Stand is a fairly new quarterly magazine that has come about by and for men that want to be better men. Well, it's sub-title is "the magazine for men who give a damn."
Since it began, I've clicked on an article or three after seeing something that interested me via Facebook. What I had not looked at close enough to realize was that they also publish fiction. I need to investigate more to see how frequently, but in the recent May 2017 issue, they published a short story by Steven Gillis titled "Long Lines of Cliff Breaking Have Left a Chasm." As a huge fan of Gillis' writing, I was not surprised to be caught by the writing very quickly and after reading it a few times this past week consider it a master work about history repeating itself.
For one, it doesn't at all set itself up to be such a story. It begins:
Oh they were sniveling, these men in their stone brick houses, with driveways stretched and covered not in cinder but a tar smoothed black and made easily soft in the sun.
I always enjoy what I'll call the flourishes, even though they're not really flashy, of Gillis' writing. The last bit of that sentence might seem like a toss away bit. Something added to bulk up the story. However, history has let me realize that Gillis never wastes words in his fiction. It is instead, a bit of information to store as one reads the rest of the story.
The men that snivel in this story, they look to push boundaries, to live better lives--they seemingly match the sub-title of this magazine perfectly. And then younger (stronger?) men do not follow their lead--no, they follow their earlier leads from when they (the snivelers) were younger men. They work more, the spend less time with families, they move upwards in their careers and incomes. And then, history once again repeats itself. It's a fantastic and subtle means of reminding we readers of this fact. It's a great read and while there are others, had at least one sentence where Gillis does something a bit familiar to his writing--pushes an idea beyond where many others would, and it works:
Through the barbeque and down the block, into offices the next day, in and out the door, into the street, to shops and restaurants, to factories and parks, to theaters and bars, to law firms and hospitals, through insurance agencies and to the day laborers, to actors and ad men, the sight and sound visited upon friends and acquaintances, a pandemic of snivelers, that’s what evolved.
Gillis is a writer very comfortable with what he's doing--he knows what he wants to do with his writing and does just that. He pushes and pulls the words and ideas and molds them until he gets them just in the right positions. Similar to that black tar that is soft in the sun can be. And men can be, whether they realize it or not.
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