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People with Holes
Hailed as "magic realism at its finest," Fowler's stories reveal the small but essential truths that motivate sex, love, and tragedy in relationships. Previously compared to Franz Kafka, Shirley Jackson, and the love child of Joyce Carol Oates and Angela Carter, Fowler's voice flips in tone and cadence in ways that delight her readers. Whether in museums of solitude, airports of dreams, archers' fields, freak shows, urban cafes, or the cottages of dwarves, her stories explore love's inevitable consequences. Fowler's unique visions are thought-provoking, with a touch of feminist sensibility, and shot through with quirky and laugh-out-loud humor.
262 pages, Paperback
First published July 2, 2012
About the author
Heather Fowler
42 books134 followersHeather Fowler is a poet, a fiction writer, a playwright, and a novelist. She is the author of the novel Beautiful Ape Girl Baby (2016) and the story collections Suspended Heart (2010, 2nd edition 2019), People with Holes (2012), This Time, While We're Awake (2013), and Elegantly Naked In My Sexy Mental Illness (2014). Fowler’s People with Holes was named a 2012 finalist for Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Award in Short Fiction. Her fictive work has been made into fine art in several instances and her collaborative poetry collection, Bare Bulbs Swinging, written with Meg Tuite and Michelle Reale, is the winner of the 2013 TWIN ANTLERS PRIZE FOR COLLABORATIVE POETRY released in December of 2014. Fowler has published stories and poems online and in print in the U.S., England, Australia, and India, and had work appear in such venues as PANK, Night Train, storyglossia, Surreal South, Feminist Studies, and more, as well as having been nominated for the storySouth Million Writers Award, Sundress Publications Best of the Net, and Pushcart Prizes. She is Poetry Editor at Corium Magazine.
Please visit her website here: www.heatherfowler.com
Please visit her website here: www.heatherfowler.com
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
October 4, 2012
One day, when I am president (note to self: run for president), my first order of business will be giving this author the praise and acclaim she deserves. With an international publishing contract, so the entire world can see that beautiful, brave storytelling is alive and well in America. Until then, you guys are going to have to help me campaign.
June 20, 2012
The characters in Heather Fowler’s newest collection of short fiction, People with Holes, released July 2012 from Pink Narcissus Press, are here to talk about Sex. That’s sex with a capital S, sex in excess, sex as an animalistic need, as a way to forget, move forward, and take control of others. Oh, and by characters I mean women. Larger than life, most of these women proudly strut in high heels, fishnet stockings, leopard-print jewelry, and over-the-top make-up. I kept imagining drag queens. Then again, didn’t “King of the Hill” boast an episode where large-footed feminist Peggy Hill is mistaken for a drag queen, which is defined in the show as a man who embodies a strong woman?
While women in Fowler’s first collection, Suspended Heart, were hurt by men and left to carry their sadness, People with Holes has a vengeful vibe, and women poison, decapitate, and belittle the genitals of those who dare hurt them. I was conflicted, though; some of these women grab men by the crotch, assuming no one could refuse them, and I started to think of them as just as bad as men who are condemned for similar behavior. The collection speaks to me in a time when sex and women are confused by political agendas and personal values. In “Sex with Dwarfs,” a re-imagined Snow White uses her friends because, essentially, they are like living vibrators: “His member, dwarf-like as it was, was too short to pierce her maidenhead and was just small enough to function like a tiny vibrating toy…”
Just when I feel like I might drown in the sexy juices of Fowler’s stories, she gives the reader a chance for air with more insight into the emotional aspects of these women. When a woman cannot get her boyfriend to say, “I love you,” she begins using plant metaphors for her feelings: “Blossfeldia have no tubercles, ribs, or spines, but are blessed with comparably large flowers, which exceed the diameter of the stems. That’s how I feel about you. Large flowers, most days. No spines. You taste like aloe to my soul.” Some of these characters desperately need an aloe for their sad hearts, proving the collection is about more than Sex and bravada. “Room Full of Scars” explores a woman who cannot find a partner because a room in her home is the literal scars of the past clinging to the walls so she doesn’t have to suffer their burden internally.
Fowler’s fabulist style does peek its head out in this collection, seen in “With the Silence of a Deer,” a story about a woman whose head becomes that of a deer and whose boyfriend “mounts” her to his satisfaction. “Three Views You Might Have Taken at a Pond’s Edge, Or Quack” turns the familiar princess and the frog tale on its head, capturing trickery at its funniest. Suffice to say, People with Holes is a “take no prisoners” sort of read.
While women in Fowler’s first collection, Suspended Heart, were hurt by men and left to carry their sadness, People with Holes has a vengeful vibe, and women poison, decapitate, and belittle the genitals of those who dare hurt them. I was conflicted, though; some of these women grab men by the crotch, assuming no one could refuse them, and I started to think of them as just as bad as men who are condemned for similar behavior. The collection speaks to me in a time when sex and women are confused by political agendas and personal values. In “Sex with Dwarfs,” a re-imagined Snow White uses her friends because, essentially, they are like living vibrators: “His member, dwarf-like as it was, was too short to pierce her maidenhead and was just small enough to function like a tiny vibrating toy…”
Just when I feel like I might drown in the sexy juices of Fowler’s stories, she gives the reader a chance for air with more insight into the emotional aspects of these women. When a woman cannot get her boyfriend to say, “I love you,” she begins using plant metaphors for her feelings: “Blossfeldia have no tubercles, ribs, or spines, but are blessed with comparably large flowers, which exceed the diameter of the stems. That’s how I feel about you. Large flowers, most days. No spines. You taste like aloe to my soul.” Some of these characters desperately need an aloe for their sad hearts, proving the collection is about more than Sex and bravada. “Room Full of Scars” explores a woman who cannot find a partner because a room in her home is the literal scars of the past clinging to the walls so she doesn’t have to suffer their burden internally.
Fowler’s fabulist style does peek its head out in this collection, seen in “With the Silence of a Deer,” a story about a woman whose head becomes that of a deer and whose boyfriend “mounts” her to his satisfaction. “Three Views You Might Have Taken at a Pond’s Edge, Or Quack” turns the familiar princess and the frog tale on its head, capturing trickery at its funniest. Suffice to say, People with Holes is a “take no prisoners” sort of read.
December 30, 2015
Heather Fowler is the author of the story collections, Suspended Heart (Aqueous Books, 2010), This Time, While We’re Awake (Aqueous Books 2013), and Elegantly Naked in my Sexy Mental Illness. She received her M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University. Heather Fowler is the hardest working writer I know. Her work is hard to classify. It has been called magical realism, new wave fabulism, amd Kafkaesque, all of which come close to fitting the bill but fall short of proper estimation. That she has chosen the art of fiction as her craft magnifies the intensity of her effort—Fowler’s work can make museums out of mindscapes, turn lovers to ghosts in unreal actuality, and tear holes in multiple parties, as happens in this book’s title story, about distinctive personal flaws mutually overlooked by pairs of lovers, no more or less fantastic than a mole or a scar, yet undeniably more than merely literal, rather uniquely abstruse, ranging into territories of unknown possibility, what experience is made of. She shoots sharp.
Not long after, we visited the liquor store. No one could see your hole. You had on this faded purple button-up shirt and some Lucky jeans. I wanted to get lucky. I could almost see you as normal, imagined you doing a great unveiling dance for me, showcasing the hole like a sex organ. We watched these two kids in the aisle, stealing candy, both lithe-limbed sixth graders stuffing their pockets with chocolate and sour stuff and laughing. The store owner saw them too, grabbed them by the scruff of their necks and said, “I think you have some things that belong to me.”
The holes can appear anywhere on a person’s body, as the story’s narrator discovers after she begins attending a support group foor people with holes in the company of her own afflicted lover
I opened a small silver mirror to look at my eyes. My make-up was fine. My eyes were fine. But there was a big hole in my forehead, so I could see the bleachers behind me — the banners, the posters made with green paint that read, “GO TEAM!”— right through my head. “Bad hole,” my neighbor said to me. “Hard to hide.” “Yeah,” I said. “Pretty much.”
Those lines nearly sent this reporter through the floor, faithful readers. CONTINUED HERE: http://www.examiner.com/review/people...
Not long after, we visited the liquor store. No one could see your hole. You had on this faded purple button-up shirt and some Lucky jeans. I wanted to get lucky. I could almost see you as normal, imagined you doing a great unveiling dance for me, showcasing the hole like a sex organ. We watched these two kids in the aisle, stealing candy, both lithe-limbed sixth graders stuffing their pockets with chocolate and sour stuff and laughing. The store owner saw them too, grabbed them by the scruff of their necks and said, “I think you have some things that belong to me.”
The holes can appear anywhere on a person’s body, as the story’s narrator discovers after she begins attending a support group foor people with holes in the company of her own afflicted lover
I opened a small silver mirror to look at my eyes. My make-up was fine. My eyes were fine. But there was a big hole in my forehead, so I could see the bleachers behind me — the banners, the posters made with green paint that read, “GO TEAM!”— right through my head. “Bad hole,” my neighbor said to me. “Hard to hide.” “Yeah,” I said. “Pretty much.”
Those lines nearly sent this reporter through the floor, faithful readers. CONTINUED HERE: http://www.examiner.com/review/people...
July 24, 2012
Normally I am not a fan of short stories. But this collection was masterfully done. Maybe I just needed something different but the themes of love and sex and magic were beautifully woven with emotion. Glad I picked it up on a whim.
July 6, 2012
Wonderfully deep and sticky, yet shallow enough at times to cause no lasting tissue damage.
August 9, 2012
“People With Holes,” is a potent collection of magic realism that weaves the tragedy and deception in relationships, the holes of humanity and pulls all that subterfuge to the surface. Holes are actual holes on people that are visible, rooms become home to our scars, heads can be cut off of bodies and carried around, people shrink, turn into various animals, a museum of solitude holds all memories, a boyfriend’s belly is a flat screen of ocean the narrator can swim into while another’s penis is a white laboratory rat. It brings the metaphor to the tactile, the breathable, the living. Fowler’s work is inimitable and exciting. I don’t even want to call it magical realism so much as Heather Fowler tearing down those ‘load-bearing walls,’ to find out ‘what’s beneath the fabric’ of each human she explores.
“The closer you are to what you want, the more you are aware how not having it stabs your space. The space of ambiguities is worse still, amorphous, hovering between wanting and taking.”
This is a collection not to be missed. Each story is a talisman for a reproduction of a life. There is not one tale that doesn’t ring true. These stories actually bring memories to the forefront that have been buried deep in the soil of the mind, marked ‘please forget or at least deny’. Fowler is a master at digging into those trenches and watering what others would much rather let dry out. She plants her seeds in them and out come damn forests!
“I am so much water, so much steam. I am a dream diffused into a nightmare. Afterward, when he stands across the room from me, when he strides away, I can pinch his distance between my thumb and index finger. He is that small. I am that small for him too, at similar distances.”
Get a copy of “People With Holes,” if you don’t already have one. It's unforgettable and inimitable! Heather Fowler is a phenomenon!
“The closer you are to what you want, the more you are aware how not having it stabs your space. The space of ambiguities is worse still, amorphous, hovering between wanting and taking.”
This is a collection not to be missed. Each story is a talisman for a reproduction of a life. There is not one tale that doesn’t ring true. These stories actually bring memories to the forefront that have been buried deep in the soil of the mind, marked ‘please forget or at least deny’. Fowler is a master at digging into those trenches and watering what others would much rather let dry out. She plants her seeds in them and out come damn forests!
“I am so much water, so much steam. I am a dream diffused into a nightmare. Afterward, when he stands across the room from me, when he strides away, I can pinch his distance between my thumb and index finger. He is that small. I am that small for him too, at similar distances.”
Get a copy of “People With Holes,” if you don’t already have one. It's unforgettable and inimitable! Heather Fowler is a phenomenon!
October 11, 2012
Heather Fowler’s stories are full of sex and magic. That sounds flowery, but in this San Diego writer’s hands, it’s anything but.
In the title story of her new collection, People with Holes, published by Pink Narcissus Press, the sexually frustrated protagonist is upset that her lover refuses to let her explore the hole that has suddenly appeared in his elbow. She complains, “You use my holes all the time.”
People with Holes is packed with sudden transformations. A woman dating a hunter wakes up with a deer’s head. A scholar’s skin ripples like the pages of a book when he’s sexually aroused. A lover turns into a duck, and no amount of kissing can bring him back.
Fowler frequently uses fairy tales and mythical creatures as leaping-off points for her twisted tales. In “Sex with Dwarves,” Snow White learns to love her dwarf companions. All of them. In “The Moth Girl,” the fairy responsible for all the remembering and forgetting in the world is captured by a circus and put on display in the freak show—with devastating consequence.
The story “Sid, Me, and the Sea” may contain the key to unlocking the collection. The protagonist is in love with a man whose mother is a mermaid. As a result, where his bellybutton should be is a “panel of ocean” that provides access to the sea—and to Sid’s dark past. “‘We’re all quite horrifying,’ he said, ‘when the real things inside us come out into the open.’”
In the title story of her new collection, People with Holes, published by Pink Narcissus Press, the sexually frustrated protagonist is upset that her lover refuses to let her explore the hole that has suddenly appeared in his elbow. She complains, “You use my holes all the time.”
People with Holes is packed with sudden transformations. A woman dating a hunter wakes up with a deer’s head. A scholar’s skin ripples like the pages of a book when he’s sexually aroused. A lover turns into a duck, and no amount of kissing can bring him back.
Fowler frequently uses fairy tales and mythical creatures as leaping-off points for her twisted tales. In “Sex with Dwarves,” Snow White learns to love her dwarf companions. All of them. In “The Moth Girl,” the fairy responsible for all the remembering and forgetting in the world is captured by a circus and put on display in the freak show—with devastating consequence.
The story “Sid, Me, and the Sea” may contain the key to unlocking the collection. The protagonist is in love with a man whose mother is a mermaid. As a result, where his bellybutton should be is a “panel of ocean” that provides access to the sea—and to Sid’s dark past. “‘We’re all quite horrifying,’ he said, ‘when the real things inside us come out into the open.’”
July 5, 2014
Heather Fowler takes the mundane subjects of modern narrative in the age of memoir and thinly veiled roman a clef--relationships, sex, the way they fit together in the world--into an imaginative magical realist territory. The best stories (and there are only a few in this large collection that fall flat) are imbued with a combination of mystery, magic and sensuality that will keep you up at night, ready to read just one more. The title story alone, with its amazing treatment of the way we withhold things from family, friends and lovers and the damage it causes, is alone worth the price of admission. Once you read it, you'll be hooked until the book is done.
June 29, 2016
This book is not for everyone. Rather, it's for those who don't mind an author who will take & shake her by the shoulders & shout, "Don't you see what's going on here?!" It speaks unapologetically of the tribulations experienced by women alone and by women in relationships, using magical realism as a powerful tool. You will love this book and/or hate it, but I promise that you will never forget it.
January 2, 2018
I first heard Heather Fowler read at AWP 2016, in a panel on magical realism, where she read excerpts from "With The Silence of a Deer" - where a women wakes with a stag's head for a head. A woman with a hunter for a boyfriend, who finds she can't speak with this deer's head, who has to write down on paper "I'm hungry. Please don't shoot me," before she bends over the yard to eat grass. The comparison - predators/prey - is apt for the entire collection. Each tale explores a coupling, drawing clear boundaries between gendered power dynamics but unclear boundaries between causation and consent.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews