One Wild Ride: A Review of Million Dollar Red, A Memoir by Gleah Powers

Reading Gleah Powers’ memoir Million Dollar Red is like going on an impromptu road trip with a smart, funny, but not always reliable friend. There were times when I wanted to step into the story and protect the narrator from the reckless decision-making of her vain, much-married mother; there were times when I wanted to jump between the narrator and her own bad ideas. But throughout, the lively writing and the speaker’s pure, admirable instinct for survival kept me hanging on her every word.

The book begins with the ten-year-old Powers and her younger sister, Kimberly, being retrieved from summer camp by their mother. Our narrator — who, we’ve been informed in a head note, went by the name Linda then — clearly admires her trim, glamorous Mom, and as both girls run toward her yelling, “Mommy, Mommy!” we might be deceived into thinking that there will be familial sweetness in this story. Instead, their mother reveals a troubling surprise: along for the ride is her new, third husband, Jack, acquired while the girls were away.

“It means you can call him Daddy because that’s what he is now,” their mother says. While Jack works to woo Kimberly, Linda stews. “If I hadn’t been at camp, I was sure I could have stopped this,” the ten-year old thinks, wrapping her arm protectively around her sister. That sense of responsibility, and that awareness that the presumed adults in the picture cannot be trusted to care well for the two girls, falls as painfully on the reader as it does on the writer. And yet, there is no trace of self-pity in this book. The young Linda is as tough as she is intelligent.

Like many such young women, Linda becomes a kind of counselor and protector for her younger sibling and for various friends, none of whom seem to have her gift for survival. In a particularly haunting chapter, “Abortos,” Linda and her friend, Arlene, newly graduated from high school, drive from Phoenix to Nogales so that Arlene can obtain an illegal abortion. It’s 1965, and Linda has a clear-eyed view of the dangers: “I tried to conjure up a good outcome, but couldn’t help tensing the muscles in my chest and ribs, armoring myself for the possible butchering of Arlene that I would somehow have to handle. Raised Catholic, she feared God would punish us, and though we were almost in Mexico, I worried that if God didn’t get us, the U.S. government would.”

What ensues is tragic in every sense — a messy abortion in a roadside motel room performed by a “doctor” whose insistence on partying with the girls afterwards is broken-up by the arrival of Arlene’s gun-toting boyfriend, Leonard. In a reversal that feels all too real, Arlene, previously determined to break up with the abusive Leonard, decides his pursuit of the girls means that his love for her is true. She decides to return home with Leonard, dismissing Linda by cruelly accusing her of “always” being jealous of Arlene’s ability to attract boyfriends.

As with every chapter in Million Dollar Red, “Abortos” is written to be read as a self-contained story. Aside from the obvious commercial value of this structure — the stand-alone nature of the chapters makes them ideal for promotional excerpting — it also allows Powers to pinball about in her life story. Instead of following a single linear path, the reader scrambles through Powers’ memories with her, alighting here and there for a tense and telling anecdote.  What is lost in such a form is the sense of perspective that a more linear framework would allow. But the book mirrors the hectic, arbitrary twists and turns of the writer’s life.

Chief among these is a chance meeting in a Scottsdale bar with Ray, a costume designer in town to work on the Michelangelo Antonioni film, “Zabriskie Point.” Ray and Linda become a couple, and before long she is traveling with him, meeting a series of artistic and cultural luminaries who she finds alternately intimidating and inspiring.  One of the latter is Kathleen Cleaver, wife of Black Panther co-founder Eldridge Cleaver, who powers meets when Antonioni is filming the group in New York. Cleaver provides the narrator with a powerful life motto: “Imagination is the most powerful weapon we have.”

As Powers makes her way from LA to New York, the pace pics up, along with her artistic aspirations. She paints, she acts, she takes voice and dance lessons. As with so many artists, the day jobs she takes to feed those aspirations are sometimes tedious and sometimes outright weird, as when she is hired as a personal secretary to a “law enforcement philanthropist” who spends his time and his inherited fortune researching the history of law enforcement in the United States, establishing a small private museum of related artifacts, and receiving award from various sheriff’s departments. The narrator begins pilfering money from her boss and then, out of gratitude and guilt, has sex with him on a holiday visit to his parents. Powers concludes the brief, cringe-worthy encounter with her trademark wit and sharpness.

Before he passed out, he told me it’d been a long time since he’d been with a woman who wasn’t a prostitute. His therapist had been encouraging him to start dating.
“I’ll never forget this,’ he said.
I drifted off, wondering which category I fit into. For the first time in months, I slept guilt free.

The author’s boldest move is her concluding one: for her final chapter, she switches from Linda’s pint of view to that of another character whose own story seemed a minor part of this particular book. This device, used in novels such as Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover and Don DeLillo’s The Names, gives the reader a brief jolt of displacement until the “ah” of recognition settles in. I will offer no spoilers here about the identity of this character, but as with the DeLillo and Sontag books mentioned above, what first comes as a surprise is, by the last page, such a satisfying narrative decision as to seem inevitable. Such a bold move suggests to me a writer who is still growing in ambition and range. I’m already looking forward to Gleah Powers’ next book.

Making the Right Narrative: Eve and All the Wrong Men by Aviya Kushner

“You have no idea what happens when you make one creature out of another,” warns the speaker of one of Aviya Kushner’s poems. Her chapbook Eve and All the Wrong Men (dancing girl 2019) makes the brave choice to revisit the biblical first woman so often featured in literature. Unlike other treatments, though, Kushner’s poems focus on transformation of self-in-relation to fully separate self. Her modern Eve refreshes the myth by dealing not with sin or sensuality but the (re)modeling of identity through encounters with the wrong men.

The women in Kushner’s poems share in the female legacy: “I was taught I had no choice/but to inherit Eve’s path on earth.” Eve, responsible for the downfall of Eden and for original sin, set women up as the gullible, subordinate sex. Eve positions us, as women, in an existence defined relative to men rather than independent beings. Rather than accept the limits of this legacy, though, Kushner sets out to find the “wrong men,” responsible on some level for perpetuating the limits women face.

The titular wrong men walk the pages of the book, often overheard at breakfast tables trying to make desirable partners of themselves using whatever tools they can assemble, one being language. Praising everything the desired woman says as “interested, interesting, interest, and oh yeah, incredible,” he hopes to hear himself reflected back in his partner, as the original Adam did of Eve. “Honey From the Wrong Men” finds language manipulated even more insidiously for consumption: “a whole bakery in the mouths of men, /saying anything for a taste.” In hearing the words, a woman knows she equates to transient pleasure, but being a delight “at least for the next hour” can be seductive. At best, these men are irritatingly amusing. At their most insidious, these men subsume the women they pursue, and “take me into how he read/the world.” The goal, then, is to come away from the wrong men with something of the self intact, which mostly happens.

Regret and relief at times collide in intriguing ways for the speaker. In “Perspective,” the speaker sees clearly “The life I could have had/stands in front of me,/wrong as the wrong man.” What was lost and perhaps once longed for becomes clear as “the angle of the wrong,” suddenly sharp and blindingly visible. “Bed” extends this sentiment to the ex married to another woman, and the gratitude at having escaped her fate. Identity, here, comes from the breakaway: who she could have been but did not become so.

When it comes to the women Kushner wants to be, readers find she admires the unsuspecting but authentic female. In “Imagining the Thoughts of the Lovely Eighty-Something Woman with the Vintage Glasses, Who Lives a Few Floors Down,” the speaker lives as unapologetically as any woman can ever hope to live. “I am who I am,” she says, “like the sea is the sea.” While her life has its imperfections (a flaky neighbor whose inattentiveness leaves the speaker to go out in the cold and snow), her soul is satisfied by the view from her window, augmented by her imagination. She first admires these “utterly man-less, there at the end” women in “Men” for the way they don’t want to be her, young and man-seeking. There’s a similar awe, if not admiration, for the “toothless hooker” who attracts a constant stream of men despite her unflattering appearance.

If the collection leaves us wanting in any way, it does so perhaps in the art poems. While David and Venus of Urbino certainly channel themes of sensuality and male/female dynamics, they are static figures in a collection that is constantly moving, flitting from encounter to encounter as it studies the sexual politics dogging women since Eden. Kushner is most successful when spreading gathered detail across the page or starting hard truths in the face.

Ultimately, Eve and All the Wrong Men leaves us with a modern Eve in the form of a woman seeking to reclaim and remodel herself separate from the men who wrote her into the character they wished her to be. Through all her transformations, she has made self-determination out of her inheritance.

Journey of Healing: Gray Is the New Black by Dorothy Rice

Most girls spend the first ten years in their bodies blissfully unconscious of the roller coaster to come. They hit puberty and spend the next ten years in love/hate with the same, albeit changing body. They learn to conflate their body’s pleasure with its power to attract. The confusion in this equation often leads to abuse, whether in aggressive workouts to keep one’s shape or in self-defeating addictions to drugs, booze, or sex with bad men. Whether they eat too little or too much, a lot of women age forty-five and up struggle with some kind of food issue. If a woman’s lucky, and willing to put in the intense inner work, she might spend the final third of her of life repairing the damage that’s been done, finally healing the relationship she’s developed with her physical self.

Dorothy Rice’s memoir, Gray is the New Black, chronicles this journey of healing. The author, a retired California civil service worker in her early sixties, vows to take a year, from January to January, to understand the stagnation in her marriage, face her on-going food issues, and devote time to her writing life. She signs up for a book-in-a-year writing class and decides her project will be this memoir, the year she takes “to get my shit together.” Her goal is ambitious: to “crack the code of living my life in the now,” to make “peace with the past and embrace the present.”

Key characters in the book are the author’s two sisters: younger, fit, driven Juliet, and the free-spirited Roxanne, Rocky, four years the author’s senior. Rice’s husband is another major figure in the book; the author married Bob later in life and the two raised a blended family of teens, plus had a daughter of their own when Rice was forty-four.

Early in the book, Rice’s sister Rocky challenges her to stop dyeing her hair. In the spirit of personal rebirth, Rice accepts her sister’s challenge and two months later, Rice has what one observer calls a “reverse hombre,” with silver streaks growing down into the dark brown. Her hair draws stares and compliments. Even Rice herself loves her hair. As such, her hair acts as a life preserver for the memoir, an honest, thorough chronicle of a debilitating sugar addiction, a years-long relationship with a sexual predator, an abusive first marriage, and ongoing struggles with yo-yo dieting.

From the beginning Rice is upfront about her sugar addiction. Though she begs her husband to hide the jumbo-sized bags of chocolate Halloween candy, she also admits that most people are like Bob, “they don’t get it.” They don’t see the difference between a “major sweet tooth” and a food addiction. “If you’re an addict, you don’t have [just] a taste of heroin,” Rice claims. Nor do you have “a little bit of booze or meth.”

She finds the bags, repeatedly inspects them for holes, a way in. A day or two later, she finds one — Bob must have sampled them — and the binge begins. She starts with just a dozen, then a dozen more. Then the bag is empty. Twelve hours later comes the consequence: a brutal migraine brought on by the sugar, hours of vomiting, dry heaves, wetting herself, and pain in her head that makes her skull feel like a “flaming match tip.” She lays delirious in the dark, vowing never to binge again. 

Until, of course, she does. Such is the nature of addiction. Just as the author can’t stop the bingeing, neither can the reader look away from the harrowing, honest descriptions of an addict in the throes. The power of the scene comes in part from the book’s structure; Rice lets readers witness the first binge early and we dread the inevitable recurrence. It’s hard to read this struggle, and it gets even worse when she begins to examine past self-destructive behaviors, namely her recurring encounters with the rapist she first met at age fourteen.

Here the book takes a darker turn towards the underlying cause of her shame. Rice claims that most women she knows have a rape story, a fact neither defended nor analyzed. In a fiction workshop, Rice tried to write about Ron before. Readers complained that the protagonist was too passive. The story was predictable as soon as the “stupid” girl got in the car. In fact Rice’s rape story is not conventional; she is not attacked but lured into a car by a twenty-something man who regularly trolls her high school. He doesn’t pin her down and force himself upon her; he unzips his pants, grabs her by the neck and forces her to perform fellatio. In his car. Parked on the side of the road.

These encounters with Ron continue intermittently for two years. Rice’s descriptions of these horrific experiences are riveting, as is her honesty about her own confusion:

It’s hard to understand why I kept seeing Ron, why I didn’t stop. I do know that even as I came when he called and did what he asked, I desperately wanted a real boyfriend. I knew that what I did with him was nothing to be proud of. I didn’t tell anyone about it. I didn’t even like to think about it. Nor did I enjoy it or look forward to the next time. . . . It was never about me, or even about sex, but rather power, control, domination. I didn’t get this intellectually, but I knew it in my bones. I’d surrendered free will.

Later she meets some of his other victims, also students at her high school. Mandy, a friend who was disowned by her mother at age sixteen, also had dealings with Ron. But unlike Rice, Mandy refused to acquiesce. “Was he at least cute?” Rice asks Mandy. “Just another loser,” Mandy says. “I can’t believe anyone would ever fall for his bullshit.”

That Rice never admits to Mandy that she “fell for his bullshit” is telling. Perhaps more powerful is what she doesn’t say to the reader. She doesn’t describe the humiliation. She doesn’t wallow in her own gullibility. She doesn’t try to defend or justify her shame. When she finally gets free of Ron, she wants to believe that Mandy’s words triggered her self-esteem. But in fact she has “no such moment to replay and relive with pride.” More likely, she admits, she simply “aged out.” Ron lost interest.

In the middle section of the book Rice and her sister attend “fat camp,” a self-help ranch in Utah where residents see therapists and learn about nutrition. Rice hikes longer and farther than she thought possible. And she experiences inner growth: “I’ve resisted happiness for being too simple, too trite and ordinary” she understands. Yet “there’s no more innate foolishness or simple-mindedness in contentment than there is in perpetual angst.”

Perhaps what sets Gray is the New Black apart from other self-reckoning memoirs is this willingness to take responsibility for the false truths she has clung to most of her life. Nowhere is this more evident than in the description of her marriage. This vector of the memoir is even more empowering than the stark honesty with which she analyzes her time with Ron, and it’s more riveting than the train wreck of her sugar binges. Here is where the reader sees change unfolding.

Rice longs for a more passionate marriage, yet her self disgust after a bout of anxiety eating makes it evident that she doesn’t feel she deserves it: “Probably I should shut up and be happy. I have a comfortable home, a decent pension, time to do the things I want.” As such, she wonders if “a deeper emotional and physical connection, worth jeopardizing all that?”

It is and it isn’t. Rice writes scenes in which she consciously baits Bob, saying she “batted my lashes and hunched my shoulders so my breasts pressed together” then asks him the mother lode of loaded questions: “Do you think I’m beautiful?”  Bob, a retired engineer, responds, “It doesn’t matter how you look. I’m already in love with you.”

Early in the book we sympathize with Rice; Bob is a “literal kind of guy,” and more than a little dense when it comes to speaking his feelings. But Rice baits him in this way repeatedly, and he fails repeatedly. She admits that she can’t be angry; she has gained weight and knows she doesn’t look her best.

By the book’s end, after her year spent excavating shame, Rice can admit that she has “waited all [her] life for a man to say the prescribed magic words to me, to perform the prescribed grand gestures.” Feeling cheated, she has assumed she wasn’t good enough to get the “Lifetime movie moments.” But when she is finally honest with herself, Rice sees that her lifelong dissatisfaction is based on fairytales and movies. Are these good enough reasons, she wonders, “to hold my husband at arm’s length until he utters the magic words? . . .  Does my piano have more than one insistent sour note to plink?”

With incisive, lyrical prose, Dorothy Rice articulates something important about generations of women, especially those who find comfort in language, reading and writing and use these tools to discover why it was so important to them to fit in, to belong, to be wanted by a man, even a bad man, or the wrong man. Why does a woman as smart as Rice “hate herself,” as her mother asks her as an adolescent? We may not get an answer, as readers or writers, or parents, even as older, wiser women looking back at our younger selves.

But that doesn’t mean we should stop asking the questions.

Precise Diction and Vivid Imagery: A Review of Joan Fiset’s Memoir, Namesake

Joan Fiset’s collection, Namesake (2015, Blue Begonia Press), has been described as a book of “memoir vignettes.” Indeed, the passages that comprise the book offer us brief glimpses into Fiset’s childhood and adolescence, ultimately giving us a fuller picture of the author’s life. More precisely, each vignette might be read as a kind of prose poem, as Fiset’s precise diction and vivid imagery allows each passage to stand alone, a tiny slice of life from a time long gone. Passages like “Ballast,” “Wonder Bread,” and “Standardized Testing” give a sense of 1950s American culture and the experiences of a young woman in that time. Nonetheless, each passage, or poem, draws upon or hints at the collection’s larger focus—Fiset’s mother—expanding our understanding of what it means for Fiset to be her mother’s namesake.

For example, in “Mirrored,” the speaker describes her childhood past time of sliding down the banister and a single instance of glimpsing herself in a mirror at the bottom of the stairs: “This face surprised me, a child rounding the bed on her way to some destination. The fleeting image lasted because the mirror was there.” These closing lines simultaneously propel us through the book with the idea of a “destination,” even as the words ask us to linger with this particular passage, to think about the layers of meaning in the idea of reflection. As readers, we understand that Fiset’s mother is the reason the mirror is there. In this way, this vignette of Fiset’s childhood experience speaks more largely to the purpose of the memoir as a whole—a reflection on Fiset’s identity through a reflection on her mother.

Thus, even in the passages that do not mention Fiset’s mother, we have the sense of her presence, of the ways she shaped Fiset’s world. Indeed, as the memoir goes on, Fiset’s mother becomes more and more of a figure in the passages, sometimes blocking out Fiset all together. In “Heartsick,” for example, we actually see a moment from Joan Stone’s point of view: “My mother comes out of the kitchen to comfort me. Years later she can still see me through the window in black-watch plaid. My cotton skirt filled with wind as I ran.” It is as if Fiset, the speaker, has filled her mother’s place, watching her child-self through her mother’s eyes.

As the memoir unfolds, then, the passages move away from innocent moments tinged by the shadow of some family strife until we begin to see a real conflict between Fiset’s parents, and between Fiset’s mother and the world’s expectations. Joan Stone, while present for her daughters, is different from the other mothers and wives around her. She teaches her Girl Scout troupe weird songs and arrives to Fiset’s fashion show in a poorly made dress. In “Entrée,” we learn that “There are sixteen bottles of ketchup in the refrigerator. They stand next to each other, some with an inch of ketchup or less.” This fact is odd, though perhaps not alarming. But the next passage, “S.O.S,” hints more strongly at the mundane paranoia of domesticity: “Turn off the stove; check then check and check it again.” Slowly, these moments reveal something deeply amiss with the mother and the family. In a late passage, young Fiset tells her father not to hit her mother, and eventually we learn of the breakdown that puts Fiset’s mother in the hospital, with shock treatments and medication.

Thus, Fiset’s true talent in this collection seems to be in her ability to slowly and deftly create a fuller picture through these tiny vignettes. While her language is honest and plain, she is never condemning of the figures she depicts. What is more, in revealing her mother’s struggle, Fiset also hints at the struggle of women to find and live out their own identities, perhaps especially in the 1950s and 60s, but also in today’s cultural climate. Before we learn of Joan Stone’s eventual breakdown, we learn of her remarkable early career as an actress on Broadway; she gave up that career to devote herself entirely to her family, to a husband whose love eventually fell short. In the end, we learn that Joan Stone finds true healing only through artwork: “She will talk of how her art grew out of her suffering, how it is the child within.” Thus, Namesake is itself an example of Fiset following in her mother’s footsteps, making art through the sufferings of the past.

While some of the passages do not resonate as powerfully as others, Fiset’s 2015 collection is filled with abiding, poignant concerns. In the selection of moments and images, one can tell that a master is at play. I look forward to reading her newest work.

Camels in Kansas: The Alternative History of Farooq Ahmed's Kansastan

Farooq Ahmed’s Kansastan is a lush and poignant portrayal of familial rivalry set against the backdrop of a Civil War-era dystopian Kansas. The story of our anonymous narrator begins when he is a young stowaway in leg braces on a cart piled high with corpses. After his delivery to the mosque where he would spend his formative years, a woman named Maryam (apparently his aunt) arrives with Faisal, the narrator’s cousin, in tow. Faisal is believed to be a prophet, and from the beginning of his arrival at the mosque, the local community is in awe of his feats. (Faisal, at one point, creates a small geyser that people from miles around come to witness.) The narrator, however, finds himself feeling like the village idiot. He’s pushed aside and ridiculed, while Faisal’s “magic” affords him not only preferential treatment but also intense — and dangerous — reverence. From that point the story shifts to what is, in my mind, the overarching theme of the novel: competition. When Faisal and the narrator fall in love with the same woman, the mysteriously named Ms. A_____, their competition only heightens.

The unreliable narrator often dispenses sour thoughts about his cousin, but even before Faisal and Maryam’s arrival, he is plagued with adolescent bitterness that can only come from being continually referred to as variations on a theme of “the ‘malformed urchin.’” As such, he reads like a Civil War-era Muslim Holden Caulfield. Sarcasm and an overinflated sense of injustice constitute the brunt of the narrator’s personality, which makes an even more interesting character juxtaposition with Faisal, whom we recognize as insufferable in a pious sort of way based on the narrator’s point of view. Anyone who has ever been an angst-filled teen can relate to the narrator, and I often found myself chuckling at his internal monologue. At one point, following a festivity at the mosque, the narrator remarks, “And like that, my cousin and I passed into official man-hood. We shook hands and then hugged, though I had to fight the urge to smother him in my embrace. As I have said, I was merciful.”

It’s important to note that Ahmed has chosen to write from an often under-represented perspective in a completely novel way. In regard to a wider conversation about religious fanaticism (present both in this novel and in our society), the narrator’s home is Kansas, which is embroiled in a bitter battle with Missouri (“spit after saying it.”) Early in the novel, during a moment of anger and inspiration, the narrator decides he will be the one to take charge of the crusade against Missouri. He says, “I resolved that I would undertake this labor in a manner befitting a stalwart Fanatic — a hard veteran of Kansas! I was all on fire for it.” Throughout the novel Ahmed expertly provides poignant examples of zealotry from both Kansans and Missourians, reinforcing the idea that fanaticism in any form is, of course, a scourge.

While Muslims, of course, existed in America during the time of the Civil War, we very infrequently hear about their contributions to society in any way. Here, Ahmed has rearranged history so that Muslims are at the forefront. This provides readers with much-needed perspective on the effects of historical alienation. Kansastan is full of references to Islam and the Quran, which was exciting to discover for a person unfamiliar with the religion. The novel itself reads as a sort of mythology, with a deep sense of humanity and humor.

With this novel, Farooq Ahmed has created a vivid world in which the history very nearly mirrors our own — with several unexpected, devastating, and delightful amendments.

Shame Will Not Have the Last Word: A Review of Jessica Fischoff's The Desperate Measure of Undoing

Recently, Senator Elizabeth Warren talked about losing her job as a teacher in 1971 when she became “visibly pregnant,” and a host of critics came out to call her a liar. That couldn’t be possible, they argued. Yet of course it was. The senator went on to say that such things still happen to women today, even though they aren’t specifically sanctioned by law. I’ve had several men tell me this past year that there is no pay gap in this country between women and men, even though all evidence and experience proves otherwise. Jessica Fischoff’s new book of poetry The Desperate Measure of Undoing is in large part a reaction to and reminder of these kinds of discrimination, and a message to those who refuse to admit, let alone work to fix, these ongoing misogynistic realities. Her book echoes the ways these issues repeat throughout history, even as many men refuse to notice or acknowledge them.

The book begins with the poem “The Fortune Teller.” The first lines read, “Give me your hand, I promise to be / gentle,” and offers hope to the reader later in the poem with “There is light /beyond the threshold, significant and pervading.” The tone of “we will overcome” is set. And yet the poem ends with “Nothing hurts that isn’t real,” cementing women’s realities in a world of patriarchal doubt, and setting up the inevitable contradiction that all is possible/all is limited.

The Desperate Measure of Undoing continues with hints of delicate power that insist on apologizing for themselves. The power of love, often seen as weakness, is portrayed here as uniquely feminine, and uniquely inadequate. Our world believes that love by itself is not enough to solve problems when really, it’s the solution to every dilemma we face. Love repudiates war, pain, dominance, all things that reinforce hierarchies meant to justify oppression. In “Abduction” Fischoff writes, “Body, forgive me this much love,” a cry of regret rooted in shame. In “The Museum” the author finds

…the picture
you painted for me of letters stacked so high

that the L bent beneath the weight of the O
and the V flattened where it fell against the E.
But love is not a word you need to read

from top to bottom
left to right
or out loud

In fact, the word “heart,” the universal symbol for love, is peppered throughout the collection, beating strongly as the most necessary and fundamental pulse of humanity.

Eve also figures heavily in this book, the O.G. of sin, the archetypal woman who, in the telling by the patriarchy, is the root of every problem in the world. Born in perfection and branded by transgression, she’s responsible for all pain we are now plagued by, and all women are her: worthy of blame; flawed; burdened; responsible. This myth is the genesis of our inevitable female self-conscious concern of never enough. If we are responsible for original sin, how can we ever be forgiven? How can we not long to go back to the beginning for a do-over? The poem “I’ve Been Spreading My Legs Like a Wishbone” tries to do this by re-entering the womb, unwinding time before sinful mistakes: “a thing can be opened without unhinging, / free me from this sentence / of splintering, weave me back into the rib.” The narrator yearns for re-absorption and absolution. A plea to the powers-that-be to allow us to shed this skin of wickedness.

Coupled with this inherent shame is righteous anger. “My Body is a Library” insists that “If all it takes to lose myself is burning the history that /brought me here, then hand me the match.” Fischoff will not allow shame to have the last word. If necessary, we’ll burn everything to the ground to gain agency, to claim power. To name the world properly.

The poem “Oh” begins,

Eve,

How often do you think of me?
The house now, the kids, and
Everyone needs to eat, I know how tired
You are to mother the world

Forgive me your skin

These stanzas serve as an apology to Eve for what we’ve done to her, for what we’ve done to ourselves. For taking on every job, every responsibility. If Eve is “mother[ing] the world,” then men are benefitting from her emotional and physical labor while using it as a means of subjugation. What of this could possibly require an apology? And yet we apologize, over and over again. For bumping into a stranger around a corner. For taking up too much space in line. For inconveniencing those who seek to profit from our pain. For everything. And if we apologize for everything, then apologies lose their meaning, their potency. Surely, we can’t be responsible for everything. And if we are, then ultimately, we are responsible for nothing.

So how does this resolve? How do we live in the contradiction? The poem “The Hold” looks for answers, claiming that “For years I felt my body suffer the ache of restitution.” Does this restitution ever come? Can it? This hint from the author, among others, suggests that societal structures must be reimagined for healing to happen, for healing to even be a possibility. The existing structures were created by men, benefit men, and are propped up by men. How can these networks built to exclude us do the hard work of inclusion without fundamental change? Fischoff maintains that they can’t. We must reinvent our institutions. People of all genders, races, backgrounds, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and ages must have their say in the creation of a new world. Until then, we have nothing to apologize for.

Music and Connection: A Conversation with Ron MacLean

I first met Ron MacLean as a student in the year-long intensive Short Story Incubator program he teaches at Grub Street in Boston. His enthusiasm for the process of revision and the short story form proved inspiring and transformative in my own work.

Ron MacLean's short fiction has appeared widely in magazines including GQ, Narrative, and Fiction International.  He is the author of the novels Headlong and Blue Winnetka Skies, and the story collection Why the Long Face?. In his new story collection, We Might As Well Light Something on Fire no two stories are alike. These diverse narratives, from the traditional to the experimental, span a vast range of emotional experiences. What unites these stories is an expert rendering of the complexity and connotations of what it means to long for a connection with others.

Ron and I met in person to chat about We Might As Well Light Something on Fire, the intersection of music and language, the creative tension between tragedy and hope, and the role of longing in fiction. What follows is a condensed and edited version of our conversation.

*

Jennifer Marie Donahue: Music is everywhere in this collection and played an integral role in my reading experience. I would love to hear about the link between your writing and music. How do these musical choices and references create meaning and unity in this collection?

Ron MacLean: I was completely unaware of it as a theme or a thread until I started putting the collection together. Music is very important to me. I love music. This feels self-aggrandizing to say and I don't mean it in a highfalutin way, but I pay great attention to the music and rhythm of writing. I'm thinking about the sound, the patterns, and the rhythms that I'm creating and I think of it as music rather than as text. That's how I think about the language. When I started noticing all the music in the book, I was thinking about how music matters to each character. My ambitions were simple. I wanted to make sure it wasn't simply my love of music getting on the page but instead to say everywhere it comes up does it matter to the characters and the situation. I trusted that unconsciously whatever I knew and felt about music would make connections between stories.

JD: I think it was very successful. In the first story of the collection “Toilet” when a Michael Jackson song starts playing our narrator reveals: “I have expectations I can't escape. I want to eat my own flesh. I want to shout, “Run!”  This critical moment of the story reveals an emotional vulnerability that we felt but that had not yet been articulated. Then there is the juxtaposition of Michael Jackson's music, since he represents a music superstar, with the character of this story who in his own words says, “I have recently recognized I'm a failed actor.” To me, that was powerful. Was that organic? Did that come through revision?

RM: Almost everything good in the book came through revision. That came through revision. The presence of the Michael Jackson music in the story ended up giving me the space to work in the narrator's revelations.  “Wanting to be Starting Something” is the first song. I chose that consciously because it's the beginning of something and for the narrator, the juxtaposition is the narrator beginning to own who and where he is in his life.  The trigger is this Michael Jackson music. Who doesn't love dancing to Michael Jackson music, pre-scandal? That factor, that I bring out later at the end of the story, is part of what allowed me to have the narrator reveal himself.  Here's this song, it's just a party song, except, oh no, it's more than that. It gave unconscious permission for the narrator to say: here's the truth – “I want to eat my own flesh. “

JD: I felt like music also informed my reading of the next story in the book, “Lesser Escape Artists.” The bridge sections callback to musical structure but subverts my expectation because in songs bridges reflect back on earlier material. These sections seem to open up the story world. And then we have Mahler and his Symphony #6!  How much of these story elements are meant to guide the reader?

RM:  What you say you read, in terms of the bridges opening up rather than providing callbacks was exactly what I intended.  I did not start out with those as part of the original structure of the story. The structure of the story came pretty late. What I had initially was a story that embodied chaos theory,  fractals, and some esoteric stuff that felt like an interesting intellectual exercise. So, it took me a few drafts to pry my fingers off of how proud I was of having a brilliant idea. There's emotional material happening here and while the chaos theory is really interesting it's not the heart of things.

JD: It's just one layer but a compelling one.

RM: Thank you. It is definitely there. The butcher makes it pretty explicit. The way the bridges came up was I had material I felt belonged in the story but kept landing on the cutting floor. I trust my intuition a lot as a writer. I would try to shoe-horn this material somewhere and my writing group would say, the story is getting better but what the hell is this? Why is Dorothy Dietrich catching a 22 bullet in her teeth? I knew it belonged in the story.

JD: So, rather than slip it in, you decided to call it out?

RM: After a bunch of failed drafts, I stepped back and thought about the story as a symphony. Because Mahler was one of the pieces that was not making it into the story but I knew I wanted. That started, I will admit, from the sheer joy it gave me to throw Norman Mailer and Gustav Mahler into a conversation together, inadvertently. Most of the time for me, those things are draft delights that I think, okay, I've had my fun now it's time to go away. But that one I felt like it was speaking to the story in a larger way. It doesn't directly relate to the rabbit who is trying to get off the chopping block at the butcher shop, nor does it relate necessarily to the couple. But then I started to think about one of the Mahler lines, “I want it to fall like an ax.” I realized late in the story that it absolutely does relate to what the couple is going through and what the rabbit is going through. That was when I stepped back and said, what if I think about it as a Mahler symphony?  That didn't work directly, so then it was: what if I think about structuring it as a piece of music? That is when the bridge idea occurred to me. I will also confess, I was also thinking of my mentor and his question he often asked: “How do you build a bridge to readers?” I decided I was going to build a bridge.  It was a goofy and literal idea in a story I was lost in and it became a way to open it up and create connections that wouldn't have been there without it.

JD:  The first line of this story “There is blood in the end. I'm not going to toy with your emotions by keeping you in the dark about that” is ominous.  While we are reading the story we are striving against that darkness, looking for that victory or win. Rooting for the blind rabbit, the couple, the narrator to push against the idea that “desire fractures us all.”  The final line of the story leaves us in a complicated emotional place: “In a world this chaotic, I choose to believe.”  Can you talk about the inherent narrative tension between the tragic and hopeful? 

RM: I think for me, the tension between the tragic and hopeful, or between the dark and the light is a pretty central thread in everything I write. I don't experience simplistic victories in my life nor simplistic defeats. When I think back on some of my best days, they are punctuated with some awful moments. Maybe not awful moments, but the good and the bad it's all there at once. Most of us don't get to choose ecstasy alone. That to me is really important to reflect in what I write.

JD: This calls to mind the quote by John O'Donoghue that I shared with you not long ago, “the human heart is a theater of longings.” This idea crystallized for me why I'm drawn to certain stories.  Many of the stories in your collection evoked this sense of longing, the permutations of this feeling and all the ways it can manifest in life. You render this longing so beautifully on the page.  How are you able to tap into this emotion so successfully?

RM:  The easiest answer is, how am I able to recognize it and tap in, I am filled with longing in my own self.  It's a pattern that I recognize in my life and its one of my obsessions in fiction writing as a result. Whenever somebody asks me -- what's your subject in fiction?, my answer is the attempts we make as humans to connect with one another and the imperfection that is inherent in that.  To me that is very tied to desire.  I have a really deep longing for connection with other humans and I'm fortunate enough to have a lot of connections but it is always imperfect. I think that the relationship of desire and fulfillment, partial fulfillment, occasional fulfillment – the slippage of good intentions that don't quite connect because of the various pressures on us is something I'm endlessly interested in. I have massive compassion for it. Because I think we are all looking for it, in one way or another, even if we are building walls so we can hide from it.