short stories

Review of “The Happiest Day of Your Life” by Katherine Damm, published in the Iowa Review

/ Keith Pilapil Lesmeister / 1 Comment

The Happiest Day of Your Life (published in the Iowa Review) by Katherine Damm is a masterclass in tempo, rhythm, and the all-encompassing clock/time so critically important to writers, especially those who write short stories.

The story takes place over the course of a wedding reception, with the remaining moments of the story—shall we say the denouement? —taking place the morning after in the couple’s bedroom. Not that couple. The couple in question, already married, are Wyatt and Nina. They’re attending a wedding reception of one of Nina’s ex-boyfriends, Greg, who married Lillian. The complimentary cocktail specials are named after the couple, so the attendees bump around while sipping and getting sloshed on Gregs and Lillians.

This all takes place at the Drake Hotel in Chicago. “It’s snowing outside” and there are several characters who come and go. Brief, though memorable interactions, such as John, the cardiologist/philanthropist, who leaves the conversation with Wyatt to look for ghosts (yes, he is a cardiologist who claims to see and believe in ghosts, or maybe he just wants out of the conversation). Or, another one of Nina’s ex-boyfriends, Austin, who Wyatt bumps into while in the bathroom where he “drank water by the palmful.” Austin is the ex-boyfriend who helped Nina feel “feminine.” A remark Wyatt wished he could “unhear.”

The story is narrated through Wyatt’s POV, and it’s a convincing one: a man surrounded by his wife’s ex-partners gets tanked, fantasizes about one part of a woman’s unshaven leg, recalls past girlfriends, dances exuberantly, and has at least a half a dozen interactions, all of which feel significant in their own way. But take John and Austin, for instance (spoiler alert): they don’t make their way back into the narrative, and one wonders, especially with conversations about ghosts, like Chekhov’s gun, might we be waiting for some instance where they appear? Absolutely not. This is a wedding reception which introduces and entertains its own sense of blissful logic, tempo, and pacing. The propulsive pace of the narrative mimics the manic aspects of being at a reception where half of what you might say or do will not be remembered, and if you do remember what you say or do, there’s a better than fifty percent chance you might regret at least some of what you said or did.

The pacing along with the number of characters and interactions teeters on too much—as it should—but then we get this beautiful scene just past midway through the story. Wyatt is drunkenly dancing with everyone, and after one of the songs, he’s escorted calmly to the bar by the groom’s brother. The groom’s brother gives him a drink, and Wyatt responds with: “I love fizzy water.” After that, Wyatt sneaks away, and we get this wonderful—and much needed—moment of calm:

“It was snowing outside, and night. The street was a glassy obsidian, lit white and red as cars passed casting wet, beige piles aside. [Wyatt] rolled his forehead from side to side on the cool pane. The script on the awning across the street read The Grand Ballroom. “If you’re there, then where am I,” he wondered, then remembered that he was at the Drake Hotel, looking over Walton Street at the Knickerbocker.”

After the descriptions above, Wyatt ruminates on family, his parents, the holidays (how many more will they have together?), and then he shares a moment, a brief wave and a smile, with a stranger. It’s so serene that you almost forget where we are, what’s happening, and how long we’ve stepped away from the party. But then “Unchained Melody” starts, “the long diphthong of an “O” buttressed by arpeggiated chords” and Wyatt is suddenly searching for Nina so they might share a dance together. He stumbles around looking for her. He doesn’t find her, not at first, so he orders more to drink. Eventually, he finds her with mascara-stained cheeks. But she’s not crying because of Wyatt.

Wedding receptions are a fascinating blend of people, sometimes family, sometimes strangers, brought together by the couple of the day. The interactions of the people are propelled then by this somewhat loose or strong connection, exacerbated by emotion, exhaustion, and possibly alcohol. The constellation of people around which Wyatt orients himself is wide ranging, but mentally and emotionally he gravitates toward Nina’s ex-boyfriends, specifically the groom, Greg. These thoughts are mostly explored through Wyatt’s interiority, which, in his drunken state, has him wondering about things with regard to Greg and Nina. Wyatt eventually shares with others various bits of information he’d learned in the past, from Nina, some of it still secret. The secret he shares (I won’t tell you what and with whom—you’ll have to read to find out) helps move the story toward its conclusion. Remember the mascara-stained cheeks.

I remember once asking my own spouse why she enjoyed weddings so much, and she said, “I don’t like weddings. I like dances.” And that seemed apt to me. She went on to explain that she didn’t like weddings because we’d been married long enough to know that shit just gets more and more difficult, so the wedding oftentimes—sometimes, but not always, I suppose—being one of the happiest memories, if not moments, for the couple. So much of their emotional energy is consumed by the planning. Then, once it’s over, there’s only one inevitable direction for the pendulum to swing.

Coincidentally, the last three books I’ve read are, in this order, All Fours by Miranda July, Liars by Sarah Manguso, and This American Ex-Wife by Lyz Lenz. The former two are labeled and sold as fiction, while the latter is a mixture of memoir and reporting, mostly about marriage, patriarchy, and most of what we’ve come to know and understand about the confines and downfalls of heteronormative institutions, specifically marriage: that it’s an arrangement, socially and structurally, for men to succeed outside the home while women struggle. In other words, the institution is a far better deal for the guy. Liars is a one-sided view of a dissolving marriage. The protagonist’s husband is a caricature, so thoroughly unlikable as to become laughable, unbelievable. Still, it’s a taut, stark account, very well written, and compulsively readable, even if wholly unenjoyable. And All Fours among others things is a reexamining of how we do marriage and what a modern marriage for multiple evolved and consenting people might look like, especially for people with ravenous sexual creativity and appetites.

While Damm’s story might not mix entirely with the three books mentioned, it does touch on important questions that most married people pause on now and again: what the fuck am I doing in this marriage? Who am I as an individual? Who is this person I married? Are our lives better because we’re together?

I, for one, don’t believe in the one—I guess I don’t know or hangout with anyone who actually believes in such harmful fairytales—but there is this sense by the end of the story of the constant mental negotiations, or questions, we go through while married: is my partner happy with me? Am I happy with my partner? Could I have been happier with someone else? What would my life be like had I married that other person? Would my life be better? While not explicitly stated, these questions lurk somewhere in the subtext of Damm’s story. Or maybe I’m wrong about that, and maybe these questions are unique to my own reading of the story.

In any case, the story takes place at the Drake. A fancy spot. It’s loud, hectic, drunk. People are dancing, talking, milling about. Ordering drinks. In other words, it’s a wedding reception. If you haven’t been to one lately, and you enjoy the manic pace of a night out, or if you simply love a damn good short story, read Damm’s story. It’s a well-crafted story with a sense of gravitas so complete, that despite knowing what’s happening to the characters—getting more and more besotted—Damm’s able to ground us readers with expertly crafted pacing/tempo, pitch-perfect dialogue, exquisite details, and a level of relational tension that compels us readers to say I do want to keep reading.

Katherine Damm was raised in Philadelphia and now lives in New York. She received her MFA from the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine, and her short stories have appeared in Ploughshares, New England Review, and Crazyhorse. She is working on a novel.

Keith Pilapil Lesmeister is the author of the fiction chapbook Mississippi River Museum and the story collection We Could’ve Been Happy Here. More info: keithlesmeister.com

Review of “Out West” by Andrew Bertaina, published in Bodega

/ cgilmanwhitney / Leave a comment

Another Friday, another awesome piece of flash!

The western part of the country has always carried a certain allure to it, a mystery. Anyone who’s spent any amount of time out there can attest to this, and it shines brilliantly in Andrew Bertaina’s latest piece of flash “Out West” from Bodega Mag. The first line of the story—“I was living out west the first time I fell in love…” is one of those openings that enthralls perfectly. Bertaina captures the enigmatic beauty of the west with such knockout descriptors as “the sun was a pencil of light” and “the fish gathered beneath knuckles of roots.” 

The speaker isn’t just describing the pretty landscape, however. He’s on the move, trying his best at being a ranch hand (and failing). It will never be his life, even if it’s what he imagined. There are little hints that the speaker is bound for somewhere else, some other experiences, evident when he explains how the flank of colt resemble shapes “I’d later see in modernist paintings in New York.” 

What is just a snapshot of the protagonist’s life—a few weeks out west tending horses and doing other chores —becomes so much more than that, for the speaker is always running forward, moving towards the unknown. The detail of the protagonist “running like a bullet” from his father shows the need for escape. And the beautifully written details throughout show the yearning for adventure, for new experiences, for wild terrain. 

Perhaps that’s how he found himself out west in the first place. “Where was I going? I’m not sure I’d ever know how to answer properly” is a line that caused me to shout YES. Who hasn’t thought this way? Who among us doesn’t think this way in every situation and in each and every day on earth? 

The protagonist often goes to a small creek on the property to unwind, to hide from the disapproving eyes of the ranch owner. It’s there that he ponders his current plan, his next steps, and after he’s let go, he hops on a train. The landscape of the west gives way to the great plains, and he’s still searching for answers, still searching for the sign, when he meets a young woman going to New York. He then does what so many “young and reckless” people do. He follows her. 

Happily ever after? Maybe, maybe not. But one thing’s for sure: he’s not working on that ranch anymore. 

Read the story here.

Andrew Bertaina’s short story collection One Person Away From You (2021) won the Moon City Press Fiction Award (2020). His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Witness Magazine, The Normal School, Orion, and The Best American Poetry. He has an MFA from American University.

Christian Gilman Whitney is a writer from Western Massachusetts, and earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College. Find him on Twitter @c_g_whitney.

Loneliness is My Wheelhouse: Interview with Ethan Rutherford

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Ethan Rutherford’s stories draw out, wind, zing; in truth, I would go so far as to explain his range as chameleonic. In The Peripatetic Coffin, his debut collection, aptly named Ward Lumpkin waxes poetic as he finds his short-stick life coming to rest, inevitably, in the nadir of the sea and history; then, two boys in their middle-childhood years code switch one summer between brouhaha and desperation as they find their lives, suddenly, never again the same. Over the course of The Peripatetic Coffin, the reader dives into alternative histories, period pieces, dramas, and epistolary tales. That each story—with altogether different, keenly rendered characters married to their different, uniquely furnished environments—delivers the reader to a head space of empathy speaks to Rutherford’s ability to see we humans as we are here, there, and everywhere.

Out this spring from A Strange Object is Rutherford’s sophomore collection, Farthest South. True to form, Rutherford spins yarns which emphasize who we are here and now: yearning, traumatized, lonely creatures. A father imparts to his boys at bedtime the wisdom from a summer under the scrutiny of something not unlike a curse; later, two parents, stuck in the hospital with their ailing baby, max-out and can’t believe, literally, their eyes. Domesticity is the foundation of this collection, but it wouldn’t be a Rutherford story without the eldritch—a baby, for example, grows scales. I cannot recommend this book enough, for behind any great story a writer has committed to manifesting our fears and in the same breath the exit ramp.

We corresponded via email to talk shop, his new book, and provenance.

***

B. Nathanial Steelman: What a fascinating, compelling new book. Repeatedly, your characters follow their fears, nuances (neuroses?), and volitions into settings which have a way of embodying so much as exacerbating conflict. For your first book, David Byrne’s line “My god, what have I done” was a unifying question. Any unifying question for your Farthest South?

Ethan Rutherford: What a great question. The characters who ring out for me, as they appear in the stories that open and close the collection, are Hana and Soren. In many ways, this book is theirs, and I came to feel, as I was writing, that their anxiety and concerns about being parents, raising children in a difficult world etcetera, guided the movement of each story in the book. And I think the difference between my first book, which was unified by that wonderful David Byrne line, and this one is that this book is concerned primarily with the idea of family. So that question has moved from my god, what have I done, which is backwards looking,to something more collective and forward-facing, along the lines of: how do we get through this, and what comes next? I know that doesn’t necessarily make for the most grabbing pull-quote, perhaps, but I actually think it is a more productive way to think about story-making, it’s how I felt writing this book, and it’s how I have felt as a dad: this is a problem, let’s zig, here’s something we didn’t expect, OK, zag, there’s the finish line, let’s see if we can get there intact. It invites stranger things to the table, but also promises that there will be some sort of arrival. And I liked that. I don’t like anymore stories that explore certainty, or that feel certain in their endings and what they’ve accomplished. I like stories that dramatize uncertainty while acknowledging that the real resolution, time and therefore time’s end, is probably hustling toward you a little more quickly than you’d liked or hoped. But before that happens, you get to play a bit. You hope to have some courage, and even if you don’t, you try to model that for your kids. I’ve left the area code of your question at this point.  But while I’m out here, let me loop back for a minute to music. That Talking Heads song (and I hope it’s in your head now!) was on loop for me as I wrote that first book. One of the epigraphs in this book is from a song called “We Can’t Be Beat” by The Walkmen, and lyrics go: “Oh golden dreams / golden dreams all lose their glow / I don’t need perfection, I love the whole. / Oh give me a life that needs correction. / Nobody loves, loves perfection. / Loneliness, loneliness will run you through. / All the kids are laughing, I’m laughing too.” It’s a beautiful song. And it says something about early parenthood that I think Hana and Soren are coming to understand for themselves as they come to accept both the strangeness and banality of their lives.

(The second epigraph is from Mrs. Caliban, the great, wild novel by Rachel Ingalls. So, you know, things aren’t fully domesticated just yet.)

BNS: The idea of being beat, and the attendant idea of resilience, makes me think of any number of stories in Farthest South. “The Baby” comes to mind most quickly. I read that story and immediately felt I was being shown an example of exorbitant stress becoming trauma becoming change. Do you find that you wrench up tension to such levels in your stories? Or that you find this tension—how to say—more organically?

ER: I’m so pleased to hear about the way you are experiencing these stories. As for tension, sometimes, when dreaming up a story, you go, oh, I know what’ll get them: I’ll kick the door down and turn the volume up to 11! And not let go! But those stories have sort of stopped feeling interesting to me; I can’t make them work anymore, or, at least, can’t do so with a straight face. A frame helps—a number of the stories in this collection are frame stories—and that formal element, to me, felt like an authentic way to both access and leaven the stranger and darker eddies in this book. It also adds a third, mostly quiet but deeply powerful, narrative space, which is where I think some of the tension is thrumming. These frames felt destabilizing as I was writing. They produced what I can only describe as an unspoken and almost unintended energy, something that was interesting and unsettling to me.

One way I’ve come to think about the creation of tension in a piece of writing has less to do with what happensand more to do with the when and how frequently it happens. Patterning, breaking of the pattern, etcetera down to the sentence level. And “The Baby”—which is of course a story of care, love, parental attention, and worry—is a story that, I think, finds its energy and tension via interruption and intrusion: parents, in a hospital with their sick child, cannot find a moment of privacy to gather their thoughts on what is happening to their family, they are being bombarded by information they don’t understand from health professionals they never recognize. The worry becomes that all the important decisions are being made elsewhere, without their consent or consultation. But you are right: a hospitalized child, it is exorbitant stress. The volume begins at 11. There is no stress that I have encountered quite like it. I wrote about it when it happened, in an essay called “Impossible Rooms,” and I’d hoped writing would help me shake the feeling. Clearly, I’m not free of it! And that experience of parental helplessness I felt at that moment was, I think, the birth zone of a lot of the stories in this collection. 

BNS: Two of your thoughts put a stop to my clocks: “[These frames] produced what I can only describe as an unspoken and almost unintended energy, something that was interesting and unsettling to me”; and “… that experience of parental helplessness I felt at that moment was, I think, the birth zone of a lot of the stories in this collection.” It seems that you are posturing yourself along the outskirts, or the warning track, of the age-old compulsion we refer to by why I write.

ER: Yep, that’s true! I suppose it is. It is why I write, to look again at certain experiences, transform them, hold them up to the light, say: what was that about, why has that stuck with me? But that feeling, or glimpse, of true, abject helplessness is fairly fleeting, hopefully rare. You can’t live there long; you’d go nuts. In my experience of parenthood, there’s always so much to do, just maintenance, cleaning up, thinking about this or that, getting on with life and getting everyone including yourself through the day and out the door that you don’t have time to do much more than say, yes, there’s a Nether Portal right over there, and we could easily fall through it…  and you still have to practice piano and call your grandparents. (That’s a, um, Minecraft reference. I’ll leave it in! Perhaps, one day, my kids will read this and go: oh, he was paying attention to the things we like.)

But a frame on a story: it’s a constructed thing, built to shuttle the reader from one narrative space to another very quickly. I feel like it stabilizes a story and also knocks things a little off kilter by layering tensions rather than schematically setting down action / reaction. And the energy created—well, it feels more Gravitron than roller-coaster to me, and I like that. I suppose I should say here that only three of the stories—“Ghost Story,” “Fable” and “The Diver”—are frame stories. The others have more traditional structures and move in more traditional ways. 

BNS: It’s common for a lot of writers to come to love their characters. Do you love them? Have a hard time of letting them go?

ER: I do come to love my characters. Not all of them equally, though, and I find, once the story is over, that almost everything sort of drifts away from me to make room for the next piece of work. I’ve heard other writers say they frequently wonder what their old characters are up to now, and that’s always baffled me a bit; I’ve just never had that experience. Which isn’t to say I don’t now and then remember the ways in which they flashed to life. I’ll always think fondly of Hana and Soren, their children, the Seal Lady and the Diver. Angus and Annabel. In this collection, the character I think of most is Emily, from “Pools, I Am A Hawk.” I think that’s the closest I’ve ever felt to a character. This feels so silly to say, but it’s true.

BNS: What I loved about “Pools” were the degrees of estrangement, it seemed to me, the protagonist, Emily, was finding herself in: daughter, oldest child, someone accused of abuse (because the onlookers didn’t think Emily & Sean were related let alone horsing around), and—lo & behold—a person thought to be a ghost. If you’re comfortable speaking to your affinity for Emily in “Pools,” as you know, I’m all ears.

ER: My fondness for her comes from, I think, the ease with which she moved through the various spaces in that story. I mean this to some degree in a technical, and very simple, sense—unwatched by her mother, she was free to inhabit and engage with the settings in that story: car, club, changing room, pool, forest, home, and, later, near the end, her neighbor’s above ground pool, late at night and after sneaking out of her small apartment, when the encounters of the day—with her younger brother, with the rich kids, with another family and the darkness that sort of belongs in and to the adult world, finally land with her. I liked how she made her entrances and exits. And you are right, what is being dramatized is the degree of estrangement she feels in each of these spheres, and the degree to which she begins to code this as a part of growing up. 

BNS: In this vein—thinking of the most pivotal setting in “Pools,” the forest—I noticed the setting of the forest was thematic throughout Farthest South, whereas bodies of water were replete in The Peripatetic Coffin (and wonderfully contrasted/defined by the very absence of water in “Dirwhals!”). Did the settings in Farthest South allow you to illustrate something you were trying to get at? Or did your imagination just step into the woods, then loiter? 

ER: Forests are everywhere in this collection, you’re right! So is the ocean, and the last story, “The Diver,” is all ocean and loneliness (that’s my wheelhouse!)—but I suppose this time I also managed to grow a few trees. What I found, when writing, was that I simply began to pay more attention to what was going on the page when things were set near the dark woods. It has everything to do, I think, with a character’s sightlines. These are stories of disruption, or the threat of disruption; of the relationship between the domestic sphere and the weird, thrumming, zone of imagination and desire. The forest is a natural barrier. But you never know what you will find there, if you go walking. You never know what might, one day, step from that tree-line and into the light.

BNS: Loneliness is your wheelhouse. Have you gravitated toward books, in your own reading, which engage with this experience, which embrace it, and examine it?

ER: Loneliness is my wheelhouse, though it’s a strange thing to say out loud, as I feel I’ve been truly blessed by friendship and family life. It’s something I can’t quite explain. Perhaps, when I sit down to write, loneliness is the territory I tread because it’s something I fear, and think about quite a lot. What if all of these wonderful people I’ve made my life with weren’t here? What if, due to some strange personality flaw, I drove them away? The first book I can remember reading that dealt with this, the one that made an impact on me, was Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. The kid in that book didn’t drive anyone away, of course, but he did have to survive in the wilderness, alone.

BNS: We are, as writers, conceived by books, in a way; it’s common enough that one or two books, or writers, once upon a time, convinced us that this is what we want to do with our days we’re allowed. I was seventeen when I read Walden—it more or less defined for me what I consider(ed) beautiful and necessary; then, I was twenty-two when I read for the first time Marilynne Robinson and James Baldwin. From which books would you say you’re born? 

ER: I love that Walden was that book for you, which then, perhaps, paved the way for Robinson and Baldwin (Giovanni’s Room is a book of his I read early and it’s lingered, even as I’ve read and loved his other work). Each project I work on has different touch points. So, I’d say a book like The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje has been incredibly important, but only now, in the project I’m working on, am I seeing what that book taught me (and it’s not visible, I don’t think, in the stories in Farthest South, except, perhaps, in the inclusion of illustrations). The books from which I’d say I was born are all the books I spent my time with before I even knew that writing was something you could do: an abbreviated, and illustrated, edition of The Hobbit; Treasure Island; The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. Any and all comic books; endless, open afternoons of reading. And a little later, a few of the writers who I remember meeting on the page with astonishment: Herman Melville, Edward P. Jones, Yoko Tawada, Joy Williams, Richard Hughes, Jim Shepard, Joan Didion, Helen Oyeyemi, Kelly Link, Yasunari Kawabata, Victor Pelevin, Alessandro Baricco, Toni Morrison, Marguerite Duras, Vladimir Nabokov, Stanislaw Lem. I’m leaving hundreds of people out.  

BNS: Speaking of author’s, you dedicated Farthest South to Paul Yoon. I understand you two are not only best friends, but that you two send work back and forth. How has that connection influenced your writing?

ER: My friendship with Paul has been a piece of great luck in my life.  I think he’s brilliant, and I love his work, and we do send work back and forth.  Writing can be isolating.  You sit at your desk and you go: why am I just sitting here?  It helps to know that someone else in the world is also spending time that way: sitting, dreaming, trying to make stuff.  And I know that’s what Paul’s doing, because we talk about it.  Not many people think writing is important, or think the work and energy you pour into a sentence is a good use of time, or is even visible at all.  But some people do, and if you are lucky you meet them, and if you are even luckier, they become friends.

BNS: What did stories do for you as a kid? Did you thirst for them? Need them?

ER: As a kid, what stories did was purely transportive.  It always felt like I could just plug in and be anywhere else in the world; time disappeared; I emerged slightly shaken but always like something I’d read about had actually happened to me.  Those were the stories I looked for: the ones where the characters were as far from who I was as I could possibly imagine, who did things I never could. 

Ethan Rutherford’s fiction has appeared in BOMB, Tin House, Ploughshares, One Story, American Short Fiction, Post Road, Esopus, Conjunctions, and The Best American Short Stories.  His first book, The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, a finalist for the John Leonard Award, received honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and was the winner of a Minnesota Book Award.  Born in Seattle, Washington, he received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota and now teaches Creative Writing at Trinity College.  He lives in Hartford, Connecticut with his wife and two children.

His second collection, Farthest South, was published by A Strange Object in April 2021.

On Reading John Edgar Wideman

/ Keith Pilapil Lesmeister / Leave a comment

One of my recent emails, Paris Review Redux, included a link to one of John Edgar Wideman’s stories, “Sightings,” published in 2004. Ever since I read Philadelphia Fire maybe twelve years ago now, I’ve read pretty much everything I’ve come across with the author’s name, this being one of them. And like all of Wideman’s work, it left me in awe of his propulsive prose.

Reading John Edgar Wideman’s work is an experience unlike any other: cerebral, experimental, challenging. As a new-ish reader/READER twelve years ago, I wasn’t attracted to Wideman’s sentences so much as his love of basketball. Philadelphia Fire (which isn’t about basketball, really) possesses elaborate scenes of young men playing hoops on outdoor courts, something of my childhood that I could cotton to as an immature reader more interested in subject matter than the alchemic cohesion and rhythmic sounds of nuanced sentences on the page, of which Wideman is a genius-master.

The summer following my experience reading Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire, I had plans to meet friends out in Colorado, but before dipping through Fort Collins and eventually onto Steamboat Springs, I had convinced my wife to drive north through Laramie where Wideman had once lived and taught. He no longer lived in Laramie, but I wanted to see what he saw; hear what he heard. I wanted to walk those same city streets and lay eyes on the same railroad tracks and eat in the same cafes that no doubt Wideman had experienced at one point in his life. Had Wideman taught anywhere else—say, a larger city of any kind—this experience of re-living his steps wouldn’t have held the same allure. But we were in Laramie, a town of mystery in its own right.

Walking those sparsely populated streets, with a pleasant lack of stimuli, one could see how a writer’s mind could be (over)stimulated—possessed not of the external, but of the inward; how, given the appropriate silence and space, a person’s thoughts are allowed to occupy and multiply in a space normally taken up by honking cars and should-to-shoulder foot traffic which, on the day I visited Laramie, was virtually nonexistant.

While there, I bought a book in a bookshop that I accessed through an alleyway. The bookshop was on the second floor, and I had to climb a set of iron stairs mounted to the side of the building in order to enter. There were a few people in the shop, and as I perused the books, I settled on the one closest to the cash register. A pocket-sized The Elements of Style by Strunk & White. I didn’t know at the time what attracted me to such a helpful (albeit boring) book. Perhaps it was that I wanted to be a writer myself, and I thought surely this book couldn’t hurt. Now, several years later, what I like about that purchase is knowing how Wideman’s work—with all its fancy lingual dexterity—wouldn’t fit neatly into anything Strunk & White advocated; that Wideman set out to break all the rules and in so doing created his own inimitable (element of) style.

If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, try reading the first paragraph of Wideman’s story “Sightings.” 1500 manic words, all one sentence.

What do you suppose Strunk & White would have to say about that?

Review of “Everything Eats Everything” by Gabrielle Griffis, published in Split Lip

/ Keith Pilapil Lesmeister / Leave a comment

A delicately woven portrait about the people we love, the cycle of life, the interconnectedness of all things, and the mystery and mysteriousness that stitches it all together.

And how does one go about addressing such gigantic concerns and ideas in such a brief space? Griffis does so elegantly by juxtaposing large questions and ideas with microscopic, seemingly insignificant observations:

“[Grandma] says, ‘Do you ever wonder why everything just works in your life? Some people, everything in their life doesn’t work. It’s one big dysfunction after the next, malfunctioning electronics, parking tickets, which is why you need to be nice. Some people are being persecuted by shadows.’

A field mouse runs through a thicket.”

Could a person actually see or hear a field mouse run through a thicket? Maybe. Probably not. I’ve seen them at my feet, briefly, fleeing for their lives, and if it were dark out, or I hadn’t looked down at that precise second, I’d be none the wiser, meaning: they scoot silently through the grass. But that’s beside the point. The point is that somewhere in that grand space — say, a thicket of bramble in the middle of a cut cornfield — a field mouse is most likely running through that space. Meanwhile, a person, somewhere, could be “persecuted by shadows” — losing their mind: fogetting “names, dates, places.” Everything is happening everywhere and all the time.

Our first person narrator is a (literal) cake eating, popsicle loving eleven years old, so the quaint questions about life (What is a biome?) and fascination with the unknown (Have you wondered why witches are old ladies on brooms?) make sense. And answers for asked or unasked questions usually come from Grandma, who lives in an apartment attached to the narrator’s house. The apartment smells like “boiled vegetables.” Grandma, in all of her boilded vegetable glory is at the heart of this piece, doling out advice like it was her birthright. Perhaps her most interesting idea/advice is about boundaries. At their best, boundaries provide a sense of belonging; help with understanding stages of life; structure time; order relationships. But “[Grandma] says watch out for psychos. She says unhealthy people don’t understand boundaries, which is why the world is dying. All the boundaries are messed up.”

While that advice is interesting, it’s definitely not her best. Perhaps this might capture it:

“She hands me a list of life advice: 

Your memory is an eroding seashore.

Barren maples look like nervous systems.

Anhedonia is a chemical imbalance. 

If you resist everything, you will turn to stone.

Try to sort the puzzle.”

Yes, when everything is fractured and out of place, where does one start? Sort the puzzle. Sound advice for all of us. Thank you, Grandma.

Check out the story here. And check out more work from Gabrielle Griffis here.

Gabrielle Griffis is a multi-media artist, writer, and musician. She works as a librarian, and lives on Cape Cod with her husband Corey Farrenkopf. Her fiction has been published in or is forthcoming from Wigleaf, Okay Donkey, Monkeybicycle, Gone Lawn, XRAY Literary Magazine, decomP, Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere. Her writing also appears in Repair Revolution: How Fixers are Transforming Our Throwaway Culture.