Buzzed Books #12: Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s Gold Passage

10 Tuesday Jun 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books, Recommendation

Buzzed Books #12 by Nicole Callihan

Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s Gold Passage

In the title poem of Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s Gold Passage, she writes, “What illumines our path forward is what once consumed us,” and the book itself seems born from this exchange of consumption and enlightenment.

Steeped in music and place, Dunkle’s poems orient me: I become dinosaur and tree, moth and rust. Here, there is so much glorious naming, and such well-done naming—Leucadian leaps and Experimental farms, Gravensteins and Doppelgӓngers—but it’s in the edges where I find myself returning. Lines are occasionally, magnetically drawn to the right margin.

“[desire, please burn off],“

Dunkle writes, setting it off to the side, and I stay, for a lingering moment, there with her.

In Gold Passage, there is a sense of things being illuminated. The illumination itself is so bright and vivid—these poems are delicately and intricately crafted—that I tend not to care what the light is pointing towards, but then it hits just right and gets me in the gut. “Multiplicity is what we’re made of,” Dunkle writes in “Sister,” and I nod in agreement, but then, she continues, “Your breasts sag after 1000 years./Your uterus must be a galaxy of stars expanding, blinking on and off,” and I feel her in a whole new way.

These are poems of history, of sisters, of lovers, of daughters, of husband and wife (their little girls “a tether between two ballooned souls), of mothers: “But motherhood consumes the heart,” Dunkle asserts.

“here, is my

heart. It’s a tight walk between what’s left of self
and the far shore.”

Reading these poems again and again, I’m struck by how deeply feminist they are. The poet stands with Sappho and Medusa, Deborah Digges and Amy Lowell and helps us to understand and re-understand what it means to be a woman and to be made of multiplicity. How can I be all of these things and still be who I am, and still be who I was (a little girl who had a conversation with herself which was the size of an apple), and still be who I will be (“Light, lifting and gone.”)?

Dunkle refuses, ultimately, to be spelled out by anyone but herself. “I am an alphabet of bones,” she writes in the opening poem, “my own telling.” This book is that telling, and only with that telling can Dunkle move forward onto her own Gold Passage. By reading closely, it seems we too can move forward on our own passages. Somewhere between “the self and the heart,” we can say, like Dunkle says, like we all want to say: “I bloomed like a god-damned hyacinth,” and we can mean it.

Pair with: A Chardonnay from Sonoma.

_______

Nicole Callihan lives in Brooklyn and writes poems, stories and essays. Her first book of poems, SuperLoop, was published in early 2014. Find her on the web at http://www.nicolecallihan.com.

Buzzed Books #11: Superloop

03 Tuesday Jun 2014

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Buzzed Books #11 by Stephen McClurg

Nicole Callihan’s SuperLoop

While re-reading Nicole Callihan’s SuperLoop, I noticed similarities to Charles Bukowski’s work, starting with form. In general, Callihan uses three forms: lists (including a recipe), sonnet variations, and thin, vertical columns that I’m not sure even have a technical name, but that I associate with Bukowski. The basic topics of the book are familiar: loss, memory, love, and family, but where Bukowski’s father plagues his work, a mother figure haunts SuperLoop. Also, Callihan’s clear and direct style is—on the surface—not unlike Bukowski’s. Even when she doesn’t use traditional punctuation (“The Wind” or “October, night”), her poems are easy to read. But where Bukowski mines slang and vulgarity, Callihan explores surrealism, and in these images is where the power of her poetry ultimately lies.

I was immediately drawn into the collection with its opener “August Afternoon.” In a list of “I did nots”that become “I wills,” the speaker tells us “I did not eat a peach today / or give birth or floss.” The images get increasingly complex, from “I did not drown // or remember to buy cat food” to the Cummings-esque ending of “O love, // even the peonies have noted / the pupils of your eyes.”

The images in these poems, as opposed to the style, can occasionally be dense and difficult, which is not a bad thing—one might argue that this is expected in poetry. But this also points to the problems of writing timely reviews that do justice to a poet’s work. I am only beginning to understand some of these poems and a few I’m not sure I comprehend or relate to on even a basic level. I appreciate that uncertainty, though; the book will attract multiple readings.

“It may end with my mother” is one of the poems that I’m still thinking about. There is something apocalyptic in the imagery, but I don’t know what to make of it. The speaker begins by saying “It may end with my mother / dog-chained to some fence / behind some double-wide trailer.” Or, the end may look more like “one boy looking for a whale / three busted doors / Hands off the mermaid / or I’ll blow out your fucking brains.” While I don’t know how to process the entirety, I love lines like a “casserole the color of sunset.” Like this poem, SuperLoop hits on all levels, from instant favorite to indecipherable. And like poetry in general, the possibility holds that what appears indecipherable now, may become a favorite later.

The closing piece, “The Poem,” is placed perfectly. It begins with a controlled and playful word association that continues throughout:

The poem may
begin with an article—

or an article
of clothing—

sweater—or of
one who sweats—

Later, several images return, including the mother, an unnamed lover, and bones. Overall, “The Poem” intoxicatingly brings the book to a close, while urging the reader to open it again.

Pair with: a snow rose martini.

1 1/2 oz. vodka

1 oz. white crème de cacao

1/4 oz. rose water

1/2 shaker of snow

Organic, pesticide-free rose petals for garnish

_______

Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) teaches and writes in Birmingham, Alabama. He also curates at Eunoia Solstice.

Buzzed Books #10: Little Reef

27 Tuesday May 2014

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Buzzed Books #10 by Jimmy Newborg

Michael Carroll’s Little Reef

“Imagine being this hungry and feeling sated, just like this, at the same time.”So closes “Barracuda,” the third story in Michael Caroll’s debut collection, Little Reef. This line carries with it its own sating effect, and is an appropriate statement for the book as a whole. Characters from Maine to Florida to New York City find themselves caught in various internal tugs of war–reality and dreams, youth and aging, satisfaction and discontent, one margarita or two.

Many of the stories tackle familiar subject matter, but Carroll avoids cliché with characters who are complex, and dialogue that is often both realistic and compellingly fraught. In “Referred Pain,” the reader is introduced to Diane. Though she is clearly dissatisfied with her life, her character transcends the two-dimensional, bored wife trope. Married to an “extremely popular” creative writing professor, she feels drawn to one of his students, a young woman named Taylor. As a party at their home winds down, Diane has an urge to confess to Taylor that she had an affair with a twenty-five year old boy, “for no reason except that it would be nice to confess something for once in her life…She thought Taylor could have been her friend.” But when Taylor reveals to Diane her desire to marry and have a sexually open relationship with her gay friend, Jesse, Diane becomes almost hateful, though this makes her feel “old and nervous and somehow afraid.” The connection she feels with the younger woman is laced with discomfort: Taylor speaks as if maddeningly sure of herself. We don’t subscribe to labels,” Diane says at one point, mimicking Taylor, “Don’t pin labels on us, we’re special.” Diane escapes the fight by going to her room to lie down. “It didn’t pay, and she’d never do it again, to entertain these obnoxious, self-loving kids.”

Just as the old and the young interact in the stories of Little Reef, so do the urbane and the provincial. The reader is taken from professor’s homes to Manhattan gay bars to small-town Florida to Memphis, Tennessee. The South echoes throughout the book, evoking the fiction of Alan Gurganus. “Pascagoula,” the sixth story in the collection, takes place in Memphis. The narrator, a middle-aged gay man (who is more accepting of his life than Diane, but equally as world-weary) meets a young and pretty boy at a gay bar and takes him home. At first he is made “nervous” by the boy and feels a “neediness or something worse” coming from him, but “he was too pretty and too here to ignore.” Again, Carroll evades cliché by making the sex between them little more than an aside: “It wasn’t much.” What’s important is their interaction, where Carroll employs his strong dialogue to reveal the perspectives of his characters. The characters speak to each other with a defensive flippancy about the most serious of matters. “You’re going to die,” the boy, Trevor, says. “I know,” is the narrator’s response.

As the book moves into its second part, called “After Memphis,” (Part One is called “Before Dallas”), the stories become more dreamy and introspective, though there are a number of bitingly accurate discussions between the main character, Scott, and his family in the story “First Responder.” When Scott protests his mother calling him “an author,” she comes up with “But you know what I mean, thinking into people’s minds.” Thinking into people’s minds is precisely a writer’s job, and Carroll does it well. Scott and his older lover, a famous author named Perry, are recurring characters in Little Reef. We find them again in the story, “Avenging Angel.” Perry has had a stroke, the traces of youthful idealism exhibited by many of the characters in the stories before it are brilliantly contrasted when he recalls a conversation with an older poet several years earlier, the poet having told Perry, then in his 60s, “I was your age, I felt great, young. Now everything’s going wrong.”

Despite what some of the characters may say or do, they are not hopeless, and the book provides wit, humor and charisma as much as it does melancholy and disappointment. Part of growing up is learning the lesson that we are never finished growing up. With probing, skillful prose, Carroll portrays this universal concept amongst a breadth of characters and locations. Readers of fiction by Bernard Cooper, Amy Bloom and Armistead Maupin will find themselves at home in the pages of Little Reef, but the rich and varied landscape of the book should appeal to most.

Pair with: Two margaritas.

_______

Jimmy Newborg‘s fiction has appeared online in Little Fiction and drafthorse: a literary journal. His non-fiction has appeared in Nylon GUYS magazine. He holds an M.F.A. in Fiction from the Bennington College Writing Seminars. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Buzzed Books #7: Train Shots

31 Monday Mar 2014

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Buzzed Books, Mark Pursell, Train Shots, Vanessa Blakeslee

Buzzed Books #7 by Mark Pursell

Vanessa Blakeslee’s Train Shots

In “Princess of Pop”, the eighth of eleven stories that comprise Vanessa Blakeslee’s debut collectionTrain Shots, Blakeslee gives a voice to one of our most exposed yet tight-lipped pop culture titans: Britney Spears. In a gutsy move that could have easily backfired or lent itself to lazy satire, Blakeslee assumes the mantle of a Spears-esque pop sensation pacing the dimensions of her luxury hotel room, hemmed in physically and psychologically by the paparazzi, the suits she works for, her fame, and her own fears about being a woman and a mother. Blakeslee immerses us in the claustrophobia of the singer’s tightly-controlled world with sensitivity and an eye towards fairness, falling neither on the side of the tabloids who sensationalize and capitalize on the erratic behavior of celebrities nor on the side of apologists who paint spotlight seekers as victims of media run amok. It’s a remarkable story and, due to its conceit, the flashiest you’ll find in Train Shots—the other characters that populate the collection’s pages are people like you and me, fast food workers and lovelorn expatriates, troubled parents and clashing couples—but strangely enough, it’s this pseudo-Britney story that brings its more conventional cousins into sharper focus. The characters in Train Shots are all trapped to varying degrees, caught between choices, addictions, and threats over which the protagonists have little control. It’s easy to imagine a pop star bowing under the immeasurable financial and cultural pressures applied to her, but in the ten other stories Blakeslee shows that we are all bearing up under our own pressures—financial, cultural, and otherwise—and that feelings of paralysis are not merely the province of those under public scrutiny.

Consider the unnamed, second-person protagonist of “Clock In”—which imagines the wall-eyed stupor of a fast-food wage slave—or the young woman in “Don’t Forget the Beignets” who, faced with the arrest of her money-laundering boyfriend, must decide whether to stand by her man or cut him loose. The time-honored space between a rock and a hard place is a familiar habitat for Blakeslee’s characters, but she doesn’t let them off the hook, or try to comfort the reader with easy solutions or hollow optimism. A different writer tackling these same characters and situations might have produced work that erred on the side of nihilism, or, oppositely, attempted to address emotional entrapment through hamfisted catharsis or redemption. But in Train Shots, epiphanies are ephemeral and momentary, resolving like dust motes in sunlight only to slip out of view if you move in the slightest. The answers that the characters grasp for materialize but rarely and reluctantly stay put. Blakeslee delicately forges a path somewhere between these two poles, and in doing so succeeds in depicting human nature with as much “truth” as it is possible to arrive at.

The author’s prose goes a long way towards helping her achieve this effect. Her sentences unwind with a rangy grace, only stopping to call attention to themselves in quick imagistic bursts before comfortably settling themselves once more. Never is this more apparent than in the collection’s most memorable and successful story, “Welcome, Lost Dogs,” in which one of the aforementioned lovelorn expatriates, languishing in rural Costa Rica, attempts to hunt down her stolen dogs. The dusty, sun-blasted landscape rises up all around our protagonist in mirror of her growing desperation. The knife of an assailant glints cold and dangerous in the dawn. Meanwhile, within, the woman flutters between the past and the future, attempting to reconcile the imminent death of a former lover with her own ambivalence about what to do with herself or where to go now. She twists against her circumstances, caught on them as if by barbed wire, and Blakeslee follows the convoluted paths of her protagonist’s turmoil using the same line-by-line precision with which she etches the light and flavor of her settings.

This juxtaposition of external and internal conflicts is a well-used tool in any author’s box, but it’s easier said than done to pull off effectively, much less with aplomb. Blakeslee wisely avoids sentimental frippery and excessive figurative posturing when going down this route. Consider “The Sponge Diver”, where a sexually-anxious young woman finds herself confounded when a sanitary sponge refuses to dislodge from inside her. It’s a predicament equally tinged with humor and panic, but the most remarkable thing about it is that it plays out without the metaphorical heavy-handedness one might expect.

Perhaps that is the most remarkable thing, in the end, about Train Shots; that Blakeslee plumbs the deep waters of love, disconnection, and the purpose of life without succumbing to the weight of pretension. The title story, which concludes the collection, tackles a subject no less complex or overexposed than mortality; in it, a railroad engineer confronts his growing bewilderment after a young woman throws herself in front of his train. Deeply shaken and haunted by the memory of a previous, similar incident, the engineer loses himself in drink, capitalizing on the sympathy of college girls; at the bar, the staff pass around “train shots” whenever a locomotive goes rumbling past. Blakeslee doesn’t sledgehammer this conceit, which gives the haunting, melancholy nature of it room to breathe and take its own shape in the reader’s mind. There is something sadly human about throwing back an ounce of tequila as a train—that industrial age symbol of greed, progress, and all their attendant casualties—thunders by. It is both toast and resignation. Which, strangely enough, is an apt encapsulation of this artful, elegiac collection.

Pair with: tequila shots (of course).

___________

Mark Pursell (Episode 75) is a lifelong geek and lover of words. His publishing credits include Nimrod International Journal, The New Orleans Review, and The Florida Review, where he also served as poetry editor. His work can most recently be seen in the first volume of the 15 Views of Orlando anthology from Burrow Press. He currently teaches storytelling and narrative design for video games at Full Sail University in Winter Park, Florida.

Buzzed Books #6: Writing (Not-So-) Magical Realism

10 Tuesday Sep 2013

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Aimee Bender, Alise Hamilton, Buzzed Books, The Color Master: Stories

Buzzed Books #6 by Alise Hamilton

Writing (not-so)Magical Realism

Within these fifteen stories, a girl sews the stripes back onto tigers, a boy can’t recognize faces, a teacher attempts to explain the origins of the universe, and mysterious, yet ordinary, objects keep appearing in one American family’s home. Aimee Bender is well known as a fabulist, magic realist writer and one of the masters of the short story form. The Color Master is Aimee Bender doing what Aimee Bender does best.

There seems to me to be less world creating in this collection than in some of her earlier work. Instead, the stories are often presented with individual magical elements attributed to particular characters (who are living in the world as we know it), more Bender’s bestselling novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. In fact, a few stories in the collection—“Lemonade,” “The Red Ribbon,” and “On a Saturday Afternoon”—while quirky, lack any traditional fantastic elements at all. Yet, like Bender’s strictly surrealist fiction, these stories are told in a style often attributed to fairy tales. The plotting is face-paced and the language is matter-of-fact, but the overall effect of the stories is that they are weighty and important; despite their quirks, Bender’s stories feel classic.

“Origin Lessons,” is a four-page story told in the plural first person from a group of school children eager to know how it all began, origins of life and the beginning of the universe. The story, again, is not does not literally contain “magic,” but the telling is whimsical and elements of space—its expanding and accelerating, matter and radiation—so foreign to the students it may as well be spells and wizards. In the story, the students struggle to comprehend the rules of the universe by comparing them to familiar images and symbols: suitcases and brides. The story, then, becomes a larger metaphor for storytelling itself. Aren’t writers all trying to find the familiar images with which to express love, grief, desire…all the greater elements of life? Isn’t our limited language at once frustrating and beautiful?

Pair with: 95 beer steins at the ogre tavern

Find THE COLOR MASTER now at your local independent bookstore or buy online at Powells.com.

___________

Alise Hamilton

Alise Hamilton (Episode 7, essay) earned her MFA from Lesley University and holds a BFA in creative writing, literature, and publishing from Emerson College. Her short fiction appeared in the Francesca Lia Block-edited anthology Love Magick.

Buzzed Books #5: Taking Setting off the Sidelines

03 Tuesday Sep 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books, Recommendation

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Alise Hamilton, Buzzed Books, Hawaii, Kristiana Kahakauwila, Setting, This is Paradise

Buzzed Books #5 by Alise Hamilton

Taking Setting off the Sidelines

Many authors, from James Joyce to Annie Proulx, have used place as a device for linking stories. Debut author Kristiana Kahakauwila follows in that tradition with six stories set across the islands of Hawai’i in her new collection, This is Paradise.

This is Paradise as a collection explores, as you may expect, themes of home, tourism, race, authenticity, and “outsiders vs. insiders” (both within the context of a community and individual families). All of these issues spring from a natural tension built into the setting.

Kahakauwila utilizes setting in her stories in every possible way. Maui, Oahu, and Kaua’i are as layered and complex as the most important characters. And characters respond to their surroundings by either like feeling that they deeply belong, or that they never will. In “Wanle,” the main character is woman who has followed her father’s path of cockfighting. Like her father, murdered years ago, she raises, trains, and fights her birds with great dedication. Like her father, she speaks pidgin. Her motivation comes from notions of both honor and revenge, notions tied strongly to heritage and place. To understand this character, it is critical that we, the reader, understand where she is from. And when her lover asks her to give up cockfighting, corrects her English and asks her to speak differently, “properly,” the reader needs to understand the importance, not just of family, but also of home and place to understand what this character’s lover is really asking her to give up.

The title story is told in a wonderfully original and complex structure: in the plural first person from a variety of groups—young surfers, hotel workers, and businesswomen heading home from work as they independently observe and cross paths with a tragic young tourist. The three groups allows the reader to see Waikiki through three distinct points of view, and the beautiful beachfront neighborhood transforms from a daytime oasis, to an everyday place of business and commerce, to a place with a dark nightlife, and finally back again. In the end, of course, Waikiki is not simply one of these places, but all of them at once—and often at odds with itself.

Setting does not just offer characterization and put our characters feet on Earth, it can work to raise the stakes. Setting, a story element too often ignored, can serve as the central conflict.

No matter where the story is set, I’m excited to read whatever Kahakauwila has in store for readers next.

Pair with: the Crown Royal found in Junior’s refrigerator

Find THIS IS PARADISE now at your local independent bookstore or buy online at Powells.com.

___________

Alise Hamilton

Buzzed Books #4: Why all Writers Should be Paying Attention to YA

27 Tuesday Aug 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books, Recommendation, Young Adult

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Alise Hamilton, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, Buzzed Books, Young Adult

Buzzed Books #4 by Alise Hamilton

Why all Writers Should be Paying Attention to Young Adult Literature

I first took note of Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe during the ALA awards last winter, when it won the Pura Belpre Award, the Stonewall Book Award and was named as a Printz Honor Book. I have been trying to inject more young adult literature into my reading—a good part due to the direction of my latest manuscript—but also because of the general excitement surrounding the genre. During my tenure as an independent bookseller, I saw YA as a continually growing genre—both in the store, and as publishers expanded, or developed, their YA imprints. With YA, I witnessed reluctant readers, both young and old, engaged with fiction, at the same time I was observing regular readers enthusiastically consuming YA titles. More so, I have been inspired by authors such as Kelly Link, Jack Gantos, Sherman Alexie, Laurie Halse Anderson, M.T. Anderson, and Chris Lynch (to only name a few) as they push the limits of genre, delve, without fear or hesitation into difficult and dark topics, and stay true (or perhaps finally return) to the cornerstone of fiction: story.

Yet, despite all this excitement, there seems to exist a general notion that young adult literature lacks substance, or merit on a prose level, and I suspect this comes from the enormous popularity (and promotion) of a handful of “blockbuster” titles: from The Hunger Games, to Twilight, to Pretty Little Liars. Books like these, big screen ready and seemingly published with pre-conceived tie-in merchandising, are not indicative of the genre as a whole. (This is not, of course, to malign the many wonderful books that find a larger audience through film or television or to suggest they are inherently inferior to other, perhaps more obscure, literary titles.)

What I mean to say it that Bejamin Alire Saenz’s award winning Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is not “just” a fantastic YA novel, it is a fantastic novel. Ari and Dante, the novel’s young protagonists, are two very different, but compatible, outsiders who find a strong friendship in one another. As characters they are undeniably likeable—two, self-proclaimed “nice guys”—a story-telling element that is deceivingly difficult to pull off. They each come from in-tact, nuclear families, and while the parents, especially Ari’s, are flawed, they are engaged and deeply loving. In this way, Saenz did not allow himself any “tricks.” Aristotle and Dante…is a straightforward love-slash-coming-of-age story, which utilizes impeccable characterization, fine pacing, and accessible (while interesting) prose that any writing student would do well to pay attention to, or enjoy, simply, as pleasure reading.

That said, I do think that setting the book in the late 1980s is something of a cheap trick to avoid addressing new communication technologies such as text messaging, emails, facebook or twitter—especially as these mediums pertain to teenagers. While it could be argued that setting the novel in the 80s raises the stakes on the topic of homosexuality, it is not beyond reason to think teens in the last twenty years have an equally difficult time coming out, as is presented in the book.

Which is to say, too, that the book is relatable—and not only for gay teens, although I do imagine a book like this can—and surely has—offer a considerable amount of comfort to a young person struggling with his sexuality. And isn’t comfort an important aspect of literature, especially young adult literature? Stories don’t need to be comforting to be worthwhile—but is there such a thing as a book-lover who has never sought comfort in his favorite novel or poem?

What Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe delivers is what readers most often crave: beautiful sentences, characters to root for, and a story that keeps you turning the page.

Pair with: your first beer

Find ARISTOTLE AND DANTE DISCOVER THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE now at your local independent bookseller or buy online at Powells.com.

___________

Alise Hamilton

Versify #1: Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet

06 Tuesday Aug 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Poetry, Recommendation, Versify

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Monica Wendel, Poetry, Recommendation, Versify

Versify #1 by Monica Wendel

In Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet (Alice James Books, 2005) some people don’t die, exactly; they are evaporated, or disappear as if they never existed, moving not from living to not-living but from something to nothing “as if even the idea of them were being / destroyed, stripped of form.”

For this blog, I’ve decided to read a book of poems a week, and hopefully you, dear reader, will guilt me past procrastination into territories both unknown and familiar. This territory was decidedly unfamiliar. Turner served for seven years in the US Army, and as the New York Times Book Review described Here, Bullet, “Turner has sent back a dispatch from a place arguably more incomprehensible than the moon – the war in Iraq.” As the Long Island Rail Road train I was riding passed under grey skies, from the suburbs to Queens to downtown Brooklyn, Turner’s words became a reminder that we are still at war (Elsbeth Pancrazi has a great poem about the far-awayness of war over at H_NGM_N) and those words also served as an exercise in naming and thereby imaging and humanizing (for example, Aracelis Girmay’s “Arroz Poetica”).

Turner is not the first to write about war, or specifically, this war. But perhaps the strength of this book is best understood in his own words:

Still hanging in the air over Ashur Square,

the telephone line snapped in two, crackling

a strange incantation the dead hear

as they wander confused amongst one another,

learning each other’s names …

(from “2000 lbs.”)

… Late at night

when gunfire frightens them both,

Habib cries for his father, who tells him

It’s just the drums, a new music,

and the tracery of lights on the sky

he retraces on the ceiling, showing the boy

how each bright star travels …

(from “The Al Harisma Weapons Market”)

The book ends with “dreams burn[ing] in the oilfields of night.” And so, readers: which book of poems should I read next? What collection (full-length or chapbook) burns in your mind like the strange dreams of malaria pills?

___________

Monica Wendel (Episode 5, interview; Episode 49, interview; Episode 57, poetry) is the author of No Apocalypse. She is a visiting instructor of English at St. Thomas Aquinas College. Her poetry has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Forklift Ohio, Nimrod, Spoon River Poetry Review, and other journals. A graduate of NYU’s MFA in creative writing program, she is the recipient of both Goldwater and Starworks teaching fellowships, and has taught creative writing at Goldwater Hospital, NYU, and St. Mary’s Health Care Center for Kids.

Buzzed Books #1: Mastering the Dinner Party, Dialogue, and First Person Narrators

06 Tuesday Aug 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books, Craft of Fiction Writing, Drinking, Recommendation

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Alise Hamilton, Craft of Writing, Creative Writing, Literature

Buzzed Books #1 by Alise Hamilton

Mastering the Dinner Party, Dialogue, and First Person Narrators

Recommendation: Bobcat And Other Stories by Rebecca Lee

Bobcat is a collection of seven short stories so rich and expansive they leave the reader walks away feeling she has read seven novels. Rebecca Lee manages to fit an amazing scope in each story, both through breadth of time and depth of character. Such an ability has earned her (rightful) comparisons to Alice Munro, but I would argue there are stronger similarities to short-story writer Amy Hempel. It is not just Lee’s inclination to use first person (each story in Bobcat is presented in first person, and the vast majority of stories throughout Hempel’s career are written in first person point-of-view as well), but her ability to reveal a kind of truth. Truth with a capital “T.” The undeniable yet often ignored observations of the little things that make us human.

Lee is not afraid to allow her characters to be intelligent—the stories are full of lawyers, professors, writers, architects and students. And since each story is presented through a first-person narrator, one would be correct in assuming the stories are, in fact, smart. This is not to say the work is littered with little-known literary allusions, is unnecessarily convoluted, or is held down by a kind of high-brow, academic snobbery. No, the stories here are both intelligent and accessible. Lee respects her characters (and therefore, her readers) enough to give them actual, working brains.

The collection opens and closes with two very different stories, each revolving around dinner parties. Lee deftly handles multiple characters in the same room, so that the reader is never confused about keeping everyone at the table straight—a feat in itself. Her dialogue is superb. Take these lines, from the title story:

“We’re not prepared at all. We just found out yesterday at our Lamaze class that we’re supposed to have a theme for our nursery.”

“Theme?” Lizbet said. “What do you mean, theme? Like man vs. nature?”

“How about alienation in the technological age?” Ray said.
“Hollywood under McCarthy?”

“It’s going to be Winnie the Pooh,” John said, which was true. Everyone seemed a bit dejected that John was closing down the joke so early, but he made a recovery. “Winnie the Pooh and the Reconstructed South,” he said.

These are not simply stories about people sitting around and talking, although sitting and talking do occur, it is what is brewing and bubbling under the surface—what people don’t say, lies they tell each other and themselves, incorrect assumptions, deep desires, fears and regrets—which are the meat of the stories in Bobcat.

In “Fialta,” a famous and celebrated architect describes what building “ought” to be composed of: “Even the simplest buildings, he said, ought to be productions of the imagination that attempt to describe and define life on earth, which of course is an overwhelming mix of stability and desire, fulfillment and longing, time and eternity.”

It is these characteristics precisely that make Bobcat the beautiful book it is.

To be paired with: Sugar Gin

Find BOBCAT now at your local independent bookseller or purchase at Powells.com.

___________

Alise Hamilton

Alise Hamilton earned her MFA from Lesley University and holds a BFA in creative writing, literature, and publishing from Emerson College. Her short fiction appeared in the Francesca Lia Block-edited anthology Love Magick.

Episode 50: David Sedaris

25 Saturday May 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Bloomsday, David Sedaris, Episode, Recommendation

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Craft of Writing, David Sedaris, Fables, Humor, Memoir, Miami Book Fair International, Writing Podcast

Episode 50 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

On this week’s show, I talk to the memoir writer David Sedaris,

plus Pamela Skjolsvik discusses David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day,

and Adriana Lecuona writes about Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Those Who Leave Omelas.”

Texts Discussed

Notes

David’s inscription in my copy of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.

One of Ian Falconer’s illustrations from Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk.

Episode 50 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.