Cutlass Press Gins up an Event to Launch KL Pereira's A Dream Between Two Rivers

By Nick Fuller Googins

Jamaica Plain, Boston 

Sept. 6, 2017

KL Pereira’s collection, A Dream Between Two Rivers, had its launch party at Boston’s Papercuts bookstore on Sept. 6, and it was a night of firsts: the first story collection put out by the independent bookstore’s publishing arm, Cutlass Press; the first stop for Pereira on her 12-city tour; and the first book launch I've been to that offered a preposterously large bottle of Tanqueray for the audience's refreshment.

Pereira at Papercuts
(photo by Katie Eelman)

There was also prosecco on ice, and most went for this chilled option after a brutally humid day and on an evening that wasn’t doing much to cut it. Plastic cups sweated in our hands as we waited for Pereira.

She appeared decked out a Ouija board-themed dress, appropriate given that the September moon was nearly full and that Pereira’s stories run the gamut from dark to darker to darkest. She read a “darker” one, her collection’s opening, “The Dark Valley of Your Lungs,” in which a girl with a killer voice (literally) finds a mentor of sorts in a woman with silver hands and feet. The story, creepy on its own, ends in a cemetery, and if that isn’t enough creep, know that it was written in one too: Pereira revealed during the Q&A that she’d penned the first draft one evening in nearby Forest Hills Cemetery. If there had been anybody in the audience wondering how one gets away with rocking a Ouija board dress, nobody was wondering it anymore.

Literary horror has long been in Pereira’s wheelhouse. She told the audience of an archeological dig through the mounds of school-work that her mother had saved. She’d recently excavated her earliest stories, composed at age nine:

• “The Haunted School”
• “The Secret of the Old Piano” (“pilfered from Nancy Drew,” Pereira confessed)  
• “The Fishing Trip” (spoiler alert: a shark devours the young narrator and her father)

In response to a question regarding the generative process, Pereira explained that she’s “always been interested in the weird” and hails from a “family of storytellers.” Her ancestry stretches back to Cape Verde, Colombia, Italy, and the Azores, providing her with a rich library of folktales and legends to draw upon.

It was fitting that A Dream Between Two Rivers launched in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood because Pereira wrote most of the collection there in 2009. She lives now with the witches and the spirits up in Salem, but the audience greeted her as if she’d never left. When she admitted that she was pretty nervous, and a friend had advised her to picture the audience as cats to help, the crowd erupted in reassuring meows.

After the Q&A, I asked Pereira what she’d done earlier that day. She’d been selected for the MBTA’s “Books on the T” program, so she and her publishing team had been guerrilla-dropping copies of A Dream Between Two Rivers in subway stations around the city, she explained. What this means for the rest of us is that Pereira’s unique brand of literary horror is right now making its way through the underground arteries of greater Boston. Innocent commuting souls: beware.

Donald Antrim's Very Once-Upon-a-Time Brand of Realism

By Nick Fuller Googins
New York, NY, Dec. 11, 2014

Dressed to the nines: Author Donald Antrim at NYU

Here's how Donald Antrim warms up a room:

“Alright, I’m just gonna read a story. So bear with me.”

The room was in the NYU Creative Writing Program’s West Village townhouse, decked out smartly for the holidays: wreath on the window, poinsettias on the mantel, heater humming in the background. Donald Antrim was decked out pretty smartly himself, wearing a sharp tweed coat, a chocolate brown vest, and a rich red tie, as though he’d perhaps moved on from his 2013 MacArthur “genius” award and retrained his sights on making the Best Dressed list. The story he’d selected to read was “The Emerald Light in the Air,” the final—and delightfully weirdest—story of his 2014 collection of the same title—narrated in his warm, hint-of-the-south accent.

“Emerald Light” begins modestly enough. Billy, a depressed, mildly-suicidal divorcé—who, like all of Antrim’s troubled male protagonists, has a past of substance-abuse issues and mental-health problems—is faced with a problem: His car has slid off the road and a storm is approaching. Rather than attempt to navigate the steep incline back to the road, Billy decides to drive his car up a nearby creek, deeper and deeper into the Appalachian woods, in search of an outlet. This is where “Emerald Light” takes an almost fairy-tale bend into the fantastic, making it, in some sense, the most Donald-Antrim-like story of his collection.

This discussion of the fantastic versus the real garnered a great deal of attention in the post-reading Q&A, moderated by Darin Strauss, author and NYU Writing Program instructor. To those familiar with Antrim’s previous work, especially his novels, the Cheever-esque realism of his short fiction might seem strange. Hearing Antrim speak on the subject, it appears as though this brand of short story realism felt strange to him too, or, at the very least, difficult to produce.

“I had written stories when I was much younger, in the eighties,” he said, “and they were dead kinda things.” Only after switching over to novels, working in the fantastic, and then returning to stories was he able to bring life to his short fiction. “I saw the thing moving away from a more conceit-driven conceptual universe to a more concretely emotional universe,” he explained, “one that the author doesn’t have to always manage and always find the distinctive logic in. Writing that is maybe less reflexively funny, in other words less driven by a narrator’s or character’s attitudes, or a writer’s attitudes, and a little more naked, and a little more direct. Just the world.”

This isn’t to say that the sharp realist fiction that drives much of Emerald Light suddenly poured forth from Antrim. Far from it. “The whole thing is so slow really,” he said, sounding deflated, as if someone had just told him to immediately hail a cab, go home, and begin work on another collection. “Each of those stories takes a long time, a couple years.” The seven stories in Emerald Light took him seventeen years from start to finish. (In response to Darin Strauss’s question if he wrote the stories concurrently: “I’ve never really done a lot concurrently. Multitasking! Can anyone really do it?”)

But the story “Emerald Light” is striking, in part, because it’s not overtly fantastical. Billy, after driving up the creek for some time, ends up grounded, stuck in the middle of the woods, at which point he is met by a boy with a tattered umbrella who asks if he is the doctor. Billy, high and definitely not a doctor, answers yes, and follows the boy to a dilapidated shack in the mountainside woods where he is faced with “treating” the boy’s dying mother. These events are neither shockingly unbelievable nor entirely fantastical in themselves, yet the story has an undeniable fantastical bent so subtle that it makes it difficult to remember where exactly Antrim departed from the more-or-less strict realism of the story’s beginning. Speaking on this juncture, Antrim called it “a bit of a leap of faith, this idea that the language, as it were, of that trip up into the woods. I mean, it’s full of associations for us, it’s very once-upon-a-time. I think the idea was to see if you can, without manipulating conceit, just get close to that place where the realism and this other thing—possibly fantastic, possibly hallucinatory—come together and are adjacent. And if that’s possible, then it may be possible to then start to actually produce what amounts to magical events.”

It’s after comments like these that you see why the MacArthur folks anointed the man. It’s not just that Donald Antrim’s fiction is skillful; it’s that he’s clearly thought about what he’s writing. Thought about it a lot. Listening to him you get the feeling that his mind is functioning at a different speed than the rest of ours are, not necessarily faster (okay, yes, probably faster) but on a completely separate plane.

Oh, by the way, he wasn’t finished with that previous comment, he was only coming up for air.

Donald Antrim took a breath, then continued: “So through that trip up into the woods, there was nothing to do but just sort of describe it as a romantic journey and a kind of a dream, and then hope that the other side would exist. If the suspension of disbelief is into this realist thing, can it then obtain in relation to something that actually isn’t real? So that was kind of an experiment for me. Does that make sense?”

“Perfect sense!” one MFA student in the audience answered, either lying, or much more of a genius than I.

The last question of the night went to another MFA student. He wanted to talk not about the fantastical or the real but about Mary, an ancillary, off-screen character who gets about a dozen lines in total. From these dozen lines, we learn that she and Billy slept together back in high school, have since reconnected, and have plans to meet for dinner. The question, posed as only an MFA student can pose a question (as an MFA student, I’m allowed to say that), went like this: “I have to say I was particularly drawn to the character of Mary, and I was almost taken aback by the very brief mention of her having had an abortion. I wonder if you can talk about your decision to have that be part of her story, the way it was included, especially in that very scientific and contemporary terminology.”

To which Donald Antrim responded with his most direct, easily understood answer of the evening: “It was just a sense of the place that I remember. That old Appalachian world, it was right there. It wasn’t meant as any statement on Mary. I was just remembering from when I was kid, growing up on a farm at the foot of the mountains. Everybody got going early.”

Drinking with the Bears: Dybek Reads Dybek

By Nick Fuller Googins
New York, NY, Oct. 24, 2014

If Stuart Dybek wanted to read from, say, Apple’s terms of service agreement, or the instruction manual to my Heaven Fresh rice cooker, I’d probably listen—the man reads with a rolling, low-pitched gravitas that rivals Sam Elliott’s Big Lebowski monologues. But better yet, though, is Dybek reading Dybek, as he did last Friday at the NYU Creative Writing Program’s cozy Village townhouse. He shared the spotlight with poet Fady Joudah in the latest of NYU’s “New Salon: Writers in Conversation” series, introduced and moderated by Darin Strauss, author and NYU Writing Program instructor.

Dybek, when it was his turn to take to the podium, chose to read his short story, “Córdoba,” a selection that was silently cheered by at least one audience member (disclosure: this audience member) because it includes:

• The Chicago Bears
• Heady make-out sessions
• A small-calibered gun 
• A sexy green dress with a plunging back
• An engraved silver flask
• A bartender with preternatural pouring skills
• An apocalyptic snowstorm
• Scraps of Fedrico García Lorca’s poem, “Song of the Horseman”

Those are some of the elements (presented in random order to prevent spoiling the uninitiated’s reading experience) that make up “Córdoba,” arguably the gem of Dybek’s collection, Ecstatic Cahoots, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this past summer. I say “arguably” because Ecstatic Cahoots contains forty-nine additional short stories, some as concise as two lines, others—like “Córdoba”—ten or so pages, all adding up to an embarrassingly large quantity of gems to sift through and discover. Oh, and add to those riches the nine stories from Paper Lantern, Dybek’s other collection (also published this summer, also by FSG). For those who’ve lost count, that’s fifty-nine Dybek stories. Enough to get Darin Strauss in a bit of trouble:

“It’s not every New York Times review that gets trimmed and twisted for over-enthusiasm. My last was.” That’s Strauss, relating his experience reviewing Dybek’s two collections. “For the first time in my years of occasional and by-in-large gentle reviewing, an editor blinked. ‘This is too much,’ she said.” Strauss went on to read a portion of his review as it existed pre-Times-editorial ax. A particularly lamentable casualty was the phrase, “jangling cinematography,” Strauss’s apt description for the narrative cartwheels and summersaults that make the experience of reading a Dybek story like that of reviewing a screenplay-adaptation of your latest, most pleasantly-bizarre dream. 

“Córdoba” seems to contain all the characteristics of one such pleasantly-bizarre dream (refer to aforementioned randomized list) but with one important caveat: It really happened. When Dybek finished reading, Strauss asked him to discuss the influence of literature in the story (“Córdoba,” in addition to the García Lorca poem, also references Emily Dickenson and Chekhov) and Dybek, on his way to answering the question, made this pit stop: “I write basically two types of stories. There’s the stories that often start with an image, and I never know what’s going to happen with those, and there’s the story that’s actually happened. This story really happened.”

It took a moment for the significance of what he’d said to sink in. Then Strauss, along with many of us in the audience, did a kind of awkward choking, double-take, laughing thing. “That’s amazing,” Strauss said. “You actually drank with the Bears?”

Okay, so now it’s known that Stuart Dybek drank with the Chicago Bears, and that “Córdoba” is a true story. Which is astonishing for all the items in the randomized list but also for the way in which Dybek manages to portray the “jangling cinematography” of reality. It’s wild—in some ways wilder than if Dybek had invented the story from scratch.

Strauss continued the conversation by asking Dybek and Joudah about their relationship to “place” as it figures in their writing. Joudah, a Palestinian-American who spent portions of his childhood in Libya and Saudi Arabia, spoke of locating his work in the Middle East as well as in the American South, where he earned his medical degree.

Chicago: A little touch of Pilsen

Dybek, naturally, spoke of Chicago: Nearly all of the fifty-nine stories comprising Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern are set in the city or in its immediate surroundings. “Image is central to a lot of what I write,” Dybek said. “And for me place is one enormous image.” Dybek was raised in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago’s Lower West Side, an area he credits for its influence on both his general outlook as well as that of his writing: “I was in a way very fortunate to be there to watch [Pilsen] go from Slavic to Mexican and it really fashioned my attitude toward America. The place that I was immersed in was not Leave It to Beaver, was not McDonald’s—my allegiance from early on was really to ethnicity and to a sense of foreignness.” As he began to write with Pilsen in mind, Dybek says, writing what he cared about came naturally, organically. “I was writing without even trying, about assimilation, about democracy, about class structure, minority culture, etc.”

Dybek is also a poet; he makes no secret of his love for both genres and their many hybrid forms. (His writer’s notebook is dominated by poetry—everything written in line—and he recalls Raymond Carver’s, when they compared notebooks, being the same way). Maybe it should come as no surprise, then, that reality, as recounted in prose by Dybek-the-poet and grounded in such specific sense of place, should take on the texture of wild cartwheeling dream-like imagination. I’m not still harping on “Córdoba” by the way; in a short discussion with Dybek post-reading, he divulged that “Four Deuces,” from Paper Lantern, is also cribbed from real life. The story—a boozy, dramatic monologue—includes mystical horse-track betting, M-80s, stigmata, and freight-train-hopping, to rattle off what comes to mind. If all that isn’t enough, keep an eye on the cinematography. It jangles.

Slice Magazine Offers Writers (and Beer) on Tap

By Nick Fuller Googins

Brooklyn, NY, Sept. 6, 2014

It’s Saturday night at powerHouse Arena (a bookstore/events space in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood) and the free beer has run out. What’s striking is that this doesn’t seem to faze anyone. Okay, a few people complain, but they’re probably the ones who arrived late. The rest of us mingling beneath the chandelier glow are taking the beer shortage in stride.

In the House: an appreciative audience

Slice magazine’s “Writers on Tap” billed itself as “a reading for discovering new voices and drinking good beer,” and it served as an interlude of sorts to the weekend-long Slice Literary Writers’ Conference. Slice, based in Brooklyn, publishes fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and interviews in a sleek, sexy magazine. According to co-founder Maria Gagliano, who introduced the night’s reading, Slice places a special emphasis on bridging the gap between emerging and established writers, with each issue featuring both well known and up-and-coming authors. The Slice Literary Writers’ Conference, held at St. Francis College in downtown Brooklyn on Sept. 6-7, kept true to this same focus, offering emerging writers the opportunity to meet with agents, attend workshops, and hear from a wide array of literary voices. Many of us here at powerHouse had come straight from the conference.

Earlier that day, we’d heard Tin House editor Rob Spillman, speaking at a panel entitled “The Secret Lives of Literary Magazines,” warn against what he called “Doogie Howser Syndrome,” or the predilection of some beginning writers to tack on an ending that tells the reader everything the previous fifteen pages of the story have already shown. At another panel, “It’s About Me…But It’s Also About You: Writing Nonfiction that Connects with Readers,” Dani Shapiro, author of Still Writing, told us, “Memory is an act of imagination.” During a session on revision, Elissa Schappell, author of Blueprints for Building Better Girls, had this to say: “Anyone who says they write without editing is either full of shit or not a writer…or a genius.”

The “Writers on Tap” reading that evening showcased the work of five writers handpicked by editors from Slice, A Public Space, One Teen Story, and Henry Holt & Co. Included in this bunch were authors Kseniya Melnik and Justin Taylor, both of whom released story collections this year, Melnik with her debut collection, Snow in May (Henry Holt & Co.) and Taylor with Flings (Harper), his second book of stories.

Busy man: Justin Taylor reads from Flings

Celia Johnson, co-founder of Slice, introduced Taylor, describing Flings as “a wonderful ensemble of matters of the heart,” a collection filled with “grief, lust, and falling in-and-out-of-love” that “takes you everywhere, from Oregon to Hong Kong.” Taylor, who later confided that he’d done five Flings readings in the past couple of weeks, took to the podium and said he needed a break from the collection. Instead he read from a thick sheaf of papers, a section of his novel-in-progress about a former child actor who’s leveraged his faded glory into part ownership of a bar—one that he himself patronizes often, especially if a certain female bartender is on duty. Of the former actor: “He liked to sit at the bar and let his longing run away with itself,” and he “assumed that all girls knew all things and modified his behavior accordingly.” If the audience’s reaction offered Taylor some focus-group-like insight as to the response his completed novel may elicit, he can anticipate having to include plenty of pauses for laughter at future readings. But that assumes he’ll have time for pauses.

Justin Taylor is a busy man. In addition to being on tour for his third book, working on his fourth, and teaching at more than one university, he is currently writing a review for Bookforum on Denis Johnson’s new novel, The Laughing Monsters. In preparation, Taylor explained that he’d been reading much of Johnson’s backlist, including his plays.

“Denis Johnson writes plays?” I asked.

Taylor reached into his bag, pulled out Soul of a Whore and Purvis and flipped through, exclaiming with no small degree of admiration that Denis Johnson not only writes plays but he writes them in verse.

Not so La-Z: Kseniya Melnik reads from Snow in May

Sarah Bowlin, editor at Henry Holt, introduced Kseniya Melnik, praising her writing for its ability to “reveal something cutting very easily and something emotional very slyly,” as well as possessing a “human quality that transports you.” Transport us it did, all the way back to Post-War Russia, where much of Melnik’s linked collection is set. She read from “Strawberry Lipstick,” a story that begins with heart-broken Olya, who “lay in bed between her younger sister, Dasha, and her older sister, Zoya, feeling that, at eighteen, her life was over. For what was life without love? A never-ending shift at a factory assembly line.” Bittersweet, cutting and emotional, the tone seemed to instantly and precisely evoke that of a love-sick teenager living through a Soviet winter.

Melnik admitted she enjoys writing stories about snowy places. It comes as little surprise because she grew up in Russia, moved to Alaska at age fifteen, and went to school in upstate New York. Currently she resides and writes in El Paso where it does in fact snow on occasion, though not often and not in recent memory. A word Melnik uses to describe the place is “sweltering.” The incongruity of writing much of Snow in May while living a few football fields from the Mexican border is so delicious that Melnik must be sick of people mentioning it. So I didn’t. But I had to wonder how she coped with such contrast. What was her secret?

The next day, Melnick answered my unasked question while participating in a panel entitled, “Literary Quirks,” when she said, “I cannot write at a desk. I write in a La-Z-Boy. I trick myself to think I’m relaxed.” If that helped her write so sharply about life in snowy Russia while living in El Paso, then that must be one hell of a La-Z-Boy.

Photos courtesy of Slice magazine and © Maria Gagliano

Interrogating the Story: George Saunders Gives Voice to His Work at Rutgers-Newark

By Nick Fuller Googins
Newark, NJ, April 15, 2014

Ventriloquist: Saunders reading at Rutgers-Newark
(photo by John Keene)

I learned something new about George Saunders when he visited Rutgers last week: In addition to his fearsome fiction-writing powers and his killer beard and his reputation as a really nice guy, he also has a preternatural knack for voices.

Don’t confuse “voices” with “voice,” as in, the unique tone and expression of a narrator or character. That Saunders knows “voice” goes without saying. I mean voic-es, plural, as in, the precise spoken-aloud voice of a bumbling teenage gentleman suitor. (“Let us go stand on the moon. Or, uh, in the moon. In the moonlight.”) Or the precious, cartoony voice of a baby deer trembling in the woods. (“Is my mom killed?”) Or the aristocratic, slightly-snobby voice of an apologetic hunter who has just killed poor trembling-baby-deer’s mom. (“If I could will life back into this fawn, I would do so, in hopes you might defer one tender kiss upon our elderly forehead.”)

Saunders willed life into all these voices and more on April 15th at Rutgers University’s Paul Robeson Gallery, where he capped off this season’s Writers at Newark Reading Series along with poet Matthea Harvey. Before reading from “Victory Lap”—the opening story in his Story-Prize-winning collection, Tenth of December—Saunders explained that the story is written in what he calls “third-person ventriloquism,” or, “third-person close, but you drop into the character’s diction as quickly as possible.” With that, he dropped in, broadcasting straight from the wandering mind of Alison Pope, an egregiously optimistic girl about to turn fifteen:

There was so much she didn’t know! Like how to change the oil. Or even check the oil. How to open the hood. How to bake brownies. That was embarrassing, actually, being a girl and all. And what was a mortgage? Did it come with the house? When you breast-fed, did you have to like push the milk out?

Alison, in the first section of “Victory Lap,” does nothing more than dance downstairs  (“hop over thin metal thingie separating hallway tile from living-room rug. Curtsy to self in entryway mirror…”) and into the kitchen for a handful of Cheez Doodles. Yet, through his “ventriloquism,” Saunders grants us immediate access to the inner-most reaches of Alison’s being without the need for lengthy passages of exposition or psychological description. He introduces Alison, as he does most of his characters, by sharing their thoughts with us, in real-time. And when those thoughts include an awkward gentleman suitor, a trembling baby deer, a snobby aristocratic hunter, and so on—all voiced by Saunders—they are not only delightful insights into a character’s psyche, but insanely funny as well. Saunders’s reading often felt more like a performance, and in this way he thwarted my attempt to capture a clean audio recording. I guess that’s something else I learned: One does not simply expect a George Saunders reading not to be laced with continual and uncontrollable laughter.

Hardly surprising, then, to hear that Saunders partially gauges the success of a story by measuring the amount of fun he has while writing. This came in response to a Rutgers MFA student who asked about the stuff that doesn’t work. How does George Saunders know, when writing a new piece, if it’s time to walk away, try something new?

“One useful barometer,” Saunders said, “is whether it’s fun. Is it fun and do you feel confident at any given minute? What happens to me is that if it gets less fun and I feel less confident, my thinking, conceptual mind comes in, and I’ll say, ‘Oh! This is about patriarchy!’ and then suddenly—in my case—you’re deciding from a dumber place than if you were just trying to follow the joy and confidence of it. I’ll often find myself getting locked up in a story and trying to think it out, and if I can catch myself that’s a good place to go to something else.”

The author's well-worn copy

To help get his point across, he paraphrased Norman Mailer: “You should never have sex if it’s not fun.” (“Maybe that’s kind of obvious,” Saunders added. “Why you’d want to take Mailer’s advice on sex, I don’t know.”)

He had similar advice for a question regarding endings. How does George Saunders know when to wrap up a story?

“Most of my writing process is rereading what I’ve already done and trying to react honestly to it: Am I liking it or not? Is it positive or negative? In a sense, finishing a story is trying to be able to get through it on a given day with that needle staying in the positive range. And being honest—if the needle comes down, don’t panic, just turn to the story and go, ‘Is there a problem?’ and the story will go, ‘Yeah, there is, I kinda suck on page three.’” (Saunders, evidently, plays ventriloquist not only for the characters in his stories, but also for his stories themselves. This particular story was whiney and mopey with a hint of self-indulgent defeatism). After honest evaluation—Saunders cautions—if your story really does admit to sucking on page three, it is important to avoid panic mode. Better to continue the interrogation.

“You’ll say, ‘What’s the matter?’ and your story will go, ‘I’m boring.’ So then you try to address it, and eventually you think it through to where you’re all right, until it’s polished off to the very last paragraph. And by then your subconscious is so deeply enriched in it that there probably is an ending.”

He added, later, “I thought the best definition of an ending is, stopping without sucking.”

As for the ending of “Victory Lap,” Saunders left us hanging, stopping after the first two sections of the story. It was a well-chosen moment that most definitely did not suck: radiant Alison Pope in serious and immediate danger. Some of us in the audience may have loudly groaned.

“It all turns out fine!” Saunders said, returning to the podium. He couldn’t help himself. He’s too nice a guy. “Don’t worry!”

“Thank You For Having Me” (You’re Welcome!): Lorrie Moore at Powell’s

By Molly Reid

Portland, Ore., April 11, 2014

Moore: Reading from Bark at Powell's

I’m obviously not the only one who goes a little fangirl for Lorrie Moore. The reading room at Powell’s Books was packed, people standing in the back and along the aisles, clutching their copies of Self-Help and A Gate at the Stairs, excitedly twittering like all the birds of America (see what I did there?).

Lorrie Moore read from Bark, her first story collection in fifteen years. Moore has written several lovely novels, but, for many, she is one of the reigning queens of the contemporary short story. (In a talk she gave years ago for Literary Arts’ Portland Arts and Lectures series, in response to a question about how she knows whether something is a short story or a novel, she likened it to knowing whether an animal is a dog or a cat: “If you throw the ball, and the creature goes eagerly after it and then brings it back to you, wanting to continue for eternity or for as long as you can stand it, whichever comes first, you’ve got a novel. If you throw the ball and the creature doesn’t budge but just looks at you as if you are out of your mind, you may have a short story – or you may just have a cat.”)

With humor that’s often described as mordant or sardonic, but feels more soft hearted than that, she handles the serious matters of life with lyric precision, offering up your very heart disguised as somebody else’s, or something else—a joke, a visit to a dead friend come to life, a dog named Cat.

Bark is what animals do in fear, in anger, in loneliness. It’s a laugh, a cough. A warning. Bark is also the protective layer, able to peel off and heal, sometimes grown rough and scabby over oozes of sap. In the last story of the collection, which she read from, the narrator tells her daughter that she saw a PBS show “that said only the outer bark of the brain — and it does look like bark — is gray. Apparently the other half of the brain has a lot of white matter. For connectivity.” In typical Lorrie Moore fashion, these multiple meanings echo and branch and contradict themselves throughout the stories of this collection. Her characters are a little older, if not wiser, have become more layered, have grown a bit more spiritually gnarled.

The title of the story she read at Powell’s, “Thank You for Having Me,” comes from one of the characters, a farmer who is playing music at his ex-wife’s wedding in Wisconsin, singing songs like, “I Want You Back,” and “I Will Always Love You.” But this character is somehow not pathetic or pitiful, or not only: 

Except he didn’t seem to want her back. He was smiling and nodding at everyone and seemed happy to be part of this send-off. He was the entertainment. He wore a T-shirt that read, THANK YOU FOR HAVING ME. This seemed remarkably sanguine and useful as well as a little beautiful. 

This is typical of the kind of dance performed in the story between humor and pathos, the push-pull of play and heart Lorrie Moore is known for.

This story doesn’t, actually, have much of a plot, at least not in the traditional sense. The only real event is that some bikers roll in and the head biker (wearing a football helmet with plush puppy dog ears glued to each side) gives a little speech about life, shooting a gun in the air. However, the bikers quickly realize they’re at the wrong wedding and speed off before anything really happens. Most of the story consists of the narrator, a woman living in the wake of her own heartbreak, a husband who left, talking to various characters, to the bride’s ex-husband, to her sassy daughter, and musing about life, and death. But the reason it works so well is simple: The writing is so f-ing funny. Every few lines, the audience erupted in laughter, and Moore knew exactly how to read with those interruptions, is obviously used to pausing as her audience continually loses control. She read: 

Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair. You didn’t have to go looking for it with open arms. With open arms, you fell of the bike: I was drinking my wine too quickly. 

She read: 

The bridesmaids were in pastels: one the light peach of baby aspirin; one the seafoam green of low-dose clonazepam; the other the pale daffodil of the next lowest dose of clonazepam. What a good idea to have the look of Big Pharma at your wedding. Why hadn’t I thought of that? 

These lines are funny on the page, but Lorrie Moore delivers them with such sharp smoky intimacy, they feel brand-new, and even funnier.   

 

“Most of the humor I’m interested in has to do with awkwardness,” Moore says in a 2001 Paris Review interview, “the makeshift theater that springs up between people at really awkward times—times of collision, emergency, surrealism, aftermath, disorientation.” This is what prevents Moore’s stories from seeming like just a string of one-liners, wordplay, amusing musings—of which there are many. Most of the stories in this new collection have very serious backdrops: divorce, war, death, torture, psychosis. Two of them—"Referential" and “Wings”—re-imagine tales by Nabokov and James. They trace the moments right before and after loss, the language play and humor inextricable from this loss, what floats to the surface when reason and safety fall away.

The story she read at Powell’s is the last story in the collection, and it feels more optimistic than the rest of the stories. Though death and loss still lurk, it takes place at that staple of comedy, a wedding. After all the heartbreak and sorrow, Moore tips the balance a bit, and ends her story, and her collection, on a hopeful note: 

I needed my breath for dancing, so I tried not to laugh. Instead I fixed my face into a grin, and, ah, for a second the sun came out to light up the side of the red and spinning barn. 

The red and spinning barn! (I just wanted to try that out, another thing Lorrie Moore can get away with and I can’t: the exclamation mark).

In the Q&A after the reading, Moore politely and thoroughly answered the audience’s questions, even the ones that seemed to me blurted unformed and absent of reason. But she had some good advice, delivered with the same kind of crackerjack humor and poise as her stories: “This is why it’s called art. There’s an element of artifice to it. You don’t write every single thing someone says. You write down the essential thing, and you get people bouncing off each other in interesting ways, and if it’s not interesting, don’t put it in,” she said about dialogue. And: “The difference between someone who is a writer and who’s not a writer is that they’re just writing things down,” in response to a question about whether there was anything in particular that influenced her to become a writer. 

I mean it when I say that’s some of the best advice about writing I’ve ever heard. If I could remember just these two things, if all writers could, what a world it would be: If it’s not interesting don’t put it in. Writers write things down.      

Favoring Humanity: Deborah Eisenberg, George Saunders, and the Short Story

By Patrick Thomas Henry

Stranded: Eisenberg, Wittmann, and Saunders

On Jan. 11, readers escaped Manhattan’s rain-dowsed Union Square for an evening celebrating the contemporary short story. The event, at The Strand bookstore, paired Deborah Eisenberg and George Saunders for a reading and a discussion moderated by Newsweek/ Daily Beast books editor Lucas Wittmann. The event’s cover charge was the purchase of Saunders’ newest collection Tenth of December, Eisenberg’s The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg, or a ten-dollar Strand gift card—but the buzz among the sold-out crowd was that buying either book was a better deal than the gift card. The readings and discussion were held on an elevated dais at the rear of the Strand's rare books room, where shelves of collectible volumes served as a backdrop for the night’s conversation.

Eisenberg’ and Saunders’ accomplishments rank them among the top writers specializing in the short story. Eisenberg, among other accolades, has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg. She taught in the University of Virginia’s MFA program from 1994 to 2011 and now teaches at Columbia University. Saunders, also a MacArthur Fellow, was recently the subject of Joel Lovell’s New York Times Sunday Magazine cover story “George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year.” Saunders’ first book, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and his collection In Persuasion Nation was a finalist for The Story Prize. Saunders has been a member of the graduate writing program faculty at Syracuse University since 1997.

George Saunders

Saunders read from “Home,” a short story from Tenth of December. In “Home,” a traumatized veteran finds his family and community in disarray. The story’s narrator cannot interpret the transformations in his town and personal life, and he eventually admits, in typical Saunders fashion, “I started feeling like a chump, like I was being held down by a bunch of guys so another guy could come over and put his New Age fist up my ass while explaining that having his fist up my ass was far from his first choice and was actually making him feel conflicted.”

Eisenberg then read an excerpt from “Revenge of the Dinosaurs,” first collected in Twilight of the Superheroes. In this story, the protagonist, Lulu, returns to the East Coast after her Nana suffered a disabling stroke, and Lulu’s miscommunications with her brother Bill lead to vocal clashes over Nana’s care. As a backdrop to Lulu and Bill’s vitriolic exchanges, Nana—rendered mute from her stroke—incessantly watches the black-and-white television’s shifty, grainy images, a resonant metaphor for the muddled conversations that govern our lives.

In response to these readings, Lucas Wittmann observed that each writer eloquently captured the inexpressive and inarticulate qualities of everyday speech. This interpretation of their work initiated a discussion on writing and teaching short fiction. Eisenberg and Saunders described how their work correlates to lived experiences and, furthermore, to teaching MFA students to sincerely depict their surroundings. Wittmann, invoking the footage of war protests in “Revenge of the Dinosaurs” and the recently discharged veteran in “Home,” asked the authors to place their stories in the context of recent political events. Eisenberg responded, after Wittmann queried her about the recently averted fiscal cliff and the crumbling vision of the American middle class. “One assumed there would always be a middle class. But now, to see it eroded and to see ourselves on this planetary cliff for everything—it couldn’t be more terrifying and riveting,” said Eisenberg.

Deborah Eisenberg

Eisenberg’s remarks suggested that the writer’s task is to express the intrinsic—and simultaneous—beauty and terror of our ever-shifting reality. Yet, both she and Saunders cautioned students against giving ideology priority because that approach can crowd out characters and genuine sentiments. These emotions, they argued, welcome the reader into a story’s fictionalized world. For this reason, Saunders commented that he often teaches Eisenberg’s Twilight of the Superheroes to his MFA students because of the collection’s “intelligent surface and overall charm.” For Saunders, the “charm offensive” of Eisenberg’s stories is effective because her prose explores the dramatic tension between characters and their circumstances, so that the larger ideas arise from the characters’ behaviors. When an author crafts a story in this way, Saunders claims, the ensuing symbols, tropes, and metaphors that convey a narrative’s message become “more honest, sincere.” This critical assessment could be swiveled around to accurately judge Saunders’ own stories, such as “Home,” which reveals the muddle of ideology to express the illegibility of its narrator’s circumstances at home.

Another reason to resist idea-based fiction is what Eisenberg termed the “danger of imposing rules.” Indeed, Saunders jocularly dismissed the misconception that MFA programs allow students to “receive the secrets on a silver platter.” Based on this conversation, Wittmann suggested that the purpose of an MFA program isn’t one of passing down strictures but of teaching students to read themselves and others. Eisenberg and Saunders both endorsed this mission. Yet, as both writers continued praising the short story’s compression as a means of amplifying a narrative’s clarity and momentum, I suspected that they were imparting a message as pervasive—yet easily neglected—as the shrouding mists outside The Strand. The writer’s craft must emphasize conveying sensation and emotion accurately, fairly, and evocatively—in defiance of our own worst habits. Eisenberg intimated as much when she discussed a conversion in her own writing habits: the decision to keep notebooks during the aftermath of September 11. Eisenberg said, “9/11 was a huge obstacle.  I felt that things were going to start changing immediately . . . and that it would be impossible to remember accurately.” So she bucked her own methods, kept journals, and resisted the urge to soliloquize in a manner that would emphasize concepts over humanity.

What Eisenberg and Saunders imparted on a cold, rainy night is a warming sentiment: May all writers have a vision crystalline enough to remember why they write, and for whom. This hope is as pervasive in Eisenberg’s Collected Stories and Saunders’ Tenth of December, as it was at their reading at The Strand.

Impaneled

(L to R) Story Prize Director Larry Dark (yours truly) with authors
Susan Minot, Rick Moody, and Elizabeth Strout (via Dusty Spines)

The three authors who participated in last night's tribute to The Stories of John Cheever at the Center for Fiction, turned out to have strong, sincere connections to Cheever's work. Elizabeth Strout read "The Worm in the Apple" and told how important the stories were to her development as writer. Rick Moody read from "The Jewels of the Cabots" and discussed how the late stories in the book convinced him that indirection could be an effective narrative technique for him. And Susan Minot brandished a faded, hardcover copy of the book with her ratings of various stories in the table of contents, ranging as high as seven stars. She noted that the story she was going to read from, "The Sorrows of Gin," only rated three stars back then, but her estimation of it had grown. I, too, brought my first copy of the book—a 1978 mass market paperback with off kilter pages. And Rick Moody had his original copy, as well. He read the very Cheeverian inscription his father had written to him, suggesting that Rick, a mere teen at the time, might never be as good a writer as Cheever—kind of like saying he might not measure up to Chekhov.

The Center for Fiction did a great job with the event, which ended with a panel discussion and questions from the audience. I say we do it again in 25 years.

Happy 100th Birthday, Mr. Cheever

Yesterday—May 27—would have been John Cheever's 100th birthday, and I like to think that I have the day off form work for that reason. In fact, maybe Memorial Day should be an annual occasion to remember writers whose work is, well, memorable. After all, May is Short Story Month.

I would be remiss if I didn't also reiterate that this Thursday night, May 31, at the Center for Fiction, The Story Prize will be co-presenting a tribute to The Stories of John Cheever. Susan Minot will read from and discuss JC's "The Sorrows of Gin." Rick Moody will focus on "The Jewels of the Cabots." And Elizabeth Strout will read from "The Worm in the Apple." If you're going to be there (and I hope you are), I would highly recommend reading/re-reading these three stories.

The 92nd Street Y offered it's centennial tribute to John Cheever, with a focus on the man himself. With the exception of Michael Chabon's spirited reading of "The Enormous Radio," the program was almost entirely dedicated to the writer and not his work. Biographer Blake Bailey read excerpts that focused on Cheever grappling with his fame. Susan Cheever read from her father's diaries, admiring the gorgeous prose that permeated even work that wasn't written for publication. And Allan Gurganus, Cheever's former student and more, read the last few sentences of "Goodbye, My Brother," and spoke at length about personal encounters with his mentor.

I'm glad the 92nd Street Y did this. Now we can focus on the reason we even remember this man 100 years after his birth—his fiction and, in particular, his stories. Call me romantic, but I would be taking note of this occasion even if I'd never seen the photos of John Cheever's handsome, craggy face or heard recordings of his exaggerated patrician accent, or learned about his troubled family relationships and his personal demons. For most of us, the stories transcend the life.

Short Story Month: Minot, Moody, and Strout Read Cheever at The Center for Fiction on May 31

May is National Short Story Month, and this year (for once) The Story Prize has something planned. Thanks to New York's Center for Fiction, we're going to be co-presenting a reading to celebrate The Stories of John Cheever, a collection you'll find on the shelves of many passionate readers and writers of short fiction.

Why a Cheever reading now? Because he will have been 100 on May 27. John Cheever, the man, has gotten a lot of attention in recent years, with the release of his diaries and a highly-regarded biography by Blake Bailey. In fact, the 92nd Street Y is having an event on May 17 with Bailey, Michael Chabon, and writers and offspring Ben and Susan Cheever. So when The Center for Fiction's Executive Director, Noreen Tomassi, and I discussed having an event there, we decided to put the focus on what is probably Cheever's greatest legacy—his short stories.

(L to R) Susan Minot, Rick Moody, and Elizabeth Strout

On May 31, at 7 p.m., at The Center for Fiction, authors Susan Minot, Rick Moody, and Elizabeth Strout will each read from and discuss a Cheever story. Minot's choice is "The Sorrows of Gin," Moody will read from "The Jewels of the Cabots," and Strout will focus on "The Worm in the Apple"—all interesting selections from among an oeuvre that includes "Goodbye, My Brother," "The Enormous Radio," "The Five-Forty-Eight," "Reunion," and "The Swimmer."

Susan Minot, Rick Moody, and Elizabeth Strout each have New England roots—as did Cheever. And the work of all three has affinities with his. I'm expecting a memorable and fitting tribute to a great writer with a continuing and widespread influence on other writers—a nice way, we hope, to close out a month celebrating the story form.

What DeLillo, Millhauser, and Pearlman Will Be Reading At The Story Prize Event

Those of you who plan to attend The Story Prize event on Wednesday night and prefer to be prepared might like to know what the authors will be reading (or reading from). 

The finalists generally go in alphabetical order (by last name), so Don DeLillo is up first. He'll read from his story, "The Starveling." It's about a New Yorker with a movie-going compulsion (as in watching several every single day) who encounters someone he imagines is a kindred spirit.

Next up is Steven Millhauser who will read from "Snowmen," which is about, well, what you'd guess it would be about. Except in the suburban town where the boy who narrates lives, the snow creations move beyond the conventional three stacked spheres with coal eyes and carrot noses to more and more elaborate constructions. Millhauser might also read something new along with an excerpt from this story.

Lastly, Edith Pearlman will read her story "Mates." A summary or description doesn't really do justice to this story. Suffice it to say, it's simple but thoughtful and elegant.

Of course, it's the author's prerogative to change his or her mind. So this could change. If you really want to be prepared, might I suggest you read the finalists' entire collections?