Category Archives: American Fiction

Tears in the Fence 80 is out!

Posted on August 15, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Tears in the Fence 80 is out!

Tears in the Fence 80 is now available at http://tearsinthefence.com/pay-it-forward and features poetry, prose poetry, translations and fiction by Joanna Nissel, Claire HM, Morag Kiziewicz, Geraldine Clarkson, Mary Michaels, Hanne Bramness translated by Anna Reckin, Jill Jones, John Freeman, Peter Dent, Cindy Botha, Lucy Hamilton, Michael Farrell, Rosie Garland, Tiffany Farr, Biljana Scott, Peter Larkin, Jane Wheeler, Robert Vas Dias, Kate Firth, Norman Jope, Steve Spence, Andrew Henon, Mark Goodwin, Randolph Healy, Jennifer K Dick, Lynne Wycherley, Eliza O’Toole, Nigel Jarrett, Danielle Hubbard, Vanessa Ackerman, Caroline Maldonado, Richard Foreman, Huw Gwynn-Jones, Kathleen McPhilemy, Charles Wilkinson, Rachel Spence, Valerie Bridge, Lesley Burt, Vivienne Freeman, Jonathan Catherall, Elizabeth Cook, Susanne Lansman, Beth Davyson, Mary McCollum, Evelyn Schlag translated by Karen Leeder, Andrew Duncan, Cathra Kelliher, David Punter and Kareem Tayyar.

The critical section consists of the Editorial by David Caddy, Andrew Duncan on Jeremy Reed, Jack Martell on Jack Martell on Laura Oldfield Ford, David Annwn on Randolph Healey, David Caddy on Emily Dickinson’s Letters and Natural Magic, Gemma Garcia on Beatriz Hausner, Steve Spence on Ian Seed, Mandy Pannett on Séan Street, Norman Jope on Sicilian Poetry, Rosa Parker-Cochran on Ken Edwards, Joanna Nissel on Elvire Roberts, Rachel Spence, Steve Spence on Alasdair Paterson, Elaine Randell on Brian Marley, Steve Spence on Fran Lock. Morag Kiziewicz’s Electric Blue 15 and Notes on Contributors.

This year’s annual Tears in the Fence Festival at the Stourpaine Village Hall, Stourpaine is on 20th to 22nd September in celebration of our fortieth anniversary and eighty issues. It is also a fundraiser for the journal. More details at https://tearsinthefence.com/2024-festival/

David Caddy 15th August 2024

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Posted in American Fiction, American Poetry, Books, Canadian Poetry, Criticism, English Poetry, English Prose, Essays, German Poetry, Irish Poetry, Literary Magazine, Poetry Festival, Prose, Prose Poems, Translations and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

The Street by John Yamrus (Anxiety Press)

Posted on January 28, 2024 by tearsinthefence
The Street by John Yamrus (Anxiety Press)

I have always loved John Yamrus’s minimalist approach to poetry, so it came as no surprise to me that I love his minimalist approach to memoir in his latest book, The Street. The Street is ostensibly about the street where Yamrus grew up and his childhood years, but it encompasses much more than that. In a postmodern and often meta approach to storytelling, Yamrus shows us what it was to live in a blue collar coal town in the Northeast, which might have been any working class town anywhere in America, while at the same time obliquely discussing the nature of memory and consciousness, what it means to perceive through the limited lens of ourselves. Also, because he is approaching his memoir through flash fiction vignettes rather than an overarching narrative, he creates a memory of a place more than of an event or series of events. In that, he is able to focus on what it was like for him to inhabit a small Pennsylvanian town in the 1950s and 1960s, what that culture and time was for the people who lived there. Because of this approach, it is a memoir of the street he lived on as much as it is a memoir of his childhood, as the title of the book suggests.

            The Street as a memoir of place rather than events explores all of those people, ways of life, and traditions that have passed on. This memoir, however, is not cheap nostalgia. He remembers the place with both love and bitterness. A largely Catholic community, he remembers the aggression and unkindness of religious people and leaders. The priests in his community are interested in controlling others, and the nuns are often angry. Religion is about dividing people. When he asks about why he is supposed to hate people of other religions, a nun depicts Hindus, and by extension all non-Catholics as unfeeling to the point of evil: 

they don’t value life the way we do . . . in their religion, they think that whatever happens is god’s will and there just no changing it and if they’re doing something like riding in a boat and someone falls overboard, they’ll just sit there and watch while that person drown right in front of them, even if it’s their own son or daughter or mother or father (77-78).

This is the kind of stereotyping and lies that he is given every day, and soon he learns to hate Jesus and the people who preach about him. That is not to say that this is a memoir rooted in bitterness; he simply does not remember everything as being perfect, and of course, no place is perfect. What he remembers with love are the people on his street. These were coal miners who cared for each other and died young because of the difficulties of their profession. He remembers how loving they were to each other and to him as well.

            The Street, however, is more than just a discussion of his life; he also discusses the nature of consciousness and memory, and how the rememberer constructs meaning. Early on in the book, he breaks into a scene to self-consciously discuss this idea: 

This memoir is going to be difficult to keep straight . . . for the reader as well as the writer . . . because memories aren’t linear (anyone who’s read Proust knows that) . . . memories are like leaves on a tree . . . and they fall at different times, at different speeds, in different ways . . . eventually, no matter how they fall, they end up covering the ground (30).

Throughout, he discusses not only what he remembers but also how he remembers it. He knows that his father was imperfect, as any person is; however, his father died at the age of 45, which was when Yamrus was young, so his memories are tinged with longing, regret, and hero worship: “he’d step out of that coal truck and it was like god coming down from heaven. the door would swing open and he’d step out, real slow, like a gunslinger . . . like Gary Cooper in High Noon” (27). This way of remembering the people and places of his past adds a level of realism to it. Rather than trying to find a kind of objective truth, he lets his truths be subjective when they need to be. The realism comes through his subjectivity because we all view the world in this way, through the lens of our own memory and consciousness. He comes back to this approach over and over until we understand that he’s talking about the nature of memory, his and ours.

            I think that Yamrus’s The Street is my favorite book by Yamrus, and that’s saying a good deal because I have always loved his approach. I did not grow up in a small coal mining town in Pennsylvania, but I felt at home in his world. He remembers his world as we all remember ours with the emotions that well up when we look back. 

John Brantingham 28th January 2024

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California Roadkill by GenXCore (Mystic Boxing Commission)

Posted on June 20, 2023 by tearsinthefence
California Roadkill by GenXCore (Mystic Boxing Commission)

I wrote a couple of emails to GenXCore after I read California Roadkill. Something in it felt familiar, and I guessed that he had studied, as I once did, at California State University, Long Beach. I went to Cal State, Long Beach in the 1990s soon after Charles Bukowski, who always loomed large there because he lived nearby and would visit, had passed away. His influence on the students and faculty was large and a lot of people were writing what you might call bad Bukowski, work that was a pale imitation, where the writer pretended at the lifestyle and attitudes Bukowski had. Others took the lessons of his work, that it should be true to who you are, and were influenced by him. They didn’t write bad Bukowski but good and honest work of their own.

            When I started to read California Roadkill, I was worried that it would be bad Bukowski, which is often pointlessly jaded and simply unkind, but what GenXCore is doing in it is allowing himself to be influenced and to learn from writers like Bukowski but taking those lessons to create something new. California Roadkill is in part about recovery from drug abuse. We have seen a lot of that kind of work and much of it is great. This novel is too, but its focus is something that I have not really seen. It follows Jimmy, a punk rocker and adjunct English professor, who has been in recovery for a long time. The idea of following someone through his day-to-day struggles years after he has become clean distinguishes this novel for me from anything I have seen. Certainly, Bukowski didn’t write about that, but had he been through this experience, he might have. We are not given the saccharine story of someone who swore off drugs and whose life is now eternally better. What we are shown is how difficult the day to day life of an addict is, and how it can be impossibly hard some days. What we are shown is that in California, life can be exceptionally difficult, and money and work are hard to obtain.

GenXCore’s description of adjunct life is more realistic than any I have ever seen. I was an adjunct English Professor for 5 years and a full-time faculty member for 20, and one of the dirty secrets of the profession is that most of the people who work there are treated as though they are disposable. They make little money, they have few benefits, and they are abandoned when it is expedient to do so. They can be driven out of their profession by a department chair who doesn’t like them or is just forgetful through under-employment. To be clear, that does not usually happen. The chairs I worked with were generally good people, but that fact hangs over every adjunct teaching today even though such behavior is illegal. On top of that, the large bureaucratic machinery that controls how people in education act and how little they are able to effect change makes it difficult to treat adjunct professors with the compassion they are due. In California Roadkill, one of Jimmy’s students has attacked him, slashing his face with a knife. The response from the university is predictably underwhelming, and now Jimmy, understandably, does not feel comfortable going back to the classroom. Where does that leave him? It leaves him where so many educators who want to teach in college in the United States are. He has the expertise and the desire to do work that he is good at, but he isn’t able to do any longer. He is underemployed and living in a city where his job would not pay him enough to afford a stable rent in any case. He is a professional who is unhoused and food insecure.

California Roadkill is powerful in these places, talking about addiction and the educational system and California in general because GenXCore permits himself to write about the actual experience of these things. They are hard and often painful, but they are real. I have a personal bias against movies that applaud the idea that teachers are heroic when they sacrifice their happiness and health for their work. Teaching should not contain the false dilemma that if teachers are good then they must be sacrificial lambs, but that idea is built into the educational system. This portrayal is accurate to so many educators I know, especially those who are unable to get one of the rare full-time positions that actually have decent pay and security. It is accurate to the way that many of the unhoused live, in that he is not always sleeping outside but living a life of chaos trying to stay in different places as often as he can. 

            California Roadkill is the kind of novel I would hope to write if I were to write about the problems that I see in California, especially among those who live on the fringes of the city and the academic world. It is a beautiful novel that asks us to reconsider preconceptions, and to think about the ways the world has changed in the last decade. It is not the only book to understand these problems, not the only legitimate point-of-view, but it is a point-of-view that I have not seen represented yet, and it is a book that should be read, discussed, and thought about. 

John Brantingham 20th June 2023

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Wannabe by Adele Evershed (Alien Buddha Press)

Posted on June 11, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Wannabe by Adele Evershed (Alien Buddha Press)

Adele Evershed’s Wannabe from Alien Buddha Press is an insightful and often painful novella-in-flash into the abuse that women often face and the way they live afterward. There are any number of ways that this work distinguishes itself, not the least of which is that it is a novella-in-flash that includes poetry. The prose of the book is clearly informed by the poetic language that moves the narrative and the points she is making as much as any other aspect of the work. This poetic sensibility along with her magical realism allow Evershed to understand what the women of her work are going through in a new way that I have not seen before.

     Wannabe is often painful and difficult to read because of the intensity of what Evershed is exploring; however, her characters are real and ultimately, we are given a vision of how to go through these times. In the final story, ‘Sliding Doors or She Never Had Those Red Dress Blues,’ the main views her life and her body from the point-of-view of someone who has survived abuse and pain.

She ran her fingers over her scars, tokens of what she once thought of as too much love. But really, they were hieroglyphics that told the story of her marriage etched on the tomb of her silence. The one on her thigh, where Ed had stabbed her with the umbrella, throbbed when she touched it, and her black eye peeked through the concealer . . . On the day he hit her for the last time, she became a storm . . . when she screamed, “No” her voice was thunder and her skin lightning (66).

Evershed gives us a vision of a woman who has survived and come through to the other side with a much greater understanding of what she has been through and who she is. She gives us a character who does not see herself as a victim without power, but rather as one who can face and live through violence. In ‘Full Fathom Five,’ an abused girl learns how to breathe underwater when the punishment for not accepting her stepfather’s sexual assault is that he holds her head underwater. The magical realism of the piece helps to develop a character who can escape the cycle of shame that is often visited upon sexual assault survivors. 

     One of the aspects that I appreciate about the novella-in-flash is that it can go beyond narrative and highlight other aspects of storytelling; Wannabe’s use of poetry and poetic language often halts any sense of narrative, so that she can meditate on a concept that can and should be developed. In ‘Remains Found,’ straddles an interesting line between poetry and prose. At times it feels like and is structured like poetry and at times like prose. This duality is a strength as the narrator contemplates the remains of a body and is able to take the time to consider how society has failed when we discover abuse by discovering a corpse when the corpse speaks to us:

Look I have always been here taking up the negative space next to the broken wheelbarrow and skunk cabbage to mask the rot. Maybe you should have tended me — helped me grow — and found out what I looked like on the insides

without an autopsy (67)

This piece with its line breaks mingled with a longer prose section uses a hybrid form, but other pieces are clearly prose or poetry. There is never a moment, however, when her work is not informed by poetry. There is music and power to her language.

     Wannabe is an exceptional and powerful work. It is socially important as well. Evershed is bringing this social evil to light and showing not only that survivors should not feel shame but how they might do that. 

John Brantingham 11th June 2023

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An Interview with Sara Lippmann

Posted on May 13, 2023 by tearsinthefence
An Interview with Sara Lippmann

I discovered Sara Lippmann’s work when I attended a reading for the New Voices Project online. The New Voices Project includes a book (New Voices from Vallentine and Mitchell) and a series of events where current writers and poets write ekphrasis to images from the Holocaust. The idea is that it is important that we not only hear what the thinkers of the past wrote about the Holocaust but that we keep learning from it and update our understanding of it as we progress as a civilization.

         Lippmann certainly does that in her story ‘Good Girls,’ which is about two Jewish children being rounded up in Vichy France at the Velodrome by nationalistic governmental agents, so they can be sent to the concentration camps. She’s also the author of the recently released novel, Lech, which focuses on people in the Catskills. It is not about the pandemic, but it seems to me that this is a book inspired by it, as it talks about ideas of the dehumanizing effects of isolation. This dehumanization also figures highly in her discussion of the Holocaust, how separating people can lead to the kinds of horrors witnessed there.

John Brantingham: ‘Good Girls,’ the title of the story in New Voices, seems to me to have some level of irony. I was wondering if what you meant was that there is some level of danger in training young girls to be good in a traditional sense?

It’s loaded. What does it mean to be a good girl? Keep her mouth shut. Do as she’s told. Never step out of line, never beat to her own drummer, never resist. It’s self-erasure. Whenever an authority figure levies such an expectation, we better run. In the case of the story, however, it is precisely that self-erasure that is desired. If they keep quiet. If they don’t make a fuss. If they put up with every indignity, every act of violence, if if if – they might squeak through to survival. They might go undetected. 

John Brantingham: That’s interesting then. So the narrative given to us by authority figures is a bluff. If we keep quiet, then we will survive, but that convention is really just a way of causing harm to those who would be obedient. And it seems to me that the potential dangers of following convention is one of the themes that is often in your work. Were you discussing that in Lech in any way?

Not to wade too deeply into politics, or thorny cultural critique, but we can see this pattern manifest, play out and backfire time and again throughout Jewish history: Jews trying to align themselves with the dominant power, as if that might enable them to ‘pass,’ only to be outed and othered, anyway. I touch this gently in the flash piece, but certainly, we saw this with the nationalism of German Jews and the push for assimilation, the cultural antagonism between those who “fit” in vs. those (eastern European) who stand out. And of course, we also see this with the Kushner Jews et.al. aligning themselves with evangelical politics and the right wing agenda as if that might somehow “save” them, ignoring the rampant anti-semitisim within their own party.

I agree that one of the common themes of all my work – short stories, the novel – is the false comfort of convention. I look a lot at illusions of safety – whether it’s all the disturbing crap that springs from the suburbs, the truth behind every staged picture, and so on. It’s almost become knee jerk for me to confront the box, the container, the convention, whatever the purported package is – and more, the person/power/system that is trying to fit us into that package.   

John Brantingham:          So then convention is a trap, or maybe a place from where someone or some group might hide to spring a trap. I think in Lech perhaps my favorite character is Tzvi, who seems so human and at the same time seems like a cluster of contradictions. He isn’t contradictory at all, but he doesn’t conform to societal norms. I’m wondering if I’m getting this right about him, if this is what you meant.

The cloak of conformity may have its uses, but not when it suffocates the soul. So yes, this becomes Tzvi’s struggle. I’m so happy to hear you connected with him, as he is such a tender, wounded character — perhaps the only character that doesn’t use humor as a coping or defense mechanism, because he’s been sheltered by the insular Satmar community for so long he hasn’t built up any skin. Born into a world where everything is preordained, where laws dictate, from what you study to what you wear, how you eat, who you marry, how you love, etc, his whole self has been erased by the collective, by ritual. His “going forth” is one of self discovery and acceptance, which takes great courage and inward looking. Who doesn’t want to belong? And yet, at what individual price such belonging?

John Brantingham: The communities represented, both the Jewish community from the city and the non-Jewish residents seem to be insular to some degree. Of course, that’s the nature of community. What strikes me though is that many of those people who have moved from the city for this time seem to have little desire for connection with their neighbors and many of the people from the Catskills don’t especially want to mingle with those from the city. This tendency seems like the danger you are warning us of, and Tsvi seems in some ways to be the character who grows the most and finds what he needs the most. I don’t think you mean to be lecturing the reader on the dangers of this kind of attitude. I think you have just drawn a realistic portrayal of cause and effect in the same way as there is a cause and effect to the girls’ relationship to the community in ‘Good Girls.’ Would you agree with that?

I never write with any set agenda, and I’m certainly not here to proselytize. But I would agree that my characters are looking for connection. And sure, isolationism of any kind breeds distrust and suspicion. We see this playing out in our political arena, in the news, where people seek out echo chambers and surround themselves with like-minded people. And of course, we see this throughout history, religious, cultural, racial and otherwise. Maybe I’m being naive to hope for greater fluidity. As social beings, humans naturally form communities. But the ugly underbelly can be exclusion. If we don’t sit at the table together, we’ll never break down those prejudices and begin to understand each other.

John Brantingham 13th May 2023

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Northwest Passages by Kate Flannery (Arroyo Seco Press)

Posted on February 26, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Northwest Passages by Kate Flannery (Arroyo Seco Press)

Kate Flannery’s Northwest Passages is tinged with more than just the happy memories of a childhood world that she cannot go back to because she has grown and changed. Flannery grew up in Southwest Washington near Mt. St. Helens and much of the world that she knew as a child was obliterated in the volcanic eruption of 1980. It is gone in a permanent way that few of us can possibly understand, the forest razed, the mountain gone. It was a place for her of quiet forests that few people visited and of innocent play; however, in her memory it was isolated, and as the only girl in a family of boys and as a girl in the male dominated society of a logging town, it was a place where she had to find herself by herself. Her collection chronicles all of the complex feelings that she has about her home forest that is gone and her difficult childhood in tight, imagistic microflash essays, that place us emotionally in the world that she experienced.

The sense of how lonely and isolated she was flows through these stories. Not only was she the only girl, but she was by far the youngest person in her family. This was an isolated town with few people she might befriend. Her play then was often in imitation of her brothers, but the lessons have to be learned on her own. In ‘Before the Rain in a Western Red Cedar,’ she performs the coming of age ritual of climbing high into the trees, but she does it alone with only the story of her older siblings to guide her.

Like my brothers, I am pliable at nine years. I thread my way through the circling cedar branches, pulling up through the smallest spaces. Even from sixty feet high, I will not fall far if I lose a foothold or handhold. My tree will catch me. As I twist my way to the top, the trunk thins and turns greener . . . I begin to rock and sway in the building wind, as I had seen my brothers do (1)

This isolation is somehow meditative. She didn’t have brothers as her playmates, so she turned inward and observed the world closely, and thought deeply. And although there is no one her age, she is able to observe the older people of her world as they experienced the rituals of that world like funerals, dances, and recitals. She got to know someone named Harry Truman who chose death over leaving the base of Mt. St. Helens when he knew it was going to erupt. She was confidant to her mother and watcher of her neighbors whom she fears.

But this is not only a place of fear but a land of complex beauty as well, and her memories of it are sweet. In ‘Anything I Want above the Columbia River,’ she writes, “The clouds are racing high above the river. The winds coming from the Columbia Gorge, miles to the east, are fighting with the winds coming upriver from the ocean, miles to the west” (12). The winds work their way throughout this collection, swaying the treetops and creating private spaces for conversation with her mother even when they are outside. At one point, her mother sends her to a boarding school, but the narrator does not want to leave her beloved forests and rivers, “but my mother tells me they will all be there when I return” (12). That sense of loss and the pain of understanding impermanence is at the root of the collection’s sweetness. She loses all of it, everything that she loved at one time is now gone, but that makes the memories of her childhood world all the more magical. 

Northwest Passages is fascinating in that it explores a world that few knew and none can ever come to know now. It holds the same fascination for me as writings and art from Pompeii holds. I lived most of my life on the west coast of the United States, but this is as foreign a world to me as any other place on the planet. This is a discussion of a culture whose manners seem to be gone. As Flannery mourns some of them, she seems to acknowledge that a lot of those customs should have disappeared. She both misses and has escaped that world. There is so much meaning and complex emotion for such a short chapbook and that is what makes it so exceptionally powerful.

John Brantingham 26th February 2023

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It Felt Like Everything by K.S. Dyal (Ad Hoc Fiction)

Posted on January 20, 2023 by tearsinthefence
It Felt Like Everything by K.S. Dyal (Ad Hoc Fiction)

K.S. Dyal’s It Felt Like Everything is a novella-in-flash that does so many things that I love about the form. Writing about pain is difficult but writing about joy is sometimes nearly impossible. In his new craft book, Unlocking the Novella-in-Flash, Michael Loveday makes the point that the novella-in-flash writer can stop focusing on the narrative arc and instead explore the moments that contain so much of our lives much as Gwendolyn Brooks does in Maud Martha. Dyal is able to find joy and pain in these moments as she explores the lives of two young women who are coming of age in Buffalo, New York. Both are adolescents and having a hard time fitting in and understanding themselves. Both are exploring their understanding of sexuality, of course, and both feel awkward and out of place. That’s to be expected. They are teenagers, after all. There is nothing spectacular that happens in this book, but the writing is strong, which makes their lives fascinating. I doubt that the characters could have been written this well in any other form, and Dyal uses the flash episodes to draw out what is interesting and meaningful about the everyday.

     So much of what constitutes what is interesting in the everyday lives of most people is lost to literature because it is difficult for longer forms of fiction to sustain the drama of normal life; however, there is great meaning in those shared moments of humanity. Dyal is able to bring readers back into the world of teenage life. For me, going through this, I remembered the difficulty I had just trying to figure out how to act in adult society when everyone around me seemed to be so clear on what they should do and how they should act. At one point, Marin is aware of her body as she just tries to fit in with other kids her age, “I was so aware of my movements. I was doing that thing where I tried to see myself how others were seeing me, my gestures and my posture, and it distracted me from what I was actually doing and saying” (41). This egoism of youth feels so real to me. It brought me back to my own narcissistic teenage angst. 

     Of course, the teenage years are not filled with pain alone; Dyal captures the joy and exploration of that time as well. The titular story is about a young woman understanding who she is, and that she is attracted to her best friend. “It felt like everything, how I loved Martina. My best friend, a girl” (23). Dyal brings us back to that place of self-discovery. It is magic at that age as we start to understand who we are and what we value. Here, we get a coming-of-age epiphany where Kate has the relief of understanding what had previously been confusing emotions. Now, she is sure of herself. In another story, Marin is worried about her mother. Her father has died years earlier, but her mother has been so invested in raising Marin that she has not pursued any relationships, for nearly a decade. Marin tries, clumsily, to set her up with a local construction worker, bringing the man into her house on the weak premise that she might want to hire him. What’s magic about the scene is the caring that the daughter invests in her mother. Teenagers are often depicted as being only selfish and only shallow. This is a person learning the skills of empathy and compassion, and Dyal handles the moment beautifully.

     K.S. Dyal’s It Felt Like Everything is an exceptional book. She is someone who understands the form of the novella-in-flash and uses it properly. What she has done is captured the humanity of her characters so well, and she has shown us that this is something we all share. Dyal is a writer of compassion and sensitivity, and I hope that this is just the first of many books from her.

John Brantingham 20th January 2023

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Willoughby, New York by Carson Pytell (Bottlecap Press)

Posted on January 17, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Willoughby, New York by Carson Pytell (Bottlecap Press)

I love Carson Pytell’s work. It reminds me of Charles Bukowski and Fredrich Exley. It reminds me of Kevin Ridgeway and John Fante. It reminds me of the kind of fiction that a lot of us were trying to do when I lived and worked in Long Beach. So many of us who studied under Gerry Locklin and Ray Zepeda were going after a kind of gritty realism, and some of us accomplished the spirit and tone. Others did not. I never did to the degree that I wanted to, and so I shifted to different kinds of writing. Pytell, however, is a kind of master of this type of writing, and his fiction collection, Willoughby, New York is powerful work, the kind that I was reaching for back in those days. His chapbook reaches the kind of humanity most of these writers are striving for as he often focuses on people’s worst days, their most embarrassing moments and how they live through them. He is a writer who isn’t afraid to show us not only how banal life can be and how insignificant we can be made to feel but also how to live through these moments with dignity.

         The first story of the collection ‘In the North Country’ captures much of that power as a 21-year-old tries to have sex with a woman, both of whom have been placed into a facility for having attempted suicide. They sneak off to a bathroom, but when the woman finds that the protagonist was born with only one testicle, she reviles in disgust and even horror. She reveals a dark side of her character as she berates him for not being the perfect physical specimen, she’d hoped he was. He asks her what her problem is, and she replies: ‘My problem? I’m in here with a one ball wonder. You’re like seven feet tall, can’t you imagine what I was expecting?’ There is a callowness that Pytell is exploring and helping us to understand. He is taking us to that place of shallowness, showing us how to move on when confronted with these moments. Years later, the protagonist finds out that the girl he almost had sex with eventually succeeded in her suicide, and he is left trying to understand her, perhaps trying to understand his place in the horror of her life.

         Getting to this place of moral, emotional, and intellectual ambiguity is one of things that I love about Pytell’s work, what he does as well as anyone I know. In ‘Where the Line Is,’ his protagonist discusses his ambivalence about death after having gone through the last rights and recovered. He describes what he sees as a funny scene when he is alone in his hospital room and his blood gets splattered around the room. ‘As for the poor nurse who walked in on the faux murder scene, the worse off custodian, I recall their faces better than my family’s. How could I not? I laughed silently, but visibly harder than I ever had.’ His protagonists are often detached in this way, watching their lives and trying to understand them but not caught up in a maudlin concern. They understand something about the nature of life and its absurdities, and they are showing how odd it is.

         Although Pytell is part of that literary tradition I found and loved in Long Beach, he is making the work his own. It is not in imitation, and it is constantly powerful. I cannot recommend Willoughby, New York more highly. 

John Brantingham 17th January 2023

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Between The Music And The Sun by Andrew Hughes (Literary Alchemy Press)

Posted on September 16, 2021 by tearsinthefence
Between The Music And The Sun by Andrew Hughes (Literary Alchemy Press)

     I reached out to Andrew Hughes, who is my former student, while I was reading his short fiction collection Between the Music and the Sun and had a quick conversation with him about what he was doing in these stories, half of which are set in Nashville, Tennessee and half of which are set in Phoenix, Arizona. He told me that part of the project was to capture the new American South and desert Southwest and how the working class lives within it, which intrigues me of course. Like every other American, I was raised on a literary diet rich in the works of Southern authors, but only to a certain point in time. My Southern reading includes Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, and William Faulkner, and so my understanding of that region is limited to images that have become stereotypes. My knowledge of the desert Southwest is even more narrow, so I was eager to get a little better insight into how the working class lives in these places. I am pleased to write that Hughes’s collection complicates my understanding of these regions, and that I was surprised to see that his South and Southwest are places of interior spaces. Where Falkner might have had his characters outdoors, sweating away in a heat, Hughes’s working class people have moved indoors. After all, much of fieldwork has been mechanized. Instead of a rich sense of the outdoors, his characters have been driven into the blandly air conditioned interiors of the service and health care careers to live lives of hidden insignificance where they feel anonymous and cut off from the world.

     Hughes’s Nashville is a place of bars, restaurants, and hospitals where people are not enjoying themselves or being healed but facing the indignities of jobs that cut them off from their humanity. I was reminded again and again of the television show The Office where David Brent humiliates and is humiliated, and everyone must smile or risk losing their livelihoods. That is Hughes’s new South. Gone is the richness and trauma to be replaced by the slow grinding that defines so much of this world. In one story, told from the point of view of Mica, a doctor working in a hospital, a paramedic is told to “Get out of my ER” (15). He has not erred in any way. He has simply finished his report and is dismissed in the most demeaning of ways. In another story, Adrian works behind the scenes in a bar that serves the vast music world of Nashville. He is floating through life without focus because all there is for him is an endless progression of days in climate controlled and fluorescent lit rooms where he never sees the sun or moon save for those moments when he is traveling between work and his apartment. His life decisions come as reactions to things that he feels are happening to him, the unplanned birth of a daughter he no longer is allowed to spend time with and the suicide of an old friend. There is no agency to these characters’ lives, just the urge to keep surviving barely from one day to the next.

     The outdoors and the natural world become even more cut off from the characters in Phoenix. That world is one of great hostility, a hellscape where people are cast if they commit the sins of falling into debt too deeply or losing their jobs. After all, this is the bare desert, where temperatures often stay above forty degrees celsius for nearly half the year. To lose one’s job is to become homeless and to live in the endless grinding heat that does not relent even at night. The only solace these characters find is within a clearly defined pattern of drinking: 

You drank to reach a place where rules didn’t exist. You became a child. Do that too much though, you get labeled an alcoholic. So, have fun, but not too much fun, or they’ll treat you like a villain. (57)

It is vital in this world to follow these rules because being cast out leads to fates worse than death like Jada who must leave her toddler daughter hiding in an alley as she prostitutes herself or an unnamed homeless man who lives near the protagonist of another story:

During the days he sweats and broils in the desert sun, talking to himself in long, unintelligible monologues. Sometimes, he lies on the sidewalk, so hot it scalds his skin, and crawls, his nails scraping long white streaks in the sidewalk. (61)

To play by the rules for the working class in this city is to live a life of great blandness, but it is better than the hell that waits for people who do not, people who are cast outside and punished for not fitting in.

     I found this look at how the world has changed intriguing. I do not know what I was expecting this vision of the South and Southwest to be, but it is not hopeful, and it is not inspiring. It reflects the current housing and wage crisis that seems to be affecting every aspect of life in the United States.

John Brantingham 16th September 2021

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Spinning To Mars by Meg Pokrass (Blue Light Press)

Posted on July 24, 2021 by tearsinthefence
Spinning To Mars by Meg Pokrass (Blue Light Press)

Meg Pokrass’s Spinning to Mars is a kind of non-linear novella in flash that keeps circling back to romantic relationships that aren’t making it and clearly were never meant to be. Pokrass comes out of a tradition that includes Stewart Dybek, Pamela Painter, and Robert Olen Butler, each of whom are masters of flash fiction and who understand unsatisfying relationships. In Pokrass’s collection, we keep coming back to two people who don’t quite understand each other and don’t really seem to want to but would rather retreat into a world of books and cats.

     Each flash story captures a moment in the life of two people who might or might not be the characters from the previous stories. It is never explicitly stated that this is the same woman often circling back to the same relationship, but we do see patterns repeating again and again. Throughout, it is familiar in that she captures what keeps us from satisfying relationships in our own lives, which is mostly the distance they intentionally keep from each other insuring that they will never understand the other’s life. Pokrass is a master of the novella in flash and uses it to its full purpose. Although each piece is well crafted, because they have been arranged as they are, the statement of the collection is that we ruin our lives in depressing patterns that we never break out of. She seems to be saying that if we had a little critical insight into those patterns, we would be able to find greater meaning in our loves and lives.

     Running through the collection is also a discussion of the awkward ways that people express themselves physically as they move into middle age. In this collection, people let themselves go, stop caring that they are near other people. In “Separation,” a wife is leaving her husband. “After packing your third bag, you find yourself staring at his penis which pokes out the side of his shorts when he lies down” (40). This would seem to be a violation, but there is a friendliness built on this kind of physical intimacy. She is leaving him for a reason, but their bodies have become comfortable. Of his penis, she writes, “It has always been friendly. You’re going to miss it” (46). Awkward bodies and closeness because of that awkwardness flow through this collection. These people have lost their inhibitions as they have entered middle age, and it is comfortable and even nice. This emotion is captured best perhaps in “Classified,” where a woman meets “one of the saddest men on earth”:

    A smile obscured his sadness. His belly poked out of his shirt and he pushed it back with his hand.

    She knelt and smoothed the dog’s ears. The dog had rancid breath and she liked it. (51)

The belly, the rancid breath, and the hand are what matter here. They humanize these characters, make them relatable and likeable. She uses the awkwardness to make them attractive.

     There is a reason that Meg Pokrass’s work is gaining in popularity right now and so many people are reading her. It is powerful and human. Through these flashes that are sometimes only a sentence long, she is able to get down to what is truly human in all of us.

John Brantingham 24th July 2021

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