Riddle Me This

Well hello there. Some little bits of news to report. First, old standby "Eat Fist!", a well-travelled short story that originally appeared in Event, has been scooped up by the Body Electric anthology, put out by and/or Publishing. Nifty! More recently, Riddle Fence, a great great journal from out east, scooped up my short story, "Up, Away, Here, Gone," for their March 2012 issue. How do I know RF is great? They published Andrew Sullivan's slick short story, "Stray Dogs." So. Good stuff.

Not good? I missed my flight to Tampa today by not showing up early enough, and by having a disgusting passport. I had to switch my flight to an 8pm (later delayed to 10pm) shitshow to Orlando. My ride back to Tampa probably wants me dead. So does my bank account. The switch cost me $230 extra.

On the brightside, I wrote 5,000 words as punishment. And watched four episodes of Jersey Shore (spoiler: Vinny peaces out). Oh, and I started reading John Irving's new novel about a bisexual dude! I scammed an ARC. I sort of wish he would stop writing about sex with older women and characters who are writers.

Anyway. I'll be dressing like a pirate this weekend, as per Tampa's pirate festival. Good day.

Hodge Podge, plus Divinity Gene review

S'looking like I'll have an essay in an upcoming anthology of writers writing about their mentors called A Manner of Being: Writers on Their Mentors. Unsure if it's official or not, but I'm excited and wanted to share my excitement on my blog, which is this place. My essay is about how mentoring someone is like figuring out the best way to get someone off. I think it makes sense, and sounds less pervy, in context.

Anyway.

On a completely unrelated note, Diane Arbus is creepy. I'm reading about her in this book:



She's weird and her pictures make me feel bad about myself and the world, kind of like Radiohead. In any case, I have her pictures taped to the wall above my writing desk.






This thing below is one half of a review I wrote for MTLS, where I look at two short story collections. You can find the entire review here.



The Divinity Gene

by Matthew J. Trafford

Vancouver, BC: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011

192 pp. $22.95



Distillery Songs

by Mike Spry

London, ON: Insomniac Press, 2011

160 pp. $19.95



In her stint as guest-judge for The Giller Prize, British writer Victoria Glendinning railed against Canadian literature for being too boring, too regional, too . . . Canadian. In her eyes, we Canucks lack imagination, a willingness to take risks. See, for example, this excerpt from a piece in The Globe:

It seems in Canada that you only have to write a novel to get grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and from your provincial Arts Council, who are also thanked. Complaints were once voiced that most shortlisted Giller novels emanated from just three big-name publishers, all owned by Bertelsmann, and that virtually every winner lived in the Toronto area. Now, many of the submitted authors, and their rugged subject matter, hail from Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland. That’s maybe because small publishers too are now subsidised, and they proliferate. If you want to get your novel published, be Canadian.

Though one can concede that maybe, just maybe, Ms. Glendinning has a point, it’s also clear she hasn’t read Matthew J. Trafford or Mike Spry. The Divinity Gene, Trafford’s debut collection, is a wicked fusion of Italo Calvino and the kind of funky grist you’d find in McSweeney’s, while Spry’s own debut collection, Distillery Songs, is a welcome knee to the groin of anyone who says that Canadian’s can’t be funny, subversive, or over-the-top.

The stories in The Divinity Gene tend to go one of two ways. Either they’re intensely creative pieces – a dance club run by angels demands of its patrons an odd sort of bartering, the son of a fisherman watches as dad slices open a mermaid – that challenge perception, or more conventionally realist stories where character trumps concept.

While the cover blurbs praise The Divinity Gene’s imagination, this reader found the glitzier pieces at times lacking. Take iFaust, for example. Here a new app for iPhones lets its users sell their souls for material ends. Once our justly-warped minds regain their natural shape, we start to consider the lives in the story. The problem, I suspect, has to do with length, lay-out, and what Trafford chooses to dwell on; (too) much of the story deals with the glamour of the Faustian narrative trajectory, at the cost of actually getting to know the characters.

Another story, “The Grimpils,” offers a plot almost as absurd as the story’s title: the call of a mysterious writer draws friends and family of our main characters to Paris, where, it turns out, they’ve somehow been assimilated into an odd kind of cult. They become, to use Trafford’s term, ‘grimpils,’ a play on the word ‘pilgrim.’

The story never quite transcends its conceit. When Canadian Richard visits the American embassy for answers, his plea for help sounds almost comical. “We’re here to talk to you about a very serious situation,” he explains, and he’s right: if someone close to me flew to Paris, heeding the siren-song of some writer, and became a weird nihilistic fanatic, I’d be concerned, too. But the sense of loss swirling at the story’s core gets lost in what feels like a running joke, while the seemingly superfluous inclusion of footnotes gives the impression that what we’re reading is actually some kind of science experiment.

Again, the story is strongest when Trafford focuses on the emotional cores of his characters and limits the time we spend vacationing in Absurd-istan. The shared grief of Richard and co. is heartbreaking enough to almost transcend the story’s silly conceit, and the ending, I have to admit, arrives with surprising power.

Stronger are more subtle stories like “Thoracic Exam,” which brilliantly uses a medical exam as a narrative frame, and “Forgetting Helen,” where our narrator, who has literally spent his entire life in a library, might have found his Helen of Troy roaming the stacks. In both cases, Trafford never loses sight of what this reader considers the most important part of story-telling: making me care, truly, about the people he’s created.

To my eye, two stories stand out from the others as evidence that Trafford can tell one hell of a story.

“Past Perfect” follows its queer lead as he struggles to comprehend his partner’s descent into dementia. There are no otherworldly creatures, no supernatural occurrences, no blinding pyrotechnics, just a man who loves another man who is dying, their relationship masterfully captured with a subtlety often at odds with the rest of the collection.

Impressively, Trafford manages to do something similar with “The Divinity Gene,” the story that probably first got the author noticed when it appeared in the brilliant Darwin’s Bastards, a collection of Canadian speculative fiction published by the same folks who put out Trafford’s debut.

The conceit isn’t entirely unfamiliar: some intrepid scientist breaks down Jesus’ DNA, spawning an entire race of Christs who behave in weirdly opaque ways. The story takes its time, developing into a surprising meditation on grief, spirituality, and humanity. Surprising, I say, because a lesser writer might milk the Christ-resurrection angle to gimmick proportions. Not Trafford. Once he’s got logistics out of the way, his attention shifts from Godliness to base humanity, where the inner struggles of Maciej, the man who cracks the ‘Divinity Gene,’ force the reader to ask big questions about faith and the capacity to hurt and hurt others.

The story anchors the collection and proves that, when he isn’t playing mad scientist, Trafford can work wondrous, heartfelt alchemy, a skill he shares with Chris Adrian, an American writer known for playfully bending reality. Like Adrian, recently named one of the New Yorker’s best writers under 40, Trafford juggles humour, sadness, and an often delicious sense of the surreal. The result, fictions that play to either mind or heart but rarely both, suggest that Trafford has the potential to become a force in Canada’s literary world. He just needs to slow down and listen to his characters, first and foremost.

[First published in MTLS]

PRISM-matic (Now in technicolor!)

Fresh from the seedy underbelly of Canadian literature comes "Krupkee, on a Molecular Level," a short story of mine published in the recently-released new issue of PRISM International. Gazooks!

I've already mentioned this, but the story is about a Ukrainian punk band on the run from the law. It also features alcholic toilet water.

Much as I'd like to explain what that means, you should probably just head to your local magazine, book, and journal distributor and pick up a copy of the magazine to read for yourself. As a bonus, you'll be supporting two industries that badly needs you support: literary journals in Canada (yay!) and me ( *crickets* ).

xo!

- Andrew

MTLS

Another bout of blog left untended. Shame on me. Shame shame. Especially when I have a review of Mike Spry's Distillery Songs and Matt Trafford's The Divinity Gene online in the latest edition of MTLS.

Interested in what I have to say? That's sweet of you to say. You can sate your review-lust here!

Review: The Reinvention of the Human Hand by Paul Vermeersch

Poetry Review
Andrew MacDonald

The Reinvention of the Human Hand
by Paul Vermeersch
Tonronto, ON: McClleland & Stewart, 2010
88 pp. $ 18.99

Toronto-based poet and former Lampert Award nominee Paul Vermeersch returns with The Reinvention of the Human Hand, a book of 38 pitch-perfect poems that test the boundaries between man and beast. The collection follows The Fad Kid, Burn, and Between the Walls, showcasing Vermeersch’s trademark wit and an artisan’s talent for crafting thought-provoking poems from the most unexpected of materials.

In “The Painted Beasts of Lascaux,” the “Yellow ochre horses” painted on cave walls may predate starships and the centaurs of our imagination, but they sing the primordial song “that’s been snarled in your heart – breaking it, / trying to pound its way free – for your entire life.” Meanwhile, an ostensibly benign encounter with the natural world in “A Scorpion in Alcohol” introduces “a venom so subtle, it lingers / and threatens to ruin you still,” the realization that the realm of the bestial might just be closer than we think.

Time and again, Vermeersch asks us to re-examine where we place ourselves in relation to the natural world. Not surprisingly, a number of poems hinge on our relationship to primates. In “Twenty-one Days with a Baboon Heart,” for example, an ape – the most striking of “our primordial reflections” – gives up its heart to fix an ailing human infant. More Orwell than medical miracle, the transplant brings with it the spectral presence of an animalistic “fear what we cannot know.” Though the poem appears to end rhetorically – “how long / do you suppose she survived with their terror?” – Vermeersch cleverly embeds the answer in the poem’s title. A longer piece, “Ape,” suggests that the aforementioned terror might be of our own making. Broken into three sections, the poem addresses mankind’s exploitation of its nearest link, concluding with actual dialogue between Michael, an ape capable of speaking sign language, and researchers eager to learn the fate of Michael’s mother. From Michael’s harrowing account, you almost wish they hadn’t asked.

Like much of the collection, “Ape” confronts its reader with some heady, deeply troubling philosophical questions about what it means to be human. Which is not to suggest that Vermeersch can’t make us laugh; comedy has its place in the collection, but only at the service of provoking more self-analysis. “Last of the Blondes,” a clever riff on recessive genetics, asks Ingrid, the world’s sole natural blonde, if her birth will be “co-opted / by governments and syndicates?” Will she become “their Golden Child, their Chosen One, their Brand?” We laugh at the absurdity of Ingrid’s celebrity status. Laugh, that is, until our flaxen-haired Everywoman’s dissolution into legend leaves us wondering what—existentially, biologically, and culturally—a world without blondes would mean. Another poem, “Three Anthropomorphic Studies,” features a familiar trio of Warner Bros. cartoon characters consumed by an almost existential despair. Here again, the gap between man and beast dissolves.

At times Vermeersch seems to laud the natural world, envying the way it has “mastered the arts of giving and taking,” (a doozy of a line from “Ode to Amoebus Proteus”), while poems like “In the Glorious Absence of Gods” and “Boys Who Envy Werewolves” point to the disastrous consequences in store for those who ignore their primeval selves.

If the collection has a weakness, it’s that the poems may cohere a bit too much, offering slightly different takes on a thesis that Vermeersch has no trouble proving in a single go. But that is a minor quibble. Both a swan song to our shared primordial past and an examination of how the animal within thrives in spite of, or perhaps in retaliation to, our best efforts to subdue it, The Reinvention of the Human Hand might very well be the year’s most astute meditation on human nature and its lingering past.

(Originally published in MTLS)

Review: I'm a Registered Nurse Not a Whore by Anne Perdue

Fiction Review
Andrew MacDonald

I'm a Registered Nurse Not a Whore
by Anne Perdue
London, ON: Insomniac Press, 2010
258 pp. $19.95

I’m a Registered Nurse Not a Whore, Anne Perdue’s provocatively titled debut, is a collection of eight funny-sad short stories about the lengths we go to find love in a world of pawned dreams and everyday catastrophe. Perdue’s characters are jerks, spazzes and obnoxious boozehounds. They cuss, kvetch and refuse to play nice. But they are also expectably human and just as susceptible to the wiles of hope and love as the rest of us.

In the “Escapist,” for example, expert tourists Doug and Shar wreak havoc in the Caribbean. Here, as elsewhere in the collection, the narrator is a roving shifty-eyed third person, binding itself to the story’s dynamic duo while doling ample helpings of snark and discontent. Not only do we dislike Doug and Shar, we have all met them in some incarnation or another. They are the goons who butt in front of us at the supermarket, the lushes who come to parties empty-handed and drink all the good stuff. While Doug heaves himself dramatically on an ice sculpture in an effort to drunkenly protest paying for a bottle of expensive wine, the perspective shifts to his wife Shar. Watching on, she weighs the pros and cons of getting yet another divorce before deciding to stand by her red-faced, steak-craving man. Somehow Perdue convinces us to suspend judgment of her creations, if only for a second. There is nothing left to do but gape at these marvelously complementary specimens in wonder.

Then, there are the protagonists of “Dry Well,” Keith and Heather, hapless first time home-owners desperately trying to stay financially and emotionally afloat. Between the mice, the busted furnace, and Keith’s career-woes, there is not much the pair can do but scratch their heads and hold each other tight. In one memorable scene, they frolic in an inflatable backyard pool until an errant nail deflates their fun. And then the rain comes. Even here, in a ramshackle house that refuses to be fixed, the human spirit endures. The ending, a brilliant recounting of the flawless trajectory of a gummy bear, is well worth the wait and proves that, even at its bleakest, the universe can still serve up grace.

Sally Snow, the main character in CA-NA-DA, is perhaps Purdue’s most striking creation – a whirling dervish of quirk and emotional spasticity. Middle-aged and awash in her own life mistakes, she urges her slacker of a son, Lyle, to get a life. She even offers him a cool grand to take the MENSA membership test with her. But Lyle is content working at the local shooting range, chumming up with illiterate rednecks, and Sally’s attempts to buy him over only widen the gulf between them. The story really comes alive when Sally welcomes Ruth, a Haitian billeting in Canada with her baby, Joe, into her house. It is not giving too much away to say that Ruth becomes vinegar to Sally’s baking soda, her presence being just what the proverbial doctor ordered to bring the story to a climax.

On a technical level, Perdue has commendable writing chops. It takes a special kind of artist to cuss like nobody’s business and still sound smart. Junot Diaz manages it, Mordecai Richler, too. Add Perdue to that list. When she is not crafting sensual metaphors and provocative imagery, Perdue drops F-bombs with aplomb. Moreover, each story is meticulously crafted and well structured. Any one of these tales could light up the big screen with their evocativeness.

If I'm a Registered Nurse Not a Whore has a flaw, it is Perdue’s occasional lack of sympathy for her characters. They are not the most likable people in the world, and I cannot help but wonder whether a bit more narratorial compassion might go a long way in endearing them to us. But that is a minor irritant in an otherwise splendid work. Manic but never gratuitous, I’m a Registered Nurse Not a Whore is a brave, sly and touching meditation on sharing an imperfect world. Perdue’s characters learn, like the rest of us inevitably do, that no matter how far we fall, as long as there is company we can at least enjoy the ride.

(Originally published in MTLS)

Two items of note. First and fore, my review of a pair of novels, Combat Camera and the Evolution of Inanimate Objects, can be found in the current ish of Event. Deets here.

Also, PRISM International has picked up my story, "Krupkee, on a Molecular Level," for a future issue. It's about a Ukrainian punk band on the run from the authorities after the lead singer puts the son of a political high-up into a coma. Other features include mysterious toilet alcohol, a plane crashing into the steeple of a church, and several reference to genitals. At its heart, though, it's about fatherhood and redemption. Seriously.

Will keep you updated, you interwebs you.