Emerging Writers Network

Source of Lit - The Quarterly - Summer 1987 - Hob Broun

There are many stalled projects here at the EWN Blog--that I'm going to try to start reviving as of today--and I believe the oldest of these is The Quarterly project--reading through issue by issue and posting on each story, or each author when it comes to those with multiple poems within an issue. It's been since September since I've posted on this project, and I'm actually afraid to look at how long ago it was that I posted the first post about issue 1 of this journal.

Today we have the story "Rosella, in Stages" by Hob Broun. To my knowledge, Broun went on to publish a story collection and a novel, both of which have fairly recently been re-released in eBook form (though it's not all that difficult to find used copies of those old hardcovers).

The title is an apt description of this story--there are six of these stages, each beginning with a number [6], [19], [32], [45], [67], and [85] that I'm sorry to say the first time I read the story I missed out on the very obvious fact that these numbers weren't random, but corresponded to Rosella's age at the time the stage adhered to.

The story itself is not that out of the ordinary--at 6 Rosella spies on folks visiting her parents hotel, at 19 a friendship with another woman wants to be more (at least from the friend's point of view), with husband at 32, daughter at 45, on through life. But maybe that's just what is so impressive with this story--in five short pages, in six sections, Broun has given his readers the life of Rosella, with enough shared information between the sections to flush out the many, many missing years. He's chosen just the right age gaps, and given just the right information for each year to allow us to imagine the vast bulk of Rosella's life. Reading the story a second, third, and fourth time having realized this, has made the writing of it seem that much more impressive. I do have Mr. Broun's books around here somewhere and will be looking for them--though I'm pretty sure I'll see more of his work in future issues of The Quarterly.

 

Source of Lit - The Quarterly - Summer 1987 - Cezarija Abartis

Another new author for me to experience via this issue of The Quarterly. Cezarija Abartis' story is "Listening to Stravinsky" and it's just a shade under 14 pages long. Lish didn't seem to have any sort of specifications for length of story in these early issues of the journal.

The story begins:

 

     Last month they cut down three full-grown elms on our street. It took an hour and a half, and with ordinary brooms, they swept the twigs toward the tall, boxlike orange truck with its funneled chute angled into a huge engine that sucked in every last leaf and stick and mulched them. A half hour per tree. On the door of the truck was lettered the name of the manufacturer, WHISPER CHIPPER.

 

We're a full page into the story, going from that chipper to how shopping malls aren't safe, to finally getting to something specific about the narrator--that things are also not good between her and Perry, her husband. And there's something to this long opening that is foreshadowing the ending.

We soon find out that the thing that is not good between them is that she's fallen in love with a man 15 years her senior, her former college professor (classes taken post-marriage), Dr. Valentine O'Neill (or Val, as most refer to him). And Val's married, and his wife has multiple sclerosis. So, even if he were the type that would leave his wife, he wasn't the type to leave his wife with multiple sclerosis. But, he IS the type that will have an affair.

So, much of the story is about that, the goings on between our narrator and Val and similar to the last story, there is a distance forced upon the reader. The level of emotion is muted by the writing. However, it fits in a way with the ending of the story:

 

     So we make love. That is something. A person shouldn't wish for everything.

     People should be happy with what they've got.

 

The idea expressed here in the ending are a means of muting emotions too.

Source of Lit - The Quarterly - Summer 1987 - Nancy Lemann

So it turns out that due to poor tagging of a couple of posts here at the EWN, I didn't realize I had already posted once about that Pamela Schirmeister story before I did so again earlier this week. I'd also already posted about the following story in the issue, by Rick Bass. Which means I'm up to Writers by Nancy Lemann.

Prior to reading this, I was not familiar with Ms. Lemann who has published a couple of well-received novels and a non-fiction title in the years since this story was published. The story is a short one, only five pages long. It almost seems as if it could have been a story written to help Lemann get through a bout of writer's block. The story begins with George Collier, an eleven year old, sitting down to his typewriter. Lines that pop up include:

"Deeply dissatisfied with this effort, George Collier took the paper out and crumpled it up into a little ball and threw it in the wastebasket."

"Uncertain as to how to continue, he sat perplexed."

"Chamber pots? No, not chamber pots, he thought. Chamber closets? As he sat in his brooding agony..."

Perhaps even more frustrating to George is that his 4 year old little sister, wanting to be like big brother, also began writing and unlike George always seemed quite happy with her output.

To be honest, I'm not sure what to make of this story. It's most likely not at all about writer's block. There's a large distance that Lemann puts between herself and her characters and the story ends on a line that almost makes me think it's been about being the young offspring of divorce. What it has done though is make me think and re-read it and think and I do believe I'm going to look for one of those novels Nancy Lemann has written.

Source of Lit - The Quarterly - Summer 1987 - Pamela Schirmeister

So, the project that will never die--and the project that disappears in huge gaps (it's been just a month under 4 1/2 years since the last post)--my readings of the journal, The Quarterly, piece by piece. Still reading issue 2 but hope this jump in is one that lasts through the fall and winter at the very least this time around.

The story is Greving by Pamela Schirmeister and I have to be honest, I must have peeked at it quickly and believed it was titled Grieving until I'd read a few pages and realized that Greves were a type of bird that the unnamed female narrator and her companion, Brand, were searching for during a trip to Africa. Not a whole lot else about the duo is really ventured into--how it is they've afforded to hang out searching for birds in Africa for an extended stay for example. Though there is a laundry list of items they've brought with them--and I do believe long lists of this type in fiction were fairly new at this time--those paragraph-long types of lists--including Cheeze-Its.

My original mis-reading of the title almost seems not far off having finished the story a couple of times now. The entire story is told from the point of view of the narrator, and much of it is about Brand and how he's dealing with daily rains which may, or may not, be the cause of their not finding any sign of greves. Or how he's seeing elephants visiting the river by their encampment every morning (though the locals tell them this is not possible--that elephants are not near where they are at this time of year). Of how when they arrived in Africa he purchased three copies of a birder guide to Africa and made copious notes in the margins day after day.

 

Brand will get up and walk to the windows to look out. Crossing the floor, bare feet on common wood, his eyes shining in the dark, he makes less sound than the rain that falls on the roof. As if he were vanishing, except that I can see him framed against the slit of sky, head to one side, waiting. Sometimes he will stand there, motionless, for twenty minutes or more before returning to bed. It is not that he cares about the elephants. But they have become a kind of comfort, something to look forward to at the end of these days that seem never to end, and they do not disturb us.

 

This appears in the opening paragraph of the story and Schirmeister maintains that slightly distant tone of writing throughout the story--almost a lack of emotion is what I really notice. In this story that eventually does see Brand vanish, at least from their camp and from the narrator's life, with no real escalation of emotion. However, Schirmeister is still able to maintain her reader's attention. The quiet, distant almost push away from what might usually pull a reader in is handled in a way that eliminated what I believe would be the normal tendency--to not care much and start looking ahead to the next story. I've not quite been able to unpack exactly what it is that she did that helped keep me interested, but think it has to do with the way she dispensed the specifics about the story--starting with the elephants and moving to the greves and the reason they were there, followed by interactions with others and a brief history of their journey to that point. It was done in a manner that just when the tone might have begun to frustrate, I was hit with something new, something else to consider, and it pushed me past how I was finding out. I'm definitely interested in seeing if there's more work by Pamela Schirmeister in future issues of The Quarterly.

Source of Lit - The Quarterly - Summer 1987 - Rick Bass

"Juggernaut" by Rick Bass starts off:

     When I was seventeen, Kirby and I had a teacher who was crazy. This happened in the last year before Houston got big and unlivable.

     Big Ed, we caled him: Eddie Odom. Mr. Odom. He taught geometry as an afterthought; his stories were what he got excited about. Class began at nine o'clock. By 9:20, he would be winded, tired of sines and cosines, and he would turn to the clock in a way that almost arounsed sympathy--so tired!--ten minutes before going into his stories. The thrill that Kirby and I felt when he lurched into these stories following a halfhearted geometry lecture--there would be no warning whatsoever, we would suddenly be listening to something as fantastically wild and free as geometry was boring, and we wouldn't have done anything to earn it, we'd find ourselves just pulled into it, in the middle of it, and enjoying.

And that's exactly where Bass has his reader at this point--in the middle of it and enjoying. And he continues doing that, while seemingly jumping from story to story across Houston with Kirby and the narrator (and Big Ed again, later on).  And it goes on and on until ending with:

Anything is possible.

Which also fits well with Bass' writing in this story--anything does seem possible in his hands. Had I read this back in '87, I definitely would have looked for more writing by Rick Bass

Source of Lit - The Quarterly - Summer 1987 - Pamela Schirmeister

At first I thought the title of Pamela Schirmeister's "Greving" was a typo (which seemed more than odd for this particular journal), but realized shortly into it that it was correct and that greves were a type of African birds the main characters were watching.

Okay, my stupidity out of the way, I kept noticing the introductory sentence to each paragraph as I read  the story:

 

"For six days and nights now ithas been raining, a small August rain, bouncing on the roof of the tent."

"Perhaps  Brand is vanishing, but at least there is very little to disturb us here."

"I do not think I would mind the rains were it not for the greves, which are very difficult to look for in the rain."

"Perhaps that makes little difference, either, since Brand speaks hardly at all these days and often takes to the tent."

"It must be admitted that there was a time when we thought of nothing but the greves."

"On the way, the rain let up quite suddenly, with a big wind coming to blow us around, and then the sky deepened, as if to leave us room."

 

These sentences almost tell the story on their own, but there is also something, well, "off" seems to be too strong a word, but to me, Schirmeister has a way with words all her own. It isn't passive, but it rarely takes on the subject--verb structure. Not in a way that distracts, but more in a way that kept my interest.

Source of Lit - The Quarterly - Summer 1987 - Sanford Chernoff

"My Man at the Station," by Sanford Chernoff starts off:

     My train is late, later than usual getting in this evening. I was dozing. m mouth is dry and half my newspaper is on the floor.

The reader is left to wonder if this just having jarred to being awake is what causes the narrator's confusion only a paragraph later:

     He has obviously taken me for someone else. I was going to say something to this effect, but he's already using my first name and talking about my lawn. It has been giving me trouble lately, thought it seems incredible to me that he should know this.

Chernoff seems to let the reader off the hook fairly soon though as by page two, and a conversation with his wife, Dave, the narrator slides towad simply being an unreliable narrator. Or, are the conversations with his wife actually closer to real life meal conversations than we typically are allowed to read--one person talking about one thing while the spouse answers questions that were never really asked and vice versa? Perhaps Dave isn't as unreliable as the conclusion one might have jumped to so quickly.

Continuing to read, Dave's conversations with his wife stay as disjointed as the original one. He continues to talk to the man he met at the station, and the reader finds out that his son, Jules, is refusing to leave his room, causing great concern to Dave's wife, and eventually to Dave as well.

The main story, about Jules, and how Dave and Edna (his wife) handle his refusing to leave his room and how they deal with each other, and the slow progression of it, is tempered well by the inclusion of the man at the station, and Dave's subsequent meeting with him and then what might only be considered obsession with him.

Chernoff does a nice job mixing these storylines, moving back and forth at just the right times, and creating a cohesive little world.

Source of Lit - The Quarterly - Summer 1987 - Paulette Jiles

I believe Paulette Jiles is the first (at least in the Table of Contents order) repeat Quarterly offender, as she had close to 40 pages of poetry in The Quarterly #1. This time around she tries her hand at fiction (though a peek at my review of those poems will find me wondering why I kept reading the poems in a prose fashion and ignoring the line breaks) with the short story, "Dune Trek."

Broken into seven sections over 10 pages, "Dune Trek" includes a fair amount of repetition and not in the simple idea of repetition of a single word, but instead the repetition of phrases or ideas:

"One of the men gets up, opens the door, and spits violently into the sand."

The idea that five miles out into the distance the curvature of the Earth kicks in and short items cannot be seen as they are below the site line of the person looking.

Fishbones, be they burned as fossils into the stone, or tattooed on ladies bodies.

These and more find themselves mentioned multiple times and in more than one of the seven sections. Jiles brings some aspect of rhythm to her writing beyond the above mentioned repetition and while I cannot be anywhere near sure what the story was really about, I'm not sure it mattered as I found myself caught up and enjoying it as I read it.

 

The Source of Lit - The Quarterly 2 - Summer 1987 - Leon Rooke

The third story in this, the 2nd issue of The Quarterly, is Leon Rooke's "I Want to Know the Answer," which begins:

     I had with me this woman. I said, Are you prepared to accept sexual fidelity to me until we can be together in paradise?

Quite a question to throw at both this woman, and his reader. Not long after this, the narrator notes:

... When I was a boy--but wait, I'm not falling into that trap, ot in that "when I was" trap. That trap--you're walking along, I'm walking along, and I can see that "when I was" trap in front of me before my foot steps down, the same way Tarzan could see a pool of quicksand.

This leads to nearly a full page of him thinking about Tarzan and quicksand and traps, and suddenly something about this line of thinking reminds him of a time he was a young boy at the end of his mother's bed being used as the brace by his father's feet as the father and mother were together in paradie, so to speak.

So, in effect, the narrator did indeed fall into his own trap, and coming out of that trap, suddenly there is the thought in his mind of fifty dollars, an agreed upon price, and I realize that I, the reader, fell into a trap of Rooke's. In following the narrator from his question, to Tarzan and quicksand, and this encounter between his parents that he so oddly became part of, the last thing in the world I was ready for was to find out that that initial question--"Are you prepared to accept sexual fidelity to me until we can be together in paradise?"--had been asked of a hooker. I believe at least part of what Rooke was trying to do was surprise his reader as the story wound down, and if so, well, he succeeded with at least one reader.

The Source of Lit - The Quarterly 2 - Summer 1987 - Mark Richard

Mark Richard's short story, "On the Rope," starts:

     I have to tell my uncle it is just a bread wrapper, a crubbly piece of paper thrown up on the fence by the wind. I run out to show that is all it is, but the spell is already on my uncle. When I come back in from showing, it is just as well I should have stayed inside.

Just under four pages later, it ends:

... They stood looking, giving good hard long looks, because they knew, like my uncle knew, that once we were back up the bayou they would never be able to watch a stew pot boil, or look at something caught on barbed wire ever the same again, even with someone like me coming in to show it is nothing but a crubbly piece of nothing thrown up on the fence by the wind.

In between those paragraphs are just under four pages of fantastic sentences and images of the bayou post-something terrible where the narrator's uncle was forced, seemingly by soldiers, to take his boat out into the water to help them scoop dead bodies in various stages of disfigurement up out of the water, down from branches overhanging the water, etc. Richard hits these images hard enough with his prose that the reader is right there with the uncle by the end, fully understanding why seeing a crubbly piece of paper up against a fence might just create a much more frightening image in his head.

A quick example:

     My uncle said the girl swimming on the barbed-wire fence had skin that did not come off in his hands like the skin on some of the others did.

or

... The baby was cutting through the current with its arms and head thrown back like it had just broken up to the surface to take a long deep breath that it was still taking.

My understanding is that this story is in Richard's debut story collection, which I believe I have somewhere in the boxes from a long ago purchase that I don't remember reading. I'll be looking for it now.