“Best,” huh. it must be good.

The Best American Short Stories 2012 was somewhat underwhelming, but any collection deemed “Best” is bound to set expectation too high. I grabbed this book off the display table because Tom Perrotta was the guest editor.  His stirring introductory essay reminded me why reading has always been one of my greatest treasures and gave a quick overview of recent and historical trends in American short fiction.  Ever since a close friend recommended Joe College, Perrotta has been one of favorite writers and I would count him as one of the bigger influences on my own writing. However, our taste in short fiction seems a bit different.

In Perrotta’s remarks on “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” he mentioned you “might catch the homage to Carver,” which might be the biggest understatement of all. Besides the title, of course, there are lines and phrases directly lifted.  The basic plot structure and overall tone: two middle-aged couples get drunk and high at home and secrets are revealed, etc. is the same.  I did think this one worked great, the examination of general of Jewish life in America v.s. Jewish life in Israel and cultural Judaism v.s. ultra-orthodox Judaism coupled with the specifics of four well drawn characters all of whom have a bit more going on than originally thought maybe for a great piece.

Jess Walter’s “Anything Helps,” about a homeless man trying to be decent father to his kid pulls at the heartstrings without being sentimental. You realize everyone begging for money at stop signs and subway stations is a real person, maybe with a family to care for, or a family back home, and how, at least for most of us, the only way to cope is too largely put them out of your mind or you’d be dragged down. The real trick in this piece is how you start believing this homeless guy can make it, and be a good dad, and then find out there are reasons he’s in this position. Walter pulls this off well.
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Last October I drove to Stevensville, Montana to visit a friend.  I had been planning to visit her last summer, but I came down with a nasty case of the shingles and had to reschedule.  I chose the date because it coincided with the Montana Humanities Festival of the Book, Missoula’s annual literary festival.  My friend and I were delighted that Pam Houston was going to be there, an author we’re both completely enamored of, or with, or whatever.  I saw Pam in passing but we missed her reading from Contents May Have Shifted (an AMAZING book) because it takes a bit to get from Stevensville to Missoula.  We found an interesting sounding panel though, something about the American culture of money, and sat down.  The two authors on the panel were David Wolman, who chronicled a year in which he lived without cash in his book The End of Money, and Mark Sundeen, who wrote The Man Who Quit Money.

The panel was interesting enough that I bought Sundeen’s book and my friend bought Wolman’s, with the idea of switching after we read them.  I just finished Sundeen’s book and am getting ready to pass it on to my friend.  But first, a short review:  Decent read—the story will stay with you.  The writing didn’t knock me out.

The book’s about Daniel Suelo, who has lived without money for over a decade.  Sundeen goes over the who, what, when, and where pretty quickly.  The rest of the book is dedicated to the “why,” mostly, and that’s one point where I think the author failed.  Obviously there are situations in which a writer might want to get that stuff out of the way so that we stay focused on the “why.”  I just don’t think it worked particularly well here—I felt the story was over after the first 15 to 20 pages and I couldn’t see what he was going to do to fill up the rest of the book.  The rest, of course, turned out to be fairly interesting—Suelo grew up in a religiously fundamentalist household.  He struggled early on with the injustices and indignities of using money.  He realized, like a lot of us, that those who have the most are the least willing to give, while those who have little are more eager to share.  Through the years Suelo studied many religions and religious texts, gleaning what he felt important enough to carry on from each set of ideas, and eventually melded them together to make an ever-changing, ever-evolving base.

Suelo seems like he’d be a great conversationalist, and the story’s a good one—the man leaves behind all money, lives in caves around Moab, Utah, and lives quite well doing so.  It’s inspiring, and though not many of us could do what he did, for various reasons, not the least of those being that it’s unfortunately illegal to camp out indefinitely, it makes for a great story with a moral.

            Looking across the fields, we could see that Mathew and Melony’s house stood just a hundred yards away, a literal stone’s throw from this Eden.  It seemed truly mystical how unfindable, moneyless Suelo had materialized from the ether and led us across the desert, to Melontopia.  To the abundance.  Mathew and Melony and I filled our arms with melons, hoarding them like iGadgets we’d liberated from Best Buy after a hurricane.  But Suelo chose only a single, small green fruit.  He lowered it into his crate and silently pedaled off.

Either it’s over-written, or it’s too early.  We haven’t yet learned anything about Suelo’s religious and economic ideal, why his commitment means so much, all the underlay.  Because by the end of the book I could see that section working better, but where it’s at is too much too soon. Read more »

1. Title novel after a John Lennon song. “Norwegian Wood” or “Number9Dream.”

2. Set novel in Tokyo.

3. Use first-person-narration.

4. Create narrator on the cusp of adulthood, eighteen or nineteen, and have him arrive in the big city having left behind personal tragedy in his small hometown.

4. Have narrator meets more experienced male “friend” who takes him out for a wild, but ultimately depressing night of carousing, drinking, womanizing, and casual sex that ends at a love hotel. Read more »

“Children of Reagan” is handmade and was released by Rabbit Catastrophe Press as part of their Scrap Chaps series.

I’m convinced that most conscious Americans have a degenerate bastard somewhere inside of them. Though they feel a relative sense of social responsibility, part of them feels the tug of certain urges: narcissism, loathing, apathy, despondency, any of the seven “deadly” sins, really. Some feel these urges more than others, but they’re felt nonetheless. In his chapbook Children of Reagan, Phil Estes amplifies these urges. He gives them a loud, clear, voice and lets that voice play out in a variety of public and private spaces – bars, parties, street corners, living rooms, minds. The poems are anarchic, consistently comic; yet they reveal many a dark truth.

Here’s an excerpt from “Adventure II: Urban Champion:”

               I walked to the forest and found
only serpents and this dwarf boy with onyx
eyes. He wanted to get to his mother. He
followed me to Dwarf Town. The elder
thanked me over and over in the same
cadence. I got their Sacred Thing.
                Part of me always wants to shout:
But I have done this all before! All of me is a
coward and that is okay. We all sit or stand
around, waiting.

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I read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle last year. The historical information sounded interesting, important even, when I was stuck at the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport for three days and willing to trade food vouchers for a good book. If you find yourself stuck in a blizzard in a strange airport, I recommend this book to get you through. In that situation, you want nothing more than to return to some previous, more idyllic state, to crawl into your psyche and figure out what brought you there, where you are really headed and why.

Of course, the book is good in any setting, planes shuffling down an icy tarmac or not.

I’ve been a fan of fiction with historical notes for a while, so maybe that’s why I was drawn into all of the characters’ stories about Japan, The War, but less by the initially-passive main character. I should correct that–he seems passive at first, but I suppose I should say that he’s active in his own way. He’s an active listener, eager to hear the stories of the characters he encounters. And to solve his problems, the main character takes to investigating by spending large amount of time sitting in a well. That is, to fix his marriage, he must enter the well to re-discover his interior self, which includes his greater culture and national history. Read more »

Sorry, Ken. We still love you.

One of the most identifiable settings in Ron Howard’s 1995 film, Apollo 13,is Mission Control. The room full of scientists and engineers sitting behind ancient computers. Cigarette smoke swirls in the air as the men wear skinny ties, white button dress shirts, and black-rimmed glasses. These guys were hipsters before hipsters could roll their eyes.
Obviously everyone had the same reaction as me when they watched the film, right? We all saw that room and thought “Man, how great would it be to sit around in there and/or make out with someone in there?” Amiright?

On Thursday this happened.
Well, the “sit around” part happened.

Last week multiple friends notified me of a new advertisement in town, one that announced in large font: Apollo 13: Mission Control. Can you bring them home?

That’s all.
So naturally the following conversation kept occurring:
Me: “Is it an exhibit?”
Friend: “I don’t know, but it’s about Apollo 13!”
Me: “But what is it exactly?”
Friend: “I just said I don’t know!”

What it is exactly is a living-history-like play that places the audience in the middle of the show. And it’s rad. Read more »

Recap this!

I was hoping I’d have more to report to you. It would have been more fitting if I could have titled this The Five-Year High School Reunion Drinking Game, Part 2: The Hangover. But, the night wasn’t really that exciting. Yes, I sort of played the drinking game. Yes, I printed out copies of the rules and tried to drop them on tables when no one was looking so others could join in. But then I got kind of bored, and I felt a little mean drinking every time I saw someone who’d gotten fat (even if it was still the tiniest bit satisfying).

The five-year high school reunion I attended last Friday was, in a word, fine. It wasn’t terrible, as I suspected it might be. It wasn’t great, as my mother kept telling me it would be. It was fine. I don’t think I would have missed out on anything by not going, but I suppose I’m glad I went. I didn’t make any new friends, but I did chat with a few people that I’m 90% positive I never spoke to in high school. Essentially every conversation consisted of the same thing. We took turns asking what the other person was up to, where he/she worked, where he/she lived. Some people said, “It doesn’t really feel like it’s been five years, does it?” People inevitably said “Wow, that’s crazy!” when I told them I was living in Washington state, since for most of my classmates, the whole world exists between Boston and D.C.

It turns out most people are living in New York City now. It turns out a lot more people were beginning to bald than I thought possible in only five years. It turns out some douchebags are still douchebags, but that one guy who I would have easily crowned King of the Douches actually wants to be a teacher, educating young minds. We also had a very nice, if brief, conversation. It turns out some people can surprise you. Read more »

I follow a lot of parenting pages and blogs.  Most of them are natural parenting type pages, and nearly all of them espouse breastfeeding, which I am all for.  I breastfed my first child for a few months, but I didn’t have any support, i.e. someone to show me what to do, how to do it, the pitfalls and how to avoid them, etc., so we only made it for two months, and then I pumped for another month.  Some of the bloggers I follow get a little bitchy about BFing, though.  It’s clear to me that breast is best—it provides the best of the best nutritionally and bumps up immunity.  It has lasting benefits.  But I also think if a woman can’t or even just doesn’t want to breastfeed, we should all shut the eff up.  As long as the baby is being fed, we should back off.  Still, if I have another baby I’ll (probably) definitely give it another whirl.

I added the qualifier after reading Florence Williams’ book Breasts:  A Natural and Unnatural History.  Williams, who received her MFA through the illustrious MFA program at the University of Montana, breastfed her children.  “I was happily nursing my second child, blithely backstroking through that magic bubble known as the mother-infant pair-bond, when I stumbled upon a news report…I read that scientists were finding industrial chemicals in the tissues of land and marine mammals as well as in human breast milk.”  Being a journalist mama, she wrote about it, sending off her breast milk to Germany to be tested for flame-retardants, which hang out and build up in our fat, and have been shown to cause all kinds of problems in lab animals.  Her breast milk tested positive, higher than she expected, and 10 to 100 times higher than women in Europe.  Williams’ milk also tested positive for a jet fuel ingredient, among other chemicals and exposures that come from electronics, furniture, and food.  And that got her wondering about the ecosystem that is the human breast.  “What toxic load had I already bequeathed my children by nursing them?  What did it mean to their health, and to mine? Was it still okay to breast feed?  How did these chemicals interfere with our bodies?  Could we ever make our milk pure again?”  Breasts store fat, so they also store fat-loving chemicals.  They’re permeable, reflective of everything we eat, drink, touch. Read more »

On my Kafka imitation paper, Greg Spatz, my professor, wrote: “Good writing here, but this is not exactly Kafkaesque.”  I tell you this to show my limitations. I write poetry. I read poetry. I read fiction, but I do not write fiction. All this to say, I felt an ache in my groin that coincided with a twinge in my heart when I finished Junot Diaz’s This Is How You Lose Her and I had to try to explain myself.

Place: Cradling Each Story

Dirty Jersey is like every home state of children in America, we either can’t wait to leave or can’t wait to go back. Those of us from the Garden State know how quickly the ridicule and insults fly: The Armpit of America. Fracking Jersey Shore didn’t help. Live there a while, and you learn why we defend it (not because of  Blue Laws.)  On a good day, it takes just over two hours to drive from the south to the north of the man’s profile of the state, and in that time, you could have passed a person representing every culture on the planet Earth. That’s something a lot of people don’t know about New Jersey – the diversity is equal to or even more so than New York City. Growing up as a teenager in Teaneck High School, I knew that saying a person was Spanish, didn’t tell you much, and to call a Puerto Rican person,  Dominican or a Haitian could get you beat up after school. I miss Jersey; it’s hard to explain.  But I don’t have to, Mr. Diaz does it for me. In This is How You Lose Her, you”ll see another side of Jersey: the rivers, the community colleges, the interstates, and New York – far away across the bridges and tunnels.

Watch Your Gosh Damn Language 

I’ve never met Mr. Diaz, but if I did meet him, and I could speak coherently, I would compliment him on his mouth. Not his actual mouth, the filthy mouths of his characters. We’re talking crude oil, curses so foul and obscene I started saying them aloud in private just to see if my breath expelled black soot.

And somehow, This Is How You Lose Her is still like poetry without line breaks, managing descriptions like “curried pussy” and “benutted condom” bracketed softly by haunting, painfully true prose. This is the kind of writing that both inspires, and makes you accept your own lackluster talent, and with aplomb. For the first time since owning my e-reader, I bookmarked passage after passage. Here’s one: Read more »

Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction: Advice and & Essential Exercises from Respected Writers, Editors, & Teachers
Edited by Dinty W. Moore.
Rose Metal Press
179 pages, $15.95

Sometimes they’re quick like a poem. A hummingbird. Sheet lightning. Sometimes their window is so small it leaves only intrigue. Watching the neighbors through a knothole in the fence. The eclipse through a pinhole. Piñon jay through binoculars. I’m speaking, of course, about flash essays, those tiny essays that are so tight they feel as if any moment they might crack open and reveal a world with a different set of rules. Rose Metal Press has just printed their Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction: Advice and & Essential Exercises from Respected Writers, Editors, & Teachers edited by Dinty W. Moore.

This book is the third in their field guide series, adding nonfiction to the discussion on shorts that also includes their Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction and Field Guide to Prose Poetry. I wouldn’t recommend reading the field guide cover-to-cover in one sitting: you may want to carry this book in your laptop bag or keep it in your glove box, for those times when you are waiting on a friend at the café or pulled over at a park during your lunch break. You will want a pen and a notebook on hand. Twenty-six writers have contributed sections, each of which feature an essay that examines the form, exercises, and an example of flash nonfiction. You’ll want to sit for a while with each of these sections, work through their exercises and surprise yourself during a freewrite, and then spend some time with each of the example essays.

The field guide begins with an introduction by Dinty W. Moore. While flash nonfiction has been around (in all its many forms) for quite a while, he points out, it’s still growing in popularity. The contemporary period—marked by the rise of flash fiction, the inauguration of flash nonfiction with the In Short anthologies edited by Judith Kitchen and Mary Paumier Jones—offers perhaps a greater readership during this print-to-digital shift.

The craft essays discuss the form, offer a craft analysis of the following flash essay example, or delve into a particular element of craft. You do not want to miss the following essays: Read more »