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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.

 

 

 

 

 

History Play: The Lives and Afterlife of Christopher Marlowe by Rodney Bolt

Bloomsbury Publishing, New York & London. Hardback: $24.95

Review by Ann Beman

 

I confess. I found History Play: The Lives and Afterlife of Christopher Marlowe by Rodney Bolt on a checkout stand magazine’s summer booklist. In the article, bestselling historical fiction writer Philippa Gregory gushed:

“this takes you to the fictional heart of Shakespeare’s England, suggests a wonderfully imaginative explanation of the genius of the bard’s plays, makes your head spin with possibilities––and makes you wonder who did write all those wonderful plays.”

I was immediately hooked.

And eventually confused. Why did three different branches of my local library shelve this book in their nonfiction sections? Had Philippa Gregory been yanking my chain while I stood in that checkout line determined to finish the summer books article before I had to actually pay for the magazine? Was History Play fiction, or was it nonfiction? As it turns out, having these questions in mind as I read Bolt’s brilliantly written “biography” of Christopher Marlowe made the book’s premise that much more salient.

On the surface, the book’s title refers to Shakespeare’s historical dramas. Of course, the title also winks at the author’s playing with history in this narrative, which assumes that playwright Christopher “Kit” Marlowe, rather than dying at 29 in a tavern brawl, staged his own death, fled to Europe, and went on to write the work attributed to Shakespeare. Footnoting his invented sources, in addition to extensive historical ones, the author effectively stages this alternative life of Kit Marlowe, raising the curtain on the life of the Bard as well.

Chapter by chapter, the narrative unfolds, seamlessly blending speculative scenes of Elizabethan espionage and intrigue with real historical episodes. Woven into this tapestry of supposition are wildly inventive yet plausible explanations for the Bard’s literary inspirations. For example, Bolt places Marlowe in Antwerp immediately after fleeing his staged death in England. Bolt explains that, if Marlowe had been living as a Fleming, possibly as an itinerant entertainer, “A jester’s motley would not have settled easily on proud Kit, and … it perhaps explains the acid streak that runs through many of his stage fools. Touchstone, Feste, the Fool in King Lear and Lavatch in All’s Well That Ends Well, all have the bitterness of the scholar reduced to earning his bread by clowning.”

History Play opens with an adapted foreword by Mark Twain, which outlines what few facts exist about Shakespeare’s life. Birth, marriage, death, taxes, debts owed, and property accumulated. That’s all that any Shakespeare historian has had to work with. Bolt merely fills in the ledger between Shakespeare’s birth and death with Kit Marlowe-colored ink. And he does so with full disclosure. I’m sure Philippa Gregory would agree with me that any prose writer, whether entrenched in the fiction genre, or hop-scotching along the nonfiction track, can learn from Bolt’s approach, effectively blending extensive nonfiction research with an elaborate fictional character sketch. 

The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie

Random House, New York, Hardcover: $26.00

Review by Joe Ponepinto

Perhaps no one blends history and imagination into captivating fiction better than Salman Rushdie. In his past works he has set stories in relatively recent settings such as the partition of India and political turmoil in Pakistan, and he has often attempted to illustrate the underlying ties between eastern and western cultures. In The Enchantress of Florence, Rushdie goes back further in history, to the turn of the 16th century, to present a tale that binds those two worlds into a single narrative and reveals just how connected those civilizations were—perhaps something of a surprise for many in the 21st century.

Historical characters abound. From Asia, we have the emperor Akbar the Great of India, Shah Ismail of Persia, and connections to the line emanating from Genghis Kahn. Italy provides the story with Niccolo Machiavelli, Ago Vespucci (cousin of the more famous Amerigo), and allusions to everyone from Boticelli to Savonarola to Vlad the Impaler. He creates a life for each of these people, and many others, within a fantastical framework of events and intrigues, yet the novel has a overriding sense of realism that urges one to think, yes, it could have all happened that way.

Such is Rushdie. He is well known to have an encyclopedic knowledge of history (in fact, there is a five-page bibliography following the story that reports only part of his research for the book). With all he has learned, Rushdie then connects the dots of history, turning what may seem to be unrelated occurrences thousands of miles apart into a single universe in which forces and outcomes are thoroughly interrelated. This allows him to represent the past with such clarity that even the most mystical events seem perfectly logical. Without Rushdie’s knowledge, however, it is impossible to know what’s really real and what isn’t. In an interview with National Public Radio, Rushdie admitted that much of what readers might assume is fabricated magic realism is actual history, and some of what might seem real he imagined.

Ultimately, whatever parts of The Enchantress of Florence are historical or not, it’s the writing that makes this book sing. Rushdie’s prose is still inventive, challenging, inspiring, and often humorous. An early passage describes emperor Akbar, whose name seems to be a redundancy. “The emperor Abdul-Fath Jaluddin Muhammad, king of kings, known since his childhood as Akbar, meaning ‘the great,’ and latterly, in spite of the tautology of it, as Akbar the Great, the great great one, great in his greatness, doubly great, so great that the repetition in his title was not only appropriate but necessary in order to express the gloriousness of his glory . . .”

The story itself is, at times, also challenging. It alternates between the cities of Sikri and Florence, with stops throughout the vastness separating them, as well as the New World, and investigates the lives of royals, nobles, advisers, servants and prostitutes, some of whom lived, some who were merely imagined by those who lived, and, in the case of the enchantress herself, who managed to do both. Rushdie keeps every aspect in its proper place and masterfully weaves the many storylines, tying them together with the thin and silky thread of the princess Qara Köz, whose matchless beauty enthralls the men and women of every culture she visits, but subordinating it all to considerations of the roles of individuals and religions, represented through Akbar’s deep struggles with his own life and values. The novel culminates in an ending that is nearly irresistible—defying readers to stop during the last fifty pages or so.

For those who crave a commanding, challenging text that transports the reader to not only other places and times, but also to alternate philosophies, The Enchantress of Florence is an awesome and delightful excursion. Rushdie, readers will be happy to discover, is still at his best.

 

The Archivist’s Story by Travis Holland

The Dial Press, a division of Random House, 2007Hardcover, $23.00

Review by Joe Ponepinto

Cracking the barrier of the first novel – having that first book published – is perhaps a more difficult goal than ever for writers. Because publishing has become more business-oriented and less willing to take risks on new writers, agents and publishers tend to look for manuscripts that exhibit certain characteristics that appeal to readers. Travis Holland’s The Archivist’s Story is an excellent example of those writing traits, and it’s a darn good read too.

The story centers on Pavel Vasilievich, a former teacher of literature, living in Moscow in 1939, just prior to the start of World War II. He’s lost his position at the university and is now working at the Lubyanka, a secret arm of the Communist government. His position, ironically, is to archive and catalog manuscripts that have been confiscated from poets, novelists and other writers for being deemed critical of the administration, before they are ultimately destroyed.

Pavel sees the writer Isaac Babel incarcerated, and watches as torture and intimidation take their toll on the once proud man. He stands by helplessly as friends are hounded and arrested by government goons. He battles against a wall of red tape in his effort to discover the truth about his wife’s death. Finally, Pavel decides to fight back – in perhaps the only way he can. He takes a story of Babel’s from the archives and hides it under his clothes before he leaves the building one night. Later he takes another. If he can keep from being discovered, these stories may survive the purge and be delivered into more understanding hands in the future.

Holland has written a book that was a perfect piece for a first-time novelist, according to his agent, Amy Williams. The story contains fewer than 100,000 words and is divided into thirty-seven brief chapters, enticing readers to keep moving forward. The language is accessible. Details and description are beautifully done. It’s clear Holland did a tremendous job of research for this book, which makes this historical fiction quite believable.

The author provides the reader with three interwoven sub-plots, each of which is developed quickly and which moves rapidly to its climax: the first, of course, is Pavel’s dilemma over the Babel stories; second is his attempt to find out the truth about his wife’s death aboard a train that was mysteriously derailed in an isolated part of the country; third is the deterioration of his mother, who has contracted Alzheimer’s Disease and can no longer be left alone. These all come together seamlessly at the novel’s climax, yielding an ending that is ultimately satisfying.

Holland is a graduate of the University of Michigan’s Creative Writing MFA program who has received Hopwood Awards for the novel and for short fiction. His short stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, Five Points and The Quarterly .

 

 

 

In the Woods by Tana French

Penguin, New York. ISBN: 978-0-670-03860-2.Hardcover: $24.95

It is the summer of 1984. Three children living in the small Dublin suburb of Knocknaree disappear into the woods. Two days later, only one is found, clinging to a tree, unable to remember what transpired, dried blood pooled in the bottom of his shoes. Twenty years later, the sole survivor, Adam Ryan, is working as a detective in the Murder squad and is assigned the case of a murdered twelve year old girl, found in the woods in the rural suburb of Knocknaree. Could the two cases be linked? Will the investigation spur the repressed memories of that terrible day years earlier? Who could possibly perpetrate such a heinous act and why?

Tana French’s debut novel, In the Woods, is a goosebump-raising thriller that will keep the reader turning pages and sneaking reading time while waiting in line at the grocery store. Her characters, Adam Ryan, the boy who survived, and Cassie Maddox, his partner and best friend, are complex, flawed and realistic. The story is told by Adam Ryan via a retrospective, sometimes chronologically stepping through police procedures, some flashbacks to his own experience with personal commentary interspersed. This foreshadowing heightened the tension in parts but became intrusive toward the last third of the book. How many times are you going to say that you should have picked up on the clues earlier? If you did that, the book would be done already.

The actual murderer and motive provides a shocker of an ending, one that gave me that wonderful ‘Aha!’ moment that mystery fans so enjoy. I found the book a fast and enjoyable read. Ms. French writes beautifully and I would gladly shell out cold hard cash to purchase her next novel. One of the blurbs on the back cover of the book compares her storytelling to that of DuMaurier and Hitchcock, and I agree wholeheartedly. If you enjoy a creepy thriller with vivid characters and lots of suspense, this book will not disappoint.

 

 

44 Scotland Street by Alexander McCall Smith

Anchor Books, Random House Paperback, $13.95

Review by Jo Meador

A master observer of the human comedy, Alexander McCall Smith delivers a jaunty stroll among the denizens of Edinburgh in 44 Scotland Street — to be exact, the Bohemian edge of Edinburgh “where lawyers and accountants were outnumbered — just — by others”. It is the “others” who interest us here. The author’s sharp eye and keen wit cut deeply into the quirks and bumps of several lives — the flat dwellers of the title’s address — to reveal a tender and optimistic slice of Edinburgh life.

Written as a daily serial for an Edinburgh newspaper, 44 Scotland Street introduces a memorable cast of characters. There is the rational and questioning Pat who sublets a flat from the narcissistic Bruce, to whom she is reluctantly attracted. The neighbor across the hall, Domenica — a middle-aged woman with some means — takes Pat under her wing to guide her interests away from the womanizing Bruce. Then there’s Bertie, a precocious five-year-old who plays the tenor sax like a pro, speaks fluent Italian, and yearns for the train sets and soccer so abhorrent to his mother Irene.

Pat selects Bruce’s flat to rent because of its proximity to her new job at the Something Special Gallery, a shop filled with obscure paintings by unknown or anonymous artists. Mathew, a wealthy dilettante, owns the shop. As Pat is attracted to Bruce, so Mathew develops an interest in Pat, although he spends most of his time at Big Lou’s coffee bar across the street trying to mingle with the regulars. Pat’s story leads into a mystery of sorts where she must recover a valuable gallery painting which has been stolen from her flat. Domenica introduces her to a portraitist, takes them on a journey through the Edinburgh underworld before they the mystery is solved.

Bruce’s life centers on his career — moving up or out of surveying — and finding female companions, which leads him to an uncomfortable dance with the boss’s daughter in full dress kilt. When Pat learns Bruce will go after any willing game, she also discovers that he is key to tracking down the lost painting.

Nearly a fourth of the episodes in the collection feature the adventures of the rebellious Bertie and his mother’s efforts to have the world recognize his genius. Irene’s ideas on child rearing come from her loose interpretation of the work of Melanie Klein, a noted British psychologist. When Bertie is suspended from school for writing graffiti in Italian on the bathroom wall, Irene seeks a sympathetic therapist who agrees with her opinions on Klein, all the while using Klein’s real theory to coerce her into allowing Bertie to be a five-year-old.

In spite of the disjointed subplot, this episodic novel moves. The characters engage even though they are lacking in the darker tones of human nature. Wacky and all too human, they never fail to surprise and entertain, which kept this reader turning pages far into the night.

Two elements of craft delighted the writer in me: first, the lucid and coherent style of a trained journalist with a sharp eye and keen wit. There was truth beneath every quirk and a lesson in every foible. The incidental reporting kept the story fresh and with the rhythm of an early morning trot on the racecourse.

The second admirable element of craft was the writer’s deft hand at shifting point of view. The reader flits from character to character like the journalist’s fly, only this creature sits on the character’s forehead instead of the wall. A shift in character can occur at the spur of the moment during a single action or dialogue. The shifts are not only easy to follow; they provide some of the upbeat pacing noted above. Thus even as one character might villainize another, there is the second character popping up with his own view, hero of his own story.

In his preface the author likens his work to Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, which he deliberately mimicked. The tone and pacing are as light as Oscar Wilde and as penetrating to human nature. And like Wilde, this author entertains and instructs in a single stroke of the pen.