What I mean is, when I look for innovation in fiction I want fiction, real fiction. As I say to my students straight out: It’s all about the story, stupid.

Well, don’t tell that to Alissa Nutting. She’s got “story” written in ink on every page of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, her lively, well-imagined, and jaw-droppingly smart prize-winning debut. I’ve got my work cut out for me trying to describe what you’ll get out of this collection: imagine Donald Barthelme writing smart feminine narratives, Mary Gaitskill sans the kinky sex, or Margaret Atwood turning to dry, Colbert-style humor, and you may start to get an idea of what to expect.

The stories in the collection live up to their title: women and girls hold jobs that definitely qualify as unclean. One is the boiled dinner for an obscure cannibalistic club, another is a porn starlet reality show host for an episode featuring anal sex on the moon, another is a child-actress-from-hell’s “adult zombie slave” television show sidekick. Each story catapults the reader into the wicked world of Nutting’s witty imagination, from a hell in which every damned frequents the same small bar that serves only non-alcoholic beer, to one where celebrities and rich people agree to turn their bodies into host environments for endangered species.

Yet, in spite of the sometimes impressionistic, sometimes realist, sometimes naïve-painting-inspired settings, the characters remain painfully familiar: a sister attempting to save her paraplegic brother from terminal depression, a transsexual attempting to hide her past from her boyfriend and from KKK bigots, a daughter trying to reconcile to her abusive mother, women coming to terms with infertility or with fatal diseases—and girls and women just trying to connect emotionally to the people in their lives.

I would abstain from labeling Nutting’s collection “women’s fiction” if it didn’t treat so heavily on the grotesque importance assigned to a woman’s beauty, and on the paradoxical conflicts and stupidities that such unreasonable demands create.

In “Model’s Assistant” for example, a party nerd is granted access to an elite night-clubbing society through her improbable friendship with a supermodel. The protagonist confesses, “Since that night my life has changed in a myriad of ways. I’m still no one, unless I am with Garla, and then I become With Garla, a new and exciting identity that makes nearly everything possible, except being a model myself. And except being someone when I am not with Garla.”

The party nerd’s life improvement reflects in the leftover attention that she can scrape from the model’s groupie followers. And when that friendship is threatened, the odd, unintelligible language the supermodel speaks takes an ominous turn: “Put you in tiny coffin,” says the supermodel when “breaking up” with the assistant, a poignant and telling variation from her earlier catch-phrase, “Special coffin.” The fact that Garla speaks no English and can only utter catch phrases that don’t always make sense (”Vodka, you know?”) is of no concern to the beautiful people who worship her.

In “Porn Star,” “Ant Colony,” and “Bandleader’s Girlfriend” the situation is reversed: women are trapped by their beauty and sexual drive, and are reduced and victimized by evil surgeons, cold-blooded Idol-style audiences and shrewish sisters with terminal cancer whose jealousy grows to appalling proportions. The beautiful protagonists of these stories are only partially aware of the potential dangers of the envy they attract: “I was very used to people feeling like they were more important then me, but less beautiful,” says the heroine of “Ant Colony.” “I often felt that every transaction in my life somehow revolved around this premise.”

Similarly, in “Band Leader’s Girlfriend,” the flighty Claudia/Sorcerella has trouble shaking off an overbearing sister who makes it a habit to call her and hang up on her, or call her and shout. “I feel like I am some sort of hostage negotiator, except Sister is both the hostage and the captor,” ponders the overwhelmed narrator.

Alissa Nutting / photo from the author's website

Nutting is especially brilliant when revealing the dysfunctional layers of her characters’ otherwise glib and (mostly) carefree lives. The transsexual narrator in “She Man” reveals that a dog-murdering pimp is blackmailing her, this after a cheerful description of a perfectly ordinary and satisfying life as “queen of kitsch.” The relationship between the narrator of “Deliverywoman” and her online buddy, FluidTransfer69, echoes the usual she said/he said disconnection of casual cybersex partners that happens when one takes the other more seriously than the situation warrants. But this otherwise common scenario takes a turn for the morbid when the narrator reveals that her mother, convicted for murdering her father, was preserved cryogenically and her body is up for sale on a futuristic e-Bay style auction house.

Unclean Jobs harnesses this type of Jerry Springer drama to bring humor and postmodern insights to these action-packed short stories. You can spend the time chuckling as you turn the page, or you can ponder the prophetic vision of the near future that this collection delivers. Either way, reading Alissa Nutting’s fiction more than satisfies.

Further Links and Resources

Alissa Nutting - photo from the author's website

How They Were Found, by Matt Bell (Keyhole Press, Oct. 2010)

The writers of Dzanc Books have received O. Henry and Best American prizes; they have appeared as finalists for ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year, the Flannery O’Connor Award, AWP’s Award for the Novel, and numerous other accolades. Since its 2006 founding, Dzanc has staggered the field with fascinating and exploratory writing. Two recent publications from one of Dzanc’s imprints, Keyhole Press – Aaron Burch’s How to Predict the Weather and Matt Bell’s How They Were Found – continue to stretch the imagination, pushing the boundaries of literary fiction.

Composed of brief, independent passages—often single paragraphs—How to Predict the Weather alternates between short narratives and second-person commands. Though distinct, the segments converge on shared themes. Most vignettes feature unnamed couples, into whose lives Burch offers intimate, almost voyeuristic insight. These characters long for freedom and self-expression, desires that might seem trite in lesser hands. Burch enlivens these subjects with images of flight and weather. His figurative language chisels familiar forms into strange new shapes. For example, he defines one couple’s decline through cloud-watching: “The excitement of similar and individual visions in their blotted sky became their special date, their ritual. Then, ritual became routine; routine, a chore. The clouds had the final say.” Characters encounter their limitations through an inability to fly or their subjection to the climate.

Burch, however, also finds hope in defeat. He commends the value of the journey, despite its unreachable end: “Consider the implications of terminal velocity… Be a bird. Tuck. Point head down, release all thought, enjoy.” He then applies this metaphor to the writer’s task:

Write it down then ball up the piece of paper, push it into your mouth … Take your time, chew slowly, savor … If, when trying to swallow, you cough and have to spit back up some of the dirt, think of the crumbs of the earth as small birds taking flight, transferring from one vessel to the next. Think of it like giving birth to an avian beginning.

Here Burch generates freedom from failure; he sees a new beginning in the coughed up crumbs of the earth—the detritus of written words.

Burch’s stories frequently use physical violence to reflect the intensity of love. His couples devour and cleave one another apart. The book’s opening passage depicts a man folding his lover like a piece of paper, “as many times as he could, counting. He put her in his mouth and swallowed, pushing down his throat with index finger, inviting her to stay forever.” The act of devouring embodies a passion so great, nothing less than complete consumption will satiate it. In a contrasting scene, a man amputates his lover’s hands. “My hands want to make little birds,” she tells him and begs for his help. Together, they saw off her hands to give them flight. With vivid and unsettling imagery, Burch demonstrates the different guises love can take, and the emotional extremes to which it can push us.

A daring work, How to Predict the Weather may frustrate readers searching for a structured plot or named characters. Rather, this collection rewards the open-minded. Burch’s narrative gems—often reminiscent of prose poetry—coalesce into a forceful emotional experience. Ultimately, they present a stunning meditation on love, loss, and the potential of human imagination.

For readers who long for earth, Matt Bell’s How They Were Found offers a compelling alternative. Each of his thirteen stories possesses its own unique and vivid reality. An army platoon struggles to find purpose in a barren, post-apocalyptic landscape; a man preserves a murder victim in a walk-in freezer in his garage; a woman falls for a shrinking homunculus, the essence of her ex-boyfriend. Collectively, Bell’s characters search for meaning and order in these realms of meticulously crafted chaos.

Many of Bell’s tales emerge from the wreckage of failed relationships. In “The Leftover,” the forgotten traits of Allison’s ex-boyfriend manifest in a miniaturized clone, a “smaller version of Jeff, maybe four or five feet tall.” Strange yet familiar, Little Jeff reminds Allison not just of the habits he abandoned for her sake, but of the “qualities that Allison forgot she even missed.” Another story features a heartsore cartographer, who documents his grief with visual landmarks — the language he knows best:

Bell’s prose crescendos with the protagonist’s anguished search, building to a beautiful frenzy:

He annotates until the city appears as a bloated, twisted thing, depicted by a map too full of language and memory to be useful to anyone but himself.

In narratives that feel almost uncomfortably honest, Bell exposes unusual acts of desperation, uncovering raw, new representations of heartache and hunger.

Not only do these stories work cohesively, they appear in a thought-provoking progression. Bell positions “Wolf Parts” and “Mantodea” beside one another, juxtaposing two vastly different portraits of oral consumption. Arguably the book’s darkest work, “Wolf Parts” deconstructs the story of Little Red Riding Hood. The fable’s familiar characters interchange as victim and predator. In one passage, Red takes her grandmother’s place in the bed, and “as soon as the wolf forced himself inside her, she sprung her trap, showing him that she too knew what it meant to consume someone whole.” Bell follows this story with “Mantodea,” which features a man’s insatiable appetite: “I’d once thought I wanted to eat something that could end me, but now I knew I really wanted something else, something approximately the opposite.” “Mantodea” serves as a more realistic foil to the preceding fairy tale, furthering Bell’s conflation of sex, gluttony, and death.

The lonesome souls of How They Were Found also use recorded history as a coping mechanism and a means of preservation. Like the cartographer, the characters of “The Collectors”— a novella—succumb to an urgent need to record. Though the novella appeared in Bell’s 2009 chapbook of the same title, in How They Were Found it engages with the surrounding stories. Based on true events, “The Collectors” details the compulsions of three distinct individuals: the two reclusive Collyer brothers, and the man who discovers their bodies amid their hoarded belongings. This last voice offers a final reflection on history as interpretation:

To each person, I try to give the thing he has been looking for, to offer him a history of you that will clash with the official version, with the version of the facts already being assembled by the historians and newspapermen. I wanted them to see you as I wanted to see you when I first came to this place, before I started telling your story to my own ends.

This narrator vocalizes the question posed quietly throughout the book: what can one capture with pen and paper, and what escapes documentation?

Bell examines the utility of art even more directly in “An Index of How Our Family was Killed.” The story, more catalogue than narrative, provides an alphabetized account of a family’s unusual deaths, recorded by one of two surviving members. Under “I,” he interrogates the purpose of his documentation:

Index as excavation, as unearthing, as exhumation.
Index as hope, as last chance.
Index, as how to find what you’re looking for.
Index, as method of investigation.
…
Index, as understanding, however incomplete.

Through indexing, the character discovers both the catharsis of writing and the shortcomings of the craft. Bell’s final definition for “index” becomes an apt description for the book itself: “a collection of echoes, each one suggesting a whole only partially sensed.”

With their debut collections, Burch and Bell demonstrate Dzanc’s diversity and its focus on literary fiction that pushes the medium further. Despite dramatically different structures, both books revolve around shared themes. How They Were Found poses a dark counterpoint to Burch’s work. Bell’s more pessimistic lens aligns the act of devouring with emptiness, anger, and lust. The stories conduct a penetrating investigation of human nature, of what happens when you strip individuals down to their barest, most honest selves. Through divergent perspectives, these books investigate the role and responsibilities of literature. No less original or thought-provoking than contemporary fabulist stalwarts like Aimee Bender or Etgar Keret, Burch and Bell expand the scope of experimental writing. They consider new forms of storytelling with books that encourage the reader to think, feel, and engage.

Dzanc and its writers continue to share the spoils of their success, initiating numerous literary programs. Bell edits for The Collagist, Dzanc’s online journal, and Burch founded Hobart, which publishes an online journal, a print journal, and printed minibooks. Dzanc sponsors low-cost, one-on-one workshops for aspiring writers, the proceeds of which go entirely towards charitable efforts. Their Writers in Residence project places established authors in public schools in Michigan and New York. From 2008-2010, Bell taught creative writing at Thurston Elementary School in Ann Arbor.

As small presses struggle beneath economic pressures, Dzanc’s continued success offers hope. It champions invigorating and inventive prose such as that found in How to Predict the Weather and How They Were Found. The press deserves the support of the community it has helped build; fans of explorative, meaningful literature should turn their attention to this innovative young publishing house.

Further Links and Resources

Edith Pearlman’s first story in her new collection, Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (Lookout Books, 2011), begins, “On the subway Sophie recited the list of stations like a poem.” Reading this, I knew I was in for a treat. That opening line of “Inbound” strikes the perfect balance between setting the stage and teasing with the yet unknown: Pearlman establishes the setting as a city through the word subway, and she gives us Sophie, a character who is whimsical, literary and thoughtful. As the story unfolds, we quickly learn that Sophie is a child, dragged along by her parents to visit Harvard, their alma mater and, they hope, her future alma mater as well. “Inbound” is a quiet story of a family, of a father willing the best for his child and struggling with disappointed expectations; it is the story of a mother doing her best to care for her family while at the same time being human and angry and tired; and it is the story of two sisters—Sophie, the main character and the bearer of all her parents’ hopes, and Lily, the younger sister with Down’s syndrome, who only speaks a couple of words of dialogue, but around whom the family revolves. Pearlman captures this family dynamic with the same sort of intelligent, humor-lightened introspection with which she begins the story. She writes that Sophie remembers her father telling friends that “Lily clarifies life,” but:

Sophie didn’t agree. Clarity you could get by putting on glasses; or you could skim foam off warm butter—her mother had shown her how—leaving a thin yellow liquid that couldn’t even hold crackers together. Lily didn’t clarify; she softened things and made them sticky. Sophie and each parent had been separate individuals before Lily came. Now all four melted together like gumdrops left on a windowsill.

In this description, Pearlman has the child of the story deliver the thematic trope of stickiness, but keeps Sophie believably a child through the use of characterizing details like “her mother had shown her how,” and “gumdrops left on a windowsill.” Sophie is precocious, but also very much a child; Pearlman sets this tone in the story’s opening line, and because of that opening, the story is able to continue forward, portraying a child both lost and found.

Image Credit: Flickr-Chiot

While “Inbound” is the story of a white, non-religious academic family, Pearlman’s next story, “Day of Awe,” begins, “He was the last Jew in the cursed land,” and the difference between these two openings hints at one of the truly great things about Pearlman’s writing: its diversity of story and setting. This story focuses on Robert, a Jewish patriarch visiting his son, Lex, and Jaime, his soon-to-be grandson, in an unnamed Latin American country. The epic tone of aloneness and heroism in the first line sets up the story of a man trying to get his bearings in a changing world, in which his gay son is adopting a boy who barely speaks Spanish, let alone English or Hebrew, and in which Robert will be forced to celebrate Yom Kippur as the lone Jew amongst “a gaggle of gentiles,” rather than the being able to “pray for forgiveness with nine others.” What is striking in reading these stories side-by-side is not just how they they differ with regard to characters, place, and tone, but also how these stories are united by the theme of searching for belonging and understanding. This theme pervades every one of Pearlman’s stories.

Binocular Vision is a book of new and collected works, with thirty-four stories in all—twenty-one older stories and thirteen new. While not delineated as such in the Table of Contents, the stories are grouped according to their original books, beginning with five stories from Pearlman’s first collection, Vaquita and Other Stories, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize in 1996. After the Vaquita stories, the next five stories are from Love Amongst The Greats, and the next eight are from How to Fall, originally published in 2005. Beyond some minor polishing and the changing of a couple of titles (“Day of Awe” used to be, “To Reach This Season”), the stories are unchanged. The final three stories in the “Collected Works” section do not seem to have been previously collected in any other book, but they seem to have been written in the same eras as the others.

While the stories themselves are generally unchanged, they have been rearranged somewhat within their unofficial book groupings, allowing them to inform each other in a new way, and the effect of having them all gathered together is the creation of a broader, more cohesive universe.

All stories in a good collection talk to one another, but some talk more than others. Pearlman returns to the same unnamed Central American country several times, while other stories take place in Maine, Massachusetts, Israel, and Europe.

Rearranging the stories highlights their binding threads. For instance, placing “Vaquita” as the last story from Pearlman’s first book, and then “Allog” as the first story from Love Amongst the Greats allows us to read these stories one after the other—and we can see that the soprano mentioned in “Vaquita” is living in the apartment building in Jerusalem in “Allog.” The latter story opens: “There were five apartments in the house on Deronda Street. There were five mailboxes in the vestibule: little wooden doors in embarrassing proximity, like privies.” In both stories, the soprano is one of those vital connections we all share—the connections of friendship and of proximity—bonds not validated by marriage or family, but as much a part of the fabric of life as any official relationship. Too often we ignore or belittle these proximal relationships, we think nothing of the other mailboxes in the apartment lobby and try to ignore our embarrassing human commonalities and frailties as we pound on the floor to get the downstairs neighbors to quiet their quarrel. Pearlman takes these connections and builds her fictional worlds around them, and in doing so, shows us what it is to be human.

Other stories are even more closely related, for instance the trilogy “If Love Were All,” “Purim Night,” and “The Coat,” each of which follows two characters, Sonya and Roland, during their time as relief workers during World War II and in the rebuilding years afterward. These connected stories work exactly as they should—each one standing apart with its own arc, climax, and resolution, each its own picture postcard of a life; and when read together, they reveal not only the panoramic of the relationship, but also the significance of previously unnoticed details.

Image Credit: Flickr-TailspinT

Beyond these connections, the most unifying element of Pearlman’s stories is the invented town of Godolphin, a suburb of Boston. In a 2005 interview with Sarabande Books (the publisher of How To Fall), Pearlman said of Godolphin that:

I dreamed of a place where odd people could be themselves . . . [Godolphin] has the human scale of a small town and provides the rich opportunities of a big city. It welcomes immigrants. It is home to austere Yankees and skeptical Jews and believing Catholics, to straights and gays, to families and solitaries. It is tolerant and inefficient and modest.

In this, her description of her dream place, Pearlman describes the world, because for all of humanity’s failures, ultimately our world does have room for each element that she names. While we may push and yell, some demanding individuality and others striving for homogeneity in which no one is the Other, we are, despite all of our efforts, endlessly different and the same. That is what literature shows us—great stories explore how our seemingly unique experiences are commonplace, while at the same time showing how people we thought we knew, could, in fact, be thinking, feeling and experiencing things that we never before imagined.

Image Credit: Flickr-Cia de Foto

Pearlman’s invention of Godolphin demonstrates that just as even the most casual of relationships marks people, they are likewise influenced, and influence, place. Characters fall in and out of love, they make mistakes, they yearn for belonging, they yearn for solitude, and they do this all somewhere, someplace—and most often, for Pearlman, that place is Godolphin.

While all of her stories are character and plot driven, one of her Godolphin stories is also expressly about both place and impermanence. The story “Mates” opens as “Keith and Mitsuko Maguire drifted into town like hobos, though the rails they rode were only the trolley tracks from Boston, and they paid their fare like everyone else.” Again, with the opening line, Pearlman sets the tone, character, setting, and tension of the story. We understand that Godolphin is just outside of Boston; we know the characters’ names; and we know a bit about them because of these names. We understand that somehow the story will explore their difference, their way of seeming like hobos, unbounded by the constraints of obligation and place.

The story is told by a peripheral narrator, who describes in the course of a few pages how the Maguires came to town, lived there for twenty-five years while raising three sons, and then (in the week their youngest went to Medical School) decamped in the same manner with which they arrived, never to be seen again. The story is filled with the details of the town as the narrator expresses her wonder that the Maguires could have left so little an impression, and could have likewise been so little marked by the town. Of course, even while doing so, the narrator demonstrates the paradoxical opposite of impermanence as she explores all ways the Maguires resisted labels and connections and yet couldn’t help but be tied into the fabric of the community. She says:

The Maguires attended no church. They registered Independent. They belonged to no club. But every year they helped organize the spring block party and the fall park cleanup. Mitsuko made filigreed cookies for school bake sales and Keith served on the search committee when the principal retired.

As the narrator tells it, this becoming integrated into a community is inevitable. She comments later that “[m]any townspeople knew the Maguires. How could they not, with the boys going to school and making friends and playing sports? Their household had the usual needs – shots and checkups, medications, vegetables, hardware.” Pearlman argues through her story that whatever makes up our daily routine is what defines our life; we are the sum of our daily existence, and thus, for a large part, we are where we live.

Image Credit: Flickr-Ed Yourdon

Descriptions of Godolphin are interwoven with details about the Maguires. Recalling the family’s arrival day, the narrator comments, “They were seen sharing a loaf and a couple of beers on a bench in Logowitz Park. Afterward they relaxed under a beech tree with their paperbacks.” Later they spent the night in the Godolphin Inn. Through small details like this—a place name here, a tree there—a town emerges. It does not take elaborate descriptions or flowery words to evoke a place; rather it requires an eye for the small, often domestic details of where we live. Writing place requires noticing qualities of shadow and light, as Pearlman does in “Vailles” when she writes of the nanny who seeks solitude in her Godolphin basement apartment: “meager sunlight slipped like an envelope into one after another of her high windows and then lay on the floor as if waiting to be picked up.” Through that sentence and through the story, the character of the nanny is revealed as one who seeks humble comforts, and who shapes a life in which she knows herself, rather than the self others impose on her. And we understand this, in part, because we have seen her apartment. Home is the most intimate of landscapes, and the setting that speaks most to our character—we are both from, and are the creators of, the places we call home.

This reminder that we are all from somewhere makes it all the more appropriate that Binocular Vision is published by Lookout Books, the new press from the University of North Carolina—Wilmington’s Creative Writing Department, which also publishes Ecotone, a journal dedicated to “Reimagining Place.” It seems fitting that Lookout Books would assert in their publishing philosophy the goal “to publish a vibrant rather than docile literature of place.” That sums up Pearlman’s approach rather precisely.

Since the book launched in January, glowing reviews have appeared in places like the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Both of these reviews began in the same way, with the reviewers admitting how they had never before heard of Edith Pearlman, and I admit now that I was also among their number. However, just as Ann Patchett predicted in her Introduction to Binocular Vision, this book seems to be the vehicle “with which Edith Pearlman casts off her secret-handshake status and takes up her rightful position as a national treasure.” Binocular Vision is, in many ways, Edith Pearlman’s opening line, broadcasting her character, her tone, and her ability to the larger world. She is setting a firm stake in the literary landscape that she is a writer to be reckoned with, and even more importantly, that she is a teller of stories that delight, challenge and inspire the reader.

Further Links and Resources

Edith Pearlman © Jonathan Sachs

One of the highlights of working with Fiction Writers Review over the past two and a half years has been watching our readers’ own writing take off—from first published stories to debut novels and collections, to all the interesting projects our contributors and community have going on around the world. When it comes to sheer energy, creativity and community-building, Meg Pokrass sets a high bar. You may remember her launch of A Barbaric yAWP last year, an online-community alternative to AWP for the many writers out there who couldn’t make the trip. Meg held a second yAWP this year, replete with writing prompts, contests, animated mini-movies, hilarious videos, and sponsorship from Press 53.

This month Press 53 published Meg’s debut, a collection of flash fiction titled Damn Sure Right. It takes a certain amount of vim and vigor for an author to saddle a collection with a title that loudly proclaims this is it!—but the stories in Damn Sure Right have an of-the-moment feeling, brash confidence, and vulnerability that make a reader sit up and take notice.

In addition to flash fiction, Meg writes prose poetry and makes story animations. She currently serves as editor-at-large for Frederick Barthelme’s online lit journal Blip Magazine (formerly the Mississippi Review) and before that, SmokeLong Quarterly. She designs and runs the popular Fictionaut Five author interview series for Fictionaut.

Meg’s work has appeared in more than a hundred online and print publications, including Mississippi Review, Wigleaf, the Pedestal, Everyday Genius, Keyhole, Annalemma, elimae, Gigantic, Gargoyle, Prime Number, Women Writers, Istanbul Review and 3AM. Her work has been showcased for Dzanc Book’s Short Story Month and has been nominated for Dzanc’s Best of the Web, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Wigleaf’s Top 50 [Very] Short Fictions.

In keeping with Meg’s beautiful economy, here’s a short conversation we had over email during the weeks after AWP and the yAWP, followed by a Meg’s flash fiction story “The Lobby” from Damn Sure Right. Let’s get to it.

Conversation

Lee Thomas: You’ve been published many, many places. Do you remember the first story you had published? Can you describe that experience?

Meg Pokrass: My first story was published in January, 2008—three years ago. The experience was straight-out shock and ecstasy! There is nothing like the first time! The story, “Leaving Hope Ranch,” was published in the online magazine 971 Menu. The story was later republished in Storyglossia and selected for the Wigleaf Top 50, 2009. You can read it in the 971 Menu archive, here.

“Flash fiction” and “short shorts” are new(ish) terms, but the shorter story has been around for a very long time. Have you always written flash fiction?

I wrote narrative poetry irregularly for twenty years, before I found flash fiction (three years ago). My original writing mentor was the poet Molly Peacock. She mentored me by working with me personally and editing my poems. She was letting me knew I had something. At the time I was a struggling actor. A few years later I got married, started a business… and the writing become even more irregular.

Then, a few years ago after an extended illness and a sort of complete mid-life crisis (!) I stumbled across flash fiction online in journals like Night Train, elimae, Storyglossia, and Vestal Review, and I started reading them religiously. I reworked my narrative poems into very short stories—it was exhilarating to do so. I started getting chills when crafting my existing poems into tiny stories: they were clearly made stronger. The flash story freed them, and from that point on, my writing became fluid. In fact, it nearly poured out, and my chronic writing blocks went away.

In your new collection, Damn Sure Right, many of the stories have a very strong sense of place, often West Coast. The first sentence of “California Fruit” is “We were transplanted Pennsylvanians who understood the value of fresh fruit.” I love that sentence because I’ve heard it from so many people who end up in California, or visit, or dream of its year-round growing season.

Yes, it’s true. There is nothing like picking and instantly eating fruit from a tree, especially as a kid. The story you reference, “California Fruit,” began life as a poem called “Fresh Fruit And Sun Damage.” It was first published by SmokeLong Quarterly.

I moved from Pennsylvania to Santa Barbara, California, with my mother and much older sisters, when I was five. Free of my mother’s volatile marriage to my father, our small family was able to breathe. My oldest sister became a successful television actress in Los Angeles, which added something exotic and exciting as well.

Santa Barbara was a sensual place in which to grow up, and I believe the overwhelming physical beauty and nature that was available there helped me to feel rooted again, after leaving my entire extended family back east.

Image Credit: Flicrk

How do you set about nailing down place in a story of only a few hundred words?

A process of severe editing (often discarding 75% of my first drafts) became ingrained in me while editing my narrative poetry for years before writing flash. I always believed that cutting every unessential word was the most important factor in the effectiveness of my writing. So even before writing flash fiction, the idea of short yet mighty was something I had learned to work hard for.

In flash, it is not necessary to rely on plot. The “plot”, if there is one, may be something murky, unspoken, and emotional. In order for a story to be successful, something internal (a way of seeing things) changes—leading to an integral, sometimes rebellious shift in a character’s way of seeing things. I’m a strong believer that big life changes originate out of seemingly small, subtle observations and/or shifting awareness toward a situational reality. This has always been true for me.

Image Credit: Flickr

More important than anything in flash fiction is what is not told or said. A story’s intentional “holes” often sing louder than what is written. Absence speaks worlds. I search for this when writing, trying to find a way to allow the writing to get out of the way!

A type of flash fiction that intrigues me is what I call patch-working—pulling out disjointed bits from various prose poems or stories and stitching them loosely together. These stories (my story “Lost and Found” may be my own best example) usually have no linear structure. The overall effect is a sense of a character’s life through scattered written moments like photographs, sort of an emotional slide show. The fun is finding the right fragments and matching them. Later it feels as though they always belonged together.

In reading your collection, especially stories that run only a paragraph—like “Team” or “Stone Fruit” or “The Lobby”—part of the pleasure is a kind of creative exchange between the story and me, the reader. I get a beautiful, full snapshot, or maybe a series of them in quick succession, and begin filling in the edges, hypothesizing, engaging in creation with you, the writer. Do you feel like flash fiction, more so than, say, a novel, demands a kind of reader-writer exchange?

Yes! I agree, but I’m not sure I can explain why—why small, successful pieces do that. I’m guessing it is what is the absence, the what-is-not-said that begs the reader inside so strongly, that creates a unique bond.

What do you read, listen to, or watch for inspiration?

Poetry: Dorianne Laux and Bob Hicok. Short fiction: Brad Watson, James Robison, Lori Ostlund, Mona Simpson, Aimee Bender, Mary Gaitskill, Francine Prose, Raymond Carver, early Lorrie Moore, Richard Ford.

Music: Yo La Tango, Spoon, Hank Williams Sr., Iron and Wine, The Mountain Goats, Belle & Sebastian, ELO, Beatles, Joni Mitchell, Big Star, Wilco and Billy Bragg, Ray LaMontagne, The Roaches, Joanna Newsom.

Film: Desert Bloom, Harold and Maude, The Graduate, The King’s Speech, Fanny and Alexander, Hannah and her Sisters, Best in Show (I have a terrible weakness for the silly, like Christopher Guest’s films and older Woody Allen flicks like Sleeper and Love And Death.).

In your story “Scotts” a woman places a personals ad on Craigslist intended for a coworker named Scott, and gets some unexpected responses. Much of your work, and that story in particular, engages the current culture—online, digital, frenetic, connected, and disconnected—in a very direct way. Do you find the shorter story form particularly suited to some new aesthetic? Have you always written stories of the “now” moment (for lack of a better term)?

Image Credit: Flickr

Writing about new technologies is a bit risky as a writer, in that whatever technologies you write about may be gone or outdated by the time of publication! I wonder if that’s why a lot of writers avoid writing about it.

Having most of my work originally published in online magazines, I found myself online a lot and therefore, well-suited for satirizing the emotional landscape and constant challenges of technology. For example, in the story you mentioned, “Scotts,” too many men named “Scott” reply to an ad on Criagslist.

The subject of humans trying to come to peace with new technologies fascinates me. As a personal example, my closest writing friends are people whom I’ve never met in person. How can it be that we feel so close? We have shared so much of each others’ worlds through our stories—but it is very, very odd!

How do you write?

Notebook and computer. Mostly computer now because my handwriting can’t keep up with my brain.

What was your experience getting Damn Sure Right published, and what has it been like going with a small independent publisher like Press 53? They’re across the country from you in North Carolina. How did you find each other?

I’d received a few nice notes over a time period from Kevin Morgan Watson, Press 53 founder, complimenting a few stories and/or publication wins. It seemed he enjoyed my work. So naturally, when I had a manuscript ready, I queried Press 53. It turned out to be an amazing fit. Watson looks for writing that sticks with the reader, and he has no bias toward form.

Working with Press 53 has been warm, fun, and seamless. The other Press 53 authors are kind and supportive toward each other; it’s been a wonderful place to land!

Would you take us out with a story?

Of course. Below is a story called “The Lobby,” which was originally published in FRIGG, and it gives just a hint of what you’ll find in Damn Sure Right.

Thanks, Meg; it’s been a pleasure.

“The Lobby”

I’m seventeen in the hotel with my father in the suite and the TV on, his wine not chilled as he likes, eyelids already droopy and unforgiving. He wants to play Scrabble with me, it’s the thing we do at night, but I want the man sitting alone in the lobby who’d looked at me with crackling eyes as though he were an eel. When my father finally falls asleep in his bathrobe and shorts I slide out to the red velvet lobby where he is waiting for me. He may be caught between bell boys shifting on their legs, business men loosening their ties; if he’s not there, I will find him in skinny fragments of sashimi. I can wait all night long in a red lobby full of geeks, listening to elevator bells. I can sit dreaming about taking everything away from my father.

Further Links and Resources

The founders of Tin House – magazine, book publisher, workshop destination – put their mission best, so I won’t try to improve upon it:

The first issue of Tin House magazine arrived in the spring of 1999, the singular lovechild of an eclectic literary journal and a beautiful glossy magazine. Publisher Win McCormack said of the effort, “I wanted to create a literary magazine for the many passionate readers who are not necessarily literary academics or publishing professionals.”

From their latest issue (pictured above), which fills me with a tinge of nostalgia (did anyone else think of Jan Brett’s wonderfully illustrated kid’s book – The Mitten?) and just the right amount of foreboding (exactly what is fox about to do?), to their gorgeous website, Tin House gets their aesthetic just right.

I mean, who wouldn’t want to attend a Summer Writing Workshop whose faculty included Aimee Bender, Benjamin Percy, Dorothy Allison, Lan Samantha Chang, Jim Shepard, and many other great writers, but also billed itself as “Metaphors & Martinis”? You had me at … ahem … metaphor.

You can read lots of great content – stories, essay, criticism, poetry – on the Tin House site, they always offer a few pieces from the quarterly online, but to really get the goods – subscribe! Their oft-updated blog is also a witty, and frequently hilarious, read. Monday’s post had me chortling at my computer, “Some Nobel Prize Winners In Literature Make Scandalous Headlines In Intellectual Gossip Rag.” Look forward to such gems as:

Orhan Pamuk Dog-Ears Rare First Edition Of Madam Bovary

J.M. Coetzee Admits The J.M. Is There Only Because It Looks “Literary”

Imre Kertesz Makes Hungary/Hungry Pun Outside of Topeka IHOP

Seamus Heaney Tells Undergraduates: “Yeats Is Actually Better Translated Into Spanish”

Toni Morrison’s First Draft Of Jazz Allegedly Influenced By “They Might Be Giants”

There’s much more where that came from. Check it out at tinhouse.com – Enjoy!

Image Credit: Flickr

Dzanc Books is excited to announce the launching of the Dzanc Books eBook Club. Sign up now and get eleven books for $50! With the proliferation of eReading devices and increased interest in reading books on kindle, Sony e-Reader, Nook, etc., Dzanc Books is making it both easier, and less expensive for readers to obtain our titles as eBooks. Additional information can be found at our website at:
dzancbooks.org/ebook-club

When you sign up for the club, you’ll instantly have access to five downloads, including Laura van den Berg’s story collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (reviewed by Liana Imam for FWR), and Steven Gillis’ novel The Consequences of Skating. Even better: Dzanc’s eBook Club would be the perfect gift-that-keeps-giving for one lucky bookworm.

As the winner of the most recent Best Translated Book (BTB) prize for fiction — for our book, The Confessions of Noa Weber, by Gail Hareven — we here at Melville House were particularly proud to win an award that had been voted upon by a judging panel made up of representatives from some of the country’s best independent booksellers, not to mention some great indie bloggers and critics. And from its inception, we have always thought of the two-year-old award as a good thing for little indies trying to champion good books in a difficult market and culture — a market and culture made difficult in many ways by the predatory and thuggish practices of Amazon.com.

The post goes on to consider what it means for Amazon to be funding the prize, and why they feel it goes against their efforts to provide genuine support to translation, as well as independent publishers and booksellers.

Translation has been on my mind frequently of late, and I’m excited for what Granta has been doing in that department. The Harvill Secker Young Translator’s Prize, in its first year, went to Beth Fowler for a translation of Matías Néspolo’s ‘El Hachazo’. The judges focused on Argentina, homeland of Matías Néspolo. You can read the full story on the Granta website, here. I’m also very excited about Granta 113: Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists. Granta writes:

After three decades and five lists championing the very best in new writing, Granta 113 is the first ever fully translated edition, published simultaneously in Spain as Los mejores narradores jovenes en español, both showcasing the work of twenty-two promising writers from across the Spanish-speaking world.

We depend on good translations to open the dialogue between writers around the globe and enjoy the feast of creativity going on in cultures other than our own. Be it story, novel, old or new – what translation have you read lately that felt like a revelation?

Image credit: Flickr

How much does a book cost? What’s the value of a book? Obvious as it sounds, those are two separate questions—but as Kassia Krozser points out on her lit blog Booksquare, they’re often conflated by readers and publishers alike:

The publisher sold readers a book they knew was not very good. Yes, the publisher had to know. Someone on the editorial staff (presumably) read the book. Someone with (presumably) enough discernment to realize the book was crap. Someone who should have had the guts to say to the author that the book didn’t pass muster. You know, instead of foisting bad stuff on readers. [...]

So much for the gatekeeping function of publishers. Is it any wonder that readers are confused? How are we supposed to discern value when we cannot trust publishers to perform the most basic duty of vetting books for quality?

One solution, according to Krozser? Focused publishers.

The truth is, as readers, we have no idea how good a book is when we purchase it, nor can we guess at the quality of what we get, generally, until we read the entire work. Yes, there are publishers (hello, Unbridled Books) who have a tight, focused list that reflects a consistent point-of-view while publishing a diverse list. I love it when I can trust a publisher. I feel the same away about Harlequin. It’s a compliment to both publishers. Readers may not love every book published by these houses, but they know there is a certain focus they can trust. Very few large publishers offer this kinda, sorta guarantee.

Another reason to love smaller, indie publishers…

In one of the four letters contained in About Writing (Wesleyan UP), Samuel Delany describes contrasting narrative styles or streams, “writing that is more efficiently ornamented than the norm,” like that of Joyce, Proust, or Woolf, and “writing that is more efficiently stripped down than the norm,” like that of “Stein, Hemingway, Beckett, or Carver.” He marks yet another stream as the “experimental work” of “a Ron Silliman, a Lyn Hejinian, a Christian Bok, or a John Keene.” Farewell Navigator (Open City), Leni Zumas’s 2008 collection of enigmatic short stories, flows somewhere between the experimental and stripped down streams. The strongest stories, namely “Heart Sockets,” “Farewell Navigator,” “Waste No Time If This Method Fails,” and “Leopard Arms” use slight yet meaningful temporal time shifts, idiosyncratic syntax and grammar, and eccentric narration. And, in stories like “Heart Sockets” and “Leopard Arms,” the author also veers into more speculative and fabulist narrative approaches.

Most of these stories are compact studies of paralysis, in the tradition of Beckett and Ionesco. These ciphers don’t so much act or react, but are usually quietly or loudly inert. Insignificance, ennui, insensitivity, and impotence all figure largely here. Sherwood Anderson could have been describing Zumas’s characters as they, too, are “forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts.” In “Farewell Navigator,” one character envies a group of blind schoolchildren having teachers “to pull them. Nobody expects them to know where to go.” And in “Leopard Arms”—a story told from the perspective of a gargoyle—a father fears…

of doing nothing they’ll remember him for. Not a single footprint—film, book, record, madcap stunt—to prove he was here. Am I actually here? he sometimes mutters into his hand. Significant fears to face, I would say: but these two do a bang-up job of not. Their evasion strategy is deftly honed.

Such characters are unmoored in an unforgiving world, bereft of hope for renewal or redemption.

Naming and defining are powerful motifs throughout the stories. Zumas’s characters sometimes come to us by their nicknames–Black, Blue, the fish-stick girl, Blotilla, Squinch, and Johnnycake–but more often they are simply pronouns, or even fragments or sketches. There is a seductive element to how these narratives unfold: a slow accretion of details, together with the use of fragmentation, absence, and space, achieves a confluence of associations, connections, and even some kind of understanding. In a world without much explicit exposition, any tiny elaboration of a thought, image, or perspective becomes magnified: the reader is drawn in to fill in the blanks.

Leni Zumas / photo by Anne Hall (from www.lenizumas.com/)

In “Farewell Navigator,” a teen’s physical blindness seems an insurmountable barrier both to maintaining trust and intimacy with his family and to establishing his independence and own sense of identity. And yet it is a psychological, spiritual darkness that proves to be the family’s greatest obstacle. This is a story of creating a life out of darkness–physically yes, but also emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. His mother has other blind spots: the story explodes when he discovers her brazenly seducing one of his friends.

Language is celebrated and played with throughout the stories. Characters invent words, usually through pun-filled mash-ups, but in “Heart Sockets” and “Leopard Arms,” Zumas develops unusual syntactical strategies to fit these otherwordy, otherworldly tales. A theme that runs across most of the stories is the discovery of new words. For instance, in “Dragons May Be the Way Forward,” while a mother wallows within television’s wasteland, her daughter revels in language. She tests her mother’s comprehension and patience by reading out loud from the dictionary.

In “Farewell Navigator,” the son learns the word “grubble” from a poem in English class. It means groping or feeling around in the dark. And this is just what we find him doing: trying to make sense of his mother’s senselessness and insensitivity, processing his father’s obliviousness, his own impotence, and reaching toward his own future’s light. This new word, grubble, is used in the story’s most radiant passage where, after the son destroys his father’s jars of plum jelly, his father responds by putting his

fingers to my cheeks, grubbling for tears. His eyes are closed but I see on the red-streaked lids, as if they were maps, how much he doesn’t care if my bloody snot glops down on his shirt. I see how he will hold my shoulders hard and fast for as long as it takes me to stop crying and how I can, if I want, stay bandaged in the soft heat of him for hours, leaking brine, tethered by giant arms to the beat under his ribs till night comes and we’re afloat on dark water, shivering together, hearing the cold get brighter and the waves slower, so slow they turn from liquid to ice—hushed meadows of frozen lather—and we are surrounded.

In this story about blindness, color becomes a powerful element. The son names his parents Black and Blue after what he perceives to be their eye colors. His father, oblivious to his wife’s reasons for being interested in her son’s friend’s green eyes, says, “green is the color of the hair on the ground.” And when the son catches his mother in the act, he runs and hits “the light. Yellow pours onto Blue, who is naked except for her underpants.” The way colors enter into this story is very powerful as is the symbolic message encoded in the parents’ names.

James Agee

Zumas’s love of language and its myriad shadings are explicitly explored in “Dragons May Be the Way Forward.” Besides reading aloud from the dictionary, the narrator luxuriates in James Agee’s writing. “I was stretched on a towel in the backyard, fourteen and no friends, when I first read Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. When the page said, ‘And the spiders spread ghosts of suns between branches,’ a nerve I’d never felt before throbbed between my legs.” Despairing at her tapioca pudding eating and trash television watching mother’s impotence, she cries out to her love: “James Agee, would you please write her into the ground. Tell about the wet earth clumping down on her coffin. Describe her bone-box with your best, your most precise exaggerations.”

In About Writing, Delany also writes about how language delights, startles, inspires. First, he describes a friend turning to a sentence in Joyce’s Ulysses. “Listen to this,” his friend says:

“On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.” Now I love this sentence. But why is it better to write that than, say, “Sunlight fell on him through the leaves?” Or even to omit it altogether and get on with the story, our day in Dublin?

Delany, in his inimitable style, answers his own question by offering several possible reasons, including this one:

The vividness comes from a kind of surprise, the surprise of meeting a series of words that, one by one, at first seem to have nothing to do with the topic—striding under a tree on a June day—but words that, at a certain point, astonish us with their economy, accuracy, and playful vitality. Again, some of it will work on one reader, whereas others will only find it affected.

Reading Farewell Navigator, we find many instances of this “economy, accuracy, and playful vitality.” In “Dragons May Be the Way Forward,” the daughter looks at her mother, “Folds of skin accordion at her neck,” and despairs that “James Agee could have described her better—would have done justice to my mother, her loggishness, her ghouliness, her secret gentleness…” But what a wonderful image she herself has created to describe her mother’s sagging, withered flesh. And then, bemoaning her own “not-bad shade of blue eyes,” she thinks that Agee would “have piled adjectives upon this blue, lavished it with taut slippery words until it was unrecognizable as a color and had become—a feeling.” This reminds me again of Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio: writing about a difficult thing, he despairs that his descriptions are not enough, that his technique is faulty. He writes, that what he wrote “is crudely stated. It needs the poet there.” But we have one in Zumas–one by way of Hemingway, Lorrie Moore, and Amy Hempel, with detours through industrial blight, tours of strip malls and stripper bars, layovers in drug-addled adolescence, and twenty-, thirty-, and forty-something unplanned obsolescence.

While the daughter in “Dragons May Be the Way Forward” plays games with strange words like “moxa,” “umbelliferous,” “flocculence,” and also making up the occasional word, other characters play with imagined etymologies, homonyms, textural associations, and mash-ups. More wordplay can be found in “Waste No Time If This Method Fails.” There’s a funny moment when an overanxious medical student questions one of the hospital inmates about

how he likes it here.
He says, Where—in this cage? and the medical student says, So the hospital feels like a cage to you?
He says. It isn’t a simile. Points at the window: barred. The other window: barred.
He senses the medical student’s disappointment, so he throws him a little bone of crazy. Hearts of oak, he cries, did you go down alive into the homes of death?

When Zumas hints at where these stories might be set, what rings through my head is Neil Young singing, “Everybody seems to wonder what it’s like down here. I gotta get away from this day-to-day running around. Everybody knows this is nowhere.”

In “Thieves and Mapmakers,” Zumas writes about the “Town”:

Although it looked clean on the surface, it was like a river that’s quit running, whose water languishes on the rocks, collecting germs. Because nothing in the Town ever changed shape, hidden viruses were allowed to grow. The rooms of my house stank of sameness…It wasn’t city, it wasn’t country, it was a way station of gray streets and brown storefronts and paralyzed faces.

She describes a similar place in “The Everything Hater”: “a town so tiny we were able to count its stoplights on two hands. This town is small but not quaint or friendly.”

As we bid farewell to the navigator, let us greet this new, compelling voice. I look forward to reading more of Zumas’s incisive prose, especially the more speculative elements of her work. In particular, I’d be interested to see the alternate/parallel/post-apocalyptic worlds of “Heart Sockets” and “Leopard Arms” developed further, perhaps even into novel-length narratives.

Further Reading

Leni Zumas (photo from Open City's website)

- Shopping for a copy of Farewell Navigator? Order from your local indie bookseller.

- Read Zumas’s story “Dragons May Be the Way Forward” on Open City’s website; you can also read “The Everything Hater” at Five Chapters; “Leopard Arms” at Harp & Altar; “Heart Sockets” at Quarterly West; and “Handfasting” in The Journal.

- On the author’s website, read more fiction by Zumas: “To Greenland,” “An Account of My Death in the Mountains,” and “Diligent Blows.”

- To whet your appetite, here’s a sampling of striking images from Farewell Navigator:
From the title story:

“He hurts himself, sure—blood in ribbons on the cutting board, ropy splashes on the ramekins…”
“I want to answer but my mouth refuses. It makes a little fist on my face.”

From “The Everything Hater”:

“Mom’s face was a punched-out cake.”

“We walk in the glittery cold to the center of town, where ribbons festoon the street lamps and plowed snow hardens on the curbs.”

From “Heart Sockets”:

“His face blown perfect like blue glass animals that cost a thousand dollars to make…”

“I have a talented mind for matching one feeling to another. A caught scarf on the bus seatback, for instance, is the hand on your neck of someone who knows you but when you turn around, nobody’s there.”

“I am leaking heavy onto my shirt, two sopping moons, the mild night a cold sleeve between wet skin and milk-drenched cotton.”

From “Thieves and Mapmakers”:

“Yet he possessed a quality more attractive—to me—than handsomeness: it was his sheer haggardness, the battered-ship’s hull look he wore, as if a lifetime of senseless routines had etched gulleys in his cheeks.”

“All four boys, I noticed, were twitching constantly, glancing around with fretful eyes. Their agitation made me feel closer to them. Their translucent skin, the dried sputum at the corners of their mouths, and the way their shrunken muscles hung as if ready to come off the bone meant they were nothing like the normal people I’d grown up with.”

“Her hair, a dimpled egg, was studded with tiny black bristles.”

“When the sun was up and burning and the guests had cleared away, we settled down on the carpets of the parlor. I dreamed of the Town, of its odors: the first cold day in fall, when all the lingering frowses of heat have left the air and the newly emptied chill is flecked with wood smoke, soft and bitter, the smell of anticipation; and springtime—bright, forgiving air with the hint of unannounced visitors, impending journeys. Of course no visitors ever showed and no journeys were ever taken and the smell would soon retreat, replaced by a dingy warmth. This was why the Town disappointed me so badly: it could never deliver on the promise of its scents.”

From “Waste No Time if This Method Fails”:

“He likes to watch salt dry in bronchial patterns.”

“…but she blinked in a way that reminded him of ocean arachnids who live so many fathoms down their eyes have not reason to grow.”

Stanger-Ross conceives her lonely seamstress masterfully and completely, down to the embarrassment Sima feels when caught staring at Timna’s perfect breasts. As Sima’s obsession with Timna’s lively presence in her life grows, so does the pathos of her longing. A rekindled yearning for motherhood carries Sima through emotions akin to romantic love: fascination, passion, jealousy and revelation. For Sima, Timna is the daughter she wished for, and the fulfillment of dreams she thought died long ago. When Timna comes to work at Sima’s Undergarments for Women, those dreams flourish anew. Sima plans conversations, jokes to tell, all the while storing up Timna’s smiles and intimacies like talismans against unhappiness. Early in Timna’s tenure at the shop, Sima cooks an elaborate Rosh Hashanah meal, and Lev teases her that she cooked for an army. Sima “pressed her nail into her hand to try to check her eagerness and hoped that, with the table so covered in food, it did not look bizarre, desperate.” The truth is, Sima is desperate, but it would be a challenge to find a human being anywhere who had not been there himself.

Ilana Stanger-Ross

One of the many pleasures of Sima’s Undergarments for Women is its intimate scope. In just over 300 pages, Stanger-Ross unfurls Sima’s entire adult life, from newlywed to matron of a successful underwear shop that provides a haven for the women and girls of Boro Park, a social hub of the community. There is boisterous Connie, Sima’s best friend since childhood, who cannot fathom the depth of her friend’s sadness at not being able to conceive. Connie’s husband Art practices law, and harbors secrets of his own. The bras, too, are described in loving detail: “a deep green bra with leaf-embroidered straps and an ivory tulle demi-cup popular with brides” which against Timna’s skin becomes “a lizard asleep on desert sand.” Sima is a master, and passages where she fits clients, or intuits their desires before they know them, hold all the delight of watching an artist at work. Much of the story takes place in the little basement shop, and one sees how rich and complex Sima’s life has been, in spite of her hidden grief.

Boro Park, Brooklyn (2007) / photo by MASCURAK, flickr cc

Timna becomes not only the object of Sima’s affection, but a lens that turns Sima inward, uncovering a secret that she’s concealed from everyone around her, even Lev. A lifetime of keeping her own counsel has stoked Sima’s fear of being left by those she loves. Looking at Timna, Sima longs to give advice: “Let me take care of you, she wanted to say, let me be there for you. The words burned the back of her throat, but she did not let them out.” The contrast between youth and age, between Timna’s life ahead of her, and Sima trundling up the stairs to Lev in his undershirt is one of the underpinnings of the novel. Sima marvels at this difference while still a young woman, riding the train back from another disheartening doctor’s appointment:

How strange she though, as she scanned the subway car, that each one here had once been cooed over, doted on: white ribbons carefully tied beneath their soft chins, scallop-trimmed cotton hats centered on wispy-haired scalps. Each had been a baby like the one she coveted, now grown to mediocrity: this one a mole on her chin with the obligatory curl jutting from it; another a pale belly not quite concealed by a gray oil-stained tee.

Sure, things fall apart, but as Tennyson’s Ulysses says, “something ere the end,/ Some work of noble note, may yet be done”. Sima may not fulfill all of her dreams through Timna, but the presence of the girl reminds the old woman what it is to dream, and what it feels like to tell the truth. Sima contemplates revealing her secret as a kind of warning to headstrong Timna, but fear constrains her.

As terrible as it was to admit her own flawed history, it would be worse still to observe its effect: the disbelief with which the long-ago stories of the old were inevitably met, the pain of watching Timna realize, so you were young once, too.

Sima may not be able to confess all to Timna, but through her love for this young woman, she may yet forgive herself and rebuild her own family.

Extras

Ilana Stanger-Ross signs copies of Sima / photo from Penguin Group (Canada) on flickr

- You can read an excerpt from Sima’s Undergarments for Women via the website She Knows.

- Listen to a podcast interview with Ilana Stanger-Ross at Single Women Rule.

- At the author’s website, read a Q&A with Ilana Stanger-Ross, as well as her blog on Judaism, writing, bras, midwifery, and more.

- View a slideshow of some of the inhabitants of Boro (Borough) Park, Brooklyn, where Sima’s story is set, on the New York Times website.

- Visit Indiebound to order Sima’s Undergarments for Women from any independent bookstore–or locate a local shop where you can pick up a copy.

- Learn more about indie publisher Overlook Press, who published the novel in hardcover. The paperback edition is forthcoming this June from Penguin.