American Gymnopédies

by Scott Garson

“Like Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies, Garson’s atmospheric shorts surprised me with their subtle shifts and eccentricities. Linked by geographic places, the collection progresses in tiny increments to become a dance between internal and external geographies. In perception and execution, this is a wonderfully original work.”

—Jim Heynen, author of The One-Room Schoolhouse


“Scott Garson concocts, in American Gymnopédies, a diabolical geography of loss out of an atlas of jim-dandy and cracker jack, snap-shotting the American township grid, netting up the world in a strung-out string theory of gorgeous adhesive prose. And, lo, looka there! Marco Polo transecting the unraveling silk road with a load of smuggled spaghetti from the Invisible Cities noodle shop. This map is more detailed than the things it represents. What distortion! What projection! What treasure!”

—Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone


“There’s a world of detail, sound and story humming through each of these short pieces about cities. Garson’s an alert writer, and he engages with each place in a way that stirs, worries, and delights.”

—Pia Z. Ehrhardt, author of Famous Fathers and Other Stories


“Garson's collection reads like a travelogue of the periphery. These are plainspoken reports from a different way of seeing. Not only do these brief assertions of poetic language appear to have been composed while the author was in transit—they seem each to be a form of motion itself. Garson has done us all a great service by containing the motion of his America in the book you now hold."

—David McLendon, editor of Unsaid

54 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2010

About the author

Author and editor Scott Garson is from the American Midwest. His first book, American Gymnopédies, is a collection of place-based microfictions. His new book--Is That You, John Wayne?--is a full-length collection of stories. His work has won awards from Playboy, The Mary Roberts Rinehart Foundation and Dzanc Books, and been published in American Short Fiction, The Kenyon Review, Hobart, Conjunctions, New York Tyrant and many others. He is the founding editor of the prize-winning journal of very short fiction, Wigleaf. He lives in central Missouri with his wife and two kids.

Reviews

[Steve]

As others have said, the pieces collected in American Gymnopédies aren't "stories" so much as moments, perhaps the germs of stories or even the longing for stories. I liked how each moment is grounded bodily and materially, because for such short fragments most of them offer a real sense of physicality and presence and that prevents the collection from becoming too ethereal even while it is otherwise ambiguous. At the same time, most of the stories feel like moments en route to somewhere else – characters look over fences to long for what's in the distance, they stop at hotels before reaching their real destination, and they daydream through the dark tunnel of a cereal box. So each story ends up feeling both grounded and untethered at the same time, an alluring and sometimes jarring sensation, and one that is increased by the book's lack of geographic detail. Although each story is named for a city, there's rarely any detail of those cities offered so I found myself wondering what about a moment was specifically "Duluth" or "Atlanta" or "Boston." There's an occasional street name but that's about it, so rather than the cultural details of place we're offered a purely experiential landscape, one in which cities only exist as our private, minute memories of and encounters with them and in which one place is more or less the same as another except for what might happen to us there (if anything does). At first that lack of clear geography felt like a missed opportunity to me, and I wished Garson had made these places more particularly themselves, and though it stopped bothering me as I fell into the daydream state of the collection, that's what I mean by a "longing" for stories. These moments almost seem to wish they meant more, or were clearer, and I felt like I was trying to make sense of a larger landscape by focusing intensely a whole bunch of individual points that may or may not be connected. My impulse as a reader was to project my own knowledge of these cities onto the stories, trying to fill in the gaps, but they resist that so firmly that I never stopped feeling adrift, and got used to the feeling instead.

[Ben Loory]

more like memories of stories than stories themselves, these are sad and funny seen from a distance. sometimes they slipped by and then only later did i suddenly hear them. it was nice. i read it twice, some three times.

my favorite:


Seattle Gymnopédie

In the apartment next to mine was a single mother whose name was Natalie. She kept her television against the joint wall. I had no clue what was going on in the shows her children watched, but I carried the songs around in the rain. The positive words, light melodies. I worked as a caterer. Natalie was a stylist. She wore her hair in a pageboy, bleached white-blonde. Some nights I'd meet up with people I knew. The fray in the hems of our jeans would leave coin-sized puddles on buckled floorboards. From within our heavy mugs the bitter ale would glow like fire. Other nights I worked late. At the wheel of the catering van I'd lean to mess with the radio dial and sometimes I'd get this guy who played nothing but jazz from the 1920's. He loved that period. In time I began loving it too. The guy worked hard to recreate the events leading up to the recordings he played. He wanted his listeners to see what he saw. The wipers thumped. The turn signal tapped. I saw Natalie in a sequined dress.

[David]

An interesting catalog of people linked through places. The writing on a piece by piece level is very well done. Garson conveys an entire essence in just a few lines and then moves onto the next. You really have to stop and consider just how difficult that was, how exactly perfect every single word needed to be to work.

[Sam Rasnake]

One of my favortie reads - ever.