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Sarah Kornfeld was born and raised in the experimental theatre of New York City. She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and has taught cultural curation at the University of San Francisco. She is a founding member of the Blue Mind Collective studying the impact of the ocean on our lives and well-being. She lives by the sea in the Bay Area of California. What Stella Sees (reviewed here) is her debut novel. www.sarahkornfeld.net.

Sarah Kornfeld, author of What Stella Sees, thank you very much for taking the time to speak to us.

The pleasure is mine, Jack!

To begin with, please tell us a little about how this most unusual novel came about.

I have a very personal relationship to the formation of this book. I was having seizure-like episodes and I found them both scary and fascinating. I experienced my episodes like being under the water. When I came out of these moments I found myself obsessed with trying to explain them. When I could not, I started writing this novel! Stella has been my way of exploring the sea and health, on a very personal level.

The oceans, of course, have always been fundamental to life on Earth and to humanity. What exactly made you choose the sea as Stella’s world to explore?

I am deeply impacted by the work of my friend Wallace J. Nichols. He wrote the New York Times bestseller, Blue Mind.  This is a book and area of research that explores our brains on water. Clearly, we are made up of water, but why do we love water (ocean, rivers, baths, streams) so much? The research is astounding: we must have water to reboot our brains, get a ‘blue mind’ which is meditative and healing. For Stella, I wanted her to have a child’s awareness of this reality without knowing the research. I wanted to explore a young person’s ocean genius, for most children have this insight about the power of water, but are told not to pay attention to that wisdom.

[image error]The world of modern art, at least as represented by its professional gatekeepers, its buyers and their wealthy clients, is shown to be cynical, jaundiced and all about the money. It’s also extremely insecure. How far is this a reflection of your own experience in that world? The novel gives the impression you have met some of these people – Julian, for example.

Ha! Well, I was born and raised in the theatre, and have deep ties to the international art world. Though I don’t know many dealers in the contemporary art world, I do know artists. My experience as a creative producer (working in site-specific art) gave me the personal desire to explore the push and pull of power that the world of art embodies. Julian is just the most creepy composite I could make of an art hound who lives off the creativity of others. That said, like all of the characters, I have empathy for his loneliness and hunger for meaning. So, yes, it’s a personal reflection of the trappings of power in the creative world.

A lot of What Stella Sees concerns convergence. Stella’s treatment in Paris is an immersive experience combining art, technology and psychology. Please tell us a little bit about what is happening and where you think these kinds of convergences might lead.

Thank you, that’s spot on. About twenty years ago I knew people involved in utilizing virtual reality with dolphins! I never forgot their stories of trying to capture the sonic waves that mammals blast under the water.  The SeaBrain technology I made up for the novel is deeply inspired by these stories I heard floating around San Francisco, as well as the remarkable immersive experiences that friends of mine have innovated. So, the technology and the technologists are inspired by real people. As for now? We are now living in a time where virtual reality, and more specifically augmented reality, are being used for healing. There are technologies that are being used for treating PTSD and general trauma that will probably be used more regularly in the future. While I don’t believe that technology heals all wounds, it certainly is interesting to think of its practical use for health.

Would you agree the novel is also about displacement of various kinds?

Yes, I agree with you completely. I had a goal to use the Talmudic exploration of inner worlds for this novel. That means the characters are intrinsically on their own path, a part of tribes that are not settled and looking to find their home. I found that walking a mile in each character, and sharing their displacement, provides a door into their humanity, as well as their path towards home.

I described What Stella Sees as full of incidental pleasures, one of which, for me, is the passage where Rachel hurries to a café toilet to adjust her makeup and clothing, to emerge as a chic elegant woman. This behind-the-scenes view of her is, somehow, both touching and admirable. Please can you comment about this or any other favourite scene you might have?

I am so happy you like that scene, Jack! I love the drama of being in another country and having to change your appearance to build a new chapter in your life. There are many scenes in the book that are looney, mad escapes, ranging from Mo leaving Bucharest in a garbage truck, Stella in Epilepsy camp getting it on with her first love (Andrea) as a means of escape, and others. I really do like the scene with Rachel, thanks for reminding me of that madcap scene.

Michael is shown to be an emotional, vulnerable man, making lists of women of his acquaintance for a possible relationship – probably a very male way to go about things. There’s no indication you had trouble writing about him, but did you encounter any difficulties with him, or anyone else, come to that?

Oh, I love poor Michael. He is such a soft soul. He means well, was a star very young in a very fickle world and now finds himself very alone. I felt, perhaps because of my theatre background, that Michael is an anti-hero – he’s weak, yet strong enough to try to be a good father. I found him heartbreaking to write, yet had to let him walk his path, one I don’t recommend to anyone.

Perception is an extremely important theme of the book – the title is What Stella Sees, after all. There are all kinds of perceptions in play: professional, artistic, emotional, imaginative, you name it. Characters have their perceptions changed or need them changed, perceptions need to go beyond surfaces and appearances to discover what lies behind. Were you aware of this right from the start or did it creep up on you?

Yes, I was very committed to perception as a construct for the characters. As I mentioned, I was Talmudic in my approach: every character has a perception of Stella’s point of view. Because of this, each character had to have very unique perceptions of their life.  Additionally, because water is a silent character, we needed to dive into the layers found in oceans, and similarly into people. We all have thousands of layers and currents, just as the ocean has. I loved exploring the power of perception, and the disconnection people can have when perceptions are not understood.

You have managed effortlessly to avoid writing an ‘inspirational’ novel about a plucky young girl who teaches us true values. The world of What Stella Sees is a messy, conflicted one. The ghost of that other possible book might well have haunted you. Did you find yourself excising and revising to make sure it did not put in an appearance?

Yes, I was very aware of not writing a ‘feel good’ story about a young girl. I wanted her mess to be our mess, and to let the conflict inform a dramatic experience, and reading of the book.  I spent a good amount of time with the editor, the remarkable Sally Arteseros, making sure that there was nothing ‘plucky’ (as you’ve said) about Stella or her experience. I wanted her to be as real to us as any kid we have met, and overlooked.

Have you ever had a really perfect experience? The kind that you can’t believe you didn’t have anything to do with, or didn’t manage or manufacture? Just an amazing experience out of the blue?

I have! When I was a kid I was an intern at the Bread and Puppet Theater summer extravaganza. We ran a football-sized field with fifteen-foot puppets that looked like birds. We ran these for hours in rehearsal and in performance. One day we ran them in the rain and I experienced what it might be like to fly. That was an almost perfect experience because I was so connected to the reality I was in, and I let go into the magic of that experience. Art can do that.

[image error]Humanity faces climatic catastrophe. We have two years to prevent our own extinction. If someone says to you we don’t need made-up stories when the world is in such desperate trouble, how will you reply?

We must have the stories of our own lives, and of the planet. I think it’s very telling that storytelling and writers are so in demand, today. In Hollywood, TV and stories are exploding with new ideas. Even though publishing is very hard, writers are still moving forward with manuscripts and ideas. Nothing can stop our need to leave our handprints on the walls of the cave.  And, even more so now, now that we may have limited time on this planet, we need to state our meaning as a means for hope, or reflection.

What can we expect from you next?

I’m working on two projects right now. One is a novella about the lost limb of Sarah Bernhardt (true story!) as told by her red curtain. The other is a set of essays, 50 under 45. These are personal essays about being a woman hitting my second act of fifty while living under the reign of our 45th president (Trump). Both pick up themes of the arts, displacement and ethical dramas. I’m deep into both right now, waking early and choosing my genre with a cup of coffee. I look forward to sharing them with you when I am done!

As do I, so I’ll leave you to your coffee. Thank you very much.

Thank you!

The post An interview with Sarah Kornfeld appeared first on Jack Messenger.

[image error]What Stella Sees, Sarah Kornfeld’s complex debut novel, is about convergence and displacement. Above all, it is about perception: the consequences of its absence and the obligations of its presence. Young Stella is ill, it seems, with a peculiar form of epilepsy that eludes diagnosis and treatment. Her parents Rachel and Michael are in the throes of divorce, increasingly estranged from their own selves as well as one another, while they careen off specialists and medical regimes, a process that takes them from New York and San Francisco to Paris in search of a cure for their daughter. Yet Stella sees other things, too. Her seizures are a kind of vision-state in which she is able to explore the ocean depths, discovering real and imagined creatures that inform her art – the art of creating worlds of meaning inside the tiny whorls of seashells.

At its most basic, what Stella sees is What Maisie Knew – that the adults around her are an inconstant and unreliable bunch, prone to objectify (later, commodify) her as the sum of her symptoms. Importantly, however,  what Stella sees is also the return of the repressed or, at any rate, the suppressed. The past – never dead, never passed – catches up with Michael and Rachel, and later with Mo, whose cerebral palsy sculpts his body into agonizing deformations. His body and Stella’s brain enjoy a mutual self-recognition that leads to catharsis of sorts, where that which has been forgotten or buried is brought to consciousness, examined and integrated.

In truth, Stella is not drowning but waving; not simply an artist but also a scientist:

Rachel, it’s something we’ve not seen. After each seizure she comes out ready to learn! She’s not deadening, see? She reads advanced books on biology. She reads graduate and postgraduate-level research on the marine and tidal patterns …

Michael, eager to love and be loved, is able to recognize his daughter’s gifts earlier than is Rachel, who is consumed by rage at each unsuccessful treatment. The world does not always bend to our wishes, but Rachel and Michael are graduates of Yale, movers and shakers in contemporary Art with a capital dollar sign, and they are used to telling others what to think and who to buy. Yet Rachel’s rage is also a symptom of her own shame and guilt, the deep causes of which lie buried in Israel–Palestine.

There are many pleasures in What Stella Sees that one might call incidental. Rachel herself is one of them – an elegant woman whose carefully maintained façade of urbane sophistication and skin-deep friendships cracks before our eyes. Her lengthy conversation with Julian, an ageing aesthete once friends with Peggy Guggenheim and an Art Whore if ever there was one, is masterly in its delineation of character and a shifting balance of power. They both get what they want, which is somewhat less than they need and always open to reversal. Perceptions support reputations which garner income, but the whole edifice is only as solid as the latest deal, the most recent recommendation. ‘Then it happened. She forgot for a minute why she was there, what she was angling for, and what she was pretending to be. A dealer? An historian? A personal shopper; high-end, like Julian?’

What Stella Sees provokes us to ask what, exactly, is the good of art to those who cannot really see it. Isn’t it supposed to make us better people than we would otherwise have been? I am reminded of the affluent gallery trustee I once saw interrupt her conversation about the architecture of the new wing in order to stamp on a spider that had the innocent temerity to scuttle across the spotless wooden floor – an act that immediately negated all her fine words about beauty and balance.

In novels as in life, incidentals are the things we tend to remember when what seemed important is long forgotten. Michael and Rachel, for example,

learned that the strangest things count for love in a hospital room … all of them showed different forms of neglect, but also often small bits of love. When the vending machine wasn’t broken and it gave Stella a chocolate; that was love. When the social worker asked Rachel a good question and got her through the paperwork quickly; that was love. When the night nurse (at 3:45 a.m.) brought Michael a Starbucks coffee – that was true love.

These little epiphanies are what art can also provide. Although I cannot quite visualize Stella’s own artworks, nevertheless I believe them, and what they convey is  very real:

Almost three years of shells: large, small, white, painted, glittery, wrapped like a miniature Christo’s or filled with poems painted carefully on the insides … the shells were artifacts and the answer to the riddle of her body: each seizure forced her into a private place that returned her just a bit harder; an outer casing that was growing calcified over time and protecting a discrete, private experience.

To his credit, Michael is much more open to these incidentals than anyone else and is moved by them: unexpected kindnesses provoke tears. And he can still talk Art, even when it comes to Stella’s shells: ‘They’re good because they utilize an archetype – the hidden architecture of shells to explore personal narratives. OK?’ Yes, we see.

What Stella Sees avoids all sentimentality about Stella’s condition. Stella is not unreservedly ‘blessed’ to be as she is. ‘She suffers multiple seizures a week. Do you understand that’s like microwaving your head three times a week on “High”?’ The seizures make her ‘smarter’ each time, so that she arrives at a ‘deeper knowing’, but they render her vulnerable to accident and injury. Nor is the novel concerned to inspire us to greater understanding and ‘acceptance’ of difference by presenting us with a brave young girl, a savant. Instead, we are shown the human, and we recognize it, incidentally and thus for always.

Sarah Kornfeld’s writing is frequently surprising and audacious, with passages of sustained concentration. She is unafraid to report how people feel when they do not know it themselves; occasionally, she hints at a future with which they cannot possibly be acquainted. This is all excellent stuff, unabashed to ‘digress’ or to break rules that are there to be broken. Most of it occurs early on while, later, the writing can occasionally slip into naïvety and redundancy, suggesting a lot of time has passed in composition or else authorial indecision has clouded artistic judgement.

[image error]What Stella Sees is a bivalve shell that turns on a hinge, and I found the first half the most interesting. I should have been delighted had the novel remained within the family dynamic and chosen to explore it in more detail. It seems to me there was a great story to be written about Stella, Rachel and Michael. Instead, the scene shifts to Paris, where the novel becomes a little diffuse, with too many things to get through and out the other side. Mo, in particular, as important and as interesting as he is, often forms an obstruction, while lengthy passages about a luxuriant techno-medical apparatus fail to resonate (at least, with me), even at the meeting point of art, science and psychology.

In short, despite many excellent qualities, the second half of What Stella Sees attempts to cover too much ground for its own good and does not quite live up to its beginnings. However, it concludes on a note that is both satisfying and disturbing. It is to do with contamination and human responsibility, and brings us back to the fragile plenitude experienced by Stella in her oceanic wanderings. Suddenly, the world is too much with us, and in our end is our beginning. Life, exhausted and bewildered, once crawled out of the sea to look about in fear and trembling. Today, depleted and poisoned, those same oceans are rising to reclaim the very thing they spewed forth.

Cove International Publishers | ISBN 97806921611579 (pbk)

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Sam Reese is the author of Come the Tide, a collection of short stories, reviewed here. Hailing from Aotearoa/New Zealand, Sam is an insatiable traveller and self-confessed short story nerd. He has lived and worked in Sydney, London, and now York, and his fiction has found further homes in magazines around the world. When not writing stories, he is usually writing about them; his first critical work, The Short Story in Midcentury America, won the 2018 Arthur Miller Centre First Book Prize.

Sam, thank you very much for joining me.

[image error]It’s my pleasure, Jack; thank you for your interest in my stories.

I understand you’re from the island nation of Aotearoa. Can you tell us a little about that and how it might have influenced your writing?

Absolutely. Growing up in Aoteaora I always loved spending time in nature. Rivers, mountains, bush and forests: it is a country of immense natural beauty – though sadly a lot of that is under threat. But I was taught from a young age to value, respect, and listen to the world around me. That definitely shaped the way I imagine relationships between people and the natural world. In te reo, Maori describe themselves as tangata whenua, ‘people of the land’, and many place names in New Zealand reflect this intertwining of natural and human world – something also captured in the concept of Tūrangawaewae: ‘a place to stand’.

I know that, in the midst of global political uncertainty, New Zealand’s distance from the rest of the world can look particularly attractive, but growing up I was conscious of this distance in a different way. There is a sense of being far away from everything important – so, as much as I appreciated the world around me, there was part of me that always wanted to escape, to travel. Storytelling, for me, draws on that yearning for imaginative escape.

Although I take inspiration from a wide range of writers, and don’t see myself as bound by a national identity, it is true that Aotearoa has a really strong tradition in the short story. Reading New Zealand short fiction at primary and secondary school taught me a lot about short-story-telling, and looking back, studying Katherine Mansfield’s stories in my final year of high school was probably my turning point as a writer – the moment when I said, I want to write short stories.

I recall reading her stories when I was a young man and finding them quietly moving. So how does classical myth square with Aotearoa? One thinks of ocean-going heroes such as Ulysses and Jason, and the various water deities, but is there more to it than that?

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Marian Maguire, ‘Herakles discusses Boundary Issues with the Neighbours’, lithograph, 2007, from The Labours of Herakles

In my second year at university, the art gallery on campus hosted an exhibition of prints by a New Zealand artist, Marian Maguire, titled The Labours of Herakles. Maguire blends images of colonial New Zealand with black-figure images of the demi-god Herakles – reimagining the European coloniser as this mythic, if brutal and sometimes clumsy, hero. I find her work fascinating. There is never just a simple substitution; Maguire’s images constantly blend Maori, colonial, and classical art in complex ways. That’s probably why I keep coming back to her art as reference when I’m writing. I was always immersed in mythology as a child, and her pictures point to different ways that classical myth and art can help us make sense of our past and present – without just idealising.

You’re right though to point to voyaging as another important link. For many New Zealanders, both Maori and Pakeha, stories of ocean travel and a quest for a new homeland are at the heart of their origin stories. All of the branches of my family have their own oral tales, passed down several generations, about the ocean journey to a vaguely imagined destination. This image symbolises a lot of my characters’ sense of being adrift: they know they are in search of something more, but they don’t have a clear image of where they are headed.

You are an aficionado of the short story and have written a book about the form. What is it that so appeals to you and which authors or stories do you most admire?

There’s a line several critics use: novels are about communities, short stories about individuals. It’s an exaggeration, but it points to something that I love about short stories – they have a closeness that makes many feel very private. Another, similar line is that the novel tells a life, the short story a moment. There are some brilliant short stories out there that cover whole lives in the stretch of a dozen pages, but when I’m reading short fiction, it is that kind of intimacy and momentary insight I really crave.

[image error]As the title of my first book, The Short Story in Midcentury America, probably hints, I have a special love for the short stories of the 1940s and 1950s. Paul and Jane Bowles, Mary McCarthy, Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, Richard Yates … As a reader, I can slip inside any of their works and it’s bliss. But as a writer, it is probably Julio Cortazar who has had the most influence. He describes the short story as a snail of language, a mysterious brother to poetry, and I often find myself turning to his way of framing and slowly unravelling stories when I am stuck with a piece.

I’m passionate about the contemporary short story, too, though. I mentioned before that reading Katherine Mansfield was a turning point for me – another was finding a copy of Laura van den Berg’s collection What the World Will Look Like When all the Water Leaves Us in a small bookshop in Potts Point, Sydney, where I lived at the time. It is one of my favourite collections – beautiful, strange, understated, with a brilliant way of telling a story – and sits alongside May Lan Tan’s Things to Make and Break, Margarita Garcia Robayo’s Fish Soup, Peter Stamm’s We’re Flying and Yoko Ogawa’s The Diving Pool as one of the collections I admire (and enjoy) the most.

You’ve mentioned some of my favourites there, too, particularly James Baldwin. The image of rising waters, of drowning, is a recurrent one in Come the Tide. Ecologically speaking, with climate catastrophe upon us, rising sea levels are a dreadful threat. Yet often in Come the Tide, it is as if Nature is reasserting control and restoring harmony. It is an intriguing blend of dread and hope. How would you describe this aspect of your work?

 I’m really glad that both sides come across in the stories! I agree; rising sea levels are a major threat, already dramatically altering the geography of the Pacific. Many atolls have disappeared, and small nations like Nauru, Niue, and Kiribati face being completely submerged. It is one of the most visible signs of the larger ecological dangers we face.

For a long time, though, I’ve also thought about this from a different perspective. I remember being told that much of my home city, Wellington, was built on reclaimed land. That seemed like an odd phrasing to me; to my mind, reclaiming was what the sea would eventually do. Maybe it sounds fatalistic, but I find something about that image strangely reassuring – the idea of a return.

Some of my earliest memories are of the ocean, and from high school onwards I trained in free diving – something I still like to do, though not in any competitive sense! After just a little practice, diving on your own breath brings a deep calm. A stillness, and a connection to something larger. I’ve never blacked out, thankfully, but remember vividly the times I have come close, pushing myself too far in the pool. For better or worse, that peaceful, creeping darkness has shaded the way I imagine the change to our world.

You are clearly interested in the idea of hidden depths, of secrets and unfinished business covered over by time and circumstance. Where does that come from?

That’s a really good question! I’m a naturally trusting person, but I’ve also always been extremely inquisitive, to the point where I can come across as nosy. It’s an odd combination, but I’d say I’m driven by a desire to look below the surface and find the story that explains why a person acts a certain way, or why they hold a particular belief. When it comes to reading, I know I’m drawn to stories where cracks appear in characters’ facades, where we slowly learn that there is more to them than first appears.

To begin with, some of the characters in your stories are ambiguous as to gender, moral status and what it is they are up to, so the reader has to be patient and put the clues together as best they can. Is this a deliberate approach on your part or does it spring from something else?

I’ve always been drawn to stories where character is revealed slowly, where there is a key or hinge that allows me to recognise and understand the protagonist in an unexpected way. As a reader, I find that slow sense of discovery immensely satisfying – but it is also something I’ve had to work on a lot as a writer! This is one of the areas where my editor at Platypus, Michelle, has been extremely helpful: she has been amazing at honing in on places where there is not enough information to get to that moment of understanding. Or when there was too much, and the effect was lost! I’m trying, too, to find an ambiguity that is inclusive – that makes it easier for different readers to find themselves inside these stories.

Feel free to disagree with me, but my view is that you have a certain reticence when it comes to people. As I mention in my review, it’s as if they are behind a glass screen, remote from the reader. Do you think that’s an accurate assessment and is it something you will vary in future?

This is one area where my writing self and social self really differ! I’m fascinated by people – their tics, their quirks, their personalities – and it helps a fiction writer enormously to meet new people, to hear how they frame ideas or feelings. When it comes to writing, though, you’re right to think that there is a distance at play.

I’m very conscious of creating space when I write about people. Expansiveness is generative; it opens possibilities for the reader. And with the short story, where your focus is not on a larger life, but a moment – a sliver – that space allows the reader an entranceway into the action. It creates a way of feeling with the character. I’d hope that, with different pieces, this distance might vary for the reader, but I have a feeling that as long as I’m writing short stories, there will be an element of this!

[image error]Personally, I found ‘Lake Country’ a disturbing story, particularly the point where the turbines are revealed beneath the ex-pump house – for me, there’s always something uncanny about big machines in strange locations, and the juxtaposition of the artificial with the natural. Is there a real-life counterpart to the lake, the tunnels and the dam in this story? Tell us a little bit about how ‘Lake Country’ came to be written.

I’ve always found that kind of juxtaposition very unnerving myself; my parents used to take me for long walks through the bush to the reservoir in Wellington, and I still remember feeling deeply unsettled by the site of the concrete dam emerging slowly through the treeline, braced between the green curves of the valley. Perhaps because that emotional memory was so strong, I always kept an eye out for stories about dams; parts of ‘Lake Country’ were influenced by disturbing stories from North America and Japan about artificially flooding previously occupied valleys for hydro power. I had even written a few poems about dams!

But the story really came together when my partner, Alexandra, and I went to stay at an old pump house in Tasmania, in the middle of Lake St Clair. It was a haunting experience – there was almost no one else there, and in the middle of winter (the first time I think that I was actually cold in the five years we lived in Australia) the silence and stillness were both beautiful and unsettling.

This story is one of the longest in the collection, and it started out as a novella – almost 20,000 words. This was one of two or three stories where I needed to write a lot before I could then really feel the emotional heart of the story, and whittle down the words to something more intense.

Humanity faces climatic disaster. We have two years to prevent our own extinction. If someone says to you we don’t need made-up stories when the world is in such desperate trouble, how will you reply?

We use stories to shape the world, to make sense of all the chaos around us. To change the world, we first need to change our stories – to tell a different tale about humans and nature, about our responsibility. I think it’s true, too, that stories shape us. History shows how this can be used as a tool of power, of marginalisation and control – but it can be a force for positive change, too. We need new stories to see the world anew.

Speaking of which, what can we expect from you next?

[image error]I’ve been working on a new collection of closely linked stories. It is challenging, but I’m finding that the resonances I can build are also very satisfying. Later this year, my next critical book, Blue Notes: Jazz, Literature, and Loneliness, is coming out with Louisiana State University Press. And I’ve started writing a literary biography of the American writers Paul and Jane Bowles with Alexandra – a hybrid book bringing together biography, literary history, and travel writing.

All those projects sound extremely interesting, so I hope they pass across my review desk in due time. Sam, it’s been a great pleasure. You’ve given us a lot of insights and provided ideas on whom to read next. Good luck with your writing, and thank you.

It has been a fascinating conversation! Thanks again for your brilliant questions, Jack.

 

The post An Interview with Sam Reese appeared first on Jack Messenger.

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The third phase of the die-in took place outside and inside a branch of HSBC, and close to a very smelly drain.

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With artist Judy Liebert at the Nottingham die-in phase two: Victoria Centre. I’m the one with the beard.

The post Extinction Rebellion Nottingham Die-in, 16 March appeared first on Jack Messenger.

[image error]Come the Tide is a sun-soaked, water-drenched, variegated collection of thirteen short stories that explores the ambiguous psychic implications of the now-you-see-it/now-you-don’t liminal terrain where dry land meets restless water. Ancient myths haunt these tales of oceans and islands, lakes and swimming pools, while bodies of water of all kinds – with their dangers and temptations, promises and secrets – weigh heavily on human protagonists drowning in uncertainty, insecurity and betrayal.

It is rare for a book’s title to be so exactly appropriate to what’s within. The thematic unity of these stories is rarer still, for they are all concerned in one way or another with Nature’s rising tide – usually, a rising tide of water, but oftentimes a wind-borne current of dead leaves or a surging mass of semi-sentient vegetation. Nature is a menace and a mystery in these stories, capable of abrupt metamorphoses that signify more than individuals can articulate, but which suggest an alarming eagerness for a rapturous swoon into self-destruction.

Author Sam Reese is from Aotearoa/New Zealand, a nation of islands amid the vast southern ocean, so I presume his preoccupation with the delicate balance of elements, the microscopic and the macroscopic, and the ever-present threat of inundation is not entirely coincidental. However, his stories of sunlight and storm, forest and desert also take in such places as Tangier and Sydney, Sri Lanka and Florence. Many of his characters are travellers in a foreign land who are obliged to confront the unexpected and uncanny in each other, in friends and lovers, in Nature itself:

I’ve started dreaming of cities overgrown with green… Skyscrapers swallowed by ivy – monstrous monstera suffocating long-abandoned rooms, craning their necks through broken windows towards the sun … The wind skirts up beneath the floorboards, the blue-grey paint peeling like leaves from cracks on my bedroom wall, and something dark is growing beneath the bathtub, behind the sink, always just out of reach.

The ecological overdrive in stories such as ‘Overgrown,’ where vegetation infiltrates the built environment, taking it over and transforming it, is like something out of Malcolm Devlin’s You Will Grow Into Them. Reese, however, takes overt inspiration from classical mythology, with its permeable frontiers between human, animal and vegetable. For instance,  in ‘Circe in Furs,’ mythology and Nature join forces to convert people into strange beasts who merge before our eyes into forests dark and deep.

In stories like ‘Atlantis,’ ‘everything is on the verge of being swallowed by nature,’ and ancient mythical cities embody grieving characters’ quests for certainty and peace. In ‘Which Way to Ithaca?’, for example, a flimsy film set of classical columns made from plywood and string frustrates a young woman’s longing to recapture a mythical moment from her own past. The people in Reese’s stories invariably have something inside themselves they wish to protect or conceal; sometimes they need to revisit or reinvent that something in the external world. As one of them explains in ‘Circe in Furs’:

Everybody has a private space somewhere inside of themselves. For some people, it’s a dainty, pretty plot, properly fenced in. For others, it’s a forest – a wide-rambling, untamed soul. Yet others have bonsai spirits; full of giant dreams but trimmed to fit a smaller space … Whatever your inner space is like … make sure you tend to it, fill it with life.

Yet, always and everywhere, there is remorseless erosion – ‘the water lapping at the base of cliffs, lapping at the base of us all.’ As this line suggests, erosion is more than simply a physical process. It is also a condition of existence and a harbinger of extinction. This world is ‘A living wall of water, an endless, aching tide’ which drowns everything in its path. Come the Tide presents water as friend and foe, life and death. Earthquake and tsunami register abrupt seismic shifts in couples’ relationships, while dreams of drowning, and visions of towns submerged in depthless lakes, thrust readers into the precarity of human existence.

Many of the women in Come the Tide know more than they’re prepared to tell, especially when they possess secret knowledge and artistic gifts. They can exercise a strange power over others – particularly men. And women frequently exercise control over the image itself: in photographs, for example, that reveal more than they show, or the broken fresco in ‘Counterfeiting,’ which conveys a mystery, a secret from the past, via the frank gaze of figures who stare outwards at the spectator, at the reader: ‘An image is a trap you get caught inside. No matter how I tried, I was never going to dream my way back.’

[image error]There are many memorable images in Come the Tide, among them hotel rooms imagined as beneath the sea, with crabs scuttling across the carpet (‘Atlantis’), or the recurrent image of a dive – be it a swimmer plunging athletically into the water or the terrible slow-motion plummet of a car off a cliff. ‘Lake Country’ has many such images and is perhaps the most unsettling story in the collection. It is set in a converted pump house at the end of a pier over a bottomless artificial lake. Vast turbines – fifty years old and never used – stand in silence beneath the building, connected to a labyrinth of tunnels and pipework that stretches through the mountainous forest to an enormous dam. Awful secrets are unearthed by story’s end.

Occasionally, Reese’s writing slips into self-parody. In  ‘Under the Wave’, for example, ‘It reminded me of being in Sri Lanka again, in the forest, just after the rain had passed’ brought to mind Phil’s chat-up line in Groundhog Day: ‘I think of Rome, the way the sun hits the buildings in the afternoons.’ In addition, there is very little dialogue in these stories, and none of it is signalled with quotation marks. This stylistic choice is occasionally confusing and a little bothersome, as it is not always clear who is speaking. It also has a distancing effect, as if there were a glass wall between reader and narrator, rather like the glass window in an aquarium that separates one character from a silently judging octopus.

However, admirers of the short story will savour Come the Tide’s blend of the numinous and the normal. Like many of its characters, I could feel the sand between my toes, the glare of the sun in my eyes, and the pain of broken love. Come the Tide shows the world as an island in space, less hospitable and more unpredictable than we often like to think. The book’s aquatic settings emphasize the immensity of the sky at night and the power of the wind and the rain, so that the act of reading becomes an unusually visceral and enlarging experience. Readers will need to take a deep breath before they dive in.

Platypus Press | ISBN 9781913007003 (pbk)

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[image error]Jendi Reiter’s wise and ambitious novel Two Natures is the story of young gay man Julian Selkirk who, Crusoe-like, finds himself washed ashore in New York in 1991 and ‘dependent on the kindness of strangers.’ Julian is an aspiring fashion photographer, whose career lows and highs quickly alternate, mirroring his personal exploration of the gay scene and his search for love. The spiritual and the carnal, the beautiful and the sordid, interweave in complex patterns, overshadowed by the gathering AIDS crisis, as the years to 1996 become increasingly hostile to difference. The intensely personal is the politically fraught, and Julian has to cope with the vagaries of love and ambition while mourning friends and lovers.

Two Natures is an all-encompassing work that plunges us into New York’s rent-controlled apartments, gay bars and nightclubs, and the overlapping world of fashion shoots and glamour magazines, in pursuit of the spirit of the times. We accompany Julian in his life of one-night stands and copious casual sex, his interactions with models and photographers, and the conversational jousting with publishers and agents on whom his career depends. A great deal of this whirl is ephemeral, but then, every so often, something permanent is created – a beautiful design, a miraculous photograph, a loving relationship.

Accurate assessment of a life requires perspective. Photography also has two natures, its concern with surface and space, texture and composition sometimes piercing the veil of appearances to reach something beneath that is true and profound. In Paris on a shoot, Julian stands at the top of the Eiffel Tower: ‘I felt like so far I’d stumbled into beauty, taking lucky shots of miracles I didn’t cause, being praised for effects I couldn’t control.’ The professional and the personal are imbricated here, and neither offers a smooth ascent to fulfilment.

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In 1991 Julian shares a flat with Dmitri, whose poster of Andres Serrano’s polyvalent photograph Piss Christ is a symbolic bone of contention. ‘“All I ask,” [Julian] said slowly, “is for one fucking place … where I don’t have to walk on fucking eggshells … for once in my fucking life.”’ Julian’s appetite for some kind of congenial faith that has the grace to accept him has survived his conventional Christian upbringing in Georgia. Somewhere concealed in religion there exists  ‘a picture of life where nobody’s trapped by being different. I feel like, if I took a fresh look at myself, I don’t know what I could find.’ But then: ‘It’s always the wrong people who can’t see themselves in mirrors.’

In 1992 the pace quickens:

Now Sundays were the only day Phil and I both had off, so the closest I generally came to a house of worship was driving Dane to important funerals. The back pages of the Times were full of them, those discreet half-columns for designers dead at 38, 40, 46; lived, loved, invented the T-shirt dress, died, details of last illness not disclosed.

Phil has a secret life starring as Randy O’Tool in the Pump Me Hard gay porn movies. This is an era of frantic post-sex hygiene, of taking ‘the test’, of waiting weeks for the result, of not daring to open the envelope when it arrives from the clinic. It’s also a time of more subtle cruelties and exclusions: barred from visiting lovers in hospital, uninvited to their funerals. Even when Julian and his friends turn up anyway, he cannot express his sorrow: ‘Any break from my invisibility would be read as drama, not grief.’

Yet all this sadness and anger is laced with humour. ‘Nobody puts adhesive on a good suit,’ Julian quips as an ultimate insult. ‘Saturday I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and watched the sun set over the Jehovah’s Witnesses world headquarters.’ Anger and humour mix it up when Julian’s family visits New York and he feels he has to put on a heterosexual front in order to keep the peace. ‘My family. Here. Next week.’ We share his dread at the prospect even as we are told that ‘Lying is my family’s preferred form of communication. It’s traditional and cultural, like chopsticks.’ Another time, Julian’s father gives ‘a coherent toast about being proud of his children, including me. He told several of his friends that I’d been working in Paris, though he said the ads were for Christian Dior.’ They weren’t.

Behind the profane – and sometimes mixed in and virtually indistinguishable – is the sacred, glimpsed in little experiential epiphanies, such as the unexpected response of a homeless man to the gift of a dead lover’s clothes: ‘Have a bleshed day, man.’ Sometimes the gift of happiness is hard to accept, as when Julian’s friend Peter looks love in the eye: ‘It feels like a mistake – this can’t be for me, it’s too good.’ The lucky ones among us, surely, have all felt as unworthy.

[image error]Above all, there is sex, described in minute anatomical detail, in all its sticky mess, pain and pleasure, guilt and innocence. There is an awful lot of it in Two Natures (some of it quite possibly with the Angel of Death himself) – perhaps too much to make its point or avoid repetitiveness. Yet the point seems to be this: sex is not essentially the opposite of the sacred; rather, it can be a manifestation of the sacred, surprising us as such even when our appetites are at their most lustful. In the milieu of Two Natures, sex is a refuge and reassurance, at once dangerous and companionable, an assertion of togetherness and belonging in a wider culture that rebuffs and ridicules:

I felt the chill of embarrassment, the familiar sickness. From the locker rooms of my suburban high school to the bars of New York, that echo would never die, the baying of the pack.

Jendi Reiter’s work in Two Natures is quite different to that in An Incomplete List of My Wishes. The novel largely eschews the poeticism of the short stories and is told exclusively from Julian’s point of view, so that what happens to him, happens to us. A great deal happens to Julian, all of which we believe but some of which might get lost in the mix. Along with the copious sex, there is perhaps too much narrative in Two Natures, or too much narrative that is too similar. There is room for something qualitatively different to occur, such as a dramatic family confrontation with grievances aired and secrets exposed. Drama tout court. There are fights and falling outs, failures and successes aplenty, but the passing of time – reading it as well as living it – probably requires more variety to be made completely memorable. Julian himself is memorable even though his emotions can sometimes feel not quite his own, filtered through his self-reports as if they are happening to someone else.

Two Natures re-creates the pain and the glory of New York’s gay community and the awful pressures it faced in the 1990s. It’s an enlightening and challenging novel that is often compelling and always frank. Above all, it is a book for gay and straight readers – anyone, in fact, with a love of fine writing, witty repartee and genuine feeling.

‘The birds of the air have nests, and the foxes have holes, and Julian Selkirk needs a place to bring his boyfriend if he should ever find one who returns his phone calls.’ Jokingly, Julian echoes the complaint of the Son of Man and, for one brief instant, shows us the sorrow and significance that unites them.

A shorter version of this review appeared in the Independent Book Review here.

For an interview with Jendi Reiter centred on An Incomplete List of My Wishes, click/tap here.

Saddle Road Press | ISBN 9780996907422 (pbk)

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Author of An Incomplete List of My Wishes

Jendi Reiter is the author of the novel Two Natures (Saddle Road Press, 2016), the short story collection An Incomplete List of My Wishes (Sunshot Press, 2018), and four poetry books and chapbooks, most recently Bullies in Love (Little Red Tree, 2015). Awards include a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship for Poetry, the New Letters Prize for Fiction, the Wag’s Revue Poetry Prize, the Bayou Magazine Editor’s Prize in Fiction, and two awards from the Poetry Society of America. Two Natures won the Rainbow Award for Best Gay Contemporary Fiction and was a finalist for the Book Excellence Awards and the Lascaux Prize for Fiction. Reiter is the editor of WinningWriters.com, an online resource site with contests and markets for creative writers.

Jendi Reiter, it’s a great pleasure to learn more about the author of An Incomplete List of My Wishes, which I so enjoyed. Thank you for joining me.

Thank you.

We could have quite a discussion about Southern writing: what it is, who it is, even where it is. In my view, some of the stories in An Incomplete List can still be interestingly analysed as Southern even though, for example, they take place in New York. The characters and their author take their history with them. What’s your opinion? 

That is a flattering testament to how thoroughly Julian has taken over my brain, since I am a lifelong Northeasterner – from Manhattan to Western Massachusetts. I suppose my work shares a certain lushness and eccentricity with the Southern gothic, as well as the inescapable weight of family and religious history on maverick individuals. ‘God-haunted’ as Flannery O’Connor might say.

Well, that’s thoroughly confounded my assumptions and expectations! When one thinks of the South, sooner or later one thinks of race, yet I don’t recall a single African American character in your Georgia stories. I recognize that you might not wish to write for others whose experience is their own to tell, but does that fully account for their absence? Can you say something about it?

That’s a very good point you make, and perhaps a failing on my part, whose causes are twofold. It reflects the unfortunate whiteness of Julian’s social circle, and of my own. I’ve been late to wake up to what isn’t represented. And, as you suggest, I’ve seen enough offensive errors by white authors to be cautious and do a lot of preparation before wading into those waters. The recent trend toward hiring sensitivity readers gives me confidence to take more risks in my next novel, knowing that there’ll be someone to edit out boneheaded mistakes before I go public.

The opening story, ‘Exodus’, is among your most moving and poignant. It refers, I take it, to the legions of young men lost to AIDS, ignorance and persecution and – to me, at least – links to the similarly fallen generation of men described in ‘Waiting for the Train to Fort Devens.’ How did these two stories come about and why did they take the form they have?

I like the connection you make here. ‘Doomed youth’ is kind of a theme of mine, I guess. ‘Fort Devens’ was based on a writing workshop prompt. Our local bank in Western Massachusetts puts out a complimentary calendar with historical photos from the region, which our writing teacher distributed to us for inspiration. My photo caption became the story’s title, and the rest just wrote itself as I described these men from seventy years ago. I grew up on Holocaust history as a New York City secular Jew – any image from the 1940s is haunted by its shadow.

‘Exodus’ was an early writing exercise to find Julian’s voice in Two Natures, hence the photography theme that recurs here. It was inspired by a prompt from The 3 A.M. Epiphany by Brian Kiteley, featuring the line ‘No one has ever loved me the way I loved him.’ Julian’s core conflict is between love and shame, the desire for human connection versus the spiritual yearning that he’s been told is incompatible with his homosexual nature.

The double meaning of the title, which no one has ever picked up on, is that ‘Exodus’ was the name of the largest organization then offering Christian ‘reparative therapy’ – a traumatic and completely bogus program to turn gay people straight. (See Garrard Conley’s memoir Boy Erased, now a hit movie, to understand the horrors of ex-gay therapy.)

[image error]As well as the sorrow and pain your work expresses, it also has a marvellous humour and joyfulness. I used C. S. Lewis’s phrase ‘surprised by joy’ in referring, for example, to Carla’s encounter with Ronnie in ‘House of Correction’ and the effect it has on the reader – love and happiness exist! How important is it for you to show this life-affirming joy?

That’s essential for me. ‘The House of Correction’ is the most recent story in the book, and I think it represents a more upbeat turn in my work, reflecting the liberation and healing I’ve worked toward in my personal life. Like Johnny Cash, the Man in Black, I feel compelled to bear witness to the dark side of life – not to wallow in bleakness but to offer empathy and seek justice. Humor is a time-honored queer and Jewish survival skill, in the midst of all that!

Many of the stories in An Incomplete List portray the encounter between Jewishness and gay culture – an uneasy combination. How does living in a Jewish household complicate a young person’s growing awareness of their emergent sexual identity? Is there a connection between the secrecy, or at least privacy, about an aspect of oneself one fears will be condemned, and the impulse to invent stories? 

American Judaism, even the Orthodox branches of it, hasn’t targeted homosexuality in the obsessive way of the Christian Right. Reform and Reconstructionist Jews are mainly affirming nowadays, I believe. As a minority group with a strong social justice tradition, Jews tend to be liberal on social issues regardless of theological traditionalism in other areas.

However, the centrality of tribal connections and procreative families is pretty hard-wired into Jewish life. Someone who falls outside of that structure can feel really alienated (speaking from personal experience) even though there is no religious condemnation of queerness. Ronnie and Carla bond over this shared minority-within-a-minority experience in ‘The House of Correction’. On the other hand, American Jewish culture and queer culture have some flavors in common – rebellion, urbanity, self-deprecating wit, the perpetual question of assimilation.

For me, ‘Memories of the Snow Queen’ is the hardest story to understand, and I still don’t get it. It’s like looking at a thousand narrative shards or mythic possibilities. Can you help me to grasp what is going on here?

It’s a fable about repressed memories, and the many different ways we can tell a story about children in peril, either to expose or to occlude the sins of adults.

I shall rush back to the story and read it in that light. I’m intrigued by the connections between ‘Two Natures’, ‘Julian’s Yearbook’, ‘Today You Are a Man’, ‘Five Assignments and a Mistake’ and your novel, Two Natures, all of which share some of the same characters. Were the short stories leftovers, so to speak, from when the novel was written, or did you wish to investigate these characters further?

All of the Julian-universe stories were written before the novel was finished, as character sketches to understand their back story and motivations. Putting shorter pieces of the project out into the world as self-contained stories rewarded me with some praise and money to sustain the longer-term effort. My characters became more real to me, the more I shared them with other people. (When my friends saw me, they would ask ‘How are you? And how’s Julian?’)

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Humanity faces climatic catastrophe. We have two years to prevent our own extinction. If someone says to you we don’t need made-up stories when the world is in such desperate trouble, how will you reply?

I would say ‘start where you are, with what you have.’ Storytelling is my skill; political organzing is not. We all have a role to play in changing the culture – or helping people survive its collapse. I see myself as Frederick in Leo Lionni’s classic picture book of the same name. Stories keep hope alive in dark times and help us imagine the world we want to fight for. That’s why every totalitarian state has tried to destroy art and silence artists.

What can we expect from you next?

I’m working on Origin Story, the sequel to Two Natures, which is told from the viewpoint of Peter from the story ‘Today You Are a Man’. While co-authoring a gay superhero comic book, Peter recovers traumatic memories that threaten his budding love affair with Julian, who meanwhile is struggling with the emotional legacy of his alcoholic family. The book is about the revelatory power of making art, and how to build healthy relationships as a survivor of both personal and political trauma.

During the 2018 election cycle, I also wrote a poetry chapbook titled American Eclipse that is currently making the rounds of contests. Combining humor, outrage, and quirky travel anecdotes, American Eclipse touches on subjects such as gender transition, the #MeToo movement, and our symbolic and symbiotic relationships with other species on this fragile planet.

I am a part-time dandy, so I have left the most important question till last. I expect full disclosure and the absolute truth. Where do you get your bow ties?

Dandies of the world unite! I get most of my colorful clip-on ties from craft fairs. My two nicest purple silk patterned ones are Guuniee and Dan Smith brands. Some of my favorite online clothing vendors for female-bodied gents are Dapper Boi, Haute Butch, and Androgynous Fox. I’m also branching out into bolo ties from CalinY.

You have inspired me! Good luck with the projects you’ve mentioned and don’t forget to send one or two of them this way.

Thank you. I shall.

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[image error]Four American Tales is available free as an ebook: follow the link.

Nadine stole a white Plymouth Roadrunner early Friday evening. She took it from an airport parking lot, which bought her the weekend before it was missed – a couple of weeks if she was lucky. Earle had shown her how and when to take an automobile. ‘Stay calm and act natural. Once they’re on the plane, there’s nothing they can do. You’re the new owner. Remember that.’

‘A Hundred Ways to Live’, Four American Tales

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Author of Above an Abyss: Two Novellas

Ryan Masters is a writer and poet from Santa Cruz, CA. He spent a decade on staff at the Santa Cruz Sentinel and The Monterey County Weekly. He is a frequent contributor to The Surfer’s Journal and former poet-in-residence for the City of Pacific Grove, CA. The author of a chapbook, below the low-water mark, his work has also appeared in publications such as The Iowa Review, Catamaran Literary Reader and Unlikely Stories. Above an Abyss: Two Novellas (Radial Books, 2018) is his first collection of fiction. It was reviewed on this blog here, but here is a brief extract:

Most wonderfully, ‘Trampoline Games’ and ‘The Moth Orchid’ end on entirely unexpected notes of quiet revelation, the reverberations of which continue long afterwards. I do not mean to suggest these endings are somehow bolted on as deliberate surprises. Instead, they are as parts to the whole, with deep roots in the material, but whose blossoming transforms all that has gone before. They are quite remarkable and profoundly moving.

Above an Abyss surely establishes Ryan Masters as a great practitioner of the novella, one of the most difficult and ambiguous of literary forms. Read Above an Abyss and be touched by a quiet moment of grace.

Ryan, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me today. It’s a great pleasure to find out more about you after reading your wonderful book Above an Abyss.

Thank you!

It’s tempting to wonder if stories like ‘Irredeemable, Now and Forever’ and ‘Trampoline Games’ are inspired by experience. How much do you draw on your own autobiography for your fiction?

Absolutely. I lived in Sandy, Utah [‘Trampoline Games’] from sixth grade to eighth grade. I went to graduate school in Fairbanks, Alaska [‘Moth Orchid’] in the late 1990s. I also worked archaeology in the Great Basin [‘Irredeemable, Now and Forever’] for a number of years as an undergraduate at the University of Oregon.

It seems to me that your fiction inhabits the rather lonely meeting point of geography, history and identity, both personal and cultural. Would you agree?

That’s a fair assessment. The characters in Above an Abyss and some of my other fiction are lost in very large, stark Western landscapes. They feel isolated or actually exist in some state of seclusion or isolation. Consequently these characters inhabit very insular physical and emotional places that also happen to be limitless and huge. This is a very American state of being. The enormous expanses of land swallow us. Maybe it is also because we routinely project our own fears and dreams on others rather than going through the trouble of getting to know them and discovering who they truly are.

There is much more of a mythic/symbolic dimension to territory in the United States than there is in the United Kingdom, certainly. Probably, that has a lot to do with the difference in scale and history of the two countries. Do you investigate the history and formation of a place before writing about it?

This question makes me think of the William Burroughs line from Naked Lunch: ‘America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.’ America is awash in so much myth because we’ve only had a couple hundred years to invent it. It’s generally a dark mythos, too. Some form of the devil or another lives in Hawthorne’s woods, in Melville’s whale, even in Steinbeck’s fields. And yes, I research places extensively before I write them. I studied under a writer named Frank Soos (Unified Field Theory, Unpleasantries) for a few years. He was adamant about the need to understand the landscape your characters inhabit to understand the characters. Usually, I have lived in a location for some period of time before I choose to write about it. That said, I have also written ‘imagined’ versions of places, but these stories tend to swerve into magic realism.

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You certainly like to reveal how abnormal the normal can be. Something strange can lurk beneath the surface of appearances. In ‘Trampoline Games,’ for instance, I was struck by Jacob’s thought that normality is really odd, and how the reader is enabled to share that feeling of oddness. Is this something you cultivate or have experienced yourself?

My life has been remarkably odd. I assume I’ve cultivated that to some degree. I am attracted to weird people and strange places. Yet it doesn’t take much investigation to discover that everybody on this planet is odd in their own way. The human experience is utterly trippy and baffling. If we were always conscious of the fact that we are stumbling blindly around this planet in bags of blood and bones with no discernible purpose, we’d probably all just sit down and freak out. But our brains normalize this experience. As a result, human beings repress all the terror and uncertainty of being alive and it resurfaces in this incredibly rich tapestry of idiosyncrasies and bizarre behaviors.

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What are the challenges of writing shorter forms such as the short story and the novella?

Nearly all of my short stories and novellas were originally much longer works. My process of revision is always one of reduction. Editing consists primarily of finding ways to powerfully suggest rather than say. Can I defend each paragraph as either (a) driving story; or (b) maintaining the integrity of the piece’s overarching themes? The challenge of the shorter form is maintaining discipline of efficiency.

As a writer myself, I am often surprised how characters and situations are apt to exert themselves in the process of composition, taking me to places I had no intention of visiting. How would you describe your own writing process?

That’s the beauty of it, isn’t it? I grew up in the Santa Cruz Mountains. While it wasn’t a wildly remote upbringing, it was far enough from town that I spent a lot of time entertaining myself, creating stories, wandering through the woods. Writing continues to be like that for me. It’s a great gift to retain that wonder and amazement in the world.

Perhaps the strangeness of the everyday is linked to its precarity. In ‘Moth Orchid,’ maintaining the hot and humid environment in which orchids can flourish is totally at odds with the outside world of extreme cold and snow. It can all collapse in a moment, and yet we persevere. Perhaps it’s rather like writing itself. What do you reckon?

Exactly. Alasa maintains the orchids in subzero Alaska to avoid facing a brutal reality. Words, as you’ve suggested, are my orchids, in one way. In another way, words are also my Dr. Funes [from ‘Moth Orchid’]. They force me to recognize and accept that reality.

What should we expect from you next?

I’m working on a collection of short stories, a novel and a collection of poetry. It’s hard for me to tell which one will be finished first at this point. Even after all this time, the process of writing is still kind of a mystery to me. I just keep sitting down and working. What happens, happens. Inshallah.

Well, whatever you finish first, make sure you send it to me for a review.

I will!

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[image error]Fine writing transcends generic boundaries. Should we call An Incomplete List of My Wishes, Jendi Reiter’s outstanding collection of short stories, Southern fiction? Possibly, but only as long as we permit a Southern sensibility (however defined) to extend as far north as New York and Connecticut. Is it LGBTQ? Assuredly, yet the breadth of human response the book elicits encompasses far more than specific issues of sexual/gender identification. Is it historical? In part, but the 1990s reside still in many living memories and can comfortably coexist with the present. May we even call these prizewinning works short stories? Only if we allow that a short story need not necessarily tell a story, or that it can tell many stories all at once.

Sensitive readers will try to store these kinds of interesting and bewildering questions at the backs of their minds: An Incomplete List of My Wishes will ask us to reconsider them eleven times over, while it overwhelms us emotionally and beguiles us with its technical dexterity, its complexities of tone and points of view, its sheer humanity. ‘Humanity’ is one of those embarrassing words one doesn’t know quite what to do with these days. The glorious and long-overdue breakout of the suppressed and the ignored, the persecuted and the victimized, the hidden and the marginalized, means all-encompassing concepts such as ‘human nature’, ‘society’, ‘family’ and, yes, ‘humanity’ have been stretched and exploded and abandoned as contexts and identities and rights have multiplied. Yet ‘humanity’ is a redeemable concept inasmuch as it can be persuaded to include the truly human – all of us – while preserving and protecting our differences.

This is to say that An Incomplete List of My Wishes is far more than merely a ‘gay book’ – whatever that might mean – of interest solely to gay people; it is for all of us who identify as human beings. Its thematically dominant gayness is not a metaphor for something more significant; rather, it is one among many wonderful facets shown and lived in these stories, some of whose characters simply happen to be gay. Inhabiting these lives – the gay and the straight, and several points between and beyond – is our privilege. Stories like ‘Two Natures’ and ‘Julian’s Yearbook’, for instance, provide such an emotionally intelligent, immersive experience that they move us profoundly, broadening our comprehension and deepening our sensibilities – quite an achievement in fewer than twenty pages.

Around half the stories in An Incomplete List of My Wishes use the South (specifically, the State of Georgia) as a cultural lens through which to view other, more personal themes: family, faith, ambition, memory, violence, death, regret, sexuality (race is notably absent). Gayness (male and female) in the 1990s in the South could only emerge in a hostile environment, so that children and teenagers aware of the direction their bodies are taking have the added burden of concealment, an instinctive survival technique that worsens their confusion and dismay. Yet gayness can also enable, or at least permit, a sideways appropriation of the culture that does its best to exclude: readers of An Incomplete List of My Wishes will never look at The Little Mermaid or Splash in quite the same way.

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There is huge variety here, much of which challenges conventional expectations. ‘Exodus’, for instance, the ironically entitled opening piece, is just over a page long, and is a reflection of sorts on loss and grief, of precious lives gone forever. Jendi Reiter is also a poet, and their* prose here possesses a poetic concision and allusiveness of language and image that convey more genuine feeling than many novels manage in a hundred pages. Its emotional resonances are held in deft details and small, often-overlooked words such as ‘polite’ and ‘sorry’, washed away in blurred ink. ‘Waiting for the Train to Fort Devens, June 17, 1943’, a later story, takes a similar approach to confront death and forgetting, the silence of men who have seen terrible things, and our compulsion to tell stories, to make sense of that which eludes reclamation.

Amid all its differences of theme and technique, An Incomplete List of My Wishes is held together by an insistent, unsentimental claim on our empathetic understanding. ‘The House of Correction’ (the allusion to Dostoevsky’s ‘House of the Dead’ is surely intentional), for example, a humorous and seemingly more conventional work, provokes a complex emotional response: we are surprised by joy for those who unexpectedly find freedom and flourish, only to be shocked and saddened by what life has perpetrated on another. Great fiction – like all great art – helps us to experience that which is hitherto inexperienceable, or only experienced lightly, fleetingly, unrecognized and unregarded. The writing here grasps those little moments in which life’s possibilities glance our way and hold out their hands before they vanish forever.

An Incomplete List of My Wishes asks us to behold these moments, to make sense of words and of lives. Jendi Reiter uses language, punctuation, emphasis, and context to extend connotation almost to breaking point, and often to the reverse of what is actually uttered. In the final story, ‘Taking Down the Pear Tree’, an utterly compelling account of a couple in need of a child, the simple line ‘Nothing hurts, you say’ is one such instance where denotation and connotation are at opposite ends of feeling, where the ostensible cause of the pain is the least significant source of anguish. This could be called free indirect speech, inflected with a semi-detached irony and a deep feeling for what is left unsaid – rather like the sad, haunting, kind smile of a despised uncle whose only impulse is to love.

An Incomplete List of My Wishes may only give up its secrets after many readings. Even then, I have the feeling it will never quite tell us everything it knows. And while some of its more arcane references and allusions to popular US culture will not be recognized by non-Americans, that hardly matters. Whoever we are, we can still be invited to cherish love and kindness whatever form they take, to sorrow for mistakes and injustices, to value people whose choice is for life, to enjoy the art of the short story at its most sublime.

Thank you, Jendi Reiter, for the invitation.

Sunshot Press | ISBN 9781944977207 (pbk) | ISBN 978-1944977085 (hbk)

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* Jendi Reiter uses they/them pronouns

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