HOBART

Dollar Store reading and BBQ in Chicago, Hobart 10 release!

This weekend, I will be reading in Chicago, as part of the Dollar Store Super Summer Tour Launch BBQ Patio Party. If you are anywhere nearby, you should probably, definitely come by. In addition to me reading a short piece, there's like 40 other readers, an improve comedy group, all the BBQ you can eat, free beer from 1-3, and practically anything else you could wish for. Also, I'll have some fresh-off-the-press copies of Hobart 10!

Also, if you live in or near Nashville, Austin, Houston, New Orleans, Atlanta, Baltimore, New York, Philly, Boston, Albany, or Ann Arbor... come see is there!

Here's the full line-up and details:

featherproof books is excited, no, totally pumped, to announce our biggest event of the year: The Dollar Store Summer Tour of Awesomeness! That’s right, we’re taking this renowned reading series on the road: packing 7+ of our beloved writers in a van, buying tons of dollar store junk, and hitting 11 (other) cities in 14 days. Which ones? These ones:

CHICAGO LAUNCH BBQ PATIO PARTY, Sunday June 28th

1-6pm, $8 The Hideout 1354 W Wabansia Ave Chicago, IL 60642

Readings by: Tobias Amadon Bengelsdorf, Chris Bower,Aaron Burch, Elizabeth Crane, Zach Dodson, Natalie Edwards, Amelia Gray, Mary Hamilton, Lindsay Hunter,Jac Jemc, Jonathan Messinger, Caroline Picard, Diana Slickman, Scott Stealey, Jill Summers, Robbie Q. Telfer Improv by: 1, 2, Fag and Hag! (Seth Dodson, Kellen Alexander and Christina Boucher), and An Oak (Neil Dandade and Adam Schwartz) It's ALSO a big barbeque, and all you can eat drumsticks, and veggie burgers, and fixin's, and corn-on-the-cob, and picnic sides! Oh, and one more thing: we’re raffling off a custom-built, featherproof-themed bike, compliments of Working Bikes Cooperative. This afternoon delight will cost $8 at the door, and for $8 you get 8 things: 1. Admission 2. A featherproof mini book 3. Readings by Chicago’s finest and Improv by Chicago’s funniest 4. Hosted bar by Red Stripe 1-3pm! Yum! 5. All the barbeque you can eat 6. Your very own Dollar Store official souvenir pin 7. A Working Bikes bike raffle ticket 8. A shot at a missed connection, and the time of your life. Buy tickets HERE! NOW! Food generously sponsored by Eye Spy Optical. Bring old glasses to be recycled! Check out eyespyoptical.com! Open bar generously sponsored by Red Stripe. Come from 1 - 3pm for beers! Check out redstripebeer.com!

NASHVILLE, Friday July 3rd
Venue TBA	With: Aaron Burch, Zach Dodson, Mary Hamilton, Jac Jemc Featuring: TBA

AUSTIN, Sunday July 5th
8pm, $1 Scoot Inn 1308 E. 4th Street @ Navasota Austin, TX 78702	With: Aaron Burch, Blake Butler, Zach Dodson, Amelia Gray, Mary Hamilton, Jac Jemc Featuring: Ryan Markel, Owen Egerton

HOUSTON, Monday July 6th
7:30pm, FREE Domy Books 1709 Westheimer Houston, TX 77098	With: Aaron Burch, Blake Butler, Zach Dodson, Amelia Gray, Mary Hamilton, Jac Jemc, Caroline Picard  Featuring: Ryan Call, Gene Morgan

NEW ORLEANS, Tuesday July 7th
8pm, FREE The Allways Lounge 2240 St Claude New Orleans, LA 70117	With: Aaron Burch, Blake Butler, Zach Dodson, Amelia Gray, Mary Hamilton, Jac Jemc, Caroline Picard  Featuring: Pia Z. Ehrhardt, Ken Foster, Michael Patrick Welch

ATLANTA, Thursday July 9th
9pm, FREE Kavarna 707 E Lake  Decatur, GA 30030	With: Aaron Burch, Blake Butler, Zach Dodson, Amelia Gray, Mary Hamilton, Jac Jemc, Caroline Picard  Featuring: Jamie Iredell Music by: Lyonnais Special Book Release! Get Early copies of Scorch Atlas byBlake Butler!

BALTIMORE, Saturday July 11th
Doors 7:30, Show 8, $1 The Lof/t 120 W North  Baltimore, MD 21201	With: Aaron Burch, Blake Butler, Zach Dodson, Amelia Gray, Mary Hamilton, Lindsay Hunter, Jac Jemc, Caroline Picard  Featuring: Lauren Bender, Michael Kimball, Adam Robinson, Joseph Young

NEW YORK, Sunday July 12th
8pm, $1 The Slipper Room Lower East Side 167 Orchard at Stanton New York, NY 10002	With: Aaron Burch, Blake Butler, Zach Dodson, Amelia Gray, Mary Hamilton, Lindsay Hunter, Jac Jemc  Featuring: D.E. Rasso, Robert Lopez and The DJs are Deadbeats from: Take the Handle

PHILADELPHIA, Monday July 13th
9pm, FREE Part of The Monday Night Club atNational Mechanics 22 South 3rd  Philadelphia, PA 19106	With: Aaron Burch, Blake Butler, Zach Dodson, Amelia Gray, Mary Hamilton, Lindsay Hunter, Jac Jemc  Featuring: Christian TeBordo, Barry Graham, Sasha Fletcher and then: The Monday Night Club

BOSTON, Tuesday July 14th
7pm, FREE Brookline Booksmith 279 Harvard  Brookline, MA 02446	With: Aaron Burch, Zach Dodson, Amelia Gray, Mary Hamilton, Lindsay Hunter, Jac Jemc, Patrick Somerville  Featuring: MC Mr. Napkins

ALBANY, Wednesday July 15th
7pm, FREE Valentines 17 New Scotland Ave Albany, NY 12208	With: Aaron Burch, Zach Dodson, Amelia Gray, Mary Hamilton, Jac Jemc, Patrick Somerville Featuring: Colie Collen, Shane Jones, Daniel Nester,Christian TeBordo

ANN ARBOR, Thursday July 16th
7pm, FREE Vault of Midnight 219 S. Main  Ann Arbor, MI 48104	With: Aaron Burch, Zach Dodson, Amelia Gray, Mary Hamilton, Jac Jemc, Patrick Somerville Featuring: Matt Bell

-aaron

J. Robert Lennon's "Castle" and the "Best New American Voices 2009"

It's been at least a couple of weeks since an update, so how about this...

I just plowed through J. Robert Lennon's new book, Castle, in the last  days and... wow. What a great freaking book. Lennon is one of those writers who's stories I've read here and there and always enjoyed (plus he was in Hobart 4!), the one book I've previously read (The Funnies) I really loved (was just telling a friend a day or two ago about it, about how it made me deeply care for a "Family Circus" style comic strip, and how difficult that must have been), and I love his blog, but I still haven't gone out of my way to track him down. I don't know why. I'm obviously a big fan. Anyway, what was so great about Castle was that it seemed to be enjoyable to the first 90% or so but I didn't really think it was something that would stick with me, and then the last two or three chapters just made it so much more powerful than what I thought I was expecting. So, take this as a rec: pick it up.

Next up, I've been using the hell out of the library here in town the last few weeks and I picked up the 2009 BNAV. I've just been reading the first few pages of each story thus far, our of curiosity, and here are two observations:

1) Each of the first FOUR stories mentioned a death on the first or second page. I don't know what that means, and don't really have much else to say about it, but still.

a) 1st sentence from Baird Harper's "Yellowstone": "Hurst struggled to keep up with the van transporting Emily's casket."

b) 1st sentence from Will Boast's "Weather Enough": "His younger brother died young."

c) last sentence of first para in Anastasia Kolendo's "Wintering": "Then, in 1999, Varvara's mother, having fallen asleep on her route, crushed a pedestrian with her truck on a gravel road north of Mountain Air Beach."

d) 5th sentence in Sharon May's "The Monkey King": "I can't say Rahu is real -- only that one bullet did not reach him and instead killed my five-year-old cousin in Phnom Penh during the lunar eclipse in late 1974, two years before I went into the jungle."

2) This is one of my new favorite lines, from the story "Little Stone, Little Pistols, Little Clash" by Jacob Rubin (the first story to not mention a death!):

"We were like cowboys who traveled through time to an era when they had Corvettes, then went back in time (with the Corvettes) and rode them through the Wild West until all our corrupt enemies and all the sweat corseted prostitutes went more or less ape-nuts because they'd never seen a Corvette before -- and therefore had never seen a group of men rock a Corvette with such skill and such conviction."

Super rad, no? I'm definitely going to try to track down some more from Rubin.

-aaron

SSM: Greg Downs bonus track!

(I took this particular photo from Greg's site because the caption is: "Exhausted at the end of a great Marah show in Asbury Park, taken by Tabatha" which is kind of rad for Marah's appearance in Greg's answer below...)

OK, I started pretty strong with Short Story Month then kind of faded away. What can I say, that's how I be. Anyway, at some point I thought it would be cool to try to contact the writers of some of the stories I've written and see if they can't kind of elaborate on the aspects of their story/stories that I focused in on. The first was with Andrew Porter, and now here's a little mini-interview with Greg Downs, author of Spit Baths. 

So, one, maybe go back and read the original post.

And then here is the interview. I asked a couple of questions, though with the same basic overall idea, and then his answers kind of melded into one long thing that, I think, if I break into two will only hurt the flow of it. So I'm going to just leave it alone and... so... here is!

First, as I mentioned when I originally wrote about the collection, I'm sure

story length and placement is one of the lesser exciting aspects for a

writer to talk about, and I certainly don't want to give the impression that

this was all I liked about Spit Baths, but I just really did admire and

appreciate the variety in the collection, not only in subject matter but

just in basic story length. And maybe this is more common than I am

remembering, but it seems like collections are often either solely "shorter"

or "longer" stores, rarely mixing the flash with the more traditional

length. Of course, as I write this I keep thinking of exceptions, but I'm

going to plow forward anyway. I guess my first question is just if you ever

felt any hesitation including a couple of such short stories or if you knew

that they were a part of the whole all along or what?

Second, I wonder if you can't talk at all about the ordering of the stories.

Again, it seems more "writerly" to talk about overarching themes and

inspirations and whatnot, but I rarely hear or read much about laying out a

collection and I know it is something everyone thinks about.  Was starting

with "Adam's Curse" a conscious decision to start with the shortest story in

the book, to start with a quick bang as it were, or did it just set the tone

well for the book regardless of length, or both, or neither? Also, you can

feel free to turn this into a High Fidelity-like riff about mix tapes and

laboring over getting everything just right, or the best first songs on an

album list, if it seems appropriate.

I wish I could claim some brilliant insight, but, surprisingly for me, the answer to this is simply that a long time ago I listened to somebody who had thought more about this than I have.  When I was just figuring out that I wanted to be a writer, I took a poetry class from a great poet named Bruce Smith.  Bruce taught us a lot of things, including how to live with your classic two monosyllabic, unpoetic names.  Greg Downs.  Bruce Smith.  At one point, he said, "When you publish your first book of poems, don't just put them in there in any kind of order.  Think about it.  And try this.  But your best, sharpest, meanest, slap-someone-in-the-face poem first, just sting the reader on the nose and get them blinking.  Then follow it with a long, slow poem that forces them to stop blinking and start engaging."  I never wrote a book of poems, though it took a while for that particular dream to die, but I never forgot his advice.  Someone who picks up a book is first asking, "Is there anything in here worth reading?" and then asking, "Is this the same thing repeated one time after another?"  I liked the idea of leading with two very different stories just to send the message that I am interested in writing, and that, at least on the level of form, this was not going to be the same experiment repeated eleven times.  This also helped discipline me into cutting out stories from the collection.  It made me think through the way that the collection had to be a collection.  Not the complete Greg Downs but a thing in and of itself.  At about the same time, I cut out three stories that I loved, that had been published in journals I admired, that had kept me writing through bleak periods, but that I had to kill.  They were repetitive, or they represented a stage in my learning, but once I internalized the notion that the book would have to belong to the reader, not to me, it seemed obvious.  So I reordered everything, put "Adam's Curse" first and "Black Pork" second, and then the book began to take shape, to fall into place.

After that, I was less formulaic.  I wanted to vary story types and lengths, and I knew I wanted to end with "Between States" because it was the most open-ended, because it would leave the reader room to ruminate, and in between I tried to vary short and long, childhood stories and adult stories, straight stories and more fanciful stories. 

For a while, my wife and I followed a band called Marah, a wonderful Philadelphia-based band led by Dave and Serge Bielanko.  It was a great period of our life.  The people who followed the band in Philly were really a special group, and it was like a voluntary family (which is to say it was not like a family.)  They saw Diane get pregnant with our daughter (not literally, but they saw her pregnancy grow), saw us through happy and sad times.  Anyway, Marah played loud, energetic, old-fashioned rock and roll, in some ways, but they were very savvy about varying their sets.  A fast, blaring guitar song, then a slower folk-y one, and Dave and Serge talked frequently about the necessity of doing that, of lifting the audience up, then settling them down. Thinking about how to pace a show also made me think a little bit about how to pace a collection.  On the other hand, I recently saw a Dead Milkmen reunion show, where the band did not vary at all, but played nonstop 100 miles an hour for close to two hours and then collapsed.  That's also fun, but that's fun in a way that overwhelms the audience.  I wanted to move the audience.  I wanted to shift the audience from one place to another.

As far as why I write some short stories and some long ones, the answer lies somewhere between my own restlessness and my own imperfect sense of the needs of each story.  "Adam's Curse" was once a novel, now compressed to two pages, so I started out thinking of it in a very different way, but the more I asked myself what was at the core of it, the more I began wildly chopping.  It was thrilling; it was heart-breaking.  "Black Pork" is much longer but it was a story that I knew from the beginning would only be a story; it would never be a novel.  For me, the tension of the story was what I loved but also what I knew I could not sustain over the course of a longer work.

I also liked that the first story is almost exclusively about a boy's relationship with women, and the second is about a boy's relationship with men, with his grandfather.  Collections of stories about childhood make me nervous; I'm not that interested in other people's childhoods per se, nor in my own. I no longer believe the idea that our personality is shaped in childhood; I no longer think that childhood is a key that unlocks the mystery of our existence.  I wanted to rub against the reader's understandable urge to see my stories as autobiographical and as existing for what they can tell the reader about Greg Downs.  I liked the idea that a reader would move from "Adam's Curse" asking when the mother would appear in "Black Pork" and find that she never does.

-aaron

SSM: "Midnight Raid" by Brady Udall

When I think of Brady Udall, I typically think of "The Wig," a story I'm sure I've mentioned here before, that Dan wrote about for Short Story Month, and that just generally gets held up as a great example of flash fiction, especially for those not really familiar with the genre. And, to all of that: rightfully so. But the collection as a whole, Letting Loose the Hounds, is badass, and one of the other stories that has stuck with me is the first in the book, "Midnight Raid." Basically a story of a husband/father, post-divorce, trying to come to terms with his life and his relationship with his son. When I put it like that, I kind of want to groan a little myself, but I also like boiling it down to that as its essence because Udall infuses the story with originality. That's the "boring sounding" summary, where the better description is the narrator is in the yard of his ex-wife's new house, with a pygmy goat and talking to Roy, the dog. He's drunk, it's around midnight, it's hot as hell because he's in Arizona, and he's trying to wait for the lights in the house to get turned out so he can sneak in and give the goat to his son. Of course, it doesn't go quite as planned, though I'm not sure how "planned" it was anyway.

Actually, here's the beginning of the second paragraph, which basically says what I tried to say above, except better:

I suppose this ought to be explained: Roy is the pet of my ex-wife Amy and her new husband Howard, whose backyard I am currently lurking around in. The goat is a present for my seven-year-old son, Tate. Tate is somewhere in this immense, tacky house and my plan is to get this goat to him without Amy or Howard finding out about it. This is Scottsdale, Arizona, close to midnight and not too many degrees shy of a hundred. I would be untruthful if I didn't say I was a little drunk...

Also, there are some great "end of relationship story" type lines, which put so many other attempts to shame. Lines like:

Our divorce was an honest, smash-mouth affair based on past indiscretions and betrayals on both our parts... Then one day my wife came home and accused me of "malfeasance." Right then I knew it was all over. You don't come into your own home throwing around words like "malfeasance" unless you've been talking to lawyers. 

I also really, really love this exchange, which I still remember reading for the first time. The set up is the narrator is hanging out in the backyard, as mentioned, and he yells at the guy in the yard on the other side of the fence to be quiet.

"Are you my neighbor?"
"I could be."
"What's the yelling for?"
"It's to quiet you down."
"I think you're just jealous of this nice pool I've got. You're the only goddamn one in this whole goddamn neighborhood without a pool. It's common knowledge around here."
I don't have anything to say to that so I keep my mouth shut.
"Well, why?" he says.
"Why what?"
"Why don't you have a pool?"
I think about it for a minute. "Because I'm a horse's ass."
"Ten-four," he says.

-aaron

p.s. I just found the story online here! Damn, wish I'd done that before transcribing those excerpts myself...

SSM: Pasha Malla

Soft Skull's publication of Pasha Malla's story collection "The Withdrawal Method" gives me an excuse to promote it on the blog again. Re-reading the collection, as I did today, I was reminded just how good these stories are.

"The Past Composed" tells the story of Lester, who moves into his sister Judy's backyard shed after he separates from his wife. Lester builds furniture he hopes to sell, teaches a card trick to a neighborhood child who bears a slightly disturbing resemblance to Richard Nixon, and marvels at the five-second memory of the pet fish Judy keeps. Every element of the story is so well chosen, and they add up to a beautiful and slightly haunting meditation on the fragility of life and the impossibility of forgetting.

"Five seconds of memory," Lester thinks, watching the fish in their blue glow in his darkened room. "A lifetime composed of these five-second installments, just flashes of existence, only to have them vanish, recede mercifully from you like an accident you'd drive by at night on the highway."

"The Film We Made About Dads" is based on a whimsical but also poignant conceit -- the narrator has produced a documentary film covering every minute of the lives of its father-subjects.

"When Jacques Cousteau Gave Pablo Picasso a Piece of Black Coral," is, like the object of its title, a shining jewel.

The risk of writing a quirky story is that the quirks will feel forced, that they'll become gimmicks. In Pasha's stories, though, they never are. Their odd turns help give these stories life, but never completely take them over. Instead these stories are driven by Pasha's sure use language, his light and graceful touch.

-- Sean

SSM: wigleaf 50 (Bell & Brown)

A confession: I don't really read much online fiction. And, more to the point, I don't even really feel all that bad about it. I think my guilt might, in fact, be more in that lack of guilt than the lack of reading. I started a lit journal, have published a decent amount in them, argue about their quality and how more people should read stuff online, but (and as I think I might have mentioned before) if and when I am online, I'm really too busy checking my email and updating my Facebook status with whatever song lyric is stuck in my head. In fact, I bet that is more common than not. 

Anyway, one of my fave things is the Wigleaf 50, now in its 2nd year. Basically a collection of links of the "top" (and I'm too lazy to go reread the intro, but I all but guarantee that Scott acknowledges this is by no means a "best of") 50 short shorts (gotta be under 1,000 words) published online in the last year. Mostly I love it for purely self-gratifying reasons (am I included? (I am!); stories from Hobart? (2, from Roy Kesey and Mary Miller! with 4 more making the longlist); friends? (yep, lots of them there)). However, I am going to try to read through them all, and Short Story Month seems as good a time as any to do that. So, working my way down the alphabetical list...

We start with a short from Hobart's very own web editor, Matt Bell: "This Showroom Filled With Fabulous Prizes." I think this may be one of the very few stories I actually did read online last year, or maybe I read it somewhere else, but I know I've read it before, a fact that made it all the more enjoyable instead of less in anyway. A couple quick points:

1) It is basically all telling, almost no showing, so take that workshop cliche! Something refreshing about such a short piece, so well written, that just tells you the scene and leaves you wanting more. A great, quick read that'll stick with you, for sure.

2) Possibly my fave part:

She says, "You don't drink anymore, but you used to," and he nods without looking. She says, "Are you quit for good?"

He thinks for a moment, says, "I'm trying to be."

Something about the fact that she can tell he "don't drink anymore" just by looking at him, as well as that "Are you quit for good?" that just makes me smile every time I read it, and completely fleshes out the scene, the bar, the character. 

***

Next up down the alphabetical food chain is Randall Brown's "Skip, Patch, Eye, Brownie, Chalk."

What either started as a kind of "here are 5 words, write a story prompt" or at least an idea to skewer said prompts, this is one of those "meta" shorts that acknowledges itself (or, you know, at least makes you think it is acknowledging itself) and sets itself up as gimmick, albeit an interesting and cool one, and then sneaks up on you and actually, you know, means something. It transitions from "setup" to "story with this paragraph:

     Somewhere Richard Ford said that stories aren't found; they are made. I don't know. Give me these words and I find the same thing, no matter how I try to find something else. It goes like this:

And I highly encourage you take the 5 minutes it takes to read it to do so. And then take another 10 and read it a couple more times...

-aaron

Book Reviews as Breakup Lit

On the Rumpus, Katie Crouch has written a fantastic review of Jonathan Segura's novel "Occupational Hazards." Check it out here.

-- Sean

SSM: Andrew Porter bonus track

As part of Short Story Month, I wrote about Porter's collection a couple weeks ago here. I kept thinking about the stories and how they work and so thought I'd do a quick little interview with him as a kind of companion piece to the original blog, special, just for SSM! In fact, this is likely to be the first of a few short companion pieces during the upcoming second half or so of Short Story Month.

First, maybe read or reread the original blog post here.

Then, check out Andrew shedding a little more light on his process...

1) First, I'll preface this question by saying I did just finish my first year back in school, so I've been looking at "craft" more than I am used to. That said, I was surprised how many of these stories make explicit their "character in the future/looking back nature." As I pointed out on the blog, the first three stories I read all contained phrases like "That was twelve years ago." and "Even now, fifteen years later..." and "It is easy now, after everything that has happened to my brother..." I'm not sure what exactly my question here is, but am wondering if you could talk about this a little. Was this a conscious decision; at what point in writing the story did this facet of the story announce itself to you; what does it gain/lose; etc.? That is like 4 questions, I guess. Feel free to pick and choose as you see fit.

That's a great question, Aaron, and not one that I've been asked before. I guess when I do that type of thing in a story -- mention how many years have passed since these events took place -- it's my way of reinforcing the fact that the person telling the story, the narrator, is still trying to come to terms with these events, still trying to understand them. It's a way of adding weight to the story -- the fact that after so many years the narrator is still haunted by these events -- but it's also a way of reminding the reader that the story itself is simply an "attempt" on the part of the narrator to try to understand these events at a particular time in his or her life. If the narrator was telling this story twenty years later, for example, as opposed to say twelve, the story might have a completely different feel to it, or a completely different type of perspective. I guess that's something I like to think about, especially when I'm dealing with memory -- how many years have passed since this actually took place and how has the passage of time affected the narrator's ability to recall and understand these events?

2) A lot of the stories also seem to be as much about the actual act of storytelling as the story being told. Maybe not "as much," but it is definitely important. Um... right? Would you agree? I feel like that actually ties in with the above question and the ideas of memory and what happens to stories over time, etc. Again, sorry to be a bit vague here about what the actual question is, but... anything to add here about this idea of "storytelling" and how important it was to you, in regard to the stories in this collection specifically?

That was definitely something I was thinking about as I was writing these stories. As I said above, when I'm writing in the first person, I like to think about the story as an "attempt" on the part of the narrator to come to terms with the events of the story, but I also like to think more specifically about what the narrator hopes to gain by telling this story and where this impulse to tell the story might be coming from. In other words, beyond simply trying to understand these events, what other role does storytelling play for the narrator? In many of my stories, for example, my narrators seem to be burdened by a certain amount of guilt, and so perhaps the act of telling the story is a way for a particular narrator to alleviate some of this guilt. Of course, you might also interpret the same story as an attempt by the narrator to justify his or her actions, which is of course a very different type of storytelling impulse. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not really concerned with how the reader interprets the storytelling impulse; I simply want it to be something that he or she is thinking about.

 

SSM: Tunneling to the Center of the Earth

For all of his posts about short stories this month, Aaron deserves some kind of blogging award. I have to admit, though, that I've been like one of those concerned audience members in a summer comedy. You know, during the scene in which the hero performs an amazing feat before a captivated crowd. I've been standing by and watching with my hand slightly covering my mouth. How long can he keep this up? Mom, he's not going to, like, hurt himself or anything, is he?

I've also been slightly distracted by the acronym "SSM" which makes me think for a second each time I see it that this blog has been converted into some kind of forum for kinky sex practices. Which wouldn't be bad! I'm all for kinky sex, as long as everyone understands what's expected of them and no one gets hurt. I'm just saying, it's not what you expect.

Anyway, in honor of short story month I picked up Kevin Wilson's collection "Tunneling to the Center of the Earth." These are fabulist tales, or you might call them speculative fiction, in which coming of age stories or relationship stories (although mostly it's coming of age stories) are modified with some bizarre twist, like that the protagonist sorts the letter Q at the local Scrabble factory, or is constructing a giant tunnel under his home town, as if he has become a mole person. Wilson's distortions of reality are brilliantly imaginative, and a lot of the power in these stories comes from the sense of wonder and enchantment they create, but these are also sad stories, full of loneliness and generally about small things. The writer he reminds me of most is Amiee Bender, and I think these stories are trying to do the same thing she does, that is, reveal something about the human condition by making it surficially unfamiliar, even alien.

-- Sean

SSM: John Updike

Have you read John Updike? Cause I haven't, not really. I mean, a story or three probably, but that doesn't really count when compared to his total output, does it?

Anyway, inspired by John McNally's raving of Updike's "The Lovely Troubled Daughters of Our Old Crowd" with this ringing endorsement:

I read this story to my students every year, and I would suggest to you to read it aloud as well – not once, not twice, but three or four times.

I went to the library this weekend to track down Trust Me, the collection. Unfortunately, they didn't have the book but, seeing the 20-30 books they did have, I figured, what the hell, it is possible it got double anthologized or something, so I pulled every book off the shelf and scanned the table of contents. Alas, I didn't find the story, but what I DID find was the above. Roger's Version had a yellow sticky on the title page which says:

Warning to innocent readers: This book is (illegible in my crappy phone camera pic, but I think it says 'smutty') trash; the product of a perverted mind.

How rad is that?!?

So, my mission thwarted, I returned to one of the only couple of Updike stories I've read: "Problems."

A few months ago, very soon after Updike's death, I was in the local used bookstore, and they had all the Updike books they had on display and one jumped out at me: Problems and Other Stories. Here's the cover:

How rad is that? And, if you don't it is awesome, think of yourself as something of a recovering math geek who is now more of a lit geek, and evaluate it again. The text at the bottom:

1. During the night, A, though sleeping with B, dreams of C. C stands at the furthest extremity (or, if the image is considered two-dimensionally) the apogee of a curved driveway, perhaps a dream refraction of the driveway of the house that had once been their shared home . . .

The rest of this, section 1:

Her figure, though small in the perspective, is vivid, clad in a tomato-red summer dress; her head is thrown back, her hand is on her hips, and her legs have taken a wide, confident stance. She is flaunting herself, perhaps laughing. His impression is of intense female vitality, his emotion is of longing. He awakes troubled. the sleep of B beside him is not disturbed; she rests in the certainty that A loves her. Indeed, he has left C for her, to prove it. 
PROBLEM: Which has he more profoundly betrayed,B or C?

I didn't buy Problems (because it was a first edition, I think, so was a good $40, at least) that day but, like the Nabokov and Cheever stories, I went home and scanned the New Yorker's online archives and, alas, there it was! (I don't know why I didn't, until writing this entry, think of checking to see if "Lovely Troubled Daughters..." was originally in the New Yorker as well and, thus, also online. And... it is!)

I've read the story a few times now (in the New Yorker magazine layout, it is only a single page) and it gets stronger with every read. The above is the first section of six, each of which follows this basic Updike-relationship-story-meets-word-problem format, and like reading a word problem a few times, to make sure you get everything before trying to figure it out, each read makes the connections a little more clear and adds another depth to the piece. 

-aaron