Vanessa Blakeslee's Eight Most Anticipated 2018 Story Collections

In the fifth in a series of posts from authors of 2018 books entered for The Story Prize, Vanessa Blakeslee, author of Perfect Conditions (Curbside Splendor Publishing), discusses 2018 short story collections she's looking forward to.

I have my eye on more than a few collections this year, and those that made my list include both debut authors and well-established voices. My literary tastes tend to reflect my nonfiction reading of late, which this year has included quantum gravity, the nature of time, and ecology; no surprise a few of these picks are influenced by the scientific realm. Others are shaped from place, a preoccupation with the fraught times we’re living in, or envision where we might find ourselves in a near future.

Unnatural Habitats by Angela Mitchell (WTAW Press, October)
I’ve been a fan of Angela Mitchell’s short fiction since I read her story, “Pyramid Schemes,” a few years ago in New South and have been looking forward to her debut collection for a long time. Mitchell is very much a contemporary Chekhov of the Ozarks, who writes the kind of gritty realism that I love—about ordinary people stumbling along as best they can, enduring the outcomes of their mistakes. And yet she’s not a regional writer; these stories, while rooted in setting, very much transcend their locale to illuminate the human condition.

The Amazing Mr. Morality by Jacob M. Appel (Vandalia Press, February)
Appel is one of our most lauded American short story writers, and this is his seventh collection. What compels me about Appel’s fiction is that he’s not afraid to step into the shoes of a wide array of characters, nor tackle a culture which is fond of both lying to itself and avoiding messy ethical questions. He’s a writer of imagination and courage, which we sorely need more of. Often disturbing, sometimes dystopian, Appel’s stories are provocative and surprising.

A Perfect Universe by Scott O’Connor (Gallery/Scout Press, February)
I’m drawn to story collections that center upon a particular place, and O’Connor’s is set around Los Angeles, his characters and their situations either in the midst of collapse or upon the precipice. While this collection isn’t described as dystopian in a futuristic sense, its themes and mood strike me as capturing the dystopia of the present day—that unnerving current running underneath our skins, warning us that the other shoe is going to drop at any moment. A bike thief, a movie star, a struggling mother and son—a rich variety of characters and social classes beckons in O’Connor’s world.

Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories by Vandana Singh (Small Beer Press, February)
Singh is a physicist, and her collection is peppered with philosopher-scientist characters in speculative situations. How we navigate the space-time continuum, totalitarian governments, and our own relationships, and how we might explore other ways of living, have earned Singh comparisons to Ursula K. Le Guin. I wonder how much Singh’s questioning of what it means to be human and the uncertainty of our journey within the quantum realm may have in common with Philip K. Dick, albeit in a style more poetic.

Come West and See by Maxim Loskutoff (Norton, May)
Another debut, this one revolves around place—an isolated corner of Idaho, Montana, and Oregon known in this near-future dystopia as the “Redoubt”— where desperate characters love and clash. In part an imaginative exploration of the real-life armed standoff at Oregon's Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016, Come West and See emerged from Loskutoff’s haunting preoccupations with the rural-urban divide in the U.S. How does a rigidly libertarian survivalist movement play out in the American West? I’m eagerly looking forward to this linked collection, not only for its gripping and timely premise but also for Loskutoff’s elegant and gripping prose.

The Affliction by C. Dale Young (Four Way, March)
This debut novel-in-stories delves into the theme of invisibility and the paranormal, and how the bestowing of extraordinary powers may be at once a burden and bafflingly haphazard. How people disbelieve and shun what they can’t understand, and in other instances, come to worship and rely too heavily upon such “gifts,” characterize The Affliction.

Worm Fiddling Nocturne in the Key of a Broken Heart by Kimberly Lowjewski (Burrow Press, September)
Dark tales of misfits and fugitives inhabit the swamps of Lowjewski’s lush and mystical world. I’ve been anticipating this debut collection for awhile, and how Lowjewski, based in Florida, draws upon the beauty and harshness of this unique wilderness to weave her fiction. For those who are drawn to otherwise ordinary situations that are twisted with magical realism and folklore, this collection should prove a treat.

Florida by Lauren Groff (Riverhead, June)
I’d be remiss if I didn’t include Groff’s Florida—we live and write from within the same state, after all—and I’m looking forward to how she’s set about depicting the nuances and idiosyncrasies of our much-misunderstood peninsula. The tension between the ferociousness of nature—the hurricanes and thunderstorms, snakes and oppressive heat—and the built environment of Florida’s human inhabitants is a pervasive aspect of living here, and I expect Groff, a skilled writer, to capture that well.

Vanessa Blakeslee Hits a Nerve

In the fifth in a series of posts on 2014 books entered for The Story Prize, Vanessa Blakeslee, author of Train Shots (Burrow Press) cops to basing her characters on people she has met.

I am guilty of writing about real people fairly often in my fiction. Is that bad? The stories in Train Shots, my debut collection, are largely drawn from the co-workers, relatives, and lovers of my twenties. Thankfully, the drafting process and the demands of creating drama do wonders, because even if you’re hell-bent on rendering an exact sketch of someone you’ll likely be forced to stray somehow. Often I find myself blending characters from a certain “cast”—say, the Tex-Mex restaurant in “Clock In” (a setting which reappears in the title story). Mostly this is for sheer economy or a certain artistic effect, character traits that I want heightened or diminished, rather than a moral sense of not exposing people that I know, or once knew.

Should this bother me, and why doesn’t it? Is my not being perturbed a sign that I’ve done my job fictionalizing these portraits? Or a sign of the dark and sinister—writer-as-sociopath?

One thing’s for sure: I don’t like limiting the world from which I draw upon. I see my vocation as a calling to experience, observe, and render the people and the culture of my time. This doesn’t mean friends and neighbors are sacrificial lambs to the cause. But it does mean that art can’t help but draw upon life, is bound to, in fact, and that means those you interact with stand a good chance of infiltrating your imagination and working their way into your fiction.

And while writing isn’t straight-up therapy, I do think when we write about what matters, when we’re really hitting that nerve of what bothers us or even a trauma we’re grappling to reconcile with or understand, we’re drawing upon the emotional territory of our lives. Sometimes that territory emerges as more veiled and fantastical—my story, “Ask Jesus,” falls into that vein. The events center around a couple’s disintegrating relationship and the husband’s obsession with a vinyl-Magic 8 Jesus doll, all of which are made up with the exception of the doll. Contrast that with “Princess of Pop,” a day-in-the-life of a fictionalized Britney Spears, which veers more into the territory of stealing from real life. Celebrities are public figures; you have free rein to write about them. But again, the events and particulars of this story are made up—the Froot Loops and hair dye, the Janis Joplin motif. These imagined details are what anchor the story as fiction.



Other times the nerve we tap into is much more close-to-home. My story “Don’t Forget the Beignets” is one of the most unapologetically autobiographical “fictions” I’ve ever written and dared publish. In my twenties, I was dating an older man who got arrested by the FBI on a trip to New Orleans; unbeknownst to me, he was involved in a white collar stock scheme. I hadn’t been there for his arrest but easily could have, through another course of events. Not too long after, I wrote about it—imagined myself into the story as Merly, imagined what I might have done suddenly alone in New Orleans and in shock, grappling with to what extent our life together had been a lie. For dramatic weight I made “Alan,” the character based on my ex, the ringleader instead of the fall guy, which also let me explore what his boss’s wife must have gone through, to some extent. I added a fictionalized cousin as an outside voice on the circumstances. But much of the story remains true—the bail and terms of release, that his arrest happened in New Orleans and the scam occurred when we were living as expats in Costa Rica. I simply had to write my truth, safely behind the third-person mask of a fictional female protagonist.

Publishing the story, I had to do, too. Heartfelt fiction requires an almost dogged honesty; shining a light on the humanity of the situation struck me as essential. What surprised me most in closely rendering such poignant, tense events was the humor that bubbled up—a reminder, perhaps, that even the gravest mistakes and failures of judgment are hardly unforgiveable. Foolishness, when reflected upon, is often just that: funny.

Has anyone ever confronted me about this, been angry or pleased? My ex, after reading the copy of Train Shots I’d sent to him at the federal prison where he’s serving out his sentence, was as excited as other friends and family members about the book. He crops up throughout the collection in different incarnations. He sounded proud and grateful to have played such a role, inadvertently, in the inception of my zany fictions; his copy has been passed around the cell block, the stories read by fellow inmates. And perhaps any contempt he might have for my artistic liberties has paled in significance to what really matters. For his recurrent cancer is back. He may not live to see the other side of prison. Sometimes I’m asked, how can I bring myself to still talk to this man, why bother sending him a copy in prison? Only through reliving the emotional minefield of our lives, sometimes, can we find our way to compassion and forgiveness. Had I not done that for myself, those stories would not exist in his hands nor anyone else’s. What do we write for but to bring about those quietly shattering epiphanies and small delights—for ourselves, for loved ones, for strangers in a cell block?