Weston Cutter's Blog, page 10

That Parmesan Cheese Grater and Other Reasons to read “American Innovations”

BY SHELBY VANDER MOLEN

Rivka Galchen’s “American Innovations”

It seems kind of stupid to say I loved a story because of the part about the parmesan grater. But if you read Rivka Galchen’s latest collection American Innovations, maybe you’ll know what I mean. In fact, do it. I want to know if I’m the only one.

This bit about the parmesan grater comes early on in the story “The Entire Northern Side Was Covered With Fire.” Trish is a writer who’s just sold the movie rights to her book. Also, her husband just left her.

“I came home one day and a bunch of stuff was gone. I thought we’d been robbed. Then I found a note: ‘I can’t live here anymore.’ He had taken quite a lot with him. For example, we had a particularly nice Parmesan grater and he had taken that. But he had left behind his winter coat. Also a child. We had a child together, sort of. I was carrying it—girl or boy, I hadn’t wanted to find out—inside me.”

Trish looks for a replacement grater online; finds none with the same mill features, the same comfort grip. Finally, she locates an identical model. She wonders if it’s too early to repurchase.

Do you see what I mean? Talking about separation in terms of anguish, loneliness, grief— I don’t know. I’m a little over it. But when you can talk about divorce using a Parmesan grater, suddenly everything makes sense.

Let me give you another example. In the first few pages of the story that kicks off the book, we’re taken up with a recently unemployed mold-litigation lawyer. She’s talking to her Boo on the phone.

“We hadn’t always conversed in a way that sounded like advanced ESL students trying to share emotions, but recently that was happening to us,” the ex-lawyer narrates.

It doesn’t come off irreverent. It’s just sort of—true. Galchen doesn’t circle around descriptions of a relationship in limbo. She cuts to that quirky metaphor, then snuggles it up to some telling dialogue. Boo is saying things over the phone like, “I’m so sorry, my love… I really do love you so much. You know that, right? You know I love you so much.” His wife listens. And so do we. Once again, Galchen’s totally got it.

It’s right there in a single paragraph, richer than if she’d explained it to us. So rich, the next time I hear myself saying those things to my own significant other, I’ll be thinking of that dang story—Galchen’s “The Lost Order.”

It’s like asking an actor to be scary. Nine times out of ten, they’ll do something physical—something that shows dominance, intimidation, a physical roar. Watching them in a game of charades, I could place the intent immediately. Am I scared by it though? No, not really. But when a writer like Harold Pinter writes a play with a character named McCann who slowly, menacingly rips newspaper into long strips? Watch an actor do that, and it’s completely terrifying. I had bad dreams for a week after reading The Birthday Party.

Galchen is like that. Not terrifying like Pinter’s plays, but ingenious at finding ways to express a feeling without using the common trigger words. Like the angst of divorce, all wrapped up in a cheese grater. Like the fascination of a young girl for her first crush, all wrapped up in the description of a single, pulsing vein. Like the complications of a mother-daughter relationship, all wrapped up in the jargon of a property purchase.

Galchen’s work is sneakily beautiful, really unabashed and matter-of-fact. And not to crack open the gender can, but reading a plethora of female characters written so un-stereotypically that only a real woman would be likely to do it— I love it.

From a mold-litigation lawyer caught taking orders for take-out Chinese food, to a tenant with—literally— straying furniture, Galchen’s characters are bright, distinct. The book is whirring with an almost –magical-realism that runs off the brain as if it’s totally unremarkable. It’s a sweet combination.

Anyway, I’ve already lent out my copy, but go find one and read it. Galchen’s debut novel Atmospheric Disturbances is already on my nightstand.

The World Cup Really Isn’t as Important as the Bottle You Give Your Little Girl

“Papers in the Wind” by Eduardo Sacheri

Apparently this book’s gotten onto a list of books you should read in prep for the World Cup. Which seems funny to me, really, because although football (SOCCER, yes “SOCCER”) plays a part in the story, it mostly serves as a means to an end. These guys need money and football’s the way they’re gonna get it. The story, really, is about what it means to be a family.

Four guys from Argentina star in Eduardo Sacheri’s Papers in the Wind. Two brothers and their two friends from, well forever, are the makeshift family that drives the story with their playful jabs, shit talking and basic unconditional love for one another. None of the guys have much cash to start, but they do all right. One of the brothers, Mono may have made a stupid investment, though, putting almost $300,000 into the future of a young football player who can’t seem to score a goal. And then, things get complicated when Mono is diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer, a type that kills 85% of people diagnosed within the year.

Really, the only thing that’s at stake is family. Mono’s the father of a baby girl named Guadalupe whose mother Lourdes really doesn’t want to have anything to do with his three friends. If it were up to Lourdes, neither the baby’s biological uncle, nor the paternal grandmother, nor the two unrelated-by-blood uncles would ever have the right to visit her baby girl. And of course, after Mono’s death, there’s not much the courts could do to change that. So, in order to see this little girl, the guys come up with a plan: They’re going to have to buy this babies future by selling off Mono’s failing player, keeping the cash as a bargaining chip with the mother. Guadalupe’s going to get $1,000 a month until she’s 21, and in return, Lourdes lets the uncles see her, lets her grandmother get to know her and ultimately, is agreeable during the whole time.

The problem is, this whole plan will fail if they can’t get the players’ stocks up. Without the money from selling his futures, they don’t have a dime to give to Lourdes, and without the money, she’s got no reason to be compliant with the guys.

It’s the most touching thing, really, how hard these uncles fight for the little girl they don’t even know yet. She’s already the fifth member of their gang before she’s uttered her first words.

There’s a passage in here that perfectly summarizes these guy’s philosophy about children, biological or not, that I can’t help but quote at length:

 

            “I’m saying that DNA can suck my balls, if you know what I mean. Imagine they come and tell me that Luli is adopted. Or Ana, my Anita, is adopted…

            If they come now to tell me, now that the twins are three years old, that they’re not my daughters, that they’re somebody else’s daughters, I couldn’t give two shits, you know what I mean? Because I changed their diapers, and I gave them their bottles, and I sang them to sleep. What do I care whose sperm they came from? That’s not what makes them my daughters. They’re my daughters because of all the rest.”

 

This is to-the-dot the attitude they carry on to Guadalupe. It’s what makes them keep fighting for the cash.

And really, some of the ways they try to raise the profit for this player are hilarious. At one point, they think about bribing a journalist to print different stats to make it look like their guy scored when he never even got close, so at least when teams read the paper, they’d think he had potential (but ultimately, if they looked at any of the tapes, they’d figure things out).

It’s really cheesy and simplistic to say it’s the love that makes this story work, but credit where credit is due: It’s the guy’s love for this baby girl and her father that make you glued until the end, wondering whether or not their schemes are going to work out. The schemes, the football, the sarcastic digs they throw along at each other and their short interjections of philosophical conversations and discussions about God, are what keep it interesting along the way. But ultimately, don’t read this book because you give a damn about the World Cup.

Untamed Force

Roxane Gay’s “AN UNTAMED STATE”

You know those action/thriller movies like Taken or the books like that, or maybe if those are too bloody for your taste, the Lifetime Original Movies where a girl gets taken hostage, held for ransom? Those pieces seem to end with the girl being rescued (usually, literally, rescued, without the ransom actually being handed over to the criminals), running into the arms of her father or her lover, embracing them tightly, horrified by the bruise on her face from where she’s been slapped while in captivity, but ultimately, over it, because now she’s home and she’s safe and the baddies will never touch her again.

These pieces are a load of crap, and that’s probably the dumbest ending you could put on the story of a kidnapping.

Mireille, the protagonist in Roxane Gay’s debut novel, An Untamed State, watches the cable TV drama of her kidnapping with an abject amusement. “It comforts me to imagine my kidnapping had been that neatly endured and resolved,” she says.

Take it from the very first sentences, this is a novel that cuts and wounds and does nothing to cover the scars with concealer. “Once upon a time, in a far-off land, I was kidnapped by a gang of fearless yet terrified young men with so much impossible hope beating inside their bones it burned their very skin and strengthened their will right through their bones,” Gay starts. From there, we are given two distinct stories of trauma: the first, the story of Miri’s 13 days in captivity; the second, her journey back from hell and the toll that time has taken on her marriage, on her ability to let another living person touch her again.

Mirellie is stolen in broad daylight. Three SUV’s surround her husband, her infant son and herself while on their way to the beach of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. She was targeted, yes, but it’s not personal. Miri’s made the mistake of being born into wealth, of having a father with enough fortune to cover a healthy ransom.

The problem, however, comes from her father’s principles. He will not pay.

This isn’t the story of Taken, either. There’s no father searching for her on the streets, though her white, American husband tries a little. Mainly, her father sits, calm on the exterior, in their mansion, refusing to hand over the entire ransom amount, for Thirteen Days.

I can’t even begin to describe the things they do to Miri during those weeks. Angry at her father’s stubbornness, they treat her as a piece of meat, tracing her body with knives, breaking every part of her that’s made her wife and mother.

She does what she has to in order to survive. She separates. She attempts to forget the woman she was before.

Finally, the ransom is paid, she is freed, and the story should end happily there.

But how do you look at a father that abandoned you for so long? Who used you as a bargaining chip to protect the rest of his family, to prove the strength of his own resolve? How can you connect to a homeland in which your humanity has been stripped away from you? How can you be in a relationship with a man who has no idea what created the scars on your thighs? How can you hold your son when you feel you’ll never be clean again?

Gay’s been a favorite writer of mine for a while now, and as ever, I cannot comprehend this girl’s range. Just start reading bylines and you’ll find her in an instant, in places you wouldn’t even expect – everywhere from the heady Salon to the mainstream Glamour. I didn’t know what to expect from her debut novel, though. It’s a book with a cover of a murder-mystery, something I hardly ever pick up, and the plot looked a lot like those fast-action novels I never read. I always thought I’d follow Roxane anywhere, but along with many fans, I wasn’t sure if I could follow her here.

Gay-lovers: This is novel contains everything we love about Roxane already.

There’s feminism, if not overt. There are political and social justice issues directly captured in the light. There’s philosophy and history and psychiatry. There’s anything you’d want from a novel in here.

Of course, it is extremely rough. It’s graphic to the point you’ll need to take breaks. It’s disturbing and hard. It’s also extremely important and the story of a real phenomenon you shouldn’t be turning your back on. Kidnapping is a problem, and although novels are not often thought of as calls to action, this wouldn’t be the first to make a change in the world (Uncle Tom’s Cabin; The Jungle anyone?).

First things first, though: this cements Gay as more than a journalist, more than an incredible smart lady who usually maxes out around 6 or so pages. This cements her as a writer, fact or fiction or both. She’s a force to be reckoned with.

Watch Out for the Girl in the Road

Monica Byrne’s “THE GIRL IN THE ROAD”

The story starts with a snake, coiled in a bed, ready to strike. Meena doesn’t know who put it there (terrorist organizations seem the most likely bet) or why, but the one thing she knows for sure is simple: she can never go home again.

I don’t know what spurred the more-recent trend of kick-ass female characters kicking ass in high-speed thrilers, but I’m all about it. For those of you who read The Hunger Games and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo / Who Kicked the Hornet / Who Played with Fire series and loved the idea but felt short-changed in terms of ‘writing,’ Monica Byrne has just answered your prayers.

Seriously though: this is like the cake with all the frosting in comparisons to the others. The Hunger Games I read in like 4 days, partially because I NEEDED to know what happened, partly just because I could because the books were written for a 7th-grade reading level and flowed accordingly (I’m not saying this as criticism. YA is SO important; I just craved the same characters to be shown in adult literature). And as for The Girls w/ – I honestly only read the first book and a half and enjoyed the movie much more. Rooney Mara made the COOLEST character, but I hated the way the books almost fetishized her. In the context of the popularity of both of these series, the world is ready for the two strong women presented in the eloquent text of Byrne’s The Girl in the Road.

The first girl, the 20-something Indian Katniss-Everdeen, is Meena, a girl living in the dangerous times of the 2060s. After getting bitten in the chest by the viper, Meena escapes, stocking up on supplies like a waterproof pod (in lieu of our modern tents), a digital scroll, astronaut-esque food powders and proteins, and begins her journey across the Trail, a dangerous stretch of bridge connecting India to Ethopia. No one’s ever returned from the Trail, certainly it’s rare for a girl to cross it, but for Meena, chances of survival are better along this path than in India.

Then, there’s Mariama, a little girl from a slightly earlier time, still enough in the future that children have begun to be implanted with chips, helping mothers find the child that wanders too far. Mariama is one of these children, a girl who’s run away for reasons she never wants to say. The refugee center is frightening; but a truck of laughing, spirited men provide a sense of comfort to the young girl. Soon, she’s traveling with these men as they escort Yemaya, a beautiful young lady who seems like a queen and a mother to Mariama, to her destination all the way across the Saharan Desert.

These two stories are connected. How could they not be? Still, you won’t guess how until the end.

In the meantime, there’s the story of these two (or really, three) women. Meena is out there on the trail overcoming the trials that kill most men, or at the least, drive them to insanity. Not that Meena isn’t worried about her sanity, either. In her rush to flee India, she felt herself watched, followed by a young barefoot girl. Even though the girl hasn’t been seen on the trail, there’s mysterious handprints on the windows of her pod and unexplained occurrences she can’t make sense of.

Mariama has been seeing things along her journey, too. Most notably, after a brutal crash that injuries and even kills the others in her caravan. A girl appears out of the road, telling Mariama about the Ethopia she is from. After Mariama awakes, no one believes what she saw. Yemaya dismisses it away.

Here’s where The Girl in the Road hits where Hunger Games and The Girl w/ do not: (1) The writing (2) The depth (3) The heart. (1) This book doesn’t read like action; it reads like poetry. Details of the Trail are so vivid they’ll leave etching. Stories of scrapes and scars and snakebites are less graphic than precisely curated. (2) Unlike, I’m blanking on the real name, the girl with the tattoo, Rooney Mara, Meena and Mariama are born of a woman’s imagination, never exaggerated to pornographic intrigue, never given the perfect-nature that would make them inhuman. Especially well done with Meena – a bisexual, a girl who at one point says her dharma, her talent, her escape is sex, yet this trait never comes across as her defining characteristic. (3) Rarely do action novels leave a space for empathy for the villain or anything but pity for the victims. In The Girl, nobody is strictly villain or victim, just a combination of the two.

Smart, sharp as a tack, and swift, The Girl in the Road is the action story I’ve been waiting for.

Emma Straub is Literally The Best Thing Ever

 THE VACATIONERS by Emma Straub

Getting this out there now: Emma Straub is one of my favorite writers right now, so really, I can’t do an “objective” review on her newest novel. I mean, the girl could have just written “TROLLLL” with L’s that filled it’s 300 pages and I still probably would have said “She’s a genius, you just don’t get it!” and found some way to highly recommend the book to all of you. She didn’t though, so as “objectively” as I possibly can say this: Go read The Vacationers right now.

I hate to confess, but I have yet to read Straub’s other books, Other People We Married and Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, (what am I doing with my life…), but I HAVE read the good majority of the stuff she’s written for Rookie. You aren’t reading Rookie yet? You need to. You think it’s for high-school girls? Well, um, yeah, but not only! Look, just, I wrote about it more here. Anyway, every single day during my lunch break, I go onto Rookie and read the day’s new stuff, and seriously – Emma Straub days are the BEST.

A shortlist of things the girl’s written about over there: (1) The Bachelor(ette); (2) That day when you have to change your tampon every 35 minutes (3) Feeling like a loser because you haven’t published a book by 25 (4) The amazingness of Kardashian memoirs (5) Binge watching TV shows… and I have to cut myself off somewhere, so here’s cool.

Emma Straub is like that older sister or maybe that really young still cool aunt that gives THE BEST advice in a way that’s not like a lecture, it’s just her telling her own story, sharing her own fuck-ups and hoping you won’t do them, but even if you do, hey, it’s cool. We’re human. Basically this: If it were the 90’s, Straub would be the John Stamos/Uncle Jesse of your family.

It’s not that The Vacationers expressively teaches; it’s just that, we see these characters fall into the clichés again, and it’s still, “look everyone – this never works.”

More about these characters, the Post family. There’s the patriarch, Jim, a man who really does love his wife, despite the fact he just ended a brief affair with an intern at his office. Now, he’s ‘retired’ from work and unsure whether or not to stay with a wife who may never forgive him. There’s the wife, Franny, a writer who thought the trip she’s planned to Mallorca would be a celebration of their 35 years, not a last hurrah. There’s Sylvia, their youngest, a girl’s who’s just escaped from the high school she hates and is desperate to learn about sex before going to college. There’s Bobby, their eldest, a boy who can’t seem to pick a path, and his girlfriend, the gym-rat Carmen whom no one really gets the draw of, besides like, how good she looks in yoga pants. And then there’s the adopted couple in the family, Franny’s best friend Charles and his partner Lawrence, who’ve just heard the news a young pregnant mother is considering them to be her infant’s adoptive parents.

All this is going on, plus more I’ve not mentioned because of the fun of reading the thing and all, and, as mentioned, the family is packing up and going to Mallorca for two weeks. You’ve seen The Shining and what happens when families that already have some issues lock themselves in together, right? TENSIONS BUILD.

Not like, to axe-murdering levels. But, to great fiction levels, for sure.

First of all, everything I’ve mentioned above? It’s a secret from somebody else in the family. Bobby’s got no idea the tension between his parents is because of an affair his father had with a girl hardly older than Sylvia. Jim and Franny know Bobby’s struggling to figure things out, but not to what extent. Carmen, I guess, knows no one really likes her. But don’t worry – everything comes out, and when and how it does is the meat of this story.

It’s a novel about mistakes, about new beginnings, about forgiveness and forging ahead. It’s a story about what it’s like to be in a real family, all with characters with their own shit and their own motives and their own sentient thoughts. It’s not a story about who wins, who’s right or wrong. It’s a story about learning to get over all that.

Seriously though – this is the novel you’re about to see everyone reading on the subway or at the airport. And it’s the novel you should follow suit and devour. Emma Straub 4ever.

Finding Fortune in the Walls of Delhi

  Uday Prakash’s THE WALLS OF DELHI: THREE STORIES

Are you paying attention to the fiction coming out of India these days? You should be, and I’m not talking about brushing up on the big-leaguer like Rushdie and Arundhati Roy (although, really, you should also read the full catalogues of both those names as well), but reading whatever you can get your English-speaking hands on. I don’t know what it is, but the whole ancient caste system’s place in this modern world and the impact it still – still – has on it’s stories, written in 2014, is absolutely fascinating.

Uday Prakash is no exception to this rule. He is, though, at a disadvantage; a Hindi writer, he relies on translators to get his words to English, but from what I’ve read, translator Jason Grunebaum did a fine job of transcribing Prakash’s latest short story collection, The Walls of Delhi.

A run down of the three stories contained here:

“The Walls of Delhi”: The title story, also the shortest. The tale of a simple street sweeper who finds a crack in the walls of Delhi, contained in which is more money than he could imagine. Never having resources like this before, he does what comes naturally: spends it as quickly as he can. By the time you get to the end of the piece, which, without spoiling for you, hands down the moral that the only way to make it in this bustling city is the find the money in the walls, it’s hard to separate what you’ve just read from the lyrics of an M.I.A. album.

“Mohandas”: You know how the ‘prince and the pauper’ trope is hard to translate into modern times? Eddie Murphy tried with “Trading Places,” which ultimately couldn’t do it fully; from a single glance, you can tell him from Dan Aykroyd. Here’s the thing: In India, where the caste system’s echoes are still in effect, this trope still resounds. In “Mangosil,” an Untouchable (contrary to how it sounds, Untouchable is not “Infallible,” Beyoncé-level flawless-ness, like “can’t touch this;” Untouchable literally means this person is so beneath the other levels, if you touch one you need to cleanse afterwards) is being targeted, hunted down because an upper-caste man is using his name and identity while committing crimes. The fun in most (good) prince-and-pauper tropes, though: It’s difficult to know which one will be dead in the end.

“Mangosil”: Hard to safely say, but probably the strongest story in the bunch. A child is born, to a poor family, with a strange medical condition that makes his head grow too big for his body. A virtual bubble-head, he learns to carry his head around with his hands as he walks. This great head is not just skull – from infancy on, this child is extraordinarily wise and insightful, and tragically serious. It seems as if he can read his parent’s thoughts, and even though, because of his illness, he is unable to attend school like his little brother can, the boy reads with a voracious appetite and create theories from these works that many adults never even bother to wonder about. He’s tragic, though – knowing his large head can’t be sustained forever, especially on his family’s budget, there’s a lingering fear each week could be his last; plus, on top of it all, this is a child dealing with MASSIVE topics like the oppressiveness of the English language. If you can read this story and not fall in love with the little boy, see a doctor, your heart is not working.

These stories are all so, so painful true to the human nature. Our flaws are exposed; faults and shortcomings shoved in our faces and forced to be looked at. At the same time, though, we are forgiven. We are pitied and adored and stroked like an infant all at once. They’re foreign, sure, but if you have a mind capable of metaphors, they’re the stories of you and your neighbors just as much as that of the characters.

Seriously, though: you finish each piece and it’s like a slap in the face of realization at what’s just occurred, and you can’t even feel the full sting until the next day or the next week when your mind has had some time to fully digest everything that’s happened.

These stories have sticking power.

Heartbeats and Empathy Exams

 Leslie Jamison’s “THE EMPATHY EXAMS”

Here’s how I became a better person in less than a week:

Weston told me to read Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams. To quote exactly: “it’s got some incredibly amazing/powerful stuff about smart women and pain and empathy and the thing just knocked me sideways. Read that shit.” I read the entire thing in a day (as I’m sure you will, too); and that’s how, within a week, I became better.

It’s a collection of essays you can read piece by piece, sure. It’s also the narrative of a woman you can read as a biography, as a memoir to her pain and that of so many women in America. It’s the pain of assault, of abortion, of anger, of envy, of confusion, of sympathy. It’s an all too true read of the aspects of our world we’re not supposed to talk about.

Unpack from the beginning, the very first essay and the work behind the title of the book. Jamison sits in a paper gown, a list of symptoms and character traits memorized. She’s an actor for student doctors, playing a patient, a realistic person that only hands out select symptoms at certain moments, often not delivering the full truth if the students haven’t probed deep enough. At the end of the practice examination, she fills out a questionnaire detailing whether or not the student ‘expressed empathy.’ “It’s not enough for someone to have a sympathetic manner or use a caring tone,” Jamison writes. “The students have to say the right words to get credit for compassion.”

It’s this secret, the key to the exam given before the test even begins, that we are asked to keep with us throughout the remainder of the book. Or maybe rather, the remainder of our lives. As you read these stories, it becomes simple: Are you coming at them with the attitude of a person who cares about the stories’ subjects, or do you actually care? Are you going to read these stories of pain and suffering and think ‘that must be rough,’ or will you actually weep with the survivors, carry on the compassion to the next person you meet?

From here, the collection is filled with essay after essay vying for your compassion. Some are medical, some not; all are profoundly human.

In the second story, Jamison attends a convention for people with Morgellon’s Disease, an illness in which fibers/crystals/fuzz grow under a person’s skin, causing irritation, red bumps and often, the incurable desire to attack the wound site. The only problem with Morgellon’s Disease? Doctors cannot prove whether or not it exists. The sufferers are a largely online community, comforting each other, confirming “no you’re not crazy; I have it, too,” even as the doctors beg people to spend their money on psychiatrists rather than microscopes.

In another, she recounts the tale of the West Memphis Three, a trio of teenagers who were convicted of killing three littler boys in a Satanic ritual. Many though, believe the three were innocent, convicted only because of faulty polygraphs machines and questions administered after hours of interrogation. It’s a lose-lose story from every angle: hate the murders; Jamison reminds you why they could be innocent. Hate the victim’s families who are begging for a conviction, who are promising to send skirts to these teens in jail; she’ll remind you this woman’s son has just been brutally murdered. The only way to process these stories is, really, to feel the pain of everyone involved.

Finally, there’s the last story, the one that asks you the most directly to stop glossing over this shit, to let the pain be known. Presented in a series of vignettes dedicated to the wounds women suffer, topics test the boundaries of ‘proper’ dialogue. Did you know there was a study done in 2001 called “The Girl Who Cried Pain” that found that women’s pain is routinely taken “less seriously” by doctors than a man’s? That a man will more often be given medication for their pain while women will more often be given sedatives? It’s things like this Jamison uncovers. Later, she reflects on the culture girls are living in today, perhaps most accurately reflected on HBO’s Girls. There’s this scene where Hannah and Marnie are fighting, shouting at each other “You’re the wound!” “No, you’re the wound!” “You’re the big fat oozing wound!” No girl in our world wants to give evidence she’s been hurt, that she may be “damaged” or in pain.

If you read this, chew on it for even a moment, it’ll sink into your pores, permeating and placing you into the skin of your grandmother or the wisest, kindest person you know. It’ll stop you in your tracks before you make fun of that girl who cuts, before you scoff at that 20-something walking into an abortion clinic, what with all the free birth control and condoms we have these days. It’ll make you pause before you say “oh, I’m fine,” and even allow you room to admit, maybe, yeah, I’ll hurting like hell over here and that’s important, too.

A Quick Interview with Ed Skoog

Ed Skoog’s second book,  Rough Day , was released actually *last* year on as-always-great Copper Canyon, and I’ve loved Ed’s stuff for a good while (here’s an older interview I did with him; here’s my take on his first book, Mister Skylight), and I asked him some questions over email earlier this year (February), and now here’s the interview, but, bigger: get his books. Follow him on Twitter, too–I’m not one to stump for social media, but the guy enlarges what feel like the possibilities of that medium.

 

Is it fair to read Rough Day as a fairly serious departure from Mister Skylight? It feels that way—it feels less built and more murked-through, less arranged and presented and more intuited. Is that remotely accurate? Do you read/feel the difference between the two?

 

Rough Day‘s not a departure, I don’t think. It’s partly an elaboration of the title sequence, “Mister Skylight.” Formally, certainly, it is. And emotionally, the book is concerned with personal and social rebuilding, while Skylight is emotionally about the texture of loss. It’s reductive to say so, because the poems mean exactly and only what they say, but I can tell you that these are how I see the books, and saw them as I wrote them, because they are what I was feeling and dealing with, emotionally and practically. Of course, the same text will mean different things at different times. I think one often takes years to understand what one’s up to. I think of Yeats’ weird short poem which goes

 

Although you hide in the ebb and flow

Of the pale tide when the moon has set,

The people of coming days will know

About the casting out of my net,

And how you have leaped times out of mind

Over the little silver cords.

And think that you were hard and unkind,

And blame you with many bitter words.

 

And which had, without any changes to the text, three titles, published years apart, “Breasal the Fisherman” and then “The Fisherman” and then, finally, just “The Fish.” Sentimentality, which is almost like feeling, is my unfortunate tendency, and I have to work my way towards honesty, sometimes through disruption and plasticity. I’m surprised that you say Rough Day seems more “intuited,” except that there is a sense of discovery in some line progressions, of “learning what next to say.” Perhaps it’s intuited within its form like a blues improvisation. The lines are often detached from the main order, and I perhaps “intuit” my way back into the form.

 

Tagging up on that: how different was the writing process for each? I know it was New Orleans basement vs walking Washington, DC (to some degree), but was there some intention behind what read as significant changes?

 

They were different experiences. Mister Skylight is a collection written over time, and Rough Day is, to me, a book-length poem in which each line is aware of the rest of the book, and there are many correspondences across the pages. I think I had something long to say. Something sustained and cascading. My circumstances were very different. What I’m working on now is very different from Rough Day. Some poets write in the same recognizable style from their first line to their last. I’m not worried about finding different registers and modes. I hope an adhesive force makes my work recognizable as part of a whole.

 

This is as much personal as anything else, given that we’ve both got young ones: how has becoming a father changed your writing?

 

Has it changed yours? I can’t tell yet. I write (and certainly read) less than before Oscar was born, but I think I’m more focused when I am writing, and I want something different — more sense and meaning. But I don’t think I have any bravely original insights about the matter of children and parents. I have to compress my time, and not get anxious when days/weeks go by without any work. That’s just the choice I made.

 

I interviewed you before, for the Ploughshares blog, and asked you all sorts of questions about other arts and pleasures, but didn’t much ask about your own tastes in poetry. Is there any aesthetic or group or movement or anything you feel aligned with in your work? I know that’s sort of a silly-ish question, and mildly impossible, but are there some authors whose work you feel your own work shares an affinity with? Again: maybe impossible. It’s fine if it is.

 

I used to see some affinities, but they don’t mean much to me when I look at what I’m writing. I’ve read the same stuff as everyone else.

 

This might be another dumb Q, but does social network stuff have anything to do with how you write or figure stuff out in terms of writing? I feel like I can imagine you saying they’re totally different processes, and yet: I follow you on Twitter, and there are times where suddenly there’ll just be a cascade of poetry from you–it’s not *poetic*: the stuff just reads as poetry. And then there’s the podcasting you do with J Robert Lennon (and others). Address this in any/no way as you feel it.

 

It’s too early for me to say, but I happily participate in the contemporary forms of communication with friends through email, facebook, twitter, instagram and probably a few other systems that I’m forgetting, or have forgotten. With one group of old friends, I use “groupme” which walls off that constant conversation from other forms. Another group I stay in touch with in the comment section of our fantasy baseball forum. These different formats are sorting themselves out, sorting us out, probably in insidious ways, in the same sense that the telephone was invasive and insidious, All mod cons seem to be disruptive, but I don’t have time to mourn traditions–hardly have enough time to mourn actual people. Death on the internet is strange. It’s really very Hermes, the messenger who also takes you to the river. Twitter has been useful as a repository of lines I cut from poems, allow them a life of their own, probably a larger space in other peoples’ minds than the poems they’re cut from will ever make. Fair enough. Podcasting has become and important part of my weekly routine, but I don’t think about it much. It’s a chance to talk to a close friend regularly, and it’s been nice to renew and strengthen that friendship, since we live far apart. I know that some friends listen in, and we have occasional guests, but it’s a small circle of listeners, and another way to stay in touch with people as I retreat into the social shadows of parenting a toddler.

 

This gets into process stuff you’d maybe rather not even share, which is fine and apologies if it is, but: how long do you work on poems? I know it’s obviously variable, but I want to see if I can circle back to one of the things about Rough Day and how it feels. What I meant by the stuff feeling intuited was that the work felt, poem by poem, much more…feeling its way toward something. Maybe this just has to do with the title-less-ness of the poems, or–as you wrote–that the poems all work together in a book-length way in ways Mister Skylight doesn’t. Maybe this is impossible. All I’m trying to get at: I love your work, and it hits me really hard, and there’s a way that *none* of it offers me anything expected, almost ever. Line by line I’m offered surprise, and usually the suprises are small, but, in accretion, they actually (I’d argue) make a more profound influence than any poem with One Big Surprise to it. There’s a discipline (I feel one, anyway) beneath your work, a dedication to do whatever’s necessary to get to just the right word or idea. God, this feels like just the stupidest question. Maybe just the simple part: how long do poems take? Is there massive revision, etc.? I don’t want it to be that dumb a question, but I might be trying to get into territory that’s ultimately not real explicable or excavatable.

 

I spent years writing and revising the poems in Mister Skylight and Rough Day, The first drafts of most Rough Day poems were spoken into a recorder as I walked around Washington DC in 2009 and 2010, and then transcribed and revised for a few years. I like to find connections between poems written far apart. I am working poem by poem at present, and trying not to tear them apart too much after they get to a certain place. Last fall I fell into a lucky streak, with several full drafts of acceptable poems a day, scribbling them at an off-track betting parlor in Missoula, Montana where the coffee was free. But for the last four or five months it’s taken ten or twenty days to get a full first draft.

Peter Heller’s THE PAINTER

  THE PAINTER by Peter Heller

It seems as if death and destruction follow Jim Stegner wherever he goes. Which is odd, actually, considering Jim’s an artist, a painter rather than any burly blue-collar profession, a decent who’ll do anything to protect those who can’t stand up for themselves. Yet, it’s as if God’s got a hand in his life, striking down those Jim comes in too close of contact with.

It started years ago, as so many fights do, in a local bar. Some gross guy makes a comment about Jim’s daughter, the joy of his life, and Jim pulls a gun just like a reflex. His friend knocks his arm, though, saving Jim from spending decades in jail, but still, the guy goes in for a while and it seems like this path of destruction never leaves after that night.

For instance: His daughter, the light of his life, his best friend, is killed a couple years after he gets out of jail, in some stupid accident. After that, his marriage just dissolves, and he’s left alone, maybe, he thinks for the better. Less people to hurt that way.

These are all things that happen before the story even gets its start.

And really – Jim’s not just this guy that’s in and out of jail, getting in fight after fight. As his daughter used to say, he’s not a fighter – he’s a reactor.

Take for instance, the way Jim made it big in the art world. He was always good, (it’s not too big on describing what he’s painting style is actually like, from context, I’m guessing kind of like Van Gogh, with a little more abstraction in subject matter), but he made it big after going on a talk show, getting called an “outsider” artist by the host because of his burliness and the way his father was illiterate, and then ending up breaking the host’s hand on live radio. After that, Jim’s painting didn’t sell for less than $50,000 or so. It’s a great gig for a guy who’d rather spend his days fishing.

So it picks up: Jim’s out and hears a horse whining, finds this big guy just beating the poor thing. He steps in, saves the pony, and pisses off the guy to no end. Later, there’s another fight, Jim knocking the guy extra hard and leaving him there.

The next day, police come to the house, asking Jim where he’s been. The other man is dead.

We don’t even know for sure if Jim killed him, if he got in another fight later that night, or if some accident took his life. Jim doesn’t know himself. The guy’s older brother, though, is convinced Jim’s the killer. And he begins stalking him, threatening him at every turn, tormenting his friends, making more trouble in this already tired-of-violence town.

Almost at the same time, Jim’s paintings take on a dark new edge. Everyone in the art world is noticing. He’s doing better than ever.

It’s so weird, though, how much author Peter Heller  (author of the fantastic, amazing “The Dog Stars”) can make this character and this story, The Painter, read like real life. I found myself turning pages, feeling so troubled by the story and so worried about the characters until I would remind myself, “oh yeah. I’m reading a book.”

You know how there’s always those family novels or characters by authors like Franzen that people are always saying are “exactly like someone you know?” Jim’s not like this – he’s not like, someone I remember from my small Minnesota hometown, or someone it seems like I’ve met, but rather, he feels like his own sentient being. It’s not like Heller’s created a new character; it’s like he’s made a real person, someone I can’t even fully believe isn’t out West fishing right now; that’s how far Heller went into his character’s head, figuring out what this guy would do in any situation.

This novel is gritty and raw and heart breaking and rough, but ultimately, it’s a story of redemption. It’s the story of a guy who’s trying to do right, sometimes without knowing

Birth to Beauty to Death to Back

  Ramona Ausubel’s “A Guide to Being Born“

Ramona Ausubel’s A Guide to Being Born is, among so many things, absolutely true to its cover. The image, compelling strange, hippie consists of a collage anatomical diagrams of the heart, a large egg growing like an infant inside a woman, surrounded by a menagerie of flowers, the lady’s hands pointed as if harnessing the power of her chakras and inborn strength. Basically, everything you’ll feel from reading each of these stories.

My experience with this book? I first heard about it from my Nylon magazine, saw this cover and read the short little blurb calling it beautiful among other things and knew I needed to have it. I FINALLY got it about a month ago, treating it with the care I reserve for my favorite books, ones given as gifts or borrowed from friends – never shoving it into a purse, never juggling coffee and its exposed pages at the same time, never reading it with wet hair. I’d begun treating this book like sacred text even before reading a full page.

Was it worth the hype? Hell yes.

It reads as though Ausubel has the power to create fiction the way a flower has power to create pollen – natural, inborn, lovely. It’s unfair to say that, though, as I’m sure she sweated over the text, finding the precise word to describe the situation, testing out the true adjective needed to finish the sentence. Still – for an author with so little under her belt at this point (her only published books are this and 2012’s No One Is Here Except All of Us, which I MUST read immediately), it’s incredible the way she reads as if she’s been doing this like the big dogs (Murakami, GGMarquez), honing it down to a beautiful yet natural equation.

What are these stories about? In order, according to the author, Birth, Gestation, Conception, Love. A reversal of the cycle of life. That’s simplifying it to the point of an insult, though; these are stories about passion, care, meticulousness, prayer, death, compassion, buttons, stitches. Details down to the small little pinky nail growing on a newborn, fleshy, soft and vulnerable.

A few standouts from the mix:

-       “Safe Passage.” The tale of a collection of grandmothers aboard a boat. They’ve no idea how they got here or where the boat is going. Some cry, thinking this is the boat that leads to death. Some mourn the grandchildren they’ll never see walk, the things they’ll never be able to tell their daughters. Others, though, rejoice in the things still to find on the ship, like boxes of yellow roses, tales from the other women, care in the form of a wrinkled hand.

-       “Chest of Drawers.” Exactly as it sounds. Most men gain sympathy weight with their pregnant wives; Ben gained a chest of drawers. Little, hurt-free drawers on his stomach that would fall open, exposing the insides, perfect size for carrying around miniature baby dolls. The couple drills half-moons into the tops, making them simple to open and close.

-       “Atria.” In the same frame of days that Hazel loses her virginity to a young boy she’s believes herself in love with, the girl is raped behind the church. There’s an animal growing in her now, one teachers, school children and her mother ponder over the gender of. Hazel can’t imagine what’s growing inside of her – possible a rabbit, a wolf, a giraffe with its neck curled up tight?

-       “Catch and Release.” The story of a little girl named Buck, named by her father for what she was worth, her mother, grandmother and the general she meets. Helping the old man reenact his wars with sticks and imagination, it’s unclear just how Buck’s playful violence helps the man reach reality.

I can’t tell you enough how beautiful not just these, but every single story in this collection is. I can’t even begin to explain the world of magic, reality and motherhood Ausubel’s created in this small space of pages. I can tell you though, if your imagination hasn’t been shut down at this point, if you’ve still the bone to appreciate beauty and the unreal, please read A Guide to Being Born and treat it with the care it deserves.