Half an Arc & Artifacts & Then the Other half

by Dan Tremaglio

"Fans of Donald Barthelme, Italo Calvino, Deb Olin Unferth, Laura van den Berg and other literary adventurers will find themselves right at home. Tremaglio is a writer to watch with giddy expectation.” —DAVID LONG, author of The Falling Boy and The Inhabited World , A New York Times Notable Book. What role must a painful past play in an imaginary future? In Dan Tremaglio’s genre-melting debut—a novella that slip-streams through a collection of flash fictions & prose poems—a pot shop employee named Z is summoned to the studio of a world-famous sculptor whose funeral is later that day. Accepting the call if only to avoid his high-achieving twin sister, Z descends into a liminal wonderland of found objects, artifacts, absurdities, dialogues, & dreams. When he reemerges thirty stories later, he must decide if he is finally ready to lay old ghosts to rest. “The complexities of death, family, work—even vacationing alone—are distilled to their wry and perfectly absurd essence under Dan Tremaglio’s pen. There’s a wisdom in each character navigating their worlds, and in them we see all of our broken and smoldering bits reflected back—the bits we like to keep hidden or at best laugh off. There is genius here worth returning to again and again.” —ASHLEY MORROW HERMSMEIER, author of Something Like the End “Dan Tremaglio’s debut is a collection of blue meteorites, lettuce-eating dogs, meaningful eye contact while whale watching. Who knew we needed a book about bologna and xylophones and the fear of belly buttons. This unexpected, provocative work is a fresh take on the ordinary. A lyrical plunge into the beauty of being interminably human.” —TOM GRIFFEN, author of With a Good Heart and Imagine the Sea

115 pages, Paperback

Published February 2, 2022

About the author

Dan Tremaglio is the author of Half an Arc & Artifacts & Then the Other Half. His fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including F(r)iction, Gravel, Tammy, Literary Orphans, and Flash Fiction Magazine, and twice been named a finalist for the Calvino Prize. He lives in Seattle and teaches creative writing and literature at Bellevue College where he is a senior editor for the journal Belletrist.

Reviews

[Lalondeseattle · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a special excitement about a debut novel. The author is stepping onto the stage to reveal not only who they are as an artist but also what to expect of them based on the power and authenticity and energy of their prose. Dan Tremaglio rewards this expectation with this brilliantly wry, unwavering novella of family estrangements and entanglements, and with a wildly oddball collection of flash fiction, all bundled up in a genre bending little book-- “Half An Arc & Artifacts & Then The Other Half.”

The novella has a resounding autobiographical ring to it. Sometimes, you just can’t make up stuff this good. The writing is both muscular and at times poetic and always painfully funny. It is the story of Z, a budding writer working at a Seattle pot shop, who is the black sheep of a family of doctors. Z suffers the universal disapproval of his family, in particular of his orthodontist twin sister, McKenzie, who has arrived to visit him in Seattle armed with an itinerary mapping out every hour of her visit. Unfortunately, she has arrived on the day of the funeral of a famous artist who was the father of Dana, one of Z’s dearest friends. And all hell has broken loose, as Dana calls begging for Z’s help as her father’s studio is being looted. Here’s just the beginning of the ensuing chaos and conflict:

“I picked up my phone and punched accept.
"Dana," I said in my best hello-dear-friend-on-this- morning-of-your-father's-funeral tone of voice.
"Z! Thank the gods! Help! We need help here. Someone strong!"
"I ... Am I strong?"
"Z, we got to get the statues out! Those fuckers are just toting them off!"
"Toting? What're you talking about, Dana?"
"Dad's work! All his goddamned work! They broke into his studio and it's a freaking free for all right now, people just carrying off statues and stuff from his studio! The police aren't coming and I need muscle! Your muscle! Somebody's got to get Dad's Pegasus out and that other one with the thing!"
"His…?"
“Pegasus! And the-that-the other-or at least the- DAMNIT! This day of all days!"
Claire had just come smiling into the kitchen, drying her hair with a towel, but quickly noted Mackenzie's expression, which had intensified from pissed to projectile disdain, and stopped smiling.

My greatest regret about the novella is that it does not continue here into a full novel. The 30 short, flash fiction stories nestled between the first half of the novella and the ending are another wildly reflective journey through Tremaglio’s imagination. Tremaglio teaches creative writing at Bellevue College, across the pond from Seattle, by the way. I’ll be looking for his next work.