Nicole Louise Reid’s collection of stories So There! tremble and quake with the electric hormonal urges and desires of teenage girls just realizing their sexuality. Whether it’s a young woman with a cicada living in her armpit, or a girl touching the cold metal of a handgun resting in a boy’s pocket, Reid’s characters are enchanting and devastating. The characters in her stories are longing for something larger than themselves, whether it’s a moment suspended in the air, a touch that changes a life forever, or an escape from the dread that lives in the caverns of your gut. They send you to a dark place that’s still living within you, a place that’s been buried under age and maturity, a place that leaves you wanting.

“Glimpses of Underthings” is about a teenage girl, Agnes, who tells boys that her name means “an angel of God.” She studies her father’s hands and infidelities and steals his girlfriend’s underwear. She twirls around a world where boys aren’t men, so she calls them by their full names. Agnes flirts with secrets and wears them where the eye can’t see.

“If You Must Know,” the first story in the collection, begins with this line: “These are the early cicadas, four years ahead of schedule, chirping, shrilling, blistering through their skins.” There are so many lines I want to pull out from the page and feed to you because they’re so rich with word candy.

While some could consider So There! to be “Chick Lit,” stories for and about women, the dark truths within this book transcend age and gender. They drip with sex and yearning.  Reid’s prose has an ethereal quality, capturing the magical idealism of adolescence while quietly breaking your heart with the harsh realities that hurl a budding youth back down to earth. They remind you how painful it is to grow up, how disappointment can leave a scar.

Nicole Louise Reid is a graduate of the MFA creative writing program at George Mason University. She teaches at the University of Southern Indiana and serves as the director of the RopeWalk Reading Series. She is also the editor of RopeWalk Press and is the fiction editor of the Southern Indiana Review.

So There! is available from Stephen F. Austin State University Press and her website nicolelouisereid.com.

“This is your brain…” Imagine a freshly hatched egg rolling on the kitchen counter.  To the left is a skillet set on a stovetop and there’s butter already simmering on its stick-resistant and concave surface.   Some legendary actor then cracks the egg shell with one hand, allowing the yoke and stuff to spill into the hot skillet.   The egg fries quickly — sunny-side-up — and the voice-over of the commercial continues, “And this is your brain on drugs…  Any questions?”

I’ve seen variations on this themes on everything from astrological horoscopes to bumper-stickers to political buttons (see end of post) to a manual on Zen Buddhism (This is your brain on Buddha!)

And yes, as prevention programs go, this one beats Nancy Reagan’s “Just So No!” hands-down.

Metaphors, 1.

Moralizing Slogan, 0.

And yet, before we, in the creative arts, run up the score, I’d like to consider a book on the brain that has been acclaimed by neurologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, neuro-imaging researchers and even by such egg-heads as the editor of Poetry Magazine, Christian Wiman.   The book is published by Yale University Press and is written by Johns Hopkins mega-star in the above fields, Iain McGilchrist.  It’s entitled, “The Master and His Emissary,” which is odd, considering it has nothing to do with the despicable institution of slavery, nor with any messengers who might have made special deliveries.  Nothing literal like that at all.

On the contrary, the subtitle saves the day (not to mention the marketing department’s ass):   “The Divided Brain and the Making of the Modern World.”  And it is here — in that criss-crossing, apple-saucing of the two hemisphere’s of your primary internal organ, your grey matter, that the rubber meets the road… that the kettle becomes black… that the chicken (coming first) traverses the road, lays the egg (coming second), which gets fried in the skillet, next to the kettle on the adjacent back-burner…   The point is, once the author clears his throat, everyone who has ever set a coffee mug down upon a literary journal of any reputation should stand and salute.  Or bow and genuflect.   McGilchrist is brilliant, as the mere progression of chapters in the table of contents can testify:

Read more »

How are we on time?   You know, chronological, nanosecond by nanosecond, always, always, running, time…  Before you answer, please note the following:   it’s been about 48 years since the death of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (and that’s roughly my own age… he added, self-consciously).   And more to the point –

Stephen King has written a new novel (released on Nov. 8, 2011), depicting events leading up to and beyond “11/22/63″…  In fact, this is the title of the 849 page tome of fiction, in which the protagonist, Jake Epping, travels back in time to 11:58 a.m., September 9, 1958, and accepts the mission of preventing the assassination.  The 35-year-old school teacher therefore has a good five years to move to Texas, get close to Lee Harvey Oswald and otherwise unravel layer upon layer of  elusive history.

What he discovers, of course, is that history’s not like a tangled string of Christmas lights.  It doesn’t even resemble an onion.

History, it seems, has been wrapped and rewrapped, inserted and re-inserted, into and out of the autonomous individual’s psyche — an individual who is embedded in peculiar communities from which we, upon “pain” of non-existence, may never detach ourselves.   There is no such thing as objective history.  Here’s the quote from the main character, favored by a New York Times Critic:

“For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don’t we all secretly know this? It’s a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. . . . A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.”

Poetic, eh?   Or maybe a hybrid of Soren Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death and Rogers & Hammerstein’s The Music Man (King’s novel even goes the extra mile and includes a librarian-love-interest)…

At any rate, I’m thinking you can either read this epic, suspense-filled revision of history — something I plan to do over the holiday season.  Or, you and I may delve into the John Hodgen poem, “Teachers,” from his collection, Heaven & Earth Holding Company.

Read more »

See? Pretty book.

Our local library recently had a book sale, and I went on the last day, when you could get a bag full for $3.  So my family and I went down and brought our own big bag and we loaded up with 25 books.  The first one I read was Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard.  It’s a short thing, just 75 pages, and I was interested because I found it in the fiction section of the book sale, and I’d not read anything but nonfiction by Dillard, but it turns out this book’s nonfiction.  It’s a lovely little first edition with the pages that are uneven at the edges, and they are thick.  I love it.  My kids already wrote in it, but that’s really neither here nor there.   I love how on Dillard’s website she explains what genre her books are (this one’s a nonfiction narrative).   It’s great because we’re always having to label our writing, and she’s sort of funny and matter-of-fact about it.   I first read Annie Dillard a few years ago, when I was on my first memoir kick.  I read An American Childhood, or at least I read part of it.  I didn’t make it through.  This was before I’d studied writing at all, but even then I knew her sentences were gorgeous, bubbling over with beauty even, but for whatever reason the book didn’t hold my interest.  In graduate school I read an essay called “Total Eclipse,” which then led me to read a beautiful and lyrical book Dillard wrote in 1999, called For the Time Being.  It was a masterful threading of a few different narratives, historical, philosophical, scientific, and ecological, and after reading it, it immediately went on my thesis list, so that I could study it more.

Part of what makes reading Annie Dillard so interesting is that she goes on all these adventures, and we get to go with her. It’s through her own curiousity and endeavoring to put pieces together that we get to see any of this. Read more »

look at their faces. the whole damn story's written right there on the freaking cover.

quick: name for me the hero of tikki tikki tembo.  you can’t, can you?  because it’s sort of a trick question.  in more ways than one.  at the center of this conundrum is the matter of how we define “hero”—and also the true heart of this story, which has nothing to do with arlene mosel’s purported purpose for telling us this tale in the first place.  what, you thought this was an ancient folktale passed down through generations about why the chinese don’t give their first-born sons crazy-long names anymore?  because that’s what the book jacket told you?  don’t be ridiculous.

this book is much closer to being yet another example of americans importing, appropriating, and abusing a product of the humble chinese people for their own profiteering ends.  yeah, in case you missed that part, the “author” of this book is some old white lady, who made up an absurd name for her character that sounds nothing like any kind of chinese word, let alone a name—oh, and she sold a million copies of her book.  and a special bonus, we get a depiction of the chinese as monsters who would let a child die rather than forsake the honor due to one’s elders.  which totally falls in line with my understanding of the chinese (i.e., they are dragon-worshipping weirdos).  but back on point…

Read more »

If This World Falls Apart, Lou Lipsitz

For all the banter and bluster of the avant-garde crowd, plain speaking can be a virtue for a poet. The literary merits of the language of everyday life—let’s call it dinner table diction—haven’t been exhausted and won’t be anytime soon. Winner of the 2010 Lynx House Prize, Lou Liptsitz’s If This World Falls Apart is a fine reminder of this.

The poems are sometimes striking in their simplicity—some seem to start out almost as simple accounts of events—but they quickly become much more, as Lipsitz’ work often does what good work should—it conveys experience, puts you there, with each piece revealing something close to truth. And Lipsitz does so while dabbling in some pretty serious—and personal—subject matter: lost love, regret, family scandals, and he somehow avoids lapsing into the great sin of solipsism. That’s a difficult dance, and something to be commended. Read more »

This week I read a craft book by an author I enjoy, one who writes both fiction and nonfiction, Anne Lamott.  The book’s called Bird by Bird, and though it mentions mostly fiction techniques, it’s remarkably relevant for nonfiction as well.  I’ve talked some about creating a character of yourself, which is what we do in nonfiction. In fact, when I write, I’m supposed to be creating a whole cast of characters—all of them me.  But the different characters I play are important, because just like you have to get to know a fictional character to figure out what they would do next, or how they would order their eggs cooked at a restaurant, I have to step into the character of that moment, the character I’m using to portray this one aspect.  Read more »

Ah, the age-old question: Which came first, the egg, or the lovely white box the egg is placed in?

Over the past couple of years, in the process of earning my MFA, I’ve heard a couple of books mentioned over and over:  one is Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy, and the other Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett.  A friend advised me, when I spoke of my interest in reading both, to read Grealy’s book first.  I took her advice and loved that book so much I immediately added it to my thesis list and studied it.  I was struck by the way Grealy used the writer-at-the-desk (that’s WAD.  It’s going to catch on.)  Her narrator was remarkably consistent at every stage and age, which is a remarkably difficult thing for a writer.  That was a couple of months ago, and this week I finished reading Truth & Beauty.  When I finished, and even throughout, I knew what I thought, but as always I wanted to hear what other people thought about it.  So I went in search of reviews of the book.  And I found plenty, but not the kind I was looking for.  I hoped for a discussion of the craft of memoir and how Patchett went about it, since she writes mostly fiction, and I hear it’s good fiction (I plan to read State of Wondersoon, which I think is her latest novel).  I wanted to know how Patchett approached writing a memoir differently than writing fiction, or if she found it much the same. I wanted to know what other people thought about the memoir and the writing.  Because it got plenty of attention, but again, not for the reasons I would have thought. 

Read more »

I didn’t want to share my feelings about Kathryn Stockett’s The Help because I felt others, like Roxane Gay have done it better than I could and also because I have no intention of seeing the movie, so I have no valid opinion there. But when Sam Ligon asked me twice I decided to say how I felt once and for all and be done with it. Sorry for being long winded.

I went to elementary school in Germantown, Maryland and later in Teaneck, New Jersey, both pretty liberal towns . My mother, though, never completely trusted the public education system and so I spent many summers doing book reports on books like The Autobiography of Frederick Douglas and The Story of George Washington Carver. I was able to label all of the African countries when The Democratic Republic of the Congo was still known as Zaire.  When I was old enough my mother encouraged me to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X , an eye-opening book that made me wary of swallowing everything I was learning in school because Malcolm X was labelled as a radical  but he had in fact died wanting peace between Muslims and Christians.

I remember once being surprised by something I found in my history text book that I pointed it out to my mother. Read more »

"you think i'm pretty now? wait 'til you see me when i'm FAT. like orca fat."

the first thing i noticed about the very hungry caterpillar was the art.  it’s not cartoonish.  it doesn’t feel like it was rushed to hit a publisher’s deadline.  these collages were lovingly created, layered, and labored over.  this was the work of an artist passionate about his vision.  the second thing i noticed about this book was that it was a striking metaphor and symbol for america, and a poignant foretelling not only of our excesses as a nation, but also our insistence on fairytale delusion when confronted with the cold hard fact of our sad gluttony.  i love this book.  then again, i bet CEOs do, too.  but i’m getting ahead of myself.

the author risks immediately alienating well-read members of his audience by opening with the well-worn image of a moon literally shining through the branches of a tree.  but the subtle yet mischievous moon man visage looking back at us hints that there is more than hackneyed storytelling ahead.  the accompanying text comes off as something closer to inscrutable koan than juvenile verse:

in the light of the moon
a little egg lay on a leaf.

from these first pages we are suddenly thrust into the moment of creation—life! freedom!—leaving the abstract origin story in our wake, but with that eerie egg still clinging to the walls of our consciousness.  we have emerged from the darkness, the sun beams down from its heavenly throne, solely for our benefit, and we are hungry.  small, but very hungry.

Read more »