection to his book—and to the women who shine in its pages—was instantly clear. I had no doubt of Grissom’s sincerity, but I also had no doubt that the lessons he absorbed while researching his book were finding a second platform in his post.

The Follies of God stretches in breadth from the history of the American theatre to the intimate musings of dozens of actors and actresses, using as its spine the confessions of one of our greatest playwrights. It is also a thank-you letter to many of the great actresses of Tennessee William’s era.

“I have been very lucky . . . because I have offered my soul to so many women,” Williams told Grissom, “and they have filled it, repaired it, sent it back to me for use.” The political moment has merged with Tennessee Williams’ musings as transcribed by James Grissom. A book that might have been relegated—tragically—to a dusty shelf in the theatre section of the bookshop has grown suddenly pivotal.

*

In the autumn of 1982, James Grissom, an aspiring playwright, wrote a letter, put it in an envelope, stamped it, and sent it to Tennessee Williams. It’s safe to say hundreds, if not thousands of fans had done just that before him, never dreaming of any response.

Williams called Grissom on the telephone.

“Perhaps you can be of some help to me,” the playwright said.

Williams next invited Grissom to New Orleans, and Grissom—naturally—accepted.

So began Grissom’s odyssey into the heart of a lonely and deeply depressed icon who felt caught in a “knot of time,” unable to write, a victim of his own ill-use of his mind and body.

That’s a lot to lay on a twenty-year-old, but Grissom listened and took notes. Williams made no pretense of being anything but a man in desperate need of validation. Grissom was led down winding passages, traveling deeper into another person’s soul than perhaps anyone should, but Williams was so hungry for communication and so urgently needy that Grissom forged ahead.

He spent many days with Williams, who felt maligned as a “hack” and discredited by contemporary critics. He longed for a return to his heyday, a time in which he had basked in the love and appreciation of a rapt audience. He had been considered, rightly, the voice of a new generation. He wondered if he had ever been worthy of such praise. Eventually, Williams tasked Grissom with an enormous project: could he find the actresses Williams had worked with, give them personal notes he’d written for them, and speak to them in person?

Why?

To see if he had mattered to them.

Over lunches in dingy diners, “Tenn,” as Williams asked Grissom to call him, offered detailed remembrances—from notes he had kept—of the women with whom he had worked. Armed with “Tenn’s” personal notes, Grissom eventually found and gained the trust of such luminaries as Katharine Hepburn, Geraldine Page, Jessica Tandy, Kim Stanley, Lillian Gish, Marian Seldes, Frances Sternhagen, and Maureen Stapleton, to name only a few of the seventy people who appear in The Follies of God. Somehow, from the substance of many voices, one narrative emerges, that encompasses not only Williams’ insights, but those of a multitude of stars in the theatrical firmament.

A pattern emerges throughout these interviews. As we flash from Williams’s accounts to the actresses themselves, in their own words, one after another establish themselves as titanic intellectual forces.

Laurette Taylor, who ushered in a new model of acting in The Glass Menagerie—had a profound effect on Williams. “Absolutely nothing escaped her attention or merciless sense of detail”—he says.

Of Elizabeth Wilson, Williams said, “Imagine yourself committed but distant; passionate but professional.”

“I reflect on Marian,” Williams told Grissom, of Marian Seldes. She says, ‘Life goes by. Your use of time defines the kind of person you are off the stage—and on. When you are in charge of that time—the time of your life—you are happy.”

And of Frances Sternhagen, Grissom writes: “Tenn felt he could see her brain at work, that her intelligence—one he described as ‘astringent’—fueled her every action.”

“Look,” Katharine Hepburn told Grissom, “. . . most of those women on your list—on Tennessee’s list—made very conscious decisions about their lives and about their actions in their careers to become good and to become some sort of inspiration to people. It is a struggle—a perpetual struggle—to do anything worthwhile.”

Geraldine Page is, of all those Grissom spoke to, the most astonishing: every word she utters makes up a kind of gospel on how to conduct a life of dignity and significance. “Page,” Grissom writes, “hated inactivity, idle minds or chatter, conversations for which there was no point or theme or purpose. She had no patience or sympathy for unintelligent, unexamined people or situations.”

“Geraldine,” Williams told Grissom, “has an intellect that I would match against that of anyone else in the world.”

And yet this fearsome intellect—who, in Grissom’s words, had “impossibly high standards of conduct and creativity that have led her to be compared to any number of ferocious and wild animals”—read the note provided for her from Williams, clutched James Grissom’s hand, and cried. She had much to say on the subject of Tennessee Williams: she hadn’t known how fragile he was, how much he had longed for friendship. Williams aspired to behave like the women he admired, but he hadn’t known how to ask for help.

When Williams muses about these women, he is telling us what to pay attention to—what he wished he had paid attention to. It is perhaps upon Page whom Williams most wishes he had modeled his conduct: “She believed that every single thing, every moment, should serve some bigger purpose. . . . She had no fear of beginning, of jumping off where she should, over and over, to get to where she needed to be. I would like to emulate her in her impatience with delusion. I delude myself all the time, still, and it offers me no reward.”

Page replied to this, through Grissom, saying, “Dreaming is a negative thing, in a way, and I think Tennessee’s dreaming—that lifelong plunge into darkness—was a negative thing. . . . It’s very poetic, but it’s not a state in which I care to work. I need all of my senses when I’m working. The dreams are the first act, I guess. The overture. And the work begins. One should always be beginning to work.”

In 2015, a great distance from that 1982 phone call, Grissom at last produced a volume overflowing with insight, both poetic and direct—from the many actresses Williams had worked with. In his effort to convey the rich life of the mind in which fine artists dwell, Grissom quotes Robert Edmond Jones: “They seem so much more aware than we are, and so much more awake, and so much more alive that they make us feel that what we call living is not living at all, but a kind of sleep.”

Uta Hagen wrote in her own seminal book on acting, that “an alert mind is an actor’s prerequisite.” In The Follies of God, Grissom conveys the quickening of the senses that is embodied by the art form. Grissom has succeeded in simultaneously introducing his reader to the almost supernatural awareness of the actor’s mind on the one hand, and on the other, the pragmatic quotidian work ethic she must apply in order to succeed at her craft.

Uta Hagen also wrote: “Art is mysterious enough without our making it more so.” Hagen was a firm believer in being grounded: “Theoretically, the actor ought to be more sound in mind and body than other people,” she wrote in her own book, “since he learns to understand the psychological problems of human beings when putting his own passions, his loves, fears, and rages to work in the service of the characters he plays.”

Grissom pays homage to the mystique of famous actresses but reveals, often through their own words, their sweaty struggle to make their work—their life on stage—real. Grissom also got an answer to Williams’ question: Had he mattered to the artists who breathed life into his work?

Yes, he had mattered.

*

Why women? Why were women so important to Williams? Why was he able to recognize their power, why was he so hungry to learn from them and seek shelter in their lessons? The answer may lie in his childhood. He had looked to his mother for shelter from a brutal and abusive father—and he had felt betrayed when she was unable to provide it. He had expected more from her than from his father, a man locked inside ignorance and bigotry. Williams spoke to Grissom about this wound: “I hated my mother for blandly accepting the mediocrity that was our life, and until I jumped on her train of outward-bound dreams, I hated her for moving out of the real world, where I felt she might have offered me some aid.”

No matter how fast he ran, he could never outpace his guilt. Williams might have loathed his mother, but he also felt great love for her, eventually recognizing that it was from her that he had inherited his talent.

“I would suddenly realize,” Williams reflected, “that the person I thought I hated had made me someone who could appreciate images, illusions, and who had probably made me a writer.”

His life’s work—his plays—gazed back at the woman who haunted him. By 1982, he was able to see his mother’s influence as a gift. Even this fragile, delusional woman had given him a kind of wisdom: a penetrating ability to feel pain and recognize the raw material upon which an artist seizes.

Williams fancifully believed that women were a magical force that had lifted him repeatedly out of despair. He spent, as he recounts to Grissom, decades seeking shelter in and friendship from many of the actresses who appeared in his plays. It wasn’t until later—1982 to be exact—that he began to understand how much more than merely shelter these women had to offer. It is in this latter day recognition that the power of The Follies of God lies.

My own mother, an actress herself, was fond of the expression “Too late we learn.” This sentiment is the clarion call, the urgent warning that drives Grissom’s narrative.

The Follies of God affirms that theater is only as great as the people who understand not only how to act, but how to think precisely, how to love completely, and how to work very, very hard. It also suggests to those outside this world that they might awake from the kind of sleep that Jones had written of, and to live more fully, more sensually, and with more purpose.

In 1982, Grissom traveled to New Orleans and met with a bereft soul, broken from childhood, who had risen above the cruelty of his upbringing, but had lived on borrowed time. By the time Williams reached out to the young Grissom, his demons had outpaced him. Williams had an appointment with self-destruction and he kept it. Still, although unable to write another play, he had much that he longed to express. It came out in the form of advice and remembrance, and it was left to Grissom to weave the words with those of the women Williams achingly described.

*

When the twenty-year-old Grissom left “Tenn,” having filled several notebooks, he did not rush to begin the project with which Williams had tasked him. Just as Williams had left a broken mother behind in New Orleans, so had Grissom needed to leave Williams to get on with his own life. Ultimately though, he honored his promise. What made him cast a backward glance at the haunted playwright? The answer lies in Williams’ description of his mother: “I knew that my mother saved things—odd things—that helped her to remember what she was and what she could have been. . . . Each had a story and each had a place in her home,” Williams told Grissom.

“Totems—I wanted to give my mother something she could place on a shelf and love, something as fragile and transparent as those perfume bottles. Something as beloved and fraught with meaning as those rose petals and those napkins.”

Grissom crafted a totem for the playwright, something to honor his insights and recollections. From pages of scribbled notes—Williams’s “odd things”—he constructed a masterful narrative. Williams offered Grissom advice and philosophy tinged with depressive regret, and Grissom poured every poetic bit into the final product.

Williams surely would have loved this totem—loved it for his mother, who was halted in her ambitions for a better life, and loved it for all the women he later reflected upon and deemed underappreciated. It is a coming full-circle. Grissom received Williams’ keening confessions and crafted a totem from them, as Williams had wanted to do for his mother.

*

Serendipitously, Hillary Clinton saved James Grissom’s life, and he crafted a Facebook post, an ode to her, another “totem.” That totem went viral.

Hillary Clinton has said that she is more comfortable with the “servant” part than the “public,” part of her work. Her legendary reserve has been used as a cudgel against her reputation. It has been easy for her detractors to characterize her as “suspect” in a culture hungry for confession. She is a private person in a chatty world. In this way, as in the driving, focused nature of her work ethic, Clinton is reminiscent of the actresses who haunt the pages of The Follies of God. Grissom unearthed the ruminations of artists who were as reserved as Clinton about their personal lives and their methodologies. They did not publicize their intellects; it would have been contrary to the very private nature of artists. This privacy serves to protect their resource, their “inner theatre,” as Tennessee Williams called the artist’s brain.

Tennessee Williams didn’t live to see a woman save his young friend’s life, but no one would have been less surprised by Clinton’s efficiency and warmth. Had he lived to see hashtags, he couldn’t have crafted a more fitting one than Grissom’s. He loved women because he had witnessed so many fine actresses at work both on stage and in life. He craved their partnership and guidance. Tennessee Williams knew as well as anyone the importance of #puttingwomenintheirplace.

Lives in the Wake of Loss: An Interview with Hannah Gersen

The first I read of Hannah Gersen’s writing was her non-fiction for The Millions, an online books and culture magazine where Gersen is a staff writer. Her elegant prose and unique critical insights made me a fan instantly. I was also drawn to Gersen’s work because, well, her sensibility was so similar to mine. She seemed to have a special appreciation for fiction that takes its characters seriously, no matter how small or ordinary their lives may be—Alice Munro, Marilynne Robinson, Stephanie Vaughn. I wasn’t surprised, then, to discover that Gersen’s short fiction is marked by a deep sincerity that reminded me of those writers. Several of her short stories—which appear in publications like Granta, The Carolina Review, and The Chattahoochee Review—are linked, focusing on a family in small-town Maryland. In one story, nineteen-year-old Louisa, home from college for the summer, plots to sneak off and visit her boyfriend in Martha’s Vineyard. In another, told from the point of view of Louisa’s adolescent sister, Annabel, the family visits the girls’ grandparents in North Carolina, and while tension builds between Louisa and her mother, Annabel wonders where she fits into her family, and what kind of independent identity she can claim. These are deeply felt stories that astonished me with their ability to capture the indelibility of certain life moments. And there was a cleverness about them: how was Gersen able to make everyday small-town life seem so high-stakes? And what made these seemingly quiet stories resonate so powerfully?

But if Gersen’s stories are quiet, Home Field (William Morrow 2016), her debut novel due out on July 26th, begins loudly, with the unexpected death of Nicole Renner, wife to high school football coach Dean and mother to soon-to-be Swarthmore freshman Stephanie. We spend much of the novel watching Dean and Stephanie try to regain control over their lives in the wake of loss: Dean struggles to handle the demands of his job and battles loneliness while trying to help his increasingly aloof son, eleven-year-old Robbie; Stephanie, meanwhile, tries to adjust to college while balancing her new independent life with family obligations. Gersen writes Dean’s and Stephanie’s perspectives equally convincingly, letting us experience their complex, messy inner lives as they find their way in a suddenly very different-seeming world.

Gersen and I spent a few weeks e-mailing back and forth. We talked about Home Field, her short stories, writing small-town life, and the relationship between her fiction and non-fiction.

Steven Williams: Did you have specific goals for Home Field when you began working on it, e.g., certain subjects or ideas you knew you wanted to wrestle with?

Hannah Gersen: I wanted to tell a story about small town life, and a family coming together after tragedy, though I guess those are somewhat vague goals. The most specific goal I had was to show girls playing sports and to have it be a part of their emerging identities rather than a point of conflict. That’s not a very literary goal or especially dramatic, but thinking back on books I’ve read and TV shows and movies I’ve watched, I realized how rare it is for female characters to participate in sports in a casual way, as part of their daily lives, whereas it’s fairly common for male characters. So I just wanted to show that aspect of girls’ lives.

SW: Can you talk about your decision to have the novel’s point of view alternate (for most of the novel, anyway) between Dean and Stephanie? Specifically, I’m interested in your decision to switch between their perspectives within chapters, rather than alternating chapters or dividing the book into sections. Something about that narrative style made me feel like I was watching a TV show. Was that effect intentional?

HG: Originally the novel was going to be from Dean’s perspective, but after a few chapters, I felt it was unfair to Stephanie because when I was in Dean’s point of view, I could only show her sullen teenage actions and couldn’t give a sense of how she was really feeling. Once I brought in Stephanie’s voice, I realized that she had knowledge of the family, and of the community, that Dean didn’t have and that could help fill in some of the holes in the story. It was also an easy way to pick up the pace of the novel because I could just jump ahead in time when I was in Stephanie’s point of view. Early in the book, I stayed in either Dean or Stephanie’s voices for a relatively long periods of time, but I knew that once the reader got to know them I would have more license to switch between them.

This dramatic structure was probably influenced by television, because TV scenes, especially dramas, are often written and shot from the perspective of one particular character. In a show like Mad Men, for example, you’ll have a scene with Don Draper, then you’ll check in with Joan, and then maybe Peggy and one or two other characters, depending on the plot lines. Time passes as you switch points of view. Only occasionally do you get an ensemble scene with the entire cast that gives a more objective view of the characters and setting. I can’t really claim that I borrowed this structure intentionally, but I was watching a lot of TV when I wrote this book! I also like to write in close third person and that’s the perspective that a good actor can give you.

SW: Why did you decide to make Dean Stephanie’s stepfather, rather than have them be blood relatives?

HG: That idea was in place from the start, and much of the backstory grew from it. I’m not sure why I made the choice, except that I thought it would be an interesting dynamic to have a father and daughter who, in a way, chose each other.

SW: How did you come to title the novel “Home Field”? Does titling your work come naturally for you or is it a struggle?

HG: Funny you should ask this because I’m in the middle of an essay on this topic. The original title of this book was actually “Count It All Joy”, not “Home Field”, and coming up with a new name was an interesting process. In general I don’t have a strong feeling about what my titles should be, so I just try to pick something that arises naturally. “Count It All Joy” comes from the Bible, James 1:2: “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds.” Once upon a time, there was a scene in church where the minister quotes this verse, but I cut that scene because it wasn’t working. I liked the verse, though, and decided it would be a good epigraph. And then I eventually thought it could make a good title, too. My editor liked the title and other people seemed to like it, too, but I noticed that people had difficulty remembering it. Even worse, a lot of people could not get it upon first or second hearing, which was really awkward. My editor noticed the same thing. We decided we had to go back to the drawing board because book titles are often passed by word of mouth.

What followed were several weeks when my editor, my agent, and I were all brainstorming titles. I remember my editor asked me what the working title was because sometimes the working title—i.e. the file name—is great. But my working title was “Sports Novel”. (In general, my working titles are incredibly generic.) My editor ended up making a list of football words and “Home Field” was on that list. I was uncertain about it, at first, because it reminded me of baseball and I thought it sounded too much like a movie title. But then it grew on me. I like that it is simple, but has multiple meanings, and I also think it gives the reader a good sense of the setting and themes. One thing I learned from the process is that titling a book is completely different from titling a short story. People don’t need to remember short story titles, so they can be pretty fanciful and/or obscure. They can even be a part of the story, or a part of the puzzle of the story. But a book needs a title that is solid and can be attached to something outside of the world of the book. Now I understand why there are so many one word titles!

SW: Before publishing Home Field, your debut novel, you published several short stories, and a lot of these stories are linked, featuring the same characters at different points in their lives, which gives them something of a novel’s feel. I’m wondering if you feel more at home writing in the longer form. Is it your preference spend a lot of time and space with a given character or world, rather than writing stand-alone stories?

HG: Yes, I prefer the form of the novel because you can write a little each day and slowly build a world and create characters in a more detailed way, showing them in different situations and moods. Once I’ve done the imaginative work of creating a setting and a character, or a family of characters, I want to stick with the material for a while and see where it takes me. That said, some of my most formative reading experiences were short stories. I love fairy tales, the stories of Roald Dahl, and above all, John Cheever’s short stories.

SW: I’m not sure whether I’ve mentioned this to you before, but the thing that made me want to find your fiction was that essay you wrote for The Millions about Friday Night Lights (a show I’m a huge fan of) and its influence on your writing. You write about the show:

I always find myself thinking, these people live such big lives in such a small place! But then when I think about what feels “big” about their lives I realize that the plot points […] are quite ordinary. No one on Friday Night Lights has a secret identity. No one is working for the mafia. […] Instead, they’re drinking too much. They’re sleeping around. They’re saying stupid things and trying to make extra money in stupid ways. They’re founding Christian rock bands.

Now, when I read your stories and your novel, I think to myself that one could say the same thing about your work. In your stories, your characters do mostly everyday things, and while I’d have a hard time pointing to what makes it feel like the stakes are so high, the outcome always feels important. I also found that in your novel, though it begins with an extraordinary tragedy, your characters again are doing mostly things like coaching high school track, trying to find their crowd at school, etc. Can you talk about how you’re able to sustain drama through a 400-page novel while writing about everyday small town life?

HG: First, I’m so glad that my essay had that effect! And I’m beyond flattered that you tracked down my short stories, since they aren’t especially easy to find.

In my short stories, I am often thinking about memory and identity and trying to home in on moments in characters’ lives when something fundamentally changed for them or maybe tilted them in a slightly different direction—but it’s not a moment they are necessarily aware of as being important. When I look back on my own life, it’s like that: the experiences etched in my memory aren’t the big milestones. The Richard Linklater movie, Boyhood, does a really good job of showing that. The plot of that film (and most Linklater films) is quite mellow, but by the end of it you see how the boy’s life has been profoundly shaped by relatively simple experiences: his relationship with his parents and sister, obviously, but also exposure to certain ideas, landscapes, cultural events, and the people outside of his family who come in and out of his life.

I think for the characters in Home Field, the stakes are high because of what they’ve lost. They’re in a lot of pain and trying not to fall into despair. Their identities are at stake, especially Dean and Stephanie, because they’ve defined themselves so much in terms of their relationship to Nicole. Still, when I was writing the book I worried that these concerns were too internal. I did what I could to ground their struggles in specific actions even if those actions seemed laughably minor—like, for example, Stephanie dropping a class. Big deal, she dropped a class! But for her it’s a big deal because she’s never really given herself a break. That’s the beginning of her being able to make some space for herself in the world. Another small moment like that is when Dean gets back from his first cross country meet and decides to go to his office to check his files for track workouts. It’s a big gesture because it shows that he’s thinking about investing himself in this new team, and a new version of his life. He’s found his lifeline even if he’s not totally conscious of it.

SW: You’re a writer I associate very strongly with a place—small town Maryland. Did you know right away when you started writing fiction that this was what you wanted to write about, or did it take you time to find your subject matter?

HG: I actually did know right away that I wanted to write about small town Maryland and some of my first short stories took place in that setting. But I was so disappointed with my first efforts that I shied away from the material for a long time. I finally came back to it in my late twenties, after one of the women in my writing group observed that whenever I wrote descriptions of Maryland or Pennsylvania, my writing came to life. Around the same time, I edited a column, Dispatches, for the literary magazine, The Common, which has a particular focus on place. Editing those pieces—which ran the gamut from reported essays to personal essays to poetry—got me thinking about place again, and how to write about it.

SW: You say that editing this particular column helped you think through ideas about place. Does writing non-fiction—such as the reviews, criticism, and personal essays you write as a staff writer for The Millions—also help you explore or work out some of the ideas that you then go on to write about in your fiction?

HG: Yes, though when I’m really deep in a draft and making up a lot of stuff on a daily basis it’s a bit hard to switch back to nonfiction mode, where I have to be analytical. But when I get stuck, it helps to do come critical reading and writing. I read almost all of Andrew Solomon’s nonfiction while I was writing Home Field, because he writes so well about illness, depression, and parent-child relationships, subjects that all come up in my novel. When Solomon’s first (and only) novel, A Stone Boat, was reissued, I used it as a springboard to write about the relationship between his nonfiction and his fiction. I ended up doing a lot more research than I expected for that particular essay but I think it probably helped me think about my book. I was also drawn to some books that deal with trauma and/or mental illness and wrote about them for the site: Irritable Hearts by Mac McClelland, A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing by Eimar McBride, and Loitering, by Charles D’Ambrosio. But The Millions is also a place where I can take a break and write about books that I find interesting for other reasons.

SW: Have you been working on any new fiction? Would you care to describe your current project(s)?

HG: Yes, I’m working on another novel. It’s set in contemporary times and follows three women over several years as they navigate issues of friendship, work, love, marriage, money, motherhood, etc. I also have a couple of short stories on the back burner that I’d like to return to one day.

SW: Can you describe Home Field’s path to publication?

HG: Before I wrote Home Field, I put together a collection of short stories—the linked stories you mentioned earlier. Those stories are what led me to my agent, Emma Patterson. We tried to sell those stories and came close at a couple of places. Several editors said they might be interested if there was a novel attached. At that point I was already working on Home Field. I was also feeling really discouraged because it seemed like such a long shot to write a whole book in the hopes of selling a short story collection. When I finished Home Field, we sent it out to a small group of editors, mostly ones who were waiting on the novel or had asked to see more of my work. I got several rejections within a week or two. I was surprised by how quick those responses were, because as you probably know, when you send short stories to magazines, you wait for months for an answer. The early rejections hit me hard and I started to panic. But my agent remained calm and soon we had interest from Margaux Weisman at William Morrow, who really seemed to get the story. She suggested that I add some new scenes, and some of the scenes she suggested were ones I had written but left on the cutting room floor for fear of writing a book that was too long. Margaux was not among the editors who had previously read my stories—and I wonder if that worked in my favor because she didn’t come to my novel with any particular expectation—but it felt good to be in Margaux’s hands.

In retrospect, it was actually a pretty quick sale, but during those few weeks of waiting and early rejection, I was unbelievably anxious. It felt like my career was in the balance and I wasn’t sure how I would keep going after two book rejections. I’ve seen writers deal with this at all stages of their careers so I know it’s just part of the experience but it’s still tough. There is just no way to predict how editors will respond to a book and how you will feel about it.

SW: Can you describe your process and habits as a writer? Do aim for a certain number of words each day?

HG: For writing nonfiction, my process is pretty straightforward because it’s dictated by other people’s deadlines and expectations. Once I get an assignment, I will schedule time to work on it and sometimes, if I’m procrastinating, force myself to write a certain number of words. (Or I’ll procrastinate by working on a different nonfiction project.) I need a certain amount of outside pressure for nonfiction because otherwise I wouldn’t do it. Fiction is different. I would do it no matter what and don’t really need deadlines—which is not to say I don’t drag my feet! I do. But for fiction, deadlines and word counts don’t motivate me. Over the years I’ve found that I just need to make space for writing fiction and the stories will arrive. The first step is turning down nonfiction assignments or at least spacing them properly. The second is turning off the internet! Ideally I turn on Freedom and don’t go online until the afternoon, maybe an hour before I have to pick up my son from school. That gives me a chance to check in with email, blogs, news, etc. But when I’m really working hard on a draft, I try to schedule my time so that I go for a day or two without the internet or email. In general, I don’t do social media because it’s way too addictive for me. Even Instagram is a problem and lately I’ve been deleting it off my phone until the weekend.

The other thing that helps to make space for writing fiction is reading fiction. Recently, I’ve been scheduling an hour or two first thing in the morning, or after lunch. It felt decadent when I first started doing it but I’ve noticed that it calms my mind to an extraordinary degree, almost like meditation or taking a walk. The internet becomes less alluring because I get into a mellower headspace and it’s easier for me to shrug my shoulders and not give into temptation.

SW: What have you been reading lately?

HG: If you’ve been following my Proust Book Club on The Millions, you’ll know I’ve been working my way through In Search of Lost Time. Right now I’m just finishing up volume III, The Guermantes Way. I’m also reading Oliver Sacks’s memoir, On The Move. In addition, I’ve been hoarding books for an upcoming vacation: Barbarian Days by William Finnegan, Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler, and Light in August by William Faulkner. I’ll probably end up reading at least one title before vacation, because I can never wait, and then when I get to the beach I inevitably read something someone left behind in the beach house.

Fractured Heavens: A Review of Janice Lee's The Sky Isn't Blue

Many would argue that the main goal of literature, like most other forms of art, is to entertain. After all, we’re frequently so bogged down with the stresses and struggles of real life that we rely on these creative efforts to generate enriched escapism in which we become and interact with drastically dissimilar people in wildly different worlds. While that’s all well and good, perhaps a greater purpose of literature is to give meaning to those very same hardships, to allow us to explore our (and others’) deepest desires, fears, and confessions in the most eloquent and relatable ways possible. In her newest collection, The Sky Isn’t Blue, Janice Lee does just that, proffering a plethora of unrestrained revelations and reservations that evoke a sense of fragility, bravery, and honesty akin to Joni Mitchell’s Blue or Kaufman and Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Although it can feel a bit self-indulgently opaque and artsy at times, there’s no denying the beauty and weight Lee pours into each examination of her innermost being.

Lee (who, among many other things, is the Executive Editor of Entropy, where “earlier versions” of several of these works first appeared) views these pieces as essays, yet they often feel more like prose poems, written in paragraphs yet packed with dense, lyrical phrasing and stream-of-consciousness structure. Either way, there isn’t a wasted chapter in the lot, and the vast majority of them will leave you speechless with empathy, wonder, and introspection as you follow her investigations into the connections we make to each other, the cosmos, and even ourselves.

The opening section, which appears before the first official selection, gives a good impression of both the style and substance Lee aims for with The Sky Isn’t Blue:

In every manner of space, there is an intimate and crucial rivalry between open and close, between time and memory, between myself and yourself. The further we walk together, the further we walk in parallel, that distance between us that wavers, minuscule on some days, and incredibly vast on others, but always and certainly there, that distance persists.

The entire sky between us.

The entire sky between us.

Arguably the most prevalent and impactful subject Lee touches upon in her anthology is the death of her mother several years ago. She writes about and to her mother regularly, as if to exorcise unspoken views and hold onto a bond that, in some ways, is still very much there. In “Backpacking, Point Reyes, Driving,” for instance, she ponders how this loss has affected her entire history and outlook:

I look back and see my life divided up into three periods. First, the period before my mother’s death: a past that is difficult to remember, almost a daydream, figments of another life with mountain ranges that separate my current self from all else that dwells back there. Then, a period of flatness and depression: utterly content and comfortable yet without happiness or joy. Then a period after an intense heartbreak. The details are extraneous. What matters is that I have trouble remembering anything from past periods of my life. As if they happened in other lifetimes, or not at all.

Elsewhere, she scatters smaller fragments of the same mourning within other contexts, such as in “Los Angeles,” where whimsical ruminations about the city lead her to the following conclusion: “The confession isn’t the desire for death, though there is that too, but that you miss your mother… But in the light there is mother, there is that untraceable wound that began with birth.” These excerpts demonstrate one of the greatest feats of The Sky Isn’t Blue: Lee’s ability to represent the ways in which our cognition sometimes acts of its own accord, dispelling memories and emotions in the midst of seemingly isolated activities. In other words, we rarely have control over how our environment determines our thoughts and feelings, so all we can do is learn the embrace the randomness of it all.

Just as death sparks a myriad of responses, so too does mature [un]requited romance, and Lee does a fantastic job of capturing this as well. Interspersed throughout the sequence are confessions (directed at an unnamed lover) that are extraordinarily poignant, subtle, and gorgeous. In “Tide Pools & Rain”, she expresses a need for that kind of intimacy again, both physically and emotionally. In doing so, she pinpoints a precise kind of longing known to anyone who’s ever loved and lost:

I think of a touch, fingertips along the small of my back, fingertips running parallel along my spine to reach my shoulders, my neck, my face. I think, fuck, I miss that. I miss that. I miss a feeling, a certain feeling, a feeling of saying I love you. I miss saying I love you more than anything in the world.

Similarly, “Spaces in Transition” begins with a reaction to how our partners begin as nothing and become all-encompassing:

The mornings in bed when you turn over to see someone there, a sleeping body you barely recognize. Who is this person lying next to you and what is this overwhelming feeling you have? For a moment you don’t recognize this person who has somehow managed to infiltrate your life so seamlessly. Three months ago they didn’t even exist. Today, they have taken over everything, become everything, are everything.

“Tide Pools & Rain” also finds her commenting with brilliant simplicity on the necessity of confessional writing while also addressing the aforementioned sole detriment to The Sky Isn’t Blue (that the fancifulness of its language sometimes impedes its messages): “To miss feelings and the feelings of saying certain words. Because words matter. Because word can never match the complexity of what is felt but words are the only approximation we have.” Here, Lee acknowledges that emotions are often too complex and intangible to represent accurately and completely; rather, the most we can do (which she does) is signify them within creative outpourings.

Even at its most abstract and impenetrable moments, though, Lee’s devastating truths about what it means to be alive still pierce through. It’s often said that ignorance is bliss, yet how many artists really delve into the inverse relationship: that creative and critical thinking is torturous, for the more we question ourselves, others, and the skies that surround us, the more we allow existential crises to disappoint and scare us. Alas, it’s all a part of the human condition, and Lee’s The Sky Isn’t Blue does a tremendous job of letting us know that no matter how we feel or what we think, we’re not alone.

The Glorious Feeling of Freedom: On Elizabeth Atkinson's The Island of Beyond

I grew up in New York City but spent every summer in Maine, where the rules were entirely different—regardless of your age. My mother fed us breakfast and then ushered us out the door for the day. “Don’t forget your sailing lesson,” she’d say. “Stop at your grandparents’ if you’re hungry,” she’d add. We walked our bikes from behind the shed down to the street and took off. There was no slathering of sunscreen, hats, or even bike helmets. We were free for the whole entire day. We rode down to the back shore and tiptoed in the cold water looking for fish, snails, and cool rocks to put in our pocket and rub during the day. Then we’d head around the bend and fire down the hill whooping and hollering from the speed, hang a left onto Court Street and pull up in front of the library. We’d lie on the cold marble floor when it was hot outside and read through the shelves. If we were hungry, we’d leave the library and cross the green to my grandparents’ house where hot dogs cooked in lots of butter were handed to us. My grandmother would be watching Days of Our Lives and drinking a lunchtime martini, paying us no mind at all. Later, we’d head back out to see what frogs we could find in the gullies on the sides of the road. No one monitored what we did. If we got hurt, we shrugged it off or howled into the wind and kept on going.

Elizabeth Atkinson’s The Island of Beyond brought me right back to that glorious feeling of freedom. Eleven-year-old Martin has been sent to spend the summer in Maine with some distant relatives he’s never met. He is appalled at this parental move. Martin has been an outsider for most of his life. He doesn’t even have the comfort of parents who understand him, so he has very low expectations for what this summer in Maine will bring. Instead of judgment though, it brings freedom and a new friend who likes him for who he is. I was riveted by this book. I didn’t want to put it down for fear of losing time spent with Martin.

When Martin first meets Solo, he is appalled by Solo’s penchant for breaking the rules. Martin likes rules and if the world becomes confusing, he soothes himself by working on the miniature town he has created for himself called Martinville. But Solo stealthily shimmies into Martin’s life. He arrives at Martin’s house regularly, getting Martin to come with him on island adventures. Together they explore the water, treehouses, and the value of acceptance. Solo insists that he has lots of wild friends waiting for him all the time, but whenever Martin is around none of the friends show up. Instead of wondering if they are even actual friends (they aren’t), Martin believes that they just don’t want to meet him. Martin always thinks the best of others and the worst of himself. His father has fostered this negative self-concept in Martin, but he’s able to begin to see his own worth on the island.

In addition to Martin’s new friendship with Solo, another relationship unfolds during this summer month on the island. Martin gets to know his Aunt Lenore, who owns the beautiful old house they are living in. Lenore appears to be senile, but after she and Martin have spent some time together, she reveals that she is only pretending in order to see how people would treat her if she really was. Martin finds this very funny. Lenore tells Martin something he has never heard before: he is special, and he has a sense of joie de vivre that his father never had. As Martin comes to realize that Lenore sees his father the same way he does, he begins to trust his own instincts. These two relationships change Martin and his conception of himself.

Throughout the book, Atkinson nods to Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven,” from Lenore’s name to her pet raven, Poe. The symbolic significance of her raven stands as the embodiment of grief caused by loneliness and separation. For Martin, Lenore’s raven shows up whenever he is at his loneliest; once he is able to move through his grief, he finally sees his own strength and independence.

Martin is endearing, frustrating, and constantly evolving, which—as an adult reader—lends itself to personal introspection around how we develop into who we are and how just one month can change us forever. As I read The Island of Beyond, I wondered how other people develop their own fortitude, world perspective, and sense of place. Everyone may not be able to head to Maine for a summer of freedom and evolution, but we can all go there in a book called The Island of Beyond.

Punk Rock Precision: An Interview with Lavinia Ludlow

Lavinia Ludlow is a breath of fresh air. Her writing often mirrors the punk rock she likes so much; rough around the edges, frustrated, fully human, and full of heart, speaking to the experience of people who have every reason to give up on themselves—poverty, drugs, toxic relationships, uncaring parents—and yet never do. Her second novel, Single Stroke Seven, came out in April 2016, and follows a literally-starving artist/musician named Lilith (or Lil) as she tries to make music and a living as a low-income resident of the notoriously expensive Bay Area.

Lilith plays drums for a couple of different bands, none of whom are terribly functional, and her relationships with her mother, her various bandmates, and her sort-of-boyfriend Duncan are acrimonious at best. Her job isn’t much better, offering crappy wages and an abusive atmosphere that leaves her with no respite from her other problems, nor the energy to do much about them.

Lavinia’s writing isn’t as clean or poetic as a lot of contemporary small press work, and the language is a great deal more exaggerated, but that’s what I like about it; it’s messy and weird and fun, cathartic in its own way, and never loses momentum or the reader’s attention. Single Stroke Seven, like much of Lavinia’s work, is a welcome antidote to the modern cult-of-the-perfect-sentence style that, for all its precision, can be kind of bloodless sometimes.

Plus, Joan’s Town (a riot grrl band that Lilith plays drums for) is an awesome band name and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone steals it.

I had a chance to chat with Lavinia via email about her book and its complimentary relationship to her first novel, alt.punk, and she is as smart and generous with her answers as ever.

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Dave K.: The economy is one of this book’s main characters, and is as present in the story as Lilith and her bandmates. What led you to make this choice? What impact do you want it to have on the reader?

Lavinia Ludlow: The Bay Area is notably booming with tech-fueled affluence, but such glory is within reach of a select few. The rest of us are losing the battle against the escalating cost of living, rampant gentrification, and mass evictions. Throw in lack of access to basic necessities such as healthy food and medical care, and the masses are left treading water against a brutal economic current.

Over the decades, I’ve personally experienced, and witnessed my friends, family, and local community fight to survive in this financial climate. Setting Single Stroke Seven in the heart of the Silicon Valley, there was no way to prevent this economic backdrop from taking center stage. I used the resulting challenges as a literary tool, to deepen the notion of the “starving musician,” while simultaneously presenting the reader with a realistic image of the San Francisco tech scene. I hope this makes people question where their smart phone, social media application, or other notable tech gadget was designed and engineered, and what the industry’s hyper growth is doing to Northern California’s local economy, culture, and people.

DK: How should modern fiction, literary or otherwise, consider poverty?

LL: The stress, adversity, and humiliation associated with living (behind) paycheck-to-paycheck, teetering on the the cusp of eviction because one can’t make rent, on the brink of termination because of obligations outside of work, or on the edge of emergency hospitalization because one can’t afford a doctor irreparably fucks with a person. Consistently snared in “survival mode” should shape character personality, outlook, and interactions with the world.

Contemporary fiction should also view the problem as existing beyond just an adjective, beyond the petty and superficial examples such as, “maybe we can’t take that tropical vacation” or “this restaurant is expensive, next time let’s Yelp a 2-dollar sign business.” There’s also the greater issue of diversity in literature, where voices of the working class aren’t as prevalent for one reason or another, which warrants a larger discussion…

DK: The book’s observations of Lil’s local music scene (and the politics/conflicting personalities therein) are very specific – were they informed by research, personal experience, or a mix of both?

LL: Personal experience. For years, I vividly recall being in bands with multiple alpha personalities and their inflated egos. We spent more time arguing over style, image, to the equipment we should be using than we did rehearsing. I remember being a part of a scene that was also very indie-elitist, and everyone was so focused on calling each other out for not being hardcore enough, not suffering enough, not listening to the right avant-garde band. It was a senseless, hypocritical rodeo, and no one ever won, not even in their own game. I wanted to highlight this conflict in a humorous and ironic manner because it is often a plague in an artistic scene.

DK: The dialogue in this book is a mix of the hyperspeed pop culture references you’d hear in Kevin Smith films and the drunken, boasting witticism of Withnail & I. My take is that it reflects their economic circumstances; for all their education and bluster, there’s no clear path for any of them to establish themselves, and that poverty can happen to anyone, even people who grew up being told they deserved better. Would you say that’s accurate?

LL: None of the main characters grew up being told that they deserved better, but they exhibit signs of Generation Y’s raging sense of entitlement, and they were also raised middle class and college-bound, so there’s that unspoken pressure (especially in the Silicon Valley), to amount to something great. Like many millennials, come graduation day, they found it difficult if not impossible to find meaningful work, and if they did, they couldn’t hang onto their jobs in the throes of the economic collapse and recession (yes, it hit the Valley too).

For the last decade, these characters haven’t had the bandwidth to worry about anything other than keeping themselves fed, housed, and healthy, and as late twenty-somethings, early thirty-somethings, they can’t help but wonder where it is they’ve gone wrong. At the end of a brutal day at the factory, in food or janitorial servicing, they come home with displaced rage that they direct at each other. When there’s no energy or patience left to work out a smarter or more thoughtful solution to the issues at hand, the default is to bitch and moan, and blame each other.

DK: In both this book and alt.punk, the protagonists have cruel, emotionally distant mothers. Was this by design? What aspect of mother/daughter relationships is being explored here? And, to paraphrase a question posed by John Waters, can bad parents produce exceptional/resilient children?

LL: Thematically, I wrote alt.punk and Single Stroke Seven as polar opposite tales meant to complement each other. Here are two different protagonists beginning their journeys on opposite ends of the spectrum: Hazel starving to break free of her mundane job and life to pursue her art, and Lilith killing herself in her job and life to support her art. Their upbringings were very similar, both raised by ice queens in the Bay Area’s middle class suburbs, and they end their journeys somewhere in the middle, realizing that the feat of living life and pursuing art should never be an “all or nothing” quest.

Neither protagonists in these books are exceptional citizens or model examples of emotional intelligence, but both are independent, bold, and resilient women who play the hands they were dealt with the best of their abilities, always seeking to contribute positively to society and culture versus any decay.

DK: Your fiction spares no unpleasant details, in the sense that there’s a lot of blood, snot, and other bodily fluids/functions in it. In that sense, your characters are often seen at their most human. What draws you as a writer to these details, and what do you want them to reveal about your characters?

LL: As readers, we have only our eyeballs to interact with a book, but as humans, we experience the world with four other senses. I seek to liven characters and scenes with details many other writers gloss over, and to ultimately create a stronger reading experience.

Life is messy. The human body is disgusting. The world is crawling with organic matter and microorganisms that “go bump” in the night (or under microscope). I craft characters and scenes to align with the reality of our everyday world. Too often, contemporary writing, especially fiction, is effortlessly and unrealistically clean. We are not androids floating through a stainless steel vacuum. We ooze, sweat, bleed, and the world throws it back at us with equal prejudice.

Single Stroke Seven features Lilith, a tough-as-nails female drummer, who grew up with an all-male cast, and she turned out unapologetically tougher and more badass than her counterparts (my intent was to write her opposite of alt.punk’s germ-fearing Hazel, again, as a complement). Lilith is going to eat off the ground (or out of the dumpster), she is going to let wounds bleed, and she won’t let grit and grime deter her from getting the (or any) job done so long as it supports her end goal of musical success. Whether she succeeds or not, her glory and notoriety shine through in her perseverance, her ability to not take any crap, and if she does, she never allows it to deter or distract from her vision of becoming a rock star.

*

Many thanks to Lavinia for her time, her insights, and her great work. Keep up with her (if you can) via her website, and pick up a copy of Single Stroke Seven directly from the publisher, Casperian Books.

Annie Bell's Dust Bowl: I Will Send Rain

The Dust Bowl is one of those time periods in history I’ve heard about often enough that I feel like I know it, only to stop for a moment and realize I don’t. Upon reflection, I realize my knowledge doesn’t extend beyond the bounds of The Grapes of Wrath, a few old photographs I’ve seen, and countless mentions of the words “Dust Bowl.” And really, I don’t even get much of picture of the Dust Bowl itself even from The Grapes of Wrath. That novel begins with the devastation already in place, the main thrust then being the struggle for a new place in the world upon leaving all that behind. I Will Send Rainhowever, Rae Meadows newest novel, provides a wonderfully detailed picture of people actually trying to live within the Dust Bowl:

Birdie loved the musty, sweet fruit and larded crust of mulberry pie. Before she turned toward the house, though, she saw what her father now saw. The clouds were not gathering overhead as they should have been, they were instead moving at them like a wall, the sun lost in a hazy scrim, the winds picking up, dry and popping with electricity, biting and raw against her skin.

“What in God’s name?” Her father squinted against the darkening sky, which turned brownish and then dark gray, even green in places where the sun was trying to burn through. It was midday but it looked like dusk, the sweep of an otherworldly hand….

“Fred!” he yelled, though it was pointless given the wind. Dirt began to blow. The world had gone dark and haywire. Dear God, Samuel thought, what is this ugliness?

Annie Bell and her husband try to protect their family and provide as the dust storms ravage their farm. Her husband dreams of tremendous floods and begins to build a boat, feeling called by God. Her daughter pines both to get away and for her boyfriend from a nearby farm. Annie’s son, an asthmatic, simply tries to keep breathing amidst the worsening dust. Facing heavier and heavier burdens in an already difficult life, Annie finds herself increasingly attracted to the cosmopolitan mayor despite still strongly loving her husband and family:

“Oh. Hello, Mayor,” she said, registering how quickly he had managed to make it out to the sidewalk, She wished she’d had a chance to blot her face with a handkerchief….

“Nothing wrong with a parade,” she said. She should have kept going then, but there she stood, a tension between them both awful and delicious. “You can call me Annie.”

“Can I carry that for you? Help you to your car?”

No one who saw them would have thought anything of it, and yet Annie knew different. What could people see anyway? They couldn’t see the weight of a glance or the impurity of a thought. They were in plain view, but the town might just have easily fallen away. “No, no. I’m all right,” she said. But she didn’t move on….

“The truth is I didn’t want to go home just yet.” She felt lighter having said it, a new hollow in her gut.

“Can I walk with you? I’m in no rush to get back to my desk.”

She was pleased, but she knew it was not quite right for him to ask. Are you doing good by God, Annie, she heard her mother say before she could quiet the voice.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay, Annie,” he said. “And you can call me Jack.”

Meadows paints this picture of the tense and ravaged farming landscape in unadorned, straightforward prose. At the same time, a good amount of beauty and warmth manage to come forth. There is suffering, people bearing more than they can because there is no choice, being pulled between many different kinds of needs, but there is an overwhelming sense of home within it. Maybe some of that is my childhood in Nebraska calling to me, but that isn’t it entirely. There’s definitely more. Of course, that sense of home breeds a great deal of tension in the face of almost ever-present possible doom. Wonderfully tuned suspense keeps the pages continually turning.

I Will Send Rain is delightfully vivid, both in the setting and the windows into the characters. The reader can taste the dust, and the longing in the characters’ mouths. I didn’t feel that I was reading as much as watching, and that kind of dive into prose always speaks highly for a novel. I Will Send Rain is an impressive showing from Meadows, well worth checking out.

It Begins with a Very Simple Incident: A Review of David S. Atkinson's Not Quite So Stories

One of the most common questions in the world of fiction is, “Which form is superior: the novel or the short story?” (That is, if one extreme must be taken over the other. The novella is usually a suitable compromise.) While it’s impossible to pick one over the other with complete objectivity, there is one important factor to consider: the latter typically allows storytellers to unleash their most unconventional concepts with maximum brevity and pacing, ensuring that these peculiarities leave an impression but conclude before they become laborious or unremarkable. Case in point: Not Quite So Stories, the newest collection by David S. Atkinson (whose previous two books, Bones Buried in the Dirt and The Garden of Good and Evil Pancakes, were copiously acclaimed within the indie publishing scene). Comprised of roughly two dozen quirky vignettes, the book proffers an abundance of colorful slice-of-life situations and philosophical ponderings. Although there are a few stumbles along the way, the bulk of the sequence is highly engaging and memorable, making it a very worthwhile read.

Aside from alluding to Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, the title Not Quite So Storiesprepares readers for what’s inside: a chain of eccentricities. Atkinson describes it as follows:

The traditional explanation for myth . . .  is an attempt by humans to explain and demystify the world. That’s crap. We may be able to come to terms with small pieces, but existence as a whole is beyond our grasp. Life is absurd, ultimately beyond our comprehension. The best we can do is to proceed on with our lives in the face of that. The stories in this collection proceed from this idea, examining how the different characters manage (and/or fail) to do this.

The majority of the tales included here capture this outlook, with the best examination being “An Endless Series of Meaningless Miracles.” It begins with a very simple incident: one day, “aging [and] pudgy” William P. Forsmythe (who feels a bit like an elderly version of Alvy Singer from Woody Allen’s brilliant Annie Hall) gets into his bathtub for his daily soak and notices that the water level sinks instead of rises. Relentlessly perplexed by how “the tub water had acted contrary to universal laws [of displacement],” he sets out to experience a few more acts of God in a single day and discover a new purpose in life. Despite the pacing sometimes getting bogged down by clarifications as the narrative unfolds (which, to be honest, is a reoccurring issue throughout the collection), the text is nonetheless consistently intriguing and inventive, with a plethora of subtle details that make it feel very realistic. After all, “it did not occur to Warren that the miracle was utterly insignificant, however inexplicable it was. Warren’s life was too insignificant as it was; he craved significance,” and the way Atkinson uses his character’s trajectory to comment on humanity’s need for self-actualization (as well as how easily we ascribe to fantastical beliefs to assuage our sense of desperation and loneliness) is understated yet masterful. It’s definitely a highlight of Not Quite So Stories.

Another metaphysical gem is “The Bricklayer’s Ambiguous Morality,” which concerns an inexplicable accident involving two friends, a brick, and causality. While its surreal events may suggest mere superficial entertainment at first, there’s definitely an underlying commentary on how misguided gun enthusiasm can conflate with misplaced senses of patriotism and masculinity. Atkinson demonstrates skill in capturing the conversations and reactions of conventional adolescent males, and the way he puts a spin on the familiar condition of two kids goofing around until something horrible happens is clever and refreshing. In other words, the catalyst for the tragedy may be purposefully silly, but its implications are strikingly relevant to modern America.

Among the peak creative concoctions in Not Quite So Stories is “60% Rayon and 40% Evil,” a fascinating and novel take on the killer doll cliché. Told from the perspective of a “five-inch stuffed bear” who “fully acknowledge[s] that [he has] a desire for murder,” the story is remarkable because of how the barbaric and remorseless actions of its protagonist are juxtaposed with his intellectual rationalizations. Rather than act as a soulless, bloodthirsty creature from hell (as is usual), Mr. Rictus (as his owner, Tristan, names him) is a product of his own backstory; Tristan pretends that the bear is a homicidal maniac, and, as Mr. Rictus suggests:

However, strangely enough, and according to no mechanism that I at all comprehended, it all became true. In fits and spurts, I found myself becoming aware . . . . After all, it was a game, a theatrical trick, which Tristan had developed. The intent would have been spoiled if it had to be suddenly acknowledged as fact. One of the core features of Tristan’s fiction was that I killed when no one, particularly him, was looking, so that is exactly what I did.

From there, the two develop a relationship akin to the one explored in the Twilight Zoneepisode “Caesar and Me.” The way the piece ends isn’t entirely surprisingly, yet there’s no doubt that its final line—“Colloquially put, you people blow my mind. Perhaps that is one of the reasons I kill so many of you”—is chilling.

Filling its hyperbolic central conflict with practical insinuations, “Domestic Ties” feels a bit like a lost Vonnegut effort. It centers on Charlotte, an archetypal 1950s-esque housewife (her husband is even named Ward) who’s preparing her home for the impending arrival of a prisoner. You see, a jury notice:

notified that the state would be requisitioning the use of her home for the purpose of providing shelter to a convict. The prisons were impossibly overcrowded, the letter informed. Unable to determine any other immediate solution, the state had no choice but to place prisoners in private residences.

Once he arrives (and is confined to a small space in her kitchen), the two engage in various instances of uncomfortable cultural shock, as Charlotte is dutifully respectful yet cautious because the prisoner is both incredibly meek and inherently threatening. All in all, it’s a very engaging and tastefully written tale, with a conclusion that, while not overly dramatic or substantial, makes readers question the nature of Man.

Although most of the book is wonderfully captivating and idiosyncratic, there are a few missteps along the way. The most glaring issue (aside from the aforementioned repetitiveness) is that some of these selections fail to warrant their length. In other words, either the premises themselves aren’t appealing enough or not enough happens within them. Works like “G-Men,” “Cents of Wonder Rhymes with Orange,” and “The Elusive Qualities of Advanced Office Equipment” are certainly written well, but they aren’t especially compelling; instead, they just kind of happen without leaving much to reflect on or remember. The biggest offender of all is “A Brief Account of the Great Toilet Paper War of 2012,” a lengthy exploration of how a simple marital squabble over pride escalates into ridiculous territory. The issue at hand is certainly relatable, and even a bit humorous, but the joke wears out its welcome far too soon, resulting in a tedious slog to the end. Empirical resonance notwithstanding, even people who’ve been in the same situation before will want to move on ASAP.

Not Quite So Stories succeeds far more often than it fails, and honestly, isn’t that the real test of a short story collection? None of the pieces are without merit, and the bulk of them provide resourceful plots, three-dimensional characters, and best of all, enthralling writing on a technical level. Atkinson has a gift for fleshing out strange narrative shells with dense minutiae, articulate wording, and weighty meanings. He certainly has a distinctive perspective on life, as well as an equally original way to deliver it; anyone looking to be simultaneously entertained and enlightened should read Not Quite So Stories.