Emerging Writers Network

Novella Month - Definition by Andrew Ervin

Seeing as I bailed early on (as in, during my first post) in explaining what exactly a novella is, the fine author, Andrew Ervin, has come to the rescue with his explanation--I'm hoping this is the first of many of these this month.

What is a novella? I have no idea. But I think it has something to do with now outdated methods of commercial categorization. Let me step back from the question a tiny bit.

I don’t believe in genre. Anyone who has ever attempted to organize a compact disc collection will know what I mean. Where do you put Sinatra? With the Jazz? The Pop Music? He would seem to fit more at home with The Beatles than John Coltrane, but, then again, he might be easier to find if he’s near Count Basie and not Radiohead. And Radiohead at their best shares some aesthetic sensibilities with Messiaen and maybe even Ligeti, who are hanging out over in Classical. These categories—Classical, Jazz, Pop—are artificial constructs imposed upon the art to turn them into commercial products we could easily locate at Borders. Little wonder that that excluded-middle model—a product is either x or y—has bankrupted retailers and been replaced by systems of information architecture and information retrieval (to borrow the wonderful term from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil) by which an iPod can use multiple criteria, not solely genre, which is artificial anyway, to locate Brad Mehldau’s cover version of “Paranoid Android.”

You see where I’m going here. The label “novella” is not inherent in the work of art; it’s a sticker publishers and editors place on the outside of it so that consumers can find it. Art and commerce have always been uneasy bedfellows, but they manage to get along because they have to. Personally, I’ve never set out to write a novella for the sake of writing a novella. In Extraordinary Renditions, I had three stories I wanted to tell and that form (again, which fairly or not has a kind of anti-commercial reputation) suited the thematic concerns. Had “The Empty Chairs” or “Brooking the Devil” required ten pages or a thousand pages to get the story across, that’s how long I would have made them and it would have been an entirely different kind of book.

  Fortunately, many publishers are beginning to see the limitations of the current model. More houses are publishing novellas these days, which warms the cockles of my heart. Maybe the emergence of e-readers will further revitalize the novella; it feels like the perfect length for reading on a screen. We may see yet another beautiful example of technology opening up the field of what’s commercially viable for writers. As for my own work, and maybe this will change one day soon, I’m not sure that commercial viability would even crack the top ten list of what I want to accomplish on the page. If it did, I probably would not have written novellas.

Andrew Ervin is the author of Extraordinary Renditions (Coffee House Press) and is a great reviewer of books, as well as all-around good guy (I penned this, not Andrew).

National Short Story Month - Guest Post - John McNally

The following is a guest post from the wonderful John McNally, who was probably wondering if I was lying about SSM as he was the first author to send me his guest post, over a month ago now. I love this post. While I wasn't doing a lot of drinking while an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in the late 80's, I was spending a ton of time wandering the stacks of the Rackham Graduate Library looking at literary journals:

When I was an undergraduate at Southern Illinois University in the 1980s, I spent a lot of time drinking.  A lot of time.  But I also spent a lot of time writing, and while working on a story in Morris Library, I would wander the stacks, pulling literary magazines off shelves and piling them up around me, like a fortress around my legal pad and pen.  Whenever I was stuck on a story, I would pick up a magazine and start reading it.  At that time, I didn’t recognize any writer’s name; I was just trying to learn about writing short stories, and I was eager to start submitting to these strange magazines that came in a variety of shapes. I liked the typewriter font of The Wormwood Review, but they published only poetry, and I wasn’t a poet.  I liked the weird covers of The Mississippi Review and the stateliness of The Hudson Review.  There was even something appealing about the ugly orange covers of the old Virginia Quarterly Review.  A few magazines I became obsessed with, like Beloit Fiction Journal, whose first issues had just come out, and Sou’wester, published by SIU’s sister school in Edwardsville.  In other words, I loved them all – the slick-looking ones and the ugly ones alike, the perfect-bound and the saddle-stapled.  More importantly, I loved the thrill of discovering new stories. 

In Sou’wester, I remember reading the work of a relatively unknown writer named Robert Wexelblatt, who went on to publish a few books of fiction.  I discovered Kent Haruf’s beautiful and chilling “Private Debts/Public Holdings” in Grand Street, and I discovered Dan Chaon for the first time in Ploughshares when I read his story “Fraternity.” Andre Dubus often published in Crazyhorse, so I would return to that magazine again and again. Other writers I remember stumbling upon?  Eileen Pollack in an issue of Prairie Schooner with mice on its cover.  Elizabeth Jolley and Alice Munro in the old Grand Street.  Bob Shacochis in The Missouri Review.  Tom Perrotta in Columbia Magazine. I remember finding in TriQuarterly a story by David Ordan whose title changed the way I thought about titles: “Any Minute Mom Should Come Blasting through the Door.”  Wow!  I had to read it. I would make photocopies of my favorite stories and hand them out to friends who might like them, and I would make my own private anthologies of my favorite stories.

As I said, I drank a lot when I was an undergraduate, and I blew off a lot of classes, but one of my fondest memories of those years – and one of my fondest memories of trying to become a writer – was reading all of these great stories for the first time, finding them in the library stacks, and it felt like some kind of great secret that I knew about that my other classmates didn’t, and it was my secret key to unlocking what I was going to do for the rest of my life.  And so when my students now come to me and say, “Where should I send my work? Could you help me put together a list?” I tell them that they should be going to the library or looking for journals online, and that they should be reading, reading, reading, until they find magazines and journals for which they’d sacrifice something in their life to be in. 

 

 

John McNally is author of five works of fiction, including the story collections Troublemakers (U. of Iowa Press) and Ghosts of Chicago (Northwestern U. Press). He’s also author of The Creative Writer’s Survival Guide: Advice from an Unrepentant Novelist.  A book on craft – Vivid and Continuous: Essays and Exercises for Fiction Writers – will be published in the spring of 2013 by University of Iowa Press.

National Short Story Month - Guest Post by Pamela Ryder

A couple of recommendations from Pamela Ryder:

A German Picturesque (Knopf) by Jason Schwartz

One wonders what the world actually looks like to Jason Schwartz.  Is it a great gallery in which the most mundane of objects become luminous and mysterious, as they are on the page?  His sentences are not complex, nor are they bound in the usual contrivances of character and plot, and yet his fictions reveal the intricacies of living in a way that will chill you to the bone.  You’ll see.

 

Further Adventures in the Restless Universe (Dzanc) Stories by Dawn Raffel

She’s a sly one, this Raffel, weighing the most ordinary of situations with the often-missed gravity of human existence. “There’s so little time,” a departing mother tells her daughter. Indeed. Raffel’s stories have us linger in those moments that so quickly pass us by, so quickly we dismiss, and have us know the way of mother and daughter, sister and sister, husband and wife.  Her stories bear us away on sentences that “pummel us gently”, as Raffel would say, with a pure lack of sentiment and a nod to what we are most likely to miss.

 

Pamela Ryder is the author of Correction of Drift (FC2) and A Tendency to Be Gone (Dzanc Books).

National Short Story Month - On Zhu Wen via Roy Kesey

A guest post today from Roy Kesey about Zhu Wen:

The questions I most often ask myself are hard questions that do not have good answers such as Why did you just do that stupid painful expensive-to-fix thing? More fun is thinking about short stories for a month and then not exactly out of nowhere asking myself whom I most want to write another book of them.

 The rule (arbitrary, crucial): the person must still be alive.

 And so now here is today's answer: Zhu Wen.

 I hope that you have already read his collection I Love Dollars (brilliantly trans. Julia Lovell, Penguin, 2008), the one where he says things like:

 “Faces no longer mattered, in this kind of light.”

 and

 “It's a great life if you don't weaken. Or at least not as bad as you think it is.”

 and

 “Plan E was, in short, to wait for death.”

 and

  “Whenever I see a baby, my heart fills with pity. Why so late, unlucky child?”

 and

 “'Instant noodles,' he said. His monotone implied neither desire for dialogue nor admiration for my choice; he was just saying it, trying the words out: Instant noodles.”

 and

 “The plan was to soothe my nerves, but all I ended up with was a droopy scrotum.”

 If you haven't then you definitely should. The stories are set in a China getting richer but not better (with the implication that if it were getting poorer, or staying the same, it would also not be getting better). These days Zhu Wen is mostly making movies that win prizes in Europe. The films are each very good, almost as good as his stories, which are glitteringly smart and funny and sad, and it would be great if he'd write some more soon.

 

Roy Kesey's most recent book is the novel Pacazo (USA: Dzanc Books, 2011; UK & Commonwealth: Random House 2012), which The Times has praised as “big, intelligent and wonderfully original.” His previous books include the award-winning novella Nothing in the World, a historical guide to the Chinese city of Nanjing, and a short story collection called All Over, which made The L Magazine's “Best Books of the Decade” list. His short stories, essays, translations and poems have appeared in more than a hundred magazines and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, The Robert Olen Butler Prize Anthology and New Sudden Fiction. He is the recipient of a 2010 prose fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and currently lives in Peru with his wife and children.

National Short Story Month - Guest Post - Noy Holland

A guest post from the fantastic story writer, Noy Holland:

Joseph Cardinale's work is ambitious and humble, carefully composed and recklessly felt.  His stories are infused with an intoxicating spiritual depth; his characters become exalted, irrational, gorgeously unpredictable.  They want the impossible and the impossible happens.  They believe in the possibilities of transformation, and they stand fast by their convictions. Here is a writer who seeks the transformative, who exults in the promise of language to deepen and complicate experience.  "Any good book is an experiment in living," someone said.  Joseph writes stories which relieve readers of the trivia of the world; his stories are invitations to compassion, aesthetic bliss.  They are necessary, and, in their nimbleness, their intensity of feeling, thrilling to read.

 

--Noy Holland  

author of Swim for the Little One First (forthcoming from FC2), What Begins with Bird, and The Spectacle of the Body

National Short Story Month - Guest Post - Jac Jemc

The first of what I hope are many guest posts this month:

What “The Man in Bogota” Means to Me – Jac Jemc

In a creative writing class in college a professor passed out copies of “The Man in Bogota” by Amy Hempel.  The story changed my mind in a million ways. 

The message of the story, the moral and the punch line is, “He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn’t good.” It was a time when I needed to re-evaluate my attitude and the line rang in my head. That sentence is so full of assumptions and contrasts.  She doesn’t write, “He wondered how we know that what happens to us is bad.”  Instead she puts the focus on what that something isn’t, suggesting that maybe, after all is said and done, it is. 

The story is short, only a page long.  It was one of the first pieces of flash I read that really made me feel it was possible to tell more in a page than in a whole book.

It’s a story within a story. It’s a story about the power of storytelling and it’s a story about survival. It was a time when storytelling was a survival tactic for me. It’s a “come-down-from-the-ledge” story.

The language is clear and plain, in a way that stuns me.  It’s a way I’m unable to write and so thankful to read. 

I remember sharing the story with my dad when I was home for a break.  “Isn’t it awesome? She’s a minimalist!” I exclaimed, boiling down what I knew of the Lish style of editing to a statement that no longer resembled the truth. I remember my dad giving me a hard time for using the word “minimalism.” We argued, laughing.

And now, I’ve taken up more words talking about what this story means to me, than the story itself allows. 

The narrator says she tells the story to try and get the woman on the ledge to ask herself a question.  I don’t know any better reason to tell a story.

 

Jac Jemc is the author of My Only Wife. Her work has also appeared in The Denver Quarterly, Caketrain, Handsome and Sleepingfish, among others. She is the author of a chapbook of stories, These Strangers She'd Invited In (Greying Ghost Press) and the poetry editor for decomP Magazine. Jac blogs her rejections at jacjemc.wordpress.com.

NSSM - Guest Post (David Abrams) - Cold June by Francine Witte

You're in for a treat this morning readers, a post about short stories that was NOT written by me.  Nope, it's a guest post from the wonderful David Abrams, he of The Quivering Pen blog (and the forthcoming novel, Fobbit, no time frame just yet).  Here we go:

Cold June by Francine Witte (Ropewalk Press, 2010)

 

The best short-short stories are trash compactors.  Short-shorts (aka flash fiction, micro-fiction, and postcard fiction) are repositories of all the scraps of life—the fruit peels, the hair clumps, the soup cans, the utility bills, the paper towels which soaked up that puddle of cat vomit you found with your bare feet on the kitchen floor at 2 a.m.  Short-shorts squeeze and compress the whole beautiful trashy experience of life down to an unbelievably-small, impermeably-hard cube of matter which, if you could reconstitute it, would expand to the size of the average Dickens novel.

In her award-winning chapbook from Ropewalk Press, Cold June, Francine Witte delivers stories the size of a breadbox, but you always walk away feeling like you’ve eaten an entire bakery.  The book is 26 pages long and there are 23 stories.  That should give you some idea of length.  What it doesn’t indicate is the depth and breadth of the stories.  Witte is smart, sharp and very funny (I’d go so far as to say she’s a witty writer if it wasn’t such a lame play on her name).

As any short-story writer will tell you, there’s no time to be wasted—especially in short-shorts.  Get in, get out, leave the reader reeling.  Emotions are telegraphed, backstories are only hinted at, and language, the yeast of the writer’s bakery, must always rise to the occasion.  In Witte’s case, it’s not just a question of what to leave out (though I imagine she revised these stories to within an inch of their lives) but what to put in.  The details of her page-long scenarios are thrilling and memorable.  Here, for instance, are three sentences from the collection’s title story:

The weatherman talks about a cooling sun, and predictions of ocean waves freezing mid-curl.  Cuts to Florida where the local station shows icy palm trees with shivery fronds.  Then, a citrus farmer, puffy cloud breath, screwdrivers open an orange, the fruit inside like broken glass.

Witte sets the stage with the standard signal words of cold weather: “freezing,” “icy,” “cloud breath.”  But then she gives an unexpected twist to the language: the mid-curl waves, the shivering palm fronds, and that wonderful use of “screwdrivers” as a verb which leads to the equally juxtaposed image of the broken glass of the fruit.  When I read sentences like those, something inside my own brain shatters and tinkles.

And that’s just the first story of the 23.  Witte has plenty more surprises up her short sleeves.  We learn that “Gluttony” is not just the title of a story, it’s also the main character’s favorite sin: “Sarah eats because frankly the food kisses her back.”  On the next page, the story “Arm” begins: “Eunice felt worthless, and so she put her arm up for auction on e-Bay.”  The story “Pretending” opens like this:

One day, Jenna pretends she is dead.

Pretending to be dead isn’t easy, as Jenna is quick to find out.  You can’t go anywhere.  You can’t even talk on the phone.

She breaks her phone rule to call Rolly.  To tell him the news.

“Oh yeah?” he says.  “You’ve been dead to me for awhile.”

You can see how Witte builds tension quickly, adhering to that get-in, get-out rule.  There are only a few hundred words left in “Pretending,” but I’m already shifting in my seat at this point.

Like many short-short writers, Witte begins telling some of her stories in the titles with efficient economy, as in “When Mary Gets Shot in the Head,” which opens: “Her thoughts spill out on the street like fortune cookie tapes.  I love you, Hector, I’m late for work, and shit, that guy has a gun!

In the space of 100 words, Witte can create entire worlds and put flesh on complex characters.  What she shows the reader is the tip of the tip of the iceberg, hinting at the enormous mass floating beneath the waves.  She is an incredibly intelligent writer who makes all the right choices; she knows just what to reveal and just what to keep submerged.  For instance, our brief introduction to a man named Hank in “Arm” is all we need to know about his character:  “Hank was balloony and humid and was always popping the buttons off his shirts.”

Most of the stories in Cold June center around relationships, particularly the struggles of male-female couples.  In “The Miller’s Barbecue,” a love quadrangle comes to a head when a lovesick teenager jumps fully clothed into a swimming pool.  In one story, Annabel and her boyfriend compete to see who can be first to air-dry after a shower; in another, Jim tells Mary to “get her naggy self off the planet,” so Mary rockets into the stratosphere to become a constellation (“Jim would need a telescope and a clear, moonless night, if he was ever going to see her again”). 

Yes, metaphor is working overtime; and yes, oddity is at a premium on these pages.  But Witte is never weird for weird’s sake.  She always has something important to say and it’s wrapped in packages smaller than a breadbox. Cold June tackles big themes like global warming, class prejudice, adultery and domestic violence.  There’s even a story called “Jetty Explains the Universe” which boils down to this: “it’s big and endless.”  Not unlike Witte’s stories themselves.

 

David Abrams blogs about the literary life at The Quivering Pen (www.davidabramsbooks.blogspot.com).  His stories have been published in Esquire, Narrative, Connecticut Review, and The Greensboro Review, among others.  He is working on a comic novel about the Iraq War called Fobbit.

NSSM - Guest Post (Caitlin Horrocks) - "Slut Lullabies" by Gina Frangello

“Slut Lullabies” is the title story of Gina Frangello’s second book, a collection of stories (Emergency Press, 2010). Frangello is also the author of the novel My Sister’s Continent, the executive editor and co-founder of Other Voices Books, and the fiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown. “Slut Lullabies” originally appeared in Water~Stone Review.

The story opens with the eighteen-year-old narrator, Emily, at a bar with her best friend and secret boyfriend—his family is Greek, and would disapprove of the relationship. The intrigue of the situation is new and exciting to Emily: “I was high on myself that evening. It was a buzz I got rarely, the way somebody who hardly ever drinks gets plowed after one sip.”

Emily’s mother is used to this kind of buzz—she has always been a woman “who never had to pay for drinks,” and wishes Emily were more like the popular girls in their tough Chicago neighborhood. “Mom ached for me to be one of them so I could have a good life,” Emily says, and one of the wonders of this story is how gracefully it grapples with the idea of what a “good life” looks like, of what the characters in the story want for themselves, or think they want, or think they should want.

Emily’s mother is now terminally ill with breast cancer, but that doesn’t stop Emily’s best friend Sera, jealous of the secret-boyfriend, from calling the mother a slut. “She did not want to see me make the same mistakes my mother had,” Emily says, but Sera’s modus operandi is to encourage her friends to make whole new sets of mistakes, so Sera can swoop in and comfort them later. As they fight, Sera outmaneuvers Emily, who ends up leaving Sera at the bar with the secret boyfriend, and getting what she thinks is a ride home from the boyfriend’s older brother George. The night does not end well, and Frangello describes the following morning with one of the very best paragraphs I’ve read in a long time:

“Approaching my front door under George’s gaze, if I thought anything it was, I always knew this would happen. Not him, not last night’s exact scenario, but that prickly sensation on the back of my neck when I found myself in a parking lot alone after dark, or in the deserted restroom of an office building, or when a strange man walked behind me on the street. My fear was the ancient archetype for all women: the knowledge, intrinsic in our flesh, that we can be violated at any time. Now it had happened. It did not occur to me, not once, to call the police—to tell anyone at all. While it would be wrong to say I felt anything resembling relief, it might be accurate to say that, finally, I could stop waiting. From now on my life would exist, like my mother’s, on the other side.”

Earlier in the story, when Emily first finds George, “His gaze flicked lazily over me, then back toward the distance, as though he were trying to figure out where he was supposed to be instead of here.” “Slut Lullabies” depicts a tangle of vividly real, relatable characters all trying to answer the same question. They hurt each other, purposefully or accidentally, in their effort to figure it out. In this story, and in her collection, Frangello says fearless, wise things about sex, about women, about friendship, about being young and trying to figure out what a life might look like.

 

Caitlin Horrocks is author of the short story collection This Is Not Your City, forthcoming from Sarabande Books in July. Her stories appear in The Best American Short Stories 2011, The Pushcart Prize XXXV, the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009, and have received awards including the Plimpton Prize.

NSSM: Guest Post (Matt Baker) - "Ten Penny" by Wendy Fox

Another guest post, this time courtesy of Matt Baker.

Wendy Fox’s “Ten Penny” is one of my favorite stories.  I came across it in The Pinch a few years ago.  The story is re-printed in its entirety on Wendy Fox’s website.  So you can go there and read it now. 
 
            The story begins rather routinely.  I knew that I was in for a standard drunk-sex-cigarettes story – the ones that tend to begin and end the same way.  And this one follows that story template loyally.  The narrator is young, reckless and searching.  Her short-lived romance is typical.  Late night whiskey and “sticky sex.”
 
            Then, the third paragraph sends the story somewhere I wasn’t expecting.  
 
            M. was a finish carpenter, though he could also frame. I admired his hands, which were long and slim and splintery and could feel out all the imperfections. There, at my elbow, the rough patch of scar from a decade-ago cycling accident—I remember sun and the dirt road and the deep drop down at my left, and then suddenly I was flying, and then suddenly I was stopped. M. knew nothing about how I laid on the road and bled, how I cried and cried at the falling, how I threw the bicycle into the ditch and walked into the little town nearby, how I never rode again, but he ran his finger around the ruined part of skin like he was a healer. He found the place on the back of my thigh, a puncture wound I got one day when metal collapsed around me; he touched the tiny dent above my eye, a fall onto a concrete step. He held my hand where it is crooked, outlined the asymmetrical ear.
 

            The story progresses with them getting together a few more times and a brief backstory is provided.  Even though the story is a reminiscence it is told with an urgency and swiftness that accurately encapsulates this fleeting episode in her life.  Then he leaves.

 

            One night I went out with some girlfriends. I wasn’t really looking for M., but I wouldn’t have been opposed to running into him. In fact, I was a little surprised that I didn’t, and I realized I had this idea that he was everywhere all the time, when of course he couldn’t be. He was in one place, and I was in another. I swear I was wearing so much mascara, I could hardly keep my eyes open.

 

            In the end, no otherworldly epiphany or inspirational vision is needed to elucidate this chapter in her life.   Her true self is still there, underneath it all, and has been all along, just like the scars.  It’s just that sometimes you need someone else to help you remember the stakes and to unleash your limitations.

 

            He didn’t return. Ever. One day, though, I woke up, and I found I had actually woken up, instead of just groggily rolling to the side and opening my eyes. I hadn’t solved much, the dizziness or what happened to M., but the break from insomnia was one damn, precious blessing. I think how M. used to say that I wasn’t much of an optimist, that I was definitely a glass-is-half-empty kind of gal, but he was wrong about me there. The difference between us was not how we understood halves. Maybe people who can build relate to it differently, something about their spatial thinking skills or something, but I think I didn’t tell M. that what he didn’t seem to be catching on to was the glass thing isn’t real. The glass thing is supposed to trick us into believing half could be enough. I would like to tell him now. I would like to tell him, I hope your back stays strong, and the light is good when you work; I would like to tell him, I dream you, and usually I’m not even asleep. Mostly, though, I want to tell him that my optimism is not in question. I want to tell him that I understand the impulse to run, and I want to tell him, No, really, don’t believe that line about the glass—take a full one or nothing at all.

 

Matt Baker's short fiction has appeared in the Southern Humanities Review, Tampa Review, Texas Review, Cimarron Review, FRiGG, Santa Clara Review, Saint Ann’s Review, Permafrost, and elsewhere.

His non-fiction and book reviews have appeared in The Oxford American, American Book Review, Kansas City Star, and Philadelphia Inquirer.

He is the author of a novel, Drag the Darkness Down.

NSSM: Guest Post (Richard Thomas) - Black Tickets by Jayne Anne Phillips

Our first guest post for the year!

Jayne Anne Phillips and Black Tickets: a fearless pioneer    by Richard Thomas

 

Whenever I am handed a list of literary authors to read, especially if it’s for school, you know “required reading”, I sigh and rub the back of my neck. And I then I start looking for the edge, the voices that speak to me from the fringe, away from the mainstream, authors that aren’t afraid to write about sex and violence, to delve into the darkness, sometimes even coming out the other side better for it. I’ve always been drawn to broken lives, people that are facing a true test of character, a dilemma, a problem, something that could change their life forever. I’d scan the list and look for names like Denis Johnson and Cormac McCarthy. In recent years, I’ve found out that I love Flannery O’Connor and Joyce Carol Oates. And I’ve discovered voices that were previously unknown to me, like Mary Gaitskill, and George Saunders, and just a few months ago, Jayne Anne Phillips.

When my Pulitzer nominated professor suggested that I check out the story
“Home” by Jayne Anne Phillips, in her collection Black Tickets, my first response was “Who?” Now, I should mention that my undergraduate studies were in Advertising, not in English, so I’m not nearly as well read as I should be. So when I picked up this collection, my expectations were pretty low. What a mind-blowing discovery this was. It turns out she’s quite an accomplished author, one that I’ve now added to an ever expanding list of compelling voices. Maybe you need to add her in too.

Jayne Anne Phillips was born in 1952 in Buckhannon, West Virginia. She has taught at Harvard University, Williams College, and Boston University and currently directs the Rutgers-Newark MFA in Creative Writing Program, which she also founded. She has won a Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two NEA fellowships as well. Huh. Where have I been?

The first thing that got my attention when reading the dark collection of fiction in Black Tickets was her use of flash fiction. About half of the stories in this book are what I could consider flash fiction—stories in the 100- to 300-word range—almost micro-fiction. We’re talking about a book that came out in 1979, with many of the stories previously published in literary journals and Pushcart Prize anthologies a few years before. I’m no expert on flash fiction, but the Vestal Review, the longest running online source for flash fiction, didn’t even launch until the year 2000. Many people say that the term “flash fiction” may have originated in the Flash Fiction anthology (edited by James Thomas, Denise Thomas, and Tom Hazuka) in 1992. Whatever the history, Jayne Anne Phillips was an early adopter of this form of writing.

The second aspect of her writing that got my attention was the subject matter. Jayne Anne Phillips isn’t afraid to write about prostitutes, drug dealers, a mass murderer—the underbelly of contemporary American life. She presents the universal fears that we all have of loss, betrayal, and abuse alongside the hopes and dreams that keep us alive. There is an element of danger in everything she writes, a tension that runs through every story, the outcome unexpected, and draining. Take this opening paragraph from “Wedding Picture” (which is about a third of the entire story) for example:

My mother’s ankles curve from the hem of a white suit as if the bones were water. Under the cloth her body in its olive skin unfolds. The black hair, the porcelain neck, the red mouth that barely shows its teeth. My mother’s eyes are round and wide as a light behind her skin burns them to coals. Her heart makes a sound that no one hears. The sound says each fetus floats, an island in the womb.

It’s the word choices, the pairings that add a weight and unsettling premonition to her work. There is a sense of violence in “olive skin unfolds” and “red mouth that barely shows its teeth” and “her skin burns them to coals”. This is a wedding picture, but the sentiment and flowery language that might be expected is nowhere to be found. The prose is lyrical, but haunting.

Another example of the harsh reality of her characters, primarily women, comes from the story “Lechery”. You root for these women, because of their situations, regardless of where the fault may lie. You understand that these lives on the street, in the back rooms peddling flesh, they are not glamorous—no matter how casually the women may reveal their lives. It is painful to watch—but told with such tenderness you cannot look away:

Though I have no money I must give myself what I need. Yes I know which lovers to call when the police have caught me peddling pictures, the store detectives twisting my wrists pulling stockings out of my sleeves. And the butchers pummel the small of my back to dislodge their wrapped hocks; white bone and marble tendon exposed as the paper tears and they push me against the wall.

Not every story ends with despair, however. There is hope woven into these tales, a sense of nostalgia and peace as well. This, from “The Heavenly Animal”:

Once it was Christmas Day. They were driving from home, from the house her father had built in the country. A deer jumped the road in front of them, clearing the snow, the pavement, the fences of the fields, in two bounds. Beyond its arc the hills rumpled in snow. The narrow road wound through white meadows, across the creek, and on. Her father was driving. Her brothers had shiny play pistols with leather holsters. Her mother wore clip-on earrings of tiny wreaths. They were all dressed in new clothes, and they moved down the road through the trees.

You can also look at the titles of this collection to see how she mixes up her subject matter, how she constantly juxtaposes the darkness and the light: “Wedding Pictures”, “Home”, “Blind Girls”, “Lechery”—where exactly is she taking us? “Stripper”, “Sweethearts”, “Country”, “Slave” and “Satisfaction”. One look at the table of contents, and you get an early clue as to the adventure that is about to unfold.

I didn’t intend to read this collection when I picked it up. I only meant to skim “Home” to see what lesson there was to be learned. I devoured the entire book in less than a day, leaving me spent, and dazed, but euphoric as well. For whatever reason, many powerful voices get lost in the noise, get pushed aside and forgotten. Do not forget this author. Jayne Anne Phillips is a voice to savor. Written in 1979, this collection, Black Tickets, could have been published in 2011, the emotional truths eternal, her language and focus hypnotic.