Desire: Tales of New Orleans

by William Sterling Walker

Tales of New Orleans , a debut collection of short fiction by William Sterling Walker , delves into the gay demimonde in New Orleans before the flood. Circles of friends and acquaintances-lawyers and supermarket clerks, drifters, painters and musicians, cabaret singers and writers-alternately dominate the landscape and fade into the background. However they identify themselves, they speak a common language-funny, sexy, pithy, sometimes bitchy, always on-target. But perhaps the main character in the book is the city itself. A litany of place names evokes New Orleans' visceral hold on these men; even when they are far away, the memory of the city haunts them. William Sterling Walker's vividly imagined characters embody the unquenchable spirit of place that would go on to survive unimaginable natural disasters, both physical and personal. Like the city, they are unforgettable in their boldness and fascination.

Genres: Gay, Anthologies

186 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2012

Reviews

['Nathan Burgoine · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Intricacies of Departure," by William Sterling Walker

This is the first tale from Desire: Tales of New Orleans and if this tale is any indication, I'm going to really enjoy this anthology. Here we have a pair of men who are meeting in a way that's unusual and random - the narrator notices this man trying to shoplift a book, and on a whim decides to help him get away with it. That chance encounter turns into something less than a relationship and more than mere acquaintance, and as the narrator learns of this man's desire to go back to New Orleans (though he seems powerless to actually do this), there's a resonance with the way the narrator feels about parts of his life now that his lover has passed.

There's a reality to these two men that was immediate and powerful - they were people I somehow instantly knew and connected with, even before they had names or pasts, and that's a trick I don't see pulled off well that often. On the cover of this book, Alexander Chee calls this book "A welcome heir to Ethan Mordden's classic Buddies." I find myself - only one story in - agreeing. I hope to visit these characters again before the collection closes.

"Aubade," by William Sterling Walker

The second story in Desire: Tales of New Orleans evokes the city from the first word. The scents, the weather, the food, the tastes and drinks - New Orleans comes alive in "Aubade," and the reader is introduced to this city by the collision between a man who lives there, and his cousin from San Francisco.

Walker's characters blur all sorts of lines - between the man and his lover, between the man and his cousin, between art and reality, and between what should be and what is. This is the core of the story - these three men, and I don't want to ruin anything by explaining anything more. Avoiding spoilers aside, this tale was freaking smart, and walked one hell of a line.

"Two Lives," by WIlliam Sterling Walker

This story, from Desire: Tales of New Orleans, is what got me thinking about monsters and how I think of illnesses like Alzheimer's. The story itself has a simple enough premise - a man, and his mother who he has had committed due to her illness, and the effect on his life, and the way he connects with other people thereafter.

It's not an easy story, but the sense of reality that it brings to the reader makes it so easy to have empathy for him. Most of us know someone - or have at least a one-degree-separation - who has a degenerative disease. The thoughts that run through the mind of this man as he wonders about his own future made me shiver beneath my skin.

"Odd Fellows Rest," by William Sterling Walker

This next story from Desire: Tales of New Orleans is this wonderful character piece. I connected with this character immediately - a clerk at a store who learns and memorizes bits and pieces of the lives he brushes with on a daily basis. There's a beautiful ache to this character, who writes notes to himself, smokes only when he drinks coffee, and has a narrative inside him that was touching and calm and a bit sad and sweet all at once.

New Orleans is alive and bright on the page here, from the taste of chicory to the cadence of the language, and a lovely bit of geography dashed in that was familiar enough to me to make me smile.

The more I read this book, the more I want to savor it.

"Farewell to Wise's," by William Sterling Walker

Every time I go to New Orleans, I go to the Clover Grill. It's a wonderful 24 hour diner, and it serves the best damned breakfast I've had anywhere. Also hubcap burgers. Really, it's not New Orleans for me until I visit there - and it's funny, but I don't have a place like that here in Ottawa - there's no one "spot" that I go to all the time that it would really sadden me to see go. I used to feel that way about the Elgin Street Diner when I was in university, but it isn't a place I really visit any more.

That's the sense drawn from this story from Desire: Tales of New Orleans, and two men who - when one buys a car - decide to visit a restaurant they used to frequent more often in their younger days. What follows is part nostalgia and part realization that it might be time to move on. But the trouble with memories and the past is that so often there's conflict with the present day, and things, people, and places have a habit of changing.

This was a gentle story that packed a surprising amount of emotion at its core.

"Menuetto," by William Sterling Walker

Speaking of endings, there's a lovely feeling of the penultimate to this tale, which is full of a gritty reality, a harsh emotional honesty, and still - somehow, among all that edge - a gentle loving friendship between two men. Told in a hospital visit in two parts, these friends have a conversation. One is ill, the other isn't pulling punches, and as memories are brought forward, held, hidden, and retold.

Neither of them are entirely likeable, but I found myself drawn to them nonetheless. Like in all the stories in Desire: Tales of New Orleans, William Sterling Walker breathes such life into the characters that you are drawn in completely. This is short fiction at its best, folks, and every tale just strengthens that conviction.

"Fin de Siècle," by William Sterling Walker

This story saw fit to break my heart. Like many of the tales in Desire: Tales of New Orleans, the emotional edge is just an inch away from raw. The main character here is returning to New Orleans after the death of a loved one. He meets up with a singer he knew back from when he, she, his lover, and their friends were still alive and it's the mix of their conversation and admissions to each other, as well as memories replaying, that spin this bittersweet story into the reader's heart.

Now if you'll excuse me, there's some ache in my heart matching that ache in my back.

"Risk Factors," by William Sterling Walker

Desire: Tales of New Orleans ends with this short story. Now, having been in anthologies - and on good enough terms with the editors to ask blunt questions - I know how hard it is to choose an order for tales, and how important it is as well. Will the starting tale represent the whole well enough and invite a reader to keep going if they read a paragraph or two in the store before deciding whether or not to buy it? Is there enough variance and emotional cadence in the arrangement of the stories to still surprise and delight the reader and make them want to keep going? Does the final story leave the reader pausing, not quite wanting to close the book, but ultimately satisfied (and ready to tell others to make the same journey)?

Rest assured, Desire hit all of these points. It's all the more astounding to me that all of these tales came from one person - I'm in genuine awe of my betters, and William Sterling Walker evokes very different voices, while holding to his theme. This last voice, in this last tale, is a perfect example of that - a married man, by most accounts straight, hard-working and teetering on the edge of the dot-com collapse, who is just maybe flirting with blurring some of the lines he has drawn in his life and around who he is.

Desire itself is treated in so many ways within this one story - not to mention the collection as a whole - and I did indeed close this book with that odd feeling of contentment and sadness you get when you've finished a great anthology. I will definitely be on the lookout for more William Sterling Walker.

[Karl Kraus · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A welcome heir to Ethan Mordden's classic *Buddies*" -- thus the rapturous blurb on the front cover of the paperback. Actually it isn't, and not just because I was greatly underwhelmed by the *Buddies* cycle. No, this blurb, like most of the adulatory blurbs, was obviously written with little or no familiarity with the stories in question. Par for the course, I suppose; Walker at least marshalled up an impressive handful of literary friends. But the manner in which *Desire* is *not* like *Buddies* points to one of the features of this collection that I found especially intriguing and gratifying. *Buddies* centers around a group of characters that remains fairly constant throughout the cycle. In *Desire*, few of the characters reappear from one story to another: Remy Peychaud, for instance, a core character in one of the stories, is mentioned in another, but only in passing. Actually there are significant recurrences, but they tend to be inanimate characters (Mozart sonatas, especially the one in E minor for piano and violin -- yes, *not* violin and piano, by the way -- or the fire at the Cabildo, or the Odd Fellows Rest cemetery) or situations, most significantly a character's leaving New Orleans, usually to escape a dying lover, resettling in New York City (it's always New York City), and eventually returning. These recurrences compel the reader -- well, yours truly at lest -- to thumb back through previous stories: Is it the same character one encountered three or four stories back? No, it never is. Or is it the same character, whom the author has disguised with different names? The effect is not at all dissimilar to that which obtains between Joseph Roth's *Radetzkymarsch* and its sequel, *Die Kapuzinergruft*, in which recurring characters have no awareness (or memory?) of who they were or what they'd done in the previous novel. Roth even heightens the tension by preserving their names from one book to the next. Walker allows each to have his own name.

The other mistake the blurbs make, both the adulatory ones by fellow authors as well as the anonymous book description on the back cover, are the various claims that the collection of stories is about New Orleans. The back cover even claims that "perhaps the main character in the book is the city itself." Hardly. Granted, there's no shortage of local color, but the stories are about people, and the concerns are so obviously those related to the human condition that most if not all of the stories could've been effortlessly edited to have taken place just about anywhere there might be a gay community. It would be nice if Walker had given us a better idea of what specifically about New Orleans compelled so many of the stories' characters to return, but this presupposes that the collection really is about New Orleans, so what the heck. It did occur to me while reading the stories that New Orleans, neglected and abandoned to die post-Katrina, was the perfect metaphor for the gay community of the 1990s, except that the timing is off by about a decade, and at least five of the stories were written pre-Katrina. But hey, who am I to deny that a work of art can't acquire resonances unimagined by their creator long after the fact? So in a way this is a story collection about New Orleans after all.

In one story in the collection, "Menuetto", the first-person character mentions that his one successful publication was a "first time" recollection in an anthology, and this perked up my literary antennae, for Walker had published an autobiographical essay in a collection called *Boys Like Us." Which I happened to have on my shelves, still unread after all these years. But the Walker essay is about coming out, not about his "first time," and reading the essay I was struck by how much *art* Walker had put into taking bits of his life and, instead of reproducing his life story wholesale and just changing the names, rearranged the bits kaleidoscopically, distributing them among his various characters (and not always the ones with the first-person perspective), and then, on top of that, allowing some of those bits to recur in different characters and stories. If you're going to transform your life into art, dear writers, this is how to do it.

If Walker's own website is any indication, he's produced little since the publication of *Desire* in 2012 (by which time at least half of the stories were nearly a decade old anyway): all I can find are a couple of appreciations of Edmund White (a much more famous and to my mind considerably inferior author) and a few collages. More's the pity. This is an astonishingly good collection of stories, and one longs for more. But then, maybe this is all he felt compelled to say? The virtue of quitting while one is ahead is greatly underrated.

4 1/2 stars, curved upward of course.

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received this book of my Amazon Wish List for Christmas, which I heard of from perusing the Lambda Literary Award nominations. New Orleans thoroughly enchants me based on the four months of time that I spent there in Americorps. I have not been anywhere else quite like it. The balmy weather, wonderful music, amazing food, and local characters all combine to make quite the impression. I recently visited last year and I hope to return sometime soon.

Desire is a collection of short stories by author William Sterling Walker. All of them have a queer male character and with the exception of the two that open and close the book all are set in New Orleans. I will say that what I consider the biggest shortcoming of the book is that none of the stories in the book stand alone as a truly great short story. Considering the subtle plot and goings on in most of the stories it lead me to a ho-hum sort of feeling after reading a bunch. Most of these stories focus on the internal world of their characters and the dynamics are that of psychological changes. This is not really a page turner.

However, the stories were all crafted with this collection in mind and as a result the sum of the parts is better than each story as it stands by itself. Walker weaves a narrative of the gay male New Orleans experience of his generation. The stories range from the 80s to around 2000 and most of the characters are around what the author would be at the time. I presume a lot of his own personal and friend experiences informed his characters and plot.

New Orleans is always an entity looming in the lives of the characters in all of the stories even in those that are set in New York. One of the characters says "When I lived in New York, I dreamt of New Orleans, when all I'd ever wanted to do before was escape it. It's like some weird stasis". This sentiment sums up the way New Orleans maintains a hold on all of the characters lives even as they leave, stay, or return. I did not know that gay New Orleans natives grew up with the same desire to get out of dodge as most of us not in San Francisco or NYC. However, the impact it leaves on the natives maintains an almost mystical sense on their lives. Walker maintains a descriptive sense of place in his stories even as his characters are often caught up in their mind. You get the sense that these stories could not be set somewhere else or with characters from another city.

All of Walker's character are caught up in the roller coaster of sexual desire, with almost every story containing a graphic sex scene. These are not the type of stories that you would find in an erotic compilation even if the description seems apt. The sex takes on a diverse array of psychological motivations. Several of his characters reminisce on pivotal sexual moments from their past that they carry with them in a sense of lost opportunities. The most prominent motivation is sexual desire in the wake of extreme loss. Walker lived through the horrors of AIDS and several stories feature it prominently. Its repercussions on those dying and the survivors are felt with a melancholy and weight found prominently in other gay authors of the same generation. Walker's combination of loss with frank sexual escapades demonstrates the prominence of sexuality on our minds even through suffering and grief.

I would recommend this book to anyone enamored with New Orleans or particularly those gay men of the generation of Walker. I have read several other fiction pieces regarding AIDS and others depict the horror and suffering more poignantly, but Walker's is of a particular place and vantage point. I found the longer short stories to be more engaging than those of the short ones, so I hope Walker embarks on a novel as his next project.

[Hilcia · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are places that exude an atmosphere of casual sensuality that can be felt, smelled, and tasted. The residents of such places absorb the atmosphere like sponges until they become part of the place and the place becomes part of them. The City of New Orleans is such a place. In his collection of loosely related short stories, Desire: Tales of New Orleans, William Sterling Walker captures the essence of this city until, with its strong presence and influence, New Orleans takes center stage and breaths life into each and every character. Walker's beautiful integration of music -- classical, jazz, 80's pop -- and art adds to the overall sense of time and place, capturing moments, depth of feeling, and often creating the illusion of a written snapshot suspended in time.

Walker's descriptions of New Orleans are also intrinsically connected to themes found in his collection, -- with "connection" the most prevalent theme throughout -- to the character's conflicts, and to their personal desires. The heat and oppressive humidity may be connected to voracious or subtle physical needs. The stagnation of a place where the past is present may be found in conflicts faced by quite a few of the men, and the gravitational pull that the city exerts on its denizens as if it were a living entity is mirrored in the friendships and relationships between the characters.

The word desire, as in the title of the book, usually brings to mind sexual want or hunger. Humans, however, desire much more from each other than the physical and Walker incorporates both in his stories. He breathes life into his stories through his characters, the friendships they share, their loves, losses, needs and desires. Moments, events, conversations, assignations, paralyzing fear, pain and regret, all become connected through friendships and hookups in a pre-Katrina gay community that learned early about tragic loss while experiencing the plague years.

I first read Walker's short story "Farewell to Wise's" in the Best Gay Stories 2013 anthology and what really struck me about it at the time, what made me love it, was the fact that the place and characters became real to me. I found that same quality in the rest of his stories. Walker develops intimate interactions and dialog between his characters, slowly revealing layers and, in the process, giving them a depth that becomes an essential part of his portrayals. This development leads readers to become fully invested in both the characters and the conflicts they face.

I know I will reread this book for a couple of reasons. Throughout the time it took me to read it, and after, I fell asleep in New Orleans thinking about the characters and woke up the next day in New Orleans still communing with them. But, most importantly, Desire: Tales of New Orleans is a book that strongly reminded me of the "why" behind my love for short stories. Highly recommended.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of short fiction delves into the gay demimonde in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina. A variety of interesting characters—lawyers, supermarket clerks, drifters, painters and musicians, cabaret singers and writers—alternately dominate the pages and then fade into the background to let the main character, New Orleans, take center stage.

A litany of the city’s bars and restaurants and hangouts have a visceral hold on these men; even when they are far away from this magical city, the memory of it haunts them.

William Sterling Walker writes with wisdom and compassion. His vividly imagined characters seem to embody the ravenous spirit of the city they inhabit. These stories are intelligent and real. They are vibrant and written with carefully chosen words to evoke a mood, and also to touch something deep in the soul of the reader.

[willowdog · Rating 4 out of 5]

Friends and acquaintances illustrate the little dramas that New Orleanians do and the lure and allure that New Orleans has on them. (If I ever become a writer, and my stories are going into an anthology, never have me in the middle of the book--the first stories and the last, especially the last two are excellent.)

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall, the stories and the storytelling style grew on me as I got further into the book. But I thought the stories set in New Orleans got a little bogged down in place details. On the other hand, Walker's characters were believable, like people I might have met.