Blind Date

I've rejected a lot of submissions to Storyglossia with the comment that punchline-style endings—where the last sentence reverses or clarifies everything that came before—don't work for me. One of my editorial biases. It's not the reversals I'm against, just the execution. The way to pull off such reversals is shown brilliantly by Steve Almond in his story "A Happy Dream" from failbetter and included in his most recent story collection The Evil B. B. Chow.

Take the story apart and discover for yourself how Almond times and executes his reversal—you'll learn more from that exercise than from me stepping you through it. I'll just note that it doesn't come in the last sentence and that there's more happening in the story than the reversal.

The other thing I like about this story is Almond's use of Fitzgerald's dictum that character = action. This is how we meet Kate:

. . . when he saw a woman zip across the street on a ten-speed bike. This was crazy. It was early February, the roads were still layered with dirty snow. The woman bonked into a parking meter, locked the bike . . .

And what does Henry do when she asks if he's Michael?

Henry smiled shyly. "Call me Mike," he said.

Essential qualities of character established economically. No big scenes or long descriptions needed.

Relative to Henry's lie—besides that he didn't have to go to Vegas to use this strategy—Almond doesn't leave it as a black hole sucking the life out of the story. He provides context, links it to motivation, so that this action reaches beyond the moment. As I've discussed numerous times regarding slice-of-life stories, this context expands the story. Almond is a master of this technique. For more on this topic, check out my discussion of his stories The Cool Cat and Pornography.

No fixed Abode

Matt Thorne's story "Inside Out" from issue 43 of Scarecrow is one of those stories that has really snuck up on me. I liked it when I first read it, but two weeks later I find it still popping into my thoughts. The narrator, Amanda—"I don't like my name, and never answer to Mandy"—reminds me a bit of the flat yet scintillating narrator of one of my favorite novels: Alan Warner's Morvern Callar (the movie was pretty wild, too). Part of what gives this story its drive is what drives horror movies: while reading I yell out "Don't go out with him!," "Don't move in with him!," "Don't let him take pictures of you naked!," but she does all of those things. Despite the flat Morvern-ish narrative, this story drips with desperate vulnerability, and that is what has stayed with me beyond the first reading. Thorne achieves that narrative tone via intimate details delivered off-hand, as if they meant nothing to the narrator, but of course they do, which is why she tells the story; to make sense of the experience.

Be sure to check out Thorne's novel Cherry which was long-listed for the 2004 Booker Prize.

   

Welcome to the Edge

Scarecrow, edited by Lee Rourke, is one of those zines—another is The Cafe Irreal— that I read, but rarely blog on the stories because they are not as easily discussed from a craft perspective as the MFA work-shopped output found in most American (especially the .edu supported) literary journals. (I could easily get lost in a digression here. . . ) What I like about the UK-based Scarecrow is exactly that divergence from the troubling and stultifying group-think across the pond. The site is a gold-mine of comparative-literature links; and American readers will find links to all the Yank alt-gods (Acker, Bukowski, etc.) and their progeny. The fiction is edgy and challenging, sometimes crass and crude, and out of the MFA-box. Poetry, reviews, commentary, pictures, and deep archives round out the site. Scarecrow 43 features fiction by: Matt Thorne, Joshua Cohen, Ellis Sharp, Heidi James, Henry Baum (also upcoming in Storyglossia 14), Robert Woodard, Bob Short, Anne Booty, Max Dunbar, Steve Vermillion, Glenn Fisher, Fern Bryant, and some guy named McDermott.

All the Naughty Bits

Steve Almond was in town (Seattle) today with Julianna Baggott to wrap up the reading tour for their novel Which Brings Me to You. And, yes, Steve read all the naughty bits. Great stuff, so check out the novel if you haven't already. The schedule of their upcoming readings is on their websites.

I have a couple Almond stories on the blog schedule; look for them in the next week or so. And The Evil B. B. Chow is now out in paperback with a cool cover.