Fiction

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From Fact to Fiction
An interview with novelist Jennie Shortridge
By Sandra Sarr

On a sunny morning in a Seattle café, novelist Jennie Shortridge talked with Sandra Sarr about the writing life and her fourth novel, When She Flew (NAL/Penguin, 2009). It’s a fictional story inspired by a real-life event involving a war veteran raising his thirteen-year-old daughter in the wild for several years. The policewoman who tracks them down breaks all the rules when ordered to separate the father and daughter. Shortridge lived in Portland, Oregon, near the forest where they were found, and followed the story as it unfolded in the media. Captivated by how the story conveyed the serious challenges of returning Iraq war veterans—brain injury, post-traumatic stress, and resuming civilian life—she tells a story about the cost of war, the meaning of family, and the strength of the human spirit.

Shortridge is a founding member of Seattle7Writers, a group of Pacific Northwest authors who create connections between writers, readers, librarians, and booksellers to foster and support a passion for the written word. She is at work on her fifth novel. A passionate supporter of the literary arts and lover of good food, she has contributed one of her recipes to the King County Library’s Literary Feast: The Famous Authors’ Cookbook, and makes a personal appearance in the 2010 Oregon Writers Colony Calendar of Authors.

Sarr met Shortridge at a book signing for her Love and Biology at the Center of the Universe, in 2008 on San Juan Island, Washington, where they discovered they shared the same Colorado high school writing teacher, Ms. Carol Abrams, in the late 1970s. Shortridge and Sarr are both still babes who want to do their raven-haired, hip-hugger-wearing Ms. Abrams proud.

S: What was it about the When She Flew-inspiring story that captivated your imagination?
J: Several aspects captivated me: the magical nature of people living in the forest and doing something so unusual, a father doing a good job parenting with very little resources, and a girl who was healthy, smart, and schooled despite extreme circumstances. What really grabbed me was the way the police officer in charge, the sergeant in charge, reacted – not following protocol, taking the father and daughter to a shelter, and then finding them a home on a farm. The officer was in big trouble, right up until everyone started cheering them on. I found out later, through interviewing the police officer, that he’d been getting cell phone calls all night from his colleagues saying, “Where are they? You better get them back here (to the police station).”

S: Did you set out to tell the story of Jess, the police officer who believed in something so strongly that she would override the rules she lived by and risk her career?
J: Yes, she did the right thing instead of the usual thing. That, to me, was the most powerful part. That was what I set out to write. It was even more about the police officer than about the father and daughter. Yet, I really wanted to keep the daughter’s voice in the story. I had originally imagined them as being equal narrators, weighted the same way. My editor would have liked to have more of the voice of Jess, the cop, because of the marketing demographic. She didn’t want me to start the book with the girl, Lindy, as I did originally. So I made the first chapter be the policewoman. I snuck in a prologue. So it’s really Lindy, the veteran’s daughter, who starts the book.

S: Do you hope your readers will consider what they’d stand up for when faced with a dilemma in their own lives?
J: Absolutely. It’s hard for me not to have a social agenda when I write. I always do. I like to show how people react under pressure. Even though they’re so wounded, or have their own issues or faults, I show how they ultimately do what they believe is right.

S: Why was Jess, the police officer, overly protective of her own daughter?
J: Jess’ family was torn apart rather early by a dad who was killed on the police force and a mother who was incompetent at raising the kids. Jess, being the only girl in the family, took on that role, even though she was too young to take it on, even though she had older brothers. She had absent parents, which is definitely a theme from my life, as well. She marries an absent husband, a father who’s absent through drinking and self-centeredness. Of course, you want to create a character who is on the edge of the bell curve for your narrator/protagonist. So, I found reasons for her to be very interested in safety and to project that onto her daughter in the extreme. I made her a police officer, which compounds all of those things.

S: How did you get to know your characters?
J: With the cops, I hung out with Travis, my cop neighbor. And I interviewed Michael, the sergeant on the case. He snuck me into a roll call meeting, just like the one I wrote about. I sat in a corner listening to their banter. They didn’t know who I was and ignored me. So, as my character, Jess, talked with her fellow cops, that teasing banter I’d heard came alive in dialogue.

S: As your book’s title indicates, flight is a significant motif.
J: An astute reader pointed out to me that at every point where Lindy makes a transition, there’s a bird. I didn’t set out to do that – I didn’t say, “I’m going to put a bird at every transition point in her life.” It’s fascinating to me–these are the things that creep in as you’re writing that show you’re working at a different level.

S: That you’re not even consciously aware of…
J: Yes.

S: Your book opens with a Brian Andreas quote that you noticed on an old postcard in your office: “For a long time, she flew only when she thought no one else was watching.”
When did you make the connection that it would eventually inform your title?
J: This postcard has been in my workspace for 10 or 15 years. I picked it up when I lived in Denver years ago. I decided that I really liked the “When” concept in that quote. I didn’t even have a slight idea of the title. The whole flight concept was not even there for this book. I think it just occurred to me very suddenly looking at it. And I said, “Ahh!” and emailed my editor. That’s how titles generally come to me. You can try on, 30, 40, 20, whatever it is, but if you don’t think, “Of course,” then you know it’s not the right title, and you keep trying. I did contact the man who wrote that quote and he was so lovely. Right away he said, “Sure,” and I said, “How much?” Usually you pay for these things. He said, “God, no. Just use it.”

S: How does the swastika come to be Lindy’s good luck charm?
J: That’s in the true story. I went back and forth about the swastika – should I use it or not? It was in the news but not prominently. I didn’t even see it in any of news articles until really late in my research. When I asked the actual sergeant about it he said, “I was wondering when you were going to ask me about that.” It’s intriguing and makes such a good case for the cops going into the forest with submachine guns and dogs and airplanes. The father taught his daughter about all kinds of cultures and different symbols. That one to them meant good luck and good fortune and all the things they needed in their life. The cops believed them after questioning them seperately. They said they had never seen two stories align so perfectly. So they believed everything they said about their past, who they were, and what they believed.

S: Your chapters alternate between Jess’ point of view and Lindy’s. Why did you chose to present Jess in third person and Lindy in first?
J: Lindy just had to be first person. As soon as I started using first person, she woke up, came alive, and starting talking to me. Lindy started talking about birds. I hadn’t been thinking about or planning birds. I was just doing that kid-thing of lying on my back, looking up into the trees–which is where she would be. And she started talking about her birds. So, that felt like it had to be that way. And I thought that we needed the grounding of Jess in third person. It’s a very closely-held third person; we’re very much inside her head. But I thought we needed the adult to be grounded. That’s what felt right when I tried it different ways. When I would get to what felt like the sweet spot to end the chapter, it was fun to then continue the story from another viewpoint.

S: It’s a weaving.
J: Yes, you have to back up a little and then get back into it and pick it up or explain the missing piece. Just as you’d work in back story, even if it’s the same narrator the whole time. If a question has been raised and then you have white space and a new chapter–start with the back story. Fill that little piece in, and then move back into the front story.

S: At the end, Lindy is making an observation about her new place.
J: Right. That is the moment at which she has matured. She’s become an adult. Her story arc is very much about going from child to adult in the relationship. She’s changed enough to see her father’s weaknesses and to understand that she has a place in the world. But she also has a duty. The story is so much about family and family duty, and what we do to take care of each other.

S: How do you know when a story is done?
J: I always love that part. Construction-wise, you know the story is done when you’ve answered the metaphysical question, the question that you ask at the beginning of the story. Writing-wise, I never have to change where the story ends. All of a sudden I realize that the “camera” is pulling back, the picture is fading, and I’m pulling away from the characters. They’re fine. You know that you’ve gotten them to the point where you don’t have to explain more, you just have to let them do more in your readers’ imagination. You know you’ve gotten them to the point where they can fulfill their destiny. That’s enough; you don’t want to keep going. I don’t know why, but I always feel it happening, and I’m always surprised. I’m thinking I’m going to write another chapter or two and I suddenly realize, “That’s it.” I just feel it.

S: Your story moves quickly over a short period of time. Why?
J: About three-fourths of the book happens over 24 hours. And the whole book happens over three or four days. I wanted it to feel urgent. The real story unfolded over several weeks.

S: What the most difficult challenge in writing this book?
J: It took me a long time to get comfortable with how much to fictionalize and how much of the truth to tell. I was very concerned about the people involved, the father and daughter eventually reading it and feeling exploited for someone else’s gain. I tried setting it in different places. I was going to set it in Boulder, but then I realized I wanted to be able to describe where they actually did live. I went to see it with the police sergeant; but I didn’t want other people to know where that was. So I decided to make it a mythical Oregon urban center. But kept the girl about the same age, and I kept the fact that he was a war veteran. I knew nothing else about them, except what they looked like. Of course, I made them look different in the story.

S: That was the challenge–how much to stick with the facts?
J: Right. I wanted the veracity of having been in the forest with the police officers–I wanted that to be very real. I’m always very aware that there are going to be readers who have been in situations like that, and they’ll call you on it if it’s not accurate. I’m a stickler for wanting it to be very real. I used a lot of what really happened in the forest. I made the motivations really different. I made how they got there really different, and I made the characters’ personalities and where they went different. I developed a container for the story: This is what will be true, and this is what will be fictionalized. I set ground rules for the story. Some of them come into play as I write, but I tried to set up the majority in advance. You have to set up the conventions of the story—point of view, archetypes, and what’s real and what’s fictional.

S: When did you first know that you wanted to write novels?
J: I always loved fiction, and I tried to write fiction starting at age 5.
I think I had an innate ability for it, but I never developed it. I left a corporate job with huge burnout and became a magazine freelancer. Then I gave myself permission: “In the morning, I’ll work on fiction. Just for fun, I’ll write short stories again.” I thought short stories would be easier than a novel. (Laughs) I found out that they’re harder. There was a point at which someone at a small press suggested I write a novel. I started in 1995 and got word that my first book would be published in 2002. I thought, “This is my new life.” I wanted to devote every moment to it.

S: You’ve said that your books are about revealing truth and beauty. Why is that important to you?
J: I think it all stems from growing up in a really dysfunctional family, like many writers. It comes from having a lot of secrets in my family and wanting not to have secrets. I wanted to show people getting past secrets; people having the strength to survive things that were bad in their lives. There’s a John Keats quote: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” that’s always resonated with me because we find the emotional truth and the symbols of truth and the most real truth in the simple, beautiful things in life; like children and nature. The correlation seems very natural. There’s something about revealing emotional truth about people that seems like the ultimate most beautiful thing. It’s hard to express. I think it’s because so much in our culture is ugly. So much is presented as the ugly side, the dark side. And I want to go against that. I think we need hope, we need beauty, and we need to understand that beauty is as much a part of our world as the dark and the ugly and the evil.

S: Through your characters you can reveal on a human scale what that looks like.
J: Exactly.

S: What’s one of the most important qualities in a successful novelist?
J: For a novelist, it’s part innate ability and discipline—for long hours, for however many hours it takes, on a regular basis. A lot of people would be beautiful writers, but they’re never going to sit there for as long as it takes to do it.

S: You’re also a singer/song-writer…
J: I was a working musician from age 16 until sometime in my 30s. That was my first creative outlet, and it let me use writing. I have a lot of teenage-angsty poems. They usually had a melody. My boyfriend had a band. I started singing and working in Colorado. They had 3.2 bars at the time. My mother made me a fake I.D. I worked in bars until I met my husband, Matt, when I was 29. I’d quit the last band I had been in. We’d been working so steadily, and my voice had just shredded. All he owned were acoustic guitars, and I had nothing. So we started playing as an acoustic duo. That’s when I changed out of rock and roll.

S: Do you think that your music and writing feed one another?
J: I wish they did. I think that they actually steal from each other. I’ve not been able to write a song since I started writing fiction. I’d rather the energy go into a book. Now Matt and I creative-cover other songs, and that’s fun. We have a home studio. I’m working on my own little project where I take 80 songs and reinvent them in different musical genres. Eventually I’ll have a CD.

S: Any words of encouragement for the yet-to-be-published novelist?
J: A third thing that perhaps I didn’t mention about what makes a person a successful novelist – I had said one was innate ability and the second was the ability to stick your butt in the chair. The third thing a successful novelist needs is perseverance and trust. These go together–the sense that some of us have that if we just keep at this long enough, it’s going to work. Trust yourself, and trust that yes, it will happen. I think that when you don’t give up, you get published. People who give up clearly don’t get published. I see it over and over. It really does take a certain kind of person to succeed. If you’re the kind of person who goes to writers’ workshops and conferences and you hear, “Only one person I know ever got published,” you should think: “Well, I’m that one person.”

S: Why not me?
J: Exactly. Trust that.

Sandra Sarr left her day job, most recently as PR and Marketing Manager at the University of Washington Tacoma, to pursue an MFA in creative writing from the Whidbey Writers Workshop and to write her first novel. She has served as Director of Communications for the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, and for Whittier College in Southern California, and served on the communications staffs of three other colleges. Sandy was Director of Publishing for Science of Mind Publishing, Los Angeles home office, serving as editor of the monthly magazine, Science of Mind, and publisher of 60 book titles. She has won national and regional awards for articles, magazines, and campaigns.

The Shipping News and The Echo Maker: Car wrecks and World Crises

by Claire Gebben

At a workshop called “Selling Your Novel in the First Three Pages” (a session held at the 2008 Pacific Northwest Writers Association Conference in Seattle), attendees were invited to submit the first three pages of their manuscripts to a panel of literary agents for critique. As the submissions were read aloud, common clichés emerged, book openings where the protagonist gazed out a window, stared into a mirror, or received the diagnosis of a terminal illness. The hands-down cliché, however, was the car crash. In forty-five minutes, I heard more car crash scenes than I’d imagined reading in a lifetime.

The Echo Maker (2006), by Richard Powers, and The Shipping News: A Novel (1993), by Annie Proulx, are two National Book Award winners that hinge on the car accident beginning. In The Shipping News, Quoyle loses his wife Petal (admittedly in chapter three, not page three) in a fatal car crash: “Quoyle had gasped, the phone to his ear, loss flooding in like the sea gushing into a broken hull. They say the Geo had veered off the expressway and rolled down a bank sown with native wildflowers, caught on fire” (24). On the second page of The Echo Maker, a pick-up truck driven by Mark Schluter plows into a flock of migrating sandhill cranes near the Platte River: “A squeal of brakes, the crunch of metal on asphalt, one broken scream and then another rouse the flock. The truck arcs through the air, corkscrewing into the field. A plume shoots through the birds. They lurch off the ground, wings beating.” Mark survives the crash, barely. Mark’s sister, Karin, must rush back to her home town of Kearney, Nebraska to nurse her brother back to life.

In both The Shipping News and The Echo Maker, car accidents catapult the survivors into life-altering identity crises. Published on either side of the cataclysmic 9/11 divide, both novels address a topic that preoccupies modern human consciousness—the evident twilight of humankind. Between Proulx’s 1993 novel and Powers’s 2006 novel, a progression occurs, a further dissolution of the idea that human beings somehow hold dominion over their world.

For such high caliber authors as Proulx and Powers, why the cliché car wreck openings? British-Indian writer Rana Dasgupta, author of Tokyo Cancelled and Solo, claims the car accident taps deep-seated modern anxieties:

The car accident is such a cliché that you would have thought that novelists would be desperate to avoid it. But what kind of death would they turn to? They face, on one level, the simple issue of plausibility: car accidents are a form of chaotic intervention that can still be imagined in societies that have worked so hard to eliminate chaos.

The car wreck permeates our everyday lives, via traffic reports, news reports, and eye witness scenes on the shoulders of roads. It is a human invention, of human design and machinery. In car wrecks, tragedy strikes out of nowhere. Take the April 9, 2009 car crash of Angels rookie pitcher Nick Adenhart, 22 years old, who died when another 22-year-old man ran a red light at 70 mph and collided with him and his two friends (who were also killed). The allegedly drunk driver lived, while Nick Adenhart and his friends died, life trajectories randomly colliding. Car accidents are born of human error. Not just the materials, but the cause can be traced to us, whether it’s irresponsibility, recklessness or just plain ignorance. Car accidents resonate as a symbol of human failure in the technological age.

In The Shipping News, when Quoyle learns of his wife’s death in a car wreck, he’s also recently lost his job and his parents. Even worse, previous to her death, Petal had sold their two children to a child molester. Quoyle does manage to rescue his daughters Bunny and Sunshine unscathed. “… the children rushed at Quoyle, gripped him as a falling man clutches the window ledge, as a stream of electric particles arcs a gap and completes a circuit. … Quoyle, in the teeth of trouble, saw a stouthearted older woman. His only female relative. ‘Stay with us,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what to do.’” (26-27). Quoyle’s journalist friend Partridge, when he hears of Quoyle’s disaster, is reminded of a “huge roll of newsprint from the pulp mill. Blank and speckled with imperfections” (31). Quoyle’s aunt, Agnis Hamm, pushes him to move to the place of his ancestors, in Killick-Claw, Newfoundland. “’It makes sense,’ [Agnis] said, ‘for you to start a new life in a fresh place. … You know it takes a year, a full turn of the calendar, to get over losing somebody. … And it helps if you’re in a different place. And what place would be more natural than where your family came from?’” (29). Partridge even manages to find Quoyle a job at The Gammy Bird, a local rag near Killick-Claw. In this 1993 novel, the protagonist Quoyle has his wits about him. Though grieving and confused, he’s nonetheless able to rebuild his life, to look after his children and hold a job.

In The Echo Maker, after Mark Schluter’s near-fatal accident, and before his brain swells to bring on Capgras Syndrome, Mark writes a note that begins: “I am No One.” From the moment of the car accident, he is erased and must start from the beginning. “[Mark] was back to how [Karin had] first seen him, when she was four, staring down from the second-story landing on a lump of meat wrapped in a blue baby blanket her parents had just dragged home” (21). Literary critic Daniel Murtaugh writes:

[Mark's] entire world changes, and yet everything remains in place, like the table setting after the magician has yanked the tablecloth. It is the table underneath that seems completely different–the young man’s consciousness is nothing like what it was before.

To Mark, with his re-dawn of awareness, his world has radically changed. Due to a rare condition called Capgras Syndrome, Mark does not recognize his own sister, and, as his recovery progresses, he believes his house and street are a fake designed to trick him. “’I'm telling you what this thing’s about’” Mark says to Karin as they visit the scene of the crash, “’People appearing and disappearing, like that!’ He snapped his finger, a vicious crack. ‘First they’re right there, then they’re not. In the truck, out on the road, gone. … Anybody can disappear on you, at any point’” (252). Such words eerily echo sentiments of New Yorkers following the collapse of the World Trade Towers. Not just consciousness, but the world around them, have become unrecognizable, forever altered.

Mark isn’t the only one to lose his grip on his identity and his sense of what’s real. Because of Mark’s accident and the need to care for him, Karin loses her job and condo. As her brother constantly questions Karin’s identity, she floats adrift in uncertainties of her own. In one instance, as Karin reflects on “flailing democracy” at work in the municipal hearing between the developers and the Refuge, she thinks, “No one had a clue what our brains were after, or how they meant to get it. If we could detach for a moment, break free of all doubling, look upon water itself and not some brain-made mirror . . . For an instant, as the hearing turned into instinctive ritual, it hit her: the whole race suffered from Capgras” (346).

In Proulx’s pre-9/11 world of The Shipping News, Quoyle’s sister Agnis Hamm must also start her life from scratch—the furniture from her former residence does not arrive, and she must transfer her yacht upholstery business to Newfoundland, a casualty of Quoyle’s car wrecked life. Agnis faces down her past and in the end is able to reconstruct her life. And Quoyle, who once would only admit to his girls their mother was sleeping, finally is able to tell them the truth that she is dead. In Proulx’s The Shipping News, the world still holds a semblance of continuity.

In Power’s post-9/11 world of The Echo Maker, being able to face one’s demons does not trigger a return a world that makes sense, it is the entry point to further confusion and disarray that cuts an ever-wider swath. Dr. Weber, a celebrity cognitive neurologist, visits Mark with the goal of capitalizing on his rare Capgras condition via a new book. Instead, Dr. Weber himself undergoes a severe, life-crumbling experience. Near the end of the book, Dr. Weber reflects as he sits with Barbara watching the cranes:

Everything will be panic, from now on. Strange as birth. He would write it up—first case ever of contagious Capgras—if he could still write. He seems to be nearing, and she is taking him. Thoughts flow through him like a brook over pebbles, none of them his. There comes the emptiness of arrival. Then there is just holding, and bracing for endless vertigo (430).

In an interview with Jill Owens of Powells Books, Richard Powers explains his view that the novel is designed to explore key questions of identity:

So the idea that the self is this ad hoc, continuous improvisation had been in my mind for a long time, and in a strange way, the theme really grew out of Time of Our Singing. Because that book is so concerned with identity as an improvisation, as a work in progress that’s perpetually changing over the course of time, it drove me back to the more foundational scientific ways of asking that same question [in The Echo Maker]: Who are we? Who do we recognize? Who do we fail to recognize? How do we construct a self that seems solid and continuous and whole to us, even when it’s not?

The Echo Maker is referred to as a post-9/11 novel precisely because it reflects disorientation and distrust, of the self, and of the power of the human race to survive our technology.

Similarities between The Shipping News and The Echo Maker are surprisingly plentiful. The remote locations of the settings (Newfoundland and Nebraska), the hotly contested natural resources (e.g., the demise of the fishing industry and increased oil drilling, the Platte River’s dwindling waters), and the main plot line of one family in crisis against a subplot of the insidious greed of multinational corporations. In the end, both books look to the importance of water and our re-connection with the natural world as essential to our survival as a species and a planet. Where The Shipping News concludes with a suggestion of human adaptability, The Echo Maker is less optimistic, emphasizing the pure folly of clinging to our trust in human resourcefulness, that same blind trust that keeps us continually driving around in cars that could one day maim or kill us.

Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk
Doubleday, New York
Hardback: $24.95
2009

Review by Kelly Davio

Pygmy marks Portland novelist Chuck Palahniuk’s successful return to a traditionally-structured narrative after his previous works, Haunted, which read more like a tenuously-connected short story collection, and Rant, which had all the hallmarks of a documentary. This new, gritty tale of terrorism and subversion is structured as a series of dispatches from an operative identified only as “agent 67,” referred to by his American acquaintances as “Pygmy.” This agent recounts his mission, his bemusement at American oddity and his personal history in a largely straightforward, first-person account.

Yet Palahniuk does not disappoint with conventionality; with a plot as wildly imaginative as those of his previous achievements in Survivor and Fight Club, Pygmy‘s narrator infiltrates the United States in order to create chaos in the nation he has been trained to view as his ideological enemy. A Columbine-style school shootout, a dirty bomb, and vicious child-against-child violence in a Wal-Mart bathroom deliver all the shock and mayhem readers have come to expect from a Palahniuk literary gore-fest.

But whereas previous works from Palahniuk have opened up subsets of the world in fascinating detail (recall the page-turning specifics of cult life in Survivor, small-town conspiracy and aggression in Diary, and transsexuality in Invisible Monsters), Pygmy collapses the whole of contemporary American culture into a bolus of outright consumerism and hypocritical attitudes. Instead of a specific city, the townspeople live in the novel’s undisclosed, presumably Midwestern setting, where they spend much of their free time at those cheap-shot icons of Wal-Mart or Kentucky Fried Chicken. The local ideology, far from being a specified point of view, is an apparent confluence of Catholic formality, Southern Baptist fundamentalism and old-fashioned ethnocentrism. The result is a cringe-worthy fresco of American life that, though perhaps overblown, gets across Palahniuk’s point that the way America sees itself is not the way in which the world sees it.

In perhaps an even greater stylistic gamble on Palahniuk’s part, the narrator of this story writes in a less-than-fluent English and with a sense of cultural detachment that is entertaining if unconvincing. Consider his description of his host family’s entrance into the church sanctuary, appareled in Sunday best:

Here worship shrine, all male neck must bind around with knotted banner, silk banner knotted at windpipe so dangle two long strands down chest to waistband trouser. All female must shelter head inside hat cover…make small parade until seated long bench.

This narrator’s bald observation of the somewhat strange customs of western worshipers is charming, if a somewhat thinly-veiled manifestation of Palahniuk’s sardonic sensibilities. But the narrator has an unlikely, skilled control of appropriate English prepositions, which most English learners can attest is among the hardest skills to master. In short, while the vernacular is engaging, it lacks some believability as a concession to readability.

But perhaps the most compelling deviation from a typical Palahniuk style in Pygmy is its final plot twist. For years, Palahniuk has been known to refer to his writing style as “romantic,” and the ending of Pygmy might finally live up to such a definition in his readers’ eyes; the self-destruction and wholesale degradation we’ve come to expect from Palahniuk’s characters are held in surprising abeyance. But with an ending approaching overkill on sentiment, it remains to be seen whether Palahniuk’s readers will appreciate his portrayal of reconnection with humanity or will wish for a return to the nihilistic free-for-all we’ve come to expect from, and relish in, his unique authorial perspective.

The Mysterious Life of the Heart: Writing from The Sun about Passion, Longing, and Love
Forthcoming, May 2009
Safransky, McKee and Snee

Review by Kaye Linden

“We all want to be chased and gobbled up by a larger thing:

fame, danger, evil, wealth, art, romance, or God. Anything to keep from going home

and seeing the five o’clock news.”

(Poe Ballantine. Excerpt from “The Empty House of My Brokenhearted Father”)

Light the log fire, grab a blanket, a mug of hot chocolate and snuggle down. The Mysterious Life of the Heart is an invitation to shut out the world and play. Here are fifty personal essays, short stories and poems, originally published by The Sun magazine and written by writers such as Tess Gallagher, Steve Almond and Bruce Holland Rogers.  Skip inside this room filled with memories and the unfathomable depths of love— its consequences, tears, hopes, dreams, tragedies and victories. The Sun’s editor, Sy Safransky, offers sentiments in the introduction that explain the magic of the anthology. To read this book is to lay bare “emotions without embellishment or embarrassment,” to give us something “of great value” and show us “the power of being vulnerable,” therefore helping us “feel less alone.” Even so, despite the “warm and fuzzy” aspects of this anthology, we are voyeurs to the wild and racy visions of love as well. Because of this all-encompassing view, to read these stories is to drive in a convertible “eighty miles an hour down a two-lane highway without a scarf… wearing lipstick, playing the radio full blast.” (Clement)

The major themes in this anthology are love in all its guises. The stories push our perceptions of love to the limits. How do we define love? Where does loss of love warp into self- pity? When do the emotions associated with love flip from euphoria to pain?  Every aspect of this most bewildering of human emotions is examined within this anthology. The arrangement of writing moves from themes of young love and innocence, infatuation to marriage, betrayal, separation, emotional devastation and loss. In the final pages of the anthology, we learn how to recover from the journey.

In Rita Townsend’s “The Year in Geese,” the narrator laments the “lover who… is gone and will not even answer my letter.” The heartbreaking cry of the pet goose echoes the lament.  “A deep sigh rises and falls…It wasn’t silence that I wanted…It wasn’t silence I was looking for.” This theme of silence and loneliness echoes the vulnerability of human love. It is an example of how we struggle alone as individuals, alone with loss of love and its shroud of silence. This is a recurring theme throughout the anthology and a natural consequence to our entering into relationships.

In Jasmine Skye’s “Finding A Good Man,” we meet a woman who moves in and out of dissatisfying relationships, repeating behaviors and expecting different results. Perhaps just once, we might have acted irrationally under the “intoxicating drug of lovesickness. I barely eat or sleep, and something inside me explodes with creativity.” This is the natural high of infatuation. Therefore, is it not surprising that we keep looking for love in all its shapes and that “Being alone …spending too many nights in a row sharing doughnuts with my dog” is not a preferred option!  Skye writes, “It is difficult to find “a man I could stand to spend as much time with as I did with my dog… I’ll …meet his (the dog’s) gaze across the room; still, dark, and contemplative, as if I’m the most soul-saving thing he’s ever seen in his broken-down life.”    This theme might explain America’s love affair with the dog!

In Krista Bremer’s pushcart prize -winner, “My Accidental Jihad,” we peer into the private room of marriage suffering the spiritual constraints of Ramadan. We gain insight into the philosophies of one of the world’s great religions. By default of being the spouse, the wife of the man who fasts, becomes spiritually aware. “During Ramadan, when he turns inward and has less to offer me…I want to speak to whoever is in charge…I wonder: is love an endless feast, or is it what people manage to serve each other when their cupboards are bare?”  Such a theme speaks to the endless struggles within mixed marriages, where cultural and religious barriers collide. The relationship can only survive if these barriers are respected. Bremer writes with an easy tongue in cheek humor about an intense and difficult topic.

In the last story of the book, Bruce Holland Rogers entices us with his “Hello, Gorgeous!”  With a style unique to Holland Rogers, this story moves fast, journeying from youth to old age and then widowhood with its inherent emotions. After losing his wife to cancer, “he”, the universal male, loses interest in life and women. This is the tale of how this man returned to the joy of life with the help of his son.  Once more, we have an example of a theme that occurs repeatedly in human lives. “He worked hard…bought a bigger house. The cars in the driveway were always new. …By the time he was fifty-five, he had put two sons and a daughter through college. That same year, cancer took his wife. It was that sudden.” Holland Rogers takes on a difficult topic and carries it with humor and expertise.

The characters in the stories, essays and poems come alive on the page.  It is easy to relate to the nostalgia of “remembering things as they were, another time”  (“Ecstasy”). In “Suzy Joins the Sex Club,” raw passion howls through the pages, “like a wolf on the hillside with its head back.”  Poignancy heralds stories such as “The Empty House of my Brokenhearted Father” by Poe Ballantine. Here we find a man abandoned by his wife. Yet when subject matter becomes too heavy, the poems speak out. The poem, “Greed,” immediately follows the “Brokenhearted Father” and breaks the intensity with “at dawn a complaining cow awakens me.”

The themes outlined within this anthology consistently meet the objective of the book and that is to approach love from every possible angle. Every aspect of love and relationship is covered in this well constructed anthology. Whether the characters are crying in the flower garden, dying of cancer, fat and beautiful, skinny and questionable, or bleeding from rejection, they cross over any time line. These characters we know, hate, love and relate to whether we like it or not. Perhaps the only aspect of love that was not covered was that of retribution. I was relieved that the anthology was a relatively peaceful and playful, although at times heartrending, read.

Our humanity lies within the stories of this book. Stephen T. Butterfield’s “Bleeding Dharma” rips out the heart of the reader. It is the rant of a jilted lover and is superb. Tess Gallagher’s “Sixteenth Anniversary,” touches on the romance of relationships — “wordless. Like what the fog says when it swallows up an ocean.”  In “The Kitchen Table: An Honest Orgy,” by Denise Gess, we feel a familiar sadness in the mother “polishing the wooden arms of the chair my grandmother had often sat in…” and companionship in the memories set around the kitchen table. All of the characters in this anthology spring from ordinary people — the “reckless, breakneck, bad-girl part,” the “moody, bookish teenager living in a small town on the coast …whispering of mystery, a promise unfulfilled, a gift forever withheld.”

In “An Hour After Breakfast,” by Matthew Deshe Cashion, we meet a demented old man “with bits of egg on his face” who “insists (his wife) is trying to murder him. To prove her love, she has started taking Polaroids.”  In “The Woman with Hair,” Robert McGee captures the purity of new love through the changing color of a woman’s eyes:

“They’re not supposed to do that,” she said.

“Why not?”

“They only turn green when I’m sad or in love.”

“Are you sad?”

“Not at the moment,” she said.”

The danger of writing such stories is the author’s possible overindulgence in emotion or sentimentality. I was concerned, with a collection of fifty pieces themed around love, that this might be the case.  However, I was delighted that only one or two leaned this way. Even with these stories, the talented writing forestalled a free fall into sentimentality. For example, Colin Chisholm writes in “Green,”— “She died the last week in April, one day before his thirty-sixth birthday…On his birthday, he took the spade from the garage …Rain fell…He smelled the dirt on his hands. The smell was hers. He cried in the shower because it washed her away.” Consider the following from “Marital Status.”  “The family’s minister came to the apartment…I spoke of the love that had kept Wanda and me …connected…the minister read from the Song of Solomon (“Love is strong as death”) …I wondered whether Wanda heard…Wanda’s mother opened her arms to me and we held one another tight, both of us weeping.”

Reading this anthology was like entering a sanctuary filled with exotic flowers. Each story exudes its individual perfume and color. “The Mysterious Life of the Heart” is a heady rain shower of nostalgia. Perhaps Kirk Nesset’s “Still Life with Candles and Spanish Guitar,” sums up the experience of reading this anthology:

“This is how it feels to be young and in love…how we’re made love to; this is how love comes at us, deliciously headlong. This is how we flower and live in it, because it’s all that matters, ever. I know this well…I refuse to forget it, or lose it. And I know you’ll remember it too.”

Mad To Live, Flume Press
$8,
randalldouglasbrown.blogspot.com

Interview with Randall Brown by Stefanie Freele

Randall Brown teaches at Saint Joseph’s University, holds an MFA from Vermont College, and is the Lead Editor at Smokelong Quarterly. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cream City Review, Quick Fiction, Hunger Mountain, Connecticut Review, Saint Ann’s Review, Evansville Review, LaurelReview, Dalhousie Review, Upstreet, and other magazines. He is the author of the award-winning collection Mad to Live (Flume Press, 2008) and will have an essay on (very) short fiction in the forthcoming anthology The Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field (Rose Metal Press, 2009).

SF: You won the 2008 Flume Press Fiction Chapbook Competition, congratulations! What was it like, receiving that news? How many houses away could neighbors hear your exclamations?

RB: My wife first got the call and took a message. She told me it was someone from a literary magazine. I called back without a clue I was calling Flume Press. It’s kind of a blur after that. I remember my wife screaming on the bed, my shaking a lot, and then it was over way too quickly. Wait, maybe that’s our wedding night I’m remembering….

SF: You organized the chapbook in four sections: “What is, What for, What not, What if.” What does that all mean?

RB: We, Flume Press and I, went through a bunch of different section headings. Originally, when I submitted the collection, I worried that a collection of so many pieces might feel fragmented, hence (I love that word) these four sections as an attempt to add some thematic structure. The “what is” looks at the post-lapsarian world (with Adam to blame); the “what for,” at that existential search for purpose in this fallen world; the “what not,” at (perhaps) failed attempts to find the “what” that makes it all worthwhile; and the “what if,” at the possibility of recovering Eden. At the end,  the final section (again perhaps) discovers an answer: “I write; ergo, I exist.” (Ergo and hence in the same paragraph; all that’s missing is a whereas.) Frost asked in a poem what to make of a diminished thing in a world in which “the highway dust is over all.” A poem, I think, was his answer, so it’s from Frost that I got this idea—that writing/art is the something to assert against meaninglessness.

SF: Whereas we can assume though that when you refer to meaninglessness, the wedding night doesn’t fall into that category. In the first story of the collection, “Little Magpie,” we meet a pregnant character who craves bugs. Where did you get that idea? And, what inspires you? And perhaps most important, did you ingest crickets during your research?

RB: First, I’d like to make it clear that no crickets were harmed in the writing of the collection. The story began with my reading a piece on CNN.com about a man with a disease—pica (from the Latin for magpie, a bird that will eat anything)—causing him to eat coins. Pregnant women, the article said, often experience such a desire. I think of “Little Magpie” as the story that taught me how to write (very) short fiction. My first instincts were to hide their history of miscarriage until the end, emphasize the conflict between the husband and wife, end on “bleeding,” things like that. With this story, I began to use flash as a way to figure things out, things that felt meaningful and deep to me. Here, I wanted the husband to want to do anything he could for his wife and the baby who wanted bugs. I wanted him to figure out what he could and couldn’t do. For him (and me),  the world didn’t end on “bleeding,” but with a wish set against Fate, the two of them together rather than apart, uncertain of what they’d done to incur this curse, but still moving and acting, like those heroes and heroines of tragedy. This story led to other stories similarly structured, characters deciding to act, uncertain if each step would bring doom, redemption or something else that is neither.

SF: There is a recurring character named Seth, and several stories are of son and father. You have a remarkable way of conveying the taut and emotional relationship of father/son without being sentimental or aloof. Could we assume there is some Randall Brown in Randall Brown’s work?

RB: That’s very nice, Stefanie, that use of “remarkable.” You could assume there’s some Randall Brown in the collection. Any time you sense a deep-felt doubt about a story’s worthiness, that would be him. I think the son is really me, both now and at his age, and the father, I don’t know, is more of a symbol for the state of the world, or not quite that, but something other than me as a father. Maybe the father is both the superhero kids wish for and the impossibility of that wish being fulfilled.

SF: And what about “Good Kid?” “Good Kid” might be your most haunting story.

RB: I love genre fiction, especially western films, noir films/fiction, and Stephen King kind of horror novels. So, this is my “Western” flash. I love the moral code of the Western, its division of the world into good guys and bad guys. And the good guys always win. Or at least they did, before all that postmodern genre redefinition. But they should always ride off into the sunset. If not, what’s the point?

SF: Has winning this collection changed your writing, your role as a writer, editor, teacher? Are you getting a big head?

RB: There’s so many dark, nasty things that get in the way of my getting better as a writer. Jealousies about other writers’ successes. Questions about my own talent and worth as a writer. A sometimes overwhelming snarkiness about feedback and reviews. Maybe the collection helped quiet those voices a bit.

SF: What are your writing practices? Where do you write, how often, how long, etc.? Do you have any strict disciplines?

RB: No strict disciplines, but I try to have short-term, daily goals and a few longer term ones. Deadlines—from publishers, online writing groups, journal submissions, story contests—definitely help instill some discipline, the kind that most writers have when they are in the classroom. Wanting to write something for a specific market or journal—such as a 500-word piece for Quick Fiction—might be a short-term goal. More long-term goals have to do with finishing a collection for a particular submission date or revising a picture book that received some editor love. The overall goal, of course, is to push one’s self to get better, but that’s kind of abstract, so maybe I use submissions to (and hopefully acceptances in) more competitive markets as a concrete sign of my “betterness.” Like thinking “before, I could’ve never gotten a story in this or that journal.” Of course, acceptances and rejections don’t quite mean such a thing, but it’s motivating for me to think they do, so why not think it.

SF: Do you have another collection on its way? What will you dazzle the world with next?

RB: I’m at work putting together a second collection, tentatively titled “A Thing So Small.” I’ve recently been writing smaller pieces, so it’s a bit of a challenge figuring out what to include and the order in which the “chosen” pieces should appear. Having done it once doesn’t seem to change the anxieties about doing it again. Unfortunately.

SF: As the lead editor of SmokeLong Quarterly, you read hundreds of submissions. How has being an editor influenced your writing?

RB: A lot of great (very) short fiction is being written. Being an editor has made me more aware of the realities of a story’s journey to a journal, the need for it to stand out in some way, the nature of the stakes when a story enters the dreaded slush pile. At SLQ, bios and previous submissions mean very little to a story’s progress from slush to acceptance. I rarely, if ever, look at who wrote it and the bio attached to it. So much of what happens to a story has to do with the story itself. I find that to be a good thing, though maybe not every market works that way. Every week, something new catches my attention about a story’s trajectory once it stops becoming a “process” and is now a “product.” Lately, I’ve been noticing how titles seem to set the tone for a piece and create an expectation of the story’s “literariness.” A really bad title is, more often than not, attached to a not-so-wonderful story.

SF: The books just arrived. The cover is quite handsome – a collection of photographs. How much influence did you have over the cover?

RB: Flume Press sent me several covers from which to choose. I grew to love this final cover (which struck me as possibly overcrowded at first) because there’s that sense of chaos/madness, of each picture asserting itself for attention, a sense of a “(w)hole” emerging from the collection of tiny things. All the credit for that goes to Flume Press and the cover’s designer, Brigid Jeffers. I did ask them to darken the image behind RANDALL BROWN so my name could be seen more easily. Because that’s the most important thing.

SF: The moment you opened up the package and saw your first book. Let’s hear it.

RB: Woo-hoo! Yes, yes, yes, oh baby, yes. Who’s the man? Who’s the man? I’m the man. (Pause for dancing involving handsprings and tumbling somersaults.) I rock. I rock. Oh yeah, I rock. The big beat blastah. I keeps getting bettah, coz I know I hasta.