Quite excited about this issue, even delved a bit into the poetry. Read the six fiction stories and all were very interesting and well written. Also read the two nonfiction pieces and I herein admit that had I not known they were such, I would never have guessed. Same imagery, sense of story, inviting voice, story arc, structure, etc. that I used to think was reserved for fiction only. I’m glad I’m wrong.
Let me highlight a couple of the stories for specific reasons.
Refund, by Karen E. Bender, is the story of a couple living in NYC that find themselves financially strapped. When they get a chance to go down south for a month to earn some extra money they sublease their apartment. Unfortunately, it is during the 9/11 disaster and the tenant moves out after ten days and demands her $3,000 full refund for fear and suffering and claiming some dirt and silly crayon marks as more reason. The young wife refuses to grant the full refund, knowing that the money is already spent and also that there are ten days that the tenant was there and she left the windows open to the dirt and soot. The e-mails back and forth between the wife and the former tenant are very funny and yet turn poignant, even as the tenant keeps demanding more to come up with a grand total of $54,000 due her. But the twist is too good to leak here. The characters learn, change and interact nicely. The element of the e-mail correspondence is a nice touch and the story is just very well done.
Alyson Hagy’s Border reads like a novel that pits character against the odds. It is exquisitely done and again brings in a sympathetic protagonist, a teenager who steals a puppy and meets up with various characters along the way as he tries to escape and learns how much he’s willing to do for the puppy. The ending here is powerful and unexpected, yet built within the arc gradually.
The Great Cheese by Luke Salisbury is a story within a story as a father repeats a tale he’s told his son many times of how he and his brother tried to bring the biggest cheese ever made across country as a gift to President Andrew Jackson. There is the adventure of that tale interwoven with the relationship of the man and his son that is structured very well in that one naturally flows around the other. There is another story being told within the tale, and that is one of racist behavior of others in the south at that time, and that brings in the element of tragedy probably more eloquently for its place within the setting in the drama.
Valerie Sayers’ Sleepwalk is the story of lost love that returns twice in a married woman’s life, and the episodes and backstory blend in in perfectly planned narrative structure so that the final impact is built by many timelines instead of just one. Nicely written, nicely plotted out.
I must leave you with this excerpt from Ira Wood’s nonfiction piece, Instead of–it is the opening paragraph:
This is a story about not doing; this is a story about everything else. The trouble with writing is that it’s too easy not to do. Imagine if eating chocolate was as easy not to do as writing. Or paying your mortgage. Or making an eight o’clock class. Imagine if you were firmly convinced that all the stupid things you do instead of writing were also more important than sex. Oh, no, I don’t want to take you doggie-style, I have to check my e-mail. (Ploughshares, Winter, 2005, p.195)
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology