A Review of Deceit and Other Possibilities by Vanessa Hua

Set in the San Francisco Bay Area, Vanessa Hua shares 13 stories that revolve around Asian and Mexican immigrant families in Deceit and Other Possibilities. Hua, the author of A River of Stars and a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, has received praise and recognition for her writing, some of which are through the Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature among many others. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post, and in this reissued collection of stories first published in 2016 now featuring new stories, Hua once again gives a voice to immigrant families as they find a way to make America their new home all the while trying to hold on to their culture and familial values. The majority of the families are possessed to lie or keep secrets from one another in order to protect their family but sometimes only with their own best interest at heart, which leads them to acts of deceit. You’ll find yourself asking how far the characters are willing to go to protect the truth.

Hua does an extraordinary job at pointing to issues immigrant families face in America, many in which the younger generations who sometimes live in two worlds face all on their own. Identity becomes an issue that is mostly grappled with in the younger generations, those who were born American but raised with different cultural values. The collection of stories touches on both the older and younger generations to show the whole picture of a family and the ways they are able to survive together and as individuals. As kids it becomes our nature to want our parents’ approval, and disappointment has a major role throughout the book. Take for example the story of “The Older the Ginger” that show other realities of returning to a birthplace where you have been gone for too long that it doesn’t feel like home anymore and where people look at you differently. The main character is an older man who never married and comes back home to fulfill his mothers wishes of taking a wife. Then, we have the prospect of marrying someone that comes from America even if they are from the same birthplace, they have become a new version of who they were solely because they’ve lived in America. We see how they’re taken advantage of by family and friends. On the other hand, the character of Little Treasure also shows the extremes people willingly put themselves through to exceed in life, almost as if it’s for survival. Little Treasure and people alike represent that story but also how they view American life, and most times that’s in a fantasy land. America is an illusion to the rest of the world but that misrepresentation is only broken once you can see it for yourself. Yet, the possibility as the title of the collection reads comes head on through the intentions of the characters in this story and many others. Readers that have seen or heard of this in their own close circle will see this as part of their story, one way of honoring their truth and also showing others who don’t understand the struggles immigrant families face whether here or in their birthplace, the realities that live within them. Family is all you have and that becomes specially true when that’s all you have in a new place and sometimes that might feel enforced as if you have no option but to follow the example. 

It is difficult to cover all the realities Deceit and other Possibilities touches on and “What We Have Is What We Need” is one of the many true but sad realities that immigrant families face. The story is about a Mexican immigrant family where the father is the first to come to America, the mother follows at one point and then the oldest son, Lalo. There are two younger brothers that are left back in Mexico with family, an inevitable result of immigration where families are separated for one reason or another. The story is told in Lalo’s point of view where we see him first say goodbye to his mother and a few years later watch him make the journey on his own at age eleven. We see him relish in feeling like an only child when he reunites with his parents. “In America, I was an only child, and I liked having all the attention.” The separation of what was and what is, is a result of a new place to call home. This quickly changes when he starts to witness how that is also changing his family dynamic in America. As the mother starts school while working and taking care of her family, tension rises as the father starts to feel that he and Lalo are being neglected by other duties. Later they find that she had been lying about working late, instead spending time with an American born man who shows her a different future, one that her husband and family can’t provide. Lalo reflects on this when he’s older, “She had an alternate existence, happier than what she was born to, bound to. The perfect life that she hid from us, the one where she did not cry for her lost sons or get on her knees to clean toilets or argue with her husband. The life she deserved.” These revelations are brought forth and the family fights to stay together even if its not entirely what each of them wants. This is a recurring theme, the mother struggles between picking what could be the American illusion becoming a reality and the actual reality. Lalo and many other children are witnesses to the life choices our parents make for the sake of staying a family. It introduces a cycle, Lalo’s parents stayed together and he followed their dreams for him, “I got the desk job my parents wanted for me. It is my gift to them. My burden.” The character learns a lot, grows up in a unimaginable truth by being left behind, leaving his family behind, crossing the border, marital struggles his parents faced, learned street smarts, avoided gangs, and how you live your life for the ones that gave up so much for you. In the end he followed the American illusion his parents set up, and for him although became a reality, it wasn’t what he would have chosen for himself.

The collection of stories is captivating for its realness, a kind of story that although at times sad or hard to grasp feels close to your heart and one that can show Americans how sometimes even if dreams can happen, they don’t always come true for immigrant families. Lalo kept the picture of his mother that once belonged to the American man, which is how he and his father found out about the lies his mother had been keeping, unknowingly helping the man that was trying to win her over. “I keep the picture as a reminder of how that smile can disappear, if you take for granted what you can never possess. You must make her yearn only for the life she already has. To want nothing more.” The collection of stories offer an appreciation for truth, a way into the lives of those you see on TV screens or passing by on streets. Within each story we see how deceit can tear a family apart as well as keep them together. The character of Lalo, a young boy shows wisdom as he figures out how to adapt to life in America, a place that has given his parents and himself opportunities but also given his family many struggles along the way. He says, “you can never see all angles at once” and this quote provides an insight to the book as a whole. Hua casts a light on deceit where it is provoked by circumstance and consequences in Deceit and other Possibilities that surround the lives of immigrant families but does well to remind the reader that such things are true within any race within any country, birthplace or not, we are all same, human. In the end, irony rules as truth is centered around the stories told in the collection but it is also deception that is equally as important. 

Native Grey: Andrea Rinard Reviews Chuck Augello's The Inexplicable Grey Space We Call Love

Chuck Augello’s debut collection of short stories, The Inexplicable Grey Space We Call Love, presents a retinue of Everyman characters and their stories, revealing quotidian reality so painful and recognizable that it hurts, wonderfully. Augello doesn’t explore or examine loneliness, or hope, or grief or love as much as he breathes closer and closer to those ubiquitous human experiences, detail by detail. The characters who pass through Augello’s gaze express the exceptionality of the everyday, leaving us blinking and shaken in the marvel of the universe behind the faces of characters who are achingly familiar.

Flynn, the first character we meet in “Pizza Monks,” is an appropriate gateway to the stories that follow in this collection. As he weighs the ethics and inconvenience of staying after-hours to make pizzas to cater a self-immolation, Flynn speaks of the motions of kneading dough as muscle memory. This idea serves as an underpinning metaphor through the subsequent stories as the characters either succumb to or break free from the habitual motions of being human. Brother Phap Dong, the Buddist monk intent on setting himself on fire, exhorts Flynn to “find your pain and make an offering to it.” For all of Augello’s characters, the pain is merely the commonplace pain of being human. Their offerings are as disparate and profound as redemption, absolution, enlightenment, or simply momentary respite from the inevitable messiness of life.

For Kevin in “Smoke,” the pain is steeped in his regret of one youthful choice that has doomed him. Years later, his older, successful brother, Jerry, wants him to burn down his over-mortgaged, post-recession McMansion, and Kevin can see no way to refuse. Augello shows how the forks and bends in a life’s trajectory are as illusive and potentially destructive as fire. Kevin’s one bad decision lingers like a stench of smoke, cloying and unmistakable.

In “The Prerogatives of Magic,” a seven-year-old girl named Chloe accidentally makes her mother disappear, and the father is left not questioning whether or not his daughter’s “tricks” are real but simply and quietly begging for his wife to reappear. It doesn’t matter whether Chloe has a power that “just comes.” Instead, Augello presents the magic of two people who find “a comfortable spot and try to hold on.” Even through ten years of marriage, there is the magic of a husband who makes his wife a cup of tea every morning and leaves it for her when she emerges from the shower. He offers his pride in exchange for her return even as he imagines “a hotel room with her blouse and skirt neatly folded on the desk, her underwear dropped at the foot of the bed.”

In “Little Green Everything,” Keith is out of work and feeling “obsolete” and “useless.”  He struggles with the brutality of the modern world at the same time he tries to help his wife Penny through her response to it. “No other planet hurts like we do,” Penny says, and Augello distills that agony into moments that ache with the simplicity and banality of a bruise. That throb continues in “All God’s Children” as an unnamed veteran and a capuchin monkey liberated from a research lab mourn the loss of Kristin, the woman they both love who was killed in a hit and run.

Augello’s Dash in “Cool City,” clings to and depends on the reliability of numbers and the presence of fire extinguishers. He finds unexpected respite and acceptance from a “level one fast love practitioner” while in the oncoming path of a hurricane. Annabelle has her own gale force impact on Dash as she extols the virtues of avoiding finding reasons not to love someone while offering unexpected and heartbreaking moments of grace and love. Like Dash, William K. in “Languid” finds himself moved incrementally into changing from a listless and indifferent Best Buy employee who encourages his customers to pray in supplication to the appliances he’s selling for a 10% discount to a man rocketing into a new velocity.

Through the extraordinary, ordinary catalysts of murder, suicide, infidelity, computer code tattoos, natural disasters, alien abduction, arson-for-hire, mysterious packages, and the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Augello’s cast of characters are familiar like a drop of water placed under a microscope. The proximity and access Augello provides is his offering to us and the heartbreaking wonder of being human. Each character is a foreign land for which we need no map or translator. As we follow the characters, we realize that “inexplicable grey space” is our native home, filled with people who are just like everyone we know. Just like us.

The Real United States: A Conversation with Matthew Baker

Named one of Variety’s “10 Storytellers To Watch,” Matthew Baker is the author of the story collections Why Visit America and Hybrid Creatures and the children’s novel Key Of X, originally published as If You Find This. His stories have appeared in publications such as The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, One Story, Electric Literature, and Conjunctions, and in anthologies including Best Of The Net and Best Small Fictions. A recipient of grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center For The Creative Arts, Blue Mountain Center, Prairie Center Of The Arts, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, he has an MFA from Vanderbilt University, where he was the founding editor of Nashville Review. His other projects include Early Work. Born in the Great Lakes region of the United States, he currently lives in New York City.

I’ve been a fan of Matthew Baker’s work since 2013, when, as an editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review, I was introduced to his story, “Goods.” A year later, the journal published another of his stories, “Html,” a story partially written in code.

When I read “Goods” for the first time, I was a first-year MFA student, writing a series of unsuccessful stories and struggling to figure out what kind of writer I wanted to be or could be. Baker’s stories were playful and idea-driven, but simultaneously had heart, had the ability to move me. He provided me with an example of the sort of writing I might want to do.

I jumped at the opportunity to read Baker’s new collection, Why Visit America, forthcoming in August, and I was not disappointed. The stories he tells are funny and heartbreaking and familiar and surprising all at once. In this interview, Baker discusses writing high-concept narratives, how speculative fiction can allow us to grapple with controversial topics more genuinely, and the films that inspire his writing.

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Dana Diehl: Many of your stories seem to be driven by “What if…?” questions. What if men became obsolete? What if children were raised by the government instead of parents? What if people could become data? I love how deliciously high-concept this collection is. Did all of your stories begin with a concept? Did any of them begin instead with a character or image, for example?

Matthew Baker: I’m embarrassed to say that every story began with a concept. The book itself began with a concept: thirteen parallel-universe stories (one for every stripe in the flag) that would span all fifty states of the country, and that together would create a composite portrait of the real United States: a Through The Looking-Glass reflection of who we are as a country.

I once submitted a story to a prestigious literary magazine, and the editor rejected the story with a note that said: “too high-concept for us.” For a writer like me, what that note actually said was: “don’t submit to us again.” I can only do high-concept.

DD: What was it like to write a short story collection with an overarching concept already in mind? Did it make it easier? Did it ever feel restrictive?

MB: It was a tremendous challenge. I loved that about it though. That was what made the writing fun.

DD: Despite these stories being very high-concept, they are also movingly character-driven, grounded in an individual human experience. Do you think character is key to writing narratives that move beyond a concept and become stories? What advice do you have for writers working in a similar genre, who struggle to move beyond their initial concept and develop character or find their inciting incident?

MB: I think about storytelling less in terms of “plot” and “character” and more in terms of “idea” and “emotion.” Strategically, I don’t approach a story thinking “how can I develop a plot?” or “how should I develop this character?” I approach a story thinking, “Given this premise, what combination of events and desires will maximize its emotional impact?” In my experience the nature of the work becomes very clear very quickly when plot and character are viewed as ingredients in an emotional reaction in the reader, rather than simply as necessary elements of a story.

DD: Was there a story in this collection that especially challenged you? What do you do when the right ingredients are difficult to find?

MB: “To Be Read Backward” was the greatest challenge conceptually—trying to imagine the physics of that universe accurately, and to be consistent in how the narrator uses language, especially verbs, to describe the events of the story. But the story that was the greatest challenge narratively was “Testimony Of Your Majesty.” I wrote about half of the story and then got stuck. I knew the emotional reactions that I wanted to synthesize, and I had assembled some reliable ingredients, but I still couldn’t quite figure out how to achieve what I wanted. I set the story aside for a couple of years, came back to the story, struggled with the story, set the story aside again, came back to the story, struggled with the story, set the story aside again. That was the process. Years of failed experiments. That story was a work in progress from 2013 through 2018.

DD: Were there any concepts or ideas or stories or experiments written for this collection that ultimately didn’t make it in?

MB: There were a number of concepts that didn’t work on the page. And there’s one story that I actually completed and even published—a story called “The Eulogist” that appeared in New England Review in 2012—that I was still planning on including in the collection as late as 2018. Ultimately, though, I decided the story was just too rudimentary and clumsy. Also, I wanted the collection to have a neutral emotional pH—there could be stories that were depressing and there could be stories that were uplifting, but I didn’t want the collection overall to register as depressing or uplifting—and “The Eulogist” would have given the collection an overall unneutral pH. So that story got replaced by “The Sponsor.”

DD: The issues tackled in these stories are painfully familiar. You explore violence against women, parents struggling to accept their transitioning child, and flaws within the justice system, just to name a few. But by placing these issues within parallel universes or dystopian (or utopian) futures, you allow readers to see them with new eyes. Why do you prefer speculative fiction for these stories instead of straight realism?

MB: In any human society, having a constructive conversation about social or political issues can be difficult, and we live in a country so radically polarized that at times it seems to be on the verge of a civil war. If you try to have a conversation with somebody about a topic like climate change or gun control, immediately these walls come up, these psychological barriers as thick as brick. It’s become impossible to talk about anything important. There’s no way to do it—unless you disguise what you want to talk about, cloak the topic in a seemingly harmless form. I turned to speculative fiction in hopes of giving readers a space to genuinely grapple with the ideas behind these issues and to genuinely access the emotions involved.

DD: If you had to live inside one of these futures you’ve imagined, which one would it be? Why?

MB: “A Bad Day In Utopia.” I wouldn’t mind having to live in a menagerie, and I honestly do think the world would be noticeably improved.

DD: How would you spend your time in this hypothetical menagerie?

MB: Probably reading, writing, napping, and trying to convince the guards to play chess with me.

DD: You’ve also written a really wonderful children’s book titled If You Find This. Can you talk about the experience of writing this novel and how it differed from your experience writing short stories for adults? Were the experiences surprisingly similar in any ways?

MB: Well, If You Find This was also high-concept: a children’s novel narrated partly in music dynamics and math notations. And like Why Visit America, If You Find This is a book that’s about place. It’s a Michigan novel, a Great Lakes novel. But If You Find This was also a very personal book for me. It’s not autobiographical, but in that book I was writing about my childhood and about my family and about my friends back home. Why Visit America is different in that I wasn’t writing about my own life in any of the stories in this book. In Why Visit America, what’s personal are the issues.

DD: Who or what are your inspirations outside of the literary world? Are there any filmmakers or artists or musicians who influenced the stories in this collection?

MB: The films Her and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind had a tremendous influence on the book, as models of emotionally rich sci-fi. The anime Sword Art Online, which for me was a master class on sincerity and vulnerability and the virtues of sentimentality. The video games BioShock and BioShock Infinite, which deliver social and political commentary with such supreme grace and skill.

But—I hadn’t thought of this until just now—maybe the biggest influence was an old VHS tape that I discovered at my father’s house when I was a child. Written on the tape in my father’s handwriting were two words: “The Wall.” I distinctly remember watching that tape later that afternoon, alone in the basement, lying on the carpet, gazing up at an old cathode-ray television. It was Pink Floyd — The Wall, the film adaptation of the rock opera by Pink Floyd. Seeing it was a revelation for me. I hadn’t realized until that moment that a music album could be more than a collection of random songs—that together the songs could tell some larger story. From the beginning I’ve thought of Why Visit America as a concept album, and that old VHS tape is what taught me what a concept album is.

DD: Is there a short story collection that you feel like does this especially well?

MB: Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, although that’s composed primarily of nonfiction. And Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, along with Invisible Cities, although that’s technically considered a novel. I especially adore The Periodic Table.

DD: Who should read Why Visit America? Who is your ideal reader?

MB: All true Americans.

A Review of Little Feasts by Jules Archer

“If I could marry a myth it would be monstrous, but not monstrous like frightening — monstrous as in a monstrous love” states the narrator of “How to Love a Monster with Average-Sized Hands” in Jules Archer’s collection Little Feasts. It is a monstrous love that is explored in this collection, the women are desirous, hungry, for it, while the men are monstrous and running, running towards the women or away from them or away with them. The stories team with this hunger, this passion — the absolute heat and power of it. Hunger begins to feel a lot like love and love becomes all consuming, powerful, monstrous. Jules Archer skillfully examines and explores the desire to devour and be devoured.

The struggle to fulfill the need to be loved only serves to fuel this hunger. In the opening story “In-n-Out Doesn’t Have Bacon” the narrator, Catherine, who hungers for meat, who sleeps with Tom while grieving the death of her husband, puts it best: “My stomach feels greasy from the burger, from Tom, from some strange artificial sense of connection.” Food and love are basic human needs but she is filling herself with the wrong things, with fast food and a man who is more interested in her sister than in her. Her grief, her hunger have driven her to these things and she has filled herself but is still left wanting. “Hunger never felt so hard.” Catherine says.

It’s the same for Elizabeth in “Everlasting Full” Elizabeth who was cold and hungry until she ate her husband Eddie when he said that he would stop cooking for her. Ginny in “Hard to Carry and Fit in a Trunk” eats but is still hungry to be chased, wanted. So much so that she fantasizes about being kidnapped, particularly by Buffalo Bill who covets her size, who would celebrate her hunger. There is a striking and terrifying honesty in the way Ginny wants to be skinny enough to be considered ‘prey’. Here, Archer is holding up a mirror to society with our beauty standards, our rape culture and we deserved to be loved, but not like this. These stories push wanting to the extreme but that is what wanting to be loved feels like — a huge overwhelming hunger that we would do anything to get, and anything to keep.

The dangers of women loving men run under the surface of all the stories. There is a never-ending reminder of how our desires mix with our vulnerabilities, how our hunger puts us at risk. Forever in the back of the women’s minds is the fact that they love, they hunger, for someone who could kill them. In “My L.A Jerry” the narrator exaggerates this knowledge by having an affair with a man, a stranger who visits the Museum of Death where she works. “Nothing says romance like a dismembered headless torso.” She muses.

In these stories, however, the women get angry and they fight back. In these stories expectations are challenged, tropes are subverted and the men get eaten or beaten and the women take power into their own hands.

In “Far Away From Everywhere” the narrator, only a teenager, is in a family taken into a cult by the father. Her anger buzzes in her body like bees, her anger is hot. Her friend Sissy lights a match and burns everything down and the narrator, with her sister, move to warmer Phoenix with their grandmother. This transition from cold and hunger to warmth and safety repeats. Elizabeth is angry about the cold and hunger she experienced as a child and vows to keep herself safe whatever the cost. When Elizabeth meets the man she is to marry she is in a cold bar but his hands are hot and warm her up, she does whatever it takes to keep this warmth. In “Backseat Blues” Maybell’s mother drives into the cold lake while Maybell, angry at her mother and more attracted to the light and warmth outside of the car, was spared. In “Skillet” a pan is passed down, daughter to daughter, sizzling and cooking. The narrator practices swinging it high as she looks at her mother’s face, bruised by her boyfriend. The images of anger mixing with heat, coupled with the idea of warmth equaling safety, leads to the idea that a woman’s anger can keep her safe.

Archer also plays with form, updating tired old horror movie tropes. In “The Ice Cream Cone” the narrator is running from a man, she notes how he should not being able to chase her so well due to his weight and lack of grace but this is how a typical horror movie goes; the woman stands no chance regardless of what the man looks like. Archer lists what this woman has had to learn as a result of growing up in this world “the boy in high school sticking his sneakered foot in your crotch beneath your conjoined desks.” And because she has escaped before (over and over), she escapes again. She stops, turns and pokes his belly with her pink ice cream spoon. The spoon, an image reminiscent of childhood, like a nod to how girls are forced to learn the possibility of danger so soon. And with that the trope is quite literally stopped in its tracks.

Archer’s matter-of-fact language faces head-on the realities of what it is like to be a woman in our society. She pairs this style with beautiful turns of phrase and fantastical elements to create a dreaminess and playfulness that evokes childhood. The overall effect being that Little Feasts presents a complex picture of what it is to want to love as a women who has grown up in this world. Her stories are bold, unapologetic, honest, and tender. It is a beautiful collection that encourages its readers to explore their desires and needs, and to confront their ingrained fears. We cannot fight the wanting but we can fight for what we want.

A Review of The Albatross Around the Neck of Albert Ross by Geoffrey Gatza

The Albatross Around the Neck of Albert Ross by Geoffrey Gatza is a collection of modern day fairy tales that are each unique and yet have a strand of connectivity between them. I was immediately interested in picking up this collection of short stories as I was curious to see how Gatza balanced relatable messages in a modern setting that is still filled with magic and imagination. The cover — and its subsequent images inside — seems to convey a message of fun antics in store for readers of all ages. Inside they will find six short stories ranging from a few pages to multiple sections, but more importantly, they will read tales of determination, excitement, and the meaning of family.

The collection starts off with the story of the book’s namesake. It follows the young Albert Ross as he befriends a wild albatross who let him escape beyond his home. Within his home, Albert’s family is constantly focused, ironically, on other modes of communication: his mother is constantly on her phone, his father is on his computer, and his sister stays in her room with hints that she is communicating to friends via some kind of technology. They are all distracted by these means of escapism and yet they fail to see the truth of Albert and the Albatross. While their technology allows for them to hear about the albatross, they each ignore that he exists beyond their technology. The albatross is a means for escape for Albert and he takes the young boy away from home to meet a family that spends time together and gifts him a decoratively carved rock. Albert is the only one who experiences true escape via the albatross as he experiences what it is like to spend time with a family who is focused on one another. It is not until he comes back and his mother sees him being happy that it begins to change his relationship with his family. We are left with hope that his family members will put down the technology and spend time with him and each other instead of by themselves. Being able to spend time together as a family is the most important escape of all as seen by this story.

Talking about family, we are led into reading “Emory Bennett’s Halloween,” which follows a young Emory and his friend Henry. Henry’s mom is going through chemotherapy whereas Emory’s dad is learning how to walk again as an amputee. The boys discuss a riddle about the “one word of human knowledge” that could be death, life, or even recovery before going to a friend’s house to look for a ghost that lives in the attic. While Henry discovers that the ghost is actually a cat and keeps the secret to him and Emory, Henry understands that “sometimes we need our ghosts” in order to move forward. As both Emory and Henry have seen each of their parental figures go through near-death experiences, it only makes sense that in order to live they must focus on recovery and the future. People must understand what haunts them and their personal pasts in order to move forward whether that be away from cancer or losing a loved one like Eliza’s mother. It’s important to understand their grief before they work towards a brighter tomorrow.

In “The Butterflies of Cranberry Chase,” Gatza continues on the individual focus of relationships between children and parents. Crispin and his mother turn into butterflies by a spell put upon them by their neighbor who happens to be a witch. After spending the evening together flying around the witch’s garden, she turns them back into their normal selves. Living the afternoon without its threat of wildlife — like the witch’s pet crow who we later find out is harmless — and potentially being squished makes being a butterfly more exciting and full of life. Gatza addresses the idea of living a life even if afraid that it might be the last day or moment makes life cherished more and those who you spend it with more precious. Life is not truly lived until wings are grown and challenges are taken on with those we love in order to push ourselves.

The longest and last of the stories is “A Rocket Full of Pie,” which follows a young rabbit, Freddie, as he is challenged by his uncle to think outside of the box when Freddie has to remember a poem for school. The pair reimagine the familiar nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence” to it being about a rocket full of pie. This whimsical change surprisingly allows Freddie to win the poetry presentation in his class and he later presents it to his family and the school. His usually stern and strict teacher surprisingly becomes the one who truly wants Freddie to challenge what he is taught and look at it from new angles — a lesson useful to all regardless of age.

Gatza’s collection of short stories highlight important ideas such as connecting with family members, living the fullest life, challenging how to think beyond the obvious, and learning how to handle grief. Each of these lessons are truly important for both children and adults alike. What connects each of these stories, however, is the ability to experience each day with someone that readers care about whether that be a family member, a parent, a friend, or a sibling. This collection has magic and mayhem that increasingly gets more and more whimsical with each passing story that makes it enjoyable for readers, but its heart beats powerfully throughout it all. The Albatross Around the Neck of Albert Ross by Geoffrey Gatza is a moving and playful collection of short stories that will appeal to both children and their parents.

Our Everyday Madness: A Review of Katie Farris’s boysgirls

To read Katie Farris’ boysgirls is to step into a circus, a burlesque, a theater, a brothel, yourself—step up and preform, “You’re used to sitting back and eavesdropping,” our narrator flirtatiously scolds us, “playing the voyeur on the lives of others. But between these covers you will participate, whether you desire it or not.”

And you do. As you peel back the covers and descend deeper and deeper into this uncertain territory, new myths that read like poetry, you notice yourself both aroused and slightly ashamed, in the most enjoyable way. You meet a girl with a mirror for a face, loved by people, who yet desires nothing but a mouth so that she can eat. You realize you are both her, and the people who look into her.

You move on, and meet many other girls. The girl who grew and was feared, the girl who listens to Christian talk radio while sanding the blade that is her mother’s mother, the girl who is a cyclops and explains loss to scientists. Our narrator watches over you, gauges your needs and guides you to through the performance of these girls who are only performing you. And you move on.

Delightfully, you find the girl who Satan has enlisted to shit on his face. She reveals something more of yourself, of the anxieties sex encompasses, the absurdity of the orgasm as goal. The elusive line between performance and surrender. “She feels it a personal failure; she has never failed to fulfill a man sexually. She doesn’t think to blame it on the fact that he has never been a man.”

The performance continues, until you are asked again to participate, at what can serve as the intermission. If this entire collection has not been a type of riddle in itself with you as the answer, well then you, dear reader, must entertain the narrator by answering the riddle proposed between the section on girls and the section on boys.

The section on boys serves more as a parable than a series of myths. You meet the boy with one wing, a “halfway boy” who is seduced by a cheerleader, and makes love to another girl in the mud. While this is happening we meet the inventor of invented things and realize that we are nothing new, that each fear and joy we have experienced has already been created and that we have simply experienced them with our own bodies for the first time. Is there less shame in that? Less fear of our own shadow? No. That would diminish our exhilaration.

As any creator, The Inventor of invented things discovers the invention of love with the boy with one wing. “What is this?” he asks. To be a true invention does it need a name, a definite shape and rules? And what will they do with this new thing? 

Katie Farris creates a Kafkaesque reality that reveals our everyday madness. To read it is a dark and whimsical delight, a joy in the grotesque. A reminder that the grotesque is normal, and that it is the source of both shame and orgasm.

An Interview with Robert Glick, Author of Two Californias

Robert Glick is an Associate Professor of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he teaches creative writing, electronic literature, and the occasional course on zombies. His work has won competitions from The Normal School, Copper Nickel, Diagram, Summer Literary Seminars, and New Ohio Review; other stories have been published in the Masters Review, Denver Quarterly, and Gettysburg Review. His first collection, Two Californias, was published by C&R Press in 2019.

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Kristina Marie Darling:  Your latest book, Two Californias, was recently launched by C&R Press.  What would you like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?  

First, thanks for reading! There are so many great books out right now. I hope you find something meaningful and pleasurable in these pages. I hope that the stories don't land too neatly—I'm one who wants a bit of visible messiness. Making treasure from trash, so to speak. 

Speaking as a native Californian, the book is less about California (though all the stories take place there) than it is about, through variation, collapsing overly simplistic boundaries—north and south, etc. While by no means autobiographical, it is more personal than I had originally realized, its spotlights drawn to the unorthodox, sometimes funny, often diversionary ways we deal with loss.

KMD:  What drew you to C&R Press for this particular project?  

They liked the book! It's so important for a press, with the complexities of media economies, to have your back, to support you and the work. I liked C&R's catalogue, their design choices, and the ways in which they wanted to collaborate. It felt ethically as well as aesthetically right, and I'm very grateful to Andrew Sullivan, John Gosslee, and the entire team.

KMD: Your fiction makes innovative use of white space, interruption, and rupture.  What does silence make possible for you as a storyteller?  

Everything. Can noise exist without silence? 

From the standpoint of lineage, the influence of white space came to me from Marguerite Duras, especially the way her blocks of text just sort of hang in air, smoke rings of meanings. For me, silence (and its physical analog, white space) is material, metaphor, tempo. Most of my stories are written modularly, with gaps, often without linear transitions, notated by white space. The reader enters this open space (well, this space is always there, but in Two Californias, it's foregrounded and encouraged) to think, to pause, to insert their consciousness/imaginations. 

The silence also reminds us that the writing, the words, the syntax: nothing but one n/mote, pointing to the more infinite possibilities. The book is not fully closed, can never be fully closed (though one might try). While white space isn't exactly an iceberg, it nonetheless points to everything unsaid. 

KMD:  In addition to your achievements in fiction, you are an accomplished educator. What has teaching opened up within your creative practice?  

Lately, teaching has taught me about the openness and possibility of process. We do a lot of collaborative brainstorming: what could happen in this situation? In what ways can X connect to Y? Writing, for me, represents what Barthes calls a "tissue of citations"—a network of meanings. In this respect, and without dismissing craft, I think about teaching as a means to work with students to be brave and critical in building their own networks. Working with the students has reinforced my own desire to slow down when writing, to pursue possibilities that aren't immediately obvious to me. Then I sneak on to campus late at night, when the classrooms are empty, to make use of the white boards :.)

KMD:  With the recent launch of Two Californias, what readings, events, and workshops can we look forward to?  

I'm on sabbatical(!), so mostly I'm holed up here in Rochester, waiting for the deer to cross the backyard, finishing up The Paradox of Wonder Woman’s Airplane. In the short run, I'll be doing a reading/workshop at the wonderful Writers & Books here in Rochester, followed by what I'm sure will be a fabulous University of Utah reading at AWP in San Antonio. Then I head off to the MacDowell Colony in March and April, where I'll visit the oracle each day, and revel in thermoses of soup. I finish off the semester working with the smart, engaged students at Hobart and Smith College in Geneva. 

KMD:  What are you currently working on? What’s next?  

I'm finishing a hybrid print/digital novel called The Paradox of Wonder Woman’s Airplane—it should go to agents by the end of the year. 

Set in Kansas City during the 2016 presidential election race, Paradox traces the unorthodox pathways we take through individual grief, collective trauma, and social awareness. After a miscarriage, Grace, a 40-year-old anesthesiologist, must decide whether she wants to have another child, weighing her own desires and her growing political awareness against the constricting biases of suburban life. Her husband Chuck urgently wants to be a father once again. While he waits for Grace to make up her mind, he falls prey to his self-destructive impulses; his imaginary friend, whom he calls The Reckless, forces him to steal a rare, expensive model of Wonder Woman’s airplane. Meanwhile, their two teenagers stumble into dangerous intrigues with Bosnian art saboteurs and rapture-obsessed veterinarians. 

The Paradox of Wonder Woman’s Airplane is written as a set of discrete, interlocking sections. Family members and minor characters contribute their distinct voices to the collective narration. The novel also contains non-diegetic chapters, including an MFA thesis in art history (with performative scores) and characters' own creative writings (such as an imagined history of a mysteriously disappeared grandparent). As a general thematic, the novel explores versions of visibility and invisibility (technical, psychological, linguistic) exemplified by the figure of Wonder Woman’s airplane, which, in drawings and animations, requires white lines to make visible the boundaries of the plane’s invisibility. In line with my artistic vision, each section attempts to intensify the emotional and intellectual power of the novel by expressing character-based story through innovative forms of language, voice, and syntax.

Chapters of Paradox have won the Summer Literary Seminars Center for Fiction Prize and the New Ohio Review Contest in Fiction. Other chapters have been published in The Masters Review Anthology. You can read online chapters at The Collagist and The Los Angeles Review. 

While Paradox will primarily take shape in the print universe, some sections of the novel will only be available in digital form (beta).