Consider once more, “indie,” that pesky trochee to which so many in today’s arts cling, with its convenient carte blanche, both choice and fate, the hand they’ve been dealt from the deck they themselves have stacked. And we the audience, likewise, are every bit as guilty of linguistic gamesmanship. Untroubled by a vacuum of meaning, we use and repeat the term as often to praise as deride, depending on the view afforded us, the relative height and ivoryness of our private towers.
But this is a time of great upheaval, or at least that’s what we hear, in entertainment. Independent bands release albums without record labels, without even hard copies of albums, and wind up in Toyota commercials or playing Letterman. And so won’t the same happen in literature? Shouldn’t it?
How badly we want to retain our faith in meritocracy. And so we appoint tiers of cultural arbiters, from bloggers to indie publishers and label reps to licensing and literary agents to the pinnacle of gatekeepers, the house itself, to identify for us (there’s so much! How can we keep up?!) the cultural products we’d otherwise miss. They pan like a prison searchlight over the landscape, or, better yet, walk among us under deep cover in our plaids and faded denims, speaking our language of hip subversion, palpating various pulses and shoulder-tapping potential jackpots like Slugworth.
For now, let us consider three books we can still safely call “indie.” It is unlikely, currently, that any would find a home at our major houses, though one has to imagine this will have to change if corporate publishers intend to survive. Each offers challenges, and all exhibit the promise and vitality of today’s small-press short fiction: what some might label “experimental,” a word that, thankfully, loses relevance by the day.
And while idea of full disclosure in a review like this is bit absurd, here are some relevant facts. Mary Hamilton sold me my current eyeglasses and lives less than a half mile from me. She, partnered with Lindsay Hunter (both of whom went to my same MFA Writing program), runs the much-loved Quickies! Reading Series, at which I’ve read three times in two years. Daddy’s was published by Featherproof Books, both of whose owner/operators I call friends, and who also published Amelia Gray’s first collection, AM / PM, which she graciously discussed during a visit to a class I teach on Contemporary American Literature. And here’s Amelia slaughtering me at the 2009 Texas Book Festival edition of the Literary Death Match.
See? Absurd. This is a world of overlaps and run-ins and full-frontal support for one another’s work. Though the bigger world of big-money publishing, let’s be clear, operates by practices every bit as nepotistic—from shared drinks at Bread Loaf to shared agents in Manhattan to, for instance, VERY IMPORTANT lists in The New Yorker—as this relatively quaint, smaller world. The smaller world just tends to be more honest about it.
We Know What We Are
Mary doesn’t want to write, or even really read, novels. Rather than convince her, we’re better off savoring small pieces such as these. After winning Rose Metal Press’s Fourth Annual Short Story contest, the small We Know What We Are has been published in a run of 300. At just 44 pages, and with its striking two-color letter-pressed cover, the chapbook is a small, gorgeous wonder.
The title’s plurality of first persons gives a fair indication of Hamilton’s approach to narrative—less interested in the development of a unique individual, her focus lies in those qualities, pains, and emotions we share. And while much has been made of her references to pop culture’s neglected heroes (Night Court’s Bull Shannon, Cosby’s Theodore Huxtable), these distract from the timelessness of her stories. Likewise, am I less drawn to the rhythms she settles into sometimes; evidence, I have to believe, of many of these stories’ original intent to be heard rather than read.
Mary’s strongest work moves beyond the Beat-like repetitions and choppy claims at which she is clearly adept (“I am a wrinkle. I am a sunken cheek. I am an arched eyebrow. A hooked nose. A hair comb. A square tie”), and reaches for a mystery less syntactic. Listen:
There is a certain faith in the body’s ability to heal. In the way a broken bone set correctly will find its way back together. The way a scab forms over a cut. The way strained muscles ease into a painless routine. There is a certain faith that the body will return and return again. The body will defend against the demons that cut us down.
Here is belief of the purest sort, one’s trust in oneself: none more vital. But shared, too, a common struggle. And then the shift:
But where do we turn when the pain persists? When the breath gets tender? When the demons are your own body, attacking, treason from the inside? Are we supposed to just give up and go, voluntarily, in that perfume of rot called twilight only to be swallowed by the selfish maw of night?
Mary’s answer is beautiful and obvious: “we stand together, shoulder to shoulder, watching the blue of our youth pulling her own skin back.” There is war on these pages, but its battles are brief and magical. Throughout, soloists find partners, sometimes human and other times beast, and together they “stand up with the sun as she rises in the morning.”
Museum of the Weird
The cover of Amelia’s AM / PM (Featherproof, 2009) refers to its contents not as a novel, and not as stories, but simply as “a book.” It’s a neat piece of taxonomic two-step, and the vague relationship, half there, half not, between the tiny fictions plays a big role in its success.
Museum of the Weird, winner of FC2’s 2008 Ronald Sukenick American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize, and published last month, abandons this intra-web of connections for a straight collection of stories, each independent and, yes, completely weird. And though clearly the product of a single consciousness, Amelia’s book feels the most anthological of these three, a kind of tour through imaginary worlds in which plates come covered in hair, boyfriends pout inside suitcases, and the delicacy of human tongue sautéed in buttermilk leads, naturally, to a woman eating her own toes.
Look, okay, yes, “Dale was married to a paring knife and Howard was married to a bag of frozen tilapia,” but that doesn’t mean the two friends can’t spend an afternoon fishing. Likewise, when the children of “The Cube” find “a massive monolith, wider than it was tall and taller than anyone could reach” resting in a field beyond the picnic area, they “shrieked over it as children do.” Because Gray’s characters sometimes puzzle along with us, and do so in language evocative for its perfect simplicity. Amelia devises her weird central conceit and follows it, never more gorgeously than in “The Picture Window,” a story I challenge you to read without succumbing to heartbreak and gratitude in equal parts.
If there’s a dimness to Museum of the Weird’s light, it’s the author’s propensity to not so much end stories as pull the narrative plug. See the penguin speaking to an armadillo, ending his story by trying to explain why males of his species sometimes sit on eggs: “It doesn’t make any goddamn sense.” Such non-endings can read as a desire to preserve the story’s charm. But charm to Amelia is a bit like clever to Lorrie Moore—which is not to call these stories cute, or precious, or anything less than startling. The INDIE AUTHOR Kyle Minor’s take on these endings is surely a worthwhile counter-point. Are they “experimental?” Technically, but who cares? Count them among Ben Marcus’s category of literature, which doesn’t give us what we already know we want. They surprise, then surprise again, but never overreach—and this is perhaps their greatest surprise of all.
Daddy’s
Let’s begin with a few summaries. In “Marie Noe Talks to You about Her Kids,” a woman catalogs the children she had and then did not have: “ten of them died. Dead is dead. It was years ago.” In “The Fence,” a woman becomes addicted to the groinal shock of her dog’s electric fence collar, holding it to, and eventually inside, her underpants as she approaches the invisible border. In “That Baby,” a child named Levis grows too big way too fast, resulting in a deeply Oedipal conflict that can only end in escape. But whose?
With Lindsay, it’s all of ours. A story ends, we close the book and are relieved at the relative sanity and peace of our trying times. How even to speak of these tiny gothic gems? With adjectives, perhaps: mean, lewd, fierce, unapologetic. These and more will a reader apply to the oddly printed Daddy’s, which we hold vertically to read, its spine parallel to the floor. It’s an odd development for a wonderfully odd collection about our post-apocalyptic present, best represented by “Out There.”
Another thing to know about out there is there’s a pack of wild dogs that claim it as their home. The story is that a farmer loaded up his sheepdog and her puppies one day, drove out there and pushed them out of the truck because he couldn’t bear to drown them but he couldn’t afford to feed them either.
Here our—that includes the author; no exemptions to this struggle—tendency to define and explain through lists becomes the story’s stepping stone, with “another thing” adding to our fragmented ontology. Note, too, the story inside the story, undercutting the author’s own claim to this terrible existence in which money is tight and compassion tighter. The story’s daddy drops his daughters out there with only themselves in the darkness, calling it their “…rite of passage. If you make it you will be men. If you don’t, I’ll lickety-split a prayer for each of you come Sunday. Then he peeled out, left us coughing in his dust. Lily said, Don’t he know we’re girls? How are we supposed to become men then?” Somewhere, there’s a doctorate thesis to be written on Lindsay’s version of post-post-post feminism. Meanwhile, we can enjoy Lindsay’s steady supply of brutal and lovely descriptions. The dark out there is “a navy quilt sewn with pearl buttons.” Elsewhere, the sun “is an orange yolk sliding down the sky.” And see that moon? In Daddy’s it’s a “dollop of jizz,” or “an eye rolled back,” or “a pail of milk.” All of these at once.
Fierce and wonderfully terrible, Daddy’s will hold class, teaching by the same method the earth teaches: “The desert is a good lesson in life. It proves that what you want most will most likely stay out of reach.” Ostension and example and nothing but honesty. Lesson learned.
Kyle Beachy can be found on the web at (where else?) kylebeachy.com.
