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Appearances
Jan Seale's capable evocation of peculiar personalities mixes with her sense of nostalgia and richly drawn places to create an ambiance of the extraordinary in the most commonplace of circumstances. Her characters are a delightful collection of people bewildered by life and haunted by memory but who also find themselves relying on the confidence of experience and the solidity of conviction to press on, no matter what. This is a delightful collection of insightful vignettes that remind us how human and vulnerable we all are, how wrong we often can be, and how, in the long run, it's the integrity of our intentions that makes all the difference.
174 pages, Paperback
First published April 2, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 28, 2020
Lovely collection of short stories! I loved experiencing the wide range of feeling and emotions in these stories; from humorous and playful, to more somber and serious. I think my favorites were Wheels and The Halloween Alps Boys.
March 9, 2017
Jan Seale was the 2012 Texas Poet Laureate, and while I've never read her poetry, I can imagine that if 90% of the words in this book were sliced away, the remainder would be striking, succinct imagery. Because this isn't the case, I have to say that I became frustrated with the book. The beginnings of several stories were strong, interesting, alluding...but they never really panned out. There was no hint of the bite or the humor that we expect in a short story. Removing the context of preconceived expectations, the stories just weren't interesting enough to carry forward, the conclusions were often abrupt, without leaving that lingering, or feeling of wanting more.
The content of several of the stories felt familiar, even nostalgic for me, someone who grew up in the Southwest, but they weren't any more interesting that anecdotes I could share myself and certainly didn't feel like they had hidden depths. In other cases, the metaphors felt so heavy-handed that I wondered if I had actually mistaken them, that my conclusions were too obvious, too easy. Still, there were moments where a turn of phrase would make me stop and roll it around for a minute. I think I'll be less disappointed by her poetry.
The content of several of the stories felt familiar, even nostalgic for me, someone who grew up in the Southwest, but they weren't any more interesting that anecdotes I could share myself and certainly didn't feel like they had hidden depths. In other cases, the metaphors felt so heavy-handed that I wondered if I had actually mistaken them, that my conclusions were too obvious, too easy. Still, there were moments where a turn of phrase would make me stop and roll it around for a minute. I think I'll be less disappointed by her poetry.
August 31, 2012
A Top Shelf review, originally published in the August 30, 2012 edition of The Monitor
Twenty-one Vignettes of Vulnerability
McAllen native Jan Seale is most widely recognized for her verse—incisive, heartfelt, and often humorous pieces that led to her being selected Texas Poet Laureate for 2012. However, she is also the author of several volumes of short fiction, the latest of which, a collection of 21 stories entitled Appearances, was published in April by Lamar University Press.
It’s rare that I like every story in such a book, but Appearances speaks to me at a deeply human level, as I suspect it will many readers. I’ll single out some of my favorites. In “The Noise Expert” a troubled man finds a solution to his crippling need for noise, thanks to the help of his co-workers. A second-grader asserts her creative individuality and connects with her stepmother in “The Only Dancing Dog in Captivity.” “After Long Silence” describes the reunion of three cousins after thirty years of separation, a single day in which friendship blossoms anew. “Going Forth” tells the powerful story of a man who decides to leave his wife, his every reason for the abandonment an indictment of his own character. In “Wheels,” a man with Parkinson’s finds a lovely, selfless use for the Mustang he can no longer drive and in doing so rediscovers joy. Finally, “Personal Effects” describes the final hours a woman spends with her dying friend, encountering her grief and her affection in a wooden carving of Archangel Gabriel: “The icons of love. Every sawn figure, book, painted pot, doll. Things that our rough hands must cling to. Clay comforting clay. Brief appearances of a hidden spirit.”
What an apt description of these stories themselves. Seale’s deft hand has carved narratives of dense, poetic beauty that serve, for those who are willing to clutch her words close, as reminders that—beyond human foibles and frailties, our vices and virtues, our fleeting notions of gender, race, right and wrong—a delicate specialness sits at the heart of every man, woman and child. The author explores the experiences of vulnerable people for whom life is often a mystery, whose attempts to control and understand fail more often than not, but whom we invariably pity and love by the end because she has revealed them to us fully. To read these stories is peer into ourselves and find our “hidden spirit,” the potential to transcend that we often ignore.
Twenty-one Vignettes of Vulnerability
McAllen native Jan Seale is most widely recognized for her verse—incisive, heartfelt, and often humorous pieces that led to her being selected Texas Poet Laureate for 2012. However, she is also the author of several volumes of short fiction, the latest of which, a collection of 21 stories entitled Appearances, was published in April by Lamar University Press.
It’s rare that I like every story in such a book, but Appearances speaks to me at a deeply human level, as I suspect it will many readers. I’ll single out some of my favorites. In “The Noise Expert” a troubled man finds a solution to his crippling need for noise, thanks to the help of his co-workers. A second-grader asserts her creative individuality and connects with her stepmother in “The Only Dancing Dog in Captivity.” “After Long Silence” describes the reunion of three cousins after thirty years of separation, a single day in which friendship blossoms anew. “Going Forth” tells the powerful story of a man who decides to leave his wife, his every reason for the abandonment an indictment of his own character. In “Wheels,” a man with Parkinson’s finds a lovely, selfless use for the Mustang he can no longer drive and in doing so rediscovers joy. Finally, “Personal Effects” describes the final hours a woman spends with her dying friend, encountering her grief and her affection in a wooden carving of Archangel Gabriel: “The icons of love. Every sawn figure, book, painted pot, doll. Things that our rough hands must cling to. Clay comforting clay. Brief appearances of a hidden spirit.”
What an apt description of these stories themselves. Seale’s deft hand has carved narratives of dense, poetic beauty that serve, for those who are willing to clutch her words close, as reminders that—beyond human foibles and frailties, our vices and virtues, our fleeting notions of gender, race, right and wrong—a delicate specialness sits at the heart of every man, woman and child. The author explores the experiences of vulnerable people for whom life is often a mystery, whose attempts to control and understand fail more often than not, but whom we invariably pity and love by the end because she has revealed them to us fully. To read these stories is peer into ourselves and find our “hidden spirit,” the potential to transcend that we often ignore.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews