It’s difficult to review veteran St. Louis writer Wm. Stage’s first collection of short stories, Not Waving Drowning, without playing spoiler. Stage’s one-page headnote explaining the premise of the collection—the best writing in a very well-written book—says all you really want to know before reading these eight stories. These are stories about “people who are in over their heads,” Stage tells us, and much of the fun in each story is discovering what exactly goes wrong and how badly.
Doing my best to avoid disclosing any plots, I’d like to express to St. Louis readers what’s in it for them if they take a chance on this 240-page book that sells for $11.95 on the apparently self-published Floppinfish imprint. The stories are all based in St. Louis, with the odd departure to a regional snake migration route. Stage introduces local St. Louis landmarks as casually and with the same confidence that modern cinema takes in the Manhattan skyline. He knows most of us will get the picture effortlessly, and yet it’s such a comfortably inhabited landscape invoked with such confidence and affection that I think Stage will draw you in—into his stories and his city—even if you don’t know every facet of the bank across from the Hi-Pointe and the giant Amoco sign.
The confidence of the writing is an important feature of this book. I would like to think a grizzled veteran of our creative community like Stage deserves the support of St. Louis readers outright, but this emphatically is not a mercy buy. Stage has developed a prose style that is quite his own, and really can carry a story convincingly. Let’s listen to a young woman—Stage narrates equally well in both genders—getting her bearings on a journey to a snake migration route in southern Illinois with her brother, the namesake of the story “Roark Manning Field Herper.”
We’d been walking on this dirt road—the snake road—for nearly a half-hour now and still hadn’t seen any moving sticks, a bit disappointing since Roark had played it up so much during the two-hour drive down here from St. Louis. The snake road was a three-mile stretch in the Shawnee National Forest. Roark explained that each year, between mid-March and mid-May, the Forest Service closed off the road to traffic to let the snakes migrate without getting squished.
If you think it’s easy to introduce that many facts and plot elements in a conversational tone while beginning to shadow character and mood with a word choice like “squished,” then you have never attempted to write short fiction.
If you’d guess that there are squishy things to come in this story and in this collection, you would be correct. This is not a book for the squeamish. The first story begins with a process server urinating in an alley and the last story ends with an utterly guiltless murderer fussing over the sudden need to develop a drawl if he is going to succeed as a fugitive in South Carolina. This is true to form for Stage, who first roughed out his prose style and instinct for stories writing things like the “Mississippi Mud” column for the Ray Hartmann-era Riverfront Times. Like his daily paper counterpart Bill McClellan, Stage is gritty and scruffy—without apology, but also without fetishizing his grit. It comes naturally to him as skin.
When Stage tries his hand at true crime, one also gets the sense that he came by these unsavory aspects of the human condition naturally. Reading Wm. Stage one has the strong sense that he has been there and, if not always done that, at least he’s seen it done or heard the desperate, detailed confession of the evil-doer. The person putting down this wonderful and entertaining collection of St. Louis stories has no doubt that when Wm. Stage talks about people who are in way over their head, he’s only writing about what he knows.
Disclosure: I wrote for the Hartmann-era RFT for many of the years that Stage delivered the paper and wrote his columns, but we scarcely ever spoke. We both had a similar outsider’s urgency, occupied too much of the same frequency on the dial, and I avoided him.
Wm. Stage reads from and signs copies of Not Waving Drowning at Big Sleep Books (239 N. Euclid) on Saturday, June 9 from 1-3 p.m. and McGurk's Irish Pub (1204 Russell) on Wednesday, June 20 from 5:30-7 p.m.
