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Wild Life

by Kathy Fish (Goodreads Author)

4.62 of 5 stars 4.62 · rating details · 39 ratings · 19 reviews

Wild Life is a collection thirty-four (34) "undomesticated" flash fiction pieces.

"Keep this book on your bedside table. Dog-ear it until all the pages are folded. Read it in the bath, teach it, store it in your bag, recite it on street corners. When people stop to ask you what you are doing, tell them that you are reading aloud from a collection by the best flash fiction w...more

Paperback, First Matter Press Edition, 72 pages

Published 2011 by Matter Press

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Dec 31, 2011 Kathy rated it 5 of 5 stars · (Review from the author)

Two recent reviews of Wild Life: A review by Richard Thomas at Outsider Writers Collective: http://www.outsiderwriters.org/archiv... and at review by Roxane Gay at Beyond the Margins http://beyondthemargins.com/2011/12/t...

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Dec 30, 2011 Richard Bon rated it 5 of 5 stars

Kathy Fish's sentences entered my brain and pressed repeat, making me read them over and over again. I could make one of these very short stories last longer than a chapter in most novels because her words put me somewhere and made me want to look around, wonder how her characters came to be in that moment, consider the thoughts behind their words and actions and where their paths may lead from the last I learn of them.

My favorite story was “The People Here Are So Hardy and Cheerful.” To me, it’...more Kathy Fish's sentences entered my brain and pressed repeat, making me read them over and over again. I could make one of these very short stories last longer than a chapter in most novels because her words put me somewhere and made me want to look around, wonder how her characters came to be in that moment, consider the thoughts behind their words and actions and where their paths may lead from the last I learn of them.

My favorite story was “The People Here Are So Hardy and Cheerful.” To me, it’s about the disconnection between people existing alongside our reliance upon each other, and the difficulty people have balancing competing desires. Tom Bridge finds himself stuck in an airport during a blizzard for twenty two hours and counting, literally disconnected from the rest of the world until further notice from Mother Nature. He calls someone named Sandy, presumably a woman he left behind when he moved to the mountains, and while lousy reception prevents dialogue, Tom says plenty into the receiver. As he speaks, he’s intermittently interrupted by other people’s conversations fading in and out of the phone line, a young woman with her mother and infant child, and an old man standing next to him eating Lemonheads.

At one point, Tom says, “‘Sandy, are you there? Everybody just wants to get out of here. I’m tired of Lipton soup and girls with bigger biceps than me and Sandy, I am really, really tired of this coat.’” These three seemingly benign sentences had layers of meaning for me. First I thought, why Lipton soup? To me, Lipton Soup or Ramen Noodles or Kraft Mac and Cheese, you name it, relays the message of getting by on low pay and living in houses with multiple roommates, reminding me of a story a friend told me about being a ski bum in Vail, working a simple job, but not being able to afford a new pair of pants when he ruined his only remaining pair because living expenses are so high there. I see Tom as a guy who’s been living that free mountain lifestyle and loving it, while part of him wants to settle down with Sandy, have kids, find a higher paying job. He wants to reconnect with Sandy, perhaps he’s reliant upon her emotionally, but as much as he wants to go home to her, a storm prevents him in the short run, while a conflicting, addiction-like desire to remain in the mountains may impede him in the long term.

I won’t attempt to interpret the two outside conversations he hears over the phone line, but I loved them both for their simplicity and suggestiveness.

The young woman doesn’t laugh when her mother laughs, but cries when Delta cancels all flights. Like so many young mothers, she’s reliant upon her own mother for help with her baby, and while she has no choice but to deal with the stress of new motherhood, her own mother can enjoy the grandparents’ luxury of worry free time with the newborn.

Tom Bridge tells the old man, “‘Please go away. I’ve tried to be patient,’” and turns his back on him. But when the call to Sandy finally cuts out for good, Tom turns to the old man for some of his candy. To me, the old man represents that free, individual lifestyle Tom’s been leading, always there for him as an option, and one he cannot easily refuse. He could be that old man someday, eating candy by himself during a mountain blizzard, in spite of his desire to return home to Sandy.

I’ll be reading this collection of stories multiple times, and I know I’ll see something new, learn and gain from each reading. Thanks, Kathy Fish.
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Oct 11, 2011 Steve rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: stories

Kathy Fish's collection Wild Life is divided into halves: first a set of stories gathered under the heading “Wild,” and a second under “Life.” In a surprise to no one familiar with my reading habits/obsessions, I preferred “Wild” to “Life,” which based on a number of other reviews on Goodreads puts me in the minority. The earlier stories are often set in the outdoors, and involve wild places and creatures, but more than that there’s a wildness to the stories themselves. They’re moments of myth-m...more Kathy Fish's collection Wild Life is divided into halves: first a set of stories gathered under the heading “Wild,” and a second under “Life.” In a surprise to no one familiar with my reading habits/obsessions, I preferred “Wild” to “Life,” which based on a number of other reviews on Goodreads puts me in the minority. The earlier stories are often set in the outdoors, and involve wild places and creatures, but more than that there’s a wildness to the stories themselves. They’re moments of myth-making tucked into what seem like otherwise ordinary lives, featuring events in which characters’ lives point toward stories of themselves larger than what actually happens.

Not to be predictable, but I’d like to offer two bits about bears to show what I mean. In “Land and Sky and Cosmo,” the narrator tells us about a camping trip at a campground owned by her step-uncle:

My boyfriend wondered about the bears and the step-uncle said sure, there are black bears, plenty of them. He said make yourself look bigger, wave your arms and yell and he demonstrated and we saw the forest of his armpits. He warned us about the dangers of leaving scraps. You don't remember me, do you, I said.

Later, in “Quantum Physics Forebears,” some friends are spending what seems like an ordinary evening drinking and talking, until the narrator offers us this:

That's when I see the grizzly bear rummaging around Coop's garbage, light shining on his fur. I point and mutter, point and mutter, ineffectually. TC doesn't even stop yammering, but Coop rearranges his forehead and goes and looks over the edge of the deck. He goes "RAWR" and waves his arms up and down, and the grizzly (the fucking grizzly!) looks at us with uncertainty and runs off with something in its mouth. An orange peel, I think.

Coop saunters back to the table, says, "Black bear. We get them all the time."

Both of these ursine encounters point toward their own retelling: there’s an awareness of these moments as stories, not in the sense they’re being written but because each of these narrators, we know, is actively revising the story of herself to fit a bear — whether real or imagined — into it. In the first case, there’s a rethinking of the past and what it means to the present and future, and in the second we can almost hear the story this night will become in the retelling — despite learning the “grizzly” is in fact a black bear, surely it will remain a grizzly when our narrator recounts the night later and makes it part of the myth of herself. So these bears loom large (as do other animals and encounters in other stories), symbolically and suggestively, and not only on the page: they’re physically or psychically present enough to feel like more than “just” symbols. The stories, too, are about more than themselves, more than the moment in which they occur — they extend backward and forward into the characters’ lives and into our own like all the best myths or fables or legends. I’ve used these bears to make my point because, well, I really like bears and they’re probably the most vivid examples, but I think the point holds true for all the stories in the first half of Fish’s book.

In the second half of the collection, “Life,” the stories are fittingly more domesticated, less feral. They also seem more contained, by being set mostly indoors but also because they don’t extend as far beyond their own pages. In “Backbone” we’re told of a girl’s ride along with her sisters in her uncle’s “black Ford Falcon,” a drive on which,

Uncle Jayce smoked Raleighs and flicked his ashes out the window and they flew back into our faces. He told us to tell him when we saw a red-tailed hawk and when we did, he'd take a sip of something he had in a bottle between his legs.

We were as well-tended as livestock.

These characters are livestock, not wildlife, and even the hawk (not to mention the Falcon) is reduced — by Uncle Jayce, not by Kathy Fish — to a cheap drinking game. That’s a far cry from the mythic, suggestive creatures of the earlier stories. And these characters’ lives are generally smaller, if more familiar and facing more immediate problems (you know, the kinds of things readers want to read about when they aren’t bear-obsessed weirdos). But for me, the character in “Prague” killing time on a youthful visit to that city with the same conversations and boredom that might occur anywhere — which certainly resonates with my own experience of travel — is less compelling than the earlier characters who seem more likely to act than wait.

In “The People Here Are So Hardy And Cheerful,” Tom Bridge is stuck in Denver’s airport, calling someone named Sandy over a poor connection. “Everybody just wants to get out of here,” he tells her, and later, “I hate it here, Sandy.” It’s a compact, powerful image of the literal and metaphorical difficulties of connection and distance, and wholly true to life in a powerful way. I easily understand why some other readers and reviewers have preferred these “Life” stories over the “Wild.” And yet, I prefer the earlier tales that take as their starting point not “I want to escape!” but instead “Off I go!” Less realistic, probably, and less like most of our lives, but I guess I prefer stories more mythic than life instead of stories just like it. So I really appreciated the bifurcation of this collection, and its invitation to think about the difference.(less)

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Sep 19, 2011 J.A. rated it 4 of 5 stars

"Kathy Fish’s previous collection sat amidst the other also stellar words in Rose Metal’s A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: Four Chapbooks of Short Short Fiction by Four Women, and her words there made me eager for her words elsewhere. Luckily, through the new editorial hands of Matter Press, run by the esteemed author Randall Brown, we have this new book to fill our need: Wild Life, a collection of undomesticated flash fictions." Read the full review + interview at Monkeybicycle: http://monke ...more

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Dec 04, 2011 Richard Thomas rated it 5 of 5 stars

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT OUTSIDER WRITERS COLLECTIVE.

In Kathy Fish’s slim volume of flash and micro-fiction stories, Wild Life, she splits the collection into two halves, the first entitled Wild (“The lioness is crouching.”) and the second entitled Life (“Grundy Triplets Perish Unnecessarily”). And there is a reason for this. While both sections deal with family (even though the subtitle to the collection is “a collection of undomesticated flash fictions”) the first part has a feeling of chaos, a...more

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Aug 28, 2011 Myfanwy rated it 5 of 5 stars

If you're like me, when you finish the brilliant new chapbook Wild Life just about every other page will be dog eared. From the prodigal brother eating watermelon in the dark, to the Payless shoe store clerk who may or may not be a child abductor, to the couple with the new bed, you will turn the last page of this book and feel as though you have entered a truly beautiful and brilliant mind. And that mind belongs to the book's author, Kathy Fish.

Fish's wry humor, keen vision, and deft language...more If you're like me, when you finish the brilliant new chapbook Wild Life just about every other page will be dog eared. From the prodigal brother eating watermelon in the dark, to the Payless shoe store clerk who may or may not be a child abductor, to the couple with the new bed, you will turn the last page of this book and feel as though you have entered a truly beautiful and brilliant mind. And that mind belongs to the book's author, Kathy Fish.

Fish's wry humor, keen vision, and deft language will leaving you laughing one minute and crying the next. She is not manipulative with her words. She does not scream her stories. She does not thrust them down your throat. She offers them to you quietly. She offers them to you as a whispered prayer. In fact, what she does is trust you with her unique and precious gift.

Take, for example, "One Purple Finch" a gentle and unexpected love story that is utterly complex in its beautiful simplicity:

He would make pancakes for her, with berries and honey. And she would life the hem of her skirt. And she would build him a fire. And he would make her a card, drawing a picture on the front, of trees and one purple finch. And they would look at each other at the end of the day and say now what should we do? We should be friends forever and hold each other's hands and tell each other when we have something stuck between our teeth and trade anecdotes and say oh you told me this before but I love hearing you tell it, so tell it to me again. And you should untie my sneakers when I am weary and I will wear the silky aquamarine robe when you want me to.

All of the pieces in this book moved me in some way, but the one that will not ever let me go is "Spin" which is about a mother and her young child. As a teacher tries to get the mother to "redirect" her child and teach him how to conform to a certain way of learning, she remembers her past life, mourns her imagined present, and learns to live in the moment and the successes that seem small, but are immeasurable. I would argue that this story will push its way into even the hardest heart and that once the reader gets to the end, he will understand this mother's heartache and her incredible love:

When she finished, she found him lying flat under the sofa cushions. She wondered if she was supposed to unbury him. She sat on the floor and leaned in as close as she could. She felt the boy's breath on her face. It smelled like apples.

"Hello in there," she whispered.

This book is a gift and I hope you will read it.

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Oct 08, 2011 Marcus Speh rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: reviewed

This book is a gem. No, that's clichéd though it's true. The book is harder, sharper, stronger; it's a weapon to help you tame the beasts that Kathy Fish has unleashed on the page. Many of these beasts aren't animals at all, they're human and that is what Fish does so very well: humanity. My favorite stories are near the end - Spin, The Bed and Tenderoni —they're about the struggle to get close to one another. "Wild Life" in Kathy Fish's magical world of very short stories is a very large world...more

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Sep 13, 2011 Kevin Fanning rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a collection of flash fiction, divided into two parts. For a reason that I am not yet able to name, I connected with the pieces in the second half most deeply. As I progressed through the book, I was thinking that the pieces in the first half of the book were shorter, more like scenes, more like what I consider prose poems, and that the pieces in the second half were longer, not just scenes, scenes involving characters, more like flash fiction. But then on my second read through the book...more This is a collection of flash fiction, divided into two parts. For a reason that I am not yet able to name, I connected with the pieces in the second half most deeply. As I progressed through the book, I was thinking that the pieces in the first half of the book were shorter, more like scenes, more like what I consider prose poems, and that the pieces in the second half were longer, not just scenes, scenes involving characters, more like flash fiction. But then on my second read through the book, I realized I was wrong, and there are pieces in the first half just as long as pieces in the second half. So I don't know, I guess! In the shorter pieces I felt sometimes that there wasn't quite enough for me to latch on to, whereas with the longer pieces, not only did I latch, they grabbed on to me, they clung to me, they would not let me go. And that's part of what's so amazing about Kathy's prowess as a writer. Because when I say "longer piece" we're talking about a page, maybe one and a half. Her ability to drop you into a fully-formed world, with characters who are struggling, characters who are losing their struggles, characters you want to cheer for, encourage, linger with after the story is over. Absolutely mind-boggling. This book is full of stories that will just kill you.

A recommendation: do what I did and read the stories aloud, to yourself. The sentences Kathy writes really need to be heard and listened to, sung. There's a rhythm and lyricism happening here that is pretty stunning.

I really especially enjoyed:

* Watermelon ("You left anyway, hitchhiked all the way to Houston,")

* Cancer Arm ("He asks why you're late. And you say 'phone call from an old friend,' and he says, 'bullshit,' plucking a hair off your sweater and you say, 'you're right! Please pass the buns.'")

* The People Here Are So Hardy and Cheerful ("His airplane sits like an invalid at the gate. He hunches over, not wanting to shout, but Sandy's still saying his name.")

* Spin ("In the other room, the fax machine started beeping, sending work. She used to be a geologist, but now she did proofreading from home. The boy clapped his hands over his ears and cried.")

* Tenderoni ("He pats my head and he's never patted my head before.")

Kathy's got another book coming out soon and I cannot cannot wait. I will be super upset if she doesn't do a book tour.(less)

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Dec 25, 2012 Tammy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Eventually I hope to give this chapbook a proper review on my blog, but in the meantime, I want to say I enjoyed it and the way it was divided between "wild" and "life." Several of these pieces have been previously published. I had come across "The Bed" and while it wasn't a favorite of mine, the language was compelling enough for me to remember the author's name. "Sweep," "Paper Boy," "Spaceman," "Cancer Arm," and "Disassembly" would be my top choices in this collection.

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Dec 31, 2011 Laura rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: owned

Liked especially "The Cartoonist", "Friday Afternoon, Her Father's Music Shop", "Faulty Keys and Latches" (for "He dreams of doors hanging off their hinges like dislocated arms. Of warped wooden doors that stick. Of faulty keys and latches."), "Warrior", "Petunias", "Cancer Arm", "Bread", "Hooligans", "Spin", and "Disassembly". Going to re-read parts out loud as per Kevin's suggestion.

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Jan 29, 2013 David Hicks rated it 5 of 5 stars

Clear, cutting prose from a deft, honest writer. I'm not, in general, a fan of flash fiction, but these stories were incisive and insightful. I found myself taking a break after most of the stories to digest each one, so a book I could have read in a day actually took me a week. Her name is Kathy Fish, but from now on I'll be referring to her as Grandmaster Flash.

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Jan 07, 2012 Colleen rated it 4 of 5 stars

I had read a number of these wonderful stories before. I believe on Fictionaut. I love having them all in one collection. And it did what I was hoping it would do: inspire me to write.

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Aug 11, 2011 Joseph Young rated it 5 of 5 stars

That's me talking up in the book description (thanks, Kathy and Randall), so I'll just add here that this book is straight up great.

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Jun 13, 2012 Tara rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: flash-fiction

You have to write flash fiction to know how damn good Kathy Fish is, she makes it look so effortless. But it takes a lot of skill to produce the little gems she writes. This is a wonderful flash collection. Loved the stories, the depth, and the originality, and even the cover.

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Dec 01, 2011 Matthew rated it 4 of 5 stars

These beautiful fictions, lush and yet the briefest of the brief, are all at best frequently returnable and at worst redeemable to the cost which I paid. Translation: I really liked it a lot and will read it again and again.

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Jan 19, 2012 Avital rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: friendsbooks

Loved the combination between the wild and life. The first flash already had me hooked, and the rest stood up to it. The last one, again, astounded me.

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Oct 08, 2011 Beverly rated it 5 of 5 stars

I think it's brilliant. If you haven't read contemporary flash fiction by a master, then this is it.
Poetry in prose. Yikes she's good.

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Shelves: favorites

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About Kathy Fish

Kathy Fish lives in Colorado. Her collection of short fiction, TOGETHER WE CAN BURY IT is forthcoming from The Lit Pub http://store.thelitpub.com/product/to...

Her collection of flash fiction, WILD LIFE, is available now from Matter Press http://matterpress.com/press/ or on Amazon.com

She guest edited Dzanc Books' 2010 Best of the Web. Her work is published or is
forthcoming in Slice, Guernica, Miss...more

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Books by Kathy Fish

A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: Four Chapbooks of Short Short Fiction by Four Women

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