In her recent interview with the author, contributor Melissa Sholes Young talks with Menendez about such things as crafting linked stories in a collection, how fiction is one of the best ways to “explore the dynamic between what is real and what lives only in imagination,” and how living away from a place allows us to write about it. When asked about this last point, Menendez replies:

I’ve never written about Miami while I was living there. The one book I wrote while in Miami is set in Istanbul – a city I still miss as well. All my characters, in one way or another, are divided and trapped by their loyalties. In Adios, one character says, “we’re always leaving.”

Menendez continues:

For me, leaving is the way we learn about identity and place. Travel far and long enough and you realize there is no such thing as a fixed “identity” – though this is often so difficult a realization that we cling to the outlines of who we thought we were.

• To read the rest of this interview, please click here.
• For more on Menendez’s work, please visit the author’s Website.
• You can also win one of three copies of this book, which we’ll be giving away next week to three of our Twitter followers.
• To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!

Orientation, his long-anticipated story collection recently out from Faber and Faber, shows off this unique set of nimble narrative chops, so it’s no surprise that pieces from the collection have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Writing, and The Pushcart Prize anthology. In addition, he’s been the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a finalist for a National Magazine Award in fiction. Via phone from his home in Moscow, Idaho, where he is on the fiction faculty at the University of Idaho, Daniel and I talked about craft, teaching, and MFA haters.

Interview

Michael Shilling: Among other writers, you’ve been one of these “best kept secrets” whose collection is deeply anticipated. How does it feel for Orientation to finally be out?

Daniel Orozco: It’s nice. [Laughs.] I never thought I’d get this collection published.

Considering that you’re a short story writer, and how little publishers want to publish short story collections, it’s quite an achievement. Was finding a publisher an arduous process?

For a long time, publishing people told [writers], “Hey, these stories are great, but do you have a novel? Because nobody wants a short story collection.” So yeah, I pretty much gave up on the idea that I’d get the collection published, and that was the reason I started a novel, out of a kind of career necessity. But then I finally found an agent who told me she could sell the collection, but we had to wait until, as she said, the stars lined up. And they did. So it’s just fantastic.

Your stories really run the structural gamut, and those structural choices create different emotional tones and narrative priorities. Taking “Officers Weep” as an example, how do you think those choices affected the way those stories ended up?

Every story that I write feels like a kind of experiment. The challenge in crafting a story is how to engage a reader emotionally, intellectually, experientially. I’m always looking for some kind of challenge, some kind of structural or narrative constraint to try and figure out. For “Officers Weep,” it was, Can I tell a story that is written in the form of a police blotter? And in a way the structure determines how the story’s gonna go. So yes, I begin with form and then fill in with character and engagement. Jerome Stern talks about the “shapes of fiction,” and I think that’s a good analogy, because I need a shape for the story and then I start figuring out what’s going to happen in it.

That approach is refreshing. I think a lot of writers are afraid of playing with structure because of self-consciousness, these false distinctions between the “realistic” and the “experimental,” and if they play around with structure it’ll be seen as a gimmick. As if a gimmick is always bad.

Right! I mean, the story “Orientation” is a gimmick. You can only do it once for a limited amount of pages, and the same goes for “Officers Weep” because I can’t do a series of stories structured as police blotters. But so what? All that matters is that a story, whatever the structure, must be grounded in the humane.

Agreed. Other stories in the collection also have specific structural choices. Like, in “Somoza’s Dream,” we jump around in time somewhat, but it still manages to have a pretty tense momentum. How did that story come together?

The first drafts of “Somoza’s Dream” were much more expansive. There were flashbacks to Somoza’s childhood, for example, so I was going to move back and forth in time more. But it read more as a biographical story, and I decided to abandon that thematic approach because I figured out that I was trying to make this man who wasn’t very interesting more interesting that he was. So once I gave up this autobiographical framing, I started populating the story with people around him. I knew that I wanted to begin with the assassination and then return to it, but that was pretty much the structural demand I made upon the story. Once I had that in place, other elements of the writing started coming together.

So why Somoza? Did you have a particular interest in the Nicaraguan revolution?

The story came from a couple of places. To start, it came out of an exercise at Bread Loaf, in a class taught by Reginald McKnight about telling lies convincingly, which I decided to do through historicality. I did a three-page scene about G. Gordon Liddy.

I have a Liddy story too!

Really? Yeah, he’s a fascinating character to take on. So I had him meeting Somoza, and then over the years the story shifted focus solely to Somoza. Also, my family is from Nicaragua, and I thought it would be interesting to engage with something from my political and cultural past, and really put the screws to this guy, really run him down because he really was a bad guy, and I had a lot of fun just “writing” him.

The agreed history is just one story, right?

Yeah. I mean, E.L. Doctorow says that history is a story, between the historian and his facts. So in writing a story based on historical figure, it’s interesting, the line between when you stick to the facts and render it with a certain verisimilitude and when you veer away.

Writers such as Jim Shepard have gone a long way in getting people to de-snobify about this false difference, or at least acknowledge the much more porous relationship between fiction and history.

Absolutely, and of course, nobody ever nails him for anything because he does his research, and [from a storytelling angle] his work is so imbued with the specificity and personal experience of the characters, who more often than not are on the periphery of historical events–which is a very smart approach.

Let’s talk about “Shakers,” which I thought was a really subtle use of the earthquake described in the story as a metaphor for “shakings,” be they personal or geological.

Yeah! [Laughs.] You know, an earthquake that huge would never happen, so it immediately becomes a metaphorical thing. It was a way of bringing all these individual and solitary lives together. So though you have these separate stories of individuals in solitude, you have them all gathered in one place, reacting to this one event, and touching on what we talked about before, that structural component was what drew me to whether I could write it or not.

Was the story ever longer? I ask because it reads like you had ten characters, and you closed your eyes and pointed at four and worked with them. Like there could have been six other people that you could have equally expanded upon and connected.

That’s great to hear that it reads like it could have gone on and on, because I’m not one of those writers who sits down and writes seventy pages and then gets it down to twenty. Me, I write two pages and get it up to twenty, and that’s how “Shakers” went, though I wrote it in five weeks, which is the fastest I’ve ever written a story.

That’s interesting, because it reads like it took a extraordinary effort of discipline to bring it down to the length it is—it could have been a novella.

I did want it to read that way, fluid in a sense, like it could have gone anywhere. I probably had one or two narrative lines that I cut out, but yes, there was something unusual about the writing of “Shakers,” organic and intuitive, different than any other story I’d written. It felt like a gift.

Which is nice, because they usually feel more like births. [Both laugh.] Another thing about the story I loved was that it felt, through this confluence of the personal and natural, like you were telling a geographic history of California, an accounting of the really different landscapes that make up California. It reminded me of that Pavement song off Crooked Rain, “Unfair,” which takes on this same confluence.

Cool! They must have read John McPhee.

Doubtless. And both the song and your story end up being celebrations of California.

Yeah, I mean one of the reasons I enjoyed writing “Shakers” so much was in rendering these landscapes. I’ve lived in Idaho for eight years and I miss California – its vastness – and so in the story I really wanted to revel in that vastness.

It reads like a love letter.

It is, very much so. And what better way to write a love letter to California than via an earthquake?

You couldn’t get much more integral to California than an earthquake. Even the ending, with the guy in the desert who’s probably going to die, [he] has this surge of love for the natural beauty around him as he wastes away with his broken leg. It’s weirdly funny, a demented commercial for the California tourist board, like, “California, right on!”

Yes! The ending is ironic but it’s also true. You know, I like combining the absurd and the profound, and I like that the story accomplishes that.

“Shakers” isn’t the only story that speaks to matters of place and geography. For example, “Only Connect,” which is so infused with the essence of Seattle, however abstract that sounds. Living here, I can tell you that you captured something on the page that encapsulates this temperate rain forest so well, and so mysteriously.

Yeah, and that story is the love letter to Washington.

Not surprising that it was published in Ecotone, considering the magazine’s focus on “place” in fiction, where setting is more the foundation of the story more than, say, character or humor or plot. “Only Connect” could only happen in Seattle and the surrounding areas it touches on, like Bellingham and Astoria.

It reminds me of what Flannery O’Connor said, which is that you can do whatever you want on the level of theme, but that the world of the story has to be real. You know, I tell my students that a story doesn’t work unless you ground it in a physical world that is concrete, that we can really imagine.

What are your thoughts on teaching?

You know, my goal on both the undergraduate and graduate level is not primarily to select the best writers and nurture them and bring them into the world. My goal is not to baptize the ones with the gift and tell the others, I’m sorry, my son, you must go to vocational school. That’s not the job. Ultimately teaching writing is the flip-side of teaching reading, by which I mean creating readers who are able to critically and thoughtfully respond to texts.  On the undergraduate level especially, I try to dispel that, number one, your opinion about a story matters. No. I don’t care if you like it or not–how does it work? This is about learning craft. Number two, students think, well, I can write whatever I want. No, you can’t. The short story is a very demanding, exacting form – once you understand what went into crafting that story, then you understand where your response comes from, and that makes you a smart reader.

That echoes what Robert Coover said, that his job as a writing teacher is to make better readers.

And if better writers are the result, that’s great too. Of course, that’s particular to the graduate level, where you’re aiming to find people capable of mastering the craft. On the graduate level, it can be very gratifying because the level of discussion and engagement is deeper.

More specifically, what about the arguments for and against MFAs?

I guess my rather benign defense of MFA programs in response to that question stems from my . . . um, irritation with writing programs being singled out as needing defending.  So: Can you really teach writing?  Well, it depends on whom you’re teaching it to.  You can’t teach writing to anybody, but you can—just as in the teaching of medicine or engineering—teach it to somebody who has the drive to learn it and the knack to get better at it.  The difference is that if you don’t show evidence of the drive and the knack, you get drummed out of medicine and engineering.  We in writing aren’t quick to do that, because writing isn’t just a thing you learn, it’s a thing you do.  It takes two or three years to get an MFA, and within that time the drive and the knack may be either fully present or they may be submerged, hidden, yet to surface.  I’m not going to shut somebody down just because they’re not at the top of their game.  (If somebody did that to me years ago, I wouldn’t be a writer, and you wouldn’t be interviewing me.)

I’m not saying that everybody who gets an MFA eventually becomes a writer; most don’t.  But laying the groundwork in craft and technique, mentoring everybody—rather than separating wheat from chaff—can certainly help the ones who stick with it.  To paraphrase the character Joe Gideon in Bob Fosse’s great allegory of writing programs, All That Jazz: I may not make you a good dancer, but I can make you a better dancer.

People like to have a strong opinion on MFAs in one direction or the other. With the haters, I often feel like, Really? People trying to become better humans in this tiny, unrenumerative way? That upsets you?

There are worse things to do than graduate someone with an MFA and send a bad writer out into the world. You know, you send out a bad engineer or a bad doctor and then you’ve got problems.

That’s why you don’t get an MFA in being a doctor. Really, MFA stands for Victimless Crime. [Both laugh.]

If I have a truly gifted undergrad, I will mention the MFA to them as something they might consider. But for other students who want to keep writing, I’m reminded of what a teacher told me, which is “Find your metaphor.” You know, find something else you’re good at to do while you write.

So you’ve got the collection out in the stores—unless you’re superstitious about talking about works in progress, would you mind talking about what you are working on now?

I won’t go into too much detail, but I am working on a novel, and am soon going out to UCross in Sheridan, Wyoming, where I’ll spend four weeks there focusing on it.

Sweet Sheridan. I was in a pretty epic snowstorm there once.

That’s why I’m going in August. [Laughs.] I’ve been working on it for about five years, then had to leave it for six months or so while we were getting the collection out, but now I’m full-bore on it, with due date looming. I started it grudgingly, out of necessity, but I have enjoyed figuring out the structure of the long form.

Jesus, novels are tough to write, huh?

They really are.

It’s like, musicians call it “running on blues power.” It’s just such an act of faith and love and inspiration, but you’re not sure if you’re actually running on, you know, quality [both laugh]. Considering that before this project you’ve always written short stories, has writing a novel made you appreciate them equally? Do you have a preference?

At this point I do prefer short stories to novels, both writing them and reading them. Not to take away from the novel, but like I said, the short story is a very precise, exacting form that’s also very artificial. I think the novel is more organic—it’s longer and baggier—and so for me it’s much harder to write a novel. I have had a hard time being engaged with it for five years, sustaining this interest, but I’m genuinely excited about this novel and eager to get back to work on it.

Further Links & Resources

Daniel Orozco / image from the University of Idaho's website

• Read J.T. Bushnell’s review of Orozco’s debut collection. In it, he writes: “Orientation is, without question and without hyperbole, one of the best books I’ve ever read. I can’t find words emphatic enough that aren’t already printed on its dust jacket, but I can assure you that all the words there are true.”
• You can also check out our most current features on other debut collections right here.
• Or check out some of our favorites from Story Month.
• For more on this author’s work, visit Professor Orozco’s University of Idaho page.
• Read some vintage Orozco: his story “I Run Every Day” published a decade ago in the fall 2001 issue of Zoetrope (Vol 5, No 3).
• I’ll take some Chemical Brothers and a side of zither with that, thanks: Largehearted Boy features Orozco’s sonic selections for his stories in their fabulous Book Notes series.
• And be sure to pick up a copy of Orientation: And Other Stories at your local indie bookstore.

In his review of Miracle Boy for Fiction Writers Review, contributor Shawn Andrew Mitchell describes the experience of Benedict leading a workshop as “Gordon Lish with a pair of revolvers blasting away as he straddles a rocket careening toward Mars.” Drawing parallels to Flannery O’Connor’s Christ-haunted South, Mitchell finds the Appalachia of Miracle Boy equally bracing:

As Elizabeth Strout says in her cover blurb: there’s “not a story here that is not the real thing.” … [Benedict] grew up in the mountains of southern West Virginia, and his fiction has always mined that region and the writing of those who have worked the Appalachian vein before him, such as Breece D’J Pancake. This latest collection continues in that tradition, filtering universal myth through the regional zone for profound results. The stories therein floor, move, shock, awe, amuse, and amaze. They contain revelation and redemption, hellfire and hail, strange happenings and mythological beasts. They’re Raymond Carver hopped up on Borges, Tobias Wolff strung out on Lovecraft, Chris Offutt drunk on Poe. There’s an apocalypse in every box.

• To read the rest of Andrew Shawn Mitchell’s review, please click here.
• For more about Pinckney Benedict, and the new collection, visit Press 53.
• Read Benedict’s short story “Bridge of Sighs” from Zoetrope: All Story, Vol. 11, No. 2.
• You can also win one of three signed copies of this book, which we’ll be giving away next week to three of our Twitter followers.

To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!

Benedict was an intense presence in workshop: enlightening, entertaining; at times heartfelt and encouraging, at others harsh in a way that could have seemed dismissive if the harshness didn’t seem to come from experience and a sincere wish to not see his own and others’ mistakes repeated. Imagine Gordon Lish with a pair of revolvers blasting away as he straddles a rocket careening toward Mars. This is why I was nervous when picking up his latest collection, Miracle Boy and Other Stories. What if I didn’t like it and that cheapened the advice, admonishment, and encouragement I’d received? What if I loved it and could never again dismiss his comments like the occasionally obnoxious man-child and frequently egotistical fiction writer that I am?

Photo courtesy the author

This thought process is the sort of thing that neurotic creative writing students are great at wasting their time on. I shouldn’t have worried. As Elizabeth Strout says in her cover blurb: there’s “not a story here that is not the real thing.” Benedict is the author of two previous collections of short stories (Town Smokes and Wrecking Yard) and a novel (Dogs of God). He grew up in the mountains of southern West Virginia, and his fiction has always mined that region and the writing of those who have worked the Appalachian vein before him, such as Breece D’J Pancake. This latest collection continues in that tradition, filtering universal myth through the regional zone for profound results. The stories therein floor, move, shock, awe, amuse, and amaze. They contain revelation and redemption, hellfire and hail, strange happenings and mythological beasts. They’re Raymond Carver hopped up on Borges, Tobias Wolff strung out on Lovecraft, Chris Offutt drunk on Poe. There’s an apocalypse in every box.

Part of what makes these stories land so hard is the heavy presence of religion and mythology. In her essay “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” from the oft-lauded Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor says the fiction writer needs to develop a sense of a higher order of things beyond the literal:

The kind of vision the fiction writer needs to have, or to develop, in order to increase the meaning of his story is called the anagogical vision, and that is the kind of vision that is able to see different levels of reality in one image or one situation. The medieval commentators on Scripture found three kinds of meaning in the literal level of the sacred text: one they called allegorical, in which one fact pointed to another; one they called tropological, or moral, which had to do with what should be done; and one they called anagogical, which had to do with the Divine life and our participation in it. […] I think it is this enlarged view of the human scene that the fiction writer has to cultivate if he is ever going to write stories that have a chance of becoming a permanent part of our literature.

This advice applies to all fiction, regardless of faith. Call the anagogical sense a feeling of divine order or call it “exploring what it means to be human,” but the truth is that our best stories typically operate on both literal and spiritual levels.

Benedict’s stories follow O’Connor’s maxim: they operate on two planes and in four dimensions. There’s no shortage of Jesus here; in fact, characters frequently find themselves looking up at his image mounted on a wall. As such, Benedict’s work has occasionally been viewed through a limited lens. It’s easy to label something Southern and Christian and safely ghettoize it. Say “The Faithful walk among us!” and the largely atheistic or agnostic academic world screams, “Run!”  During Short Story Month 2010 over at the Emerging Writers Network, there was some back and forth regarding the overt Christianity in Pinckney’s work. The sixteen-penny nails in the title story were interpreted by one commenter as being related in some mysterious way to Jesus on the cross. There might be some truth in this. Like O’Connor, Benedict runs his characters through the spiritual wringer, putting them through crises that test their mettle; they’re given a chance at redemption but they often flub it up.

Christianity isn’t the only thing at play here, though. These stories draw on mythologies from popular culture and other religions just as much, if not more so. They are mythological in a broad and globalized way: Jesus lives right next to mythological bulls, horrific mudmen, ancient and ever-running feral dogs, and pulp sci-fi robots. Things that might ordinarily be considered fodder for “genre” literature are treated reverently here. In “Zog 19: A Scientific Romance,” the story of an alien sent to Earth on an unknown mission becomes the story of a son’s grief over his father’s death. The anagogical sense, in this case, is more that of Humanism, of a willingness to portray a character’s plight honestly, even if that character is an alien masquerading as a man.

In some of these stories the anagogical sense is implicitly felt, while at other times it is explicitly stated. In “Mudman,” for example, there is a bull locked up in the barn and ramming the walls. Something, some gadfly or another, is irritating it, like the truth nagging at the corners of the main character’s consciousness. The bull seems related to a sense of restrained and troubled masculinity, and in its majestic stature it brings to mind Zeus, who often took the form of a bull when he visited humans (read: “when he came to Earth to violate women”). In a story like “The Angels Trumpet,” however, this connection to the mythological and historical sense of things is made explicit. We are given long passages explaining domesticated cattle’s long fall from grace, from uris to aurochs to penned-up milk cows. Domestication and its fallout are recurring themes here: no matter how much we repress, suppress, and tame, the mystical and primal reemerge in catastrophic ways.

Flight of Europa

With names like “Lizard” and “Miracle Boy” and “Vandal Boucher,” Benedict’s characters sound like something out of O’Connor’s stories, too. “The Misfit,” anyone?  “Manley Pointer?” But while O’Connor can sometimes feel dismissive and judgmental of her lowly, not-Catholic-enough characters, Benedict never falls into this trap. All the characters here, no matter how “educated,” are as smart as we, the readers and writers, are. They are lost and searching, driven by subterranean motives. Everyone―men, women, children, and animals―has a job or a role; everyone has dreams and nightmares. Take, for example, Snedgar’s reflections in “Mudman”:

The mudman wasn’t moving because it had nothing to do. Snegdar knew that, without the constant nagging of the work, without the terror that something had been left undone, he himself would lie down and never arise again.

Benedict has allowed Snedgar the dignity of the intellect and imagination necessary to understand his lot in life. He might be largely doomed and in denial about his wife’s actions, but he is not a dummy set up to be viewed from a safe distance as he learns his lesson.

If this is all starting to sound a little depressing, you should know that the collection is not all death and doom and despair. Benedict has previously discussed the place of apocalypse in fiction in “Vignette VS Story: The Apocalyptic Arc” over at Red Room.  He defined it as:

…a revelation (the literal meaning of the word apocalypse; a “lifting of the veil”), and a very specific type of revelation: the destruction of an old order, followed by a time (however brief, even a moment, a flicker) of disorder and chaos, and the replacement of the old order by a new and entirely different order (though that new order may in its external details greatly resemble the old).

His definition leaves room for the subjectively “positive” and “negative.” A revelation isn’t always destructively devastating. Sometimes it can be constructively devastating. Likewise, this collection can sometimes be playful and even, well, happy. The title story itself follows a morally redemptive path and at the end, the world seems a little more correct.

Defining the apocalypse in its original sense as a “revelation” gives the reader another clue as to how to understand how Benedict’s fictions function as well. Again and again the narratives move in dreamlike, circular patterns as they careen toward mind-altering visions, such as when Pig Helmet goes to see the Wall of Life in the aptly titled “Pig Helmet & the Wall of Life,” a story which blurs back and forth between back story and present before wrapping up with a Borgesian vision of infinity:

What lies before Pig Helmet’s eyes is likewise a door, a hard entrance, a long narrow tunnel of infinite length. Pig Helmet thrusts his killing hand, his unbaptized hand, out toward the girl. She is far away and getting farther, but she extends her hand toward him as well, and her lips shape his true name. If Pig Helmet is strong enough, if he strains far enough, if the motorcycles spin fast enough, and if he keeps stretching out his unclean hand forever, he will reach her.

One of the things Benedict advocates for in workshop is that we as writers develop “Shamanisma,” the mysterious X factor that gives a writer the power to grab a reader’s attention and not let go, to convince them of the untrue and to move them thoroughly while doing so. This is not entirely unrelated to O’Connor’s “anagogical sense,” either, in that it requires the writer to believe in his fiction fully, to see it on all levels. It’s impossible to be objective when approaching the work of your teacher, but Pinckney Benedict has Shamanisma. Aside from the fully developed world and characters in each story, the prose here is so well crafted that it’s hard to slow down and question the reality of the story. As Updike said of Nabokov, Benedict “writes prose the only way it should be written: ecstatically.” Benedict’s ecstatic playfulness is palpable in his work. He guides us through “surreal” story after “realistic” story after “genre” story, always pushing toward that satisfyingly inevitable apocalypse.

A visual representation of Shamanisma?

Further Links and Resources

Enright considers, rejects, and modifies many possibilities. She draws on that old master of the form, Frank O’Connor: the story is dictated by its needs alone; the story is always about human loneliness; the story thrives among “submerged population groups.” She quotes Sean Ó Faoláin’s demand that a story be untidy and carry personality, punch, and poetry. She cites John Kenny’s suggestion that the story thrives most where cultures are in touch with oral storytelling. Then she trots out her own thoughts that The Short Story is driven by an anxiety about The Novel, and The Irish Short Story by an anxiety about The British Novel. After parading out all these possible answers to an impossible question, Enright abandons the quest and moves on to her own admittedly idiosyncratic reasons for choosing the stories.

What remains after all the debate is the undeniable fact that the Irish short story is masterful, moving, and expertly made, constantly drawing on a tradition that goes back to Joyce’s Dubliners and beyond. The stories here are are able to be obtuse and lyric to a fault but still completely compelling, uncouthly direct and blunt but still beautifully rendered. They can all be read once to enjoy the quality of storytelling and language, twice to admire their shape and craft, and thrice to pick out the strands of early Irish folklore and mythology that surface again and again. Roddy Doyle delivers a potent horror story in “The Pram.” Edna O’Brien and Colm Tóibín investigate the fallout when love and lust and nuns and priests intermingle. Frank O’Connor’s “The Mad Lomasneys” delivers lingering blow after lingering blow. Men cheat on women and women cheat on men. The stories span the twentieth century and weave back and forth in time and all work together to deliver a solid sampling of the last century’s Irish literature. This collection might not offer a definitive idea of what makes the Irish short story great, but it’s a good place to fall in love with it.

• Find a copy of The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story at an indie bookstore near you

Danticat, Credit Jill Krementz

Edwidge Danticat is a writer well known for her stirring and insightful stories about Haitian life. Her novels, including Breath, Eyes, Memory; The Farming of Bones; and The Dew Breaker, are praised as much for their cultural specificity as for their poetic universality. Critics call her Haiti’s literary voice, and Granta named her one of the Best Young American Novelists in 1996. She received a 2009 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, so one might even say that some have even called Danticat a genius. But no one would have pegged her for a noir writer until now.

Though not commonly associated with genre fiction, Danticat was a natural choice to edit Haiti Noir, the most recent volume in Akashic Books’ groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. The author speaks widely and often about Haiti, not only of the issues facing her countrymen abroad and at home, but also of her fellow Haitian writers. She includes many of these emerging and established authors in Haiti Noir. Moreover, it’s hard not to think of Danticat as a noir writer after reading her story “Claire of the Sea Light,” which is included in the anthology. Classic elements of noir—mystery, misfortune, even a graveyard—emerge masterfully from her powerful prose. “Claire of the Sea Light” is a remarkable story in a collection with many other extraordinarily nuanced tales.

Danticat was nearly done with editing the collection when, on January 12, 2010, Haiti suffered a devastating earthquake, an unimaginably destructive natural disaster that was followed by widespread suffering, flooding, and a cholera epidemic. At first, the editor worried that the stories would no longer seem relevant, but after adding three pieces about the earthquake, she found that Haiti Noir actually offered a unique portrait of the country before and after the disaster, snapshots of moments and places not often seen on the nightly news. What is more, the collection truly entertains; it is dark, surprising, and even funny. In the book’s introduction, Danticat confesses:

I can honestly say that, in spite of the difficult circumstances in Haiti right now, I have never felt a greater sense of joy working on any collective project than I have on this book . . . Each story is of course its own single treasure, but together they create a nuanced and complex view of Haiti and its neighborhoods and people.

The editor’s joy will certainly be shared by her collection’s readers.

In addition to being an acclaimed novelist and the editor of Haiti Noir, Edwidge Danticat is a prolific writer of short stories, published in more than twenty-five magazines and journals and collected in the National Book Award-nominated Krik? Krak!. She received the American Book Award for her novel The Farming of Bones, and her many other awards include a grant from the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund. Her moving memoir Brother, I’m Dying received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has also written several books for children, including Eight Days: A Story of Haiti, which tells the story of a seven year-old boy trapped in rubble after the 2010 earthquake. Her recent essay collection, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, is an extraordinary manifesto that will be appreciated by both immigrant and non-immigrant artists. Beyond her prolific work as a writer, Danticat has taught creative writing at both New York University and the University of Miami. She lives in Florida with her husband and children.

The following interview was conducted by email during May 2011.

Interview

Carolyn Gan: How did you come to edit Haiti Noir?

Edwidge Danticat: Johnny Temple from Akashic Books called me one day and asked me if I would edit Haiti Noir for the publisher’s noir series. I was already a huge fan of the series, having read many of the books, so I jumped at the chance and said yes.

Haiti Noir features new stories by well-known, emerging, and even a couple of unexpected writers, including Mark Kurlansky. How were the stories collected? Were there authors or particular perspectives you sought out, or did the submissions shape the collection?

I’d like to think of the book as a kind of party. Most of the writers are Haitian and live in Haiti, but others are Haitian writers who live outside of Haiti, in Canada, Berlin, and the United States. We decided to also include two Haitiphile writers, Madison Smart Bell and Mark Kurlansky, who know Haiti well and have written about it extensively. The writers in the book range [in age] from early twenties to early seventies. There is a broad scope of experience represented. I did seek out some writers whose work I already know, and some other writers came to me via friends, particularly the younger writers. Marvin Victor, for example, was recommended by an older writer who had been his teacher. Now he has a hugely successful novel, Corps Mélés, that was published by a prestigious house in France. We got him just in time before he was huge, and he is going to be really huge among the next wave of Haitian writers.

You say in the collection’s introduction that only a few of the included authors identify themselves as writers of noir. Your own work is not typically classified as such. Are you a reader of noir?

I am a reader of noir…not an obsessed one, but if I see a name I recognize, I go at it. The beauty of this series is that it brings new writers to noir, so it’s always fun to see what they come up with. I think people have said that my work is dark, which would be the literal definition of noir, but they might not call it noir. It was interesting to see, though, how much the writers wanted to jump in and try this. It was like having an assignment, coloring outside of the lines, for them.

Themes and images repeat throughout the collection. Unreliable electric generators, for example, buzz in the background and even appear as a plot point in Kelly Mars’s story. Magic winds its way through many stories as well, especially Marie Lily Cerat’s fantastic “Maloulou.” Are there aspects of Haitian culture that are inherently noir? Or that can be understood more clearly through the lens of the genre?

I guess there are aspects of Haitian culture that you might call noir or that lend themselves easily to the genre. The police investigations that are always ongoing and may never really be solved. The mystical elements of Haitian life, class difficulties, and conflicts. The writers, I think, made great use of those elements and more. In one of our earlier reviews, someone listed all the similar tropes, including Comme Il Faut cigarettes. It was interesting to see where many of the stories overlapped.

In Josaphat-Robert Large’s hair-raising story “Rosanna,” a particularly philosophical neighbor says that “[i]t’s almost impossible to discover what’s behind a mystery in [Haiti].” Do you agree?

Unfortunately that’s often true, especially in terms of solving crimes.

In April 2000, one of Haiti’s most famous radio journalists, Jean Dominique, was assassinated outside his radio station. At the time he was a friend of the president’s, yet his murder still remains unsolved. I guess one other way to say it is that it is very easy to bury a mystery under even more mystery in Haiti.

You include your mesmerizing story “Claire of the Sea Light” in the book. Was it written especially for the collection?

Thank you. It’s part of a longer book I am writing about how a child’s disappearance affects an entire small town in earth-shattering ways—earth-shattering in the sense that as the people of the town remember their last interaction with the child, they realize that they are all connected in more ways than they knew. It’s one of those tricky books, and it has a different ending than the story, but that story is the first chapter of that book.

“Claire of the Sea Light” is structured in reverse chronological order, which adds so much suspense. What inspired that choice?

I love playing with time in fiction. That’s somewhat noir inspired. Noir film inspired. I wanted to go back and forth in time but focus on one day, this girl’s birthday. Because her birthday started out so tragic—her mother dies in childbirth—she is never allowed to be happy. The entire plot of the book also happens in one day, in one night, really.

Do you always write fiction in English? How have your first two languages, Creole and French, affected your writing?

I moved to the United States when I was twelve. I speak French and Creole and write both, but I have always written creatively in English. It’s not even a commercial choice as people sometimes think. It’s just that when I got here and started writing, I started writing in English. If my family had moved to Spain around the same time, I would probably be writing in Spanish as one Haitian writer, Micheline Dusseck, does. Maybe English also offers a veil, some kind of distance that makes me bolder, but that’s just the way it’s always been. Always behind my English, though, are Creole and French certainly. I sometimes think I am doing simultaneous interpretation while writing: the characters are speaking Creole, and I am interpreting for them.

I’ve always admired that you never hinder the flow of your narrative with awkward translations. Somehow your translations enhance the rhythm. When do you know that a line in Creole or French is necessary?

When I use Creole and French it is easy, I think, to understand contextually. If you read carefully you should get what it means. However, I try not to do literal translations because I know a lot of people are reading the book who speak both languages, so I try to add a bit of extra nuance for them.

There is a heartbreaking moment in “Claire of the Sea Light” when the little girl sees a child’s tombstone near her mother’s and ponders “who the child was that her mother was now looking after in death.” It reminded me of Anne in your novel The Dew Breaker, who holds her breath when passing cemeteries because she imagines her drowned brother searching for his grave. Can you talk a bit about that intimate relationship between the living and the dead in your work?

It’s a morbid fascination for me, this fine line between the living and the dead. When I was little, my uncle was a minister and presided over a lot of funerals, so I often heard that death is not the end, and that there is something else, and that the dead are always with us. I believed this deeply and grew less afraid of the dead and less afraid of death. I was just telling a friend the other day—who is obsessed with past lives’ experiences—that my childhood made me totally unafraid of death because of all the post-death possibilities it provided. I only became afraid of death again, I think, when I had children. My only fear is of leaving them. Writing a story like “Claire of the Sea Light” is almost like getting those fears out of yourself, placing in someone else’s life a moment that personally terrifies you and then taking it out of your nightmares and putting it on the page.

You mention the idea of “leaving them”—that is, death as separation from your children. Of the father in “Claire of the Sea Light,” you write: “It took watching another child die in her mother’s arms to make him realize how very much he’d miss Claire when he finally gave her away for good.” Is separation just another kind of death?

Separation when you’re a little kid, I think, can feel like death, which is also something you are struggling to understand. In Haiti when people say someone is lòt bò dlo, they can mean that the person has died or that he or she has migrated, has gone to live in another country. After my first book was published, I met a woman who was five when her mother left Haiti for New York. She was asleep when her mother left, and no one had prepared her, so when she woke up and was told her that her mother was lòt bò dlo, she thought her mother had died. She was twelve when her mother sent for her. When she got to New York, her mother had changed, and she had changed, and she told me at nineteen years old that she never quite believed that her mother was really her mother. In her mind, her mother is dead, and she was tricked into an adoption of some kind. This is an extreme case, but it feeds my nightmares about parental separations when they are badly handled. Some families can be severed by that kind of separation forever, even when they are physically reunited.

In your recent essay collection Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist At Work, you wrote that “All artists, writers among them, have several stories—one might call them creation myths—that haunt and obsess them. [The historic public execution of revolutionaries Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin] is one of mine.” What are some of your other creation myths?

There are some new ones now, which I talk about in Brother, I’m Dying. My father’s death. That was and still is so painful. My uncle’s death, the death of my minister uncle who raised me. The birth of my daughters. Slowly I think your foundation myths change as your foundations shift under your feet.

You also write in Create Dangerously that “I used to fear [my parents and uncle] reading my books, worried about disappointing them.” When did you stop worrying about disappointing them? Did that worry extend to your larger Haitian audience?

Thankfully I worry after the writing is done, and the book is about to be published. While I am writing I give myself free rein. Yes, I used to worry about a larger Haitian or Haitian-American audience that they would recognize nothing of themselves in my work. But then I know, too, that we all have the stories we have, and those are the stories we tell by various means. It’s foolish to try to accommodate your story to any audience’s taste. The most important thing I can do as a writer is tell the truest story I know with the most love and passion and respect I possess. The rest will just have to take care of itself.

You’ve spoken and written widely about the situation in Haiti since the January 12th, 2010, earthquake, including conversations with NPR and articles for the New Yorker. Do your Haitian readers approach you to share their own stories?

They often do, but not forcefully. When I am in Haiti, I just observe. I don’t badger people for their stories. They go though enough of that. I just observe and live the moment I am living because, especially with family members, there are so few of them.

Could you talk a bit about your last visit to Haiti?

It was a private visit. Most of my visits are. There was still a lot of devastation. A lot of people without homes as another hurricane season is approaching. The visit before that I went with a group of women activists from an organization called We Advance that was co-founded by the actress Maria Bello. We visited one of the first women’s clinics in Cité Soleil, where they do rape recovery and counseling. Rape has become a very big problem in post-earthquake Haiti. We also met and broke bread with and sang and cried with some extraordinary women who had run for parliament at great risk to their lives. These women were just exceptional, some of the most amazing women I have ever met in my entire life.

Part of the profits from Haiti Noir will be donated to the Lambi Fund, a non-profit organization. Could you talk a bit about their work and why you selected Lambi?

The Lambi Fund works in the rural sector in Haiti, and they work with women, which was very appealing given as we often say that Haitian women are the poto mitan, the middle pillars of our society.

Haiti Noir was almost complete before the earthquake struck in January 2010. How did you select the three stories in the collection that reference the earthquake?

I thought we had to represent the earthquake somehow in the book so I asked a few folks if they had written some stories since the earthquake, and we got the three wonderful stories in the book. I think it’s really hard to write fiction so soon after a tragedy, but our writers did an amazing job, and I am really glad we made that choice.

Was the completion of the project part of your own healing process after the tragedy?

Those stories, as disturbing as they are, were indeed healing. I think a year, ten years from now, this is a book that you will be able to read and appreciate in terms of how it’s represented Haitian fiction in general and the post-earthquake moment in which the book was published.

Thank you so much for your work and for your time.

Further Links & Resources:

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

In her recent review of Binocular Vision, Andrea Nolan writes:

All stories in a 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. Through the rearranging of stories, putting “Vaquita” as the last story from Pearlman’s first book, and then “Allog,” as the first story from Love Amongst The Greats, so that we read the stories one after the other, we see that the soprano mentioned in “Vaquita” is living in the apartment building in Jerusalem in “Allog,” and thus a binding thread is highlighted… Too often we ignore or belittle these proximal relationships, we think nothing off 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.

To read the rest of Nolan’s review of Binocular Vision, click here. In it, Nolan explores how thematic resonance in Pearlman’s stories has built over time, and the way the careful arrangement of the individual pieces in Binocular Vision shifts the reader’s perspective like a series of refracting lenses.

You can also win one of three, signed copies of the book, which we’ll be giving away next week to fans of our Facebook page. To be eligible for this week’s drawing (and all future ones), please visit our Facebook Page and “like” us.

To everyone who’s already a fan, thanks again! Our Facebook page exists, in part, to feature the work of great new writers and what’s happening in the literary world. But our primary goal for everything we do is to put books we love in the hands of readers. Literally, in this case.

So please help us spread the word!

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.

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Edith Pearlman © Jonathan Sachs

Somewhere east of Memphis, where the steep bluffs of the Mississippi River drop down into the Tennessee Bottomland, I heard Wolff reading an excerpt from the story: “I came to on the grass with the dog barking, ‘Wake up!’ he seemed to say. ‘Do you know your name? My name is Duke! My name is Duke!’” A talking dog, I thought, and knew I was in for a special story.

Memphis, Tennessee. Image Credit: Flickr - Chris Wieland

I didn’t realize how special until fiction editor Deborah Treisman introduced the podcast, explaining that Vaughn published four stories in the New Yorker during the late 1970s and ’80s, but nothing at all since Sweet Talk. Wolff, who in 1994 selected “Dog Heaven” for The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, says he isn’t sure why she hasn’t published, but that she has been working on a novel, part of which he’s read. He says, “What I read was absolutely wonderful, beautiful. I think she’s just an absolutely extraordinary writer with her own tone and her own subject.”

“Dog Heaven” opens with one of the more compelling leads I’ve read:

Every so often that dead dog dreams me up again.

It’s twenty-five years later. I’m walking along 42nd Street in Manhattan, the sounds of the city crashing beside me—horns, gearshifts, insults—somebody’s chewing gum holding my foot to the pavement, when that dog wakes from his long sleep and imagines me.

I’m sweet again. I’m sweet-breathed and flat-limbed. Our family is stationed at Fort Niagara, and the dog swims his red heavy fur into the black Niagara River.

The narrator, Gemma, tells the story of the last three months her family lived on the Army post where her father was in command of the Nike Missile Systems, the “missiles that would rise from the earth like a wind and knock out (knock out!) the Soviet planes flying over the North Pole with their nuclear bombs.” Ostensibly, the story of these three months is about Gemma’s best friend, Sparky Smith, who somehow convinces her to run as his vice-presidential candidate during his campaign to become a homeroom president at Lewiston-Porter Central School.

Image Credit: Flickr - shellac

The elections are just one of Gemma and Sparky’s many attempts to fit in at the civilian middle school. Other attempts include wearing “mittens instead of gloves, because everyone else did,” sporting “ugly knit caps—caps that in their previous schools would have identified [them] as weird but were part of the winter uniform in upstate New York,” and practicing not only how to ice-skate, but also how to coolly respond on the off-chance a civilian child invites them to a skating party: “Oh yeah [I skate]. I mean, like, I do it some—I’m not a racer or anything.”

Running along the outer edges of the story are the wild adventures of Duke, the family dog, who weaves himself into “the history of [Gemma’s] family, all the stories [they] would tell about him after he was dead.” Duke is the dog who swims the Niagara River, but “knows where the backwater ends and the current begins.” He’s the dog who caught a live carp with his mouth and brought it back to the house, the dog who “stole a pound of butter off the commissary loading dock and brought it to us in his soft bird dog’s mouth without a tooth mark on the package.” Best of all, Duke is the dog who escaped Charlie Battery, where he would be kenneled with the mess sergeant for six weeks before rejoining the family after their move to Oklahoma, and “traveled fourteen miles across […] frozen pastures, through the prickly frozen mud of orchards, across backyard fences in small towns, and found the lost family.”

Only after finishing the story do you recognize the skill, and the storywriter’s sleight-of-hand. Vaughn promises upfront with the title “Dog Heaven” and a flash-forward near the middle that the poor dog won’t survive the story. As a reader, you become so enamored with Duke and the dread you feel in anticipation of his death that you miss what the writer places right in front of you: Gemma’s best friend is named Sparky. In fact, in the story’s opening paragraphs, a civilian kid even teases the boy, “Sparky is a dog’s name,” and Sparky drops to his “hands and knees and [bites] the football player in the calf.”

Image Credit: Flickr - k9mq

This isn’t mere trickery on Vaughn’s part. It’s a master writer in control of her craft.
Four months after leaving Fort Niagara, Gemma’s old homeroom teacher, Miss Bintz, sends her a newspaper clipping titled, “Boy Drowns in Swift Current.” Sparky had joined two civilian boys—“both student-council members as well as football players, just the kind of boys Sparky himself wants to be”—for a swim in the Niagara River. The same place in the river’s current that reaches out “like a whip” for the too-smart Duke on page one, manages by story’s end to “[whip] out with a looping arm” and pull Sparky to his death.

What I’ve written here only scratches the surface of the strength and wonder of “Dog Heaven.” I’ve left out the complicated family dynamics, the details of growing up on a military base, and the way the author nests the story beneath the shadow of the Cold War. I’ve left out the way the story’s imagery revolves around the threat of violence and the aggressive differences between the world of adults and children—“Miss Bintz had all the answers and all the questions and she was pointing them at us like guns.” I’ve even left out the way the writer bends verb tense and time to pull the story off.

All of this is to say that it’s surprising that Sweet Talk was Stephanie Vaughn’s first and last published book. Tobias Wolff seems equally dismayed in the podcast commentary that follows the story. With a coded reference to Frank O’Connor’s The Lonely Voice, he implies that in having “her own subject” she should have more stories in her:

I haven’t encountered anywhere else this very submerged world of the children of soldiers… These frequent moves, these attempts to find community when they know they’re only going to be at a place for a little while and the strange types of bonds that hold them together… She brings to life a world I knew nothing about, but I lived next to it [during his time in the US Army]… We’re always living next door to worlds that we don’t suspect, and the best fiction suddenly illuminates that thing that’s been beside us all along and makes us see it for the first time and makes us enter another world.

As soon as I reached my parents’ home in Tarboro, I ordered a copy of the out-of-print Sweet Talk. Reading the collection felt a bit like unearthing a time capsule from the 1980s. Instead of finding neon leggings, synthesizer-laden cassette tapes, and photographs of Mikhail Gorbachev, I found myself picking through the techniques of minimalism—straightforward prose, stripped narrative, pedestrian details that gradually became lyrical and metaphorical. In many ways, it was like discovering a long lost contemporary of Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Mary Robison, and Ann Beattie. That said, however, there’s a heart and generosity to Vaughn’s writing that stands in opposition to minimalism.

Wolff touches on this during the podcast, when asked by Deborah Treisman if Vaughn was influenced by Raymond Carver. He says it’s unlikely because when she began publishing he only had one book out, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? This book was written in a “bare-bones, stripped-down style, and it gained its velocity by paring away the kind of things that Stephanie Vaughn really luxuriates in: full-throated descriptions, a sense of the history of the characters, [and] a leisurely procession through the narrative.” Treisman adds that she finds Vaughn’s writing to be similar to Lorrie Moore, the combination of “comedy and irony with terribly sad moments.”

This comparison strikes me as apt, especially in the five (potentially six) stories narrated by Gemma. The details of her life and even her narrative voice are fluid in these interconnected stories, which revolve around the impression her military father made on her family. The majority of the stories are narrated retrospectively by a version of Gemma, who is sometimes a freshman composition teacher at a large university, other times is a high school teacher in Chicago or California, and still other times lives in New York City. Just like the fluid details of her adult life, her retrospective narration shifts at will to present tense in the same way that first person occasionally gives way to third. Gemma can even gain or shed a brother depending on the needs of a particular story.

Image Credit: Flickr - Vince Alongi

The version of Gemma in “Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog,” has accepted a high school teaching position in Chicago and from that distance tells the story of her family’s last year at Fort Niagara—the year her father’s military career ends because he calls a general a “son-of-a-bitch” and in a drunken stupor attempts to walk across the frozen Niagara River to Canada. “Kid MacArthur”—Gemma’s brother— recounts the way Vietnam ruined a family and a generation. Gemma says, “Today, when I contemplate my wasted youth and corrupted womanhood, I recall that when I left high school I went to college. When MacArthur left high school, he went to war.” While Gemma spends her days walking in protest marches, her brother becomes the broken veteran whose comrades send him human ears through the mail. In “My Mother Breathing Light,” Gemma, the only child, returns home from California to care for her dying mother and comes to understand the way her precise and demanding father circumscribed her mother’s life.

This realization becomes the lynchpin of the story cycle. The father, who at the collection’s beginning is responsible for the defense of the United States and by the end is diminished by his own limitations to an owner of a chain of hardware stores in Ohio, dominates and shapes the lives of every member of his family. In some ways, his influence is terrible—sending his son to war, flirting with suicide in front of his daughter, and physically and verbally abusing his wife and mother-in-law in drunken fits. In other ways, for Gemma at least, the man whose voice “hung over us like high vaulted ceilings” provides the means for a kind of freedom. Through his mealtime lectures “on the mechanics of life, the how-tos of a civilized world,” as well as his impromptu lessons on river-barge captains, Arctic explorers, tomato planting, shotgun-shell loading, and the Defenestrations of Prague, he arouses a keen interest in history in his daughter. This absorption with history is ironic because history is the one thing a military family struggles to establish; their nomadic lifestyle prevents permanence. Yet it’s an interest that sparks Gemma’s curiosity and sends her out into the world in the hope of finding a place to root her existence.

Image Credit: Flickr - misternaxal

Nowhere is that longing more apparent than in the title story, “Sweet Talk.” Let me preface this by saying it’s a bit of a risk associating this story with the other five that belong to Gemma. The narrator of the story is unnamed and the details of her life differ in significant ways from the other variations of Gemma. That said, given the squirrely nature of the story cycle, a throwaway comment about cigarettes leading to heart attacks, and the narrator’s investment in the minutiae of history, I’m willing to take the gamble.

“Sweet Talk” features a married academic couple with “six university degrees between them,” traveling from California to Virginia to take a job at an “unaccredited community college.” Along the way, the couple faces accusations of infidelity—real and imagined, the theft of their belongings (“the trash of [their] life”), and the prospect of divorce. To cope, the narrator busies herself quizzing her husband on slave-owning presidents, reading from the dictionary, picking obscure facts out of guidebooks, reveling in the ghoulish history of the Donner Pass, and watching a sports documentary on Ohio State football. It isn’t difficult to transpose the image of Gemma’s father onto the narrator’s character, the man who before dying of a heart attack “sat in a green chair and smoked cigarettes, drank scotch, read books… all about Eskimos and Arctic explorations.”

What’s magical about this story is that by the end, the couple crosses into Virginia, where “green exit signs [begin] to appear announcing the past and the future: Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown, Yorktown, Patrick Henry Airport.” In what feels like a ludicrous moment given the trajectory of the story, the couple heads to the beach and on impulse—“we haven’t done anything with our bodies since California”—race each other on foot to the ocean. It’s in this moment, surrounded by the past, the present, and the future and running toward the edge of what was once the New World, that there appears to be some hope for Gemma to establish a permanent history of her own.

The remaining four stories in the collection are no less accomplished, but they’re smaller in scope and perhaps ambition. For this reason, they don’t shine as brightly. That’s not to say they’re not well-crafted or worth reading. On the contrary, the smaller stories make it possible to see the writer’s technique at work.

Image credit: Flickr - Skiwalker79

In “We’re On TV in the Universe,” a narrator on her way to a party— with a caged chicken as a gift—imagines that the universe is a pair of lungs “breathing in and out” moments before she crashes into a deputy’s patrol car. The story returns again and again to images of space: her car loses “touch with the planet” and glides through “that galaxy of flashing lights, on its way through Andromeda, Sirius, and the Crab Nebula”; she spends the night at “Koch’s Universe Motel, which had a giant neon sign depicting stars and spaceships”; and, after seeing television coverage of her wreck, she imagines her image “bouncing off satellites and caroming over the planet… passing through the orbit of Mars, then Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.” It’s through the repetition of cosmic imagery that the story develops plot. The theory of the universe offered at the story’s beginning hints at the character’s central yearning. In circling back to it, the imagery gains metaphorical significance and ultimately builds up to reveal what’s at stake for the narrator: “When I set out in bad weather I had a feeling. Something was going to change for me that night, something that was going to relocate me in the universe.” For Vaughn, the movement of hint, circle, and reveal becomes a plotting technique that she relies on in her stories about domestic life and adultery: “Other Women,” “The Architecture of California,” and “Snow Angel.”

Image Credit: Flickr - dalechumbley

I had planned to end this review by contacting Stephanie Vaughn for a brief interview about Sweet Talk. I thought I might ask her what happened and if she was still working on her novel. I even went so far as to locate her online at Cornell University, where she’s a professor of creative writing and co-faculty director of “Imagining Rome: Art Studio & Creative Writing Workshop in Italy.” Ultimately, though, I decided not to try. I like the mystery. I am happy to see that she has published since Sweet Talk. She’s written an introduction for an edition of Willa Cather’s My Antonia. And the novel that Tobias Wolff said she was working on is set in Italy. There’s hope. Like anyone who’s fallen under Vaughn’s spell, I’m willing to bide my time and wait.

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