Emerging Writers Network

NSSM 2018: Dzanc Books Short Story Collections - Origins and Other Stories (chapbook) by Angela Woodward

Origin and Other Stories, a chapbook by Angela Woodward, was the winner of the 2015 Collagist Chapbook Contest. If I remember right, it was selected winner by the journal editor, Gabriel Blackwell. I believe it ended up coming out shortly after Angela's FC2 novel, Natural Wonders, which also won a contest. It's a fantastic little collection.

 

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WINNER OF THE 2015 COLLAGIST CHAPBOOK CONTEST

Provincial cineastes sit down to a hundred-year-long movie. The reader of an immense Hungarian novel descends the quiet corridors of its pages. An amateur archaeologist fashions a dramatic shipwreck out of a pair or iron keys. These Stories blend chemistry textbook with family memoir, the history of ordinary objects with desolate loves, creating literary hybrids of surprising form and flickering passion.

PRAISE FOR ORIGINS AND OTHER STORIES AND ANGELA WOODWARD

“Woodward's Collection, Origins and Other Stories, is incomparable. Each sentence is its own universe, creating a cosmos of unparalleled territory...I want to tack every line of this collection to my walls. Woodward's genius straddles centuries with her staggering language, philosophical layers, and the alchemy she bleeds onto every page. This is inspiration to feed lifetimes.”

—Megan Tuite, author of Lined Up Like Scars

“Woodward has a way with the intentional meander, the stories that blossom into stories, that morph and shift and come together like the earth's crust itself.”

—Amber Sparks, author of May We Shed These Human Bodies and The Unfinished World

“Angela Woodward in Natural Wonders knows what the grand satirists knew about the great tectonic paradigm shift to this new way of knowing. Her deadpan take on the scientific deadpan is expansive and microscopic, hilarious and heartbreaking.”  

—Michael Martone, author of Winesburg, Indiana and Four for a Quarter

 

Angela Woodward is the author of the novel Natural Wonders, winner of the Fiction Collective Two Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. Her other works include Origins and Other Stories, winner of the Collagist Magazine prose chapbook competition, the collection The Human Mind,  and the novel End of the Fire Cult . Her short fiction has won a Pushcart Prize (2016)  and been included in Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web collection (2010). Her work has won statewide awards from the Council for Wisconsin Writers and the Illinois Arts Council. The Writers Center in Bethesda, Maryland granted her an Emerging Writers Fellowship in 2011. She was a resident artist at the Bali Purnati Center for Arts in 2014. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

National Short Story Month - Min-Interview - Lex Williford

In August, Rose Metal Press published Lex Williford's Superman on the Roof as the winner of their annual chapbook competition (that has churned out a decade of fabulous little books). It, like all of Rose Metal's books, is not just full of fantastic writing, but is a gorgeous book and piece of art in itself.

 

 

EWN:  Your short story collection, Superman on the Roof, was published in 2016. What story within the collection had the earliest publication history outside of being in the collection, and what was that history?

Lex:  The oldest story is also the first in the collection, “The Coat,” published in Quarterly West, I believe, in the mid-nineties, then anthologized in Sudden Flash Youth ten years later.  The original version of the story was, like the essay the narrator is required to write for his teacher, exactly 500 words long.  The longer version, just under 1,000 words contains backstory that I last year.  I had to write the other stories to know the backstory, to give a coherent—if not irrational—motive for the beating depicted in the story.  The narrator’s survival guilt is as irrational as his father’s behavior in inflicting the punishment the narrator receives, but it took me a long time, decades, to know that.  I write fiction people can read fast, but it takes me forever to write.

EWN:  How did the publication of this particular collection come about? Were you solicited by the publisher, win a contest, agent submission, etc.?

Lex:  This publication won the Rose Metal Press Tenth Annual Flash Chapbook Contest, a highly competitive contest I’ve submitted to for more than a few years.  I see the chapbook as a novella in flash, part of a longer book of stories I’ve been working on.

EWN:  Where do short stories fit within your life as an author? Primary form to work with, or something you write when an idea hits, or …?

Lex:  I consider myself primarily a writer of stories and flash fiction, mostly because the forms are so challenging.  I’ll be teaching two courses next Fall and Spring in UTEP’s Bilingual MFA Program, both courses about two difficult-to-write hybrid forms, the first course about the so-called novel in short stories, the second about the so-called novella in flash.  What interests me is how to create something like an episodic chapter that also stands on its own as a story, and Superman on the Roof is all flash fiction, an example of this evolving form I’ll teach several examples of next Spring.  I’ve already published all these flash pieces and several of the longer stories, in places like Glimmer Train, Quarterly West, Witness and Prairie Schooner.  I have a few more stories and pieces of flash yet to write, plus a novella.  Then I suppose I’ll send the entire book out, a long novel in stories, and try to wash my hands of it. It’s the most autobiographical—and difficult—fiction I’ve ever written, and I suppose that’s at least one reason why it’s taken me so long.  I want to get it right, or as close to right as humanly possible.

EWN: Where do short stories fit within your life as a reader?

Lex:  Along with novels and memoirs and a good bit of poetry, I mostly read flash and short fiction for the same reason I write both forms: They’re the most challenging narrative fiction forms I’ve encountered, the most difficult to write and the most satisfying to read—when they work.  For every story or piece of flash I’ve published there are two or three others I didn’t publish and probably never will.  Most of my writing is about discovering about what I’m going to write.

EWN:  How will you be celebrating National Short Story Month this May?

Lex:  Mostly, I’m working on new stories—or will be once the Spring semester is over.  I’m grateful for the summer, when I can crawl back inside stories, pull the lid shut and not poke my head out until it’s time to teach again.  I’ve been a department chair for the last four years, but I don’t have to do that any more beginning September 1.  Hard to write anything with so many distractions, problems it’s hard not to take home with me every day.  I’m looking forward to writing and teaching full time.

EWN:  Thank you very much for your time!

Lex:   Back at you.

 

 

Lex Williford holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas and has taught in the writing programs at Southern Illinois University, the University of Alabama and the University of Missouri, St. Louis.  His chapbook, Superman on the Roof, won the 2015 10^th Annual Rose Metal Press Flash Fiction Award book, and his book, Macauley’s Thumb, won the 1993 Iowa School of Letters Award for Short Fiction.  His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in American Literary Review, Elm Leaves Journal, Fiction, Glimmer Train Stories, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Kansas Quarterly, Laurel Review, Natural Bridge, The Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market, Poets & Writers, Quarterly West, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Smokelong Quarterly, the Southern Review, Sou’wester, StoryQuarterly, Tameme, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Water~Stone and Witness; his stories have been anthologized in W. W. Norton’s Flash Fiction, Persea Books’ Sudden Flash Youth, The Iowa Award: The Best Stories, 1991-2000 and The Best of Witness: 1987-2004, The Eloquent Short Story, the Rose Metal Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, and elsewhere.  He has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Blue Mountain Center, the Centrum Foundation, the Djerassi Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Villa Montalvo, the Wurlitzer Foundation and Yaddo.  Coeditor, with Michael Martone, of the popular Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, now in its second edition, and the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Nonfiction, he is the founding director of the online MFA program and the current chair of the on-campus bilingual MFA program at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Book Reviews 2016-017 and 018 - Chapbooks by A. Kendra Greene

2016-017 - The Anatomy of a Museum by A. Kendra Greene

2015 by Anomalous Press, 39 pages

2016-018 - The Stone Collector by A. Kendra Greene

2016 by Anomalous Press, 27 pages

 

I'm pretty sure it was an email from Small Press Distribution that caught my eye--one of the books in question was by A. Kendra Greene (@akendragreene on twitter) from Anomalous Press--a chapbook entitled The Stone Collector. The description they had, from the publisher, was:

A lyric essay from Iceland's east fjords, The Stone Collector examines, over decades and by degrees, how one woman's daily walk sparked a private collection and public attraction. Most every day of her life, Petra took a walk; and most every walk, Petra found a stone. Petra's jaw-dropping collection of jasper and onyx and agate and amethyst and scolecite and calcite and chalcedony and spar spilled filled the house and spilled out into the garden. Her neighbors fretted over the strangely feminist act of spending so much time in the mountains. Her children grew up with strangers in the garden, strangers who saw the collection from the road and drew close. Tour guides brought busses and Geologists wrote letters and Petra served coffee in her kitchen, as the public pressed her collection into becoming a museum. This is the second installment in A. Kendra Greene's series on Icelandic museums.

I thought it sounded interesting--a woman walking daily and it turning into a museum. Then I wondered about the "feminist" act? And wondered how the public might have created this museum. And wondered what the first installment of Greene's series on Icelandic museums (Seriously? Icelandic museums?) was about. Turns out that one was about The Icelandic Phallological Museum--which is about just what you'd think it would be about with Phall as the first five letters of the word.

As the titles weren't cost prohibitive, I ordered both of them (unfortunately too late in the process to be one of the 100 receiving special letterpressed covers) and while I had ordered some other short story collections, and had a few ARCs promised to be coming my way, every package I received that didn't say Anomalous Press in the return address space bummed me out a bit--I really wanted to see how these were. They arrived yesterday and I think the reason I woke up at 3:45 a.m. today is that my mind was pushing me to awaken so I could read these two chapbooks.

I decided to read them in order, even though my initial interest in Greene's writing came through the second chapbook. So I began with Anatomy of a Museum: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About The Icelandic Phallological Museum but Were Afraid to Ask. It's a fascinating 39 pages about the creation of this museum. How it actually began as somewhat of a joke as the curator had received a gift once that was a pizzle, a dried bull's penis used as a whip. He kept this in an office and colleagues found it funny and began leaving other types of animal penises, frequently portions of different types of whales, on his desk, in his chair, in his office. Post-work visits to local pubs led to post-drinks discussions of his "collection," of a possible museum. And then it actually happened. And it grew, and was publicized, and moved to a larger building, and so on.

Greene does a great job of dropping in facts she's learned specifically about the museum, while also dropping in other facts (in 1941, those born in Iceland were still considered citizens of Denmark, for instance), as well as her own thoughts about collecting, and about museums in general. I was very happy I had purchased both books after reading this one and jumped right into the second chapbook without much time at all.

The Stone Collector might be even more specific than Greene's first chapbook in the series (per her bio, this is a series that is ongoing--chapbooks on Icelandic museums). The style is similar though as she writes of the history of the particular museum, and the person behind it and the people behind its growth. She also continues to drop in bits of information she's learned along the way, be it about the area, or something about the contents of the museum in question, as well as her own thoughts on museums in general.

In general, I like Green's writing itself, content notwithstanding. There's a bit of wit behind it, and the thoughts about museums in general are really interesting. A quick sentence example:

Most of the Eastern towns are attached to harbors, and are the kind of towns where there is probably a restaurant to feed you should you stop in, but probably not two to pick between.

I find it a more interesting way of saying it's a small town, and found that her writing frequently took the more interesting path to get points across. In regard to the museum thoughts and questions:

The outside influence used to trouble me. The scattershot randomness of it all drove me to distraction....At best, one of those collections will achieve any prominence, the rest of the collecting eclipsed. Yes, collectors collect. But it's something else that makes museums.

It's an interesting question, and one I hope that drives Greene for a long time to come as I believe it's what is behind this series. Both of the two museums she's written about seem very random--one starting almost as a joke, the other in a woman's home because much of what she displayed was outdoors and visible to strangers. One does not need to be interested in the phalluses of all the mammals in Iceland, or about geology, to find something worthwhile within the pages of these two chapbooks. They are excellent and in neither case am I propelled to suddenly read more on either subject--but I'm greatly looking forward to A. Kendra Greene's third chapbook in this series, no matter what museum she writes about.

Anatomy of a Museum - 4 stars

The Stone Collector - 4.5 stars

Brian Evenson - Chapbooks

1997 saw Rodent Press bring out a chapbook entitled prophets and brothers, a collection of four short stories by Brian Evenson. The cover is pretty basic though the word "prophets" does wraparound from the back to the front. There were 250 copies of this chapbook published.  As a collection, it may be the most focused on Mormonism that he's put togehter--though I do wonder if that might not be  aided greatly by the fact that there are only four stories and not 150 plus pages worth of work.

I looked online for this for a couple of years before I was able to track one down at a price I thought was reasonable.

Six years later, Earthling Publications put out a second chapbook--what at the time appeared to be a novella entitled The Brotherhood of Mutilation. This was put out in two versions, 300 signed and numbered softcovers copies (of which this is number 10) and 15 hardcover, lettered, traycased, editions (I've never seen a hint of a sign of one of these online over the last five or six years of looking).

Turns out that four years later, Evenson published another novella length work, "Last Days", in Unsaid Magazine. Close readers would notice that the protagonist in this new novella, Kline, is the same from The Brotherhood of Mutilation, and in fact, "Last Days" picks up where the other left off. Underland Press would publish the two works together as Last Days in 2009. It's a work that sticks with you long after you finish reading it. Typing this post has various scenes popping back into my head this evening.

Book Review 2012-001 - Lorraine Nelson: A Biography in Post-It® Notes by David Hawkins

Book Review 2012-001
Lorraine Nelson: A Biography In Post-It® Notes by David Hawkins
2012 by The Cupboard, 58 pages

 

I love The Cupboard. A quick description from their website: "The Cupboard is a quarterly pamphlet of creative prose published in Lincoln, Nebraska. Each volume features a body of work by a single author." I've enjoyed each and every one and am a very happy subscriber. The eleventh such volume recently arrived in the mail and reading it twice the past day and a half I was struck by how much it reminded me of Michael Martone's The Blue Guide to Indiana (which has a big note, at least at Amazon.com, that it is NOT a member of The Blue Guide series). Martone's book contained fictitious essays, sprinkled, I believe, with true information, about the state of Indiana, the type of information tourists would be interested in (I especially recall a description of a maze of a system of pipes in which the state product of mayonnaise was distributed) that he frequently published in small town newspapers. While reading David Hawkins' Lorraine Nelson: A Biography In Post-It® Notes, I had a similar feeling of rarely knowing if I was reading truth or fiction or a blurring of the two. Upon looking up the website to find a cover image, I have to say I was less than surprised to find out that this particular volume of The Cupboard is a contest winner, and the judge, Michael Martone.

Hawkins does a fantastic job of putting together twenty-five short pieces that combine into one long essay (what I've determined this truly is, perhaps foolishly) using, mainly, lousy jobs and bits and pieces of trivia to write of both language and to a point, survival. At one point in the first short piece, Hawkins writes:

     Alas, I had never met the hero of my story, Lorraine Nelson. Or read her letters. Or spoken to her parents or friends. Or seen her, for that matter--not even in a picture.

Which all makes sense, for Lorraine Nelson is the standard fictitious (?) name used on proofs for products created by DDS, the Direct Mailing firm that our protagonist (assumed David Hawkins) is temping for during the bulk of this essay. Every single proof that comes his way (copy editor/proof reader) is addressed to Lorraine Nelson, 322 Palm Beach Blvd., Pompano Beach, CA 90525. He sees her name hundreds, if not thousands, of times. Well, "her" name, as if there were a her.

Much of Hawkins' tale hits on the mundane daily routines that slip into the corporate world, often finding him slipping away to sit for two hours in a stall in the bathroom until his rear end  numbs to the point that he needed to waddle back from the restroom, or at one point shredding a package of lunchmeat he found in the kitchen, piece by piece. Describing the temporary worker industry:

As long as I continued to punch-in and refrained from urinating in the company watercooler or setting my head afire on the printroom floor, I retained my status as ideal temp employee.

"Language is continuously on the move," Hawkins notes mid-book. And he shows this rather incredibly through the Direct Mailing industry. Short pieces on how specific words like "real", or like in this sentence usage of unnecessary quotation marks can cause the reader to react more positively. He uses  puns and wordplay to describe both the work day and the industry in general, even showing examples of how important the double entendre is to the industry--in response to an add from the beef industry stating Beef. It's what's for dinner, the pork industry replied with a billboard that featured:

...a model Madison-Avenue couple standing at a barbecue. As he fusses over chops on the grill, she smiles broadly and fauns just a little too intently over her hubby.

     The slogan above the scene reads: Pork The one you love.

Somewhere in here was my intent to really make readers want to read this book and to be honest I'm not sure I've done so. It truly is a fascinating bit of writing, getting me to not only enjoy the writing itself, causing me to laugh, to think, to google names to try to determine if it were non-fiction, but most of all it made me want to flip it right back to page one and start over when I finished page 58--and to me that's the sign that I've just read something really wonderful.

4.5 stars

Chapbook Month - The Chapbook Review

I'd be very remiss in celebrating Chapbook Month if I didn't point everybody that reads here to John Madera's The Chapbook Review, a quarterly online look at chapbooks, reviews of them, interviews with authors and publishers of chapbooks, etc.  Well worth your wandering.

Chapbook Month - Museum of Fucked by David Peak

The image to the left is similar to the cover of David Peak's Museum of Fucked, from Warm Milk Printing Press, but not exactly how the chapbook looks.  The artwork, by Truett Dietz, is the same, but the fonts and placement of the wording is slightly off. 

I don't know if this will be the plan with all of their chapbooks or not, but Warm Milk's aesthetic for this particular chapbook is a nice, clean approach.  The cover is pretty simple, a drawing and simply the title and author's names.  The back is blank minus the publisher's name, in small lettering.

Inside is similar - a sturdier, colored sheet of paper stands in as an end paper and then the 24 pages of print themselves, covering 14 works from Peak, again with fairly small print and just a simple, straightforward design.

This design fits Peak's writing to a tee.  His sentences are stripped to nearly nothing as he writes about what seems to be one constant place, and not a pretty place at that.  Peak's writing observes those that we tend to try to ignore whenever we're confronted with them - the guy in a wheelchair, legs missing; the panhandler rooting through garbage cans hoping for a couple of returnables or some tossed food; those wandering the projects; etc.  It's not overly comforting reading, but it's also pretty fascinating. 

This book was published in a limited run of 50.  As of about two weeks ago, per a conversation  at The Constant Conversation (The weblog of The Quarterly Conversation), they were down to about six.  I'd go look for one of those six asap!

Chapbook Month - Don't ever stay the same; keep changing by Elisa Gabbert & Kathleen Rooney

From Spooky Girlfriend Press comes this collaborative effort from Elisa Gabbert & Kathleen Rooney, two authors that work both on their own, as well as with each other.  Don't ever stay the same; keep changing contains 20 poems, 14 of which had been previously published in literary journals.

This chapbook is a 6" x 9", saddle-stapled, 30 page book of poetry.  It's glossier than most chapbooks - the cover itself, with the artwork, benediction, by Carrie Scanga, is on a thicker, shinier stock than most chapbooks.  The pages inside are white, not natural or off-white, again creating a bit of a shine to the book itself.

Spooky Girlfriend Press does a nice job of keeping prices down, as this chapbook is $5 and available through Paypal via their website.

The poetry itself ranges in form from prose poetry to poems broken up into equal sized stanzas, to those that seem very formal.  The poems themselves catch contemporary topics like Paris Hilton and Chuck Klosterman, while not seeming to be too culture-pop.  That is, while they touch upon these topics, they are not simply relying upon those names to hold onto the reader's attentions.

Chapbook Month - For the H in Ghost by Julia Cohen

From Brave Men Press comes this lovely chapbook, For the H in Ghost, by Julia Cohen.  This post almost feels like teasing as I go to dig up some information and find that it is already sold out (though Brave Men Press does occasionally reprint editions).

The chapbook cover is letterpress with grey ink on white Fabriano Tiziano paper using a Vandercook No. 4 (which I believe must be the press type).  The text is Centaur and was laser printed on Finch Opaque Vellum.  The cover itself has glued flaps and there is a nice clear tissue end paper between the cover and the printed pages. 

The chapbook is 17 pages in length and has 8 poems ranging from 1 to 3 pages in length. 

A great portion of my personal interest in chapbooks, while I'm obviously hoping to find writing that I enjoy, is the chapbook as object itself - this particular edition is stunning - Emily Goodale has created a lovely, sturdy, piece of art all her own here, infused with the art of Cohen's poetry.

The poetry itself was also great (and I'm excited to hear that Cohen has a full-sized book of poetry forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press.

An example, from the beginning of the first poem ("Someday You'll Be Replaced by Language & then Nothing at All")

I killed the beast & then I became the beast
           whatever I ask for turns red
watery

I climbed the stairs before the staircase
           I'm to blame
the first image bounced back            the real ear
sits in the chest

no decision            in when my blood flows

Chapbook Month - Prophets and Brothers by Brian Evenson

Published by Rodent Press out of Chicago in 1997, Prophets and Brothers is one of the harder to find works by Evenson (though a search last night on AbeBooks.com showed that a couple of copies have found their way to being on sale).  It includes four short stories, two of which had seen publication in the journal, Dialogue. 

The chapbook itself is nice - thicker stock for the cover and nicely textured paper inside - 54 pages in length.  The cover appears to have been letter pressed.

The writing may be early Evenson, but it is Evenson nonetheless.  These four stories may cover Mormonism even more than those that later touch upon the subject.  The protagonists tend to be following their own versions of the religion.  In "The Prophets," the opening story, the protagonist begins having dreams that he is sure stem from God, involving a shovel.  This need for a shovel ends up having his next door neighbor dragged into the story - oftentimes leading to quite humorous conversations and scenarios.  As the titles suggests, he is looking for a true prophet to get the church back on the right track and the story follows his search as maybe only a Brian Evenson story can.  There's some humor, some violence, never seeming to be there to shock, but just because violence happens.

The fourth story, "A Brother's Love," is unique in that it's written in letter form - letters from a nephew to his aunt - both complete and incomplete letters included, chronologically.  They discuss his innocence in the deaths of his parents, the murder of his sisters (and possibly a motel clerk) and the numerous injuries to the aunt in question.  The story only includes one side of the correspondence, which works out since at some point, the aunt refrains from sending any more letters to the nephew.

This one will cost you a few bucks if you're interested - if you're an Evenson completist, it's a must-have, but with some $400 plus items out there floating around, it's hard being an Evenson completist.