Flight Advice: a fabulary

by Tobey Hiller

“In Tobey Hiller’s magnificent collection of fables, Flight a fabulary, these captivating short stories traverse otherworldly landscapes. An accomplished poet, Hiller’s prose shines with mesmeric intensity and imagery. Singing mermaids, a bejeweled dog, one philosophical genie, and Lilith and her bald children transport the reader on surrealist excursions through worlds of humor and invention. Flight a fabulary crackles with energy and wildness and seduces with dreamscape narratives.”—
—Maw Shein Win, author of Storage Unit for the Spirit House

88 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 14, 2021

Reviews

[Joyce Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

To read Tobey Hiller’s Flight Advice: a fabulary is to surrender to the muse and the process of storytelling, to enter the space of constant invention and revision, embrace and rejection and perhaps most of all questioning that produce the finished work. This journey, this state of constant immanence will feel familiar and brilliantly captured to people who tell stories and write poems, mysterious and revelatory to those more used to consuming the finished product. For both audiences, Flight Advice captures the constant swirl of the creative as event and word, plot and language stumble toward a fixed state on page—all the while distracted by the absurd intrusions of real life. And it’s funny, too.

[Barbara Quick · Rating 5 out of 5]

FLIGHT ADVICE: A FABULARY is a thing of magic, a gorgeous example of what can happen when a poet turns to story-telling. As a writer myself, and a fan of Tobey Hiller's luminous poetry, I found myself both moved and--unexpectedly, at times--amused by the author's incisive wit and insight throughout this deliciously lovely little treasure-trove of tales that both embrace the everyday world and transport the reader far beyond it. From the mermaids who seasonally go to shore to mate with human men ("The Origins of Opera") to a mystery writer wrestling with "the complex magic of the actual world in all its splendor, its gritty foreverness [...] dressed in the sleeves of the visible and invisible," these tales engage with the slippery and splendid beauty of language. Every writer, and every reader who loves and values timeless writing, will recognize the noble and often comical universal struggle to convey what seduces and eludes us at every turn, from childhood on: the swirl of imagination and wishful thinking, the urge to metamorphosis, the desire to understand what it might mean to be fully alive in this world.