The Danforth Review

Interview: Daniel Griffin

2012-01-24T15:33:00.000-08:00

www.danielgriffin.ca

Globe and Mail profile

Please tell us about your interest in the short story by

(a) telling us a bit about your recent collection (e.g., how did it come about? does it have a recurring theme? do you have a particular story or passage that's a favorite?)

I wrote the stories in Stopping for Strangers over the past ten years or so which is about the same amount of time I've been a parent--my eldest daughter just turned eleven. As you might expect, during that time, I often found myself writing about family. If there's a unifying theme to Stopping for Strangers that's probably it: Most of the stories in this book touch on family in some way.

I think the approach I take to short stories is another reason family comes up so often in this collection. Conflict and tension drive stories forward. Time and again I found myself using family relationships as a way to ratchet up the tension and magnify the conflict, increase what's at stake in the story. After all, these are the ties that bind us most closely. A family's fault lines—and in this I include husbands and wives—have always been more interesting to me than the fault lines between friends or lovers.

It's hard to pick a favourite story, but I think of "The Last Great Works of Alvin Cale" as the story that got the book published, so it has a place close to my heart. The truth, of course, is that “Cale” really only got the editor's attention, the entire manuscript is what got the book published. Getting noticed though is an important first step. After I met Andrew Steinmetz at the Writers Trust Awards in 2008, he read the story, liked it, and contacted me about the collection. It took a while to sort out the details, but that's ultimately what brought the book to Vehicule.

(b) recommending a short story or collection by someone else that you admire (and why?)

I just went up and looked at my shelves, and I've got to say it's hard to just pick one book to talk about. It's tempting to mention something by Raymond Carver--both because I admire his work and because some reviews have recently compared Stopping for Strangers to Carver's writing; however, I'm not going to do that today.

VS Pritchett is another favourite of mine and I'll recommend him in part because I think on this side of the Atlantic he doesn't get all the attention he deserves. A good book to start with is the volume of Selected Stories published in '78 which includes some of the best stories from collections he published in the 60s and 70s. It was the first book of his I read. The unadorned prose and the clarity of voice held me.

While I didn't particularly identify with the 1960s England he wrote about, he brought a truly compassionate and unflinching eye to commonplace characters and situations. I couldn't put the book down. As a story writer, I think he's up there with Ernest Hemingway.

(c) reflecting on the 21st century and the short story: Are they a good match (and why)?

I love this question. But I'm also struggling: we're in a time of amazing acceleration and change; it's hard to predict ten years let alone a century. One trend I see is that people's disposable time is getting shorter and also getting chopped up. All these time saving devices, gadgets and appliances and we're busier than ever before.

I often hear people say the short story is perfect, I can read it in one sitting. Our ability to now deliver books on portable electronic devices from iphones to Kindles helps too. It can make the short story and short story collections easy companions for commuters or people who find them selves with blips of time here and there.

With that said, another interesting trend is the decline in our attention spans. I've been watching some HBO TV series lately and it's the crack cocaine of video. Now when I sit down to watch a quiet French coming of age film, I don't think I've got the patience I used to have. What does that mean for the short story?

I was discussing this with my friend and fellow writer Craig Boyko a while back. He pointed out that a short story actually takes an increased level of attention. Every word counts, they're densely packed works of prose. With a novel you can skip a few pages and still get it. You can't do that with a short story. A public with shortened attention spans isn't a good match for the short story form.

So there you go: two trends, one suggests the next few decades will be good to the short story, the other suggests there's challenges ahead. I'm peaceably on the fence.

Fiction #32

2012-01-17T17:27:00.000-08:00

Here is new fiction, issue #32:

Birther by Lucile Barker
sorry i drunk texted you lasted night by Jon R. Flieger

Submissions now open for #33.

Fiction #32: Lucile Barker

2012-01-17T17:13:00.000-08:00

Birther

I could have killed Evan for the boat accident, but part of it was my fault for letting him take out a twelve foot flat bottomed rowing canoe in five foot waves.

For the first few days after the accident, I didn’t want to sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I was back in the warm too high waves, the oars under my arms so that they couldn’t float away.

“The seats, the generator, the motor, the cooler,” he moaned to all his neighbours, who could see my increasing lack of sympathy.

I had my own list, including the salmon mousse and the expensive smoked pork hock from the out-of-town deli. And my wallet, driver’s license, health card, my USB stick (which had been backed up on a CD the day before), several absolutely for sure winning lottery and raffle tickets, including one for a rainbow-hued afghan that I had lusted after at the Fergus Truck Show, and business cards with e-mails for people I might never see in the flesh again.

As the week progressed, the list got longer and more expensive. I began to remember why Evan was an ex-husband.

The nightmares became worse and started to mix in with old ones when I had been trapped in my school locker in grade ten. Now I was back in the locker but it was filling up with water and rocking. Maybe it was time to get rid of the water bed.

“Ya wanna come to Cuba this winter?” my best friend, Annabelle, asked.

“Maybe,” I said, ever though I knew I really couldn’t afford it. “But I gotta get a passport.”

There, I had my excuse.

“I will spring for your passport,” Annabelle said. “I got a huge hunk of extra vacation pay.”

“Desperate women,” I said. “Maybe this time we’ll behave.”

Once, long ago, we had gone off on a trip where she had met a writer she introduced me to. Then she met his roommate and we had frittered away twenty years of our lives on them. Some of it had been fun; some nearly tragic.

“I’ll write away for it,” I promised and went to the community center to print the application off the internet.

I looked at it and cursed under my breath. First I would need my birth certificate, and that was a soggy mess somewhere in the bottom of Lake Ontario. I went to another web site and printed off the application for that. This was going to take a while, so maybe the balance on my Mastercard wouldn’t get inflated by a winter trip.

I filled in the birth certificate application and put the passport application aside. I was busy doing other things, like finding out how to load my new USB stick, so I didn’t notice that there seemed to be a delay in the return of the document. The envelope from the Bureau of Statistics came back when the first snow was on the ground. I might not be able to afford new boots, but maybe Cuba was doable.

“Your application is incorrect or incomplete,” the form letter said.

Maybe I had Daddy’s birthday wrong, I thought, and called Mom, who said I had it right, the government was just screwing around because of all the terrorist threats.

I was sure it was collusion between the Post Office and other government departments to make up for the loss of revenue due to the internet.

“I’m going with or without you,” Annabelle threatened when the storms started to hit.

I live above a commercial establishment that repairs small motors that I am allowed to walk through after hours. The other tenants have to trek around the building and go through a semi-paved badly lit alleyway. My landlord has cut me slack. When the doorbell rings after hours and I’m not expecting anyone, I usually ignore it because it’s someone wanting to pick up a re-cored motor that I wouldn’t recognize.

There was a storm and I looked out when the bell went. On the street below was a nasty looking black car, something official. Bad news time. My mother, Evan…

I didn’t bother with shoes, damn the metal shavings from the grinder that were never completely swept up. I fumbled with the two locks on the glass door and two large dark-coated men pushed their way in. They flash ID that wasn’t standard issue and looked around unbelievingly.

“Someone live here?” the bald one asked, the kind of guy who never wears a hat so he can prove how macho he is.

“Apartment behind and I’m upstairs,” I said.

“And you are?” the other one asked. His snow-slicked hair looked dyed or maybe it was just the nasty florescent lights changed the hours of everything.

“Jacqueline Shoshana Pomerantz,” I said and they both jumped. “I didn’t quite catch your names.”

They looked at each other; they hadn’t expected that.

“Is there somewhere we could go?” the bald one asked, not answering my question, gesturing with his head to the door to the stairs.

“Not really,” I said, digging my heels in, and feeling a metal splinter slide in.

“You have ID?” Mr. Clairol asked, getting pushy.

I could see that this was going to turn into a game of good cop, bad cop. I was feeling bipolar enough to be good Jackie, bad Jackie.

“Why?” I asked, pulling out a chair from behind the open-drawered cash register and sitting on it. I might as well be comfortable.

They looked at each other again and then the bald eagle spoke.

“You apply for a birth certificate?” he asked.

I nodded. I wasn’t about the bring back the memory of being in the water, to explain about the waves. I wasn’t going to get out that easy.

“Where’s your old birth certificate?” demanded blackhead.

I tried to hold bad Jackie back.

“Bottom of Lake Ontario,” I said. “Off the island.”

“The birth certificate is government property,” he said. “Destroying it is a crime. Why did you do that?”

Hey, isn’t it the other guy’s turn? I wanted to ask. Good Jackie was getting a workout.

“Boating accident,” I said, and his lip curled in disbelief. “Lost every piece of ID, bank card, charge cards, you name it.”

“Must have been a pain replacing all that stuff,” Baldie said sympathetically.

Bad Jackie had an idea and passed it to good Jackie. I pulled my wallet out of my jeans.

“See, all my stuff was reissued the second week of September,” I said, handing over the picture license and health card. “Heck, I had to memorize a new library card number and change the macro for it on my laptop.”

Baldie seemed to be satisfied but now Blackhead leaned forward. His dripping black hair seemed to slip. Oh, lord, it was a toupee and it was going to tumble off into my lap if he wasn’t careful.

“And why didn’t you get a replacement until now?” he demanded, triumph in every pore.

“Hadn’t realized it was in there, and then I tried,” I said, trying to move away from his drips. “They kept sending back the forms.”

“Because you kept lying on them,” he yelled and I could hear the ballast in the florescent light over me vibrating.

There was a long silence.

“There is no lie on the application,” I said. Now I knew I was good Jackie or I would have decked him.

“Time to take her in and find out who she really is!” Wiggy said to Chrome Dome, surreptitiously adjusting his toupee.

Baldie didn’t answer. He was checking something on a small wireless computer screen.

“Didn’t like your real parents much,” Wiggy said. “That why you put someone else’s name on the forms? Think you could inherit from them?”

I love my mother but I don’t much like her, I wanted to say, bad Jackie thinking the truth even when it was hateful.

“Weren’t around much when I was really little,” I admitted. “I lived with my grandparents a lot. There were my legal guardians because my parents were travelling around in other countries all the time.”

Baldy was looking at the computer screen and gave a deep sigh.

“Can you tell me your grandparents’ names?” he asked.

I did while Blackie glowered. He was growing an eight o’clock shadow both physically and emotionally. Baldy passed him the device. The angry man just shrugged when he read the screen.

“Put up job,” he muttered, and Baldy gave him a look. I had the feeling that they hadn’t been partners for all that long and that they wouldn’t be for much longer.

“I’d advise you to call the toll free number at Statistics and tell them what you just told me,” Baldy said, handing me back all my cards. He looked out at the snow, which was still pounding down. “Lock up when we go,” he advised.

I did, and went back upstairs. I opened the window a crack. The two men were standing beside the car, having a heated discussion that could have melted the snow.

“ – take her in,” insisted Blackie, who was probably as bald as his partner.

“Nope,” said Baldy, fumbling in his overcoat pocket for the door opener. “She had
no idea. And we just opened up a real can of worms for her.”

The car beeped open and then purred off, unlike any vehicle I had ever driven in the snow. The toll-free line didn’t open until eight in the morning. It was a long night, punctuated with dreams of babies being plucked from swamping cradles.

I looked too much like both of my parents to be anyone but theirs. I had always known that they were too tied up in each other for me to be anything but second place.

I called Evan at dawn, watching the snow fall down.

“I don’t get what’s going on,” I wailed.

There was a long pause.

“Your grandfather told me,” he finally said. “They adopted you when you were two. The first time your parents split up.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. How could he know so much and I know so little?

“I’ll be down there in a couple of minutes,” he said, even though the radio had told everyone to stay off the roads. “You can even do the call to the Stats people off my cell.”

The man on the other end of the line was polite and quite understanding.

“There was a legal guardianship change,” I said, giving him Gramma and Grandpa’s
names. “To my grandparents. Would that make a difference?”

“Well, that’s who I’ve got as your parents,” he sighed. “Things were more fluid back then and maybe someone in your family didn’t understand the terminology. Or the ramifications of the legal process. Just print yourself off new forms and put in that information. It’s happened before.”

I was being comforted by a civil servant.

“Wanna go to the beach?” Evan asked. “Call work before I take you there, everything is closed. Except the swans in the snow.”

The pure whiteness, nothing having sullied it…yeah, the beach. I called the office.

“Due to inclement weather, the Centre will be closed today. Please call before your appointment tomorrow or to reschedule-”

The lake was ice, hard. I closed by eyes and I wasn’t in it, fighting waves. Maybe I was over it.

“Let’s go and print those forms,” Evan said. “Post Office will be open.”

He printed, I filled in, and we took them to the southern depot to mail.

“I thought you knew,” he said gently as he dropped the envelope into the shaft that led to a conveyor belt below.

That night I had a dream of legal documents on an assembly line, dwarves passing them along to each other and then roughly stapling the documents to living dolls who cried but didn’t bleed. Then the workshop started to fill with water and I was back in the lake, this time reaching for the papers attached to the dolls, trying to get one for myself. The water was hot and cold; I awoke in a cold sweat and had to take a shower.

The birth certificate finally arrived but I didn’t bother to look at it all that carefully. I didn’t want to know what it said, what lies I had been living with all these years.

“It doesn’t change the fact that we were born in the same delivery room,” I said to Evan.

That was one of the wonderful pieces of family lore over the years and I wanted to keep it alive.

I asked my mother about it gently.

“Just a legal guardianship,” she huffed, and changed the subject. She’s always been good at that. We’ve always let her get away with it.

Like the people who believe that the American president is not a true citizen, my mother and I will each believe what we need to believe about my birth certificate. I know they were married; I’ve seen the pictures of their wedding and when I was brought home from the hospital and the cars in the background give an accurate dateline. But there are other problems. Like trust. Maybe, like the President, I am an outsider. When it comes to my mother, I am ineligible.

*

Lucile Barker is a Toronto poet, writer and activist who has written since swiping her grandmother’s Waterman fountain pen and her mother’s purple ink. Time spent in the corner gave her more writing opportunities. These were augmented in her teenage years by time spent in detention rooms and sitting in the hall outside of the classroom. She may have the world’s largest rejection slip collection. There are no plans for an exhibit of these. She has participated in Nanowrimo for the past seven year. “Birther” is one of the linked stories from the 2011 Nano, Jacqueline Pomerantz had Insomnia Here. Since 1994, she has facilitated The Joy of Writing, which has weekly meetings at the Ralph Thornton Centre, as well as on-line and Facebook members.

Fiction #32: Jon R. Flieger

2012-01-17T17:03:00.000-08:00

sorry I drunk textiled you last night again

FUCKIN autocorrect

We are drunk on kerosene and I swallow a Roman candle to impress you. The firebreather.

There. I started on the lie and the image so the truth is okay now. It is buried and you won’t read past the first line. I miss you and it’s alright to say that now. It’s fine. I see your face in patterns. You take shape in the stucco of a ceiling. I read your name in numbers and the static at the edge of the screen. The brain is an architect among wolves. This is a failing, but an intentional one. Human beings learned to read patterns to survive. I will survive you. This is on the nose but that’s okay. Language is for communicating. I will be plain. Call me to tell me you’re unhappy. That you miss me. That you’re sorry you got drunk before you left and kissed me. You have feelings for me even though

But.

Yup.

Only.

Okay. We’re okay.

We’re okay. Sure.

Listen to the dial tone scream never eat again my dogs will be fine. They will swallow my body and someone will come rescue them when no one sees me for a while. This is on the nose. That is a grown ass man wanting to die over you. Precious. You’re my white whale. Wait no. Harpoon imagery.

Nope. Not doing that.

I can drink you out of my brain. I am extra double powerful like that. I can mix kraken and dr. pepper. I can text Hollie that I have invented and swallowed the dr. doom and that I don’t miss you. She will call tomorrow to see if I’m okay.
You were kind of for real last night

And I’ll say nothing is ever for real. And she will lose interest in the conversation. I’m obviously all right and now I’m being boring.

She’ll say look I’m sorry that

And I’ll say nope. Nope not doing that.

And she’ll say but at some point you have to

And I’ll swallow my cell phone.

Go driving and see fire and dead crows eaten by live crows at the sides of roads. This is not metaphor or a pattern this is cannibalism. Buy a new phone and hover thumb over your number. Swallow me down. Language is for communicating. I shouldn’t buy a plane ticket. I should just survive. And yet. Put phone in pocket. Will maybe text you later. Drink kerosene or krakens. Feed the dogs and edit the dictionary settings on my phone. Why not.

*

Jon R. Flieger is from Windsor and now lives in Calgary. He is afraid of bees.

Interview: Matthew Firth

2012-01-14T14:24:00.000-08:00

Please tell us about your interest in the short story by

a) telling us a bit about your recent collection (e.g., how did it come about? does it have a recurring theme? do you have a particular story or passage that's a favorite?)

It’s a new short story collection called Shag Carpet Action, published by Vancouver’s Anvil Press: ten stories and a novella.

The novella part is new to me. I’ve never written (successfully, at least) anything longer than a long short story. The book came about the usual way. I write slowly, or maybe sporadically is a better way to put it. I go long periods of time not writing anything. This is fine by me. I like to wait until the engines are firing, rather than try to stoke them to life when they’re not in the mood.

So I wrote this book over about four years. I’m like most small press writers in that I have a day job, family and life outside of writing that eats up my time. I write out of a sense of urgency; when I have time and wherever I can. On the bus. At work at lunch. Early in the morning over a coffee before my kids wake up. That sort of thing. I never have sustained periods to ponder, pick, and scratch. I think things over on the bus, on my bike, maybe on a train if I’m travelling for work, and then lay it down when I have the time.

There is no recurring theme in Shag Carpet Action. Some stories are first-person narratives, others third. Some protagonists are sexually-ponderous 40-something housewives, some are horny teenaged boys, some are truculent, blue-collar workers with drug problems. The shortest story is about 350 words; the novella is 25,000 words. Shag Carpet Action takes readers all over the place. But I’d say the writing style and tone is what links the book, that and the subject matter to some degree.

The tone is bare-knuckled, sparse, urgent and direct. Nothing flowery or wasted. It’s driven by character action and dialogue. The subject matter tends toward the darker pockets of our hearts: to violence, lust, longing, loss, sex, and yearning for some change or some tilt in characters’ lives that will make their lives more bearable and infuse it with some minor joy before that is washed away by something more foreboding and shitty.

I don’t really have a favorite passage or story, although I’ve been getting a kick out of re-reading my story “Greeks” in Shag Carpet Action that I find funny. It’s more humorous than most other parts of the book. Humour is important in my work. It adds light and is important for keeping any type of fiction human and humane. “Greeks” makes me snicker lately. Maybe in this post-holiday mode, humour is more vital than usual right now.

(b) recommending a short story or collection by someone else that you admire (and why?)

I’ve read a few really good ones lately: If Only by Peter Stockland is superb. I like it because its characters are truly plausible and Canadian – in a contemporary way, rather than the cliché, surviving-on-the-prairies way. The Snows of Yesteryear by Len Gasparini because of its humour and honesty. Anticipated Results by Dennis E. Bolen because I love his damaged characters. The Mountie at Niagara Falls and Other Brief Stories by Salvatore Difalco because Difalco’s fictional bursts are blazingly insightful, humane and humorous.

Older collections I always go back to and admire: anything by Raymond Carver, Charles Bukowski, John Fante, Daniel Jones, Dan Fante, Laura Hird, Jim Christy, Dennis Cooper and others.

(b) reflecting on the 21st century and the short story: Are they a good match (and why)?

Yes, of course. I don’t see anything that suggests the short story is endangered. But I also don’t buy into clichés about shorter attention spans and quicker and more abrupt forms of communication (i.e., Twitter and all of that) somehow making short fiction more palatable and popular. Short fiction is as credible a literary art form and expression as any other. It will persist so long as people tell each other stories.

I cannot stand the arrogant perspective some novelists have that short stories are inferior and some sort of warm-up to writing a novel. This is a common sentiment in Canada in particular. No one tells poets, songwriters and playwrights to knock it off, grow up and write a novel, but this criticism is often fired at short story writers.

Short fiction is viable, vital and vibrant. I also don’t buy all this moaning about books being dead or reading being dead. It’s defeatist for one thing. Narratives are part of humanity and so long as we’re living and breathing – though that does get more difficult every day it seems sometimes – we’ll have fiction in one form or another, short and otherwise.

Interview: Sarah Selecky

2012-01-12T18:59:00.000-08:00

www.storyisastateofmind.com

www.sarahselecky.com

Please tell us about your interest in the short story by (a) telling us a bit about your recent collection (e.g., how did it come about? does it have a recurring theme? do you have a particular story or passage that's a favorite?)

I wrote the first drafts for This Cake Is for the Party when I was living in British Columbia. It took me a long time to write it - almost ten years, in fact. I kept writing drafts and letting them sit for about a year before I knew how to revise them. But then two of the stories, "How Healthy Are You?" and "Go Manchura," were both written within one year. That was an incredibly productive year for me. I still can't believe I did it.

The book wasn't "a book" until I'd finished revising almost all of the stories. I was just writing stories, one at a time, for many years. At one point I looked back at what I'd written, and I saw that many of them fit together. They were about the emotional ways people related to food. They were about people who wanted to be good and/or healthy but just couldn't figure out how to do it. They were about mental illness, and love, and fidelity (and infidelity). Seeing that - seeing that I was writing about the same thing over and over again - this was both gratifying and unsettling. Because it wasn't intentional!

I love the story "Where You Coming From, Sweetheart?" especially because it was one of the first stories I'd ever written in the collection. I started the draft of it around 1999. I reworked that draft and put it away and reworked it and trashed it and then rewrote it entirely a number of years later. So it's both the newest story in the book and the oldest story in the book.

(b) recommending a short story or collection by someone else that you admire (and why?)

I recently reread a story of Jennifer Egan's titled, "Safari." It's now a chapter of her novel-in-stories, "A Visit From the Goon Squad." I loved reading the story out of context, as a whole and solitary entity. Letting go of all of the other characters in the book, and just focusing on the moments of this story in particular - it was a thrill. Interestingly, I felt sneaky doing it this way. Almost as if I was cheating on the novel to enjoy the story so much on its own.

It says a lot about Egan's writing that she can pull this off - write a novel-in-stories with chapters that actually DO stand on their own, as short fiction. She doesn't take anything for granted - every word, every scene and image, it still has to count. No short cuts or assumptions - she builds a world and a voice from scratch in each story.

I read "Safari" in the 2010 Best American Short Stories anthology (ed. Richard Russo). One of the best things about these anthologies are the notes by contributors at the back of the book. I really try to savour these anthologies: I only read one short story every day (at the same time every morning), and then I pause to read the contributor's notes after each story.

After reading "Safari," I read Egan's notes about her process while she wrote it. Get this: she started a first draft of a story called "Safari" around 1988, but never finished it. She found it again years later, still liked something about it, but didn't do anything with it. Then, in 2008, twenty years later, she started writing another story -- and characters from that 1988 story appeared in this new story, which is now also titled, "Safari." It took her twenty years to write that story! And I believe that you can feel that, in her writing. Nothing is rushed, here - it's the real thing.

(c) telling us about Story is a State of Mind. What's it all about?

I know so many writers who struggle with writing in their life. They can't find the time, or it's hard for them to prioritize it in their life, or they're afraid of being terrible, or maybe they're afraid of what would happen if they actually DID write something good. Whatever the reason is for their resistance, the end result is unhappiness. When a writer isn't writing, he/she can experience terrible pain and longing.

I created this course to teach people how to repair their relationship to writing. It's for writers who know they’re good, or at least have a feeling that they’re good at writing, but they fear doing it anyway. Or they resist it. I made it for writers who struggle with writing itself. Writing is one activity that could potentially give them so much joy – if they just learned how to trust themselves, and teach themselves to write often and write well.

And it doesn’t matter if you’re a beginner or a seasoned writer, either. Every time a writer faces the blank page, it's difficult. Story Is a State of Mind is for writers who know they love to write, feel that they're called to do it, and want some support and instruction as they start writing a new story. It’s is designed especially for short fiction writers, but any writer can benefit from the methods.

It started as a wish: I was teaching my courses online in a wiki already (similar to what the Banff Wired Writing program and the UBC optional-residency MFA offers in terms of online workshopping). But there were a few problems: first, the obvious problem of time zones. Second, the problems around flexibility. Many writers came to me saying, “I wish I could take your course, but the time isn’t right for me right now.”

Then there was the issue around my own writing time. I love teaching so much. I offer writers advice and methods that are different than what academic programs offer, and I think it’s important. But if I spend all of my energy teaching, I don’t have the space and time I need to write - and then I become unhappy, too. I wished for a way to keep teaching more people what I feel most passionate about, to do it in a rich, full, motivating and interactive way, AND to still have time to write.

I looked into it, and discovered that this was not an uncommon wish. People have created successful, inspiring and educational digital programs that work this way, in different fields of study, like Chris Guillebeau and Danielle LaPorte. But nobody had created one for creative writers yet. So I did.

Fiction #31

2011-12-10T13:32:00.000-08:00

Here is new fiction, issue #31:

Koping by Carole Glasser Langille
The Deerflies by Jeffrey Griffiths

Submissions now open for #32.

Fiction #31: Carole Glasser Langille

2011-12-10T13:31:00.000-08:00

Koping

Dan didn’t know if he should say yes or no when he got the letter, or what his daughter Sylvie would want. After Sylvie dropped out of university a few months ago and returned home, she hardly left her room. She didn’t call anyone, or receive calls. "You have to love that girl," Dan said to his wife. "She’s so gentle and sweet." And sad, he thought. Lately Sylvie had grown skinny and all she wore was black, mostly ripped jeans and t-shirts. She’d had her tongue pierced when she was away at school and when she did speak he could see the flash of silver sparkle in her mouth, a sad twinkling. Lydia, a family doctor herself, hoped her daughter could avoid medication. Surely there were troubled young people who spent years in a darkened bedroom, and who painted or wrote poems or songs to haul themselves out of depression. Or simply rested and let their spirits slowly heal. Dan too hoped that if the environment were safe and stable, time would take its course. He remembered his mother saying, "May all your worries be money worries." He wished his troubles were only financial, as they had been when he was younger.

Dan looked out the window at trees he loved. He was glad his family lived on a quiet street. He might ask his oldest daughter what her insights were regarding this mess. But Sylvie didn’t seem to want to confide in anyone these days, especially not her half sister Marin. As far as he could tell, Sylvie hadn’t talked to a single soul in months except him and her mother. Sometimes Dan thought his very presence was imprisoning her, that she’d rather be anywhere than where she was, but he didn’t know what to do for her. Her brown eyes had that lacklustre dull glaze, like a lump of coal that would not catch fire. But when he closed his own eyes, he could see the filament glowing within her, one that glimmered and burned in the dark.

He thought for weeks about the letter, but put off his reply. He couldn’t deny that somehow, without him noticing, all the rooms in the house had become engulfed in shadow as if invisible trees had grown huge in front of windows. Sun could no longer penetrate the gnarled, overgrown branches blinding the house, invisible as they were. He imagined that if he opened the right door at the right moment, sun would come rushing in cascading the dust and gloom. But where was that magical door?

They didn’t leave Sylvie alone. He did not head off to Thibalt & Sons until Marin came over in the afternoon. She left only when Lydia was back from the hospital. Lydia’s mother came by in an emergency, but no one was happy with Pearl around and they tried to minimize her on-call visits. At first Pearl was baffled by Sylvie’s refusal to return to school. "She should be around other kids," Pearl said.

"She doesn’t want to be around anyone, obviously," Lydia told her mother. Pearl tried another tactic. She told Sylvie to "buck up" and realize how lucky she was. After a while, Sylvie refused to be in the same room with Pearl when she came over. "Indulged" Pearl said when describing her granddaughter. "She should be taking one course, at least, if she can’t take a full load." Dan would walk out of the room when Pearl was talking.

Lydia didn’t ask her daughter if she had plans to go back to school, or if she had any thoughts about getting a job. When the leaves began to turn, she took her for drives on back roads where maples were red and orange. Sylvie liked these drives. One morning, when she was out with her mother, Dan went into her room. The bright blue paint on the walls (was it Ultramarine, or Cornflower Blue, or Pthalo that she’d picked years ago?) could not disguise how dreary and airless the room was. This quiet frozen sea she surrounded herself with was the main lifeline she had now. On the floor by her bed, on a piece of looseleaf, were lines written in her tight, barely legible scrawl. He picked up the page and read: "Sometimes I feel I am climbing out of a hole so deep and sunk in cold, but I keep losing my grip. Each day I’m getting older and more exhausted." She was nineteen.

When Sylvie started going out for brief walks to the library, Lydia considered this great progress. Dan wanted to think so too, especially when Sylvie brought books back, mostly biographies. When she finished the last page of a biography on Cicero, she started again on page one. She read as if she were trying to flee something and might die trying. Stacks of paperbacks and hardcovers lay by her bed. "A room without books is a body without a soul," she said, quoting Cicero.

"Would you like to apply for a job at the library?" Dan asked. Sylvie shook her head. They were playing chess. She complained that their games had the same opening moves, so the next day she got out a chess book to see if she could learn new strategies. The next time Pearl asked what her plans were, Sylvie said, "He does not seem to me to be a free man who does not sometimes do nothing. Cicero."

One Saturday Sylvie didn’t get out of bed. Dan knocked on the door around noon. Sylvie was still in her pajamas, headphones on.

"What are you listening to?" Dan asked.

"Music," Sylvie said.

"Ookay. Why don’t you come down for something to eat."

She didn’t have breakfast that day until three. He wasn’t sure what time she went to sleep, he heard her in the kitchen around midnight, but Sunday, she didn’t leave her room except for a quick snack in the afternoon. When he called up to tell her supper was ready, and then came upstairs to insist she come to the table, she said she wasn’t hungry. He felt like it was parent versus daughter.

They should have had another child, Dan thought. Marin was eight when Sylvie was born, but Marin lived with her mother then, visiting only on holidays. She was more like an aunt than a sister. She thought he infantilized Sylvie. "The more you expect from her, the better she’ll do," she said. Dan didn’t think Marin understood the bigger picture. If Sylvie had a sister or brother she could confide in, maybe she wouldn’t feel so isolated. Maybe she wouldn’t spend hours in the bathroom. Was she trying to throw up?

Both he and Lydia, only children, wanted another child. But Lydia only conceived once, and they never bothered with medical intervention. They should have tried harder, Dan castigated himself. He remembered Sylvie begging her mother to have another baby. She was the only one in third grade without a brother or sister. "I’ll be a good big sister," she’d said. She was seven. She said she’d teach a little brother to use a scooter. If she had a sister, she’d give her all her dolls.

Her grandmother was in the room at the time. "It costs a lot of money to have a baby," Pearl said. "Ma," Lydia scolded , "why are you telling her that?" But Sylvie had already gone into her room and came back with her piggy bank.

"You can have the money I have," she’d told her mother. "All of it."

Even thinking about this made Dan feel helpless. He’d vowed never to send Sylvie to day care. But he wasn’t able to keep that promise either. Monday through Friday he’d walk Sylvie the eight blocks to WEE Care at eight and pick her up when he got back from work at half past five. When Sylvie started going to primary, a girl from grade six waited for her after school and walked Sylvie, and the other young children, three blocks to day care. One day Sylvie got out late from class and the older child had already gone with the others. Sylvie waited. Should she go to WEE Care on her own? Should she run home and cross the busy street alone? In the end, she ran back to her house. A truck stopped abruptly, horn blasting, as she dashed across the road. It was just luck that Dan happened to be home that time of day. He was in the kitchen making tea and trying to shake the cold he had when he saw Sylvie race up the hill. "They left without me," she blurted as she ran in. "Can I stay home?"

"They left without you? How could that be?" he said, staring at his daughter who was still catching her breath.

"I don’t know," she said and started crying. "Do I have to go to day care?" He could imagine how scary it had been for her, coming home all by herself, poor little thing; she was only five. "Of course you can stay home," he said, and hugged her while she cried.

"What good does it to do to torment yourself?" Lydia asked only the other night. "We can’t only have faith when things are going well. We have to believe things will be okay, even when they’re difficult." But lately, when Dan was alone with Sylvie, the silence would tighten around everything in the house, and Dan would feel chilled. Conversations were difficult too.

"Numbers have personalities too, don’t you think?" Sylvie said out of the blue, when they were eating lunch. "Ah Sylvie," he thought. Her name meant "Of the forest," he would remind himself and repeat the name. Trees were of the forest and lived a long time. What were more magnificent than trees? He sighed. It was hard for him to simply watch and wait and not have any plan. When the letter arrived it felt, if not like divine intervention, certainly like a gentle nudge from some invisible source.

At first he couldn’t figure out who it was from. Did he know a Britt Hakala? But of course, she was the daughter of Nils, the friend he made in Sweden decades ago. Nils made his time in Sweden bearable. Now his daughter was graduating high school and wanted to visit in the summer.

When he finally brought up the possibility of her staying for a couple of weeks, Marin thought the plan ridiculous. Later she added, "Mom thinks it’s incredible too, that you’d invite a stranger into the house when Sylvie is so sick." It used to annoy him that his ex-wife had such a keen interest in his family. But now he just laughed at the unsolicited comments from a woman who had once made his life so difficult. When Dan finally asked Sylvie what she thought, she said she didn’t mind as long as Britt stayed in the guestroom. "That’s good enough for me," Dan told Lydia, who’d thought the idea a good one all along. He wrote back welcoming his friend’s daughter.

At the end of August Marin went with Lydia, Dan and Sylvie to the airport to pick up Britt from her twenty-hour flight, the four of them silent in the whoosh of traffic as dusk turned to evening. But on the way back, Britt did all the talking. "Most people don’t talk when they’re tired," Britt said, "but that’s when I can’t seem to stop. Forgive me!" she said and everyone laughed.

It surprised Dan that Sylvie didn’t mind going to the malls and watching as Britt tried on dresses and skirts that were especially unsuited to the Swedish climate, asking Sylvie’s opinion each time she came out of the dressing room. When she said she couldn’t get clothes like this in Sweden, Lydia mumbled, "Thank goodness," as she and Dan watched her purchase low cut jeans and shirts that ended above her waist. She was much taller than Sylvie, but she walked next to her new friend at a comfortable gait, even in the new heels she purchased, a tall blonde teenager with long hair, striding beside a petite girl with dark hair shorter than a boy’s. The fact that Sylvie hardly said a word didn’t faze Britt, who was used to her quiet Stockholm friends. She said she loved being in Canada and whenever she spoke, her brown eyes sparkled. She had a scar over the bridge of her nose and onto her forehead, a thin silver line of scar tissue which looked like a premature worry line. It made her appear burdened beyond her years and though Dan knew this wasn’t true, he felt protective toward her. Often he and Lydia would hear music drifting from Sylvie’s room as she shared CD’s she liked with Britt. They lied, you CAN get blood from a stone, Dan heard a CD blare late one evening. His daughter was simply listening to music with a friend, something perfectly ordinary. For the first time in months Dan felt like he could stop holding his breath.

He’d told Lydia all about Koping, how he’d spent one semester as an exchange student in that small town, about an hour and a half south of Stockholm, when he was in high school. Now he told her again what a cold, dark place Koping was. Most of the people were chilly as well, aloof and silent. He met Nils, a student who lived on a farm down the road, a few weeks after he arrived. Nils knew the old couple Dan was staying with, who didn’t speak English and rarely smiled. Having Dan in their house seemed to irritate them. Why had they signed up to host a teenager? The first time Nils came by, having heard about this student from Canada, he gave Dan a bear hug. "You’re going to help me with my English, yes?" he said but as it turned out, Nils was the one who helped Dan. He lent Dan skis, took him on easy trails, invited him to play ice hockey with his friends. When the old woman said Dan wasn’t to go out at night, Nils explained that they had to attend a meeting at school that evening. Then he drove Dan to a party, the only party he was to go to during his time in Sweden. Of course they returned late but Nils walked into the house with Dan and gave an account to the woman of car trouble he’d had. What a look she gave Nils. After Dan returned to Canada, it was Nils who kept up the correspondence year after year.

"To Britt, Sylvie is a typical nineteen-year-old who’s just a bit on the quiet side," Lydia said as she was going to sleep. "Aren’t we lucky you went to Sweden thirty years ago," she said yawning, her hand on Dan’s arm, the front of her body brushing against the back of his.

Dan wouldn’t call it luck, exactly, that made him go into the kitchen later that week to make tea when Britt and his daughter were playing chess in the living room and didn’t know anyone could overhear them. "This girl in my class is a beauty," Britt said. "All the boys like her. But she’s only interested in math. Oh, she is a brilliant girl."

"Your move" he heard his daughter say. But Britt continued, "There was a math conference in Germany when we were in grade nine and a professor wanted her to go. Her parents weren’t able to come, so she went on her own with the professors. She was only 14."

Sylvie spoke so softly he could barely hear. But he did hear. "When you’re ugly you have to stay close to home," Sylvie said. "Though when you’re very ugly, maybe it would be better if you didn’t have a hole to crawl into."

"But what do you mean?" Britt said.

"Your move," Sylvie said. "You’re losing."

"No really, what do you mean?"

He couldn’t see Sylvie but he could sense her glare. "It’s your move," she said, her voice icy. Dan unplugged the kettle and walked upstairs without making a sound. What a cold dark place coping was.

When Marin came by later, she found him sitting in his office in the dark. "Can I come in?" she asked. But when she began to talk, he didn’t respond. "What’s up?" she finally asked.

"What do you know about Cicero?"

"Sylvie’s the expert on Cicero."

"Did you know he went into a deep depression when things were difficult for him," Dan said.

"And? Your point?"

"I wonder if that’s why Sylvie is interested in reading about him."

"Dad, I don’t think Cicero was renowned for his depression."

"I read that when his daughter died he felt such anguish, he wrote to his friend, ‘I have lost the one thing that bound me to life.’ He read everything in his friend’s library about overcoming grief."

"So? Is there a paragraph I’m missing here? Whose dying?" Marin asked.

Dan looked down at the rug. Then he started to cry. Marin froze, staring at him.

"Sylvie is very unhappy," he said. "We can’t be too careful. I mean, if she were to ..."

"Oh Dad," Marin said, and went over to hug him.

"I’m sorry," Dan said, but he kept crying. He thought of what Sylvie said once, quoting Cicero: A man of courage is also full of faith. He wanted to have faith. At least he was getting a fuller idea of the problem. Things were coming to the surface, and wasn’t this visibility the first step in recovery?

"Have you told Sylvie that you’re worried about her, that you think she needs help?" Marin asked.

"I can’t force her to see a doctor."

"Yes you can. You can find a doctor she wants to talk with."

Dan didn’t say anything. But when he sighed he felt as if the pain were leaking out of his chest and expanding to fill the room. If he were to open one of the windows it would keep expanding, saturating the damp night air.

*

Carole Glasser Langille's fourth book of poetry, Church of the Exquisite Panic: The Ophelia Poems, will be published in the fall of 2012. Her last book was a collection of short stories, When I Always Wanted Something. She teaches Creative Writing:Poetry at Dalhousie University.

Photo credit: Karen Runge

Fiction #31: Jeffrey Griffiths

2011-12-10T13:30:00.000-08:00

The Deerflies

Payne gave the kitchen table the once over, tools, keys, a plastic grocery bag, but no hat. He scanned the counter digging at his mind to remember where he’d left it. His head was killing him. He needed the yellow ball cap, the beak covered in finger prints, to squeeze his temples.

He and Tammy had killed two bottles of wine the night before, somewhere between nine and whenever she had made her way upstairs to bed. She didn’t look back at him as she pushed her harsh blond hair off her shoulder. Payne had remained on the sofa, tucked into his form in the cushions.

He’d heard Tammy and her son Jason eating breakfast earlier and had faked being asleep to see what they would say. They whispered as he strained to hear while keeping his eyes pinched shut. He stayed that way until Tammy took Jason to school and then off to her cleaning job at the Super 8 on the highway.

Payne knew that Jason hated him. The bastard stayed with his father every weekend and sauntered in on Sunday night wearing a baggy T shirt and his jeans around his ass. Two more years and the kid would be 16 and hopefully with his dad full time. At least that’s what he claimed.

Payne plugged in the kettle and dug around the sink for a clean mug. He found the one with Darth Vader on it. The water boiled and he filled it. He ran his hand through his oily hair before spooning a healthy dose of instant coffee. He stirred until white froth came up. He turned on the TV and flopped down on the couch. A news station from Buffalo bragged about keeping its audience informed and ready for severe weather. Footage of hurricanes and snow storms played while an anchor man locked eyes with the camera. Payne switched off the set and went to the bathroom.

A spear of dread hit him as he remembered that Jason’s dad still had their computer. Big Jason had taken it home for repairs. There was nothing Payne could do but hold the screen door open while the intimidating bugger carried it out. The whole issue started because Payne had tried to sabotage the machine to keep Jason off it.

He grabbed a car magazine from the pile in the bathtub. A grey cat was curled up in the sink looking like a birds nest. Payne pictured three robin’s eggs on her stomach.

The split vinyl on the toilet seat pinched his ass; he made a mental note to bring duct tape the next morning. He was reading about fiberglass patching when the phone rang. He waited until it let up. Two weeks before he had thrown the answering machine against the woodstove, the pieces were still scattered along the baseboard. The little cassette tape tucked in the corner. The scrape of his mother’s condemning voice had pushed him to do it, "Pick up Payne. I know you’re there. Pick up the Jesus telephone."

Payne had been out of work for a couple of years. His mother sent him a cheque each month. She also owned the house and land he lived on.

At the bottom of the stairs he found his cap, it felt like an old buddy as it slid onto his skull. Payne had the whole day now, Tammy was on day shift and Jason wouldn’t get off the school bus until four-thirty. He looked out the picture window. Condensation filled each corner between the plates of glass, it was worse than ever this summer. Payne would have to take off the wood trim and refit it one day. There were hundreds of things he should do around the house, it was falling apart. Tammy told him more times than he needed to hear that the place was a dump. "All the old wrecked cars in the field. Do you know how many?" she had asked with her eyes bulging at him. "Fourteen god damn pieces of junk for everyone to see."

Payne knew what the field looked like, but all those cars were good for parts. He had just picked up an 89 Ford pick-up for $150; it just needed rings to pass the emissions test. He had another Ford with a 302 that would do for a ring switch. Payne had been using Tammy’s Toyota since she moved in the year before. She had been complaining that he was leaving her stranded on her days off. It was his place and she wasn’t paying any rent so why shouldn’t he drive it?

Exactly one month ago Payne knew that Tammy had decided to leave him, she had said nothing, but the decision was on her face. Payne had thought he was alone that day when he was guzzling ice cold raspberry Kool-aid from the plastic pitcher. He spit out the sweet drink and cupped his mouth with his hand, his eyetooth pounded. The tooth had been slowly turning grey over the past few months. Payne frantically dug through the tools on the table, grabbed a tiny pair of vice grips, and fit the jaws over his tooth. For only a second he hesitated, then squeezed and pulled. The ache was gone instantly. Salty blood filled his mouth. He spit into the sink, filled a glass with water, swished it in his mouth and spit again. The stringy red water gathered in the basin like egg yolk. Payne turned his head when he heard Tammy clear her throat. She grabbed her purse and car keys and didn’t come back until after midnight.

After that, Tammy started staying at her mother’s on her days off work. If Payne phoned, Tammy’s mother would treat him like he was a bill collector. She would tell him that Tammy was at the store, in the shower, a list of lame excuses. He felt like Tammy was drifting away while he stood on a shore watching, doing nothing.

Payne made the decision to get the truck running. After an hour the deerflies were driving him crazy, always buzzing around just out if his reach. He gave up. As he walked back to the house his shadow showed two more flies behind his head. He pulled off his hat and swung it around to ward them off. They were back in seconds.

Tammy walked in at five-thirty. Jason was already slouched on the sofa watching a rerun of Cops.

"We gotta get satellite TV. This aerial sucks the…"

"Hey, watch your tongue," Payne said looking at Tammy as though Jason’s mouth was her fault. She was the one that had the kid with Big Jason in the first place.

Jason rolled his eyes.

"I’m making veggie burgers for dinner. I suppose you want real meat," Tammy said tilting her head as she stared at Payne.

"If you don’t mind." Payne watched the television as four cops handcuffed a biker. The criminal’s face was blurred out as though that would somehow save him from embarrassment. Payne remembered boys from his old nieghbourhood in the city that bragged about their crimes, like it was all they had to create some form of self-worth. Like the men that collected trash, they always threw the cans as far as they could. As though they did it to say, "I’ll pick up your shit, but don’t look down on me."

Tammy sat a plate in Payne’s lap. Two hamburgers and a pile of potatoe chips. He had to get up and get the mustard and relish out of the fridge.

"Thanks," he said.

Tammy sat on the couch beside Jason and fell into a vacant stare. They switched channels and found the final segment of the news, the human interest story, saved for last to wind the audience down to thinking that the world may not actually end on that particular day. A nice couple stood in front of their large suburban home, they had just adopted a dog from the animal shelter. The dog had been found in a basement chained to a work bench. An overly lit photo of a skinny black lab was flashed on the screen before the couple was shown with the freshly groomed animal.

Tammy shook her head as she sipped club soda. "I wish they’d say what happened to the pigs that had the dog. I hope they got charged. They probably just got a slap on the wrist. They way our court system works the case probably won’t be heard for five years, by then the jerks will have another dog to torture."

Payne meticulously spread an even layer of mustard on the bottom half of his hamburger bun.

"That’s right Payne; bury your head in the sand. Don’t say what you think. The world’s going to hell and you hide here on your little junk-yard farm." Tammy craned her neck around to look him in the eye.

Jason snickered.

Jason’s sarcastic laugh made Payne want to smash his head. He was exactly the kind of kid that Payne spent his childhood avoiding. The aggressive ones that used muscle and numbers for strength. Jason wasn’t at all stupid; he had high marks in public school. Though recently he seemed to be turning into his father, a path to a bad place.

Over the next week Payne mustered up the ambition to get the truck on the road. He worked at night while Tammy and Jason watched television. It was cool outside and peaceful. Getting his vehicle up and running was also a means of survival. If Tammy left he’d be screwed for wheels.

On Saturday Payne took the truck for a test run, he wasn’t worried about the outdated license plate. The police weren’t too picky with the locals. He pulled into the parking lot of Nichols grocery store. His heart flipped when he saw a car like Tammy’s drive into the space beside him. A guy that must have been six-foot-five unfolded himself from the red Toyota and went into the store. Payne sat for a minute to settle himself. When he got out of his truck he glanced at the plates on the Toyota he saw that it was Tammy’s car. He jumped back into his vehicle. He started the motor. Sitting with his hand still on the key he shut it off again.

Payne decided he would follow him. He could taste fear just thinking about it. The tall man came out five minutes later with a long paper bag that Payne figured was a bottle of wine. He imagined a confrontation with Tammy and the giant. Payne busting down the door and punching the goof in the mouth, he had the fight choreographed, the kick, the missed swing, a quick succession of insulting face slaps and the final blow. He wasn’t sure if he left with Tammy or not in his fantasy film.

The Toyota drove onto the main street and turned east toward the countryside. Payne clunked the column shifter into drive and followed thinking he would at least see where the guy lived. The Toyota quickly sped up past the speed limit. Payne kept up from a distance. A pack of cars moved slowly on the first hill outside of town, a dump truck was holding them up. The Toyota hauled up behind them and without hesitating swung into the left lane. Payne watched in shock. The guy crested the hill and vanished. Payne nearly slammed into the slow moving car at the end of the line. The driver held the rear-view mirror while the teenage girl in the back seat turned and gave Payne a look of disgust.

*

Jeff Griffiths lives in the west end of Hamilton with his wife and two young children. He writes like a fiend to sustain his obsession to submit work to literary journals.

He has published magazine articles, book reviews, and a column in a local magazine (in 2007).

His short fiction has appeared in Front and Centre, Hammered Out, The Puritan, Qwerty, The Nashwaak Review and various on-line journals. He also received the Arts Hamilton award for short fiction in 2007 and 2008.

He is very close to completing a short story collection and recently received Writer’s Reserve Grant from the OAC thanks to a recommendation from Wolsak and Wynn publishing House.
He is currently teaching Creative Writing and Dynamics of Prose for the Writing for Publication Program at Mohawk College.

He maintains a poetry-ish blog called TVAFFECTS. http://tvaffects.blogspot.com/

Interview: Matthew J. Trafford

2011-12-06T18:29:00.000-08:00

Please tell us about your interest in the short story by:

A) telling us a bit about your recent collection (e.g., how did it come about? Does it have a recurring theme? Do you have a particular story of passage that’s a favourite?)

The Divinity Gene came very much out of my studies at UBC’s Optional-Residency MFA program. I went in to the program thinking I was a poet, but the program requires students to work in multiple genres. I took a short story course with Zsuzsi Gartner, and fell in love with the form.

I also started reading writers I’d never encountered before, and through that, felt able for the first time to write stories I’d had the ideas for but never knew how to execute. For example, I can remember so clearly when I had the idea for “Forgetting Helen,” about a boy who’s born in a library, but I had no idea how to go about writing a story like that.

I ended up doing my thesis in short fiction, and that became the basis of what eventually became The Divinity Gene. The book has ten stories in it, and generally they deal with science and religion, grief and loss, belonging and identity.

“The Grimpils” is probably my favourite story in the collection, because it was one of the hardest to write -- the first story to be started and the last one finished. It has an omniscient point of view, a large number of characters, and footnotes. I’m very happy with the way it turned out, and I care about those characters a lot. I think of the story as the collections unsung hero, because only one reviewer mentioned it, who didn’t like it.

But when I hear from readers that “The Grimpils” was their favourite story, those are good moments for me.

B) Recommending a short story or collection by someone else that you admire (and why?)

When asked my favourite short story, I always answer Rick Moody’s “Boys,” because I can’t read it without crying. There are so many short fiction writers I admire - Adam Hasslett, Jim Shepard, Aimee Bender, Ryan Boudinot.

This was a great year for short stories in Canada and of the ones I haven’t got to yet, I’m especially looking forward to reading Michael Christie’s collection The Beggar’s Garden and Julie Booker’s Up Up Up.

This year’s Journey Prize collection was also a fantastic read, especially Seyward Goodhand’s “The Fur Trader’s Daughter.”

Right now I’m reading Jeremy Dyson, a British writer, The Cranes That Build the Cranes. It’s macabre and strange and right up my alley - I’m loving it.

C) Reflecting on the 21st Century and the short story: Are they a good match (and why?)

I think the creation and telling of stories is intrinsic to human life and culture. This century is interesting because the world is more connected than ever before; the internet allows us to read cross-nationally with an ease that has never existed before (look at something like joyland).

Tablets and e-readers present new opportunities for the short story form to become popular again, though it’s anybody’s guess how all this will pan out. At the end of the day I’m excited to be writing and reading stories at this time, and optimistic about the future of the form.

Carole Glasser Langille on short stories

2011-11-27T10:03:00.000-08:00

I love short stories because, when they work, characters reveal in a few pages what is deepest and most intimate in their lives.

The author disappears and I am no longer reading a story but entering it. Because it distills what is essential, the way a poem does, the intensity and details of a short story linger.

In "Awaiting Orders" by Tobias Wolff, we know who the sergeant is beneath his disguise because we witness his desires and secrets and failures. We mourn for him. I don’t believe our knowledge would increase, and could very possibly diminish, if we had to accompany him through chapter after chapter of a novel.

Several times after slogging through a contemporary novel, I’ve thought, "It’s so padded. But it would have made a terrific short story." Of course there are wonderful novels - but often when I’ve finished a short story, I feel as if I’ve read a novel.

The insights and observations of a gorgeous story remain with me. I have thought of the following paragraph from Alice Munro’s "Family Furnishings," many times, a perfect description of the creative process:

I went in and had a cup of coffee. The coffee was reheated, black and bitter—its taste was medicinal, exactly what I needed. I was already feeling relieved, and now I began to feel happy. Such happiness, to be alone. To see the hot late-afternoon light on the sidewalk outside, the branches of a tree just out in leaf, throwing their skimpy shadows... I did not think of the story I would make about Alfrida—not of that in particular—but of the work I wanted to do, which seemed more like grabbing something out of the air than constructing stories.

In that same story a character relays a family secret and the narrator says, "There was some sense of triumph about her, which wasn’t hard to understand. If you have something to tell that will stagger someone, and you’ve told it, and it has done so, there has to be a balmy moment of power."

Short stories contain that power. It’s difficult to pare down a story to a handful of pages and get rid of what’s extraneous. But when successful, like reducing wine to make sauce, the end result is concentrated and rich.

A short story is like travelling to an exotic country for a brief visit. Shopping in a market or riding a bus, rather than being mundane experiences, stimulate the senses. We see things as if for the first time because, in this country, it is the first time. The world of a short story has that vitality. Because we do not stay too long, the unusual retains its mystique.

There are many short story collections I love: All Aunt Hagar's Children, by Edward P. Jones, Love and Obstacles by Aleksandar Hemon, Man Descending by Guy Vanderhaeghe, Drown by Junot Diaz, Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff, Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri, Gold Boy Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, by Maile Meloy, every collection of Alice Munro’s (how can I choose one?). Several individual stories have had a powerful effect on me: "Werewolves in Their Youth" by Michael Chabon, "An Apology" by Ramona Dearing, "Cowboy" by Thomas McGuane, "Or Else" by Antonya Nelson.

After reading their stories, I’ve wanted to write to each author and declare my undying devotion. But I’ve resisted the impulse. I did not raise my hand during the question period at an Edward P. Jones reading, as I wanted, to blurt out, "Your readers love you." Instead I began, slowly, painstakingly, to write my own stories. As Emerson said, "What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." The short story zooms in on what lies within us.

*

Photo credit: Karen Runge

Fiction #30

2011-11-08T16:49:00.000-08:00

Here is new fiction, issue #30:

The Draugr by Kelly Evans
In-Breeding by Zachary Alapi

Submissions now open for #31.

Fiction #30: Kelly Evans

2011-11-08T16:43:00.000-08:00

The Draugr

There was once a great chieftain, kind and fair and loved by all, including his daughter, the only child to whom he could leave his fortune. He was a wise man who lived longer than anyone expected and while there was much mourning when the chieftain passed away it surprised no one.

The chieftain’s daughter prepared her father’s body; for seven days the daughter and her servants cleaned the body, sewed new clothes and gathered the possessions the chieftain had most loved while living so that these might be buried along with him to use in the afterlife. On the seventh day the chieftain was carried from his home to the grave site, the men carrying their lord ensuring that the coffin was lifted and lowered three times in three different directions. When the chieftain’s body was placed in the grave a pair of iron scissors was placed on his chest. Around him were golden goblets and dishes, arm bands and pendants and many swords and daggers encrusted with valuable stones and decorated with intricate designs and lines praising the gods. The grave was then covered with rocks, sod and soil and when this was done they mourners gathered in the great hall for the sjaund, the feast to honour the dead.

The mourners gathered around the door of the hall and there awaited the chieftain’s daughter. When she appeared two large men of the village lifted the girl three times over the doorframe, as was the tradition, for in this way the future could be seen.

“What did you see?” the villagers asked. They all followed the heiress to the Lord’s chair at the end of the hall.

The daughter had been raised to be sensible, logical and fair. She sat , smoothing her funeral dress as a goblet of mead was brought to her. She took a sip before speaking. “I saw a mountain shrouded in mist. The mountain shook and great rocks crashed down the side. Three trees stood and were crushed by a huge boulder rolling down the side of the mountain. After this the vision ended.” She took another sip of mead.

There were mutterings in the crowd and one man asked, “But what does it mean?”

The daughter shook her head. “I know not, but this is not the time to discuss it. My father’s spirit awaits its feast!”

“And mead!” someone shouted. A great noise went up in the hall and the daughter ordered the food and drink be served. The smell of roast boar suddenly filled the hall and over the next few hours all manner of beast and fowl was served, along with mead and wine.

Later in the night one of the dead lord’s serving men started to argue with a man from another village who had come to pay his respects. “Your lord was great but mine is the greater of the two!” the visitor said.

The local man, by now quite drunk, and angered by the visitor’s insult, roared back, “My lord was much better than yours, you dog! He was a great warrior and as fair a ruler as any man seen! And he had more gold than any man in Iceland, as befitted his station!”

The men continued to argue drunkenly, unaware that three strangers had entered the hall and were secretly listening to the fight. “My brothers, we have stumbled onto a wonderful opportunity this night. Tomorrow at midnight we will go the grave of this chieftain and steal his gold. What need has a dead man of gold? If he is as wealthy as his servant said, we will needs never work again.”

The following night the thieves met by the chieftain’s grave, wearing their darkest cloaks so as to remain hidden. Silently they removed the rocks and sod until the gold that had been buried with the lord could be seen shining through the dirt. Each of the three men had a sack with him and each took enough gold to fill their own sack. When they could carry no more they snuck away with their stolen gold, hastily refilling the grave so that no one would know that they had been there.

The next day the chieftain’s daughter visited her father’s grave and noticed that some of the rocks and gravel had been disturbed. Dismissing it as animals, she knelt beside the cairn and spoke to her father of her sorrow at losing him. As she spoke she thought she saw a haze hovering over the mound but again dismissed it, believing it to be an illusion caused by her grief and exhaustion. But when a young bird who was flying over dropped from the sky onto grave, cold and dead, this she knew she could not ignore.

The daughter announced her suspicions to her household when she returned. “There is a draugr in the village. I tell you this so you might be prepared.”

Most of the household listened however even the conscientious were not spared the draugr’s wrath. A shepherd was out later than usual one night when he heard an unearthly howl. Suddenly the foulest stench surrounded him, stinking of putrefying flesh. As the shepherd stood to investigate his entire flock came charging over a hill, straight toward him. He saw that some had their flesh hanging off of them and that others ignored the entrails they dragged behind as they ran in terror. They made the most piteous noise as they ran, their bleats sounding like screams. The rotting smell grew worse and the shepherd knew he had to get away. But the realization came too late; the draugr appeared amidst the flock, still picking the sheep and tearing into them with sharp misshapen teeth. The draugr had taken the form of the dead chieftain however it made a mockery of the man the lord had once been. It wore the chieftain’s clothes but the body was so bloated and putrid that the clothes had torn at all the seams and were stained dark with the draugr’s excretions. The creature’s flesh was dark blue with glowing white eyes and its weight had grown so dense that the ground shook with every step it took. Yet it was still quick and easily caught the shepherd, lifting him into the air with both hands and tearing the man apart. The draugr chased remaining terrified sheep off of a cliff, laughing as it did so. More mischief and damage occurred in the village, for illness and death followed in the draugr’s wake.

The three thieves, who believed they had gotten away with their crime, dismissed the tales of destruction as the delusions of superstitious villagers. They laughed and enjoyed their riches, mocking the dead chieftain though they had been taught as children that this would bring misfortune. One night the eldest of the thieves was stumbling home alone along a deserted road. He had been visiting his cousin in a nearby town and they had had much to drink. Singing and giggling to himself, he did not notice that a cold fog had descended on him as he walked, nor did he notice the foul stench that surrounded him. As he neared his own village the cold air had finally sharpened his senses and he became aware of thunderous footsteps following him. Turning, he saw an enormous blue shape advancing quickly towards him and tried to get away. But he was still drunk and stumbled, falling onto the cold ground. He looked up and saw that the huge shape was now towering over him, five times the size of any man, and was rocking back and forth, shrieking. Scrabbling in the dirt and now mindless with fear, the thief screamed in agony as the draugr fell onto him, crushing him so badly that his organs split through his skin and fell onto the ground. In this way the first thief died.

The second thief, after hearing of his friend’s death, decided to take a trip to the mainland. He booked passage on a ship which would sail in three days’ time and readied his belongings, including the dead chieftain’s gold. The evening before his voyage he made sure a dagger was close, for he now slept with a weapon. He had felt a sense of unease all day and now that the night had come his feeling grew worse. Despite his disquiet the second thief fell into a deep sleep, and was thus unaware of the draugr in his room. The draugr closed its dead white eyes and flew into the thief’s dreams, showing the man death and fear and the end of all things. When the thief failed to show at the dock the next day to board the ship a servant was sent to his house, where the criminal was found dead in his bed, a look of terror on his face.

By now the third thief was aware that something was coming after him but was still arrogant and believed that his fellow-conspirators had been weak. He snuck into each of their homes and took all of the gold that they had taken from the dead chieftain’s grave, storing it along with his own share in the cellar in his house. He barred the doors to his home, covered all of the windows and had a local shaman give him tokens of protection to hang on trees around his property. Nothing would gain entrance to his home, living or dead. The draugr, seeing what the last thief had done, stood outside of the house and in the old tongue roared a curse at the man. Howling as he finished he flew off into the night. Inside the house the thief shivered in fear but emerged the next morning alive, if a little disoriented. He went down to the river to bathe himself, laughing at his own superstitions and fear. But when he undressed the smell that suddenly came from his own body nearly overpowered him. Looking down at his arms he saw nothing but patches of rotting flesh, pus and corruption dripping from each wound. His entire body was covered in sores, some with small wriggling maggots burrowing deeper. He ran to the shaman who told him that this was old magic and impossible to cure. In despair the last thief ran back to his house. He had to do something, he would cure himself. He heated the dagger that had been by his bed and when the weapon was red hot he sliced the bad flesh from his arm, leg and torso. The pain made the thief cry out and he lost consciousness. When he awoke he saw that the wounds were worse than before and again tried to cut the infection out with his knife. Again he passed out. The next time he woke he was delirious, the agony excruciating. He thought of his gold and knew he had to survive but there was nothing the thief could do. When they presented his body to the chieftain’s daughter he had only a single small wound on his arm. All of the gold that had been taken from her father’s grave had also been collected from the last thief’s house.

One of the daughter’s advisors spoke. “The draugr has had its justice; it has claimed the lives of the men who stole from it yet it still remains with us. Is there any man in the village who will help us to secure the creature?”

No one spoke, all were terrified of the beast. The chieftain’s daughter stood and addressed the villagers. “I will do it, I will return the draugr to his grave. It was once my father and the responsibility is mine. I require a few men to help me.”

The daughter first ordered that her father’s grave be opened, that all of the rocks and sod be removed, and that the gold that had been taken by the thieves be restored. She then changed to her warmest clothes and sat waiting by the grave until nightfall. As the light dimmed the haze she had seen her first night at the grave returned and the smell of decay embraced her. She stood and turned. The draugr was before her, enormous and dripping fluid onto the ground.

“I say out loud that I have respect for the draugr before me. The draugr before me is a mighty warrior whom many will sing of. I cower before the great draugr and while I am unworthy to address the draugr I request the powerful draugr allow me to speak with my deceased father.”

The draugr listened to the words of the daughter but was unmoved. It roared and took a step toward her. She gathered her courage and yelled over the noise. “Father! Help me, please! Father, I miss you.” The draugr stumbled and swayed. “Father, I miss you and think of you every day!” Again the draugr swayed, holding out a decaying arm to steady itself and howled in pain. The daughter took a step towards the creature and whispered, “Father, I love you.” When the draugr stumbled again, the chieftain’s daughter rushed at it with an iron knife. Nothing could kill a draugr but the iron would hurt it. The beast fell backwards into the open grave, screaming and grasping at the knife lodged in its chest. The daughter acted quickly: she jumped into the grave after the draugr and using the same knife she sawed off the thing’s head. It was only when she saw the light fade from the pale white eyes that she climbed out and ordered the grave to be refilled.

To this day songs are sung of the chieftain’s daughter and her great love for her father.

*

Kelly Evans has been a writer for as long as she can remember but is currently trapped in the life of a Business Analyst. She writes for pleasure because there is no possible amount of money existing that would be worth the torment it occasionally causes her. Four years ago Kelly moved to Toronto, Canada from London, England after sixteen years away from home. She brought three cats and a teacher back with her; she couldn’t bear to leave the cats behind and she’s married to the teacher, who would have complained.

Fiction #30: Zachary Alapi

2011-11-08T16:19:00.000-08:00

In-Breeding

“I almost had a threesome once,” Ted said, casually sipping a strong Belgian Chimay in a footed pilsner glass, exclusively brewed at some remote Trappist monastery in Belgium.

Ted had already been careful to point out that only seven such brewing monasteries existed. Six in Belgium, and one holdover in Holland. His beer was nine percent, yet tasted like rolled oats, Maine blueberries, and “mad” cherries. Or so he said. With our evening beer education complete, Clarissa and I now had a course in multiple partner manipulation to sit through.

The conversation had turned to sex, a seeming inevitability because none of us were guaranteed it tonight. Times like these require the ammunition of spank-bank stories. Memories you can recall and use to elicit jealousy, admiration, or, depending on the atmosphere and number of drinks consumed, disgust amongst your peers. Ted cast the illusion of having a Rolodex of stories and had waited until splurging on a twelve-dollar pint to savour and impart the latest one.

“Do tell,” I implored. I could sense Ted smirking at my Früli, a strawberry flavoured Belgian brew that lacked manliness with its stained fuchsia coloration resembling Slushy syrup. I didn’t care. It tasted fantastic.

“I was at this party and ended up on the couch with two pretty-littles.”

“What point of the party?” I was good at cutting Ted off with the kind of questions that forced him to enhance details. He was usually purposefully vague. I could sense Clarissa’s intrigue. Clarissa was gay, but she and Ted had fooled around briefly when she expressed interest in pinch-hitting for the other team. When she couldn’t get wet for him, she broke down, lamenting how she thought she might be asexual since she had the same excitement issues with women. Despite his public bravado, Ted nurtured her through the whole thing. Now she was his lesbian wingwoman.

“Late. We’d been drinking solidly for several hours.”

“Beer or liquor? Or mixing?”

“Mixing. I was at least. You remember Karen?” Ted asked me.

“Of course. We dated in grade five. I’m pretty sure she was the hottest girl in school at the time. She dumped me after I asked her to wash her mouth before kissing me, because of my peanut allergy. Instead of having my first kiss at 11, I had it six years later. I blame all my subsequent sexual awkwardness on that one incident.”

Ted and Clarissa laughed. Clarissa was nursing a rum and Coke, scanning the bar that looked like a clear rectangle filled with oil. It was a deep black, and the glasses, beer and wine, hanging from gold racks above it, reflected off the surface.

My anecdote was like stuffing two packages of smelling salts up each nostril.

“Hold up! No! You asked her to wash her face before the kiss?” Clarissa asked.

Ted just leaned back and laughed. “Yup,” I said. “It was either that or risk anaphylactic shock and death. Maybe I sensed she wasn’t my soul mate.”

“You, sir, are fucking insane!” Clarissa said. “But let’s get back to Ted’s story. Sounds juicy. I’ve always been curious about threesomes.”

“Like I was saying,” Ted continued, briefly stopping himself to laugh at the narrative in his head, “I was sitting on the couch with Karen. We start making out a bit, and she’s rubbing my crotch. As this is going on, this foreign exchange student from Switzerland, Elma, stumbles into the room and sits on the other side of me. Pretty close. Our thighs are touching.”

“Aw, shit!” Clarissa interjected. “Old Teddy’s gonna get a double dip.”

“What did Elma look like?” I asked, feeling renewed interest in our conversation for the first time in over an hour.

“Blond, blue eyes, thick lips. Athletic build,” Ted said fondly.

Disappointment. What a lame description. I hadn’t asked him to fill out a medical questionnaire for Elma. I decided she had a Marie Antoinette mole and that, well, she was basically Cindy Crawford from that old Pepsi commercial. Now that was more interesting.

“So our legs are touching, and Elma suddenly starts rubbing my thigh with her hand, inching it up closer to my crotch with every stroke.”

“What room in the house were you in? Were other people there?” I asked.

“Basement. A couple of others, but they were passed out. So once Karen notices Elma rubbing my leg, she stars kissing my neck. Before I know it, we’re really making out.” Ted pauses to laugh again. Sort of a transvestite witch laugh. Sharp, yet deep. “But then I start to get distracted because I can’t feel Elma’s hand moving anymore. I look over and she’s passed out. When I turn my attention back to Karen, she’s already getting up to go to the bathroom to puke.”

That’s it? I think to myself. “Did you at least wake up in a dumpster the next morning with blood and chocolate stains on your shirt and pants?”

Clarissa and Ted give me blank stares. Lame.

“Ah Teddy, one of these days you’ll get there,” Clarissa soothed.

“What about you, Vanilla Sweetness?” Ted said to Clarissa. “Any tales of moral debauchery to tell us?”

“I don’t want to excite you chumps too much with girl-on-girl action stories. Get your imaginations running too wild.”

“About that,” Ted began, “What are the assumed ethics of a gay relationship?”

“What do you mean?”

“Yeah, Ted,” I said, raising my eyebrows, “they don’t have a written manual with rules, ya know?”

Everyone laughed. “No,” Ted said mock-defensively, “I have this gay friend Martin who told me that the assumed ethics of a homosexual relationship are that you should presume to be sleeping with, and actively looking for, other people until the exclusivity talk happens.”

“Don’t know where he gets that from. We don’t have unified rules like a boxing commission,” Clarissa said jokingly, “I’ve always been monogamous, actually.”

“Yeah, Ted,” I cut in, “no unified rules. Not every lesbian…” I pause. “Damn, I was trying to pun on three-knock-down-rule, but I got nothing.”

“Actually,” Clarissa began, “I will give you guys a little taste of something… but nothing exclusive to the fairer sex, so you boys don’t go making any assumptions now. I had this partner who had an armpit fixation. She could only really get off if she had her face buried in my pit. The ranker, the better. Made for an easy couple of months since I could get away without shaving.”

“I think the hair helps retain the scent,” I said.

Ted was looking at me. “Alright, boss. Let’s hear some shindigery.”

“Bah, I got nothing.” I figured I wouldn’t tell them about the time I peed on my ex-girlfriend. We were in the shower, I had to go, mentioned it, and she actually brought up the idea. I hesitated at first, but getting the green light was actually appealing. I ended up peeing on the side of her ass and thigh. It was nothing. She soaped it off right after, and she was standing right over the drain. Still, all the qualifying and technicalities I’d have to convey made that story worthless when you were a few drinks in.

I paused. “I’ll just tell you about the fetish room at the Amsterdam Sex Museum.” I figured this would work well enough. I talked about donkeys with pricks that dwarfed a Louisville Slugger, piercings and hot wax in various orifices, and midgets packing some serious heat. My story was half-assed. Ted’s “near” threesome made me think of how my current girlfriend had promised me a threesome with a girl she’d once “been” with. I was sceptical, but the thought kept me going when final papers were sucking the lifeblood out of me. Needless to say, the thought of that success increased the flow of red bile and changed my humour from melancholic to sanguine.

I was starting to find the conversation tiresome. I’d been nursing my beer for the past hour, and Ted was now pontificating on how he was certain, with a surgeon’s precision, that he’d given every girl he’d been with an orgasm.

“That’s impossible!” Clarissa ejaculated.

“What do you mean, ‘it’s impossible?’”

“You have no way of knowing. What if they faked it?”

“Trust me, had you been there, you’da known they weren’t faking.”

“But still. You can’t ever really know. You can have a sense, or perception of it. But it’s impossible to inhabit her body and actually know. Men have…”

“A tell?” I jumped in.

“Exactly. Like if someone spilt their beer all over the table every time they tried to bluff.”

Ted wasn’t convinced. “I know for a fact I’ve given every girl I’ve been with an orgasm.”

“Teddy, that’s ridiculous. I’m sure even you have an off night.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell them they were misunderstanding each other. Ted meant he’d given every girl he’d been with an orgasm, not every single one he’d been with every single time, as Clarissa seemed to gather. Their sparing match was entertaining.

As Male Prowess versus the State of Female Orgasms continued to cross examine witnesses and prepare for closing arguments, I spied a mother-daughter combo manning two stools unsteadily at the bar. An awkward 17-26 year age gap separated the two; the mother, with wavy blond curls, make-up caked age lines, and bifocals, was probably one of the only regular customers of the local Miami Tanning Salon; the daughter, petite in a black one piece dress that rode up enough to reveal a tear in her flesh coloured stockings, had ink-black hair and Sicilian features.

The mom guzzled a vodka-cranberry with a lime wedge, and the daughter slowly sipped scotch with an appreciative demeanour. Every time the aura of a body whisked past, the mom swivelled around, on the prowl. I made eye contact with each one separately, lulled into their Circean spell, which Ted finally broke.

“Common, man. Let’s get a tall tale.”

I sighed inwardly. “I’m not in the sharing mood. How about a joke instead?”

“As long as it’s dirty.”

“So this guy’s boarding a plane. He sits down, and before he has time to buckle his seat belt, this gorgeous woman sits next to him. I mean, this is the type of woman a man gives up red meat for.” I’ve got Ted and Clarissa under my spell.

“The guy’s deliberating about how to break the ice. Pick-up lines always fail at the critical moments, so he’s at a complete loss. Lo and behold, the woman engages him in conversation. ‘Hi, my name’s Krystal. I’m headed to Chicago for a nymphomaniac convention.’ The guy can’t believe his luck. ‘A convention? What are you, speaking or something?’ he asks. ‘Yes,’ she replies, ‘In fact, I’m the keynote speaker. I’m there to dispel myths about sex and nymphomania.’ At this point, the guy is nearly bursting. He asks her what the myths are.

“‘Well,’ she continues, ‘most people assume that black men have the largest penises. But actually, it’s the Native American Indian. Another is that the French are supposed to be the most sensual lovers, but actually it’s the Jews. Finally, and this one might surprise you, a prevailing assumption is that Italians are the most devoted lovers when, and you might not believe this, it’s in fact the Southern Americans… or ‘rednecks’ as the uncouth like to call them. But look at me, I’m rambling about all this technical stuff and haven’t even asked you your name.’ The guy pauses for a second, looks at the woman’s naked things, moving up past her cleavage before settling on her face. ‘My name is Tonto Goldstein, but my friends call me Bubba.’”

Ted and Clarissa laughed, but I felt the timing was off. Around the middle of telling the joke, a man sitting at the table over Ted’s left shoulder, diagonal from the mother-daughter task force, distracted me. He had a suit with a silk bowtie and medallions, one each with red and blue sashes respectively, pinned to his lapel. I noticed the medallions as I was watching the mother, who I’d started calling Madame Bovary, stumble towards the bathroom.

I kept gazing periodically at the medallion man. He had closely cropped black hair, receding with a widow’s peak. The bald patches next to the peak glistened like newly buffed curling stones sliding along a freshly zambonied rink. His suit was precise, clearly custom fitted, and his face was razor sharp aquiline. Still, his jaw fanned out. Looked like he could take a punch with that bull neck, too.

I was hooked. He sat at a table with three others: an older man and two university-aged boys. He carried himself like a patriarch who maybe had a kid fighting overseas in Afghanistan. Damndest thing was that every time I looked up, he was standing up next to his chair, shaking some stranger’s hand who’d approached his table. The other three supposedly sitting with him seemed to pay no mind to his celebrity. After he shook hands with each newcomer, he stood erect, his back with a perfect outward shoehorn curve, with hands cupped in front of his crotch.

“Ted, casually look over your shoulder at the guy standing up. Isn’t that fucked? Why does he have medals pinned to his lapel?”

Ted and Clarissa both looked over. “I don’t know, man. How long have you been staring at him?”

“On and off for the past fifteen minutes. That’s the third guy who’s come up to talk to him randomly. I wonder what his deal is.”

My companions didn’t seem to share my curiosity. “I donno,” Clarissa mused, “might be a war veteran?”

“He can’t be. He isn’t the right age. Unless he’s American and fought at the very beginning of Desert Storm.”

I pretended to rejoin the conversation. Clarissa and Ted were goading each other into approaching random strangers. This was my way to find out who the medallion man was.

“See that mother-daughter combo sitting at the bar?” I asked.

They both nodded, afraid of what might follow.

“I’ll go hit on them. They’ve been striking out all night.”

Before Ted and Clarissa could respond, I was up out of my seat and sliding onto the stool next to Madame Bovary. The man with the medallions was right over my shoulder. I rested my beer on a Stella Artois coaster and hunched forward, leaning my elbows on the bar, ignoring Madame Bovary’s obvious staring.

I could hear snippets of conversation going on behind me.

“My bitch is so obedient. We have this great game of fetch that we like to play at night,” the man with the medallions was saying to a portly, half-pint sized man with a broom-bristle Hungarian-style moustache, extending approximately two centimetres below the corners of his upper lip.

Straining to hear more about the game, I was interrupted by Madame Bovary. “What’s a stout manly thing like yourself doing sipping a fruity beer like that?”

“Taste is a lost art, Madame,” I replied.

“I’m an expert in many of the lost arts,” she whispered, tonguing the rim of her glass and caking it with passion fruit lipstick. Her daughter merely sipped her scotch absently from a seat away, paying no attention to her mother or me. I was temporarily spellbound as she gargled the syrupy, amber liquid on her tongue, sucking in air through her front teeth to extract the aroma of birch bark, peat moss, and old rubber bands.

I smiled and nodded, hoping to end the conversation. Behind me, the man with medallions was holding forth. “She wears a leather collar with a Canadian diamond encrusted at the front. And yet, you’ll never believe this, she’ll only fetch this old tennis ball I’ve had since the era of plum-smuggler shorts and wooden rackets, but not the custom made, velvet ensconced rubber ball I ordered from Italy for her.”

The man seemed enamoured with his dog.

“My daughter over here just finished her first semester of university,” Madam Bovary interrupted, touching my shoulder with one hand while pulling her daughter by the hem of her skirt towards us with the other.

“What’s your major?” I asked, bypassing Madame Bovary entirely.

She paused, dragging air as if smoking. “Undeclared.”

Her lack of eye contact startled me. “How are you enjoying it?”

Madame Bovary seemed hopeful for the response. “Enjoyment merely implies that the experience has been equally painful.”

Everyone was silent for a while. “Where are you both from?” I asked.

The daughter sighed; Madame Bovary seemed embarrassed. “Conversation should only involve minds consolidating their perplexities. Your banality has made both my intellect and scotch stale. Ta.”

The daughter got up and left slowly, pulling out a cigarette case and making for the door. I watched her leave and noticed Ted and Clarissa had also gone outside to smoke. Madame Bovary laughed and took a large swig of her vodka-cranberry.

“The bitch scurries on all fours, incessantly panting and wriggling her arse. She always comes back and deposits the ball on my lap, resting her jaw on my thigh…”

“I’m sorry about her. She’s going through that rebellious phase,” Madame Bovary interrupted, again.

“Never mind.” I smiled.

“What are you doing here alone, no woman on your arm?”

“I might ask you the same thing. No gentleman caller this evening?”

Madame Bovary’s eyes looked like near empty glasses of stout. She rubbed my knee with the sharp, red-painted nail of her index finger. “Maybe we can help each other out.”

“The Scottish Deerhound is unequivocally this year’s front-runner. Its coat is like crystallized salt and pepper sewn into Mandarin silk.”

The man with the Hungarian moustache seemed pleased. “Stupendous. Lyudmila and I very much look forward to the Kennel Club’s annual competition. Will your bitch be there?”

“Absolutely. She won’t be leaving my side, or she won’t get a reward.” His last statement carried a tone of contempt. The man with the medallions continued. “She wavers occasionally, but she’s usually an obedient bitch. Highly excitable.”

It made a fraction of sense. Clearly the man with medallions was head of the local Kennel Club and was preparing for a best-in-show competition. Still, praising a bitch for her fetching skills seemed amateurish.

Madame Bovary interjected. “I have a pocket poodle, you know. I wanted to give it to my daughter as a reward for completing her semester of university, but she scoffed at the idea, lamenting having to clean its droppings and such.”

“Has the dog been in your purse the whole time you’ve been here?”

“Certainly. I merely lay down napkins at the bottom. It makes cleaning simple. When I think ahead I line it with reinforced paper towel, or my husband’s silk handkerchief if he’s been naughty.”

She reached into her purse and pulled out a hard candy. “Would you like one?”

I recoiled. She had a husband, and I needed a way out. The man with the Hungarian moustache had wandered away, and before I knew it I’d swivelled around and the man with the medallions was rising out of his chair to greet me. He extended his hand. We shook. He had Herculean grip.

“What can I do for you?” he asked. I was too nervous to look at the medallions.

I hesitated, tugging at my sweaty wedgie once my hand was free. It was as if Vulcan had forged his paws. My fingers throbbed and felt singed by an oven burner.

“I have a Vizsla.”

“A fine pointer-retriever breed! The best hunt-dog, in my humble opinion.”

I needed to think of a follow up. “I overheard you talking about some bitch you have. I want my Vizsla to breed. Think your bitch might have use for him?”

His widows’ peak ignited with a flaming aura and his eyes squinted as if blasted with sand. He neck veins throbbed, and he grabbed me by the collar, gripping my shirt like Scylla and Charybdis. “That ‘bitch’ you so flippantly referred to happens to be my wife! And NO, she is most certainly not interested in fucking your Vizsla!”

Still tearing at my shirt collar, he swung me to the side towards a table, forcing me to grab hold of his lapels, jolting his medallions to the floor in the scuffle. Metal struck floor just as he was about to smear my face in half-eaten calamari and tartar sauce.

Noticing his medallions had fallen, he loosened his grip slightly, but still kept me pressed against the table. Bent over a chair, I felt something scurry between my legs. He’d now twisted my arm behind my back and was frantically yelling out, “My medallions! My medallions! They’ve fallen to the floor.” The three other men from his table stood up and frantically began to search for the lost treasure. Amidst the commotion of squeaking dress shoes and men bending down on all fours to search, their noses nearly pressed to the ground, Madame Bovary emerged next to us on all fours, panting with delight, the medallions firmly clasped between her teeth.

The grip on my arm slackened and the man sat down in front of Madame Bovary. I observed the scene as I backed away towards the door. Madame Bovary placed the medallions on the man’s lap and rested her head on his thighs.

I burst out the door and found Ted and Clarissa standing at some distance from Madame Bovary’s daughter.

“Guys, we need to get the fuck out of here!” I exclaimed.

“What happened?” Ted asked.

“Just trust me. I think some bloodhounds are about to be sent after us, followed closely by an angry mob whose gin supply is about to be cut off.”
They could see the desperation in my face. We started walking briskly but were interrupted after a few paces by Madame Bovary’s daughter. “You. Aren’t you going to ask me out for a night cap?” she asked, clearly directed at me.

“But everything’s closing now. I think they just had last call.”

“Huh. Fitting.” As we walked away, she took a tennis ball out of her purse and absently began bouncing it up and down.

*

Zachary Alapi is a second year M.A. Creative Writing student at the University of New Brunswick. His fiction has appeared on tommagazine.com and in the Ottawa journal Front & Centre, and he has also published non-fiction on eastsideboxing.com and the British online zine, Beat the Dust. In 2007, he co-founded the Montreal-based small press Siren Song (www.sirensong.ca) and is currently co-fiction editor for the UNB graduate student literary magazine, QWERTY. He can be reached by email at zacharyalapi@gmail.com.

Interview: Greg Kearney

2011-11-04T17:45:00.000-07:00

Please tell us about your interest in the short story by

(a) telling us a bit about your recent collection (e.g., how did it come about? does it have a recurring theme? do you have a particular story or passage that's a favorite?)

The new collection is called Pretty (Exile Editions, 2011). Between two stillborn novels, I’ve been cobbling together the stories since my last collection came out. I’m slightly mortified by my first book – I find it cautious and cloying now – so I was desperate to publish again, to prove that I was more than a Derek McCormack acolyte with a penchant for toilet humour.

A version of Pretty was already in the can in 2008; my agent, Sam Haywood, shopped it around tirelessly but nobody wanted it. Naturally, I was crushed at the time, but it all resolved beautifully: Barry Callaghan accepted it for Exile Editions last year, and arranged an edit by Lisa Foad, a friend and brilliant writer who made the book more incisive and less puerile than it ever would’ve been otherwise.

There are no intentional motifs in the book. I was just running with my hottest impulses, sentence by sentence. I’ve learned that my stuff instantly dies on the vine the moment I attempt to “do” anything. My guiding theme, when writing, must be boiled down to a word, or I start to teeter; for instance, the novel I’ve been beavering away at is all about “hurry!” I actually may end up calling it Hurry.

(b) recommending a short story or collection by someone else that you admire (and why?)

The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel. I am tempted to not write another sentence, but I want to prove that I am more than an Amy Hempel acolyte. I was obsessed with her first book, Reasons to Live, when I was fifteen, read it over and over. Prior to reading her, I simply assumed that I was too impatient, too graceless, too preoccupied with masturbation to ever write more than a paragraph. After reading her, I realized that I didn’t need to write more than a paragraph. She emancipated me in the biggest way. Oh, and her next book, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, leveled me with its perfection. But then, in my preening, presumptuous late twenties, I forsook her: so one-note! Where’s the reach?

I’ve returned to her loving arms, however. My journey through high-minded contemporary fiction has led me to one awful, bloated novel after another. Rick Moody, Cormac McCarthy, David Foster Wallace. Ugh. All those straight, white, American male writers, bursting with entitlement, never knowing when to shut the fuck up. I literally hurled Infinite Jest across the living room (the thousand page thud of it sent our pug, Tammy, scurrying under the couch). A thousand page novel with footnotes! The nerve! Some of us don’t have time for footnotes! Some of us work several jobs, some of us have Lupus or worse, some of us are exercise addicts. Yes, I’ve come back to Amy, her small, fussy sentences and modest page count, her thoughtful presumption that the reader is busy and/or dying. I’ll never stray again.

(c) reflecting on the 21st century and the short story: Are they a good match (and why)?

The short story should be the prevailing literary form of our time – a few thousand words, two or elegant scenes, a bit of edification, over and out – but it’s not. Today’s reader is so frayed and twitchy after a long day of Tweets, status updates, gratuitous cell phone conversations and overly cerebral relationships with toddlers, it’s as though we need to do penance by reading all forty installments of “The Girl with Pierced Ears” or whatever the hell it’s called. We need to bask in the borrowed humanity of a long narrative. Pretty has received great reviews, and other writers love it, but I can’t tell you how many people have, by way of praise, wished that one story or another could’ve gone on and on. It’s confounding, this preoccupation with “going on and on”. I instantly think of some horrible Jethro Tull album. In any case, I have caved: I’ve got 135 pages of Hurry, and I’m nowhere near finished. Forgive me, Amy!

Interview: J.J. Steinfeld

2011-10-28T17:17:00.000-07:00

TDR question (in three parts):

Please tell us about your interest in the short story by (a) telling us a bit about your recent collection (e.g., how did it come about? does it have a recurring theme? do you have a particular story or passage that's a favourite?)

Writing stories in an ongoing process for me, and after I finish one, I send it off to a journal or magazine in an attempt to “test” my current exploration of the worldly or the otherworldly. Then, for reasons that elude me, I wake up one tormented morning and decide to gather up some of my stories, sometimes in their original form, other times reworked, and put them in some sort of order and literary shape.

For my latest (and tenth) short story collection — I have also published two short-fiction chapbooks — I selected, as is my idiosyncratic tendency, a variety of stories so I could present the themes that engage my sensibilities, and this collection wound up having the most stories, twenty-eight, of all my collections, surpassing the twenty-six of my 1993 New & Selected Ragweed Press collection, Dancing at the Club Holocaust. As for describing the themes in my latest collection, and in much of my other work, I’ll use the description from the back of the book (and the publisher’s website):

“The twenty-eight short stories of A Glass Shard and Memory deal with the influence of the past and memory on the present; how the turmoil and struggle of existence stir some people to rage while paralysing others; the significance of love, creativity, and madness in the lives of individuals as they attempt to deal with the not always hospitable world around them. These stories are interwoven with the tragic and the absurd and sometimes with the darkly humorous.”

While I don’t have a favourite story, I do have a title I particularly like: “The Only One in the Beautiful Magician’s Audience Who Did Not Look Like Kafka.” As you know, Michael, I have a lifelong literary fascination with Kafka’s work and references to Kafka and his writing find their way into some of my writing, including this story, the title (and opening) story,“ A Glass Shard and Memory,” and the collection’s concluding story, “Historical Perspective.”

Since I prefer to allow my writing to speak for my work rather than describe that work, here’s a passage from “The Only One in the Beautiful Magician’s Audience Who Did Not Look Like Kafka.” that attempts to capture the narrator’s entrapment somewhere between the absurd and the existential of his life. Just so you don’t think this narrator is anything like me, he has sky-blue eyes and mine are earth-brown. There, I’m off the autobiographical hook:

…Nervous, a bit disoriented by my disrupted sleep, I arrived early at the old, recently renovated building. Outside, the weather was unseasonable, spiteful; inside, I found my seat near the centre of the third row, and sat with my eyes closed as the audience entered. It was not long before I was enthralled by the featured act, a young top-hatted magician, sensual, long-legged, superbly talented, creating a name for herself making small, growling animals and large, antique cars vanish from the stage. I am here for the beauty, not the magic, I shouted out, forgetting for a instant that I was not alone in the audience. But the magic is beautiful, I declared as a plea for forgiveness. I looked around, nervous about my outburst, waiting for the beautiful magician to perform her next feat of magic, and saw that everyone resembled Franz Kafka, their faces exactly the same. A joke, I thought, a peculiar coincidence, but no, how could that be. I thought of the photographs of the brooding dark-eyed writer I had seen in books, and the resemblance was indisputable. I counted over a hundred of the Kafka-faced, re-counted, looked for discrepancies, slight deviations, but no again, the evidence resolute as the Seven Wonders of the World. Confusion and fear exerted their boisterous language, and I was a poor translator, a frightened linguist. I ran to the washroom, my heart beating faster than confusion or fear, and looked into the mirror: ah, reprieve and a sigh of familiarity, recognizing the reflected face I knew, the well-worn, unhandsome shape. I studied my face half-heartedly, disappointed, and wiped the mirror in unmagical despair, mouthing the words homely and ugly, then peculiar, odd, hideous, unusual, my words a memory stammer. I wondered about the life I would have lived had Nature smiled more favourably on my features or dreams, or if a skilled surgeon would have fashioned my face into something else.

— from “The Only One in the Beautiful Magician’s Audience Who Did Not Look Like Kafka,” pages 14-15 (in A Glass Shard and Memory by J. J. Steinfeld, Recliner Books, 2010, copyright © 2010 by J. J. Steinfeld).

(b) recommending a short story or collection by someone else that you admire (and why?)

I am reluctant to single out one short story collection but being gnawed at by my sense of literary fair play and attempting to repay a kindness, I will recommend Rebecca Rosenblum’s new collection, The Big Dream (Biblioasis, 2011), for two reasons: 1) it is an exciting, well-crafted, captivating, insightful collection, and 2) Rebecca said some generous things about an earlier short story collection of mine, Would You Hide Me? (Gaspereau Press, 2003), in an interview she did in this very same TDR. So, that makes as much sense as any other way of making a recommendation. I first ran across Rebecca’s work in the form of her first short story collection, Once (Biblioasis, 2008), when I was one of the three judges for the 2009 Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and was greatly impressed by her writing. And if life were a short story, here’s an interesting plot twist: Rebecca is now engaged to a good writer friend of mine, Mark Sampson, but when I was judging her work I had no idea that they even knew each other, let alone anything romantic was in the air for them.

(c) reflecting on the 21st century and the short story: Are they a good match (and why)?

Gee, is it the 21st century already? My, how angst-ridden time flies when your synapses and psyche are grappling with writing new stories (and poems and plays). I like to think the short story transcends time and place and century, but I guess I do reside on a planet that requires categories and calendars and existential snapshots of our times. Technologically, everything seems to be speeding up, information is accumulating at a ridiculous pace, and perhaps the short story can accommodate this spiralling heavens-knows-where century through language that can be as absurd or realistic or fanciful as a writer wishes in an effort to either depict or deconstruct or reinvent the comings and goings of the century we are caught in but can certainly embrace or escape (either back or forward in time, and with old or new writing techniques) through the short story. Personally, I seem to be writing more and more minimalist short stories in an effort to deal with a century that is becoming more and more cumbersome and overloaded. Seems appropriate to end this interview on an absurd note. Happy (and sad) reading! Happy (and sad) short story writing!

Photo credit: Brenda Whiteway

New Fiction by J.J. Steinfeld

2011-10-28T17:15:00.000-07:00

One Last Question

Samuel Prufrock woke up and actually felt good, refreshed. Not even the slightest hint of a hangover. He was never one to hold his liquor and last night he had a half-dozen beers. What was more amazing, he wondered, not having a hangover or being able to perform in bed being drunk, with a woman he had met at the retirement party for the chair of his department less than twelve hours ago. And the wonderment did not stop there. Amazingly, he wasn’t feeling any guilt about what he had done. He thought he’d feel guilty, and when she invited him back to her hotel room and he accepted, he was only half blaming it on the drink.

Samuel looked at the back of the woman in bed with him and couldn’t believe his good fortune. This extraordinary woman had come up to him in the party, handed him a bottle of beer, and said she found him attractive. He was never one for looks. In fact, he had always considered himself unattractive. He felt his head was too large for his small, unusual body. His wife claimed he had inner beauty; at least that’s what she claimed when they dated and married a year later in a memorable ceremony in Buenos Aries. He liked having an Argentine wife. Exotic, he considered her, even though she had spent most of her life in Canada. That’s where she was now, in Buenos Aries, with her critically ill mother. She had taken their daughter and son with her, to be with their dying grandmother who they had never met before.

Now Samuel was waking up in a lavish hotel room, with no hangover and the most extraordinary woman he had ever met who had stirred him in ways he didn’t think possible. Extraordinary if for no other reason than her impressive athletic physique. She was ten inches taller than him and muscular, yet there was an appealing femininity to her. And she could excite him with her talk. Also, when he first told her his name, not only did she know that his surname was the same as in the T.S. Eliot poem, she immediately recited the poem’s epigraph in Italian from Dante’s Inferno and then in English the first two stanzas of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" as if she had been waiting for her cue to begin an impressive recitation. "I can’t stand the poem, wouldn’t memorize a sentence of it when I was growing up," he said. "You were born to be an English Lit teacher," she had said, and he told her he was a philosophy professor. She told him she was a niece of the philosophy department’s chair and that her mother and her uncle hadn’t spoken in almost a decade but she had asked her to attend the party and wish he estranged brother her best. Before he left, though, Samuel wished the chair well in his retirement and commented on what an extraordinary niece he had but the chair claimed he didn’t have any nieces, only two nephews who he hadn’t seen in ages. The chair seemed even more drunk than he was, and Samuel hugged him goodbye, the most affection he had ever shown this man who he had always regarded as unfriendly and eccentric.

Samuel touched the woman’s shoulder gently, but she didn’t respond. The woman felt cold, and he pulled the cover over her shoulders. He gave the back of the neck a little kiss of appreciation, and it too felt cold. Too cold.

"We should have breakfast," Samuel whispered. He said it a little louder, then he thanked her for the most incredible night of his life. He looked at the clock and calculated what the time would be in Buenos Aries . He had promised to call his wife and children yesterday to wish his daughter a happy birthday and chat with his son, and to find out how his mother-in-law was doing, but had forgotten to during the day, remembering at the party at eleven Toronto time but that would have been midnight in Buenos Aries, too late to phone. He wondered if his wife had tried to call him at home. He was preparing excuses why he hadn’t been at home, or called earlier. Forgotten to take his cellphone to the party. Early morning walk. He always did his best philosophical thinking during early morning walks. Bumped into an old friend and they went out for a long breakfast. He was starting to feel guilty. The first time he had slept with another woman. In fact, his wife was the first woman he had ever slept with. His wife was certainly no novice. She had dated three other men in their department before she proposed to him during an academic conference they were both at in France. The stories about her in the department. At first he didn’t want to believe them, but then it didn’t matter. She was a lovely woman and a first-rate scholar. He couldn’t believe what she had said and questioned her. All his life he had been asking questions—he liked to say his calling was to professionally ask questions—but usually in his academic work. He had recently been made a full professor. She thought he’d make a good father, had humility despite his academic accomplishments, and had a great sense of humour, which he didn’t unless cracking groaners about metaphysics or epistemology was one’s idea of the humorous but she insisted that was one of the reasons. You’re so exotic he said after her proposal. She insisted he get her pregnant that night, even before they were married. That was the best conference of his life, even if felt the paper he had delivered with not his best.

Amidst his thoughts about his wife and academic career, Samuel gave the woman a slight shake, a little more forceful—Oh God, she was dead. He felt like a bewildered undergraduate who had received a failing grade on the best essay he had ever written. He got out of bed and saw himself in the mirror, thought he had the body of a much older man. He could see the woman’s body on the bed. He looked around the room, as if the explanation for what had happened were hidden somewhere in the hotel room. He touched her clothes that she had thrown earlier on a chair, opened the small purse she had. Found an ID. It wasn’t the name she had given him. Her middle name, Sarah, was the same as his daughter’s first name. Strange, but so what? A meaningless little coincidence. The ID was for an organization he had never heard of: Worldwide Security Enrichment. Maybe he was being set up, lured to this room and the woman killed. What a terrible plot, yet it seemed plausible. But he was no one, at least in the context of world events and national security. He wasn’t a threat to anyone or anything. I’m a philosophy professor, he said aloud, as if preparing to answer the interrogation that was sure to follow. He picked up the woman’s cellphone and his cellphone, trying to decide not only which one to use but whom to call first. He put the cellphones down and dressed quickly, fearing there would be a knock at the door, or even worse, the door would be broken down by members of the organization the woman worked for.

After dressing, and searching around the room further, Samuel decided to call the front desk. There had to be an explanation for her death. A logical, rationale, verifiable explanation. But not for his adultery. Not for going to a hotel room with a strange woman. Unless it was alcohol. He had drunk himself into a meaningless fling. That was how he was rehearsing it for his wife, whom he would call soon. How’s your mother doing?…I love you, darling …Let me talk to our little birthday girl … But he would wait until she returned to Canada to tell her what had happened. By then, he was sure, the identity of the woman and who or what had caused her death would be known, and he couldn’t be held culpable. As for the sexual encounter, maybe he could deny that, but he knew there would be an autopsy and a thorough investigation, and they could certainly determine there had been sexual activity. Despite his belief in rigorous, rational thinking, he even hoped for an irrational moment that his wife and children would not find out.

No answer at the front desk. Samuel tried over and over again, conducting some sort of scientific experiment. He wanted to take a shower first. Just go down to the front desk and tell them to call the police. Or should he call the police himself. What was the organization? Couldn’t find it in the phone book. Checked it on the internet. Put her name in a search engine and all he found were references to her athletic achievements in high school and college until an injury ended her pentathlon career before she had a chance to go to the Olympics, which several articles said had been her lifelong goal.

Samuel called Buenos Aries , already in his mind attempting to sound cheerful for his wife and children but there was no answer. Called the university, but realized no one would be there on a Sunday. Called the police. Called numbers at random. Voice mail and answering machines. Annoying busy signals. Peculiar electronic signals. Combed his hair, took his laptop, and opened the door. This had to be dealt with. He had a marriage and a career to protect. He hurried toward the elevator as though attempting to catch a departing bus, nearly tripping over a tray of food that had been left outside a room’s door. Near the elevator he saw an open door an stepped cautiously inside. An elderly couple were on their bed, unmoving. They looked peaceful, he thought. He spoke to them but neither person answered, and he decided they had died in their sleep just like the woman in his room. Maybe there was some sort of poisoning or lethal gas on the floor. But he felt no ill effects. Not even a hangover. He left the room and pushed the elevator button, watching the numbers, until 20 appeared. The door opened and he rode down in the elevator wondering how many people had died in their rooms in their sleep.

The elevator opened to the lobby, and there was no one in the lobby, only the clerk at the front desk slumped over the counter. Samuel shook the man, hoping he had merely fallen asleep on the job. Obviously it wasn’t just the twentieth floor. The entire hotel, no indication that anyone was alive. He could leave. No need to tell anyone he had been here.

Quickly Samuel went through what had occurred since he met the woman, watching a sped up film. Thinks if he left anything in the room. His fingerprints. Semen. But there was no record of his fingerprints. He had her cellphone with him, and realized it needed to be discarded. What sort of moral and ethical quagmire had he fallen into. He thought of the colleague in the office next to him, an eminent ethicist who would surely chastise him for the decisions he was making. He didn’t want to go back. Everyone in the hotel, he became certain, was in their room in repose…dead.

Samuel stepped outside and took a deep breath. It was a calm, beautiful morning. The temperature seemed much warmer than he recalled the forecast. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, except there was no one around.

Samuel walked for blocks, looking through apartment windows, occasionally seeing people asleep inside, sometimes tapping at windows or banging at doors, but no one responded, he concluding that they too had died in their sleep. Tried his cellphone again. Thought of going to the university, his office. Saw a Rolls Royce parked, with the keys in the ignition. He’d never been in a Rolls. He imagined that the owners of the car, a husband and wife deeply in love, went to bed after a night of partying, and never woke up. He didn’t want to believe that no one in the city hadn’t awoken to such a beautiful morning, and still hoped to find others who were greeting a new day, having a Sunday breakfast and perhaps an affirming kiss or exciting, hopeful conversation with someone they loved and cared about. How he wished he were in Buenos Aries now, close to his wife and children.

Samuel started the car and drove to the university. Maybe the deaths and the strange occurrences were only in the downtown area. Nothing on the radio. He opened the glove compartment and found a gun and car registration. Maybe the car’s owner belonged to the same organization as the dead woman in the hotel room. That was preposterous, he decided, and pointed the gun out the window, aiming at nothing in particular. Aside from toy guns as a little boy, he had never handled a gun. First time in a Rolls and first time with a gun, he told himself, and smiles at the absurd juxtaposition of these first-time images. He abruptly put the gun back into the glove compartment, shaking his head at even the thought of carrying a gun.

He didn’t see a single living person on the half-hour drive to the university. There were few cars in the parking lot. It was Sunday, after all. His office was exactly as he left it. No one around. Looked at the photographs of his wife and children. Sat at his desk and turned on his computer. A paper he had been working on. Wanted to watch the episode of The Twilight Zone with the last person left alive. "Time Enough at Last." How he liked that television series and "Time Enough at Last" fascinated him, so much so that he had incorporated that one, along with several other episodes he found philosophically stimulating, into one of his first-year philosophy courses. He even liked to attempt to imitate Rod Serling when he gave the introduction and summation to each episode. He had all the episodes from 1959 to 1964, all 156 of them, on DVD in his office, and had watched them with his children. He wasn’t the last person alive. There were close to seven billion people on the planet. A few weeks ago his son had found a population counter on the internet and showed his father the date the seventh billion person would be born. Now he seemed to be surrounded by death: a hotel of bodies, at least on the 20th floor and in the lobby. Tragic and sad these hotel deaths were, it was a mortality glitch. How could he be the last one left alive? Continued to think about stories and films that dealt with the last person left, but it was The Twilight Zone episode that occupied his thoughts. Wanted to go home and watch that episode. Put the DVD in his computer and watched the episode. Watched it twice.

Samuel drove home, walked around his neighbourhood, went into houses, searched through the lives of people he knew, had some wonderful liquor, a few slices of cold pizza. Found no one alive or any explanation for what had happened. His confusion worsening, he got back into the car and drove toward downtown, wanting to return to the hotel.

Before Samuel reached the hotel, he slammed on the brakes in front of an imposing church. The oldest church in the city. Sensed there would be people alive inside. A church full of people praying and attempting to understand what was happening. Gets out of the car, not bothering to close the door. Strange, he thinks, how he is drawn to this religion’s place of worship. Shouldn’t he go to a synagogue. He was Jewish, after, all. The synagogue where he was bar mitzvahed. No, what’s the difference. Church, synagogue, mosque, temple. Starts thinking of holy places in the city and other places in the world. A mental exercise, fighting to make sense of what was happening all around him.

Inside the church, not a single person present, Samuel looks at the iconography. His wife would be proud of him, he thinks. Attempts to call her again. Starts singing songs from his youth. Thinks about the woman in the hotel room, the chair of the philosophy department’s retirement party. Looks at his watch, and shakes his head. Takes his watch off and hurls it toward the front of the church. Decides to take a drive, a long drive. And when he runs out of gas, then he would decide what to do next. Samuel continued to hold out hope he would find people somewhere.

As he is about to leave the church, Samuel asks one last question: Why am I still alive? He half expected to hear Rod Serling’s voice doing the opening or closing narration of an episode. How he wished he were in a classroom, lecturing to students, attempting his inept imitation. He asks the question again, more like a prayer this time.

All the icons and statues start speaking, but in voices Samuel Prufrock cannot understand.

*

Read TDR's new interview with J.J. Steinfeld.

Fiction #29

2011-10-15T10:38:00.000-07:00

Here is new fiction, issue #29:

How I Learned to Thrive in 2010 by Catriona Wright
Re: You Are My Music by John Delacourt

Submissions now open for #30.

Fiction #29: Catriona Wright

2011-10-15T10:22:00.000-07:00

HOW I LEARNED TO THRIVE IN 2010

I didn’t quit. I resigned. Quitting is for hormonal teenagers who have difficulty with authority and I am a twenty-five-year-old woman in possession of a B.Com from McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management with a concentration in Entrepreneurial Studies.

Skills: My technical savoir-faire and interpersonal acumen provide the ideal compliment to my Creative Disposition and Self-Motivation.

Why did I resign? Because there weren’t enough opportunities for professional development. My boss didn’t even need to read the entire three-page resignation letter I handed over to him. He knew this day was coming, that he couldn’t keep me there forever; I have a degree from McGill, I had my eye on bigger things—no offense to the others in the office who will probably be there for years to come. It was a 100% positive and professional exchange: mutual expressions of goodwill were made, I handed over my nametag, and we shook hands.

Work Experience: ~~Data Entry~~ Information Management Agent (September 2009—February 2010). I inputed large amounts of data into a database. Accuracy of data was paramount whether numerical or linguistic or other (i.e. photographic, graphical, etc.). Employed analytic tools to analyze the data and ensure that accuracy complied with Data Protocol and Standards Regulation as devised by the Data Auditing Department.

~

It’s strictly temporary. I’m only working this catering job until I can discover where my true calling lies. I am a creative person with a loving heart and a strong work ethic who believes in results. My career must align with my innermost passions or, I know myself, I just won’t feel fulfilled and if I don’t feel personally fulfilled I will not be able to fulfill a life partner or fulfill my children and that is not the way my life is going to happen.

Volunteer Experience: Event Coordinator and Social Media Technician for Breast Cancer Society (September 2004—March 2005). Organized a formal ball for the Breast Cancer Society in order to raise funds for the organization because philanthropy is close to my heart and it is our duty as concerned citizens. Updated the Facebook site, designed the invitations, and brainstormed with my student colleagues to come up with an appropriate theme (cleavage).

REFERENCES AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST

I opted not to return to my catering job after working at an Arts Fundraiser where I ran into a former professor from McGill, who I approached, balancing a plate of miniature eggrolls and dipping sauce, with the intention of sneaking a little networking into the evening—I am an adept multi-tasker. The professor did not, however, recognize me and actually ignored me entirely after taking two eggrolls off the tray. When at last his companion left and he turned to me, I thought he was going to speak and perhaps offer me a job lead, but instead he asked for a napkin. There weren’t any on the plate, so I seized the opportunity and offered him my vest to wipe his hands on, which he did. And then I asked him if he thought he could act as a reference, which he did not.

Awards: Employee of the Week for West Island Catering (April 2010)

I lost touch with most of McGill friends. Occasionally I get emails from my former roommate, Maria (though, come to think of it, she still hasn’t responded to my last one). She’s teaching English in Japan. Every time I think about the opportunity cost, I am overwhelmed with sadness, because who will hire her when she eventually returns? Karaoke isn’t exactly a transferable skill.

Are you able to work well in a team and alone? Yes, friends are important, especially as stress relief, but I am rich in Inner Resources, most notably Resiliency and Initiative, and I participate in many selfcare activities, like bikini waxes, so I am prepared to meet the challenges of today’s working world. Yes, with a team. Yes, alone.

My job right now is looking for a job. I take this search seriously. I have written hundreds of personalized cover letters, have changed the font on my resume from Times New Roman to Verdana to Garamond, depending on my perceived perceptions of the recipient. I am a creative person and I work on that kind of wavelength, the detail-oriented one where every single decision needs to be made with care and conscientiousness, because if I have one major fault, it is perfectionism.

In the mean time I have offered to take care of my sister’s children, Rose and Emily, who are three and five respectively. Family is important and a strong stable base for anyone with ambitions and you should never forget them, ever. My sister, who is a grade 10 Biology Teacher, is insisting on paying me, which is nice, but unnecessary. And in fact I wish she wouldn’t because she is paying me the awkward sum of fourteen dollars an hour, which is obviously excessive for a babysitter and yet is not actually very much if she sincerely believes I am in financial duress, which I am not because I am fiscally responsible and also I have a credit card with a high limit. I am putting my sister’s money toward printing, paper and postage costs and I intend to buy presents for the kids as soon as I secure appropriate employment which will happen momentarily because I am a worthy person and thus far in life I have passed all the signposts to success, such as a getting into a good school (McGill), so there is no reason to believe that I am now off-course in any permanent or meaningful way.

~

What special talents can you bring to the organization? One day I am sitting in a waiting area with several other applicants. As I look around the room, I realize that I am the youngest person there. Ordinarily I do not even notice that kind of thing because age is just a number, but then one woman asks another if she has any children, just small talk, and this look of disappointment crosses the other woman’s face, and she doesn’t even try to suppress it or anything, she just lets it expand over her entire face. “Trying” she says without elaborating and explaining about fertility treatments or acupuncture or special diets. Just “trying.”

And that’s when I understood that what I can offer is not more experience, but less. My youth is the ultimate leverage.

Craigslist>jobs>etc.
Seeking Would-be Parents for Exciting Opportunity!
DATE: 31-DEC-10

McGill graduate seeks driven sperm and receptive egg to house in her womb for nine months. Sperm and Egg producers must be generous, possess excellent oral and written communication skills, and be able to prioritize the surrogate’s wellbeing above all else.

Both parents must provide a cover letter detailing why the surrogate should consider them, four references, and a CV.

Only qualified candidates will be contacted for an interview.

~

Just imagine! I’ll be the one asking the questions now. I’ll be the one deciding. And once I find the right candidates and my belly begins to swell, my life will finally be fulfilled. People will eye me in restaurants to make sure I don’t order wine. They’ll offer me their seats on the bus. People will stop me on the street to feel my belly for kicks or to predict the sex based on whether I’m carrying low or high.

I will finally stop being ignored.

*

Catriona Wright has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in various publications, such as The Dalhousie Review, Contemporary Verse 2, Room, and The New Quarterly.

Fiction #29: John Delacourt

2011-10-15T10:14:00.000-07:00

RE: YOU ARE MY MUSIC

To the Editor:

I read your magazine’s review of Aimée Yamada’s recent video installation “You Are My Music” at the Barker Gallery with great interest. As one of the men featured in the video, I just wanted to clear up a few factual errors your reviewer Maya Turner made.

1. “Aimée Yamada’s video project features lonely middle-aged men who started conversations with her to pick her up. Yamada would then agree to go home with them as long as they allowed her to videotape what happened.”

It was Aimée who first approached me - at Topper’s Vinyl where she began to come in last September. At first she was accompanied by two other students, as pale and androgynous as my friends and I all wanted to be thirty years ago. What began as conversations about Kraftwerk and Brian Eno inevitably led to us talking about my past and her future.

Was I attracted to her? That’s complicated. The way she put herself together, all bold monochrome patterns, nylon and leather and sharp angles, it was like some ghost of a girl had come back to claim her rightful place among the memories I resist. As soon as she spoke to me that apparition vanished and I was just as anthropologically interested as I usually am by the young.

It was she who persisted and who kept the conversation going for weeks before there was any mention of her video project. It was the fear of confronting the ghost of my old self that got to me and made me care enough to consider it.

2. “The men Yamada selected are beer-bellied awkward loners who seem remarkable mainly for how unremarkable they are.”

I will fully admit I could lose about twenty pounds. I’m also forty-eight years old and can’t bear the indignity of tramping and panting through the streets in cartoon clothes.

You want unremarkable? You go stand in line at your grocery store and take in the countless wizened, tucked and taut fifty-year old men, their bum cheeks vacuum packed into those two hundred dollar jeans they bought to save their third marriage.

Yes, that would be the marriage to your critic Maya Turner.

As for awkward? When I was twenty-four and the keyboardist for Broken Lines, the reporter for Canadian Music Express magazine described me as “reserved,” “intense,” and “mesmerizing” live. Maybe all of that changes twenty-four years, four pant sizes and a shaved head later. I’m the same guy. Not sure what I could do to be mesmerizing though.

Even the word loner here is questionable. If you spent your best years traveling around the country with four other troubled introverts and one untroubled extrovert, committed to the code of conduct the music business requires, you’ve seen and heard quite enough of human behaviour to favour moderation in all things, including human contact.

I still talk to people but in contexts that do not cause me undue pain, stress, hostility or possible humiliation. I believe I have a higher tolerance than most for the company of men my age who want to discuss music. If you were to add up all the hours I spend each week standing at the counter discussing Bowie’s Berlin period or the once-pervasive influence of Rudy Van Gelder, I would challenge you to tell me how much more of a loner I am than any man who bases his very livelihood – such as it is - on transactional conversations.

3. “It is difficult to explain how uncomfortable it is to watch Yamada’s videos. No matter how much the camera loves her, the stubborn presence of her co-stars denies any possibility of eroticism.”

I’m going to suggest that what Maya Turner really means is not eroticism but arousal. In other words, it is not porn, these old guys Yamada is with are too unattractive and there’s no fucking. So it’s probably art.

I’m the last person to deny Aimée Yamada’s claims that she is making art. I would hope more than anything in the world that she realizes all her ambitions. The closest thing to ecstasy I saw her experience (clothed – always clothed) was when she spoke of her new dealer and to whom and how much the stills from her video are selling for. I am not begrudging her that; who doesn’t want ecstasy to still exist, especially for the young?

But I think she may have indeed been making porn with “You Are My Music.” It’s just a different kind of pornography, maybe. One that transcends arousal.

4. “In one segment, when Yamada and one of her costars dance along to a music video from the nineties, there is something deeply poignant about the connection made that transfixes the viewer.”

The video in question is actually from 1983. It is the one song of the Broken Lines that entered the top 20 of both the UK and US charts and led to two years of constant touring, opening for bands that are also best forgotten, ten years of anger, legal battles, intermittent sallies of bitter recriminations among all the band members and twenty years of therapy for me, as I tried to come to terms with my boyhood friendship with lead singer and arch-narcissist Davis Clegg.

Aimée turned the camera on after we had finished a pitcher of vodka and tonic and I had unspooled all my hurt. I was trying to explain to her all Davis Clegg had done to me during the time we were on speaking terms, and the glee Aimée and I shared, dancing to that flickering image on my old person’s Eastern Bloc TV, was the glee of ridicule, a cowardly, pointless gesture of revenge on my part.

What it meant to Aimée, I don’t know. But I think she may be one of those people who can only feel such emotions when she is performing them for others.

5. “As brave and remarkable as it is to see Yamada attempt to own the creation of sexual imagery, it is less the presence of her in the frame than the way we are forced to pay attention to these men that resonates. We watch them watch her. Images of sexy young women are everywhere in our culture; images of titillated middle-aged men are not.”

I haven’t watched porn in two years. The diagnosis on my prostate made it very clear to me that even masturbation was going to be a fail so why indulge? Nostalgia? Yet what I can tell you from any casual browse of the internet is that the explosion of thousands of sites put up by enterprising stay-at-home moms across this country has given us no shortage of images of titillated middle-aged men. And somebody’s watching these videos; Aimée told me all of her friends have watched porn since “the beginning of time.”

With the prospect of intimacy just a memory, a not altogether fond one for me, I can say with complete assurance that Aimée never “titillated” me. From our conversations I know the fearsome presence Aimée’s architect father still exerts, and I would take no part in creating the kind of guilt he would burden her with if there was a real videotaped seduction, publicly exhibited. It is guilt she would live with for the rest of her life.

Now let me digress because I believe it is important here; it will give you the context for what actually occurred. The rest of my time alive does not amount to much. The cancer is back, and this time it really means business, as they say. That is probably why I’ve tried to get some peace with my attraction to narcissism and what it has cost me over the years (whether it was with Davis Clegg or Bryan Menzies, the investment advisor who squandered the thousands I made from over twenty years of studio session work). Performing that footage with Aimée, from the time when all of my fatal mistakes began, felt like a rite, a way to claim that my feelings of rage for all those years are now gone.

Let me just emphasize Aimée is a lovely young woman. She invited me to the opening at the Barker, and she was the one who directed me to your review. She says that knowing how this whole process has helped me has changed her a little, and I’m just happy we have become so close. If in the time I’ve got left this video only serves as a memory of our friendship, I’ll be happy with that too.

Sincerely …

*

John Delacourt's stories and other writing have appeared in a number of publications in Canada and elsewhere including The New Quarterly and The Guardian (UK). He's also written for theatre and had his work staged at Theatre Passe Muraille and Buddies in Bad Times in Toronto. He currently blogs on culture and politics at delacourt (http://delacourt-jd.blogspot.com/).

Fiction #28

2011-09-26T20:11:00.000-07:00

The new issue is here, #28, and it consists of two stories:

Thurston Pyle by Kate Millar
Impression, Nightfall by Jéanpaul Ferro

Submissions now open for #29.

Fiction #28: Kate Millar

2011-09-26T19:57:00.000-07:00

Thurston Pyle

by Kate Millar

Thurston Pyle loses his thumb when he's three years old. Sucks it clean off. He deposits the shriveled digit into his mother's lap, like the loneliest thumbs up of approval in the world. "What did I tell you about sucking your thumb," his mother is quick to admonish, but, unbeknownst to Thurston, remains rather shaken. Thumbs don't simply fall off, after all. She takes Thurston to the doctor and he's diagnosed with a rare condition. "Like leprosy but not," the doctor says with a shrug. "Best keep him indoors." Heeding the doctor's advice, Thurston's mother keeps her son indoors at all times and, after witnessing him stub his foot and lose three cherry pink toes as a result, decides that little Thurston would be best off in a wheelchair.

Thurston hates his wheelchair. The loudness of its whir makes it impossible for him to sneak up on his mother and share a laugh together. But the chair's controls remind him of a joystick and it's like he's the hero of his own private video game. Sometimes he even makes sound effects when he wheels through the house, blipping and bleeping to himself. To maneuver the chair, he cups the fleshy part of his palm around the joystick; using his fingers is too risky and he only has one thumb left, his mother reminds him.

Thurston's favourite place to sit is near the window of his new ground-floor bedroom, which overlooks a grassy knoll of oak trees and a swing-set for the neighbourhood kids. He looks at the children playing, and he looks at the sun which shines back at him like a half-eaten lemon drop. The sight of the grass and the trees makes little Thurston's heart swell and when he sees the wind tip the branches and bathe the leaves in coolness, Thurston sways in his wheelchair, hypnotized, as if feeling the breeze through the walls of the house himself. This swaying costs young Thurston a rib bone, which breaks off from the ribcage and rattles in his torso like a maraca. Too absorbed with the scene out the window, Thurston hardly notices.

When Thurston Pyle turns eighteen, he ditches the wheelchair and leaves home.

"This is a mistake," his mother says to him, hysterical.

"I'm grown up now Mum," he tells her with a kiss on the cheek. He moves to the city and immediately loses a hand pushing through the subway turnstile—his left hand, which falls plumb off at the wrist. But Thurston's intoxicated by the strange soupy air of public transit and the gathered mass of people in the subway car, each with somewhere different to go, and it's like the most chaotic magic he's ever known. He finds a small bachelor flat and gets a job answering complaint letters for a soft drink company. He takes pride in his work and is good at what he does. Thurston meets a girl named Jessica and he takes her for a picnic under the stars. "I've always wanted to do this," he tells her. Jessica kisses him and she smells like oranges, and then Thurston Pyle has sex for the first (and, unfortunately, final) time.

What was his mother so worried about? He's happy, has many friends, and shrugs off any and all minor mishaps, like the time his ears fall off at a rock concert, or when he loses his tongue after an adventure with Korean barbeque. When he's thirty he meets a woman named Debbie, and Debbie takes Thurston swing-dancing because it's her passion. She leads tongueless, earless Thurston around the dance floor and, mid lindy-hop, Thurston's arm comes off at the shoulder socket into Debbie's hand. But Thurston's so happy to be wearing saddle shoes and lindy-hopping with Debbie that he doesn't really mind, and then he decides that he loves swing dancing and then he decides that he loves Debbie and within a year they are married. They are happy together.

For his sixtieth birthday, Thurston Pyle goes sky-diving. The timing seems right. He lost his dear mother the year prior, so he no longer has to worry about her worrying about him. And Debbie has never been disturbed by Thurston's flights of fancy. "I always admire your vim," she tells her husband. The sky-diving instructor had been reticent to allow a one-armed, one-legged senior citizen to jump (Thurston having lost a leg in his forties on a boating excursion to the Keys), but Thurston's eyes and cheeks are so buoyed with anticipation that the instructor is eventually persuaded. Thurston kisses his wife and boards the airplane.

Thurston ascends. He gazes out the window contentedly, the white corpulent clouds still so far above him and the field and farmhouses hazy below. And then the sky-diving instructor tells him it's time to jump and Thurston Pyle flies out of the airplane without a moment's hesitation, caught up in the raptures of open sky that envelope every inch of his body.

His stomach is the first to become detached. Thurston is thrilled to feel the organ flip-flopping and freefalling inside his abdominal cavity. His nose snaps off next and his head fills with a rush of cold splintery air. His collarbone grinds inward to press against his spinal cord, and then his eyes dislodge, rolling into the back of his cranium like marbles clinking in a glass bowl. His kneecaps shimmy up his legs into his pelvis and Thurston giggles at the sensation. But his favourite part, his absolute favourite, is the rush of wind that he feels on the two remaining fingers of his one remaining hand. A rush of wind like a blanket. And then his arm flies off, fist over shoulder, and then his leg and then Thurston's head and torso keep tumbling, falling, as Thurston weeps with ecstasy.

By the time Thurston Pyle finds land, his skin and bones have all fallen away and there's nothing more to him than a mass of gelatinous liquid that splats across the landing strip with terrific force. But then the liquid oozes back together, gathering its gooey molecules until it forms a perfect puddle. Debbie collects the puddle and puts it in a jar.

"I've always loved his vim," she tells the sky-diving instructor, with tears in her eyes. She hugs the jar tightly to her chest. The puddle gleams in the sunlight.

*

Kate Millar's work is forthcoming in Event and Paper Darts and she is currently at work on her first collection of short stories. She lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Fiction #28: Jéanpaul Ferro

2011-09-26T19:33:00.000-07:00

Impression, Nightfall

by Jéanpaul Ferro

Elijah Ransom stood at the edge of his family compound along the bluffs and dunes of Matunuck, R.I. He stared up at this bow of cable television wire hanging loosely between two poles that he was about to splice into, not to steal it, mind you, but to “share” a cable feed that was already being paid for by Clifford Brown his next door neighbor right across the street.

Elijah had known the Brown family for several decades. Clifford Brown was a Narragansett Indian who his people called Lightfoot, because he used to run track barefoot back in high school. The name of the village, Matunuck, was also an Indian name, meaning “look out,” as the Narragansett Indian tribe once kept their summer encampment along these coastal plains before they sold it all to the colonists in 1657 as a part of the Pettaquamscutt purchase.

If Elijah had something to sell on that warm Sunday afternoon in May he would have sold it already. Times had been tough in Rhode Island. The 2008 financial crisis on Wall Street had trickled all the way down to Main Street now. Unemployment hovered in the double-digits, Americans were getting laid off left and right, and everyone, including Elijah, had clinched up their buttocks and wallets and no one was spending a dime that they had.

All of this totally sunk Elijah’s lawn and care service. Nobody cares about lawns and gardens in a recession. In the early Bush years his self-made business had soared to the point where he had to hire twelve employees simply to keep pace. Now his business was down to just him and his new wife, Brooklyn, who he had taught to use a John Deere X300 overnight so they could both go out on the weekend and do those two extra school lawns he had scrounged up from an old buddy of his who was now on the South Kingstown school committee.

For as long as he could remember, Elijah thought of himself as a self-made man. He had waited until he was 53 to get married, chasing his lifelong dream of being a pro golfer until old age, a really pretty girl twenty years his junior, and the reality of his golf handicap all caught up with him almost exactly at the same moment.

Now he was standing there on a ladder, his balding head sweating in the sun as he spliced into his neighbor’s cable line, because he could only afford electricity or cable, one or the other, but not both.

And as he was cutting into the cable and then hooking it up to the wire connected to all the houses on the property where he lived, Elijah looked back across the emerald lawns of his family compound only a stone’s throw from Matunuck Beach. His mother and father, Juliet and Hester, had left their three children five houses on over twenty-six prime acres of coastal Rhode Island land. His brother, Joe, had the small yellow house everyone called Little Beaver. His sister, Maggie, had Big Beaver, which to this day still drew out a laugh out of everyone in the family. He and Brooklyn and their newborn daughter, Paloma, had the small blue house that had no name. The large summer house and the gray cottage next door were the ones they rented out all summer to those New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania types who summered along the gold coast of Rhode Island between May and August of each year.

Of course, it nagged at him that he lived in his house for free, got free heat by burning the wood he had to cut himself for the wood stove, and still drove that twenty year old Volvo with the 356,847 miles on it, and yet he still had to go and tap into his neighbor’s cable so he and the rest of his family could watch a couple of hours of nightly television.

When he returned back to his little blue house he smiled as he went walking past Brooklyn who was outback taking the clothes off the laundry line. After knowing Elijah for over five years now she certainly had learned which battles to pick with him.

“Are you done with your little cable television fiasco?” she asked, taking her whites off the clothes line that the May sun had already warmed dry.

Elijah wiped the sweat off of his half-bald head and nodded a guilty grin. “Hey, I’m off the grid,” he joked. “Haven’t paid income taxes in twelve years. Have no driver’s license. And the Federal government doesn’t even know I exist anymore. So a non-existent person can’t be watching someone else’s cable, right?”

Brooklyn took a deep breath, wiped some of her long brown hair out of her face, and gave Elijah this dour look where her eyes cinched tight and her lips pursed together out of annoyance. He knew that she expected him to help raise their daughter, Paloma, right, making sure she would be someone who grew up to pay her taxes, paid her fifty bucks to get her license renewed every five years, and had a steady job so she would never have to relay on any man, or anyone else for that matter, unless that was something she decided to do.

Elijah saw the frustration on his wife’s face. He felt guilty right then. Brooklyn, who ironically was born in the Bronx, a 32-year old brunette with green eyes and a diploma from New York University, had been working double-time at her photography job, filming weddings, graduations, and anniversary parties all over southern New England, and then she would come home and take care of Paloma and then help her husband with his business on the weekends on top of that.

He went over, kissed her gently on the top of her brunette hair, and held her against him as her weary head fell against his chest as though she had to listen to his heart to make sure that he was okay.

He leaned back and held her face with both of his hands. “My heart’s fine. He said. I haven’t touched a cookie or a chip in three months. I’ve been taking my medication. And the doc said at my last visit that my heart was functioning up to sixty-percent now.”

Brooklyn’s green eyes stared at him as though she couldn’t help but be worried. She had married him knowing that he had this severe heart problem. But now every time she looked at her daughter, Paloma, and she witnessed the same blue eyes of Elijah on her sweet and delicate face, she worried whether or not her little girl was going to know the man who had the same beautiful blue eyes as her, a man that her mother had fallen in love with the very first day she met him down at the 84 High Street bar and restaurant in Westerly.

“I know,” she told him. “You’ve been doing great.” Her hand rubbed against Elijah’s heart. “Especially for you.” She said this last part with a bit of a smirk on her face.

“Hey, what does that mean? Especially for you?”

Brooklyn gathered up her whites in the antique wooden box, the one that once housed wine grapes from the vineyard down the street, and she smirked all the way back to the house as Elijah stood there with this silly grin stuck to his face.

Elijah chased her inside, gave her a good whack on the rear end right in the middle of the living room, kissed little Paloma who was sleeping beautifully in her Baby Bouncer inside her bedroom, grabbed his white golf bag full of clubs, and then went to hug Brooklyn goodbye as he passed her going the other way toward the front door.

She dropped the wooden bin of clothes on the couch and gave him a long, endearing hug goodbye.

He kissed her gently on the lips and gave her that charming smile he always had. “Don’t worry,” he told her, “this ain’t the last time you’re gonna see me. I’m too much of a pain in your rear end to go and die on you.”

He laughed as he slapped her on the butt again, dragged his white golf bag over to the doorway, where on his way out he always gave this photograph of the two of them, taken on the beach in South Africa during their honeymoon with Table Mountain in the background, a little touch, like the way Notre Dame football players touch the “Play Like a Champion Today” sign on their way out of the tunnel right before a game.

Brooklyn stood there now in the quiet living room of their little blue house. She walked over, made sure Paloma was sleeping okay, and then collapsed onto the couch next to the clothes she had put down. She listened as Elijah’s Volvo drove down the claim shell driveway and then quietly disappeared into the hush down the road until there was only the calm wind and the sound of the breaking waves off on the beach not far away.

The next thing she knew she was in New Haven Hospital in the critical care unit where Elijah lie on a perfectly pristine and white hospital bed with tubes and wires going into his mouth, nose, and arms every which way.

“He was without oxygen for over thirty minutes,” the gray haired female doctor told her quite gravely. Her name was Eugena Peverley and she had this look of concern on her cracked old face as she spoke. “We never know how these patients are going to respond. He could be fine. Or he could never wake up.”

Brooklyn nervously held a sobbing Paloma as her husband’s brother and sister, Joe and Maggie, looked on through the glass of the room from outside.

“And what about his heart?” Brooklyn asked.

She watched as the gray haired doctor’s eyes turned and stared off at the wall for a second before returning straight back at her intense and concerned looking green eyes.

“He could not have been taking his medication,” the doctor told her. “His heart is down to functioning at only sixteen percent. It’s a miracle he’s even alive at this point.”

Brooklyn looked down at her young daughter who was quieting now. She kissed Paloma on her head, that was somewhat still barren of the dark hair that she could see was still coming in, and she leaned her up against her chest feeling that perhaps it would only be the two of them going forward.

For the next two weeks Brooklyn had Joe and Maggie take turns watching Paloma back in Rhode Island while she slept curled up with a blanket and pillow that a kind, old German nurse had given her so she could sleep next to her husband’s bed curled up on the floor.

On the first day of the third week she stood there next to Elijah’s bed when with her own eyes she watched as he took a deep breath and opened his half-startled eyes.

He looked right in her eyes.

“Who are you?” he asked her.

There was this blank expression on his face like he was someone else.

“You’re wife—” she said somewhat confused.

A blond haired nurse she had never met before came rushing in, pulled her outside, where she had to wait for an hour as all these doctors and nurses and hospital folks walked in and out of Elijah’s room with these astonished looks on their faces as though they were all witnessing something they had only read about in text books.

When Doctor Peverley arrived and took Brooklyn aside she almost couldn’t fathom what she was told.

“He has no memory of you or your daughter,” Doctor Peverley told her with this determined look on her face. “We’re in a real bind,” she was told now. “If we try to operate on his heart now he might not ever regain his memory. Anesthesia can really have an effect on memory loss, especially existing memory loss due to trauma. It’s a Catch-22.”

“But I can’t live if the person I have isn’t Elijah,” Brooklyn tried to tell her. “What should I do?”

Doctor Peverley got this compassionate look on her face. “Only you can decide that.”

Later that same evening, Brooklyn talked it over with Joe and Maggie and they all decided as a family to let Elijah try and regain some of his memory before they tried to perform open heart surgery.

The next week Brooklyn sat beside her husband on his bed and patiently tried to make him remember. She showed him photographs of them together; places that he would have known by heart. She brought in one of his golf clubs one day; a piece of sod he had stolen from Fenway Park once that he planted in their front yard. He wouldn’t even let anyone walk near that patch of grass.

But Elijah lie there in bed with this angry look on his face like all these people who kept visiting him and the brunette constantly sitting beside him there by his bed were all annoying the hell out of him.

“Is that my wife?” he said, as he pointed at this attractive blond walking by right outside his room.

“No. I’m you’re wife,” Brooklyn told him, storming out of the room, losing her patience and composure for the first time since her husband had the heart attack.

By the next day she had to convince Elijah that he was a man and not a woman. “It’s obvious why I’m here in the hospital,” he told Brooklyn with this very I-got-it-figured-out look on his face.

“Oh, yeah,” she said, sort of getting a laugh out of his antics now. “Why are you here Elijah?”

He stared down at his somewhat bloated stomach that was all swollen from all the drugs, beta blockers, and bad hospital food they had been giving him.

“I’m pregnant!” he yelled out loud.

Brooklyn’s hand went up to her mouth and she began to laugh. “You think you’re pregnant?” she asked. “But Elijah, you’re a man.”

“If I were a man I’d think I’d know about it.”

Brooklyn took a deep breath, patiently walked over to his bed, lifted up her husband’s hospital gown, and nodded for him to look down between his own legs.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Now that’s a problem.”

Brooklyn rushed in and kissed him gently on the cheek, leaning onto his bed and beginning to softly cry as this stranger in her husband’s body awkwardly held her and let her cry even though she could tell by the look on his face that he, she, whoever it was in there, had no idea who she was from anyone else in the world.

The next morning she came in holding that photograph of her and Elijah on the beach in South Africa while they had been on their honeymoon.

She walked straight into his hospital room, sat down beside him on the bed, and placed the photograph right onto his lap.

Elijah stared down at it with this suspicious look on his exhausted face. His blue eyes moved from side to side as he looked at himself and Brooklyn in that photograph.

Suddenly he looked up and uttered: “Brooklyn?”

She watched as his soul literally began to fly back into his eyes. She threw her arms around Elijah and cried for the next twenty minutes as he kept wiping the tears out of her eyes and asking her over and over: “What happened? Why am I here?”

That night she drove the long distance back up Route 95 from New Haven to Matunuck. With Paloma fast asleep by her side she slept right through the entire night for the first time since her husband had walked out the door and she found him in critical condition at the hospital later that evening.

When she arrived back at New Haven Hospital the next morning she rushed into Elijah’s room only to find an empty bed that was perfectly made like her husband had never been there.

She ran out into the hall and she overheard one nurse say, “Oh, Lord, didn’t someone tell her first? Someone downstairs should have told her.”

The next few days were a complete blur to Brooklyn.

She sat on a chair in front of a hole on her husband’s property with his coffin already in the ground. In her arms sat the photograph of her and Elijah in South Africa on their honeymoon. All his friends and family and high school buddies and girl friends and customers and the mail man and the Brown’s next door and just about everyone Elijah ever knew, all stood there in line; and one by one they began to take this brand new silver shovel that his older brother, Joe, had bought down at the Home Depot earlier that day and they each threw one shovel full of dirt onto his grave.

There was a beautiful grayish-black mockingbird dancing on a branch of laurel that sang throughout the afternoon service, which seemingly got truncated by a musician they hired to play “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes. After his performance so many guests were overcome by grief that many of them had to leave.

Later that evening, Brooklyn, Joe, and Maggie all stood there by Elijah’s grave. There was this cloudy starlight trailing across the sky from the Milky Way as Brooklyn took one final shovelful of dirt and cast if over Elijah’s plot. She heard Paloma begin to cry back at the house as she was being watched by her mother, Elena, who had flown in from Iowa two days earlier.

Brooklyn looked at Joe and Maggie and then the three of them began to hug each other.

“He loved you,” Maggie said, weeping for the first time since it all happened.

“I’ll look after you. You always have me to look after you,” Joe kept telling her as though he needed to tell her this as many times as it took for her to believe him.

Brooklyn wiped the tears from her eyes, stood back from her brother and sister-in-law, and looked back at the grave that she knew was completely illegal to have on the property, but she had allowed it to be put there, because Elijah had always told her quite clearly that he wanted to be buried on his families’ property near the ocean if anything ever happened to him.

“See,” Brooklyn said talking to the grave as though Elijah were still alive. “One last time you got to poke ‘em in the eye,” she said; and then she collapsed, Joe and Maggie helping her back up to the house, where she didn’t wake up for another two days.

The following summer was this blur of blue torturous skies and world events that never touched Brooklyn’s mind.

There was Elijah’s death, a $250k hospital bill for which she had no insurance, this realization that Elijah had no life insurance either, and she didn’t know how to run his old business by herself. There were these people questioning her thought process on knowingly marrying someone who was ill. And then there was this realization that she was going to have to raise a child on her own now.

The candy colored blossoms of August soon turned into these dark reds, yellows, and grays of autumn, which in turn changed into the skeleton trees that stood there amid the tall winter snows of Rhode Island.

Soon the pain in Brooklyn’s heart turned to rage. This eventually turned into great sadness until one day the following spring, not long after Paloma said “da-da” after seeing her father’s picture on the refrigerator, she said, yes, to a date with a boy for the first time since Elijah had died.

His name was Robert Ridgeway, but everyone called him Bobby. He was a professional fisherman out of Galilee, but he had gone to Emerson College, studied Shakespeare, and he had this infinite love for photography exactly the way Brooklyn did. Tom Chambers was even his favorite photographer exactly like her.

Two months into their courtship Brooklyn and Bobby sat there in her living room on a hot summer night, drinking some sangria that she had chocked full of oranges rinds, lemons, peaches, and honey. They had spent the day at Green Hill Beach; and with their bright tanned faces and glowing eyes and their stomachs full of claim cakes, Brooklyn began to relax, lying backwards onto Bobby who was sitting there perfectly quiet with her now.

When she stared up into his dark brown eyes that looked as though they would never hurt her, she leaned her torso up, the outline of her breasts slightly touching against his chest as she hesitated for a second and then kissed him for the very first time.

She smiled when she saw the elated and surprised look that came to his face.

“I can’t believe you just did that,” he said.

“See, I’m full of surprises.”

When she sat up and began to caress his day old beard with her hand she was surprised by the look on his delighted, shocked, and bewildered face.

“Aren’t you happy I kissed you?”

As Brooklyn slid off of him his hands fell onto his lap.

“No. No. I mean— We’ve said goodnight twenty times and never kissed. I reconciled myself that you’d do it when you were ready.”

His face began to nod toward the photograph of Elijah and Brooklyn on their honeymoon along the beach in South Africa that was still hanging over by the front door.

“Oh,” she said.

She immediately felt terrible.

Brooklyn quickly went over and took the photograph off the wall. She rushed with it into her bedroom, and when she came back out she stood there next to the couch looking very proud of herself.

He surprised her though by getting up, going right by where she stood, and over to the threshold of her bedroom door.

She stood there feeling terribly embarrassed now.

“You put the photograph up on your bedroom wall?” he asked.

Her hands nervously slid down into the front pockets of her jeans. Her shoulders shrugged. These tense lines came up into her forehead as her mouth suddenly became dry.

“Yes,” she said. “I put it where my photograph of the Old Man and the Mountain used to be. Look— Bobby— I’m really sorry.”

When she looked at him his face didn’t look upset at all. But then he said: “You’d take it down if we were married, right?”

Brooklyn stood there silent as her eyes opened wide. She knew Elijah would always be a part of her. She couldn’t just stand there and pretend that she had exorcized him out of her DNA and that she had no feelings for him at all like all those old feelings could simply evaporate on command. It was as though she was suppose to take his memory and put it down in the cellar with the dust, the old records, the daguerreotypes, and the pain that was still there in her heart that no one else wanted to look at anymore.

“I don’t know,” she said quite honestly.

Bobby politely nodded like he understood. He went over and kissed her on the cheek, hugged her for a long time, and then told her that he would call her in the morning.

She went outside and watched as his old pickup truck drove away down the clamshell driveway and off into the darkness of the rest of the night.

Exactly one year went by.

People like to say, Time heals all wounds, but this is utter nonsense. What really happens is that the living who are left behind by the departed simply begin to fill their lives up with these other objects, these other routines, these prescriptions for the pain they can’t get rid of: nights out on the town, having kids, building homes, and pushing the years gathering up behind them like waves as far back as they can push them.

Moving forward and keeping busy seemed to be the thing that helped Brooklyn the most. She came to an agreement with the hospital in New Haven that as long as she paid something down, even twenty dollars a month, on her enormous hospital bill that they would not come after her through the courts. Social security began to send Paloma social security benefits in order to help stabilize the family. Brooklyn worked as hard as she had ever worked in her photography business until one day she came home and Bobby was waiting there down along her long driveway in front of the little blue house that she used to live in with Elijah.

He got down on one knee, proposed, and two weeks later they eloped in Niagara Falls, New York.

When they returned after a week long honeymoon, Bobby worked something out with Joe and Maggie so that he and Brooklyn would pay them some sort of rent—he just didn’t feel right living in their brother’s old house without paying them something. He brought in some of his own furniture and they repainted the entire inside of the house the very first day they returned from Niagara Falls. Not once did he ever mention to Brooklyn that she should take down that photograph of her and Elijah that was still hanging there on the bedroom wall.

He was being so sweet about it all. It even got to the point where he insisted on painting around the photograph when he went to paint the new egg-white hue over the faded white that had been there before.

It was right before they were going to go to bed, Bobby looking exhausted from all the hard work he had done around the house that day, that Brooklyn began to change into her nightclothes, shorts and a T-shirt, having already kissed Paloma goodnight in the other room, when she looked over at Bobby already lying there in bed; and she went over to the old photograph of her and Elijah still hanging there on the wall, and she quietly took it down, walking over to her closet and carefully tucking it under some old boxes of shoes that she had never worn.

The moonlight came through the bedroom window in these illustrious whites and grays as Brooklyn turned down the bedroom light and walked over and slid into the arms of Bobby who almost immediately fell asleep from fatigue. She held her arms around him tight and knew that she was luckier than most who had lost someone, and she prayed to God that night to make her never forget Elijah no matter what happened in the future.

She lie there in bed watching the moon glow twist and turn like body parts moving on the wall every time the wind would move the branches of the spruce and cedar that were right outside the bedroom window. Brooklyn exhaled, expecting this transcendent moment when the pain would stop. But the longer she lie there, staring up at the faded spot on the wall where that photograph used to hang, its old outline a different shade of white than in the rest of the room, the more she began to realize that the lack of loneliness that she had just traded in for all the other problems that are the grist of life left her with nothing to trade after that.

She thought about this for a long time that night, watching the shadows of the tree branches waver back and forth on the walls as though it were Elijah finally saying goodbye. And then she closed her eyes and fell asleep and forced herself to dream of something else.

*

An 8-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Jéanpaul Ferro’s work has appeared on National Public Radio, Contemporary American Voices, Columbia Review, Emerson Review, Connecticut Review, Portland Monthly, Arts & Understanding Magazine, The Providence Journal, Saltsburg Review, Hawaii Review, and others. He is the author of All The Good Promises (Plowman Press, 1994), Becoming X (BlazeVox Books, 2008), You Know Too Much About Flying Saucers (Thumbscrew Press, 2009), Hemispheres (Maverick Duck Press, 2009) Essendo Morti – Being Dead (Goldfish Press, 2009), nominated for the 2010 Griffin Prize in Poetry; and Jazz (Honest Publishing, 2011), nominated for both the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize and the 2012 Griffin Prize in Poetry. He is represented by the Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency. Website: www.jeanpaulferro.com * E-mail: jeanpaulferro@netzero.net

Interview: Tim Conley

2011-09-22T18:07:00.000-07:00

Tim Conley's latest short story collection is Nothing Could Be Further (Emmerson Street Press, 2011).

His website is www.timconley.ca

The title to your new short story collection, NOTHING COULD BE FURTHER, completes itself subliminally with "from the truth." I read this as a kind of affirmation of fiction as fiction (i.e., as an art that doesn't tie back to a grounded "reality" or "truth"). And the stories are fabulous and fable-like (i.e., excellent and take place in a world similar but distinct from our own). So the question is something like, how would you describe your approach to the short story? Or what is your interest in creating other worlds?

The title phrase could also be concluded “from my mind,” and in both cases the disavowal might seem a little suspicious, a little absurd (I think of the White Knight praising Alice for having such good eyesight so as to see “nothing”). Fragmented in this way, though, the phrase has a wistful sort of half-promise or expectation to it: “nothing could be just up ahead.” Whatever that might mean.

I’m not at all suggesting that fiction has no connection to reality, if by “reality” (a word Nabokov rightly said must always be kept in quotation marks) we understand this to be a perceptible phenomenon. Put another way, I don’t hold that imagination and perception are irreconcilable – on the contrary, I think that we are most deceived when we suppose we behold the world without any imagination involved in that process. Fiction, then, ought not to be understood as a surmounting of or escape from reality, but a retuning of it, however fine or subtle or radical or ridiculous.

There is a prison escape story in the book that I guess could be read as a kind of meditation on this question of “escapism.”

The decorum of the royal court is a recurring theme in these stories. This seems both a throw-back to, to be most obvious, Shakespeare, but also a way to query the way language influences and even controls human relationships. These stories are both funny and intricate (and delightfully beyond television; what I mean is their focus on language is arguably beyond the over-simplified image, beyond what the camera can capture). Their courtliness is also charming. I'd like to hear something from you on this subject, but I'm having trouble putting that into a question. As a professor of English Literature, I wonder if you despair for the indecorous incivility that is CNN, The Toronto Star, et al, and what passes for what's left of the public square?

That’s an unexpected question, or more accurately a series of questions, and I’ll take them in reverse order to try to end where you began.

The first answer is a yes and no. Yes, there is good reason to be alarmed at the state of public discourse, for there’s plenty of discourse but less and less meaningful public involvement. The public square has been replaced by shopping malls, an entirely privatized commercial space that apes civic virtues and seems to deceive many on that score. The state of publishing is so bad that I despair to go into detail, but basically the general narrowing of aesthetic experimentation reflects the shrinking concentration of publishers, who because they have more at stake and want to maximize profit with every enterprise, are ever more averse to risk.

But as for decorum, no, that doesn’t much concern me. Sure, when I scan the “comments” to online news articles and see the reactionary, semi-literate barkings of jackals, it’s a temptation to get depressed, but again, look at how meaningless that forum is. Nothing one says in such places about, say, such and such a government initiative is going to affect the government, which knows full well that it doesn’t have to listen to anybody when it isn’t an election year (if then). Imagine a load of people squeezed into a tight cell, where every movement puts somebody’s elbow into somebody else’s back and everyone is stepping on everyone else. If in this writhing mass one voice were to call out for some decorum, please, the best that might be hoped for is some unifying laughter. The problem is the cell, but it is easy for the prisoners to forget that or assume they can do nothing about that and instead vent their frustrations on one another.

Writers, like anybody else, can either accept the cell as the given world (natural, just, unchangeable), which can in effect mean ignoring it or, worse, praising it, or else they can try to measure and even challenge that confinement. The best writers, the ones that are most important to us, open up the room and enrich the discussion about how to open it up even more.

I hadn’t really thought of the “courtly” element in NCBF, but I can see what you mean about at least a couple of stories in there. I guess I’m attracted to different discursive forms and like to sample and explore them. In some ways the book might be a jukebox of idioms.

What's a recent short story you've read that reminded you why short stories are the greatest genre on earth? What was it about the story that set off fireworks?

Greatest genre on earth? Surely not; and besides, that sort of braggadocio is precisely what short fiction doesn’t do; it is precisely not a giant claim or sweeping statement (on the other hand, the novel is especially given to these gestures). And I’m not sure I have a favourite genre, and would prefer to see genres dissolved wherever possible. When people refer to my work as “short stories,” I try to smile and tell myself that they must know what they’re talking about, but that doesn’t mean I have to be comfortable with it.

Take something like James Kelman’s “Remember Young Cecil.” Besides being note-perfect in its intonations, it is a marvellous snapshot of billiards-at-the-pub culture, in its way as much a straight documentary of a side of Scottish male life, with all of its jostling anxieties and pleasures, as it is an invention. And I, as a reader, don’t have to choose between the two. That’s exciting.

So I may be praising short fiction for –when it’s at its best– not being a definite genre at all.

Interview: Zsuzsi Gartner

2011-09-18T09:48:00.001-07:00

Zsuzsi Gartner's latest collection is Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (Penguin, 2011). It is nominated for the ScotiaBank Giller Prize.

Her website is www.zsuzsigartner.com

What's a recent short story you've read that reminded you why short stories are the greatest genre on earth? What was it about the story that set off fireworks?

I should confess, at the risk of annoying my YOSS buddies, that I’m not genre-ist. Although I write short fiction and have a stake in making sure story collections aren’t viewed as a kind of warm-up act for the all-mighty novel, I read pretty catholically in every genre (save memoir – so many self-examined lives, so little time!).

And I love genre-bending enterprises (like Michael Turner’s American Whiskey Bar, and Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, meta-fiction, mock docs etc).

But a great short story “(half-puppet show, half-mugging,” as American short-fiction maestro Lorrie Moore has put it) can achieve the intensity and specificity of language of the best poetry while satisfying our primitive hunger for narrative.

So, at its best, dammit, yes, you’re right, it is the greatest genre on earth! A great short story’s canvas might be small, but it can contain the universe.

(Some indelible ones: “Love and Hydrogen” by Jim Shepard, “Like Life” and “People Like That are the Only People Here” by Lorrie Moore, “The Falls” and “Comm Comm” by George Saunders, “Boys” and “Demonology” by Rick Moody, “The Girl with Curious Hair” by David Foster Wallace, “The Divinity Gene” by Matthew Trafford, “The Aurochs” by Lee Henderson, and “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned” by Wells Tower.)

Each of these is sui generis, exists now & forever as a three-dimensional object in my world, each lights the alphabet on fire while taking me on a journey into the human heart (of darkness in some cases), as well as letting the big old world in, rather than pushing it away and diving for cover. What they also have in common is an urgency that you don’t often find in novels and non-fiction or even most short stories.

“The Lizard Man of Lee County,” by U.S. writer Nicola Mason (first published in 1998), was an exciting new discovery this summer. It’s a deliriously funny, moving, and urgent take on a family fissuring during a day-trip to a swamp. It made me laugh and then broke my heart. That’s what I look for in a story. It was simultaneously entertaining and serious; larky with the lurk of menace in the white space and in the trees at the edge of the protagonist’s psyche. Another thing I value in a great story. And. Every. Single. Word. Counted. (Here’s a link to first page.) As far as I can tell, she’s not published a collection, but there’s a new story kicking around called “Cancer Party” that I’m trying to track down.

I wanted to also ask you about satire. Virtually all of the reviewers refer to you as a satirist, but I'm not sure many people really know what that means these days. Are you a satirist? If so, what does that mean to you?

Great question! I’ve been thinking a lot about (and thought a lot about this while writing Better Living) what it means to be a satirist in today’s self-satirizing world. Satire, at least the way I try to practice it -- the dark-humoured, take few prisoners kind -- is not mockery or mere parody, but a hard look at our society’s foibles and cruelties under the microscope while electro-magnifying 50x or 1500x. Besides magnification, it involves reversals and formerly unfathomable juxtapositionings. And you have to be wary of both sacred cows (I initially typed “scared cows” which could be true!) and of shooting fish in a barrel. (I think it’d be tough for someone resolutely leftwing or rightwing to be an honest satirist.) It’s a kind of very satisfying truth-telling, but I strive to celebrate language and narrative as well, otherwise I might as well be simply writing angry letters to the editor.

And because any day of the week you can randomly open the newspaper or troll about on-line and discover better stuff than you could’ve made up (Vatican-endorsed Confession App, anyone?), lions lying down with lambs, satire has become that much harder. I’ve taken to setting stories slightly in the future and/or introducing other-worldly elements in order to up the ante and stay ahead of the news. I try hard to create a universe of complete verisimilitude to ground the more “unreal” aspects of my fiction. And at the heart of every story, there’s a very human struggle for understanding.

What’s interesting to me is that on TV there’s brilliantly written satire that has large followings (The Simpsons and The Daily Show will serve as prime examples), yet readers (who you’d assume are among those audiences) have a difficulty recognizing and dealing with satire on the page. (Maybe the lack of visuals?!) First of all, you have to be able to read the double (sometimes triple) nuances or meanings embedded in almost every line when reading satire just to recognize that’s what it is. You have to read slant, rather than taking everything at face value. And, most importantly, you have to have a deviant sense of humour.

Although my stories are satirical, some more than others, satire is not all I aim for. Hyperrealism might be a better definition. (Your colleague Nathaniel G. Moore mentioned the terms “old future,” and “lucid hilarity” which I like, so maybe “the lucid hilarity of the old future”?!) I’m deadly serious about certain topics that are important to me (questioning the commonplace that faith/belief have to stand in opposition to science, for example), and I’m not sending up my protagonists but puzzling and burning and bleeding alongside them.

David Foster Wallace and J.G. Ballard are the two writers I think about most as precursors to the type of writing you do. First, is there anyone else you'd like to mention, specifically short story writers. Second, how's my aim? I would love to hear you expand on the influence of DFW and Mr. Ballard any day, any time of the week.

Rick Moody, Will Self, George Saunders, and yes, the dear, late DFW, as well as Lorrie Moore, Elise Levine, and Barbara Gowdy, and another late, great writer, Donald Barthelme, are all short fiction influences. Moody, Self and Saunders, and sometimes DFW, would be classified as having written actual satire, but I’ve learned from them all. To be daring, to bleed on the page, to make a mess, to up the volume, to regard a sentence as capable of containing a world, to maintain a sense of mystery, to not be afraid to be ferocious or funny or decapitating. To not forget that a story is about its language. To not forget the sense of urgency that should be brought to short fiction, to bear in mind the necessity.

Your aim is spot on with regard to DFW: his story collection, The Girl with Curious Hair, changed the way I thought short fiction should/could be written. The run-on sentences, odd syntax, ultra-contemporary subject matter, use of real, living people. The crazy variety of voices and styles. The derring-do: He ends the title story like this: “And here’s what I did.” He is the godfather. Ballard is a much more recent discovery. I loved The Drowned World (read after I wrote “Summer of the Flesh Eater” and was thrilled to discover the devolutionary symbiosis there), but haven’t read too much other of his fiction—yet. I read a few books of his essays and interviews while working on editing Darwin’s Bastards, so that’s maybe the influence you’re seeing. I’m curious to know more.

Moody, Self, Saunders, and two another faves, Jonathan Lethem and William Gibson, have all written dystopian and/or S-F stories and novels, or S-F-tinged, so that’s all leaked in though various cracks where the lights gets in, as Cohen sings. And I’m looking forward to my first China Mieville novel that I’ve just bought. Another big recent influence has been the YA Steam Punk novels I’ve been reading with my son (almost 12, but we love a good, shared bookish adventure). There’s some absolutely remarkable stuff out there. (Happy to provide a reading list). And movies: District 9, Moon, Let the Right One In, and can’t what to see Contagion.

Interview: Jessica Westhead

2011-09-18T09:48:00.000-07:00

Jessica Westhead's recent short story collection is And Also Sharks (Cormorant, 2011). See also her website: www.jessicawesthead.com

What's a recent short story you've read that reminded you why short stories are the greatest genre on earth? What was it about the story that set off fireworks?

That would be Greg Kearney's story "What to Wear" in his collection Pretty (Exile, 2011). There's a string of dialogue that had me laughing out loud, and then re-reading it because it was so much fun, and then I giddily read it to my husband when he asked what I was laughing about. In the scene, a middle-aged, HIV-positive gay man (the "I"), who's been deformed by the side effects of protease inhibitors, is being driven to dinner by his distracted sister:

"I'm so happy for you," I say. "Do you enjoy it? The personal training?"

"I love it! It's freaky how much I love it. Sometimes I just catch myself and I'm like, 'do you have any idea of how fulfilled you are?' And I totally don't. Because I'm just so happy."

"That is so great. Where are we going?"

"It's--FUCK OFF!" She slams on the brakes.

"What is it?" I say.

"That asshole is following too close behind me! Umm. Tammy's."

"Tammy's?"

"The place I'm taking you. Is called Tammy's. It's on the Danforth. It's a--oh, what do you call it?"

"Restaurant?"

"No. It's like a café, but like they have in Europe? You know..."

"A pizzeria?"

"No! Shut up! What is the fucking word I'm trying to think of? Bee--"

"Bistro?"

"Bistro! Shit! Thank you! Bistro."

There's so much going on in this seemingly simple exchange. And so much energy! The way the dialogue zips along between the two characters, the speed of the car, the way the conversation gets away from the protagonist, his sister's out-of-control driving...it all reflects how the protagonist's life (and appearance) has veered out of his control--it's all there.

There's hardly any narrative in this scene but I can picture it exactly, I'm right there with them. Kearney has a great ear for dialogue--he's got it down, and it's unique to his writing, as well. The way he captures his characters' slightly mannered ways of speaking is brilliant and hilarious.

The whole collection grabbed and delighted me this way. I loved it, and now I want to read more of his work.

Cats or dogs? Why?

My favourite is cats that act like dogs. You get all the neatness and quietness of cats, minus their sneakiness and plus canine friendliness. The ultimate would be a dog-like cat that was a kitten forever. Kittens are the best. Also, it would be furless but with the ILLUSION of fur. Bingo--no shedding or hairball puking.

Work-life balance is usually framed as work-time versus family-time, but for writers it can be work-work versus writing-work. Your short stories often take work-life as the subject (or at least framework) of the story. Is there something in particularly interesting (or absurd) about work-life that engages your imagination? Can you integrate examples from your book into your answer ....

I've worked at a ton of 9 to 5 office jobs (the majority of them as a temp). Always there was the eerily familiar atmosphere--the fluorescent lighting, the cubicle mazes, the photocopier room, the receptionist's desk, the kitchenette. And that surface civility that everyone has with each other, but underneath it, the whole place is seething with barely contained resentments and jealousies and ambitions and hopeless complacency.

It's an artificial environment with all these written and unwritten codes of conduct that have to be navigated, where alliances are formed and enemies are made. There's the thrilling freedom of the lunch break or the smoke break or the walk break, and the eager counting-down-the-days anticipation of the weekend or the week-long vacation. Then afterwards, trading wistful stories about how the weekend or the vacation went.

There is so much great (and absurd) stuff in all that!

One element that my office-themed stories have in common is the sense of being trapped. In "Our Many-Splendoured Humanity," a woman is constantly being corned in her cubicle by her boss, Lee-Ann. In "We Are All About Wendy Now," a dying employee can't even escape her co-workers in the hospital. It's funny, because only four of the 14 stories in And Also Sharks are office-themed, but lots of reference has been made to the office content. I think that's because it's something that resonates with a lot of people.

Interview: Rebecca Rosenblum

2011-09-18T07:30:00.000-07:00

See more at Rebecca's blog/website: www.rebeccarosenblum.com

Tell us a bit about your new book?

My new book is called The Big Dream and it's coming out from Biblioasis.

Here's what I wrote when asked by my publisher for a cover blurb (they didn't use this exactly, but pretty close):

The Big Dream is a collection of interweaving short stories about life at the offices of Dream Inc., a lifestyle-magazine publisher. In these stories, the Dream staff struggle to do 'and keep' their jobs in a tough market, but they're also trying to have friends, to be good parents and good children, to answer the phone and fix the photocopier and be happy. The Big Dream is a book about how life doesn't stop on company time. Sometimes the 'dream job' and dream life that's supposed to come with it don't pan out, but in The Big Dream the joys and sorrows and sandwiches of waking life are more than enough to sustain us. This is a book not about jobs, but about the people who do them.

How is it similar/different/changed from your first?

Once was a gathering of the best short stories I had written up until that point; the connections between them were incidental, though certainly present. Whereas The Big Dream was a capital-B Book almost from the get-go. TBD has a definite arc and structure (at least in my mind). There were certain things I wanted to accomplish in one story that took me several others to build to. And on a more logistical level, I wrote the stories all together, over just over 2 years, so it all came out of one period in my life and writing, as opposed to the Once stories that came from a bunch of different points.

What's a recent short story you've read that reminded you why short stories are the greatest genre on earth? What was it about the story that set off fireworks?

Well, J. J. Steinfeld's "Outliving Hitler" is pretty amazing--subtle, strange, sad, and funny. But lately my big interest is in how those aforementioned capital-B Books of short stories work, and the book that contains "Outliving Hitler" has a lot to do with the individual story's success.

The book, called Would You Hide Me? has a number of stories dealing with characters who survived the Holocaust, or whose parents did. As you might imagine, most of those are pretty wrenching--well-written, honest, sometimes even funny, but very tough reading.

When you get to "Outliving Hitler," which I would consider a warm story, and gently hopeful, it feels like this perfect grace note, and the joy I felt reading it seemed earned, you know?

The interesting thing about short story collections is that, no matter how well the individual piece is working, it also has to make sense in terms of the book as a whole. Would You Hide Me? is a masterful collection, and though "Outliving Hitler" is my favourite piece in it, I know the whole collection contributed to that.

What's your ideal vacation? Why?

I'm not a huge vacationer--I don't really chill out at the beach or in the woods...ever. I have a lot of very far-flung friends, and I like to spend any extra time I have trying to see them. I went to England this summer and saw a friend who was living in London, and that was great--and that also means I made it to England for the first time at age 33, so it was more than revelatory. Now a number of my university friends are in the states--DC, Michigan, upstate New York, so nothing too far away. I just have to get some free time (easier said than done) and make a plan to go. I miss them.

Submissions Now Open

2011-09-03T15:47:00.001-07:00

TDR is back in the short-fiction reading business!

We intend to publish two (yes only 2) short stories per month.

Submissions of short stories can be sent via http://danforthreview.submishmash.com/submit only.

Our goal is to reply quickly (within a month).

Unfortunately, there is no financing, and so no payments. International fame, however, is sure to follow.

The current iteration of TDR does not publish reviews, but we will be carrying brief interviews with short story writers and tweeting like mad.

We hope to find a few readers and share the short story good news.

Keep the faith, brothers and sisters. And submit.

The Danforth Review

2009-08-28T16:52:00.000-07:00

The Danforth Review was an online magazine published out of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, between 1999-2009.

All content and a number of full past issues are archived at the website of the Library and Archives Canada.

The magazine published:

27 issues of fiction
12 issue of poetry
over 100 interviews with authors
dozens of fiction, poetry and nonfiction reviews
an odd number of other articles, essays and features

Michael Bryson is the magazine's publisher and editor. Nathaniel G. Moore provided significant assistance.