Author: Keith Pilapil Lesmeister

Review of “Empty House” by Julia Strayer, published in the Kenyon Review Online

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There are certain stories that lull you into an unbreakable hypnosis — a spell so thorough that you’ll forgot all other obligations and spend the next 20-30 minutes of your life dedicated to the story, not because you want to, but because you have to, because of the spell to which you are now beholden. I think this happens through some combination of rhythm and cadence created by the language — some auditory magic that happens on a level that we aren’t aware of yet, as readers. This is what happened to me both times I read, “Empty House” by Julia Strayer.

The story is narrated by a woman who most of the time wanders through life in her bathrobe and, who, when she needs them, drives to the laundromat for cigarettes because they still have the vending machine that you can stick coins in and watch the pack drop into the reservoir for your hand to squeeze into and claim. The woman who lives next door happens to be her mother, who the narrator refers to as “the neighbor lady,” and this “neighbor lady” tells the narrator she can’t keep going around town in her bathrobe. To which the narrator responds: “Everyone at the laundromat is used to seeing me in my bathrobe.”

In the story, the narrator is attempting her best—or what we think of as her best—to raise a precocious four-year-old who loves dogs, ducks, and the color pink. The daughter, like the neighbor lady, wants her mother to stop smoking. But the pressure the daughter, Fern, applies to the mother is more in the form of an unasked question: do I really need you as a mother? Of course the answer is yes, emotionally, but practically speaking, Fern is thriving: feeding herself, picking out paint, raising the dog, and motivating her mother.

The narrator and “neighbor lady” have a tumultuous history that isn’t fully revealed. What we do know is that the neighbor lady is now trying to make up for parental deficiencies of the past. She even tells her daughter, the narrator, when referring to her and Fern staying in the same room for the time being: “A girl should be with her mother.” And the narrator responds: “Oh that’s good coming from you.”

Which is a perfect set of lines to show the distance between the two. We don’t need to know precisely what it was that pulled them apart initially—do we ever know, or do we ever remember what those initial fights with loved one are about anyway?—but instead, we only need to know that there’s a riff somewhere, and the “neighbor lady” is trying to repair it while also trying to keep her daughter, the narrator, from losing it completely. The narrator has been damaged by the lack of sustained connections in her life, one with her mother, and the other, which becomes more apparent as the story continues, is with Fern’s father. Fern’s always asking in some way, spoken exactly or not: Why can’t we be like a normal family? And the mother/narrator has to steel herself against the idea of what a traditional family is, when in fact she has a family unit surrounding her all along: mother, daughter, dog, and ducks.

The story is lush with detail and insights so true and vibrant that many times I found myself nodding along in agreement to the narrator’s thoughts. And as timely and true as those are, they are made more so because of the wonderful dialogue throughout — those gripping, heart-wrenching conversations between the three generations of women. Writers who want to learn how to write damn good dialogue, or teachers who want an excellent example to show students, will do well by suggesting “Empty House” by Julia Strayer.

Or, if none of that matters to you and you simply want to read a damn good story, full of heart and intimate human textures, read this story.

Review of “Maeve” by Walker Rutter-Bowman, published in Hobart

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A man and a woman have a chance encounter in front of a “smoked nut stand” somewhere in the city. The man was walking to the cobbler to get his shoes polished – shoes that held nostalgic value for him. The man and woman (Maeve) had been friends—maybe even more than friends—in college and now they were meeting on the street after a lengthy absence. From start to finish, if we’re to tell what happened in the story, the above mentioned would be accompanied with: they talk, they talk more, walk back to get nuts, then to a diner or a bar (“I don’t remember which,” the narrator tells readers) and then converse a bit more, and that’s it.

It’s a slightly askew story, despite the straightforwardness with which I just explained its happenings. There’s something complex about the story’s texture, its structure—we get a back story toward the end—“We’d almost slept together once” which arrives three-quarters the way through, but even that isn’t as off-kilter as maybe the way the information about the two unfolds, as if the narrator is trying in real time to make sense of things from his past: “How do you talk about the meaning of things?”

It’s the question, I think, the narrator is aware of throughout, and while we learn of Maeve—who held strong opinions, wrote movies, and at one point was quite an orator at parties, delivering her “tastes and hatreds”—we also learn a thing or two about the narrator through what Maeve declares about him: “You stood in the corner at parties…You wanted to add to the conversation…But you kept yourself buttoned.” And later, “That’s how I remember you now: sitting, licking your little lips, looking down and in.”

It isn’t all serious, however. The narrator has his moments of humor: “We sat on a bench and ate our nuts… I was pretty sure I had gum on my ass.” And on that same bench, thinking of who he was when he’d first met Maeve: “I thought of those days. I didn’t want to say anything, but I didn’t want to keep being seen as the same.”

And while the narrator shows his motivation—or perhaps we could call it his revised agenda (remember, he was going to run an errand)—we also see the evolution of the smoked nuts throughout, as the narrator tells readers:

“Still, I told her what I thought. The nuts, a mistake. But hadn’t they given us something to eat outdoors? Some flavors on a nice day? There was nothing more worthless than really good food asking for attention, getting itself talked about…The nuts had brought a pleasant pressure from the past. A memory can lodge in your throat like a stone, an unhusked drupe. It was painful but it was right. You cough it up or you swallow it down for good.”

There’s something useful for writers here on how to effectively use an object: repeat, repeat, evolve. The smoked nuts are mentioned in the first line, and thereafter, we see them appear again, and yet again, until they’re understood differently, as is the narrator’s new perspective along with what he wants for himself, as understood in the above quote.

But the narrator isn’t the only one with a privileged view of the object. Of the smoked nuts, Maeve claims to the narrator: “Those weren’t good…They smell better than they taste—that’s well known.”

Check out the full story here.

Walker Rutter-Bowman lives in Washington, DC. He earned his MFA in fiction from Syracuse University. His work has been published in Nashville Review, Tin House Online, Harvard Review Online, and Full Stop.

Teeth’s Story by Ron Austin, published in Juked Magazine

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I had the privilege of hearing Ron Austin read his work at the Luther College Writers Festival earlier this fall. His work is edgy, fun, playful, serious, mysterious, lyrical, entertaining, and moving. Steve Almond said something to the effect that good fiction will awaken the heart of a reader. In Austin’s fiction, he moves both the heart and the mind. His stories are smart, funny, at times absurd (in the best possible way), but always with a clear-eye toward social awareness and the plight of those characters who inhabit his stories. I can’t wait for his forthcoming collection: Avery Colt is a Snake, A Thief, A Liar.

Below is an interview about his story “Teeth’s Story,” which will be published in his forthcoming collection. Also, before the interview, below, Ron offers a brief preface to his answers.

Ron Austin: Keith, thanks for these excellent questions. I’m going to frame my responses by attempting to describe the nature and dimensions of hustle. Hustle is a mutagenic substance that rapidly transforms organic and conceptual matter, allowing organisms, both organic and inorganic, to increase adaptability and survivability in worrisome conditions. In language, narrative sense, and characterization, I pursue the judicious application of hustle to all techniques.

Interview: Ron Austin and Keith Lesmeister

KL: The thing that jumps out at me almost immediately in Teeth’s Story is the rhythm and cadence of the language — the musicality. It’s fantastic and addictive. There’s poetry throughout the entire story, but these lines stood out to me right away:

“Hot pipes split lips, chemical clouds suffocated kin, rocks avalanched, crushed sons and daughters.”

And, “I feared his death wasn’t enough to clear the karmic debt he had charged to our bloodline. “I imagined elders chewing iron nails, banging hammers, erecting crosses of shame to crucify me and my folks.”

And: “Old dude was a defunct dope dealer and prison mystic who rocked gold fangs.”

Could you share a little about writing in such a poetic way? Are these lines the result of a lot of revision? Or is this your natural rhythm and flow while writing through a first draft?

RA: In one dimension, I rely on lyricism to generate momentum from line to line. Poetic methods, theories, and principles act as filament that conduct the intensity, direction, and duration of contact with pure thought and emotion. The stronger the filament, the higher the fidelity. In another dimension, both literally and figuratively, the text itself is an organism, something conceived somewhere between synapses and brainstems, the fruit of an experiment conducted in a laboratory. One commits sacrilege in engineering a homunculus. In this sense, crafting strong individual lines is the work of synthesizing fiber and blood vessels, building muscles that power an arm, an arm that gives language the ability to reach out and grip readers. Hustle allows the larynx to produce hypnotic melodies, birdsong. Hustle turns tongues dexterous, prehensile. Hustle turns teeth to metal that can crack thick hides. While these techniques can be learned, Teeth understands this innately.

*But also, to come off the fun for a bit, my initial drafts take forever. I’ll usually spend a week or so polishing a page or a few before finding that they don’t fit into a full narrative frame and throwing them into my scraps file. And then a few months later, I’ll land on the narrative frame and push hard from there.

KL: The beautiful, gripping language up against the stark contrast of dim reality in which the narrator is growing up creates a kind of tension in the narrative. How do you balance the beauty of the language against some of the grittier locales and hardscrabble lives that make up the characters in the story? Or even many of your stories?

RA: In the story, Teeth knows no one is going to spend time or attention on common items, bruised goods. He uses hustle to transform hair clippers and bus passes into supernatural relics. But hustle, in its strange properties, does more than that. Hustle can reveal the true nature of objects, settings, people. Hustle reveals the satisfaction in struggle, the profit in pain. By using heightened language, I aim to give the place and characters I describe the presence and power they deserve.

KL: The story is aptly titled “Teeth’s Story” because this is in essence about his life and the kind of legacy he hopes to leave behind for the youngsters growing up in his neighborhood, namely the narrator of the story who brings Teeth contraband left behind by his deceased uncle. In the middle of the story there’s a kind of historic, mythic, fable, that Teeth shares with the narrator. It’s a fantastic interlude. Could you talk about blending the story within a story? And perhaps a little of what the fable means to you (not sure if fable is the right word here….)?

RA: Teeth is the closest thing to a villain that appears in “Avery Colt Is A Snake, A Thief, A Liar.” Because of that, I wanted him to have a chance at redemption. The role of a neighborhood drug dealer is more complex than good and evil, right and wrong. If your grandmother sells illicit goods out of her basement, and that gets you through college, where you work to become a counselor, what could be said? What judgements can be made. Teeth never had designs on ruin. He only wanted money and status. Drug dealing ultimately does him no favors, and he falls back on hustle. He can’t let “defunct drug dealer” be his legacy. He can’t let people know his neighborhood as only abandoned buildings, the specter of danger. The narrative interlude acts as a consequence of the hustle he spits. The transformation of Avery’s story and the mode in which Teeth asserts his own transforms the meta-narrative into a collaborative effort, bridging the gap between them and the reader with story-telling.

KL: Objects play an important role in many of your stories, including this one. Without giving too much away, I’m thinking of the jar left behind be the deceased uncle, which goes through its own kind of process and change as the story progresses. Could you share a little bit of how objects work in your stories? Do you have any special fascination with any objects in particular?

RA: The objects I introduce into stories generally are the concrete residue of a concept. In “Avery Colt Is A Snake, A Thief, A Liar,” Granddad’s WWII service revolver is an item that represents power, toxic masculinity, protection, fear, obedience, and heart break. The jar and its contents represent decay, greed, and choice. At the end of Teeth’s story, Avery is being unfair and foolish by shoving the jar back in Teeth’s face. But he’s also giving Teeth a chance at moving on from what he was and committing to a new path.

KL: As mentioned, the title of the story fits quiet well as this is a story about Teeth, more or less. But the narrator goes through a kind of change of his own, which mirrors, in a sense, the change that Teeth comes to realize — or express publicly — to his own self, along with the narrator. Still, the narrator seems to take a back seat to the goat-bearded women, the elders who shame the dealers and crackheads, and to Teeth himself. Was there ever a version of the story when the narrator had a larger role? And what effect might this have in your view — the narrator taking a kind of back seat to the other figures in the story?

RA: In the arc of the stories, Avery is the reader’s point of entry into the community, but I never wanted him to be the only focal point. His story and whether or not he survives is not as important as the community’s story. The first half of the collection, Avery has less agency and takes up more space in the narratives as he deliberates on what’s around him. As he gains more agency in later stories, I intended for the community and other characters to take the forefront.

KL: I’m looking forward to the release of your debut collection of stories. Is Teeth’s Story part of the collection? And could you maybe share a little about the collection here?

RA: Yes! “Teeth’s Story” is in the collection. It’s the eighth story and works in tandem with the seventh story, “Cauldron,” which originally appeared in Story Quarterly. “Cauldron” is where Teeth is first introduced. After finishing a major project, it takes some time to really nail what it’s all about. In a concrete sense, “Avery Colt Is A Snake, A Thief, A Liar” is about whether or not Avery and his family can survive the economic downturn in his neighborhood as opportunities decrease and violence escalates. In another sense, it’s about adapting to the barbs of grief and whether the way forward is amassing methods of brutality or negotiating surrender to vulnerability.

KL: Last series of questions.

KL: Do you prefer…

KL: Pumpkin or Squash?

RA: Squash

KL: Almonds or Cashews?

RA: Almonds

KL: Neat or On the Rocks?

RA: Neat

KL: Bikes or Scooters?

RA: Bikes

KL: Boy Bands or Hair Bands?

RA: Boy Bands (Brock Hampton)

KL: Leaves on trees or leaves on the ground?

RA: Leaves on the ground

Ron A. Austin holds an MFA from the University of Missouri–St. Louis and is a 2016 Regional Arts Commission Fellow. Avery Colt Is a Snake, a Thief, a Liar, his first collection of linked stories, won the 2017 Nilsen Prize. The book will be released in fall of 2019. Austin’s short stories have been placed or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Story Quarterly, Ninth Letter, Black Warrior Review, Midwestern Gothic, Juked and other journals. He, his partner Jennie, and son Elijah live in St. Louis with a whippet named Carmen.

The True Death of Abel Paisley by Maisy Card, published in Agni (online).

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I was going to write an intro to The True Death of Abel Paisley, but then I came across this, written on Agni’s website, and it was probably written by someone much smarter than me, so I decided to use this intro instead of my own. Here it is, as published by Agni:

“A Jamaican has the opportunity to take on a dead man’s identity and live a free new life with a full-body alias. But things are never so simple. Never mind the long arm of the law—preordained retribution has a longer arm still. Stay tuned. The true death of Abel Paisley doesn’t get revealed until the very end.”

I suspect after reading the blurb you’re going to want to read the actual story. And you should. It’s fantastic. Here’s a link. Enjoy. And here’s an interview with Maisy.

Keith Lesmeister: Let’s start with the name of the first character we’re introduced to, Abel, which, for me, conjures memories from Sunday school where I learned that Abel suffered the wrath of his jealous brother Cain. After the horrible deed, Cain is cast out into his own no-man’s land, east of Eden. I was never convinced Cain had it as rough as people thought. After all, no one would bother him out there, but then there’s the whole notion of human connection blah blah blah. Okay, only the first question, and I’m already digressing. So, tell us about the name, Abel.

Maisy Card: I was looking at birth certificates from the town in Jamaica where one of my grandfathers was born and still lives. Abel is supposed to be roughly the same age. I noticed that names tended to be biblical or men were named after Roman emperors (my grandfather’s name is Augustus). I’ve always liked the name Abel.

KL:  The POV jumps out at me. An alternating kind of omniscient second person. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever read a story with this kind of POV. How did this POV emerge?

MC: This is one of the later stories I wrote, but I had been planning it out in my head for a long time. I had planned to tell it from Abel’s POV,  to try to understand how a man who abandons his family justifies his actions to himself, but I think by the time I got around to writing it, I knew so much about the other characters, I had a hard time letting Abel get the last word. This story, and the rest of the stories in the collection, is about intergenerational trauma. Even though some characters, like Estelle, grow up in a seemingly normal family, they manage to absorb and sense some of the negativity and trauma. I wanted everyone to be heard, for the reader to get a sense of everyone’s pain and anger, and this was the best POV to make it happen.

KL: Each character carries his/her own intrigue, which is a credit to the way you’ve developed each of these characters in nuanced and sophisticated ways, but within the parameters of a short story (length). I noticed in your bio that you’ve written a novel based on these characters. In which POV/POVs is the book written? Is there any one character who you enjoy writing more than the others?

MC: This story is part of a linked short story collection or a novel-in-stories–I’m not quite sure how I should describe it yet. Each story focuses on one or several members of the Paisley family. POVs change throughout. Some stories are told in 1st person, some are 3rd person, this is the only one told in 2nd person. I try to switch up POVs to keep things interesting for myself and hopefully the reader.

KL: Was there research involved in this story? If so, how much and what kind?

MC: No, I didn’t do any research for this particular story, but did a lot of research for other stories in the book.

KL:  Have you ever read the short story “The Disappearance” by Jeanne Schinto? Really fascinating account of an immigrant who essentially gets paid off to go back to his home country of Italy during the time of intense labor talks and negotiations and strikes and other issues, but his family doesn’t know, and they think he’s “disappeared.”

MC: I haven’t read it and couldn’t find a copy. Can you send it to me?

KL: Most likely. I will try to find it.

KL: A few random questions, preferences:

KL: Sprite or Sierra Mist?

MC: Neither. I prefer Coke or Pepsi

KL: Vacation or Staycation?

MC: staycation

KL: Sandals or shoes?

MC: shoes

KL: Candles or flashlights?

MC: candles

Maisy Card is a writer and a public librarian living in Newark, New Jersey. Her work has appeared in Lenny Letter, Sycamore Review, Liars’ League NYC, and Ampersand Review. She recently completed a novel about the fictional Paisley family.

Sentence by Sentence: an interview with John Jodzio

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John Jodzio’s work is humorous and dark, precise and eccentric, and compulsively readable. Look no further than these latest two stories to appreciate his talent, range, and ability. THERE’S NO CHICKEN FIGHTING IN THE INFINITY POOL was published in the latest issue of Adroit and THE NARROWS was published in The Sun. I had the privilege of chatting with John about writing, rivers, soda pop, and hot dishes.

Keith Lesmeister: Congrats on these back-to-back publications. I’m a long-time subscriber to The Sun and your story “The Narrows” is unlike anything I’ve read lately. And I say that in the best possible way. On the surface, here are two women, sisters, who rescue jumpers from a river in a selfish attempt to satisfy their own need for physical connection. What were the origins of this story? How did the idea surface (pardon the pun)?

John Jodzio: The origins of this story are sort of all over the place and kind of hard to pin down. I grew up on a river and now I live in Minneapolis by the Mississippi so there’s always been a bunch of moving water around me. I’ve always been interested in how random things end up in the water and wonder who dumped these things there and why. I also remember one day I started thinking about how Niagara Falls is this bizarre dichotomy — a very popular place to go on your honeymoon but an even more popular place to commit suicide. Like most of my stories my brain started to pull some of my experience and some of these weird facts into a strange alignment and I ended up with these two lonely sisters fishing suicidal men out of the river with their man hooks.

KL: The sisters in “The Narrows” are not always “successful” in the sense that many of the jumpers achieve their desired goal, which is suicide. You’ve managed to touch on a very sensitive and critically important topic which has, for so long, been taboo. Or maybe not taboo, but just very difficult to talk about. What is your approach to writing about important societal topics and issues in your fiction?

JJ: There’s been a definite shift in the tone of some of my stories lately. I think I’ve gotten more interested in attempting to explore these kinds of societal issues in a more overt way (instead of letting them organically occur in a story) while also trying to figure out how to channel and express more of the world-weariness, loneliness, and anger that myself and a lot of the people around me are battling in their lives.

KL: In “Chicken Fight” you’re able to capture perfectly the manic throes of a failing marriage. Despite the glorious ending, this moment in the couple’s life together—the hotel, drugs, booze, and playful reverie—feels more like a pit-stop on their way to ultimate demise. Either way, when writing a short-short fiction piece, what are you focusing on initially? Character? Language? Some combination?

JJ: Usually any short-short piece I write it usually starts with the language and voice. There’s always an opening line or first paragraph that is always a little shocking or funny or weirdly phrased and has some propulsion to it. This story just started with me revising that first paragraph over and over until I got the voice how I wanted it and then there was some taffy pulling and taffy mushing with characters and plot, trying to concoct how the narrator and his wife had arrived at this critical point in their marriage and how they might move forward.

KL: There’s a theme and mood of desperation throughout both stories. A kind of addictive melancholic alchemy—the stories feel sad and desperate to me but they’re offset by humor, intrigue, and perfect pacing. Could you discuss how you strike this perfect balance between desperation and all those things that help offset the desperation without compromising it completely?

JJ: All of these things you mention are just gut feelings I get while I am writing a story. I don’t really do any planning when I start writing something and so I am just blindly making my way through sentence by sentence, figuring out what would make sense next. Whatever alchemy exists in my stories probably always ends boiling down to a simple equation: if things start getting too desperate I leaven, if a character gets too happy I weigh them down, if the pacing gets bogged I cut some darlings to speed it up. How those things exactly happen in the context of the story is always the hard part and what takes a bunch of drafts and a bunch of time to get right.

KL: In any versions of “Chicken Fight” did the featured couple not win the last match? If so, what was that like?

JJ: Figuring how to end that story was difficult for me. There were a number of different endings, one with them losing the match, but it felt too hopeless. In the end the ending that felt right for me was for them to win and stay together (at least for now) and continue on with their hedonistic weekend.

KL: What are you currently reading?

JJ: Arbitrary Stupid Goal by Tamara Shopsin, The Strange Bird by Jeff VanderMeer, and My Own Devices by Dessa.

KL: What was the last concert you attended?

JJ: Spoon/Grizzly Bear

KL: And… last series of questions.

KL: Is it soda or pop?

JJ: Always and forever pop.

KL: Casserole or hot dish?

JJ: Hot Dish

KL: Do you prefer…

KL: Downhill or cross country skiing?

JJ: Definitely cross-country

KL: Lakes or rivers?

JJ: Obvs rivers

KL: Dylan or Young?

JJ: Young

KL: REM or Depeche Mode?

JJ: Depeche

KL: Solitude or small groups?

JJ: Solitude

JOHN JODZIO is the author of the story collections Knockout and If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and is horribly addicted to burritos.