Here I get the chance to talk to Charles Harper Webb about his latest book, What Things Are Made Of (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013). The conversation takes place mostly during April over email.

Charles Harper Webb is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Reading The Water (Northeastern, 1997), Liver (University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), Tulip Farms and Leper Colonies (BOA Editions Ltd, 2001), Hot Popsicles (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), Amplified Dog (Red Hen Press, 2006), and Shadow Ball (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). His poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize, and Poets of the New Century. Webb has received the Morse Prize, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Pollak Prize, and Saltman Prize, as well as a Whiting Writer’s Award and a Guggenheim fellowship. He is professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, and teaches in the MFA in creative writing program there.

One of the first things that strikes me about What Things Are Made Of is the predominance of the first person. What are some of your thoughts about this point of view? What’s gained? What are some of the drawbacks, if any? 

I know that some poets avoid the first person for a number of reasons, including that it can seem self-involved and egotistical. If a writer truly is truly self-involved and egotistical, though, I don’t think that fact can be disguised simply by writing in third person, or trying to write “objectively” in no person at all.

My intent in writing is to communicate with my audience in the most intimate, direct, and believable way that I can. I think that first person is the most intimate point of view, and carries, potentially, the highest credibility. “I was there. I saw that.” First person is often the most efficient way to write, as well, involving the least confusion of pronouns and antecedents.

Writing in first person is almost always the best way for me to inhabit a character. I draft nearly every poem in first person, even if the speaker is a serial killer and a sadist (which, for the record, I am not), or lived hundreds of years ago, which I also did not. There may be good reasons for me to switch from first person after the first draft is written; but if there are not, I usually leave the poem in first.

Good readers understand that the first person “I” is no more or less a fiction than the third person “he” or “she,” and does not mean that I-the-speaker am equivalent to I-the-writer, or that everything related actually happened to me. If my poems speak to the human condition, and not just my particular one, I believe that the reader will participate in the poem as fully, and perhaps more fully, than if I wrote from some other point of view. If my poems do not speak to the human condition, only my mother will be interested, anyway.

One of the things that’s so fascinating about a work of art (and the poems in this book demonstrate this consistently) is the move from intimate detail to an insight into something large like “the human condition.” While the poems don’t shrink from the bleaker side of human experience, one of the things I’m most surprised by is the sense of gratitude I find here. I’m thinking of “At Lamaze” and “The Best Moment of My Life” in particular. What part does gratitude play in your work?

Ed Hirsch, in his preface to my book Reading the Water, called me, among other things, “a poet of praise.” I think that’s true. One of the things that moves me to write is the sheer amazingness of the world and being alive in it. Life is so compellingly wonderful and strange. The odds against any one of us being here are beyond astronomical. We’ve lucked into the chance to experience consciousness. Why not celebrate the fact, and be grateful?

Life is also, of course, nasty, brutal and (even at 100 years) short, not to mention frequently horrible, disgusting, unjust, tedious, and always tragic in the end. But that just makes it more important to be grateful when, where, and about what we can. The “default” position for any moderately intelligent person over the age of about 10 is depression and anger. Adolescents “discover” hypocrisy, unfairness, and heartbreak, and believe that expressing sadness and outrage at these things makes them special. But it takes no unusual intelligence/insight/imagination/awareness to be sad or outraged. Since good poetry should, I think, display unusual intelligence/insight/imagination/awareness, I don’t think that just being bummed out warrants a poem. Talk about “Been there, done that.”

My awareness of the world can’t support a Candide-like optimism, or the sunny disposition of a Polyanna, but I find the pursuit of the positive to be more challenging and more worthy than wallowing in the negative. (Humor, by the way, is an enormous positive—especially in the face of despair.) In “At Lamaze,” the speaker ends by celebrating things that “evolved” people are supposed to despise. He even celebrates the act of complaining. So yes, gratitude plays a big part in my work. I hope it always will.

I’m glad you bring up humor. It seems kind of rare to find it done well in a poem. What Things are Made Of is full of various kinds of humor that work. The poems “Nostalgia’s Not What It Used to Be” and “Jackass: The Viewer” both find the humorous in tension with a kind of “official” language or culture. Do you find humor difficult to write?

I’m glad that the humor in What Things…works for you. Writing well is always hard; but I don’t find humor harder to write than seriousness. It would be hard for me to write without humor. It seems so fundamental to human consciousness—certainly to mine—that to lose it would reduce me to the proverbial one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.

I’ve always seen the world through humorous lenses. One reason, I’m sure, is that humor is a way to gain a brief ascendance over the tragic, oppressive, irritating, and awful. It’s a way to strike back against the ridiculous or the More Powerful. Another reason is that humor makes the world a more interesting and entertaining place—not to mention that laughter is one of the great pleasures of being human. Since I want my poems to give pleasure, I like it when humor appears. I rarely start out trying to be funny; I write what I see through my particular lenses, and sometimes what comes out is funny. 

How do you see your work participating in its cultural context? What I mean is that in both the poems mentioned (and in “Liar’s Ball”) there’s a sense that humor can assert personal freedom when aspects of the culture at large are repressive. I was wondering if you see your work in these terms—as making a claim for freedom.

I absolutely see my poems as making a claim for freedom, humor being one way to express and achieve that freedom. (If we can’t be free when writing in a non-commercial form like poetry, when can we be?)

I love humor’s subversive quality. When any sacred cow remains un-tipped, I think artists aren’t doing their job. It seems to me, too, that humor speaks to many of the “post-modern issues” that avant-garde poetry works so hard to address, but humor does it in a more readable and entertaining way.

A lot of American poets, young and old, seem virtually seminarian in their wish to be “good.” I miss the Id in their poems. I miss what Robert Bly calls “wildness.” Humor is great way to express wildness. I love the Monty Python sketch where morticians convince a man that they should cook and eat his deceased mum. I love the scene in The Trial where K gets a look at his judge’s law books, and finds one to be a pornographic novel, and the other to contain nude pictures too poorly drawn even to be good pornography. I feel closer in spirit to Monty Python and Kafka than to many of America’s most respected poets, who rarely if ever take real risks or say anything truly surprising, dangerous—or funny.

Every day, Law and Government prove themselves at least as inadequate as religion to deal effectively with the modern world. We’re surrounded by crassness, greed, self-satisfied stupidity, and idiotic rules, all trying to imprison our spirits and control our lives. The brilliant and gifted among us, of which there are many, are all too often either rendered powerless by the non-brilliant and non-gifted, or find ways to grab a good life for themselves, and drop out of the fray.

What can we do about these facts, and our own impotence to change much of anything large-scale? We can point out absurdities. And, if we have the courage to be free in our own minds (as the father in “Liar’s Ball” advises his son to be), we can laugh.

I love it when a work of art can surprise with its absurdity or “wildness.” You mention Kafka and Monty Python. What poems do you turn to for this sense of the wild?

The first poem I read that truly reveled in the wild was “Howl.” It led me to “America,” and Corso’s “Marriage,” which also had Ginsberg’s wild feel—the sense that no holds were barred—that anything could happen, even something shocking, antisocial, dangerous. I was in high school, playing in rock bands, and those poems felt very close to rock-and-roll. A couple of years later, I encountered Edward Field’s “The Bride of Frankenstein,” Ron Koertge’s “Lilith,” Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” and—more formal, but still wild—Dylan Thomas’ “Lament.” James Tate, Russell Edson, Thomas Lux, Tony Hoagland, and Dean Young are a few of the poets I turn to for a wildness fix today.

Yes! I think it was Edson who said in an interview “Poetry is uncomfortable in language.” This seems to me, in one sense, to be getting to a crucial interaction between poetry and music. The power of music figures heavily in many of the poems in your book. I’m thinking especially of the poem “Nuh-Nuh-Nuh-Nuh-Nuh-Nuh-Nuh-Nuh-Nuh, Dah-Dah-Dah! Doesn’t Look Like Much in Print.” There’s a real sense of the conjunction and the conflict between the linguistic and the non-linguistic. As a writer and a musician, how would you describe the interaction of these endeavors?

Music and poetry have both had a huge impact on my life; and music has had a huge impact on my poetry. I think, though, that there is a lot of confusion about the relationship between music and poetry.

Music and poetry are often assumed to be the same, or close to it. This misconception holds just enough truth to keep it floating. (Plus, as “all art aspires to the condition of music,” most poets aspire to the condition of musicians.) It’s true that the word lyric is used for both poetry and song, and that both poetry and music count “beats.” Both arts also involve using sound effectively. But the sound-resources they deploy are very different. Poetry in English uses the rhythm and sound of words, but not pitch (to any major degree), and certainly not the range of rhythms and dynamics that music has at its disposal. Metered poetry is counted differently from music, too. The “music” of poetry is, in fact, best understood as a metaphor.

Song lyrics may be important to the overall impact of a song, or they may be incidental. In either case, they’re energized by the enormous sonic power of music, which plays on the emotions more directly and intensely than any other art. A song—especially a rock song—can have inane lyrics, and still be a terrific song. The words in poems, though, stand alone. If any heavy emotional/artistic lifting gets done, the words have to do it by themselves.

I’ve played music in front of thousands, and know first hand the handicaps under which poetry labors, by comparison. “Nuh-nuh-nuh…” acknowledges and tries to have fun with the fact that, for pure excitement and unmediated emotional wallop, words fall short of what music can do. On the other hand, when it comes to taking us deep into the human mind—its thoughts, feelings, and psychology—words have the edge. And good poems—powered by sound and strong imagery—can hit hard too, as “Nuh-nuh-nuh,” even as it pleads inadequacy, tries to do.

***

You can find some of Nathan Moore‘s work at Heavy Feather Review, Pudding Magazine, Everyday Genius, Menacing Hedge, and Fleeting Magazine. He posts paintings and other things at disorder1313.wordpress.com.

The Year of the Rooster, by Noah Eli Gordon. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press. 144 pages. $18.00, paper.

Noah Eli Gordon’s newest collection, The Year of The Rooster is like a hyper-intellectual conversation in the midst of a total rager. It’s easy to get lost, but that’s half the fun. Especially as these poems huck themselves around from existential doubt to post-modern denial, especially with this rooster running around giving everyone a hard time.

The book begins with “Diminishing Returns,” a section of poems decaying from sonnet to nothingness. In sonnet form, and in the first few variations, Gordon’s rhetorical contract reveals itself, the poems bouncing from Romantic-era picturesque to Camusian negation. The sky loiters around, waiting to become a topic of argument. The Earth is literally battened down in anticipation of newfangled discoveries. As we, alongside the speaker, posture on the “timeless, unmoving, & immutable, an arrow passes our illusion.” Here, these little worlds are allowed ample room for development and so the forays into the anti-logical read as sanctioned disavowals. But as the poems dwindle, the contrast between the competing aesthetics becomes starker. For my part, the intuitive logic connecting these visions of the world can seem harder to parse as the poems dwindle (though my sensibility has always preferred the maximalist). Gordon, in my opinion, flourishes where he approaches the maximal, and it seems that these diminishing returns are mainly a sort of anticipatory stage dressing for the Rooster’s big (BIG) premiere. As the poems diminish, so too does our footing seem to slip, until we’re left with “A Subjective Matter,” a single-lined death knell for personal nostalgia that keeps tolling in your head, even as you dig into the next section, and the Rooster (who goes variously by “he,” “she,” Roo” throughout the poem) begins to rise for its day.

Gordon calls the Rooster “a trope,” but it seems also to be partly a rhetorical foil—especially, I suspect, when the goal is to avoid outright endorsement of an idea. “The Year of The Rooster,” delights in washing its reader in a surf of competing intellectual currents. On one page, it can ask, “[w]ho’d want to move from the particular?” while on another, it will seemingly reject any value for particularity, as when a nameless presence, a “he or she / or me says / to no one / in particular” that “[s]ense is some- / thing else you make willingly.”

In terms of “intellectual current,” Roo often seems to play l’enfant terrible. Like a cartoon troublemaker, he hops around a scenic backdrop, lighting tiny hotfoot fires in our critical ideals—here with a sonnet made exclusively of crowing; there with a “teen rebel” standby against adopted assumption:

[h]e doesn’t

believe

in the farm

that he’s sure

he must have

thought into

being

but believes

in the thought

being

farm-like

& thinks

everything else

unnecessary.

This is a poem that moves like the devil, though. And so rarely do we find out whether these blazes are extinguished, or whether they take off. Still, “The Year of The Rooster” is building toward some new terrain, built up almost impressionistically, like the worlds of Borges or Simic, so that we can’t quite figure out where the walls and doors are, but we have a pretty good sense of the rules. It is a world where “[t]he first painting / you’d ever done / is the best you’ll do / not because you didn’t / know what it was / that you were doing / but because you didn’t / know what it was / that you weren’t,” where, “for the rest of your life / you get to be an adult / trying to reconstitute / the age of the egg,” and where “[y]ou don’t plunge headfirst into the pool / First, you make sure someone’s there to see it happen.” It’s a world where every action is bristling with both the ironic and the painfully serious. Does a cannonball, alone in the pool even create a splash? We’re asked to believe, simultaneously, that it does and it doesn’t. That to “make sure someone’s there to see it happen” is both a real necessity and a self-important ideal. “It’s a deafening sound drives through / sincerity,” Gordon says, and it’s true: there’s a feeling of post-modern “Importance” to every line, even in those places where the inquisitions begin to get almost ambient (“or is it / the light’s / half solicited / by his simple rhetoric?”).

It’s hard to see this project as unrelated to “capital T Theory,” but thank God for Gordon’s acute humor, or it might risk being as unnervingly insular as those other works so often tend to be. When we emerge from this bizarro world of the Rooster with our notions of everything—from gender and its performative aspects to the universality of relations—completely restored to question marks, we’re led by the first few, zig-zagging pages of “The Next Year: Did You Drop This Word” into another treatise on nostalgia, this one in essay format, invoking Ashbery’s Three Poems with its luridly transient train of thought.

“Returning Diminishments” ends the book with a sort of completist symmetry, reversing the first section’s mission, now building from a single line back to a sonnet, the ultimate poem taking its images and devolving them into nothing but actual imagination figments. “Reduce the lizard to a thought, / the flag to a thread, & sun to a smear of yellow inside the flower. / The rock is already a reduction.”

Our overall sense of the speaker is something sort of contemporarily yogic: the anodyne jargon of the theorist bolstered and simultaneously rejected by the ultra-talk sincerity. Even when Gordon dives into anxiety, it seems brief and vaguely sunny. He’ll call out a fraudulent rhetorical “you,” with “your mouth salvaging prude armor of a pride encased by lesser speech with louder reach,” before undercutting it with instances of diminishing severity: “You & Roo’s collaborative poem / on the ills of capital / You & Roo’s condemnation of nudity / with all clothes removed.” This is just one of the pervasive (and oft-needed) reminders in Year of The Rooster about just how deadly serious and complex everything is, and how the only way to even approach a successful navigation is with a well-tuned sense of humor.

The Year of the Rooster at Amazon.com.
The Year of the Roster at Ahsahta Press.

***

Joshua Kleinberg lives in Ohio.

Byzantium, by Ben Stroud. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, forthcoming. 192 pages. $15.00, paper.

I was kind of stunned when I opened Ben Stroud’s Byzantium for the first time to discover that I would be reading a story about a 28-year-old shut-in with a withered hand who lived during Heraclius’ reign over the Byzantine Empire. I don’t read much historical fiction, it’s true, but that doesn’t mean I’m completely unaware it exists. You could say I have a certain bias against it, in that whenever it comes to selecting something from the bookshelf, my eyes tend to glide over the historical fiction offerings without even registering their titles. But that’s also not to say that whenever I do happen to be reading historical fiction, I don’t find myself enjoying it, because often I do. I suppose I detected an audacity, and it was the audacity that surprised me: Stroud was going to try to bring the Byzantine Empire to life within the spatial ‘constraints’ of a short story, and on top of that attempt to weave a completely engrossing, suspenseful tale of a young recluse tasked with gelding a monk, for a reader with a pitifully deplete historical background.

Part of the complete pleasure and brilliance in Byzantium is the consistent level of adventurousness in the choices of settings and characters that Stroud makes. That it’s (almost) a disappointment when Stroud decides to tell stories with contemporary settings about characters whom I’ve more or less met in my actual life, speaks to the vivid, addictive immersion throughout the rest of the book.

I would expect a less skilled writer to either a) not attempt such a feat at all, or b) approach the subject matter with an overwrought, and therefore false (and therefore ruinous), style. Stroud’s major accomplishment (well, one of many) is how his unassuming language is immediately recognizable to any reader. The effect of transportation is instantaneous. See how Stroud brings to life Heraclius’ legendary Chamber of the Golden Meadow so that it just seems like another room:

 The room glittered with gold. A stream ran through its middle, bounded by golden shrubs hung with carnelian fruits, silver briars hooked with thorns. High green trees of mosaic climbed the walls to the ceiling, where light fell from shafts and a sun glided on a circuit. In the center of the ceiling’s vault, God stared down, His hair flowing, His eyes gleaming in angry judgment.

What is particularly striking about this description, to me, are how there are certainly expected phrases here—“glittered with gold,” “light fell from shafts”—and yet these expected phrases, (some might even call them clichés,) add to the immersion. Yes, I’ve seen gold glitter, at least in books, and I’ve seen shafts of light, but I have never seen the Chamber of the Golden Meadow, about as foreign a room as I could possibly imagine, and with such an unexpected clarity and factuality until now, thanks to these phrases. It seems like a significant achievement in how this immersion remains consistent throughout the stories, and with settings and time periods as varied as ancient Byzantine, nineteenth century Havana, sixteenth century Mexico, and contemporary Texas (just to name a few), allows the reader to switch from one time period to another without ever feeling disoriented. Besides, the immersion that Stroud creates through this deceptively obvious language is the key to the profound morality of these stories since, without feeling like we can see the Chamber of the Golden Meadow as clearly as Eusebios, how can we connect with his moral struggle and its implications for us as readers?

I mentioned earlier that the more contemporary stories could be disappointing, only in that, after reading about a private investigator in slave-labored Havana or about an explorer searching for silver mines as an assignment from the Royal Audiencia, a story about an existentially lost American academic in Germany can seem kind of quaint, lacking imagination and adventure. But the mix of historic and contemporary settings and characters lends to how Stroud track’s morality through history. It may be difficult for some readers to empathize with the moral implications in missions such as severing a monk’s testicles or feeding the troops of a separatist pre-Civil War American colonel, but when those same missions are compared to, say, delivering shingles to roofers in East Texas or sleeping with a war widow in contemporary Germany while estranged from one’s wife still living in the States, it becomes much clearer to contemporary readers how the choices we make are infused with historical significance.

Stroud’s characters wrestle with issues of power and reputation: most of them are prompted to do things they don’t really want to do for fear of losing favor with those in power—emperors, viceroys, generals, and businessmen. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, most of these stories end on unrepentant notes, with the characters morally compromised in one way or another. To be sure, Stroud is making a large claim about history here, about how the decisions that people make, however historically significant or deeply personal, create the unrepentant historical narrative as we know it. Not to mention it’s difficult to read one monk’s disparaging of Constantinople as a “pit of sin” borne from that city’s material comforts in “Byzantium” without considering it, at least in part, an indictment of the spiritual emptiness in American consumer culture. It’s an even spookier condemnation when another monk observes that Heraclius “is a blind beast, thinking ever trembling leaf the read of a hunter, and he feels not the world shifting beneath him.” How can we ignore history when these same sins and fears trouble us still? Can we not see that the same lack of repentance seen throughout these stories, whether ancient or contemporary, implicates us in our historical moment just the same?

Putting aside these significant issues of historical shame, it’s perhaps most important to note that Byzantium is simply chockfull of excitement. These aren’t highly mannered domestic short stories (well, maybe one is), but rather yarns, tales, and moral quests driven by genre (mystery, science fiction, crime, even fantasy to a small degree) and studded with perfect totems of significance—a withered hand, Mountain Dew, meat biscuits, the severed head of a slave. Combine these profound moral issues with the one-hundred-percent absolute joy of reading these stories, and you have a fantastic debut collection of stories from a deeply feeling and purposeful writer.

Byzantium (soon) at Amazon.com.
Byzantium (soon) at Graywolf Press.

***

Michael Goroff lives in Columbus, Ohio. His reviews and interviews have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Southeast Review, Whiskey Island, and Barn Owl Review.

The Stone Thrower, by Adam Marek. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: ECW Press, 2013. 180 pages. $14.95, paper.

I recently went to the wedding of a friend I’ve had for over twenty years. Mostly I did the things I do with people I know and enjoy the company of, telling and listening to stories and generally trying to let worthwhile moments be themselves.

“My wife’s a shopaholic,” one of my friends who is a bit drunk tells me. He’s not doing a bad comedy routine and he’s not boring me with the minutiae of his days. All he’s trying to tell me it that his wife spends too much money on stuff they don’t need.

Later, around when I have to leave for work at the bar, he shows me the time on his phone. His background is a picture of his daughter, an inquisitive looking two-year-old with his eyebrows and cheeks. My other friends pull out their phones to look at the time and I see all of them are about the same: wives kissing daughters, little brothers holding littler sisters.

The background on my phone is a picture of a naked redheaded woman half-draped in an American flag. By saying this, I mean only to explain that my list of responsibilities runs short.

Before even reading Adam Marek’s short story collection The Stone Thrower­—a book that openly states its themes of parental protection and vulnerability right on the back cover—I began to worry that I would be slogging through a dozen or so stories written by someone who has been made soft and sentimental by the idea of what they do to nurture their offspring or, perhaps even worse, stories written by someone who has been made hard, writing for the aforementioned softies.

Thankfully, The Stone Thrower is none of that. In each story there’s a hint of unknown sacrifice that’s agreed to immediately and dealt with continually throughout. I’ve barely figured out what it means to be an adult, and I may never know what it means to be a parent, but in reading the stories I understood what it means to be ready to give up something for the goal of a greater safety. Finding out along with the characters what that greater safety may be is one of the many joys of the book.

Despite the complications the characters face, the prose itself and the narratives constructed are painlessly easy to digest and follow. Halfway through the book I realized how focused I became on the stories and not the sentences—certainly not my default. I love Barry Hannah and Amy Hempel and Gary Lutz to a point of absurdity, but Marek’s own focus on the story, the amplified simplicity of it all, is too beautiful to ignore. The fact that it became easier and easier to put faith in Marek as each line passed is a testament to his skill.

Even when the stories appear to be, at first glance, nothing more than silly—a boy’s electronic pet gets AIDS in “Tomagotchi” and orangutans are born and raised to do high-production manual labor in “An Industrial Evolution”—Marek is just too good to not let a resolution happen in a way that is both fittingly clever and wholly satisfying.

There’s a deep helplessness lingering in these stories. A growing boy deftly and subtly explains both saving baby chicks from choking on a beach with his father and the absence of his deceased mother in the minor heart-shattering opener “Fewer Things,” and from then on there’s nothing but vulnerability. There’s danger-through-improvisation and layers of protection, one person looking at an end and the other seeing only the path to the end.

Often, what can be done is not enough. The AIDS of the toy in “Tomagotchi” isn’t the only disease fought—in that story alone there’s the trouble of the child’s seizures hovering over everything, explaining youthful attachment and why the father didn’t just throw away the toy and buy a new one. “A Thousand Seams” finds a mother battling on behalf of her son’s mysteriousness, electrical illness and feeling not so much better about doing the right thing, the lack of joy in struggle and the complications that arise from a newfound lack of complications.

Closing story “Earthquakes” is the big finale and, despite being perhaps an awkward choice in reading due to its epistolary form, is perfect in sealing up the theme. The exposition is begging, literally, as the story takes the form of a “personal” request form letter for a charitable donation to be made to a foundation researching Sterna’s Syndrome, a type of seizure whose effects go beyond the individual’s body. Not only is the book’s signature helplessness there, but the bizarre presence of an unwavering hope is always pulsing in the background. From “Earthquakes:”

Professor Straumberg says no two Stern’s cases are the same. It’s really an umbrella term for any seizure activity that affects anything outside of the body. The strength of the effect in different children varies greatly too. Some of them make Toby’s seizures seem quite mild.

There was a little two-year-old boy in the Hague whose seizures caused severe nosebleeds in everyone within shouting distance.

No one knows why or how this type of epileptic seizure affects things outside of the child’s body. Professor Straumberg says we may be decades away from an answer, but within the next year or two, within Toby’s lifetime, Professor Straumberg’s research could lead to a better diagnosis and treatment.

It’s vital that more is found out about Sterna’s right now. Please will you help?

Another part of my buddy’s wedding reception I remember was towards the end, right after the conversation with my friend about his wife being a shopaholic. We were expressing admiration for one another in a slight way, like we would if we were boys half our age, after figuring out how settled we are into our lives. He liked my mustache, my long hair, my five bands and job at a bar. I told him that I liked them, too, but nothing compares to a family and a nice job, both of which he has.

He thought about it, considered it. I thought of The Stone Thrower, my friend’s great responsibility and the wealth of love he must constantly rescue.

The Stone Thrower at Amazon.com.
The Stone Thrower at Powell’s City of Books.
The Stone Thrower at ECW Press.

***

Ryan Werner is a janitor in the Midwest. He is the author of the short-short story collection Shake Away These Constant Days (Jersey Devil Press, 2012). He runs the small chapbook press Passenger Side Books, is on Twitter @YeahWerner, and has a website, ryanwernerwritesstuff.com.

The editors are happy to announce, with the fulfillment of HFR‘s second volume, that HFR will be moving to a quarterly schedule of publishing* and will debut four issues each year. Due to this, submissions for issue 2.2 will close effective MAY 13, 2013; works submitted on and after this date will be considered for issue 3.1. We will continue to read submissions year-round.

The deadline for HFR 3.1 issue consideration is SEPTEMBER 15, 2013.

*The price of digital subscriptions will double to reflect the move. Current subscribers will be grandfathered-in and receive the extra issues at no additional cost.

The New Issue

Sam Chivers has graciously allowed us to use his artwork for HFR 2.2′s cover. This is “Saboteur” and will be its front. A different work by him will be the back of HFR 2.2 print editions.

HFR 2.2 (print)* is now available for preorder ($10) until July 1, 2013, when it will go on sale for $12. All preorders will receive the digital edition at no additional cost, and in the three formats that we make available: epub, mobi, and pdf.

*HFR 2.2 contributors include: Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Randall Brown, Dan Chelotti, Carol Guess, Trent England, Laura Ellen Scott, Anne Valente, and more.

Featured Chapbook Contest Each Quarter

Post-2.2, each issue of HFR will feature a chapbook. The method for determining this feature will be by contest.* The contest will alternate between fiction and poetry each issue.

Amber Sparks, author of May We Shed These Human Bodies (Curbside Splendor Publishing, 2012), and the collaborative-hybrid text The Desert Places (with Robert Kloss and Matt Kish; Curbside Splendor Publishing, forthcoming), will serve as final judge for the first contest, a FICTION feature.

*Non-refundable entry fees are set at $10, with the winner receiving a $250 prize. Read more and submit to the contest here. All entrants receive 1-year digital subscriptions to HFR.

How to Shake the Other Man, by Derek Palacio. Nouvella Books. 63 pages. $11.00, paper.

Derek Palacio’s debut book, Nouvella Book’s most recent, is top notch and reaffirms everything I’ve already thought about the in-between novella form. How to Shake the Other Man is a beautiful meditation on love, brotherhood, identity, and boxing. Palacio, who has a story forthcoming in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013 collection, has staked a claim for himself, emerging as one of the freshest young voices to come out of the fiction landscape in years.

There’s plenty to gleam from this book despite its size. The shifting tenses, the emotion that is bubbling just beneath the surface, sort of rippling on the edge of the precipice, the simplistic beauty of several complex relationships, the identity issues (be it cultural or sexual), this book has everything one could hope for.

Palacio’s deft ability to shift back and forth within the constructs of a multi-layered tale belies his youth. He shifted back and forth between the past and the present like a prizefighter tiptoeing around his opponent in the ring, waiting for the right moment to change course and catch them off guard. Just as I was getting a hold of the present storyline Palacio would throw an unexpected left hook and drop in a scene of backstory, adding a tier of complexity to the already finely woven narrative.

The book begins and ends with scenes from inside the boxing ring. Although the text is anchored by the lonely and unrelenting world of boxing, it’s the relationships between the characters, a portrait of brothers, an insight into two lovers, and the death of one of the brother’s that forces the lover and remaining brother to re-examine their own relationship that serves as this book’s motor. As these relationships unfurl and the particulars are untangled things get messy but the underlying beauty of the humanity that Palacio exposes within these relationships pushes the book forward at a pace similar to that of a classic heavyweight match. Each page, each section gaining momentum, feeding off the last forcing the reader to sit up a bit more, to pay attention so as not to miss a key sentence or phrase feels like I was sitting front row for a Tyson bout in his heyday. Blink and you’ll miss the magic. Get up to go to the bathroom and you’ll miss his opponent bouncing off the canvas, mouthpiece flung out into the stands.

In many ways the boxing metaphors are bigger than the book itself. Just like many took Tyson’s dominance for granted, didn’t appreciate the degree of difficulty, the multiple aspects that he balanced and honed to a razor sharp edge, it’s easy to fall in with Palacio’s narrative and completely forget, or dismiss, his level of skill. Even if this short book is a sprint rather than a marathon it doesn’t take away from its grace, the skill needed to execute it. Palacio has honed his craft here and by the end you’re left much like an inexperienced boxer after a match: tired, dazed, confused, and not quite sure what just happened to you but knowing fully that you can’t wait to get back in the ring and do it again.

The story felt as though it could’ve been strung out into a full-length book but that’s the beauty, and challenge, of a novella I suppose. To be able to compact feelings and scenes and a narrative arc enough to keep it at sixty odd pages but to be able to include enough extra brush strokes so as to illuminate the story with the proper amount of nuance. This balancing act, this situation which is usually only discussed if the author fails at it, is what makes this book so good. Besides being a gripping story with memorable and unique characters, Palacio has taken the nuts and bolts of storytelling and massaged them so as to help further the story along rather than impede it.

Like an underdog, long shot no name boxer, this story refuses to silenced, waiting for the right moment to strike and show that even the smallest of books can pack quite a punch. Palacio’s sense of language, his ability to use the right phrase at the right moment and the equally difficult job of knowing when to back off, when to let the silence envelop the reader is a rare find nowadays, especially in a debut book.

How to Shake the Other Man is a beautiful elegy to family and brotherhood and love. Palacio’s exploration of the dichotomy between immigrant minorities trying to find, and place themselves within a cold and foreign environment and the machismo of the world of boxing and the relationship between brothers is what gives this book friction. Sparks virtually fly off the page, igniting his prose in a multitude of meanings depending on reader.

I finished this book in one sitting. Read it straight through. It’s on my shelf now but I suspect that it won’t stay there for long. It’s only been a week and already I’m itching for another look, another peak to see if I missed some hidden gem. That to me, is what a good book is. That want, that need to re-read it. The only thing better than reading a good book is reading one from a new author. Take my advice and keep Derek Palacio’s name stored in your head for the future. Chances are you’ll be hearing more from him, a lot more.

How to Shake the Other Man (soon) at Amazon.com.
How to Shake the Other Man (soon) at Nouvella Books.

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Patrick Trotti is a writer, editor, and student. On good days it’s in that order. For more go to patricktrotti.com.

Is That You, John Wayne? by Scott Garson. Queen’s Ferry Press. 164 pages. $16.95, paper.

Scott Garson is a writer who captures moments, and it is here that his new collection, Is That You, John Wayne? excels. Individual moments are the stars of these stories, similar to the micro shorts in his previous collection, American Gymnopédies. The moments are quiet but powerful. The characters are unself-conscious. Most of all, they are sincere, and it is perhaps this characteristic more than anything that makes this collection fresh and engrossing. The strongest stories in this collection, the ones that stick with the reader the longest, are the ones that focus most severely, acutely, and minutely on a culminating single moment.

One such story is the title story, which relates a quiet afternoon between lovers playing a game of memory and movie quotes. However, by the end, it’s clear that it is not a game, that “luck is like love,” that there are secret messages, secret meanings, contained in this quiet domestic interaction, waiting to be deciphered. In one of the very short stories, “Note to Dickwad Ex-Stepdad,” the narrator focuses on how a single, quiet moment of a fork scraping on a plate can encapsulate all that is contradictory and painful and complex in a dysfunctional relationship. Even “Hourly,” the shortest story in the collection at five sentences, builds enough momentum to bring us to a meaningful moment, an articulation of longing. The closing moments in these stories are load-bearing in the best possible ways.

Another delight in this collection is the play with form, both in short story and very short story and in the epistolary, modular, and list forms. The variety in form offers a varied reading experience, creating beats and pacing within the collection itself and preventing that dangerous moment when the reader begins to feel that all the stories sound the same.

In this regard, one stand-out is “Acquired from Ex-Girlfriends,” a catalog of objects the narrator has retained from prior pursuits, each retaining a strong emotional color from that relationship and imbuing the narrator with different kinds of power. One item can make another girl jealous, make her “value me more.” Another, a pair of shoes that he continues to wear, lets him relive happy moments of the past. These objects are his, by accident or on purpose, and it’s the fact that he possesses them that is important.

In reading this collection, however, the prose feels curiously detached, even in moments when the primary characters feel strong emotions. In “Advent Santa,” the main character is so angry when a group of teenagers steals his son’s lawn Santa that he chases them recklessly in his truck, runs a red light, and is grilled by a cop for his reckless driving. And while the main character’s actions indicate rage, the prose is calm, matter-of-fact:

I said, “No—red Jeep. Two boys. They were trying to steal my kid’s Santa.”

The cop kind of studied me.

“DDJ or DOJ,” I went on. “That’s the plate. You could run it. DDJ, I think. For a red Jeep.”

The cop asked to see my license, my registration and proof of insurance. I let me eyes close.

The verbs are serene for a situation that is tense: said, studied, went, asked, let. While the reader learns that “my heart was banging,” the prose is not banging. Many of the stories in this collection have this tendency toward clear, calm, detached narrators. And, while it perhaps detracts from tense moments, it enhances some of the softer moments, where a detached narrator perhaps finally connects. In the same story, at its conclusion, the narrator has failed to protect his family in failing to protect the Santa, but “I saw I could maybe just do something here—something to get us inside.” Here, the narrator perhaps finally draws near to the situation, and to the other characters, in a shift made stronger by the detachment of his narrative voice.

Many of the characters in this collection speak from a similar place as the father in “Advent Santa”: a little outside, perhaps a little delayed, from those around them. These are stories about characters who function a little off-track from the world where they find themselves, but these are also stories about characters who keep trying. Greatman from “Greatman and the Non-Human Girl” is the story of a washed-up super hero who decides he can try to save one more soul, no matter what she may do to him. Harlan Colliers from “The Goth of SecurityOne Field” can’t stop writing letters to the annoying biographer writing about his former teammate as he keeps trying to get at the truth of why the rising baseball star died. While a detached prose style can be, in some ways, disorienting, it works well with the narrators and characters who people these stories.

This is a solid collection, with clear prose, diverse forms, and engaging characters. This is a collection to sit with, to read straight through, to feel how each moment matters.

Is That You, John Wayne? at Amazon.com.
Is That You, John Wayne? at Queen’s Ferry Press.

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Kelsie Hahn is days away from holding an MFA in fiction from New Mexico State University. Her reviews have appeared in Puerto del Sol and The Collagist. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrelhouse, NANO Fiction, Inkwell, 1/25, and Timber, among others.

Penny. n. by Madeline McDonnell. Rescue Press. 133 pages. $14.00, paper.

Penny, n. tells of Penny, a girl who grew up being told she was pretty by her mother. Penny discovers she is not pretty, and at thirty, worries. Worries worries worries. She takes a job at a bar, she meets Guy, the lexicographer. Guy moves in, invents clever, nauseatingly sweet pet names. Then, one day, the dictionary assigns Guy a word:

“Nigger.” He whispered it, his voice caught by a low, sweet fever.

Her own voice came out small. “Why do you keep saying that?”

“Because it’s mine now! I’m going to define it, revise it, I mean.” He took his hands from her waist, busied them at his sideburns. Blinked. “And, jeez, Penny—”

Penny? Had he actually just called her—

“Penny, jeez. You don’t know what an honor this is. It’s such a complex word—the history, the tricky modern usage—and, well, to be the one to revise that—that—woefully inadequate tripe we have now—”

Engrossed by his research, Guy tells Penny, “Some slaves really did love their masters.” Soon, he asks her,

“Anyway, don’t you identify, just the littlest bit? Don’t you think you’re sort of like my little bitty kitty slave?[...]Don’t you think you really are such a very good loyal slave to your nice, nice, kind, white master?”

Thus begins the most vanilla of BDSM relationships. And then…poof. Penny is invited to the second wedding of Bridey, her childhood friend. Penny discovers her love of drink. Penny ruins Bridey’s wedding, tells everyone about the whole ‘slave’ thing. Guy and Penny fly back home, or maybe just Penny. Fin.

The characters are one-dimensional, deliberately so. Penny is determined by her name, was hired at the bar because of it, then determined by Guy’s pet names for her. Penny is not “playful but pliable,” not “funny or fun, just functional.” As for Guy, his background sketch—his lost virginity, his dreams, his therapist—does not round his character so much as prop him up with trivia. Occasionally the story makes hay of his near interchangeability. The flatness doesn’t often bother me, since McDonnell can truly impress on a sentence-level:

Penny still attended tenderly to the words in the songs she sang (we’ll build a little home, just meant for two)—their touching fidelity to formal usage (from which we’ll never roam)—their chiasmi (who would, wouldn’t you?). She loved their simple, tongue-twisting rhymes (either, aye-ther, neither, naye-ther), their similes (naïve as a babe, normal as pie, bromidic and bright as a moon-happy night). And Penny loved these words more now than ever. Because it was September, but she was corny as Kansas in August and she was high as a kite on the fourth of July.

Still, Penny, n. draws its world as though neither Shulaminth Firestone, nor bell hooks, nor insert your feminist of choice here have lived in ours, as though feminism were merely the permission for women to define themselves through serial monogamy rather than through marriage. I can imagine how Penny might choose to abandon her freedom because, for her, a world in which meaning is guaranteed by a master is prettier than a world in which meaning has no guarantor. The practice of freedom for Penny is burdensome and never seems to pay out. And I can understand the popularity in literature—following the Patriot Act, Operation Iraqi Freedom, austerity—of ribbing the local humanist for still believing in progress, individuality, autonomy. But it would be nice if Penny had ambition above and beyond being in a relationship; if she strived, and in either succeeding or failing, awakened my sympathies. (An exceptional moment to this: Penny’s drunken toast to the bride and groom was stomach-churning.)

Furthermore, it is hard to downplay the insensitivity of McDonnell’s provocation. Nor can the baldness of the calculation to provoke for provocation’s sake be ignored. As though consensual sub-dom role-play between two sexually-mature, middle-class, white, heterosexual people was analogous to centuries of chattel slavery. As though Guy’s psychology, which extends little beyond the horizons of his occupation, was entirely governed by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. As though the word ‘nigger’ itself was so full of exotic virility that it awakened in whites who studied it not any sense of historical remorse or circumspection but rather a will to mastery. As though the word ‘nigger’ was commensurate with ‘slave’; as though the former lost all currency once slavery in America was abolished. As though McDonnell could imagine no more plausible word to use for her plot device. A novella is too short as form, Guy too secondary a character, and McDonnell’s narrative style too wry, too ambivalent toward her characters, to portray with subtlety the descent of a lexicographer who, having been assigned a contested word, decided in his Faustian arrogance to test-run the evolution of its usage by living in microcosm a world which fueled and was fueled by the word.

Which is a shame because I want to love this book so so much. It is small enough to put in my pocket. There’s a portrait on the cover of pretty Penny taking the place of Abraham Lincoln on the penny (charming until you realize how sinister the usurpation of the author of the Gettysburg Address is). The inner flap lists eight definitions of ‘penny’. Sprinkled throughout are delightful illustrations by Benjamin Mackey: “mas·ter /’mæs tər, ‘mɑ stər/, n.” is paired with a mustachioed ring-master leading a teddy-bear in stocks; “worse /wɜrs/, adj.,” with a floating chthonic head attacking a man with its tentacle-jowls. The Icarus figure, mid-flight, strapped into his wings, which illustrates “free·dom /’fri dəm/, n.” is perhaps the most smoothly integrated, as it follows Guy’s statement, “They talk of freedom, but they’re counting on your ignorance! Because you don’t know how confining and lonely freedom really is!” and precedes Penny’s being “lashed” to the mast…er…into seat 4F on the airplane, when her drinking problem really…takes off. Just saying, this is the most stylish book in Rescue Press’s catalogue I’ve yet seen. Kudos to book designer Sevy Perez.

And kudos to McDonnell, too. The writing is fleet and fluffy and playful. The writing is well-wrought without being overwrought. Read aloud, it tickles the tongue. It is everything you’d hope from an Iowa Writer’s Workshop alumna. A hybrid of the academic and the popular, the intellectual weight is waiting unobtrusively for you if you want to take some Adderall and refresh yourself on C-M-C vs. M-C-M’ circulation in Das Kapital and then go read Penny, n. a second time through: as a parable about how a word-cent accrues and sheds value circulating through a language-economy. And, to extend further, how word-cents like ‘master’ and ‘slave’ mutate with new connotations, evolve in value, when exchanged in an isolated, intimate language-economy, only to undergo radical devaluation when a Dionysian Penny reintroduces them to the wider market. Ah, Penny, ever lobbying against Guy’s protectionist, paternalistic policies. Penny, how dare I claim you lack ambition!

Cool as this deconstructionist parable may be, excavating its title is the quickest way to explain my reaction: ‘Penny’ is a proper noun; ‘penny’ is a common noun. For the humanist in me, the personhood of Penny, virtual as it is, matters; theory is not best served through oversimplifying persons so they easily fit inside it. I’m not surprised that Penny can muster no lasting indignation to ‘nigger’ or ‘slave’, which act to erase the distinction between person and thing, since Penny’s character depends on the distinction not being there in the first place. Whether Penny’s recognition of her reflection in the airplane window in Penny, n.’s final passage is of self-disgust or of her subjecthood or of her objecthood or all of the above, it remains sad, sadly ambiguous and belated:

She could just make out a white blur trapped in the plastic.

A pale, smudged face. Hair, in a brown-yellow halo. And in the center, a small, white mouth.

It moved.

“What is that?” it asked. “What is that?”

I was going to quote Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man here, about opening possibilities for the amelioration of human life, and go on to say that art which opens those possibilities most entice me, but this is long enough already. Here, let me dismount my high horse. If you cared about any of this you’d probably be reading “Thinking Kink” over at Bitch Media, or maybe a review of Django Unchained, instead. So let me conclude by playing as cross-promotional algorithm, which is maybe all a review is worth: if you enjoy Secretary with Maggie Gyllenhaal or Manderlay with Bryce Dallas Howard, I hope you will enjoy Penny, n. as well.

Penny, n. at Amazon.com.
Penny, n. at Rescue Press.

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Jeremy Behreandt lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Pretty the Ugly, by Jillian M. Phillips. ELJ Publications. 50 pages. $12.00, paper.

Pretty the Ugly, Jillian M. Phillips’ collection of poems, poses with its very title the question of whether the contained poems will center on the ways we see the world, or the means and methods we use to manipulate ourselves in order to look better to those who see us. From the first poem’s last phrase—“I forgive you”—it becomes clear, however, that this chapbook will neither merely contemplate nor cut skin-deep, that the critical question it asks of its reader it will also ask of itself: how do we damage ourselves when we pretty the ugly?

This finalist in the 2013 ELJ Publications Chapbook Competition is slim: twenty-five mostly brief poems separated into three parts—“The Onslaught,” “Scrambled Bodies,” and “Truths Like Tassels.” Progression through the book is without artifice, as section titles are drawn from an included poem’s title or actual language. But the poet isn’t prescriptive in her structure and instead maps a compelling territory of forgiveness that yields to the reader through its accessibility in tone and form, and the singularity of documented experiences, reflections, and calls to action.

The first section, “The Onslaught,” focuses on the physical world and on our efforts to beautify the evidence of dishonesty and disloyalty that we observe on permanent cultural display. The need for reinvention is focused on these structures that stand firm in the face of punishing emotional and environmental aggression, and the dignity we often assign to these ardent monuments. Possessed of storms that batter the self and relationships that erode intimacy, these initial poems assert that contrary to the notion of endurance as elegant, “Immortality is in the remaking,” and forbearance lies directly in the path of destruction, as “even concrete can be broken.”

A poem like “Traveling” makes it clear that there is little grace in abiding, that staying “is stopping, drowning / in what you have kept / afloat,” and that the “language of leaving / is fluent and fluid.” Motion, therefore, is not only espoused for safety, but for sanity:

It’s the staying

that sticks in the craw,
the art of letting go without
going anywhere.

Whereas forgiveness is “a foreign land / with its own currency / of love forever / exchanged without loss,” staying and pardoning means sinking and condoning, means trying to negotiate with time: a force that not only corrodes, but diminishes and robs.

The consequences of absolution emerge in the poems of “Scrambled Bodies,” most evidently in the well-placed “Pretty the Ugly” pivot point. In length this piece is a departure, as is a narrative that disarms by sidling up close before spinning away and dragging the reader’s eye to the “grotesque spectacle” of “ihateyou and lookwhatyou’vedone things” and forcing a confrontation with the notion of release from blame through explicit and often sexual imagery about the price we pay when we try to “make the savage serene”:

You’ve dressed it up in bows and curled its blond hair,
made it a delightful Shirley Temple tap number,
and Oh! How cute it was! And maybe you threw up just a little bit
trying to reswallow the saccharine bullshit.

Because we recognize that we have made this attempt before—“killed the things inside.” Our intent to protect others from our inherent ugliness has led us to pardon, but rendered us guilty of quieting our voices to the point of silence and diminishing our own brutal beauty to the near-absence of selfhood. We have freed others from blame or guilt but in so doing have also subsumed responsibility in such a way that we “will always remember / what [we] could not let live,” and find ourselves at:

the part in the slasher movie where the serial killer
takes off his mask of human skin
to reveal an attractive face.

Taking on an almost elegiac tone, the poems of “Truths Like Tassels” confronts the role of honesty in forgiveness’ “danse macabre”:

We are separated
by the veil of niceties, could be priest and sinner,
the bell and the sexton, but more—we are lonely
and starved for absolution, paying our penance
to watch the peep show. We dance for each other
in our little booths, shaking our truths like tassels.

And it is in these dark places that we find not forgiveness, but truth. Because “we do not pretend when we are blind” and are not distracted by the sun’s “false livelihood”; we don’t have to feign interest or simulate appropriateness in these dim places of confession. To recognize that we see clearly—“the ghosts as well as the living”—when we are disadvantaged is to accept that what we perceive as beautiful is so because it is tragic.

Ultimately, forgiveness requires bravery: to risk ourselves in terms of both what is taken from us and what burdens us. Finding truth means making an active choice to explore the catastrophe of beauty—the physical elements of assault, the self-destructive byproduct of absolution, and the ornamentation of truth:

we realize that courage
is just another word
for honesty and make the decision
to find our own truths.

And how will we know when we have succeeded? When “taking the risk of being wrong” leads to the “uncomfortable places within” that cannot be defined in polarizing descriptive terms, or by a singular sense of truth? Pretty the Ugly has certainly succeeded. This incisive chapbook achieves an almost discomfiting ability to poke and comfort and provoke and calm within the span of mere words. The distance from poem to poem and between ugly and pretty appears minor, but the implications of this reinvention—the harm we do ourselves in attempting to achieve the transformation—comes at the price of forgiveness.

Pretty the Ugly at Amazon.com!
Pretty the Ugly at ELJ Publications!

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Erin McKnight is the publisher of Queen’s Ferry Press, an independent press publishing collections of literary fiction. Erin’s own writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and W.W. Norton’s The Best Creative Nonfiction. Erin lives in Dallas with her husband and young daughter.

The Lifespan of a Fact, by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal. New York, New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 128 pages. $17.95, paper.

I am seeking a truth here,” John D’Agata boasts in an essay he wrote for Harper’s, “not necessarily accuracy.” The subject of the essay: Levi Presley, a Las Vegas teenage resident who jumped to an early death from the brink of the Stratosphere amid the blinding lights of downtown Vegas. However, due to the numerous discrepancies and uncomfortable with D’Agata’s stance, Harper’s rejected the essay they had commissioned. After Harper’s denied the draft, The Believer picked it up with enough shared reservations to stick a rookie fact-checker on it. In the battle that began between John D’Agata, author, and Jim Fingal, fact-checker, Levi’s story dissipates in D’Agata’s personal search for meaning and Final’s fight for truth. For seven years, they wrestled with more than D’Agata’s essay, but the nature of truth, lies, and the nonfiction writer’s search for meaning.

Harper’s rejection led D’Agata, along with Fingal, to publish both his essay and their debate in the book, Lifespan of a Fact, which has drawn more notice than his original essay ever would have on its own. D’Agata and Fingal’s joint work displays a new structural concept; on the page, D’Agata’s original essay appears in its entirety—section by section—blocked in the middle and framed by large margins of both Fingal’s fact-checking notes and transcripts of his and D’Agata’s email correspondence. There on the outskirts of the essay, the battle wages: Factual Dispute, Fingal writes again and again, picking apart D’Agata’s loose essay with meticulous and at times infuriating precision, often writing long paragraphs for one sentence, line, or even word of essay. Fingal breaks up part of a sentence into even shorter sections in order to confirm and explain why D’Agata’s observation that it was “a hot night” is accurate. He continues by quibbling that the “winds from the east” were actually from the northeast the night of Levi’s death and those winds were not even strong enough to blow what D’Agata described as “white palls of dust.”  “…Let it go,” D’Agata tells him, “I don’t think it takes much wind to blow dust.” D’Agata sees the rookie as attacking and worse even, questioning his art. Brief clashes between him and D’Agata occasionally interrupts Fingal’s report. “Watch it, asshole,” he warns Fingal repeatedly. John’s derisive snap backs (“It’s called art, dickhead) and Fingal’s sarcasm (“…your precious words, which no doubt fell into the world from your pen fully formed and immaculate”) keep the reader hanging through the decidedly dull moments of fact-checking details. D’Agata occasionally offers a reason or explanation for the innumerous discrepancies between fact and fiction for which Fingal docks him. D’Agata will forgive inaccuracies for beauty because he “think[s] brackets are ugly,” or for art because “rules of any kind do not apply to art,” or because writers should have “a compulsion for meanings” that supersedes the nonfiction genre. D’Agata can’t seem to see truth as accuracy. For him, it is only ever “The Truth,” and any lie that lets him capture that is more than forgivable, it is necessary. For Fingal, there are not levels of lies—all inaccuracies are falsehoods that break the “social contract,” which he believes every nonfiction writer initiates. No wonder the battle lasted for years, no wonder it never resolved.

Still, D’Agata’s biggest problems are not the pink vans he changes to purple “for the extra beat,” the left turn instead of right, a slight variation in the strength of the wind the night Levi jumped, or the nine seconds he claims Levi fell (he eventually reveals the true number—eight).  But he wants Levi to have fallen for nine because he can find more significance there, so he makes it nine. His claim after all is that the essay isn’t so much about meaning, but “the search for meaning,” and he is fairly open about his belief. His main problem is when he unleashes what Fingal calls “…a parade of easily verifiable and yet clearly manipulated facts…” he just gets lazy. Most writers will at least sympathize with the desire for strong syntax and beautiful words, but they won’t sympathize when D’Agata writes, “most sacred Buddhist temples” because he didn’t do enough research to realized the nine floors is only present in one temple, or that there are ten levels of clouds, not nine. But while this reader is willing to forgive many of D’Agata’s little white lies, most readers, in fact, probably the majority are siding with Fingal since the release of Lifespan. “Readers don’t want to be lied to,” Fingal claims, pointing to James Frey and the uproar his highly falsified memoir caused in 2009.  D’Agata, however, defends Frey, roughly saying readers should suck it up and be thankful for the “experience” that A Million Little Pieces gave them, for an essay he claims, is just that, an experience.

Despite Fingal’s strong aversion to shaping the truth, in the end, even the red-pen-crazed fact-checker participates in a crafted version of a correspondence, which Lifespan, at least, presents as whole. I’m not suggesting that any of the emails were falsified, then again, James Prouge, who worked as a fact-checker for the New Yorker and is a writer himself calls it, “a smoothly edited and largely fabricated e-mail exchange.” Jim Fingal for all his factual disputes sees the debate between “The Truth” and all the little truths as important enough to fabricate exchanges with the same man he repeatedly called to account for his slack note taking in interviews. Does that mean D’Agata wins? Take away his lazy flubs, and perhaps the intentional intonations of truths and not-quite-truths do indeed create an art, an essay, and an experience that communicates a postmodern sort of “Truth” to a reading public whose hands D’Agata has no interest in holding.

The Lifespan of a Fact at Amazon.com!
The Lifespan of a Fact at Powell’s City of Books!
The Lifespan of a Fact at W.W. Norton & Company!

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Jill Davis is a writer and teacher from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, now working in the Dayton, Ohio, area.