Aaron Cance: Hello, Melanie! Thank you so much for agreeing to discuss The Voice of the River with me. Reading it was a beautiful and haunting experience, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget this story. I’d like to start with a few general questions, then perhaps shift into a few, more specific, ones about the new novel. I’m always curious about, and interested in, the formative years of writers whose work I enjoy and respect. Who were some of your earliest influences?

Melanie Rae Thon: By the time I started high school, I was not only reading but memorizing poems by Sylvia Plath and Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda and e. e. cummings, passionate scenes from Wuthering Heights, quirky stories I found in journals. I rewrote sections of Johnny Got His Gun, imagining the speaker not as a soldier, but as girl my own age. I read the King James Bible without the filter of a minister or Sunday School teacher, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and a history of the Holocaust. These encounters jolted me into wakefulness, but also, strangely, miraculously, into love and wonder, a hunger to understand the gloriously diverse, mysteriously transient world around me.

Who are writers who continue to influence and inform your writing today?

My dear and beautiful friend Mark Robbins once told me, “Writing is prayer, the dedicated concentration of your being on that which will help you become the person you know you should be.” This is very close to the teachings of the Desert Fathers who described Lectio Divina, divine reading, as the meditative approach, ”by which the reader seeks to taste and savor the beauty and truth of every phrase and passage.” The writers who inform my writing are the ones who guide me toward a deeper contemplation of how I wish to live, to be, in the world. There are so many, and each is unique and important in his or her influence, but lately I’ve found myself reading or rereading something by Thich Nhat Hanh (the Buddhist monk) and John Berger every few months. James Agee, Tillie Olsen, and John Wideman help me understand the transcendent possibilities of inner speech and multivocal narratives, the importance of listening to everyone. When I enter the smoke and flames of Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire, I am transformed and inspired by his commitment to storytelling and research. There’s a gorgeous passage in a letter Dostoevsky wrote to his brother from prison:

Brother, I am not depressed and haven’t lost spirit. Life everywhere is Life, Life is in Ourselves and not in the External. There will be people near me, and to be Human among Human Beings, and remain one forever, no matter what misfortunes befall, not to become depressed, and not to falter, this is what Life is, herein lies its task. I have come to recognize this. This idea has entered my flesh and blood. . . . Never until now have such rich and healthy stores of Spiritual Life throbbed in me.

The Brothers Karamazov is a gloriously expansive exploration of this vision, and the recent translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky restores the nuance and complexity of Dostoevsky’s language.

I could go on for days about books that inspire me to live fully, with compassion and curiosity and infinite wonder: the poems of Mary Oliver, The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, Of Wolves and Men by Barry Lopez, The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel, Touching the Rock by John Hull, The Gospel According to Jesus: for Believers and Unbelievers, translation and guide by Stephen Mitchell . . . the more books I list, the more I leave out!

How has your conceptualization of, and personal philosophy about, writing craft evolved and changed over time, from your earliest efforts to your approach to The Voice of the River?

My own writing grows more spare, more elliptical all the time, closer, I hope, to the music of poetry. At seventeen weeks, the ears of the human fetus are open, ready to receive, exquisitely developed. We awaken in a waterworld, immersed in vibration and sound: the unceasing whoosh of blood through the uterine artery, our mother’s heart and breath, the surprising syncopation of our own miraculous heartbeat. We know the exaltation and pitch of voice: anger, fear, love, sorrow. Language to us is a polyphonic murmuration. We speak not only mind to mind, but body to body. Until each sentence sings, my work is unfinished. I read every line aloud—twenty, thirty, a hundred times—seeking not only sense, but tone and timbre and rhythm, hoping that through the fusion of meaning and music my words can touch anyone, fetus or mother.

In your acknowledgments for both The Voice of the River and In This Light, you’ve written that your students have shattered all opinions and challenged all assumptions. Describe a couple of ways that teaching has had a profound impact on your life?

My students constantly remind me how diverse human experience and perception can be, how little I know about anyone or anything! These revelations may be quiet or extreme. Last year my students and I were reading Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness. One woman described practicing mindful breathing while she was reading to her autistic son. A miracle indeed! Never before had he remained attentive while she read, but when she used her breath to calm her spirit, he too became tranquil. A thousand times a semester my students deliver to me a new understanding of grace. 

Several years ago I taught a class called Healing Into Life and Death, exploring the ways people of different cultures understand spiritual and physical healing, the cycle of life and death, and the lives of individuals as they relate to the life of the family, the community, and the natural environment. Every student in that class amazed me! One woman gave bone marrow to her older sister when she was still an infant. Before she could speak, my student had saved a life! We performed poems from The Gift by the Sufi mystic Hafiz. A 200-pound tattooed video game addict read one poem in the voice of Sean Connery, and another in the voice of John Wayne. Hafiz is a holy man with a subversive sense of humor. My brilliant student brought his fourteenth-century work into the present through his wildly perfect interpretation. It’s endless, truly endless, the surprise and gratitude I feel in the community of the classroom.

You’ve been guiding writers in their formative years much longer than I’ve known you. Just since we first met, I’ve seen Jacob Paul’s moving debut, Sara/Sarah, come to fruition and was profoundly impressed to discover that Bruce Machart, author of the astonishing debut The Wake of Forgiveness, was a friend and former pupil of yours. I haven’t met very many people that have a heart as big and as encompassing as yours, and I know that you probably celebrate your students’ successes even more than your own. How has their success fueled your own work? Do your students motivate you just as much as you motivate them?

I always hope my friends and students will survive their “successes.” In  Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl says:

Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it does so only as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds true for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge.

I don’t think I’ve ever met a writer—or any artist—who didn’t long for external validation, but these rewards are fleeting at best, and never come close to the rapture one feels in the process of creation. Perhaps this is what fuels the desperate craving: when we abandon a piece of work, when we call it “finished,” we face the sudden loss of this passion.

I couldn’t agree more. I was having lunch with Jacob just a few days ago, and we were speaking to this. We discussed the challenges of producing fiction that has any significant degree of abstraction, how mainstream audiences don’t find it palatable and commercial publishers don’t see it as a viable publishing endeavor. A writer shouldn’t create art with the expectation of an audience, renown, or financial reward. A writer shouldn’t refrain from creating art because these things may never follow. A writer shouldn’t change the art with these things in mind. We agreed that you can only write to make art, to experience the miraculous act of creating, to discover something about yourself through your creation.

My friends and students inspire and motivate me when I see that they are able to stay true to their own visions and hear their inner voices, when they are not swayed by external rewards or dispirited by the stunning silence of absolute incomprehension. In one of the first classes I taught, a research report writing on the history of the Civil Rights Movement in America, many of my older, nontraditional students were learning to do research for the first time. (This was in the late 80s, in the days before students did research on the Internet, so these endeavors were infinitely more challenging!) Their discoveries and accomplishments were as thrilling as any I’ve ever experienced. 

Yes, many of them composed impressive essays, but what remains with me even now is the awe we all experienced as we learned more about the movement, the incredible sacrifices, the history of violence and oppression. We were transformed together. Together we found the courage to take a difficult journey. We became a community, bound by shared purpose and dedication. Writing is always about discovery, and exploration allows for the possibility of transfiguration, the dynamic convergence of humility and enlightenment. The classroom is a place where we join hearts and minds and senses to become larger, more open than we are alone, more bold than we ever thought possible.

On a related note, I’ve gotten the sense from my own experiences in your novel workshop that your belief in the interconnectedness of every living thing is not a philosophy that begins when a reader opens The Voice of the River and ends when he or she turns the last page, but is something that you live every day.

Try to live! This is why I have to keep rereading and teaching books by Thich Nhat Hanh. This is why my students and I split our reading between science, spiritual texts, and literature. To be reminded, yes, again and again: we are intimately bound to everything that is, was, and will be. Even our bodies are complex biotic communities. Bacteria outnumber other cells ten to one, and without them we wouldn’t be able to digest our food or defend ourselves against many infections. Remnants of extinct retroviruses remain in our DNA, fossil records of the multitude of beings that influenced the course of our evolution. A fish that pushed itself out of the sea is our distant relative. The embryos of bats, lizards, birds, and humans are astonishingly similar. 

There is a beautiful African proverb: I am because you are, and you are because we are. I like to think of this idea in the broadest terms possible: we are all part of the jeweled net: nothing exists except by connection to everything else in the infinitely miraculous universe. We mourn intimate loss, the deaths of ones we love, the extinction of species, but we are exalted by the spiritual belief and scientific understanding that through time and across space everything changes and continues. In The Heart of Understanding, Thich Nhat Hanh illuminates this idea with stunning simplicity. His example is a piece of paper, and he shows how all forms and forces in the universe are here: tree, soil, sun, rain—the logger who cut the tree, the wind that pollinated the wheat that made the bread that sustains him—all his ancestors are here, as are the worms who made the soil fertile. We can begin anywhere, with any being or any entity, and we will discover a web like this that opens forever in every direction.

In the film Planet Earth, Doctor Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury says, “Wilderness always speaks to human beings of Transcendence: in the widest possible sense it says, You as a Human Being are part of a System which is not just about your needs and your concerns. Like it or not, you’re part of something immense and very mysterious.”

I think the single most painful image in The Voice of the River is the hole in the ice. It seems dark and beautiful in its own way as a doorway to some other place, but it is a heartbreaking image because it seems to also represent the hole that Kai Dionne’s disappearance has left in the fabric of the life that he left behind, perhaps we could say that it represents a hole in the jeweled net, an absence felt by all who were close to him. It almost seems to function in the story like a wound in the world that he inhabited.

Thank you, Aaron! This is a beautiful way to express the sense of loss I felt. Kai’s sections (the chapters in second person) are composed as love songs. I wanted to explore the different ways his love is manifested, the unique relationships he has with his cousins Iris and Tulanie Rey, his uncles Griffin and Roy, his half-sisters Juliana and Roxie, his dog Talia. This is what’s lost when a person disappears from our lives, the ongoing action of his physical love in the world. Juliana and Roxie will be forever changed by their love for Kai. His love for his sisters, his spiritual presence in their lives, will continue to transform them as they remember and reinvent shared experiences. But they will never again ride him up and down the stairs pretending he’s their pony. The hole in the ice reminds us of this profound physical absence.

You’ve written, in notes about The Voice of the River, of the way that the search for a missing child “becomes holy: a missing [emphasis mine] child belongs to, and is loved by, a whole community.” Had Kai not bolted out on the ice over the river to save his beloved dog, Talia, the community of searchers in the novel would never have come together, would never have had the shared experience of the search, a shared experience that has been revelatory for some of them. Is this novel also, perhaps, an impassioned plea to its readers to be mindful of the love that is possible all around them? To foster an awareness of a broader human family that we could all have if we would just come out of hiding long enough to embrace it?

A follower asked Jesus, “When will the Kingdom of God come?”And Jesus said, “The Kingdom of God will not come if you watch for it. Nor will anyone be able to say, ‘It is here’ or ‘It is there.’ For the Kingdom of God is within you.”

I believe this with my whole heart. During the last thirteen days of my father’s life on earth, I had a profoundly simple revelation: every moment of every day my siblings, my nieces and nephews, my mother and I had nothing to do except come here (to his hospital room) and love him and love one another. Despite the toxins flooding his body, my father gave and received love perfectly. Tolstoy says, “Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love.” When we are faced with extreme circumstances, we know this, we live this truth.

I carried my awareness everywhere: to the grocery store, the crowded street, down to the park in early morning. Everything and everyone seemed holy. I remained on the path in the months after my father’s transcendence. But as time passed, I wavered, I failed to love with that clarity. Love one another. It’s so simple to say; so challenging to practice in the frenzy and distraction of our daily lives! This is another reason teaching sustains me: it’s easy to love in the classroom; my generous students lift love lightly out of me.

I have always really been proud of my ability to stop anywhere and at any time I needed to in order to witness the beauty of the world around me reveal itself to me, whether it is by watching a prolonged process or being present mindfully to experience a single, shimmering moment that makes itself manifest to me, and is gone. In the novel workshop, that was reinforced, reinvigorated. The Voice of the River is flush with luminescent, transient moments that the reader witnesses. But the project as a whole was larger than that, wasn’t it? This seems, to me, to be a book about being a witness. Every revelation the reader has about one of its characters seems to encourage seeing with new eyes.

For more than twenty years I’ve been keeping what I call the Book of Wonders. Life begins here, in joy and astonishment. I see deer up to their ears in snow; a pigeon dying on my porch the day after Christmas; reflections of trees in the river, brilliant fish swimming in the treetops. One tanager swoops tree to tree, gold and orange, black-winged, silent: as I watch him fly, I feel my body rise as if I too have wings, a heart as strong as his to lift me.

In the park, a woman drags a drunken man into the grass, feathering his face with kisses from her fingers before she leaves him. The x-ray of my sister’s back shows enormous bolts in her narrow spine, her fragile body transfigured.

I learn of medical miracles: marrow taken from the bone of a small girl, injected into the vein of her brother or sister; titanium ribs perfectly formed for scoliosis patients; a baby who thrives in her mother’s womb after the woman is shot in the belly. My father survives nine coronary bypasses, three heart attacks, five strokes. When all his organs finally fail, we learn his precious pacemaker cannot be transplanted to a human being, so we offer it to a golden Labrador. Now every dog I see fills me with spontaneous delight, my father’s love, a living vision of his resilience.

My work as a writer begins here, with strange and miraculous tales, the daily prayer of attention. I’ve filled more than seventy volumes. Making stories is not the goal: I wish only to be more alive, more mindful, more reverent. Keeping The Book of Wonders restores me to the possibility of grace in every moment.

So yes, you’re right, the project as a whole becomes larger, but it begins with “attention taken to its highest degree.” Simone Weil says this is the same thing as prayer:  “it presupposes faith and love.”

The presence of the lost children in The Voice of the River is tragically fitting. Each of these children, present though they may be in the story, is missing to someone. Missing children appear in your 1997 collection, First, Body, and in the new story, “Heavenly Creatures,” that appears in In This Light, the story collection published by Graywolf Press just a bit earlier this year. Talk about the presence of missing children in your work. Is their presence in the writing a way of giving voice to the voiceless? Of giving presence to the absent or of rediscovering the lost?

I want to go back to your comment on witnessing. I had my first intimate encounter with homeless children when I was sixteen and a friend of mine was sent to a juvenile detention center. (I’ve fictionalized his story in “Iona Moon,” another piece in the collection In This Light.) When he returned a year later, he was irrevocably altered, brain damaged from fights or drugs or beatings—he could never tell me. His parents refused to let him come home, and he lived in sheds he found or made shelters from sticks and garbage bags.

Years later, when I lived in Boston, my “apartment” was an attic room without insulation.  I froze in winter, fried in summer. Still I knew how lucky I was to have shelter, food, a job, a doctor. I walked everywhere, miles and miles every day, through all parts of town, tame and dangerous, in all kinds of weather. I encountered the homeless, the poor, the extravagantly wealthy, the addicted, the recently immigrated, the excessively educated.

One brutal winter, a storm surged up the coast every weekend. I lost power for days at a time. Pigeons flapped at my dark windows. I walked. And there they were: the kids, throwaways and runaways, the unloved and unlucky. The emaciated Haitian refugee shivered in Harvard Square, playing his guitar, trying to earn a few dollars. He was a brilliant musician, but his eyes were yellow where they should have been white. I thought he would die soon. The man with no fingers slept in a doorway and could barely move; as I passed, he opened his bare palm and lurched toward me.

The lives of the people I saw on the street became vivid to me, intensely personal. I began to imagine how those children might survive, who they might love, why they were out there. I began composing “Xmas, Jamaica Plain” (another piece included in In This Light),  dreaming the lives of Nadine and Emile.

In 1998, I worked with a juvenile prosecutor in my hometown (Kalispell, Montana), doing research for my novel  Sweet Hearts. He told me he believed there were 300 homeless kids in the area. These are the children in “Heavenly Creatures.” By the time I started exploring The Voice of the River, I imagined their numbers swelled to 700. But it’s strange: as numbers increase, they become even more abstract, weirdly inconsequential. Stories remind us that each life is precious. Nadine, Emile, Matt Fry, Trace, Peter Fleury, Flint Zimmer: each missing child has a history of love and loss, a passionate story to tell us.

Like you, like all humans and perhaps many other creatures, I have received the gift of mirror neurons, pathways in our brains that allow us to experience “Kinetic Empathy,”  the sense that when you witness something, you “feel” as if it is happening to you. This may be physical (you watch someone fall and scrape skin on gravel and you flinch in pain), or emotional (you see a teacher ridicule a classmate and feel the burn of humiliation). Kinetic empathy may become unbearable: powerless or paralyzed by fear, you watch one person torture another. Years later, the memory continues to haunt you: you see yourself as both victim and perpetrator.

This too must be transformed by love, a willingness to remember, to re-invent and re-imagine. Anna Deavere Smith says she recognizes the gap between herself and the people she represents in her plays. The thrill of the experience for writer or actor, viewer or reader, is to move into that space, to become other than oneself while still acknowledging and respecting the infinite unknowable mystery of every living being.

Rumi says: You become bewildered; then suddenly Love comes saying,  “I will deliver you this instant from yourself.” Love, not art, is the purpose; but for some, witnessing and rendering and imagining stories is the process and the path to understanding.

You’ve been working on The Voice of the River for quite some time. Looking back at the entire process, were there points of its development that stand out to you as particularly profound or important? Were there any points in its development that were revelatory to you?

I loved going to the park in early morning and speaking with the pigeons in their language, trying to imitate their tender voices. When I composed Daniel Sidoti’s sections, I loved the owls and the mountain goats, the ways Daniel taught me to perceive them. Every moment of the experience still feels revelatory to me. I could open the book at random, point to any passage and tell you a story about the ways in which that exploration continues to open my vision and deepen my sense of awe for all the living beings and potent entities I encounter. When I imagined the hibernating bear giving birth to two cubs, I lived inside the den, trying to render every detail from their perspective. I can’t really know what bears sense and think, but I can move outside myself, and this freedom, this joy, is extravagant.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget the experience of reading this novel. Will these characters continue to haunt you?

I hope all the living beings, human and more-than-human, will continue to change and open me. I believe they will. I trust them.

Further Links and Resources

I’m thankful for many things this Thansksgiving–friends, family, bits of good fortune large and small that have come my way over the past year. But in terms of stories, there’s one I’m eternally grateful for: Julie Orringer’s “Pilgrims.”

I first encountered “Pilgrims” in The Best New American Voices 2001, where it was the lead-off story. It begins simply enough: a family–father, mother, sister, brother–are headed to Thanksgiving dinner. But within paragraphs, you feel less and less at ease. The mother is gravely ill, as are many of the parents at the group dinner. Brother and sister must contend with a pack of motherless, lawless children roaming the huge treehouse in the backyard. The story’s conclusion is so shocking that the first time I read it, I literally had to sit down. Once you read this story, certain images will stay with you forever: paper pilgrim-buckles taped to sock feet. A glass of red water. A tiny tooth clutched in a palm.

In some ways every story I’ve written since has been influenced by “Pilgrims.” It prodded me to delve deeper and darker in my own writing, to follow characters into terrifying places, to allow terrible things to happen–even to characters I loved, even to children–if that’s where the story led. It gave me permission–no, it dared me–to see how far I could take a story. Thank you, Julie Orringer.

• Read the first few pages of “Pilgrims” online, and find the complete story in Julie Oringer’s collection How to Breathe Underwater
• Erika Dreifus reviews Orringer’s novel The Invisible Bridge
• More “stories we love”

A recent discussion on the community blog Metafilter asked, “Please tell me one book you think everyone should read and why. Fiction or nonfiction, doesn’t matter. I’m not so interested in hearing about your favorite book or your desert island book, but a book you think everyone would benefit from reading.”

In a matter of hours, over a hundred people responded with their recommendations. Many suggested nonfiction—from Richard Dawkins to Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond to The Art of War to the Bible—but surprise! Many others felt that the one book everyone should read would be fiction.

Here’s a sampling of novels and collections recommended by posters as the One Book, and why. Notice anything?

• Where I’m Calling From, by Raymond Carver (”Honed gems of short stories about the human condition” and “Wonderful insights into human behavior, in some cases simply within a drunken conversation. They show us what we’re capable of.”)
• Catch-22, by Joseph Heller (”It portrays the inescapable absurdity and irrationality of life, and different ways human beings can respond to that. Hilariously, and movingly.”)
• The Stranger by Albert Camus (”It is, for me, a How To Survive as a Member of A Larger Society Handbook.”)
• The Good Earth by Pearl Buck and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (”These beautifully written novels (the latter is practically musical) are entirely different, yet comparably profound explorations of human desire, motivation, and angst”)
• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (”Because most of us are invisible. And if we are not, we should try to understand the invisible ones.”)
• To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee (”to hopefully begin a dialogue on race and class matters, and how much (or how little) has changed since the book was written in 1960″)

All of these suggestions look at fiction as a way to explore and understand our humanness and our place in the larger world. I’m not sure I could name One Book Everyone Should Read, but I’d agree that few things can explore the human condition better, and more lastingly, than fiction.

What would you recommend as the one book everyone should read, and why?

• In his Quotes and Notes column, Steven Wingate looks at the links between fiction, history, and self-examination.
• Nobel Prize winner Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio argues why the writer, literature, and literacy matter in a global society.
• Why fiction is important, even in a world of memoirs
• Author Dean Bakopoulos on why fiction matters, and another excellent discussion (also on Metafilter) on why people read fiction

We don’t usually think of Halloween as a “reading” kind of day, but I can think of at least a couple of Halloween-related stories.

In Lorrie Moore’s classic short story “You’re Ugly, Too,” a history professor escapes her life by visiting her sister over Halloween weekend–to attend what may be the most painfully awkward Halloween party in literature:

Zoe put on her bonehead. [...]

When Earl arrived, he was dressed as a naked woman, steel wool glued stretegically to a body stocking, and large rubber breasts protruding like hams.

“Zoe, this is Earl,” said Evan.

“Good to meet you,” said Earl, circling Evan to shake Zoe’s hand. He stared at the top of Zoe’s head. “Great bone.”

Zoe nodded. “Great tits,” she said.

And Rick Moody’s short story “Demonology” begins with trick-or-treaters:

They came in twos and threes, dressed in the fashionable Disney costumes of the year, Lion King, Pocahontas, Beauty and the Beast, or in the costumes of televised superheroes, Protean, shape–shifting, thus arrayed, in twos and threes, complaining it was too hot with the mask on, Hey, I’m really hot!, lugging those orange plastic buckets, bartering, haggling with one another, Gimme your Smarties, please as their parents tarried behind, grownups following after, grownups bantering about the schools, or about movies, about local sports, about their marriages, about the difficulties of long marriages, kids sprinting up the next driveway, kids decked out as demons or superheroes or dinosaurs or as advertisements for our multinational entertainment providers, beating back the restless souls of the dead, in search of sweets…

and hurtles towards a terrifying familial heartbreak. This is one of a few stories that I literally cannot read without crying.

There must be more that I’m forgetting. What other Halloween-related stories can you think of? Tell us in the comments!

Further reading:

• Want more chilling reads? FWR contributor Forrest Anderson recommends three favorite stories that scare (and be sure to read the comments for a scary real-life story about one of the authors!).

I don’t mind admitting that I get stuck as a writer—occasionally. Well, pretty often. Okay, I mean constantly. And I’m not talking about jamming up over a flowery paragraph or a pivotal scene. I’m saying that I’ll be four pages into a new story (on what I’ve come to imagine on my worst days as the road to hell, thanks to a willful misinterpretation of Ron Carlson Writes a Story) and I’ll not only forget how to write a sentence, but I’ll lose sight of how a short story should even look. I used to feel ashamed about my lapse in genre memory and the sweaty-palm, shallow-breath panic that followed, but I’ve convinced myself that all writers catch the yips.

I’ve learned to keep a small stack of short fiction in my desk drawer as a remedy—a way to interrupt my bad habits, challenge my stale techniques, and remind me of the moves the best stories are capable of making. The story I keep on top is “Irish Girl” by Tim Johnston. Originally published in the now-defunct DoubleTake Magazine, it was later selected for the 2003 O. Henry Prize Stories and anthologized by David Sedaris in Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules. I first found the story in Johnston’s debut collection, also titled Irish Girl, which won the 2009 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. I’d bought the book because the contest judge was Janet Peery, who wrote another story I keep in my drawer as a curative tonic, “What the Thunder Said.”

“Irish Girl” opens simply enough with the protagonist as an eight-year old boy playing with army men under the kitchen table. His older brother kicks his leg—“not too hard but not too soft, either”—and tells him that his parents want to speak to him in the bedroom. Then, in a move I don’t recollect seeing in any other story, the writer breaks out of scene for the briefest of paragraphs to contextualize the family and the era they inhabit by telling the reader what the protagonist does and doesn’t know: “Charlie didn’t know… about Nixon’s decision to send troops into Cambodia, or how that led to the shootings at Kent State… He did know a little about the thirteen boys from the agricultural college arrested for rioting, because his father had been their lawyer. But he didn’t know that the trial, which had made the news every night for two weeks… had given his father the idea to run for office.” The story drops back into scene—the eve of his father’s departure for the Iowa House of Representatives—and the protagonist learns that his older brother is adopted.

The story does an excellent job portraying not only how the adopted brother grows distant from his parents and younger brother over the space of four years, the “blue light” going from his eyes, but it also subtly reveals a family held prisoner by its inability to adapt to a changing country. That’s a highfalutin way to say that it’s a damn good story, a story that cures the yips that ail me by reminding me what I can get away with in the best short fiction: direct language, echoing imagery, and earned sentiment.

• See the entire “Stories We Love” series (so far!)
• Find a copy of Irish Girl at an indie bookstore near you.

In Marion Ettlinger’s stark black-and-white portrait of Carver, the author sits hunched forward slightly, his hands crossed at the wrists and resting on this knee. He wears a supple leather bomber jacket, a wool scarf, and a broad ring on one of his fingers. Carver looks comfortable, untouched by life’s rough edges, a slight smirk seems to be growing at the edges of his mouth.

Marion Ettlinger's photo of Carver, from http://www.nancykiefer.com/

I remember thinking, “How could this guy know so much about these characters?”

I was sixteen, and still naively believed that the narrator of every first-person story must be the author himself. Right? I mean, I was writing self-absorbed, autobiographical poems and stories every day. Wasn’t everyone else?

But back then I had no idea of the difference between sympathy and empathy. And, most importantly, I had no idea of what the imagination was capable of.

When I discovered the writing of Andre Dubus in my early twenties—beginning first with his final collection, Dancing After Hours (Knopf, 1996), and then quickly devouring his entire catalog—I discovered complex work that both taught me about the literary craft of compression and point of view in short stories, and gave me a deeper understanding of empathy and compassion as a human being.

As I read Dubus’s work, I also sought out all that had been written about him. In the latter, too often I stumbled upon other writers and scholars seeking to make tenuous links between the characters that inhabit Dubus’s tough yet celebratory stories, and Dubus’s actual life. Such reductive readings frustrated me. By then, I’d come to understand the difference between art and life, between the writer and the writing.

For no other apparent reason than the sake of putting fiction into neat boxes, some scholars seem to regularly seek out the explanation of fiction in the autobiography of authors. These scholars cling to ease rather than aspiring to generate objective knowledge and insights. They claim to admire a writer, yet diminish their work by putting forth essays and papers full of feeble examples of how the author’s work is thinly veiled autobiography.

Dubus himself said he steered clear of autobiography in his fiction. “I’ve always fought writing autobiography,” he told Kay Bonetti in a 1984 interview for the American Audio Prose Library series. ”I’ve felt that there was something wrong with it. I guess in my early twenties I started thinking about my choice of subjects and worried then that if I spent too much time writing autobiography I’d lose touch with the world.”

Unsurprisingly, that conversation with Bonetti eventually got around to Dubus’s literary hero, Anton Chekhov. In Dubus’s own words, we discover that what the short story devotee really sought to achieve with his art were stories devoid of himself. Explaining Chekhov’s reaction to an editor’s praise for his piece “A Dreary Story,” Dubus told the interviewer: “What [Chekhov] wrote to his editor about that story is absolutely true, it is full of arguments and philosophical debates, and Chekhov said, ‘but you will not find me in there.’ And that’s what I like.”

Recently, I sought input from several authors about the idea of autobiography in fiction. Many of the authors I spoke with have themselves, in varying degrees, dealt with their own writing being questioned as to its autobiographical elements.

Christopher Tilghman, author of the novels Mason’s Retreat (Random House, 1996) and Roads of the Heart (Random House, 2004), as well as the story collections The Way People Run (Random House, 1999) and In a Father’s Place (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), is unequivocal about his feelings on the matter of fact versus fiction in Dubus’s short stories.

“On the subject of using personal material in fiction,” says Tilghman, “I tend to think of Andre as one of the least autobiographical writers I know.”

In 1987, Tilghman became a founding member of the writers’ group that met nearly weekly in Dubus’s living room until his death in early 1999. The group eventually became known at the “Thursday Nighters,” a term coined by Tilghman. Dubus chronicled some of the group’s particularly difficult growing pains in his essay “Letter to a Writer’s Workshop,” collected in Meditations from a Moveable Chair (Knopf, 1998).

“If there are specific incidents in any of his stories that were drawn from life, his literary and spiritual project simply subsumed them. Whatever residue of personal experience that survives is simply not recognizable as autobiography,” continues Tilghman. “And to the contrary point, Andre seemed to have used fiction as a way to place and observe himself within situations that, thankfully, he never did experience in his waking life.”

It is not voyeurism that readers seek in Dubus’s stories, says Tilghman, but the pointed “horns of ethical dilemmas” that Dubus’s stories thrust readers between. “Many of his characters take action that we might think of as unlikely or distasteful or unlawful, but they do it because they think it is the only thing to do.”

When Tilghman met Dubus back in 1987, he was a young writer struggling to find his voice. Today, he is the director of the creative writing program at the University of Virginia. At UVA, known as the school Thomas Jefferson built, the legend of William Faulkner’s stint as a writer-in-residence in the late 1950s still looms large, as does the legacy of a certain alum: Edgar Allen Poe. Today, the acclaimed novelist and short story writer Ann Beattie serves as the university’s Edgar Allan Poe Professor of Literature and Creative Writing.

Like Tilghman, Beattie was close to Dubus. In the winter of 1987, she joined E.L. Doctorow, Gail Goodwin, John Irving, Stephen King, Tim O’Brien, Jayne Anne Phillips, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Yates for a series of benefit readings in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to raise money for Dubus after he was struck by a car and handicapped. A decade later, Beattie joined Dubus for several readings together while he was on tour for what would end up being his final story collection, Dancing After Hours.

For Beattie—whose recently published novella Walks with Men (Scribner, 2010) had many reviewers pondering whether or not the author had raided her own memories of living in New York City in the 1980s in order to write the book—the question of autobiography in an author’s work is much less interesting than many other more intriguing questions.

When Beattie was in college in the late 1960s, the New Criticism model—eschewing the biographical and sociological in favor of close reading and the work itself—was a prevailing wisdom. Then, for a time, she questioned such an approach. “When I became a writer, I found this increasingly….odd,” says Beattie. “Why were we living and working, if not to admit that we were peculiar? Not that I think the key to fiction is ‘Is it autobiography disguised?’ but rather that readers might think there was a ‘key’ to better understanding the work, and that that ‘key’ turned in the lock of ‘writer’s life’.”

“If readers do think this—as opposed to people who speak about literature, who want, justifiably, to move closer to the text, but who may therefore be led into a kind of thinking that involves verifiability—they’ve been misled about what fiction is. Both parties have misunderstood,” asserts Beattie, whose newest collection The New Yorker Stories (Scribner, 2010) collects her forty-eight pieces that appeared between 1974 and 2006 in that bellwether of American short fiction; the book was named to the New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2010 list.

“Fiction mystifies the writers of fiction,” says Beattie, explaining:

They—they, alone—are quite capable of displaying the ‘facts’ of their lives, yet doing this holds almost no fascination for any fiction writer, EVER.

So while fiction writers don’t write blindly, neither do they think that facts should be warped into art. They have taken a huge step away from facts in order to write fiction. In that space—in that gap—true make-believe, true fiction, occurs. It occurs as much for the writer as for the reader. It seems to me that it’s interesting additional information if an incident really did, in point of fact, happen to the writer, but the more interesting question is: So what? Why did that capture the writer’s interest, as opposed to 1,000 other things that really happened?

The author Edie Clark has long been awed by not only the incidents and characters that captured Dubus’s interest and empathy, but by Dubus’s seemingly prophetic vision.

Clark, the author most recently of the essay collection States of Grace: Encounters with Real Yankees (Benjamin Mason Books, 2010), traveled for years from her home in New Hampshire to attend the weekly writer’s workshop at Dubus’s Massachusetts home; Clark’s searing memoir of losing her young husband to cancer, The Place He Made (Villard, 1996), was written and drafted during those workshops.

“What always struck me so deeply about Andre,” says Clark, “was how some of his stories turn out to be his life, rather than the other way around. Like he was prescient.”

Clark served for many years as the fiction editor of Yankee magazine and published many stories and essays by Dubus, as well as work by Donald Hall, Stephen King, John Updike, and Monica Wood, among many others. In particular, Clark remembers an eerie, seemingly prophetic Dubus story that came across her desk.

In 1986, Clark had Dubus’s story “Blessings” in production for the next issue of Yankee. The story, later collected in Dancing After Hours, revolves around an horrific boating accident, a shark attack, and the subsequent aftermath for the survivors. “I recall counting the number of times the word ‘leg’ appears in that story,” says Clark. “Twenty-seven different times. And, of course, while we were putting that story into print, Andre lost his leg and the use of his other. I don’t think he ever put that together as the rest of his life was so dramatically changed but it wasn’t the first time I saw this, that what happened in his stories preceded what happened in his own life.”

Watson and the Shark, by John Singleton Copley

But, of course, Dubus’s stories don’t always fall into this prescient category—a category, it could be said, that exists for an honest writer engaged in writing about their own fears and the what-ifs of life. In Clark’s opinion, Dubus both used kernels of his life as seeds for stories, and he listened closely to the stories of others to inspire his art. For years, Clark kept a long quotation from Dubus’s essay “Marketing” (from Broken Vessels, Godine, 1991) tacked to the wall beside her desk. The quote, the essay’s opening paragraph, reads:

I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice. We can sit all night with our friend while he talks about the end of his marriage, and what we finally get is a collection of stories about passion, tenderness, misunderstanding, sorrow, money; those hours and days and moments when he was absolutely married, whether he and his wife were screaming at each other, or sulking about the house, or making love. While his marriage was dying, he was also working: spending evenings with friends, rearing children; but those are other stories. Which is why, days after hearing a painful story by a friend, we see him and say: How are you? We know that by now he may have another story to tell or he may be in the middle of one and we hope it is joyful.

“Andre thought deeply about life,” says Clark, “and about what happened to his friends, because he cared but also because he wanted to understand how the world worked.”

In Dubus’s own remarks we find how consistently he looked outward to find the stories he wove, such as in a 1985 interview with Thomas Kennedy for Revue Delta. Dubus was open about the very simple inspiration that led him to write Voices from the Moon (Godine, 1984), a story that is both his longest novella and very likely his masterpiece: Dubus told Kennedy that he came upon the story’s plot while reading the Boston Globe one day.

The nine chapters of the 126-page Voices from the Moon alternate between Richie Stowe, a serious twelve-year-old who plans to become a priest, and the other members of the boy’s family. The story takes place over the course of a single day and is centered on the revelation that Richie’s divorced father plans to marry the ex-wife of Richie’s older brother—the father’s own former daughter-in-law.

“Woman in her 20s who wanted to marry a man in his 40s who was her ex-husband’s father,” said Dubus on the newspaper article. “Against the law in Massachusetts and in some other states. That was the whole thing. I tried to make up the characters who went with them.”

In the end, Clark doesn’t believe that it matters either way whether the kernel of a Dubus story came from his own experience, a friend’s life, or from a newspaper article. “The point is,” she says, “that Andre recognized transformative moments in life, whether in his own or in that of his friends, and turned them into art. He understood what it means to be human.”

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Ford is renowned for capturing the transformative moments in life. He is also no stranger to having his fiction confused for his life.

“It’s happened to me a lot,” Ford told me recently, “that novels and characters I’ve written have, by readers, been confused with my life and self. In one way, I suppose, it ought to be flattering. It means the illusion of the book was fairly complete, or at least it seemed ‘true to life.’”

While Ford solidified his reputation as a master of the American short story with his early collection Rock Springs (Atlantic Monthly, 1987), it was his 1986 novel The Sportswriter (Vintage) that thrust his fiction into the American consciousness. The voice of Ford’s narrator Frank Bascombe, an American Everyman set adrift in New Jersey, has resonated with readers both in the States and abroad. Ford has since taken Bascombe through the subsequent novels Independence Day (Knopf, 1995) and Lay of the Land (Knopf, 2006).

Ford, who included Dubus’s story “Killings” when he edited the anthology The New Granta Book of the American Short Story (Granta Publications, 2007), has been charged by some critics with using Bascombe as a mouthpiece of his own views. The author, however, insists that very little, if anything, about Frank is autobiographical.

“I’m always trying,” says Ford, “to give Frank responses to things that I’ve never had—and maybe once I’ve seen them ascribed to him, wouldn’t want.” If he slips and lets a little Ford into Frank, he sees it as a weakness that needs correcting. “I think to myself,” he says, “’Gee whiz, what a failure you are. Is that all you can do, just to give him some point of view, some opinion, some response that you yourself have already had?’”

Ford, who says he came to Dubus’s stories later in his life, notes that even when kernels of fact occasionally find their way into fiction, they are quickly mutated by the very act of storytelling. “Of course, these bits of oneself migrate into pieces of fiction—both advertently and inadvertently,” says Ford:

But they never get there in a pure state. Events are events; people are people. But characters are made entirely of language, and come onto the story’s stage through a process of authorial choice, misadventure, fortuity, editorial acumen, and really a lot of other courses—all of which fundamentally change them from being real people, assuming they were real people to being with—which frankly they mostly weren’t.

In fact, Ford finds the act of attempting to wedge real people into fiction to be harmful to the creative act:

Writing real people into fiction is hazardous, as many writers have pointed out, and I myself know to be true. Real people, whom you might want to install in your story, turn out to be intractable. They tend to stay themselves and be hard-sided, and not the infinitely mutable fascicles of language real characters (versus real people) are. Made-up characters are lambent, they mutate, they surprise, they act out of character, and are therefore to be prized—for this freedom alone.

In the end, Ford believes such reductive readings of fiction do not merely minimize his work or that of his peers, but diminish the human potential of the mind. “The assertion that characters in fictions are just real people put onto the page offends me by selling the imagination short, by reducing all things fictive to the personal, to the known, to the flesh—as if that’s really where reality lies. It’s not. Reality’s dull, dull, dull without the imagination to show it the way outward from itself,” says Ford.

Are biographical readings always wrong? No. Are biographical readings but one limited lens through which to explore fiction? Absolutely.

Writers discover and tell stories for reasons that often remain a mystery to the writer themselves. Dubus himself could only speculate on why many of his characters so often struggle with loneliness, heartache, violence, adultery, rape, murder, and abortion. “I think honest writers write about what bothers them,” he once opined.

“My guess is that surprise is the variable,” speculates Ann Beattie when she considers what it is that captures a writer’s interest and sends them spelunking into the depths of a story:

You can be surprised at the simplest, most ordinary things, like that the houseplant wasn’t done flowering; that it was winter and it snowed; that you boiled water and put something in the pot and, by golly, out came pasta. So: writers are not special creatures, hyper-aware and hyper-sensitive. Rather, they are ordinary or dumb creatures, who—for whatever reason—have decided not much is lost if they are to be vulnerable, and to make something of their surprise when confronting ordinary life. To look at ordinary life in an unusual way—a lingering way—tinges it. If the color and contrast takes, that’s what fiction is. Fiction is like a big, absorptive blotter.

In the end, no one—no scholar, nor his children, family, or friends, not even the author himself—can truly give us impartial insight into Dubus’s fiction. Fiction need only be true to itself.

On February 23, 1999, the day before Dubus died, he gave a brief interview to Greg Garrett. When asked how he wrote dialogue that is “so real,” Dubus insisted that it wasn’t in the least bit real; it was, he said, human speech purified to a poetic rhythm. “We’re not trying to be real,” Dubus told the interviewer, on what he did not know then was the last afternoon of his life. “We’re trying to be better than real. We’re trying to be true.”

During the symposium, I was somewhat disturbed by the constant assumptions by many of the presenting academics that Dubus’s masterful fiction was simply thinly veiled autobiography.

After the symposium, Ed asked me to contribute an essay to the special Dubus tribute edition edition of the Xavier Review published in December 2010. I appreciated Ed’s support in allowing me to contribute an essay that, in some ways, sought to debunk the work of other Dubus scholars. I thank the Xavier Review for first publishing this essay, and supporting its republication here.

The Stakes Are Absolute

Three Questions on Andre Dubus with Todd Field

Todd Field, image via Wikipedia

With the 2001 film “In the Bedroom,” director Todd Field became the first person to bring Andre Dubus’s fiction to life on the screen. Field worked with co-writer Rob Festinger to adapt the screenplay from Dubus’s taut short story “Killings.” After premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, the film went on to earn five Academy Award nominations, including Best Adapted Screenplay.

On the evening of February 23, 1999, Dubus called Field—who was well underway with “In the Bedroom”—to wish him an early “Happy Birthday.” The next morning, Dubus died of a heart attack. Field was the last person to ever speak with him.

Field and I spoke briefly about his interest in Dubus’s prose, and his work adapting it.

Joshua Bodwell: Of all Dubus’s work, why did you to select “Killings” to adapt into a feature-length film?

Todd Field: The most exciting thing as a reader is to come across someone’s material—a short story or novel—that you can’t stop thinking about—to become haunted by an impression. In 1992 I was a directing fellow at the American Film Institute. The first year we were allowed to make whatever we liked so long as the running time wasn’t in excess of thirty minutes. We weren’t permitted to show our work outside the conservatory, and so there was no fiscal obstacle of having to secure standard literary rights. That year we were required to make three films. The first two were original, but for the third I wanted something to adapt, and someone recommended Andre Dubus. The first book I got my hands on was Collected Stories and it was like discovering a new country where all the relatives you’ve never met live. Two days later I’d camped on three of Andre’s stories— “Killings,” “Delivering,” and “The New Boy.” Of the three, “Killings” was the most powerful in terms of theme and breadth, but for those same reasons it was definitely not a 30-minute film. “Delivering” is the story I ended up adapting, and to this day is the film I’m most fond of in terms of execution and process. But “Killings” kept on nagging at me. In large part because Matt Fowler reminded me so much of my father, a man you would never imagine violating his own nature in such a way. When it came time to make a feature length film there was no question that it would be anything but “Killings.”

Bodwell: One of the major changes you made in adapting “Killings” into In The Bedroom was making Frank Fowler an only child, whereas in the story he had a brother. Can you talk about that decision?

Field: The stakes are absolute for the Fowlers, leaving them just each other, without any other immediate family, to mitigate their grief. This is something I witnessed first hand when, sadly, one of my dearest friends, an only child, was murdered at twenty-one.

Bodwell: Could you talk a bit more about why you feel that your film adaptation of “Delivering” was so artistically satisfying?

Field: “Delivering” is a wonderful character study that explores, over the course of a single day, some of the complicated dynamics of brotherhood. In this case an older, stronger brother trying to sort out how to protect his younger, not particularly athletic, sibling from something he knows will hurt him emotionally. But that same afternoon the older brother too becomes worried about the physical safety of their father. In the end he decides he must inflict physical pain on his younger brother to get his father’s attention, ultimately, at least in his mind, saving them both. The story is really perfect, and Andre, who would sometimes take years working on a story, told me that “Delivering” was really the only time he ever sat down and wrote something in a single sitting. That didn’t surprise me, because it does have a peculiar kind of momentum. We all experienced something similar making it. “Delivering” was photographed and edited very quickly in just four days.

Further Links and Resources

From “The Times Were Never So Bad” from Edward Delaney on Vimeo.

(click to enlarge, print, and solve)

No, no: PANK isn’t a word find. More than the terms hidden in the puzzle,* PANK is in many ways the puzzle itself: a journal that delivers meaning in ways you simply haven’t seen before.

But if we had to distill PANK into just one word, it would be:

Inspirational.

After all, the idea to kick this feature off with a “Word Find” came naturally after experiencing PANK’s Issue #4, 234 glossy pages that not only provided me with two stories that changed my idea of what fiction could be—what it could accomplish—but also redefined how narratives themselves could be executed. The first story had no title, as readers were asked to create one. Nor did the story have an author, as readers were expected to fill that in too. Byline onward, the entire story was formatted as a Mad Lib—8 pages of narrative that no two readers could possibly experience the same way, given that character names, verbs, and even the entire three-line conclusion were completely customizable.

I’m incredibly grateful to this story for much more than its creative formatting. The entire exercise is a reminder that every reader reacts to stories uniquely. Not your typical Mad Lib, Travis Hessman’s work is  less a fun break in Issue #4 than a lesson: by forcing readers to create the story, “(Title)” shakes up pre-conceived notions of how deep a author-reader collaboration can go.

This notion is further shaken about 90 pages later with Laura Lehew’s “Standardized Testing,” a story composed of 20 questions in the guise of an online test. Again, the collaboration between reader and writer is remolded into something unique and challenging. Equal parts mystifying and gratifying, the story’s meaning takes a new turn with every new question and every subsequent answer. Take for example, the second-to-last question:

19. Which of the following is least like the others?

o Poem    o Novel    o Painting    o Statue    o Flower

As you might expect, the stories in PANK epitomize their founders’ spirit of innovation, and it’s this spirit that has quickly helped build the journal a loyal community. The brainchild of M. Bartley Seigel, PANK began in 2006 as a home for all kinds of writing—and experimental writing, in particular. Eager for the kind of avant-garde work that might not find a home at other literary magazines, the journal quickly found an audience and evolved beyond its roots as an annual print magazine to include a monthly online magazine, robust blog, and book imprint.

Pank Issue 5

Over time, the journal has stuck to its experimental roots, often publishing what might be called “gritty realistic” writing. PANK’s writers have been recognized in all manner of ways, including making notable lists for the Wigleaf Top 50, the Millions Writers Award, and more. And that’s before Sherman Alexie contributes a story to Pank Issue #6.

Beyond the extraordinary production values of PANK’s annual issue, or their blog content (among the most fun and readable on the net), one of my favorite aspects of the magazine is how ferociously the editorial team repromotes their authors’ accomplishments. PANK rounds up previous authors’ most recent stories and awards and touts them in posts like this one.

Keeping track of all this could take an army of interns, but something tells me it’s a loving chore handled solely by co-editor Roxane Gay—whom you may recognize from frequent posts at HTMLGiant, or her prodigious blog, or perhaps her numerous Pushcart nominations.  Under her guidance, PANK has become a journal about paying it forward, the staff working their butts off to repromote authors who worked their butts off on stories for the journal.  From PANK’s nearly 5,000 devotees on Facebook, one quickly sees how such a commitment to community instantly builds one.

Roxane was kind enough to share answers to our “Journal of the Week” questions over email:

What is the role of PANK in today’s literary community, be it for readers or writers?

We strive to be the kind of magazine that respects both readers and writers.

How do you see PANK’s mission and tastes evolving in the next two years? Will the rise of digital publishing impact the composition of PANK?

We want to just get better at what we do and reach a broader audience. Our tastes always evolve because we’re fairly open-minded, but one thing remains constant—we are looking for writing that moves us in some way, whether that movement happens intellectually or emotionally. PANK already has a strong digital presence, but we’ll definitely try to venture into the world of apps for mobile devices. We’re waiting until we can do it right. We don’t want to have an app just because that’s the “cool” thing to do.

If you could put three items in a time capsule (or USB drive) to be opened in 1,000 years, that would provide a snapshot of PANK’s aesthetic today, what would they be?

A glass jar of dirt from Michigan’s upper peninsula; a wrinkled, stained wife-beater T-shirt; and a puzzle with 10,000 pieces that do not fit together.

What album is playing on the PANK stereo these days?

I’ve been rocking What Wandering Heart by This is Deer Country. My co-editor turned me onto them last year and I’ve been listening to them non-stop since.

This past June, PANK featured two issues—a regular issue and a special issue, London Calling, featuring work from UK writers and guest-edited by Kirsty Logan. They also just released a new Little Book, Ethel Rohan’s “Hard to Say,” which is available in print and electronic formats.

Check out the PANK website for more information on back issues, online issues, and more. Friends and followers ought to get involved too, as PANK keeps their social-networking sites constantly updated with blog posts, columns, and of course, those one-of-a-kind author-updates described above.

Going back to that word “inspirational” for a moment: even more than what authors accomplish in PANK, nothing may be more inspiring than seeing what they achieve post-PANK. It’s heartening to see Roxane and the editorial team champion their contributors instead of letting them get lost in the word find”that is literary America. From the quality of its stories to the strength of its community, if PANK wants to pride itself on the experimental, we might all want to look at it as the control for a new generation of journals to come.

*We think it’s more fun without a list of words, but here’s what you’re looking for: adventurous, an arts collective, a non-profit, digital, experimental, print, refreshing.

~

As a special bonus to readers of Fiction Writers Review, we’ll be giving away three free subscriptions to PANK! If you’d like to be eligible for this week’s drawing (and all future ones), please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us.

For those of you already in the FWR Twitter family, you know our presence there exists in part to inform followers of what’s happening here on the site, as well as to update the community on literary trends, worthwhile links, etc. We couldn’t be happier to see this role expand in a way that allows us to put journals we love in the hands of readers who will love them too.

(Editor’s note: “Stories We Love” made its debut as part of Fiction Writers Review’s Short Story Month celebration. But we love short stories year-round. So here’s another installment, courtesy of FWR contributor Tyler McMahon.)

As an undergraduate, I took my first fiction-writing workshop around 1997. It didn’t go well. My peers were entrenched in Mafia stories and Christian parables. I failed to find my voice. The instructor was accepted into law school for the following fall, and declared there was no future in writing. Near the semester’s end, she invited one of her fellow graduate students, Eric Rickstad, to visit. Eric read us a story called “The Quiet.” I was transfixed. His energetic, hard-eyed prose did everything I hoped to do with my own writing.

Weeks later, I sat typing a paper in the computer lab. A loud bang rose above the chatter of punched keys and humming hard drives. I looked up from my work and recognized Rickstad, delivering a series of open-hand slaps to the side of the printer.

After his smacking failed to fix the machine, Eric stormed out of the lab. A few minutes later, I went to retrieve my own homework. Suddenly, the printer began spewing out page after mismatched page of fiction with Rickstad’s name in the header. I recognized a few sentences from the reading. Others were unfamiliar. They kept coming. Within minutes, over a hundred pages of unpublished fiction lay before me.

I looked from side to side, spot-checked my still-developing moral compass, and grabbed the stories.

I nearly fell over on the way back to my filthy shared house, reading Rickstad’s sentences: Father’s Buick pings, cooling… Sal can’t take another cold morning… Once I did get home, I was able to piece together one complete text of a story called “Ballerina Ballerina.” It was a tense and visceral account of pot-growers and car-washers, rife with dust, dildos, and childhood demons.

I read that story many times over my remaining days at university. The stolen manuscript didn’t survive the furious cleanup of our house after graduation. But I’ve carried several of those sentences and images with me ever since. (An engine “pings, cooling” in nearly every story I’ve ever written.)

I sometimes wonder what might have become of me, had I not taken those pages and absconded like an addict in search of a fix. It continues to amaze me: the way that art can intervene via tiny coincidences—a mid-afternoon reading, a temperamental printer—and alter our lives.

(Rabid Transit published the story in 2005. It can also be read on Eric Rickstad’s website.)

In “Map of the City,” a story from her new collection Separate Kingdoms, Valerie Laken portrays the life of an American college student in perostroika-era Moscow. The story is brilliantly structured—the names of Moscow metro stations head the various sections, each of which captures a new moment in time and space and thereby mimics the experience of using the subway: you descend into one station and resurface at another.

Perestroika, after all, was a time of change and restructuring, and in the early-nineties Soviet Union you might go to sleep in one sort of nation and awake in an entirely different one. “We’re in the heart of the biggest country in the world with its eleven time zones and fifteen republics, its thirty thousand nuclear warheads,” the narrator thinks. “And for today at least, nobody knows who’s in charge.” Language, too, seems to be fleeting. For instance, when the narrator learns the Russian word for solstice, she repeats the word to herself but knows that in an hour it will have vanished.

“The country no longer exists, but the city remains,” one section begins. “A country is just an idea, its borders only visible in your mind and on maps.” The story suggests maps are just ideas, too, superimposing order, logic, and stasis on an ever-changing, dynamic place. In a city like Moscow, to say you live near a certain metro stop means everything to someone familiar with the place and nothing to someone who is not. And yet it’s the streets “covered in slush,” the crowds that “dwindle and swell,” the “clusters of women” and the tall-standing statues of poets and the soldiers who peek out of the hatches of the tanks that really are the place—the place Laken masterfully evokes.

The beginning of “Map of the City” is so gorgeously vivid that it almost feels like an ending, alight and crackling, its own midsummer night’s dream. The story begins on the feast of John the Baptist; ten o’clock at night and the sun has not yet set. According to the narrator’s books on Russian culture, which also serve as a kind of map, detailed yet sometimes ultimately uninformative: “[T]his is the night when everyone pours into the forest and stays out till dawn jumping over bonfires and searching for magical fern blossoms.” The characters, five Americans and six Russian students, visit the forest, but nobody else is there. The rest of the city pours out from the metro and moves not toward the woods but its large blocky apartment structures, highlighting the disconnect between visitors and those who move in a place’s real underbelly, a distinction that blurs, defines, and alters as the story progresses.

The students’ collective experience is its own mini cultural exchange. One of the Russian students says, “‘I read somewhere that in America you can tell what kind of person someone is by the type of car he drives.’” The absurdity makes all the characters laugh, but both the narrator and the reader see the truth in the statement. It is bizarre, we think. And so true. “There are lots of things I can’t tell them about my country,” the narrator notes.

She also reveals how when you think you understand a place, you discover another layer to it:

I once heard a rumor about a second, secret metro system that supposedly runs below this one, designed to evacuate the most important people in the event of—here Russians stop the story, because what they were about to say would be impolite—in the event that your country annihilates us with those weapons.

Such details show not only the city’s unknowability but also its sense of urgency. When the narrator’s friend Andrei tells her, in the middle of what turns out to be a coup, not to worry, she points out that the phrase literally translates as “Don’t uncalm yourself.” The beautiful confusion of this idiom—I repeated it to myself over and over—implies that her state of rest is calm and any deviation from such is unnecessary, trivial. Yet anyone who’s lived in or visited a foreign country knows that very little time is spent in such a state. Unless it involves gated resorts and drinks with tiny umbrella garnishes, often to travel is to uncalm yourself. You may experience tranquility and joy, but the sheer extra work your mind does to translate and transpose generally cannot be described as calm.

And the narrator doesn’t necessarily want calm. She wants to live. When her classmates are hesitant about going out during a time of unrest and protest, she forges ahead, believing she has nothing to lose. And she wants to live like a native.

But like many expatriates, desperately wanting to fit in often makes us stand out all the more. The longer we are abroad, the more we cling to other expatriates—not because they remind us of home but maybe because they, like us, are homeless, not a part of either culture but instead forming another one altogether, using the slang of the new land while eating the Frosted Flakes of the old. Laken’s narrator asserts to Jacob—an American expatriate who seems to know more about Moscow than anyone—how well she knows the geography of the city, challenging him to quiz her on any part of the metro.

But the metro, Jacob tells her, is “tourist stuff.” We wonder then if it’s not the metro that defines the city but the river; the metro creates separate little kingdoms that are difficult to conceptualize as one whole (much like the republics that emerged and redefined themselves after the fall of the Soviet Union, after all). Maybe the rumored secret subway runs along the river in its haphazard, evasive way, like the missing part of a culture or language or place you think you’d understand if only you could figure it out. The one you never got around to memorizing, or if you did you could only hold it your mind for so long, like the Russian word for solstice, never yours to begin with.

For the first time you understand why the word language so often comes from the word tongue. Of course it’s this base writhing thing you survive on, this thing that unfurls from your core, where you can’t see its origins. You can try to escape yourself, but you’re still here.

You’re still here! Laken’s awareness of the tension between transience and permanence creates the beauty and complexity of this story. And this tension also creates the wonder of uncalming yourself in a new place, the thrum and magic of bonfires and the forest and magical ferns, the possibilities inherent when you descend in one place, arise in another, and study a map to see if you can find yourself.

Thankfully we can read stories year round, but I still feel the urge (while they’re center stage) to list two recommendations this week. They both come from Narrative magazine, which does require (free) registration. But I promise, these stories are so good, it’s worth filling out a quick form to read them. And Narrative offers a huge, inspiring, and ever-growing archive of fiction from emerging writers to authors as well known as Margaret Atwood and T. C. Boyle; if I weren’t headed to a wedding this afternoon, I might curl up with this site all day.