Holding America Accountable: be/trouble by bridgette bianca

Poet bridgette bianca wants you to know about black people. About black women. About herself. She wants you to understand that their lives are always in danger; that they ready themselves with armor for what the day will throw at them, how amazing; how “bad” they truly are.

In doing so bianca breaks up her debut collection, be/trouble, into four sections—“and the living be,” “this much i know is true,” “our fallen” and “ain’t we a dream too”—sprinkling in their amazingness between all the pain and violence and death they experience every day. bianca breaks her collection into helpful sections, not to make the poems easier to understand or easier to take in, but to ensure she, a black woman, is being heard. As such, she makes clear that her audience is white America, as she pushes back against America’s long and continued history of silencing black women, only noticing them when they can comfort—care—for white people during their most difficult times.

In the first poem “at least i can say” bianca opens by giving context for her discussion of black lives saying from personal experience, “i have/always been keenly aware/that i/could die any day” and “i have/always been sure something/was trying/to kill me.” It’s how black lives are lived each and every day. Danger, death, the possibility of it affecting every choice, as she says in “a saturday night,” about driving while black. bianca asks, “what do you do when you see lights in the rearview mirror/what do you do when the siren loops around your throat.” The use of “you” draws in and implicates the reader in this discussion on policing, effectively gives them a moment to reflect on their own experience, to allow bianca to make her point about how her experience, and by extension black peoples, are different from the readers’.

In this context—to ensure she is not spoken for or misunderstood again—breaking the collection up into sections works. Each section heading functions like the best crafted critical thinking questions, especially the first and last. With the first section heading, “and the living be,” how are their lives lived and in what ways? How are they constructed in America?

And the last section “ain’t we a dream too” begs the question, in what way? The dream white America has created to depict black women, in the sense of aren’t they cool, amazing, confident, or in the sense of this is how they conceived themselves to be, something quite amazing. Or,  all three?

bianca’s poems derive their power from their bluntness. For holding the reader accountable. One way she does this is by the use of refrains. She needs to emphasize certain key points about black people and black women, that white America keeps getting wrong or continues to ignore or discredit. The poem “an exasperated black woman said fuck i’ll do it” uses the alternating refrains “this is not a poem” and “this is my life” as their own stanzas following stanzas telling the truth about bianca’s lived life, what she was going through “…the morning after/the election” after she “…recently buried a loved one.” As the title states directly the frustration of always having to explain herself to white America because no one else will, these refrains stress the factual truth bianca relates, of how she always—and black women historically—have to set their needs and feelings aside to comfort white America when their feelings are uncomfortable,  to play the role of mammy. These refrains build in intensity, enwrapping the reader in Bianca’s world, as the words get more pointed.

this is not a poem…

…forgive me for not
holding back your hair
in solidarity

this is my life

So I’m a little busy

She confidently takes the power from the reader, flips and asserts it.

The refrain in this poem also acts as a call and response in the tradition of black and African poetry. And black music like Jazz and Blues. This, along with bianca’s codeswitching within and between poems, from proper educated English to brief instances of black English before switching back, forces English to adapt to her needs, to her ways of making meaning. These meanings are vital, specific and natural to her experiences as in “i’m trying to remember when i started apologizing for my body” when she says “no growth spurt would/puberty me.” Or in the poem “every nigga is a scar,” where bnianca says “and staying black don’t mean/niggas get to ride our backs/to freedom land/we ain’t no mule.”

Through all the danger, bianca is still able to beautifully assert how amazing her people and their culture are. The poem “that good black don’t crack” is an ode beginning “this is a big black greasy poem” unabashed about all facets of the black community from “the way the other dominos on the table/tremble/when somebody yells/gimme fitteen/while slapping bones” to “full of bus rides down south/or better yet car rides/when the air conditioner stops working/halfway through texas.”

However, the directness about who the audience is doesn’t always work. In an era where writers of color are done teaching white America about themselves, doing their work for them, when people of color are expected to do all the work of learning about white America, the directness took some getting used to. It wasn’t until I read “an exasperated black woman says fuck i’ll do it” that I started to understand that bianca was using this chance to hold white America accountable. Unfortunately this directness in who bianca is addressing unnecessarily interrupts the poems “the good black don’t crack” and “every nigga is a scar,’ undercutting the context in which the poems are powerfully understood, to create a teachable moment.

In the last section “ain’t we a dream” brings everything discussed in the first three sections to an unforgiving and raw head. bianca writes them through the emotional lens of empowerment. All the personality traits American society teaches black women not to inhabit—loudness, the right to their own feelings, joy, to be noticed, etc.—she inhabits with unabashed confidence. A forceful example is from “a message from uppity negresses” where she asserts at the end, that:

…i want you to know
i am all that
i am too good
i know my place is first
and if you have to ask
i have to confirm
the rumors are true
i am better than you
and you can stay mad

I saw such assertions intensify as be/trouble drew to a close. But once the dust settled, it’s apparent that bianca has pushed forward, moved past the witness of white institutional nonsense. Her loving, unflinching gaze of black lives. The only option that remains, she says, is to hold white America accountable and as she asks the reader in “i want the world to see” “am i making you uncomfortable.”

An Interview with Robert Glick, Author of Two Californias

Robert Glick is an Associate Professor of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he teaches creative writing, electronic literature, and the occasional course on zombies. His work has won competitions from The Normal School, Copper Nickel, Diagram, Summer Literary Seminars, and New Ohio Review; other stories have been published in the Masters Review, Denver Quarterly, and Gettysburg Review. His first collection, Two Californias, was published by C&R Press in 2019.

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Kristina Marie Darling:  Your latest book, Two Californias, was recently launched by C&R Press.  What would you like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?  

First, thanks for reading! There are so many great books out right now. I hope you find something meaningful and pleasurable in these pages. I hope that the stories don't land too neatly—I'm one who wants a bit of visible messiness. Making treasure from trash, so to speak. 

Speaking as a native Californian, the book is less about California (though all the stories take place there) than it is about, through variation, collapsing overly simplistic boundaries—north and south, etc. While by no means autobiographical, it is more personal than I had originally realized, its spotlights drawn to the unorthodox, sometimes funny, often diversionary ways we deal with loss.

KMD:  What drew you to C&R Press for this particular project?  

They liked the book! It's so important for a press, with the complexities of media economies, to have your back, to support you and the work. I liked C&R's catalogue, their design choices, and the ways in which they wanted to collaborate. It felt ethically as well as aesthetically right, and I'm very grateful to Andrew Sullivan, John Gosslee, and the entire team.

KMD: Your fiction makes innovative use of white space, interruption, and rupture.  What does silence make possible for you as a storyteller?  

Everything. Can noise exist without silence? 

From the standpoint of lineage, the influence of white space came to me from Marguerite Duras, especially the way her blocks of text just sort of hang in air, smoke rings of meanings. For me, silence (and its physical analog, white space) is material, metaphor, tempo. Most of my stories are written modularly, with gaps, often without linear transitions, notated by white space. The reader enters this open space (well, this space is always there, but in Two Californias, it's foregrounded and encouraged) to think, to pause, to insert their consciousness/imaginations. 

The silence also reminds us that the writing, the words, the syntax: nothing but one n/mote, pointing to the more infinite possibilities. The book is not fully closed, can never be fully closed (though one might try). While white space isn't exactly an iceberg, it nonetheless points to everything unsaid. 

KMD:  In addition to your achievements in fiction, you are an accomplished educator. What has teaching opened up within your creative practice?  

Lately, teaching has taught me about the openness and possibility of process. We do a lot of collaborative brainstorming: what could happen in this situation? In what ways can X connect to Y? Writing, for me, represents what Barthes calls a "tissue of citations"—a network of meanings. In this respect, and without dismissing craft, I think about teaching as a means to work with students to be brave and critical in building their own networks. Working with the students has reinforced my own desire to slow down when writing, to pursue possibilities that aren't immediately obvious to me. Then I sneak on to campus late at night, when the classrooms are empty, to make use of the white boards :.)

KMD:  With the recent launch of Two Californias, what readings, events, and workshops can we look forward to?  

I'm on sabbatical(!), so mostly I'm holed up here in Rochester, waiting for the deer to cross the backyard, finishing up The Paradox of Wonder Woman’s Airplane. In the short run, I'll be doing a reading/workshop at the wonderful Writers & Books here in Rochester, followed by what I'm sure will be a fabulous University of Utah reading at AWP in San Antonio. Then I head off to the MacDowell Colony in March and April, where I'll visit the oracle each day, and revel in thermoses of soup. I finish off the semester working with the smart, engaged students at Hobart and Smith College in Geneva. 

KMD:  What are you currently working on? What’s next?  

I'm finishing a hybrid print/digital novel called The Paradox of Wonder Woman’s Airplane—it should go to agents by the end of the year. 

Set in Kansas City during the 2016 presidential election race, Paradox traces the unorthodox pathways we take through individual grief, collective trauma, and social awareness. After a miscarriage, Grace, a 40-year-old anesthesiologist, must decide whether she wants to have another child, weighing her own desires and her growing political awareness against the constricting biases of suburban life. Her husband Chuck urgently wants to be a father once again. While he waits for Grace to make up her mind, he falls prey to his self-destructive impulses; his imaginary friend, whom he calls The Reckless, forces him to steal a rare, expensive model of Wonder Woman’s airplane. Meanwhile, their two teenagers stumble into dangerous intrigues with Bosnian art saboteurs and rapture-obsessed veterinarians. 

The Paradox of Wonder Woman’s Airplane is written as a set of discrete, interlocking sections. Family members and minor characters contribute their distinct voices to the collective narration. The novel also contains non-diegetic chapters, including an MFA thesis in art history (with performative scores) and characters' own creative writings (such as an imagined history of a mysteriously disappeared grandparent). As a general thematic, the novel explores versions of visibility and invisibility (technical, psychological, linguistic) exemplified by the figure of Wonder Woman’s airplane, which, in drawings and animations, requires white lines to make visible the boundaries of the plane’s invisibility. In line with my artistic vision, each section attempts to intensify the emotional and intellectual power of the novel by expressing character-based story through innovative forms of language, voice, and syntax.

Chapters of Paradox have won the Summer Literary Seminars Center for Fiction Prize and the New Ohio Review Contest in Fiction. Other chapters have been published in The Masters Review Anthology. You can read online chapters at The Collagist and The Los Angeles Review. 

While Paradox will primarily take shape in the print universe, some sections of the novel will only be available in digital form (beta).

The Complexity of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience: A Review of Nancy Au's Spider Love Song and Other Stories

““After a long frigid winter, she’d been craving jasmine blossoms, which is the scent of dragons in love.””

— "Anatomy of a Cloud"

Longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, Nancy Au’s remarkable debut collection, Spider Love Song and Other Stories, explores the Asian American diaspora. Simultaneously modern and ancient, quirky and compelling, the seventeen short stories, flash and fables reveal the complexity of the immigrant and refugee experience. How that experience changes and morphs with each successive generation and yet carries the ancestral DNA, threads of culture and tradition, legend and mythology. Dynasties insisting to be sewn into the fabric of the now.

In this collection, Au humanizes the newcomer. In so doing, she invites us to sumptuous feasts and day-long meal preparations. Oven baked frog thighs, “pearlescent moon slivers with pungent garlic, tiny onions” served on a bed of arugula.  Appreciated with loud croaking burps. Plates of “gingery fish and scallops, pickled duck web and salted squid, and a bowl of steaming rice.” Slurping of fish-ball soup. Serving the duck head to the honored guest. 

Au reveals their struggles, from finding friends and community to finding employment consistent with education and background. Making do, making ends meet. The hard work, the physical and emotional toiling of non-white America. Where families labor in an orchard hand dusting blossoms with pollen sticks in “Lincoln Chan: Pear King” and a former veterinarian is reduced to dispensing meds at a nursing home in “Odonata at Rest.”

The stories are told mostly from a youthful point of view. Ten, eleven, twelve-year-olds, young enough to believe in dragons and damselflies, young enough to believe the stories their elders tell. But this is an age of constant observation. Because the world is still a wonder, they take it all in. They are at the dawn of understanding. They puzzle together white lies and omissions. They see, for the first time, their parents’ deficiencies. They feel acutely their displacement, their otherness.

In “The Richmond,” a daughter wins a lottery to attend a private school. The new school, the mean girls, the other side of town complicates her relationship with parents’ history and her new divergent path. She tries to understand the pain of fleeing Communist China– the cruelty and sacrifice it took to survive, but she can no longer tolerate the neighborhood in which they live. A place that’s not Chinatown. A place that’s not white suburbia. She tells her parents that she is not like them. She is not an immigrant. Why are they punishing her?

“I wanted to say that I understood Baba’s crude jokes with the Wans, about how they escaped genocide by pointing to their neighbors then playing dead. But at eleven, I couldn’t interpret their birdsong and thought it a sweet uselessness. I couldn’t grasp my parents’ twisted refugee humor or that their laughter was a sparrow song of sorrow, of disloyalty, of survival—a savage happiness. I couldn’t picture Mama’s childhood friend on her knees, hands tied behind her back, hair spilling over her shoulders, tears pouring from her eyes as a soldier towered over her. I could not picture the explosion of a bullet fired from the rifle, the pierced skin, the shattering skull, or Mama’s grief.”

Throughout the collection, Au underscores the tradition of Chinese storytelling. Au finds stories everywhere: in math and science, in trashy romance novels, in death. Where people can “stand next to each other on the slippery wet edge of their story, holding up each other’s glossy dime-store dreams.” 

In “Wearing My Skin,” a single mother Cynthia earns a living as a phone sex worker, spinning erotic tales while she shuffles around her apartment in airplane slippers. 

In “How to Become Your Own Odyssey or the Land of Indigestion,” a father recounts nighttime travels after he is found sleeping on top of the family’s old station wagon or sprawled on the kitchen floor amongst the remains of his sleepwalk-gorging: tofu blocks, raw cabbages, sesame oil. He tells glamorous sleepwalking stories where his dreams take him to grand forests with golden-winged creatures resembling seahorses and prisons, churches and schools “built out of bright vermillion pomegranate skins.”

There is a hopefulness embedded in this collection. Throughout, spiders and spider webs, pear trees, peaches and peach pits, the color red, and ducks, symbols of good omens, prosperity, abundance and luck, signal an optimism for the future, long and happy marriages and cures to relationship problems.

In the laugh out loud, riotous “Louise,” a married couple, wife and wife, May Zhou and Lai, both accountants, are having their traditional Friday picnic lunch when a mangled, one-eyed, one-toed, bald-headed duck wanders over. Lai scoops up the duck in delight, names it Louise and insists on adopting it. She tucks Louise into their lunch cooler, using a half-eaten peanut butter sandwich as a duck mattress. She’s already picturing the domestic scene, Louise greeting them at the front door after work, nipping at their pant legs, wiggling her feathery tail until they pet her bald spot. They’d be a family. “You don’t know love ’til you have a duck.” They are arguing over the practicalities of having a duck (it can’t bury its own poop, duck-proofing the house) when a ranger enters the scene commanding Lai to hand over the bird. A melee ensues. Lai believes the duck will bring magic into their lives, she refuses to give up hope.

Despite the psychological hold of the past, Au challenges stereotypes and traditions. Women marry women. Daughters are adored. A mother refuses to honor the birth spirits that would have diminished her daughter. “Math is an asshole.” An eighty-year-old woman, “in her own true myth,” is not “a corny grandmother.” “She is useful poison.” Women are the breadwinners, holding their families together with their wages while husbands/fathers are left behind, lose jobs, or disappear.

And with a slight of hand, Au uses an ancient tale, a retelling of Chinese mythology to comment on the future. Her lush poetic prose illuminates the truth of climate change and the truth of building a new life in an inhospitable land. In “Anatomy of a Cloud,” a story of love, ingenuity and grief, Fei tends to last dragon god of rain.

“Fei uses the chicken claw to comb YingLong’s coarse beard, and recites stories of the afterworld, a place not deadened by drought, with oil slicks for oceans, black and mystery deep. Fei shakes the sand dollar to hear inside. She puts it to her ear and listens to grains slide over themselves, washing over rocks and sea ledges the way water once washed over the long dead sharks and penguins, seaweed and jellyfish. The sand dollar lets her see underneath the beach. And there she finds millennia before the Anthropocene dried up the planet. She finds buried treasure, gold booty and purple gemstones, lost eyepatches of pirates. She finds the footsteps of every creature that has ever walked the beach, every bird, every warrior. She finds every seal and every whale and dragon skeleton. She finds broken kite strings, lost tennis balls. She finds the ocean that was once glacier and once in Africa and on the cap of the earth.”

It is difficult to sum up the experience of reading this collection, a journey through time, a dance with people you may have seen from a distance but never bothered to get to know or understand. In a place as vivid and inviting as your own backyard. These stories linger long after the last word is read. Like an ornamental shawl embroidered with the finest silk thread.

Bill Lavender’s My ID: A Genre Bending Narrative Memoir

Reading poetry can be a radical act of self-reflection. I find myself unpacking my own depths in the presence of a great writer’s fearless journey, whereas maybe I cannot find or accept that moment in other genres or therapies, medicines or practices. Like My Life Lyn Hejinian’s profound imagist memoir, Bill Lavender’s new BlazeVox volume My ID is opening those doors for me.

Lavender’s title poem near the start of the book is a list of firsts that begins with that nearly universal American act of getting a Social Security card as a teenager:

1965, I’m 14, at Evelyn Hills Shopping Center
SS office, where my mother brought me to get
my first card, and next door a wallet to put it in

We hear of the mundane, the triumphant and the embarrassing. We learn who he is by the images of a life fully lived and decades passing by:

VISA, permission to enter, end
of the phone book, second marriage
license, houses VI,VII,VIII, inheritance,
first last will and testament…

A “list of firsts” poem may be a brave and wonderful Proustian exercise but Lavender takes it to master’s level. The yellowed card is “a handsome artifact” and he uses it as the book’s cover. He lets us know he is not going to hide anything in his memoiristic prose poems.

He describes his father’s face in his sister’s portrait one of “primal ambivalence” in the finely tuned poem “Imagework.” “Structures” is a dream poem, both descriptive and analytic and “Grand Isle” takes us on a fishing trip. The ID and the id are both in play. This is the work of a writer in his 12th book. His writing is prone to analysis, sometimes psychoanalysis, and at its best his poetic and genre bending narrative memoir is gripping.

At the book’s center is “Tui: an Elegy.” It is a tryptic, bookends of a mourning process with a travelogue in between. The beginning and end are unpunctuated creating an unnerving staccato, and the travelogue in the middle introduces denser prose text. It is a journey about travel and loss, and the writer’s compulsive urge to document it all. His sure language and process succeeds in bringing the whole to us. “More and more life feels emptied like that” he says in recounting a memory of another travel journey in the midst of the one to Tui, Portugal. He and his partner Nanc have taken many journeys together. She is there in a way that is essential. Their feet land in the familiar place, “The big room where we used to have to ask people to move to make room for a dart game, was empty but for the bartender.”

“Time” is the collection’s most fearless work. Here Lavender recounts clear eyed seeing his oldest friends who’ve scattered and regrouped, the 30 years gone by and how to relate and re-relate to them in the present, again in an unpunctuated flow, a satisfying collision of memory, thought and action on the page.

The book’s final piece is a “magpie scholar’s” history of “La Police” both the origin of the word and the concept of the modern police force. It was originally written as a Locofo Chaps chapbook, sent to the 45th president on his 100th day in office. On first read this writing seemed tacked on to a collection which felt complete. Then I found myself discussing Lavender’s assertions, re-read it, and understood its place in a book about an ID card. “One is a thief unless one can prove otherwise. Thievery is not merely punished; it is prevented by this pragmatic measure. Have your identity card or go to gaol.”

In Bill Lavender’s ID, wisdom is the bittersweet prize of a life well lived. So much can change that simple pleasures become unfamiliar. This book is full of timeless empathy: “Poetry that ancient broken/ pottery of sound.” It is a gift to all who strive for sentience.

An Interview with Cris Mazza, Author of Yet to Come

Kristina Marie Darling: Your novel, Yet to Come, will launch soon from BlazeVOX Books. What would you like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?

Cris Mazza: I’d like readers to assume that Yet to Come can provide different gratifications or provide different responses from different kinds of readers . . . and that any kind of response or take-away is interesting to me. Among the various elements — for example the “setting” of the characters’ mid-lifespans being from the 80s to 2010, the aspects of male-victim spousal abuse, or the subplot of female sexual dysfunction — will come to the forefront in different orders for different readers. I wish I could hear from every reader to see which parts, characters, or story-lines spoke loudest. Basically, I always tried to write books that my mother could read and also my English professors could appreciate.

KMD: You’ve worked with many outstanding literary publishers over the course of your distinguished career.  What drew you to BlazeVOX Books for this particular text? 

CM: First, one of my former PhD students had a recent novel from BlazeVox, so I knew there was an appreciation for literature-off-the-beaten-path. Also, when I looked at the books, they each had a personalized size, shame and design, appropriate for the book itself and not a standard for all of their books.  I knew I would need a publisher sensitive to the repeated postcards in the book, which required the use of different fonts, an image of a postcard, etc. BlazeVox is open to a writer having a mental image and actual production input for what a book looks like as a finished product.

KMD: I admire your experimentation with form, which frequently encompasses templates that are not germane to literary texts:  postcards, lists of problems, handwritten notes, and more. What do these non-literary or found forms make possible within a given narrative? 

CM: I began doing this in earnest in my 2014 memoir Something Wrong With Her because my college journals were essential to the book containing a “me-then” who was not the same person writing the “real time” text. I realized I had to use images of the journals rather than retype the passages I wanted to use — to prevent myself from editing the earlier me. While researching my own cache of artifacts for that book, I found more: the handwritten notes, yearbook inscriptions, hand-drawn cartoons, etc., that I knew had to be seen and not just described. I think the book was able to be urgent and alive in more than one time-zone, from the “real time” text to 40 years earlier.

KMD: Relatedly, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the gender politics of genre. Is experimentation with — and challenging — received forms of discourse an inherently feminist act? Why or why not? 

CM: It traditionally largely hasn’t been. In the 70s and 80s when so much literary prose experimentation was disproportionately by male authors, a simple explanation was provided (I can’t recall the source): these men were rebelling against the established canon; but that canon, being predominately male, was not what women writers were moved to rebel against — they had to create their “canon” first. Instead, the mere act of speaking out at all, having a published written voice, was the initial “rebellion.” Then when I co-edited the “chick-lit” anthologies in the mid-90s, the publisher launched the project as a talent search for unknown or emerging women writers who were beginning more and more to challenge popular expectations of writing-by-women.

It’s difficult for me, personally, to say how the forms in my own writing is or might be a feminist or gender-related gesture because most of the writers who influenced me in terms of form were male since most of the writers taught to me in college were male; and yet the work of one of the female inclusions, Kathy Acker, for whatever reason did not speak to me. Female writers who later participated in my development, from Erica Jong to Alice Munro, were not experimenting so much with form.

KMD: As you promote YET TO COME, what readings, events, and workshops can we look forward to?

I plan to be in my car heading west, to California where the novel is set, and making as many stops along the route was I can manage to arrange. Anyone interested in an event can feel free to contact me. 

KMD: What are you currently working on? What’s next?

CM: Related to my answer about the insertion of image-artifacts in my work, I’m working on a series of linked essays that make further use of this technique, or using form to “concretize” what the essay is saying. This concept is best characterized by “Ask The Depot Commander” in which the narrative of my father’s recollections of his experience in 1946 Nuremburg, Germany — plus original photos he took there — is formatted to lie side-by-side with researched historical details that correspond to the substances of his memory. For example, he described giving an orange from the Army mess to a German man, whose wife and child ate one segment a day and made the orange last two weeks; this personal anecdote is juxtaposed beside original text of a different tone, explaining U.S. occupation policies that stipulated sharing food with German citizens was against military orders.

Each essay, with a different topic but involving my family, will have a form that suits its needs.

Be Prepared to Travel: An Interview with Clifford Garstang, Author of House of the Ancients and Other Stories

Kristina Marie Darling: Your new book, House of the Ancients and Other Stories, will be launched by Press 53 in May. What would you like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?

Clifford Garstang: First, be prepared to travel. While about half of the stories in the collection are set in the United States, the rest have settings all over the world, including Mexico, Europe, and Central and Southeast Asia. Second, while the stories are mostly grounded in realism, a few of them take a decidedly unreal turn, which I hope readers will find interesting. They’re something of a departure for me.

KMD: You’ve worked with many excellent presses over the course of your career. What drew you to Press 53 for this particular project?

CG: I have a great relationship with Kevin Morgan Watson, the publisher at Press 53. The press also published my first two collections as well as the anthology series I edited, and I worked closely with them on the literary magazine I co-founded with Kevin, Prime Number. The press really understands short story collections—in fact they only publish short fiction and poetry—and when this new collection was ready I knew I wanted them to publish it. Some publishers are all about the novel and short story collections are an afterthought, at best. Not so with Press 53. 

KMD: On the whole, your fiction has a distinctly international sensibility. Tell me what travel has made possible within your creative practice.

CG: Living outside the United States—first in South Korea as a Peace Corps Volunteer, then for a long time in Singapore and later in Kazakhstan—plus extensive overseas travel for work and pleasure has, I think, opened my eyes and strengthened the empathy a fiction writer has to have. Because of that, I’m able, within some limits of course, to write sensitively about people who are different from me. To some extent, I’ll always be writing “what I know,” but pushing the envelope of what that encompasses has meant, for me, looking beyond America.

KMD: In addition to your achievements in fiction, you are well-known for your literary citizenship, making resources available to writers who seek to navigate the ever-expanding landscape of literary journals. I’d love to hear more about what this has opened up within your writing. What has being part of a community made possible for you as a storyteller? 

CG: Years ago, when I was considering a career transition that would allow me to focus on writing, an old grad school professor of mine advised me to enroll in an MFA program because, he asserted, writers need to find a community of other writers. Most of us do our creative work in isolation, but I have found it both comforting and encouraging to emerge from time to time and connect with the community. And the community grows for me as I interact with it—starting with my MFA program, continuing with workshops, conferences, and residencies, and sometimes more remotely such as through the annual literary magazine rankings I’ve been doing now for more than a decade. Being part of the larger community exposes me to different ways of doing things, of telling stories, and relating to readers.

KMD: With the upcoming launch of House of the Ancients and Other Stories, what readings, events, and workshops can we look forward to? 

CG: The book comes out in May, so I’m planning launch events in Virginia, where I’m based, and North Carolina, where Press 53 is located. We’re still working on setting up readings and other appearances, and I regularly update the Events page on my website, which is cliffordgarstang.com.

KMD: What are you currently working on? What’s next? 

CG: I have a novel coming out in 2021 called Oliver’s Travels. As the name suggests, it’s about a man named Oliver who travels, and he’s traveling in search of answers to a question his family can’t or won’t answer for him. And I’m currently working on another novel, this one a blended contemporary and historical novel set in Singapore. It’s been fun to do research for that one.

Blurring Lines, Fraying Edges: A Review of We Might As Well Light Something On Fire by Ron MacLean

“There is something particularly compelling about a detached foot, he says. Something sad. Almost Lonely.”

—from “Unfound”

Remember silly putty? Back in the day. When you kneaded the polymer dough into a pancake, pressed in headlines and comics from the Funny Pages. Doonesbury, Garfield, Peanuts. After you peeled away the newspaper revealing your new creation, you tugged and pulled, twisted the words, distorted the images. It was like having a fun house mirror in the palm of your hand. Then you rolled the political commentary, the cat’s ponderings and Charlie Brown, all that existential angst into a ball. If you pulled the sphere apart and peered inside, you could still see the essence, the infinite possibilities, amid the swirl of ink.

This is what it’s like to read Ron MacLean’s short story collection We Might As Well Light Something On Fire, published by Braddock Ave Books, where he stretches the boundaries of storytelling, plays with form, presses his thumb into the life of his imaginings, blurring lines, fraying edges, playing with time and space, following threads of energy, but always with the intention to question what it means to be human, to search for political and social justice, to expose our feelings of alienation, to illuminate the never ending quest for connection.

The sixteen stories divided into three sections are often off-kilter, zany and absurd. Consider: A quinceañera for a cat named Egg in “Quinceañera.” Or, dancing goats clad in tan raincoats, porkpie hats and Ray-Bans hiding in plain sight from their executioner, a theoretical physicist turned butcher in “Lesser Escape Artists.” Or disarticulated feet washing ashore in British Columbia, five in total, wearing size 12 running shoes in “Unfound.” Or a friendly haunting by turn of the century Wisconsin politicians in “What Remains” where a former Assistant US Attorney finds a father/son duo hiding in her bathtub. They hang around fixing her plumbing, cooking dinner, enjoying cable TV and facilitating the donation of food to Occupy Wall Street protestors while she battles the Lockport, NY police department over custody of her father’s ashes.

MacLean interlaces excerpts of recipes, musical refrains, travel guide books, historical anecdotes. He spins time in a blender, scrambles sentences like refrigerator poetry magnets. “River Song,” a prose poem like song lyrics, recounts again and again the saga of a dead girl, a doctor, a bridge, Blinky and Ray Ray and a freezer full of tinfoil wrapped money. With each retelling, the truth like memory becomes malleable, more elusive; it erodes away like the banks of a river.

Despite its unconventional underpinnings, the collection begins with and disperses throughout realistic straight forward narratives, in an earnest voice that’s like a conversation. A confessional. Grounded in the here and now — with keenly observed details — leaving head space for the surreal complexities to come. MacLean crafts dialogue and interior musings that are clipped and fragmented, proffered in inhospitable environs, highlighting an acute sense of dislocation.

In the opening story, “Toilet,” the narrator attends a birthday party for someone he doesn’t like enough because she has no need to shine. His thoughts ping pong off the concrete columns in the large industrial open space, a former toilet paper manufacturing concern, now an apartment. He’s not where he’d like to be in his career. He opines that he’s recently lost his context. Confides that he keeps a goat to clean his yard, to make conversation at parties, but mostly for the company. He’s connected to all of these people, he’s friends with them in one way or another, but feels alienated, disjointed. He’s so desperate, he’s willing to go home with a woman whether she’s “sexy or sick as a dog.” The partygoers are reduced to body parts in his mind: the mustache, the sexy clavicle, an ear. Everything is out of context. Even the party food doesn’t makes sense in this hipster Northeast enclave, in which the hosts serve biscuits and gravy.

In a triptych of stories “Prostate Frank Finds True Love,” “Bounce Goes Kissy-Kissy,” and “The Hemorrhoid Holds Court,” a group of mostly middle-aged men meet for their weekly Friday morning coffee klatch. Reduced to nicknames, Bounce, Max the Grabber, Hemorrhoid, Alter Boy, as if a person’s entire being can be summed up in a word or a phrase, they chat, each man assuming his roll, but no one is really listening.

MacLean’s musings of isolation are most profound in the “Night Bus” a travelogue of a tourist excursion to see the uppermost reaches of Northern Finland, the barren tundra, and the constellations. Initially the narrator is optimistic, energized by the crisp cold air.

“And the air. I can’t get enough of it, It’s so, I don’t know what. Cold. More than clean. Something that makes my pores sing Buddy Holly. Bjork. Like mountain air poured through a trumpet filled with lake water.”

He feels boundless love for the communion of parkas, mittens and boots, bib pants and balaclavas. He tries to communicate, practices in his head the sentences he parses together from his translation phrase book, but he never quite hits his mark. He tells a young woman she looks hot in her coat. A fellow traveler, “the Talker” is everywhere chatting everyone up from the bus driver to passengers, to the snack man. The Talker rhapsodizes: “I want to get closer and closer to unadorned yearning.”

There’s a disorientation that comes from long trips, the rhythm of miles lulling the brain to sleep. As the narrator clenches his frost bitten fingers (result of a failed college romance) he contemplates the polar night when the sun doesn’t rise above the horizon for 51 days. The Talker wants him to admit, “I have been lost in this night before.” The narrator refuses to voice the Talker’s directive but his despair is palpable.

I was frustrated at times with my inability to decipher the meaning, the author’s intent in some of these stories such as the madcap “Lesser Escape Artists.” I didn’t mind searching the dictionary or questioning the Googleverse. I desperately wanted to unlock the mystery of string theory and its connection to Mailer and Mahler and string cheese and goats shuffle stepping to what I presumed was Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science.” How was all that connected to the couple who bring a philosophizing rabbit of the wrong sex to a butcher shop to determine the state of the woman’s womb?

But perhaps that’s the point, the pondering and not knowing with certainty is what it’s all about.