Dead Aquarium: An Interview with Caleb Michael Sarvis

Caleb Michael Sarvis’s forthcoming Dead Aquarium is a collection of twelve short stories and a novella that Tom McAllister described as being “full of people living in the in-between spaces, downtrodden people at their lowest points who are still trying to do their best. . . . Though the stories are melancholy, they are also funny and hopeful, and you can’t help but root for these damaged characters to put it all together, or at least put something together. In Dead Aquarium, Caleb Michael Sarvis has written a collection that is thoughtful, inventive, smart, and a little bit weird, in the best possible way.”

Sarvis’s writing has appeared in Barrelhouse, Flock, Hobart, Split Lip Magazine, and various other journals. In addition to writing, he’s the managing editor for Bridge Eight Press and the co-host of the Drunken Book Review podcast.

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Michelle Ross: At the beginning of the story “Goose Island,” the protagonist tells us that his sister, an aspiring doctor, “ loved how [chemo] made you suffer before you recovered.”  That line really struck me. One, because it’s an interesting, and rather alarming, characteristic in a would-be doctor, but also, two, because it kind of resonates with the book as a whole. That is, your characters do a lot of suffering in this book. So I wonder: is there a way in which you like to write about suffering? Grief? Is there joy in that somehow? Or are you compelled to write about suffering for other reasons, e.g., as a necessary step toward recovery?

Caleb Michael Sarvis: I do tend to gravitate towards suffering in a way. I’m very mean to my characters, and it may just be a matter of feeling in the general sense. When I think about happiness, and this idea of joy, it seems really static. Writing for me is that pursuit of happiness, and to pursue something means you don’t have it yet. So I guess I’m mean to my characters because I want them to move. I want them to pursue something.

MR: Another line that particularly resonated with me and with your book as a whole comes from “Unfaded Black:” “Growing up was learning what was worth saying.” Many of these characters are young adults grappling with growing up, coming into themselves, as we all do. What draws you to writing about this age group, this time of life?  

CMS: I’m all about people figuring themselves out, because I’m not sure what the fuck I’m doing, and I’m still a sucker for a good existential quest in a way. Writing for me is discovery. It’s almost scientific, in that I’m just curious to see what happens. I think young adults, and those on the cusp of growing up, are more susceptible to chaos, which is an important element for me as a writer.

MR: There are a lot of dead fathers and other dead loved ones, and dead animals, too, in Dead Aquarium. Hence the title? How do you see the book’s title as speaking to all of the stories in this collection?

CMS: The original title of this book was Looney Purgatory, because I was really into the idea of a cartoon-like immediacy mixing with a sense of suspended displacement. But after a while, Looney Purgatory just started to feel like a mouthful. I settled on Dead Aquarium because yeah, there’s a lot of death in here, but I also wanted to stick with the idea of suspension. I couldn’t stop thinking about what it meant to tread water in a large tank that may or not may be full of dead things.

MR: I read that you’re from Florida, Jacksonville specifically. Certainly Florida is very present in this book. Have you lived in Florida all your life? How would you describe your work’s relationship to Florida?   

CMS: I moved to Jacksonville when I was nine after my parent’s divorce. I’d just spent the last six years living in Spain, and the first thing I noticed about Florida was that it stayed hot after the sun went down. That was so bizarre to me, and growing up, I continued to have experiences like that, where I would kind of just ask myself, “What is this place?” You start to realize what’s normal for Floridians is absurd to outsiders, and it just became natural fodder for my work. Need a story idea? Just walk outside, something will try to kill you or eat you, and then you will write.

MR: This description sounds so much like Tucson, Arizona, where I’ve lived for the past 13 years. I find the environment endlessly fascinating and inspiring and have written quite a few stories set in the desert. At the same time, I’m drawn to writing about the swampy Gulf Coast of Texas, where I grew up. Do you ever write about Spain? Or are there ways in which Spain or other places inspire your work in less direct ways?

CMS: It’s funny, but I don’t write about Spain, but maybe because we lived on the base and it didn’t feel all that different than America. I have a lot of personal anecdotes (catching scorpions in shoe boxes, breaking into empty homes), that I use for other things. I was born in Maryland, just outside DC, and my dad lives there now. I think my fondness for that area shows up more than anything else.

MR: Another element that shows up several times in this book is comics. For instance, the protagonist in “Goose Island” write a comic strip. The protagonist in “Scoop Carry Dump Repeat,” bonds with his deceased father over Calvin and Hobbes. Are you a big comics fan? What relationship, if any, do you see between comics and writing fiction?

CMS: I wouldn’t call myself a comics fan. Just a huge Calvin and Hobbes fan. I’m working on essays / a book about this now, but I contribute a lot of my writing style and success to Calvin and Hobbes. I think the shape of a daily strip (four panels, minimal detail, punchy dialogue) is a perfect model for a short story. In his essay “On Writing,” Raymond Carver says, “Get in, get out, don’t linger,” which is exactly what Bill Watterson does in Calvin and Hobbes.

MR: It’s interesting that you say this because, on the other hand, within your short fiction you do linger in a way. You allow your characters to brood some. One certainly wouldn’t accuse you of being a writer who doesn’t go deep. This brings me back to that line, “Growing up was learning what was worth saying.” Maybe while short stories must have a certain economy, at the same time, they must linger when it’s worth lingering?

CMS: I definitely agree with this. It kind of goes back to this whole treading water thing, right? I don’t want my characters to swim from one side to the other. That’s not quite enough. I want them to feel the water a bit, struggle along the way, give them opportunities to run out of breath.

MR: There’s quite a bit of range here in terms of genre. Many stories are rather straight-up realism. Others are more fabulist. Do you think much about genre when you set out to write? Did you think about it much in collecting these stories?

CMS: I’m sort of a sponge when I read, and a lot of the time, the stuff I write has a direct relationship with whatever I’ve just read. So I don’t have it in my head that I’m going to pursue any sort of genre or style when I write, I just kind of follow the rhythm of whatever I’m feeling that day. In “Terra,” when a man crawls out of the tree hole, I remember exactly where I was when I made that decision. I kind of just let the story be the story.

MR: Do you often remember where you were or what you were doing when the ideas for particular stories come into being?

CMS: In a way, for sure. I always know where I was when I started a story. “The Matter of Dust” was written in a Mellow Mushroom. “Vertical Leapland” was started while I was proctoring the PSAT. “Gastropod” was written in my garage after Hurricane Irma had blown through.

MR: Another way your book demonstrates range is in story length. You’ve got a little bit of everything here—traditional short stories, flash fiction, and a novella. How did you decide to put these particular stories together? Were there particular challenges involved in collecting pieces of different lengths together into one collection?

CMS: Again, I think these are all just products of wanting to emulate and write things that were similar to the things I liked to read. This idea of combining stories and a novella came about because I’d just read CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders and Maybe Mermaids and Robots are Lonely by Matt Fogarty. Both of those reinforced this idea that the novella shouldn’t begin or end the book, but rather, exist somewhere halfway. Once I figured that out, shaping the rest of the collection was easy.

MR: I’m always interested in hearing writers’ thoughts about ordering the stories in their collections. Your book is divided into four sections: Mundane, Supra-Terrestrial, (Loon)acy, and Sublime. Would you talk about how you came around to this structure and why you chose it?

CMS: Originally, I opened the collection with “Bad Zeitgeist” because it’s the kind of flash story I think punches the reader in the mouth and prepares them for what’s next. But an editor who rejected an early version of the book made a comment about “the stories not building off one another” and that really made me think. So I printed all the stories out and organized them in piles based on which stories “belonged” together. I realized I had my “realist” stories, my “absurd” stories, and those that were somewhere on the spectrum. Then I became really interested in this idea of a slow descent in absurdity. So my “realist” stories open the book, but as you continue on, the hope is that the reader feels like they are slowly sinking into the abyss of my own literary fuckery. The only story that might be out of place is the last one, because it’s actually kind of a peaceful read, but it felt necessary to close the collection that way.

MR: I love this description of your book as a slow descent into absurdity. This arc calls to mind Ben Marcus’s Leaving the Sea, a collection which also moves from more familiar, realistic stories to stranger, less familiar worlds as it progresses. Have you read it?

CMS: I have not, but I will definitely put it on the list. I think collections need an arc of some sort. I want to finish a book and have an immediate impression, and I think the right sequence of stories (like a mixtape) can do that really well.

MR: How long was this book in the making? 

CMS: About three years, I’d say. Most of these were written in grad school, which could be why there’s so much range. “Scoop Carry Dump Repeat” was the first of these stories to be written but was probably the last one to be “finished.”

MR: Several of the protagonists in these stories are female and Xavier in the novella is black. What are your thoughts on writing from the point of view of characters whose experiences may be rather different from yours?

CMS: I just had these characters I was desperate to exist, and it wasn’t like I could tap on another writer’s shoulder (whether they be a woman or black), and say, “Hey, will you write this for me?” Xavier had been hanging with me for a while, and I ended up pursuing his story because I thought he was really interesting and hell, no one else was going to write him, specifically. Same thing with Taylor in “Vertical Leapland.” I just loved her, but until I wrote her, she wouldn’t exist. And once I did, they felt like real people I’m happy to have in my life.

MR: Do you have a favorite story here? Or one that is dearer to you for whatever reason?

CMS: I go back and forth. I’m so proud of the novella, because I managed to actually write one after struggling with long-form narrative for so long, and there are aspects of it I am so happy to have written (Sebastian the T-Rex or the Salamander, a superhero who is not the least bit super or hero). But “Terra” is probably the go-to. It’s my favorite to read out loud. I think it’s the story that mostly encapsulates who I am as a writer.

MR: In closing, what particular writers and/or books do you feel inspired or helped shape these individual stories or this book as a whole?

CMS: This would be a long list if I really got into it, but I did read a lot of Florida work while working on this. The Heaven of Animals by David James Poissant, Felt in the Jaw by Kristen Arnett, Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, Ovenman by Jeff Parker. When I look back at some of my book, I can see the moment where I was reading the above work. Then there were the sort of research-style reads, where I was trying to figure out a George Saunders sentence, Jason Ockert’s voice, and Amy Hempel’s sense of emotional destruction. But yeah, the list could go on and on.

The Love of an Old Friend: Remembering Monica A. Hand

“Who are you?” Monica Hand asked me, the first time we finally got the nerve to speak to each other. Columbia, Missouri is small, and the literary community is tiny. As an undergrad, I’d go to poetry readings, open mics, and author craft talks. I was just as much of a book nerd as anyone else attending those events, but I was ignored in those places. Too young and maybe too black to be taken seriously by the older white crowds. I was shy, awkward, and sometimes too eager to run home to my fast-food leftovers to stick around and mingle with crowds that would rather look me up and down with their noses upturned than chat with me.

“Who are you?” she asked. “You’re everywhere.”

“Yeah, I see you all the time too,” I said. “I’m an English major.”

“And I teach here.”

Our conversation was brief, but since then, if we saw each other at literary events, we would exchange simple head nods or smiles in acknowledgement of each other. She saw me and I saw her: black women navigating white spaces to participate in the thing we loved—literature.

To be a black woman in America is to be the owner of many masks. I wear a diluted mask when I’m in places where I’m the minority: at work, shopping downtown, at literary events, and the like. It’s the mask I wear when I’m hyper aware of the space I take up. The mask I wear in order to survive. A mask Hand spotted from across the room and chose to approach with warmth.

About a year or so after our official introduction, Hand passed away. Her death was abrupt, causing Columbia to, at least for a while, pause and lament our friend, our teacher, our pair of fingers snapping for us at open mics. Things eventually picked up again, as life after another’s death tends to do, and I went back to my craft talks and author readings. Only then, without her familiar face smiling, or nodding, or simply affirming my presence there.

Hand gave us a final gift: just one week before she passed, she signed the contract for her second poetry collection DiVida to be published by Alice James Books. In DiVida, Hand addresses the idea of navigating white society. An idea we both knew all too well in Columbia and an idea every Person of Color must come to terms with in America. Hand explores this navigation as it relates specifically to black women with the help of two characters: DiVida, who wants to assimilate into white society; and her subconscious Sapphire, who doesn’t want to sacrifice her true self to appease others. Hand states that housing these multiple personas, these multiple masks, “masks the madhouse.” To be able to break oneself apart, to bend, mold, flex, and sometimes even break oneself into different masks to simply survive in a world that has only one view of you can cause craziness.

Sapphire attempts to save DiVida from this madness. Early in the collection, in “DiVida becomes Captain of the Lacrosse Team,” DiVida refuses to deny herself the love of Lacrosse, even if she may be the only black person on the team. Sapphire asks “Why you wanna play with people who want to slave you?” Throughout the book, Sapphire continues to argue that black women shouldn’t bounce between masks and be their full, unapologetic selves at all times, regardless of how uncomfortable it will make white society. In DiVida, we explore DiVida and Sapphire’s opposing positions and Hand forces us to grapple with the space that exists between the two.

With every move DiVida makes, Sapphire is in her ear, criticizing DiVida when she censors herself to tackle everything from getting pulled over by a police officer to chatting at a work event. Hand creates Sapphire’s warnings with a cadence that feels like they’re coming from the love of an old friend. These warnings serve as reprimands to DiVida for even wanting to survive a life amongst those who, she feels, want nothing to do with her. Sapphire speaks like an elder who has seen this play out in the lives of other black women before and she attempts to end the cycle here, with DiVida, on the page.

At times, DiVida’s voice wavers and cracks under both society’s and Sapphire’s pressure: in “DiVida submits to her Duende” we see DiVida reach a breaking point. Tired of succumbing to society, she allows herself to escape:

“she let loose the boogeyman / unchained the monkey on her back / Sapphire sucker-punches her in the gut / just to be sure / there is blood / there are tears…”

Hand captures the internal struggle of black womanhood in America through DiVida and Sapphire’s ongoing conflict. She leaves her readers to ask how much of DiVida’s actions are performative and just her being her true self. She then forcers us as readers to question our performative and actual selves—our unique masks—as we navigate our own spaces in society.

Shelf Life of Happiness: An Interview with Virginia Pye

It’s rare to open a book, read any given page, and find oneself utterly absorbed. But that’s precisely what happened to me as I read Virginia Pye’s marvelous new collection of stories, Shelf Life of Happiness. With supple prose and truly immersive worlds, I found myself neglecting the dishes, my ringing phone, and refusing to turn off the lamp and get to sleep. Pye’s book simply had more meaning and urgency than any of those things.

I met Pye as a fellow writer in Boston, where we met at numerous readings, events, and gatherings hosted by GrubStreet, an independent writing center. She immediately struck me as sharp-eyed and generous, and before long I got to share drafts with her in a local writing group. I’m grateful to read her fiction, and to pose some questions to the woman whose work swallowed me up.

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Sonya Larson: To me, the great engine of Shelf Life of Happiness is how it juxtaposes life’s tranquil, peaceable, and lovely moments with the dark, sinister, betraying, exploitative, and even murderous. Characters may be attending a theme party, planting flowers in the garden, or vacationing in Italy, but the claws of danger, envy, and manipulation are always on their heels. Do you think about such themes in your work, and how do you manage to have contrasting forces coexist?

Virginia Pye: Thanks for that description! I think you’ve captured well the source of tension in these stories. I suppose I think that in the midst of happiness there’s always the possibility of its expiration. That’s what the title of the collection means to suggest. Even knowing that joy can be snatched away, we have to fully throw ourselves into life anyway. In fiction, I’m interested in those moments that teeter on the edge. They allow us to see into the hearts and minds of characters. We figure out who we are when tested by life. The same is true in these stories.

SL: Your book exhibits wonderful range; somehow you’re able to inhabit many different characters from all walks of life—aspiring young skateboarders, aged painters, slick art dealers, wily adulterers, a dying groom, and a town in the aftermath of a family massacre. Where do you get your ideas for these characters, and how did you stretch your imagination to render each one?

VP: I love writing about people I’m not. To me, that’s what fiction is for. Writing gives me an excuse to imagine the inner workings of strangers. A lot has been written recently about how fiction increases empathy in readers and writers, but to me that seems so obvious: art has always been about stretching and enriching our hearts and minds. My characters may be inspired by people I’ve rubbed elbows with, or by people whose situations I’m intrigued by, but then I enlist my imagination to move beyond the real and create new worlds with their own challenges. I think a good story needs a crux—an inner or external conflict—that brings out who characters really are. By putting them in dramatic situations, hopefully they come to a life of their own.

SL: Several of the stories also manage a remarkable feat of craft: they capture an entire person’s life in a tiny, heightened sliver of time. An artist, for example, reflects on a lifetime of longing and regret while struggling to swim. How did you go about writing a short story that’s so ambitious in its scope? Did you begin with that aim in mind? 

VP: Usually I know where a story is headed, though I don’t always know how I’ll get there. In the case of Redbone, the story you allude to, I sensed a tragedy, but had to write it to discover how it would unfold. Sometimes, in a story, you need to give the reader an encapsulation of a character’s past. The trick is figuring out how much or how little to share. I think reading and writing a lot of fiction over the years has helped me to make an educated guess. I also think about rhythm in my writing—not wanting to get stuck on one note for too long, or bore the reader, but instead keep a story humming along.

SL: Which story was most fun/most difficult? Which taught you the most as a writer? 

VP: My first thought was that there’s only one story, Her Mother’s Garden, that taught me something: it helped me to move on from the grief I felt over my parents’ deaths and the sale of the house where I grew up. But actually, each story in the collection helped me in some unique way. Best Man helped me absorb the loss of a friend who died years ago of AIDS. An Awesome Gap helped me accept my son’s devotion to skateboarding—and therefore who he is as a person—even though I didn’t fully understand it. Each time I succeed at imagining a story, I think I evolve a bit as a person. It’s hard to explain, because these stories aren’t about specific things I’ve gone through. And yet, they each do the job of helping me to move forward in life with greater understanding. Perhaps they do something similar for the reader. To me, at least, this explains the joy I feel when writing each and every one of them.

SL: Describe your process. How do you go from idea to first draft, and first draft to final draft?

VP: These stories come out of small gems of understanding and serendipitous moments when life suggest deeper meanings. One Easter morning, at a brunch in our backyard, my husband and I realized that our young son had dug up a dead bird he and his father had buried a few days before. We were suddenly dealing with a resurrection on Easter morning—almost too perfect a gift—and I had to use it as inspiration for a story.

After considering some specific conundrum or irony of life, I write a draft, then rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, sending out the story to literary magazines and getting it back, then revising more until it’s finally placed. It’s a long process. The stories in Shelf Life of Happiness were written over a dozen years and rewritten all along the way. I even continued to edit on the spot during a recent reading.

SL: You’ve also written two award-winning novels: Dreams of the Red Phoenix and River of Dust. How do story-writing and novel-writing differ for you?

VP: A story can come from a single idea or gem of understanding, but a novel has to have many themes and characters and an arc that can sustain it. A story is more of a snapshot, although I like my stories to have a beginning, middle, and end. By the end of a story, I want my reader to have a feeling of completion. Each one should be a small sculpture—coherent in theme and style and execution. In a novel, there’s more room for elaboration and excess. I like my stories to be tight.

SL: What are you working on now?

VP: I’m working on something very different. A Woman of Letters is a novel set in 1890s Boston, about a woman who writes romance and adventure tales and must fight to be taken seriously in the world of men of letters. She decides to change her writing style to be more literary, upending everything for herself and her publisher, and ultimately allowing romance to leave the page and enter her life. It’s a feminist tale, and a writer’s tale, and a lot of fun!

“Reality” Has No Place Here: The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington

Not infrequently, the “reading public” will “discover” a writer or artist from the past who is so brilliant, and singular, and original, that a furor or interest and outrage results. It will surprise no one that most of these creatives are women whose stars never rose quite as high as their male contemporaries.

Leonora Carrington is one such creative luminary who is—hopefully—currently experiencing such a revival.

In brief: Leonora Carrington was an English-born, Mexican surrealist painter, artist, and writer; she was also a deliciously difficult woman.

All of the best women are difficult.

At more length: We know some things about Leonora’s life, but it is shrouded in some deliberate mystery, since Leonora herself gleefully and stubbornly refused appeals to speak about her life with any kind of clarity. She had a habit of embellishing the stories she did tell with fantastical elements, or of offering multiple contradictory accounts of the events of her own life; the effect is that reading about her life has the same unreal, uncanny quality as reading one of her stories. In fact, the clear ways her stories draw on her own life only serve to further blur the lines of reality and art in her life and her work.

A surrealist to her very marrow.

We know that she was born in England in 1917, that she was a rebel against the confining role of a ‘nice young women’ from a young age, that she was expelled from two Catholic boarding schools as a young girl (“I had an allergy to collaboration,” she once said on the subject), and that while being educated by governesses and tutors at home, she reportedly focused her energies on haunting her family’s “lavatory gothic” mansion trying to learn to levitate.

So she was a weird kid from the off.

In time, Leonora was sent to an art school in Florence, and then a finishing school for well-to-do young ladies in Paris—from which she was also expelled—before returning to England to be presented at court and to have her own coming out ball. Her opinion on this whole affair is perhaps most clearly, and cleverly, revealed in her first story in this collection—“The Debutante”—in which a young ‘deb’ sends her only friend—who just happens to be a hyena—to her ball in her place, disguised by a gown and the face of the maid they’ve killed. The story is narrated in such a matter-of-fact style, that the young protagonist complimenting her hyena friend on the neat way she nibbled around the skin of the maid’s face to make her mask, must simply be accepted while also being experienced as absurd and delightful.

So, Leonora clearly did not make much of the society life.

While studying art in London shortly thereafter, she met the lauded surrealist Max Ernst when she was nineteen—he was forty-six—and the two ran off to France together. There they lived two years in, by all accounts, passionate and artistically fruitful happiness. Of course, if we know our history, we know that Germany invaded France in 1940 bringing it all crashing down. Max Ernst was arrested and sent to a prison camp; Leonora had a break down and was sent off to an asylum in Spain. There she was subject to what any modern reader would recognize as truly terrible ‘treatment.’

Eventually she escaped—With the help of her old nanny and a submarine, or was it a warship? And the nanny may have been a cousin. And really, does the ‘truth’ of the events matter? Is ‘reality’ a concept which holds any water? Leonora didn’t particularly think so—and perhaps the only good thing to come from that time at the asylum was that it would inform her novel Down Below. As she began to take up the threads of her creative work again, she married, moved to New York City, moved to Mexico City, divorced, married again, had two sons, and settled into her life-long home in Mexico, which she loved deeply.

Leonora described Mexico City as “A familiar swimming pool with sharks in it,” which from her can only be a compliment. She called her own home there the “house of the Spinx” and expressed her passion for the fantastic and rejection of the “normal” and the “real” with zeal. Her cooking is one good example, being more alchemy or witchcraft than culinary task; she was known to mix squid ink with tapioca pearls and call it caviar with a straight face, or to cut hair from the head of a guest she particularly disliked and cook it into omelets she served.

Is it any wonder that reading her fiction is such a singular, uncanny experience? She manages to hold all the liquid, shifting (false) duality of Freud’s “heimliche” and “unheimliche” in her hands at once, in a way that can only be marveled at. The known becomes strange, and the unknown becomes familiar, and it all happens at once without you noticing.

Take “A Man in Love” as an example, which opens quite suddenly with a fruit seller catching the narrator stealing a mellon, and stating: “Miss, I’ve been waiting for a chance like this for forty years. For forty years I’ve hidden behind this pile of oranges in the hope that somebody might pinch some fruit. And the reason is this: I want to talk, I want to tell my story…” If you haven’t figured out yet that you need to simply surrender to Leonora Carrington’s genius, and let her take you where she will, then you are a slow learner, and likely keenly uncomfortable. You will become even more so when the story moves in to the vendor’s shop, “through a door at the back and reached a room where there was a bed in which lay a woman, motionless and probably dead. It seemed to me that she must have been there a long time, for the bed was overgrown with grass.” But her mortality is, in fact, unclear. She is, for example, still warm enough to hatch chicks from eggs by her heat, and the greengrocer—who has a special talent, which is dehydrating meat by looking at it—waters her every day with loving tenderness. And all of this is simply the prelude to the man’s story.

Another standout story is “White Rabbits,” in which the narrator relays living in New York over a hot summer in which she gets in the habit of hanging about, quite naked, in front of her open windows watching the house opposite the street for any signs of life. After many days of this, she finally spies a woman come out on to her balcony with a dish of bones for a raven that had landed on the railing: “The woman, who had very long black hair, used her hair to wipe out the dish. Then she looked straight at me and smiled in a friendly fashion. I smiled back and waved a towel.” Nothing about this is surprising. Nor is it surprising when the woman calls across to ask the narrator if she has any spoiled, decomposed meat; our narrator only replies, “Not at the moment.” So she buys some meat from the butcher, leaves it out to rot, and pays her neighbors a visit. The rotting meat is, but of course, food for the hundreds of ravenous white rabbits living in the neighbors’ rooms. The neighbors themselves’—Ethel and Lazarus—wear ancient clothes, have white sparkling skin, and regard their rabbits as both loved pets and food. But none of this is treated as terribly strange in the word which tumbles from Leonora’s Carrington’s brain, and the story simply goes on from there.

Each piece in this collection—The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington—is a glittering jewel, and, although the volume is relatively slim, it is best to take it slowly and savor each one. When you have finished with them, consider seeking out her other books—The Hearing Trumpet and Down Below—as well as digging in to her wonderful artwork; her paintings in particular are extraordinary, and worthy of every bit as much lionization as any of the more well-known surrealists. If only we could bottle whatever mad witchcraft she possessed, the creative arts would be richer—and weirder—for it.

After the Death of Shostakovich Père by Maya Sonenberg

Maya Sonenberg’s memoir/personal essay, After the Death of Shostakovich Père is an intermingling of family-related memories, authors that shaped her as a reader and as a writer, contemplations on grief, and how this coalesces around a sense of identity. Within four sections, Sonenberg takes a non-linear approach to examining her father’s, Jack Sonenberg’s, pivotal life events. Ms. Sonenberg often addresses the reader with invitations to “imagine,” and takes an authorial stance that is overtly aware that what is offered from her accounts of a daughter making sense of her talented father’s demise and death, are experiences presented to strangers, unknown readers who find her book, but trusting, as every writer trusts, that the personal life of a writer can instinctively correlate to the personal life of a reader.

Sonenberg includes other narrators in addition to her own lyrical prose and occasional lines of verse. We hear from Jorge Luis Borges’s fictional characters, Sonenberg’s own fictional characters, and most compelling, as she curates her father’s own words by means of diary excerpts and recorded dreams. The intertextuality adds inspired echoes throughout the memoir and essays. In addition to the personal writing, is an effectively unnerving short story. The wide-ranging mixed genre in After the Death of Shostakovich Père feels much more substantial in scope than the page count suggests: it is rich with well-placed imagery, and intricate psychological insight.

In “Prelude,” Sonenberg succinctly paints a portrait of her parents and her childhood; she was raised by an artistic and passionate family—with professions and interests in painting, music, activism, and natural habitats. And a portrait of a herself emerges as a well-read person who is forensically observant, and empathetic. This preciseness encourages the reader to relate to the author’s experiences, and this is consistent throughout the work. Details such as, “…a cold mountain stream ran, the water delicious but laced with arsenic,” clues us in to the bittersweet reality of giving ourselves over to the vulnerability of loving someone entirely. She invites us to imagine along with her as she constructs an experience of grief that she can make sense of, and so that we can as well.

Sonenberg brings in stories of others’ experiences of grief to refract shared loss, in the way that relatable personal stories can buffer individual grief. In “Prelude,” Dimitri Shostakovich’s father suddenly dies in 1922, forever changing the trajectory of his life and that of his mother and sister. Shostakovich writes a piece of music and dedicates it to his father, and plays it with his sister, to “‘include her in this act of mourning.’” The music that Sonenberg and her father enjoyed together was part of their bond, a way for Sonenberg to illustrate how shared experiences often define relationships.

In “Danse Fantastique,” we are given more excerpts that chronicle her father’s life, her youth, and authors that influenced her. These memories meander non-linearly and highlight moments of her father before and after a devastating stroke, taking us into ruminations spun off of Jorge Luis Borges’ story, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” and examples of Borges’ characters who encounter ancestors, just as Sonenberg engages with ancestors when she crafts a story out of her father’s life.

Then in the fictional story, “Nocturne,” a young woman and her niece are on a road trip when by chance, the main character, Reba, stops at a small-town motel, waking in the night to supernaturally meet the ghost of her neglectful father. Embedded in the story is a photograph of Sonenberg’s father, a ghostly reflection in a mirror gazing out of the photograph at the reader. Once again, Sonenberg’s impulse is to invite us to accompany her on this exploration of grief, which successfully creates a sense of solidarity, and solace.

The last section, “Finale,” includes more black and white candid photographs of the author when she was a child and her father when he was in the prime of life. Sonenberg offers from the pages of her father’s writings, his own account of his mother’s death, “…3 a.m. in her sleep—mercifully—her agony not drawn out—enough agony being told by the doctor—seeing in all our faces the awareness of her death…’” And once more, Sonenberg returns to a familiar text which reflects her own reevaluation of death as she revisits Borges’ story, “The Library of Babel,” a tale she once loved, but then as her life changed, the re-reading of a text, as so often does, changes because we have changed. She goes on to poignantly confront the limitations of memory and language when faced with the inevitability of death’s muteness, and those finite memories of what “…is remembered and what is forgotten? By whom and for how long?”

I recommend listening to Russian Composer, Shoskovitch’s, Suite for Two Pianos in F Sharp Minor, Opus 6 while enjoying this engaging selection of memories, candid photographs, fictions, and diary entries; it enriches and deepens the reading experience as the music with its moments of repetitive, obsessive circling of notes is not unlike revisiting memories of loved ones after their passing.

Leaning Into the Infinite by Marc Vincenz

All roads are travelled.
Vibration determines everything.

This life journey upon which one embarks, a path enveloped by vague mists & fractured contexts. Marc Vincenz’s Leaning Into The Infinite would be this journey recapitulated — an odyssey through language where allegory is served up as the cargo. It is a topography of conjecture, with Orphic allusions joined through a synthesis of loose & knotted linkage. The exploratory imagination is on full dioramic display here, a mosaic of exploration through the centuries, configured by a confederation of ideas & imagery.

The pathways that insinuate through foreshadowed imagery in Vincenz’s previous books This Wasted Land and Becoming the Sound of Bees, continue in Leaning Into The Infinite by way of a similar thematic momentum, with images of visions achieved via passage through the Underworld — through “Journey’s that do not end” —  with images of decay and renewal, of inertia, of prayers and cursings. The journey proceeds across terrains of questioning exile in a pursuit of language as it transcends the temporal realms.

The mytho-poetic narrative begun in Becoming the Sound of Bees echoes throughout these poems, both cryptic and intrepid. Uncle Fernando (as a persona of Pessoa) and Ivan, two wayfarers linked-up across their symbolic process, thread their way along the sinuous journey embarked upon, both of them recording various illusions and sundry events as they proceed. Counterparts-in-exile striving for their glimpses of the Infinite.

In prior books by Marc Vincenz, these various palpable instances of exile have been previously suggested, where the actors involved are impregnated with a transitory residency. Yet “what soul wants to dwell forever in exile, watching a tide rise & fall from the sidelines?” This would seemingly lead Uncle Fernando to suggest to anyone finding themselves in strange territory:

Let us lean toward the infinite with the sense
that somehow we lean toward ourselves
& let us preserve the flame that each night
may buzz in the memory of a sundrenched day,
so we might know what it means to be truly sad,
to be truly simple,
to be calm as trees.

Within the pages of Leaning Into The Infinite are deft hints regarding our evolutionary future; we receive kaleidoscopic glimpses that mesh in a process of particulars, sustaining a journey both inner and outer. And it is the water, “that engine of change”, and the a priori light which underpins all process and motion, that are the elemental redeeming allegories of infinite pattern & flux which fuel a “primal inkling”, the very phenomena that sparked the Romantics with their nature visions. Water and light, inextricably bound by the wave phases of eternity, provide the rhythms of genesis and renewal, of elemental action by way of substance & process.

A holy order interlocked
In its own unity.
And that everything
Was a sign or signature of something else,

The metaphor being the meaning
Behind matter and what mattered:

A code to be deciphered by those in the know —

Leaning Into The Infinite depicts a Dantesque narrative quest, where getting lost becomes the impetus/consequence of a journey taken through unknown terrains. Jungian episodics of retrieval and anticipation reveal the insinuating path through descent, plateau, and ascent. Wisdom beckons as the goal, handed down through riddles revealed across this world’s historical legacies.

Allusions to language’s purpose abound across these pages, leading one to ask: Might it be that language has evolved because of our continuous usage, “a language woven/ with rivers & skies”, and the “Language of Dawn”? By the ancient auguries done in the gaugings of bird flight, would there be reference to the poetic flights of language? Uncle Fernando indicates this to be so: “Take note. Observe everything. One bird at a time.”

It is himself as augur, the one who has originated a Dead Bird Theory of Everything in a kind of ontology based on the metaphor of a bird that dies, yet who reawakens through a quantum reassembly in its quest to know the Unknowable. He has further avuncular advice to the one on the journey of self-discovery:

Become
That bird
In space
In your own right

Even if “Few Birds Speak”, Uncle Fernando’s Dead Bird does speak, does notice, and does realize through its transformation, that it is destined to lean into the Infinite.

In his uniquely original book Meadowlark West, the San Franciscan poet Philip Lamantia, himself characterized as a “Shaman of the Surreal”, speaks about “the lyrical sublimity of birds”, where the language of birds provides a “mouth of poesis”. It seems likely that Uncle Fernando, that ontologically searching soothsayer, has embarked upon his own “homeward journey” in the second part of Leaning Into The Infinite, where he engages the “symbolique” of the birds with orthinic offerings. A mythopoetic ekstasis reflects Lamantia’s Ornithic hermetica and suggests itself in this Orphic utterance:

[Whoever is going to] make offerings
to the gods first [releases] for them a little bird . . . ,

Where wind-augurs observe the pattern of winged flight, &

Clouds scatter
and the birds hush,

Which seemingly echoes Lamantia’s

The language of the birds/ is never spoken,

Which also suggests a sense that

Their gestures speak with deep silence
flying hearts before they take off
and primordial gnosis takes flight

As every flight becomes a resurrection where

After death poetry shall have its morning of birds.

The embedded thematics of uncertain journeys, reflecting primal patterns that influence the landscapes of our acquired spaces, continue to direct our contemporary cultural shuffles. In the aftermath of the post-industrial state-of-malaise we currently are drowning in these days, will we attempt to rebuild a renewed world through the conscious reclaim of our corrupted language? Can poetry remake a world rapidly going to ruin through a fresh awareness of the language fundamentals that have underwritten humanity since ancient times?

To “Dream outside the dream” would be one suggestion towards any realization of what it takes to dream back into focus all that has produced this quotidian blur now engulfing us. Leaning Into The Infinite suggests a way forward, a renewal and return from the dark passages that collectively we have endured throughout our evolutionary stumbles. By chronicling the mythos, along with the pathos, of our human condition, the tribe who we are, both individually & collectively, can slowly rise upon the thermals like the birds. We might likely achieve a higher level through this greater process that could be our destiny. As that avuncular seer would have it,

Put yourself to useful work

and go forward. . . .