"North Country" by Roxane Gay

Let's just go ahead and declare it the year of Roxane.  Seriously.  Her novel, An Untamed State, (which I was psyched to procure a copy of at this weekend's Muse) is getting rave reviews and her upcoming book of essays Bad Feminist, is going to break the internet, IMHO.  You can also find her tweeting about all the things.

I got a chance to attend a session with Professor Gay at this week's Muse conference, hosted by Boston's Grub Street.  The Brutal Languages of Love was fun, real, and insightful: not surprising.  One of the most valuable lessons I took from the session was the question of mixing love and politics.  A fellow conference attendee asked Ms. Gay how she navigates this challenging territory.  "I am a woman and I write.  That is a political act.  But I don't let politics stop me from writing what I want to write," Ms. Gay said. She reminded us that politics should be organic to the work.

Want an example?  Read Gay's "North Country," which is included in the Best American Short Stories of 2012.  I am almost rendered wordless in the face of explaining the beautiful intricacies of this story.

Confession: I am a Women's Studies minor dropout.  It was my senior year and I knew the last few courses to fulfill the minor would be dark and hard and twist my twenty-one year old brain like taffy, so I gave up and took fun classes like "The United States" instead.  It is very important to know all of the state capitals.  Women's Studies frustrated me; I guess I'm a bad feminist.  It was assumed that we would complicate (verb) our lived experiences (what other kinds of experiences are there?) by making the personal political.  I was happy to board that train.  But it was always a one-way ticket.  We never examined things in reverse.

That's what I love most about this story.  The politics are organic.  Kate is a Black woman living on the Upper-peninsula of Michigan, working in an all-male department as a university professor.  She's deeply unhappy with her surroundings but we also learn that Kate sought this desolation to escape a previous trauma.  Are gender, race, and class at the heart of this story?  Absolutely.  But so is Kate's broken heart.  The political becomes very personal in "North Country" and that's why I love this story.

"Taken" by CB Anderson

I spent Saturday at the Newburyport Literary Festival with my husband and he dug CB Anderson's reading from her collection, River Talk.  We're going to try to share, read, and discuss a short story each week in our own personal, world's smallest book club, in recognition that in about thirteen years our son will leave the homestead and we'll need to talk about something other than him.

Our first selection is Anderson's "Taken," which is the story of Michael, his brother Sheridan, and Sebastian's ex-girlfriend Et.  They live in Maine and shoot all the things, then they carve the things up and hang them on walls to honor them.  That part was a little hard for my all creatures great and small loving self but Anderson's strength is setting, and she nails it.  You are firmly planted in the middle of Maine where a random nighttime gunshot and a taxidermist are the norm, not the exception.

I'm looking for change, or the missed opportunity for change, in the stories I'm reading these days, and this falls into the missed opportunity bucket.  Michael is the better man, the better brother, and the better hunter.  He's ready to make a play for poor, dumped, white-haired, Alanis Morrisette-loving Et.  He's got the scallops and wine and everything y'all.  Yet he's also carting his human barnacle of a brother around town because Sheridan lost his license and he's dropping two hundred big ones on little bro at Wal-Mart.  Michael can take down a wild animal in one shot but he's a fool for his brother.  He knows it, Sheridan knows it, and Et knows it too.  It's why she stops making pies for Michael and heads back to Sheridan's love shack.  Michael's the better man, but until he figures that out, he's destined to spend most of his time with dead deer.

The Irony of a Short Story Blog

It's a SHORT story right?  And this is a blog, not the NY Times.  But alas, I haven't made the time to read a story and post my response in over a month.  How can that be?

Work, holidays, family, The Good Wife Seasons 1-4, writing, exercise….and these 24 hours we are given seven times each week quickly disappear.  

I'm taking a look at my priorities this week as my spring semester looks to be busier than ever, and that's going to mean some tough choices about how I spend my time.

I don't know if Shorty will continue to Get Down, and I know that all three of you reading this are very sad about that.

But it might.  I mean, they are SHORT stories after all.

So if you've happened on this blog trust that I still love short stories and I hope you'll take the time to peruse what I've read and recommended over the past six months.  

Stay tuned….