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WRITERS ONLINE

Spring 2005
Volume 9, Number 1

Fred Allen once said that "To a newspaperman a human being is an item with the skin wrapped around it."

I don't know for certain, but I don't think he meant it as a compliment. And I don't really think he's right. I've never met a good newspaperman who would let something like a little skin come between him and a good story.

That may be why newspapermen make good novelists. Defoe, Dickens, Crane, Hemingway, Dreiser, Kennedy, Dexter - merely lists a few of my favorites. Busybodys in some sense, peddlers of the variegated things humans do to one another, they are people who pray for what's known in the trade as 'good' murders as well as for the pope to die on their shifts.

They expect people to lie to them and for some people to despise them. An old joke asks "Why do so many people take an immediate dislike to journalists?'

The answer: "To save time."

And in all, you would think that the profession would drive news people to the rim, to the outside, behind the ropes. It doesn't. It brings them in closer, notebook in hand, giving them a better sounding device for the capacious human appetite for love, greed, lust and drive. And if the writer is willing, it gives him empathy, lets him step into the shoes of the subject, feel his way around someone else's pantry, the stern of his yacht, the place of another's demise.

Of course the best place to learn anything about anyone is in the petrie dish of disorderly conduct. After all, we learn very little about one another when everyone's on their best behavior. Good newspaper people have great eyes and unusual hearing for the signs of sin and vice and an even better than average sense of what makes a reader sigh, accepting that his secrets are known.

In Pete Dexter's work, people are rarely on their best behavior. And under some of life's most gripping circumstances he draws them with an empathy that draws the reader up close too. A former newsman, Pete Dexter possesses a gimlet eye for the human gestures that quilt a tale with flourish. He is the author of the National Book Award winner Paris Trout and of God's Pocket, Deadwood, Brotherly Love and The Paperboy, and a screenwriter for the movies Paris Trout, Rush, and Michael.

Train, his newest novel, just out in paperback, is a book that includes a rape, a double homicide, a one-footed duck, a woman who eats ticks, a man who feeds another man's false teeth to a dog, and two people whose wedding day looks like this:

"They got drunk and went to Mexico. They went to a live sex show, a woman and a bear, woke up in the morning in a room with a cat in the corner and cockroaches all over the ceiling, and went out and got drunk again and got married."

It's a sweetheart of a book, filled to the rim with a newsman's detection of the things we can do to one another.

Here to read from it is the author, Pete Dexter.

By Marion Roach, author of the forthcoming book The Roots of Desire and coauthor of Dead Reckoning: The New Science of Catching Killers

Times Union Article
Pete Dexter
Top of Page

Not having a pet, I was a bit skeptical when I heard that Pam Houston's new book "Sight Hound" (2005) was based on a relationship between a woman and her dog. Let's face it, the depth and complexity of human-animal relationships is hard to grasp when the closest you've come to owning a pet was that time when your sister got to take the 3rd grade class gerbil home for a night. On the other hand, knowing Pam Houston's fresh perspectives and gutsy writing, I was excited to read her first novel no matter what the subject. As it turns out, "Sight Hound" proves that you don't have to be a pet owner to understand human-animal companionship, and Houston has done it with style and honesty that makes readers think twice about the primacy of human relationships.

It would be a mistake, however, to describe "Sight Hound" as a novel simply about pet ownership or human-animal companionship. This novel is grounded in relationships of all types. The plot revolves around Rae Rutherford, a playwright living in Colorado who splits her time between an apartment in Denver and her ranch in Mineral County. While the plot centers around Rae's life, and is set in a specific three-year period, the story is told by a handful of characters. Each chapter is broken into numerous sections, which are narrated by Rae and her many companions. Although Rae is the only character who speaks consistently in each chapter, her voice does not dominate the novel; Rae's companions, human and animal, tell the bulk of this story.

The first chapter opens the novel with brief references to people in Rae's life: Peter, the ex-fiance who ran off when Rae was at the grocery store; Mona, her loopy camping friend; Jonathan, Rae's writing partner and travel buddy; and Dante, a seven-year old Irish wolfhound that Rae will drop everything for. The details of the first chapter, which is quite short and narrated solely by Rae, gather meaning later in the novel when these people and situations are fit into the larger context.

What really grabs readers in "Sight Hound" is Houston's character development, and this extends to Rae's dogs, Dante and Rose just as much as the human characters. This is a grand feat considering the number of characters who participate in the story and narration. For example, Houston gives a thorough history of Dr. Evans and Brooklyn Underhill, the veterinarian and resident vet student who treated Dante at the animal hospital. Both Evans and Underhill narrate their own chapters, giving the power of voice to the characters themselves. This is a privilege that Houston denies Rae's mother, father and childhood friend Victoria, who have undoubtedly had more of an impact on Rae's life, but are not central to her current situation or to that of Dante, the other main character. If the novel were just about Rae, Evans and Underhill would probably not be as significant as they are in "Sight Hound"; but the novel is about companionship and love between Rae and Dante, and the supporting characters are those people who have been intimately involved in their relationship.

The second chapter gives the background on Dante's health history, particularly how he recovered from osteosarcoma in his left front leg. Under the care of Dr. Evans, Dante became the first patient to successfully undergo a new surgical procedure; this miracle made Evans famous and saved Dante's life. Sometimes people don't realize that animals develop the same kind of life-threatening conditions that humans develop, and Houston has illustrated the many issues that pet owners face when their animal companions develop a terminal illness. Using the perspective and insight of various characters, Houston emphasizes the issues and difficulty such quality of life decisions pose for pet owners: should I end my pet's suffering? How can I afford all these medical expenses? Am I being selfish at the cost of my pet's happiness? By allowing Dante to express his thoughts to the reader, Houston has powerfully conveyed an animal viewpoint that is sometimes overlooked. This helps readers grasp the complexity and depth of human-animal companionship, a dynamic that is not limited to human relationships.

Dante narrates the first section of chapter two, telling the readers that his duty in "this" life is to make sure his human, Rae, finds another human who will love and take care of her as he has done. Dante must teach Rae trust and love so that she can extend what she has learned in her companionship with him to her human relationships. Dante's introduction includes his unique perception of humans:

"There are three principles to remember if you are to teach a human being anything, and they are consistency, consistency, consistency. They are such fragile creatures to begin with, with poor eyes, poor hearing, and no sense of smell left to speak of, it's no wonder they are made of fear" (27).

As the story develops, the symbiotic relationship between Rae and Dante unfolds in situations, behavior, and thoughts expressed by both pet and owner. They are completely dedicated to each other. Their intimate relationship is not like human companionship; Rae and Dante have a straightforward understanding and commitment that is based on the simple things in life. As shown in "Sight Hound," the most basic connections often turn out to be the pillars supporting our foundation, that unconditional love can bridge borders that other bonds can't, even if this love comes from a fluffy four-legged creature. Rae and Dante's companionship is subtly central to all other relationships in "Sight Hound," playing a crucial part in character transformations and plot development.

The depth of Houston's character development is also grounded in the revolving narration. Situations and events are usually recounted or described by many different characters, although a situation that occurred in the first chapter might not resurface until the end of the book when a different character is speaking. Take, for example, the scene where a mutual friend introduced Rae and Howard, a local actor, after a theater production. Rae partially describes the scene in the first chapter, which is then described by Howard much later in the novel after the playwright and actor have married. The scene is also recounted by Dante and Rose at different points in the novel, but for different reasons. Frequently, a scene is recalled in order to relate it to some other situation or event. Rose used the scene to demonstrate that Howard was superior to previous boyfriends, whereas Dante used the scene to size up Howard and analyze the way humans interact:

"He divided his time equally between Rose and me, complimenting us both on our best features, Rose's platinum blond Tina Turneresque coat, and my bone structure, particularly that of my face, which has been the model for more than one sculptor over the years… They were standing around the way humans do when they are nervous, and interested, not allowing each other so much as a sniff. The conversation wasn't much to write home about, but I do remember him saying,

"I'm glad I met the dogs." And her saying,
"Well, yes, that's the important thing."

It's so mystifying to those of us who have only rudimentary--albeit subtle--language skills, why a breed with such advanced skills so often fails to use them. They just kept standing there, silent, neither of them acknowledging their attraction, Rose wagging her tail for all she was worth, me more reserved of course, but offering little grunts of enthusiasm as Howard rubbed in the deep cavities behind my ears" (112).

"Sight Hound" is a dynamic story, one that challenges the narrow beliefs that often accompany our interactions with animals. So often we overlook small, daily routines unaware of the impact they have on our lives. By highlighting the central position that pets hold in the lives of their owners, Houston shows that human-animal companionship can be valued and understood on different levels. The way we interact with our environment is determined by how we think about our environment. Robert Olen Butler, author of "A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain" says, "Pam Houston is a wonder, moving with grace and humor and insight from the inner voice and soul of human to canine to feline and back again. 'Sight Hound' is not only a narrative tour de force but a brilliant examination of what it means-in the deepest sense-to be alive on this planet." Pet ownership is not a prerequisite for readers interested in this book. The intimacy of Houston's work makes impact through her creativity.

Houston's first book, "Cowboys Are My Weakness" (1992), won the 1993 Western States Book Award and launched her successful writing career. According to the Milwaukee Journal, "Many of these short gems owe their entire core to the west, which, more a character than a setting, allows subtle interplay to occur between Houston's strong, modern women and the prairie or rangeland they temporarily inhabit." Each of the twelve short stories features strong women and their trials with equally strong men, often involving outdoor activities, sportsmanship, or rustic lifestyles. In "Dall" and "Selway" the women risk their lives just to be by the side of the man they love; boredom ruins a relationship in "Cowboys Are My Weakness" and in "A Blizzard Under Blue Sky" the woman tries to cure winter depression by camping with her dogs in dangerous weather conditions. Essentially, these are stories of single women defining their lives amid the contemporary American backdrop.

Pam Houston's second collection of short stories, "Waltzing the Cat" (1998) won the Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction, and is connected to "Cowboys Are My Weakness." Other work by Houston includes "Women on Hunting" (1994), "A Little More About Me" (1999), "Men Before 10am" (1996), and the stage play "Tracking the Pleiades." Houston's stories have appeared in the Best American Short Stories, the Best American Short Stories of the Century, and have been nominated for the O. Henry Award and the Pushcart Prize. Currently Houston is the Director of Creative Writing at UC Davis and teaches at summer writing workshops around the world.

By Alison Kenner, M.A. student in the Women's Studies Department.

Sunday Gazette Article
Pam Houston
Top of Page

Kazuo Ishiguro explores memory and the role that the past plays in the present lives of his characters in his many novels including his most recent work Never Let Me Go, and The Remains of the Day for which he won a Booker Prize. The protagonists of his books often work to gain an understanding of the past as a way to integrate it with their present realities. They are, however, often confounded by their lack of available information or their unwillingness to honestly examine certain elements of their own lives, and they also fall victim to the gaps inherent in memory itself.

Never Let Me Go (2005) is set in the idyllic English countryside at the progressive Hailsham School for boys and girls. The tranquil setting, however, becomes ominous as the narrator Kathy H., now 31, relates the events of her life and those of her close friends Tommy and Ruth. She explains how she and her classmates were raised "to know and not know" that they were human clones created to donate their organs in the prime of their life. They grew up taking for granted that they would be "carers" first and then "donors" until after their fourth donation, when they "completed." As one guardian explained to them in an effort to debunk their romantic notions: "Your lives are set out for you. You'll become adults, then before you're old, before you're even middle-aged you'll start to donate your vital organs. That's what each of you was created to do. You're not like the actors you watch on your videos, you're not even like me" (81). As Kathy H. finishes her ten-year career as a carer for the other donors and moves into the next stage of her life where she will also become a donor, she reminisces about her youth and explores with her friends the mysteries of their childhood. These mysteries include trying to determine whom the figure "Madame" really was and the role of art in their education-the best of which was confiscated for an unseen "gallery."

Regardless of the mysteries and dark origins of her childhood, Kathy finds comfort and companionship in her memories about it. In a revealing passage that echoes many of the concerns of Ishiguro's other novels, Kathy explains her feelings: "I was talking to one of my donors a few days ago who was complaining about how memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don't go along with that. The memories I value most, I don't see them ever fading. I lost Ruth, and I lost Tommy, but I won't lose my memories of them" (286). In Ishiguro's novels, memory becomes like a shadow for many of the characters-something they not only learn to live with but that they eventually find comfort in by its sheer inevitability of its always being there. Though many of Ishiguro's characters are unwilling to honestly come to terms completely with their past, it is something they return to over and again.

In Never Let Me Go there is another aspect to the characters' lives that functions much like their memory and serves to further complicate and extend Ishiguro's themes and concerns: the "possibles." The narrator explains them in the following way: "Since each of us was copied at some point from a normal person, there must be, for each of us, somewhere out there a model getting on with his or her life. This meant, at least in theory, you'd be able to find the person you were modeled from. That's why, when you were out there yourself-in the towns, shopping centres, transport cafes-you kept an eye out for 'possibles' (139)." The "possibles" are the closest things that the characters have to parents and a family. They function like the characters' memories in that while the "possibles" are always out there somewhere much of their reality is shrouded in secrecy and unknowingness. Hence, they become another kind of a memory for Kathy and her friends-a theme which is taken up in many of Ishiguro's other works albeit in very different settings.

The Remains of the Day (1989), Ishiguro's third novel, won the Booker Prize for Fiction and received wide-spread popular acclaim. Stevens, an aged butler, narrates the work and unknowingly reveals many things about the world around him that he is oblivious to as he reminisces upon his past and his "life of service" to a "great gentleman." As he becomes a butler for an American who is quite different in his expectations and affectations, Stevens takes his new employer's previously inconceivable suggestion to take a brief vacation. During this time, he probes the concerns closest to his heart including his view of Great Britain: "What precisely is this 'greatness'?…This whole question is very akin to the question that has caused much debate in our profession over the years: what is a 'great' butler?" (28-29) Yet even as Stevens upholds the "nobility" of his career and his former esteemed employer, disconcerting details arise and must be justified or carefully explained.

Other novels by Ishiguro include A Pale View of the Hills (1982), which won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, An Artist of the Floating World (1986), which won the Whitbread Book of the year, The Unconsoled (1995) and When We Were Orphans (2000). He has also written two screenplays for television and a screenplay titled The Saddest Music in the World, a melodrama set in the 1930s, starring Isabella Rossellini.

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan in 1954 and moved to England in 1960. He currently lives in London with his wife and daughter. He was awarded the OBE in 1995 for services to literature and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1998. His work has been translated into over 30 languages.

By Danielle Jones

Times Union Article
Kazuo Ishiguro
Top of Page

Author of only two books, Edward P. Jones has quickly won national attention and critical acclaim for his short story volume Lost in the City (1992) and novel The Known World (2003). Lost in the City is a collection of stories that take place in Washington D.C. and follow the lives of average people who are literally or figuratively lost. The stories take place during the 50's, 60's, and 70's and trace the struggles and difficulties of our nation's capital during that time period. Though the characters are black, Washington Post Book World reviewer Jonathan Yardley explains that "it is more accurate to say that he writes about people who happen to be black. For that reason his stories will touch chords of empathy and recognition in all readers, which is exactly what fiction is supposed to do." Critics and readers alike have "empathized" with Jones's characters and Lost in the City won the Ernest Hemingway/PEN award, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1992, and the first printing of the book sold out.

Jones's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Known World, presents a complex cross-section of the lives of freed and enslaved blacks, whites and Indians living in the United States during the 1800s. Set in Manchester County, Virginia, the novel follows the life of Henry Townsend a black farmer and former slave who becomes proprietor of his own plantation and slaves with the help of the wealthiest white man in the county, William Robbins. His death marks a tragedy for his widow and heir, Caldonia, and the beginning of the downfall off his plantation and the lives around him.

A number of "Known Worlds" are presented in the novel including the world of the South, the world of Manchester County, the world of Townsends' and Robbins' plantations, and the world of the characters themselves. At the beginning of the book, the many characters and story lines seem disjointed and difficult to reconcile like the map of "The Known World" that Sheriff Skiffington has hanging in his jail: "The map had come from the Russian in twelve parts, each weighting about three pounds, and Skiffington had had a time putting it together" (175). As the novel progress, however, these worlds intersect and collide at various junctures and provide tension and an insight into the characters' lives from many different points of view.

Many of these worlds are presented by the author through lists of details. We learn a number of historical facts about the South and Manchester County including figures from a census report that stated that in 1840 there were "2,191 slaves, 142 free Negroes, 939 whites, and 136 Indians," (22) the numbers and kinds of plantations, and particulars like the fact that "a 1912 fire killed ten people, including the Negro caretaker of the building where the records were kept, and five dogs, and two horses" (176). These specifics, which seem to be delivered in an objective manner, serve to delineate the historical data of the era and to also reveal the social atmosphere of the age with its multifaceted nuances.

Like the world of the South and Manchester County, the plantations also come alive in the novel with detailed sketches of their occupants. We learn not only about Henry Townsend but also about all the people connected to him: his wife, his parents, his childhood caretaker, his master (and his children and family), his foreman and slaves, his friends, and the sheriff of his region. The characters themselves are often described from birth to death with accounts of important events in their lives. Hence, we learn a great deal about each character even if they are a minor figure in the novel like the young girl Tessie:

"Hi you, Missus?" Tessie said. She was carrying her doll because her brothers had been playing with it more than she was comfortable with. "That's such a pretty doll," Fern said.

"My daddy made it for me," Tessie said. She would repeat those words just before she died, a little less than ninety years later. Her father had been on her mind all that dying morning, and she asked one of her great-grandchildren to go to the attic and find the doll. (350)

Similarly, Jones uses details and often jumps over large segments of time to give the reader a full picture of the lives of his major and minor characters alike.

In the same way that critics and readers lauded the characters in Jones's first book, they have also been drawn to the individuals that populate The Known World. The QBRL: The Black Book Review called The Known World "complex, beautifully written, and breathtaking…the book will knock the wind out of you with the depth of its compassion" for the characters that it describes. When asked about his particularly strong female roles, Jones explained, "When you are raised by a woman who had it hard and you are sensitive to how hard a life she had, you don't necessarily look around and think of women as fragile creatures, slave or otherwise. You develop the belief that they can "make a way out of no way'." In addition to Caldonia, these women include Fern Elston who educates the illiterate, Celeste who overcomes her physical disabilities, and Alice Night who creates art that transcends the difficult life of slavery.

The figure of Alice Night is particularly important in the novel for her character functions on a number of levels. Alice is the madwoman who is forever breaking boundaries around her "known world" by wandering past the physical perimeters of the plantation, by breaking the social conventions of slaves, and by creating her own "world" through her madness that she may have contrived in the first place. Yet Alice is also the woman who knows her physical and social world better than any of the others and the one ultimately who is able to survive the best on her own and create something out of the hardships of life. Near the end of the book, Caladonia's brother describes seeing Alice's art work:

People were viewing an enormous wall hanging, a grand piece of art that is part tapestry, part painting, and part clay structure-all in one exquisite Creation…a map of life of the County of Manchester, Virginia. But a "map" is such a poor word for such a wondrous thing. It is a map of life made with every kind of art man has ever thought to represent himself….It is what God sees when He looks down on Manchester. (384) In this creative gesture, unlike the Skiffington's poor map of the world, Alice has not only transcended the world of slavery and madness but she has become a kind of supernatural figure through her creation of this world that contains all the intricacies and beauty of real life. Arguably, this is what Jones himself has done in his novel The Known World through his careful rendering of his complex characters being woven together with a rich history and locale.

Jones was born in 1950 and raised in Washington D.C. He was educated at Holy Cross College and the University of Virginia. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Essence, and Ploughshares among other publications. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2004.

By Danielle Jones

Sunday Gazette Article
Times Union Article
Edward P. Jones
Top of Page

Noted for her productive career of over forty years, Maxine Kumin is the author of thirteen poetry books and a number of novels, children's books and collections of essays. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her fourth volume of poetry Up Country in 1972 and has continued to maintain an active presence in the contemporary poetry scene. This presence has only been challenged by her near fatal accident falling from a horse in 1998. Since her dramatic recovery, she has produced two books of poetry The Long Marriage (2002) and most recently Jack and Other Poems (2005). These works complement and further her earlier career of pastoral poetry and later her fervent advocacy for wildlife conservation and animal welfare in addition to her other subject matters. Ellen Davis writing for the Harvard Review claims that "Kumin sustains her equal measures of interest in the literary, the political, the natural, and the personal, just as she's done throughout her writing life." At the same time though, Kumin's more recent books take on a new urgency in relation to the themes of death, leaving a legacy, and her own relationship to poets and intellectuals who have gone before her.

In The Long Marriage, the poem "Thinking of Gorki While Clearing a Trail" exemplifies Kumin's heightened attention to these concerns. The poem opens with two stanzas of description of the poet narrator as she goes for a walk on a rainy day with her dogs. She considers the scene before her, which includes a large number of Boletus mushrooms, and ruminates on how some animals can eat things that are poisonous to humans. At this point, she turns her attention for two stanzas to the figure of Gorki before ending with the following lines:

Born Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov
he chose his own name--gorki--bitter
and a century later I carry him
like a pocket guide on this secret trail
clearing and wool-gathering as we go. (18)

Other revealing "pocket guides" that Kumin includes in The Long Marriage are her former friend and mentor Anne Sexton, Muriel Rukeyser, Marianne Moore, Rainer Maria Rilke, and William Wordsworth. In some of these poems, she reminisces from a distance on the legacy of her mentors before turning to the personal-where they have touched and have changed her life. She remembers, for example, Muriel Rukeyser's "spraddle-legged" stance and the way she would declaim her poetry, and then she explains her own struggles with physical rehab in the poem "Mother of All." In other poems, the poet narrator and her guides inhabit the same space. In "Imagining Marianne Moore in the Butterfly Garden," Kumin and Moore wander through the garden together taking in the wonder of the natural world and sharing insights with each other. Regardless of how Kumin narrates her poems, each of these figures serve to guide her present practice as a poet.

Kumin's greatest inspiration, however, is still nature. "Inescapably" she says, "many poems come up out of the earth I live on and tend to." This tendency is evident in the poems from The Long Marriage such as "Bringing Down the Birds," "Grand Canyon," and "The Greenhouse Effect." Kumin's new book, Jack and Other New Poems is also populated by work that shows how nature is a muse and a means to explore time and mortality. These include pieces such as "Widow and Dog," "Seven Caveats in May," and "The Apparition."

In the title poem of the book, "Jack," the poet narrator remembers a cold winter when she needed to stable all of her horses due to the inclement weather. She describes, in particular, the horse named Jack: "One of them / a big-nosed roan gelding, calm as a president's portrait / lives in the rectangle that leads to the stalls. We call it / the motel lobby. Wise old campaigner, he dunks his / hay in the water bucket to soften it and then visits the others" (59-60). The following summer, the poet narrator relates Jack is lent to a neighbor and then sold. She admits that she does not go to look for her lost horse, though she meant to.

Kumin, then, completes the poem with the lines: "Oh Jack, tethered in what rough stall alone // did you remember that one good winter?" Taken together, this poem is more than an anecdote of a horse. It is also a commentary on loss, memory, and nostalgia. Though the poem does not allude to it directly, this horse can stand in for the poet's body of work and what will become of it after she dies. In this way, the poem is also about legacy and how the memory of someone or something is just as important as their real presence. This poem, as well as the larger volume as a whole, is a very personal perspective of a poet looking back on her life and career.

In addition to the volumes mentioned above, Kumin is also the author of Selected Poems 1960-1990 (1990), Connecting the Dots (1996), Looking for Luck (1992), Nurture (1989), The Long Approach (1986), Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief: New and Selected Poems (1982), House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate (1975), and Halfway (1962). Kumin has also recently written a memoir titled Inside the Halo and Beyond: The Anatomy of a Recovery which relates to her riding accident at the age of 73 and her miraculous recovery. She is the author of four novels, four books of essays, most recently Always Beginning: Essays on a Life in Poetry and more than twenty children's books. Her numerous awards include the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern Poetry, an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets. She has served as Poet Laureate of New Hampshire and is a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

By Danielle Jones

Maxine Kumin
Top of Page

Maxine Kumin has won many prizes and awards in poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize for UpCountry: Poems of New England, the Ruth E. Lilly Poetry Prize, the Poet's Prize and the Aiken Taylor Prize.

But I don't read her for her prizes - well-deserved though they are - and I expect no one else here, after falling in love with her rhythms and rhymes, does either. This first happened for me while reading the music of "Morning Swim" (UpCountry):

I hung my bathrobe on two pegs,
I took the lake between my legs.

Invaded and invader, I
went overhand on that flat sky.

Fish twitched beneath me, quick and tame.
In their green zone they sang my name

And in the rhythm of the swim
I hummed a two-four-time slow hymn. (70-1)

It's not unusual for poets to write about other poets who have influenced them or been extremely important to them, but I can't recall any other poet writing a poem like "Skinnydipping With William Wordsworth." It is Maxine Kumin's humor - never intrusive or mean-spirited - that often picks us up and shifts our perspective. We may never have thought of skinnydipping with William Wordsworth, but at the end of the poem it seems the right thing to do, the only thing to do with a late, great, respected poet who loved nature and who has figured in numerous important and/or intimate events in your life - not a particularly funny idea after all. The collection The Long Marriage opens with poems dedicated to and about poets Marianne Moore, Muriel Rukeyser, Rilke, and Carolyn Kizer/Yeats, to name a few. Each poem reflects a particular relationship with the poet that is both personal and part of the continuum of literary history, addressing, as these poems do, qualities or lines we all can see in the named poets' life and work.

It is poetry itself that Kumin discusses in "A Calling" (from Nurture) as she rifts on some things that Georgia O'Keeffe said regarding work, that is, her art, which O'Keeffe said switching back and forth from first to third person. "Sashaying between/ first base and shortstop as it were" describes Kumin, before noting that: "Syntax, like sex, is intimate./ One doesn't lightly leap from person/ to person." And I think that it is this care and consideration of syntax, music, and themes - the humor and cruelty and ordinary beauty of life - which Maxine Kumin's poems balance brilliantly and that make reading her poems a sensuous pleasure, a conversation with an intelligent, puckish friend, and a gentle nudge to relook at the world.

Please join me in welcoming Maxine Kumin.

By P.R. Dyjak, poet and graduate student in UAlbany's English Department.

Maxine Kumin
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Pablo Medina, novelist, poet, and essayist, is the author of eight books. Rooted in Cuban life, his works explore the exile experience and the complex emotional and psychological ground that his characters must traverse. Critic Lourdes Gil claims that "the unexpected combinations of authenticity and fiction seem both surprising and obvious, as Medina reinterprets the variant faces of political control over the centuries and reconstructs the crucible of modernity and a colonial historical tradition."

Medina's most recent novel, The Cigar Roller (2005), is narrated by the fiery Amadeo Terra. Though a stroke has incapacitated Amadeo's body to a point where he cannot communicate with the nurse or the nun who tend to him, his mind remains alive and active. During one of his dreary days seated in front of the window, the nurse feeds him a new kind of baby food: "Mango! He wants it, tubs of it, he wants all mango, mango day and mango night, mango moon and mango sun and mango sea and mango mountain and mango swamp. Nurse is mango. Home is mango. Amadeo is mango" (6). When Amadeo is given mango baby food, the taste brings back memories of his former unrepressed appetites for his mistress, his native Cuban home, his wife, Julia, and life itself. His memories find new sorrows and joys filtered through the everyday routines of his life, as he searches for himself in the choices he made that led to his present debilitated state and his probable future. While Amadeo can see clear shortcomings in his life, the one thing that he can look back on with pride was his proficiency at rolling cigars. He uses this time in his life-when he was still a young man in Cuba-as a corner stone for anchoring his other memories and present survival:

If life is imaginary tobacco is not, not its broad green leaves growing in the slow heat then harvested and set to dry in large shadowy barns. How could he have imagined the process, the treatment of the leaf, techniques of preparation, the rolling, the cutting knife, the factory, the molds the lector, Ibor City, an art, an industry, a life? Tobacco exists apart from Amadeo Terra and that leads to the conclusion that his life exists beyond his capacity to imagine. (66)

As this passage reveals, Amadeo's job was much more to him than a way to earn money. It became part of his being, part of the way that he understood himself: "There was none better for him than being a cigar roller, un torcedor: a vocation of smoke in tune with his life, with anybody's life" (164). At the same time, though, that Amadeo takes pride in his abilities as a cigar roller, he must also face the grievous truths regarding his relationships with his family and the reasons why they left him alone and near death in a nursing home.

Medina's works also include the novels The Return of Felix Nogara (2000) and The Marks of Birth (1994), the poetry collections Puntos de apoyo (2002), The Floating Island (1999), and Arching into the Afterlife (1991), and the essay collection Exiled Memories: A Cuban Childhood (1990). His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, and Poetry among others. He has won an award from the CINTAS Foundation and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the Woodrow Wilson/Lila Wallace Reader's Digest fund. He came to the United States from Cuba in 1960 at the age of twelve. He now lives in New York City.

Angie Cruz is the author of two novels, Soledad (2001) and Let It Rain Coffee (2005). Though Cruz was born in America, her works are deeply rooted in her Dominican heritage, especially as informed by her childhood in the ethnic barrio of New York City's Washington Heights neighborhood. In an interview with Calabash, Cruz explains how her cultural upbringing impacted her first novel Soledad: "When I wrote the book, it was about community, and I was really interested in how voices sort of identify community and how language identifies a community." The voices in the novel include those of the art student Soledad who is anxious to leave her neighborhood behind, her mother whose sickness requires Soledad to return to her roots, her aunt Gorda, and her wild cousin Flaca. Soledad's challenge is to negotiate the chaos of her past in order to rebuild a relationship with her mother.

Cruz's interest in polyvocality is also evident in Let It Rain Coffee, as different members of the Colon family share their sides of the story. Initiated by the patriarch Don Chan's move to New York City to live with his son and his son's family, tensions abound between family members. Don Chan continues to fixate on the past by thinking about the small town of Los Llanos where he lived most of his life. His daughter-in-law, on the other hand, is anxious to grasp the possibilities of the future and strives to model her life according to the glamorous TV drama Dallas. Don Chan's son, Santo, becomes pulled between these opposing forces and his job as a taxi driver, as he struggles to examine the conflicting claims of his past and present.

In addition to the familial dynamics, the concerns in Let It Rain Coffee are deepened and extended by a heightened awareness of social dynamics and hierarchies. Cruz often addresses these subjects with humor as in the following selection when Don Chan is aboard the airplane enroute to New York City: "While the coffee could've settled his nerves, he didn't want to experience the awkwardness of finding the bathroom, only to obsess over the possibility that his waste would be spat into the sky. He knew the world was built in such a way that some got to piss in toilets high above everyone else while the less privileged sat at home thinking the piss was rain" (5). In passages like this and many others, Cruz uses humor to address her concerns. She brings up not only the incongruencies between the Dominican Republic and America but also her character's expectations about this "new" world that they have moved to.

In particular, Cruz examines the polarities between the rich and poor. Hence, Don Chan relates a story from his youth when he snuck his way into the capital city and walked right into the palace-taking a mail opener as proof of his feat. In this episode, he becomes aware of the discrepancy in the homes in his native village and the surroundings of those in power. These issues are also raised in America, as Esperanza longs to live a life like those she sees on Dallas and even names her children Bobby and Dallas after the show. She buys fashion clothing until her credit card limit is reached and "the more she bought, the more insatiable she became" (32). Through these kinds of scenes and others, Cruz critiques not only the wealthy who have and keep the money but also the poor who think their lives are worthless without better means.

Angie Cruz is the recipient of the New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship and the Van Leir Literary Award. She is also a founding member of WILL (Women in Literature and Letters). Ms. Cruz lives in New York City.

By Danielle Jones

Albany Times Union Article
Pablo Medina and Angie Cruz
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The following is a transcription of The BookShow which aired in 1995 on WAMC.

Glover: Welcome to The BookShow. I am your host Douglas Glover of The New York State Writers Institute which is located at the University at Albany as part of the State University of New York system. My guest today is the novelist and short story writer, Francine Prose, author of, among others, the award winning first novel, Judah the Pious, published in 1973; Household Saints, published in 1981; and Primitive People, published in 1992. Francine Prose's early work, say up to her novel, Bigfoot Dreams, which came out in 1986 was characterized by a preoccupation with legend, folklore, and the supernatural. Often she set her fictions in the past: 19th century New Orleans or the Yiddish Theater circuit of New York of the 1920s. Lately she has staked out a fresh literary territory writing a series of contemporary novels concerned with gently skewering cultural trends; and these after all are a modern folklore. Now, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux has just published Hunters & Gatherers, Francine Prose's tenth novel. A wry, comic account of the 1990s Goddess religion as seen through the eyes of a timid, and rather literal-minded magazine fact checker named Martha. She happens upon a cult ceremony on Fire Island one lonely Labor Day weekend. Martha is ripe, if not for conversion, at least for inclusion. Her job is mediocre and she has just been dumped by her actor boyfriend who has been somewhat over-generous with his criticism of Martha's person. In the course of Hunters & Gatherers, we come to know, love, and laugh at Isis Moonwagon, the accident prone and visionary high priestess of the Fire Island coven, and her charming clique of Manhattan New Age women: lesbians, artists, mothers, and daughters who bicker and gripe but who, yet, find some solace in the rituals of the talking stick, group hugs, and chanting. As the novel wears on, the group adjourns in a marvelous picaresque to Arizona to study with a trailer park Native American, Shamaness. They eat road kill for dinners, seek jaguar visions, and pound on drums. A haunting, almost embarrassing it seems, parallel of all those Iron John retreats, male retreats, in the 1980s. Finally, they meet a truck-driving, family-loving, reconstituted new male on a lonely desert road in the middle of the night. Prose has a radar eye for the absurd, a sly wit, and an absurd sense of humor, but she is also a compassionate observer of our common folly. She is Evelyn Waugh without the crushing cynicism. She understands the deeply human yearnings that underlie our most embarrassing gaffes. Francine Prose, welcome to The BookShow.

Prose: Oh thanks Doug, and thank you for the introduction. It was beautiful.

Glover: Well it was a fun book to read. You liked my comparison with Iron John? You seemed very reminiscent of that. (Laughs) Did you do any of this drum-pounding yourself?

Prose: No, I didn't. I read a couple of books about it and then I kind of made it up. But about six months before the novel finally came out, a magazine editor asked me to write an article about the Goddess movement and the women involved. I went out and had to actually talk to and actually interview the women that I made up for the novel. When I was doing that, then I went to a couple of rituals.

Glover: You made this up but were they quite a lot like what you made up?

Prose: They were eerily like what I made up. I mean, it was really quite frightening because as you said, Isis is very accident-prone and all the rituals or many of them, end in near disaster in one sense or another. I would go to these rituals and there would be candles and women would be dancing around with these filmy skirts and I would think, "Oh! They are going to set themselves on fire and it's going to be my fault because I made up the novel and now this thing is going to happen."

Glover: You sat in but did you actually participate? Did you hold the talking-stick and say something about yourself?

Prose: (Laughs) Sort of. I really was not very good at it, I think. I have to say I was easily the most self-conscious person in the room about it. The other thing that was sort of strange was that I did feel exactly like my character, who is also just writhing with discomfort during a lot of this.

Glover: Yeah, she is not exactly a good recruit. She is a little too distanced or ironic. The idea that she is a fact checker lends a consort to the Goddess of Reason. She is really the kind of person in the mainstream of modernity and stands back from all the irrationality.

Prose: I think literal-minded was a good description of her too. The Goddess women in the novel who substantially altered history to fit in with Goddess history, and every time something like that comes up, she is saying, "Wait a minute, the pyramids in Mexico weren't built by nurturing, loving, priestesses."

Glover: (Laughs) That's right. They offered human sacrifices as she points out. The women don't like that very much.

Prose: Then she thinks, "Oh God, I am a fact checker, that is all I can think about."

Glover: Do you worry you are going to be struck by lightning for having written this book?

Prose: Well, of course, but in different ways for all the books. For this one, I am more likely, as I have to get reviewed by Goddess women.

Glover: Oh you have been reviewed by them? How did that go? What were the reactions?

Prose: Well, it has been mixed to say the least. The interesting thing to me is that a number of places have sent the novel basically to the women in the novel for review.

Glover: What did they say? "Exaggerated…cynical…"

Prose: Actually the disturbing thing is that they don't seem to realize that I actually have a great deal of sympathy for these women in the novel, which I do. I think that really there is more and more these days that you are not allowed to make jokes about.

Glover: That sense of humor is missing. It is missing within the group itself in the novel as well.

Prose: (Laughs) And yet they are hilariously funny, they just don't know it.

Glover: Martha looks at them and does have sympathy because she is also in that world; the world where she is somewhat put upon by men although she doesn't hate men in quite the same way a lot of the other women do. A lot of these women are lesbians as well.

Prose: Right, but I also think there is a lot of big talk about hating men and actually doing it. To me, there is something so sweet about these women.

Glover: What do you think is sweet about them?

Prose: How vulnerable they are and how genuinely in pain they are.

Glover: And in need of some kind of group feeling, a feeling of belonging.

Prose: Of community and also some sort of higher power.

Glover: I wanted to go into this a little bit. When I compared them to the Iron John movements, there seems to be in the era we are in almost a recursion to what happened to the late 19th century with the kind of Tolstoyian movement, and that sort of thing. This fits in with your earlier themes; a kind of return to a folkloric sense of what religion is. Did that cross your mind as you were writing it?

Prose: Oh yeah, sure. What I keep thinking about is what is it that people want, what do they want from that and if they don't go to traditional religion for it, then what are they going to and why?

Glover: And what is your answer?

Prose: (Laughs) I don't know!

Glover: Well think of one right now. (Laughs) You wrote the book.

Prose: They want the same thing. They want to be told that there is a reason for things. They want to be told that someone is looking after them. They want to be told that they are not just little, tiny, isolated, figures that are going to drop off the edge of the earth.

Glover: And when they get into that mood, as with the men in the Iron John thing, their critical circuits cut out. These are very intelligent women: successful artists and academics.

Prose: Oh I know. Well that's the thing. The religion itself is so goofy.

Glover: (Laughs) Goofy. What do you think was the most goofy thing in the religion as you see them? In the novel I think the goofiest thing is probably the Native American Shamaness.

Prose: Oh yeah, I know. But then again, it's also so heartbreaking. When you look at the culture that has just been trashed to produce a road show religion.

Glover: Which we went through from the late 1890s up to the '30s and '40s in this country. Maybe we still have road show religion in the mainstream culture with the television evangelist.

Prose: Oh yeah, I know, but somehow for a moment you would like to think that Native American culture was above that.

Glover: This Rita is hilarious. The way she, as a character, skewers the assumptions and presuppositions of these New York women. She is taking them on a hike through the desert and she cavalierly throws a candy wrapper to the wind and the women are all appalled at this. She says, "Well, natives can do this."

Prose: Right, I know. They are all so ecologically correct that they're just slipping. They watch her gum wrapper just floating across the desert.

Glover: But then they are appalled that she would actually eat road kill, which I suppose is ecologically correct in some ways.

Prose: Oh that's another thing. Actually, I hadn't done any research on that but just before the novel was coming out, we went to a pot luck and someone there brought a metal pot and in it was road kill venison too.

Glover: Say that again! Where was that?

Prose: (Laughs) In the Hudson Valley.

Glover: My goodness.

Prose: I know, I know. And there it was. You make it up and it happens. The guy was really a genuinely, sincerely, ecologically conscious guy so he does make the stuff. His wife said something like, "Oh it smells so bad. I leave the house every time he makes it." I didn't have any. I didn't notice if other people were eating it.

Glover: I probably wouldn't mind. I would eat that.

Prose: I like venison.

Glover: Doesn't matter how it died. Anyway, I just need to pause momentarily to let our listeners know that I am Douglas Glover, this is The BookShow, and I am talking with the novelist Francine Prose about her latest book, Hunters & Gatherers, just published by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. Now, this Goddess movement was a real movement in the 1990s and it is actually quite powerful. There is a certain amount of money behind it, a lot of books get published and sell in the hundreds of thousands, is that correct?

Prose: Oh absolutely. Goddess books really do sell. I was speaking to a woman who writes these Goddess herbal books and her books sell like 150,000 copies.

Glover: And they are even published by mainstream publishers. They aren't cult publishers.

Prose: Yes that's right. There is a Goddess magazine that's a quarterly that, I can't remember what the circulation is but it's considerable.

Glover: That's fascinating. You really think that there is some need that this is addressing now?

Prose: Absolutely. One of the things that I did find out when I was doing what research I did and it shows up in the novel. There are very few former Atheists or even Agnostics that become goddess worshippers. Many of the women have been religious: Catholics or Protestants or Orthodox Jews. They have found that the traditional religion was unsatisfying for one reason.

Glover: Which reason?

Prose: That they are still in many ways patriarchal religions.

Glover: And especially, as I suppose, with Catholicism with a rather conservative Pope, that would clash directly with any feminist sensibility.

Prose: Absolutely. And then there have also been big conventions. There is a United Church of Christ and many women there who have been part of the Goddess movement spoke at this convention and there was quite an uproar. Even in the most mainstream Protestant organizations, it is not always an easy marriage between Goddess women and ministers.

Glover: I want to talk about basically the humor of this novel. I know you because you are my colleague at the New York State Writers Institute Summer Workshop every summer at Skidmore College but you never struck me as a stand-up comic comedian. You are intense and hardworking and yet this novel is hilarious.

Prose: So? (Laughs)

Glover: So, how do you do that?

Prose: The thing is that you just create characters who are funny. That is the great joy of doing it. This one and I think Primitive People, I don't mean to make it sound like more fun than it was, but there were days when I would just go to my desk and the characters would start talking and I would be laughing and laughing. It is great fun to do that when you write something and just burst out laughing.

Glover: Actually, I burst out laughing at this book in several places. There are a couple things. There is one little thing that you do a lot with language and you just conflate basic cultural code words. So, you have this dark and funny cancer sufferer, Hegwitha. All these women have alternate names.

Prose: Right, they are Goddess names. Her real name is Randy.

Glover: She is a cancer sufferer or in remission and later on we find out she is not in remission. She comes on the scene smoking cigarettes but they are all right because they are, "Supposedly non-toxic but made exclusively from organic Native American tobacco." I burst out laughing there because of course conflating, it is organic and it is Native American and those are all positive indicators and then it's tobacco. As you put "organic" and "Native American" in front of tobacco then "tobacco" becomes healthy! (Laughs) What are you doing?

Prose: I didn't make up that line. I heard someone say that. It is just as much about paying attention to the stuff that people say and being able to remember it as it is to make it up. I couldn't have made that up.

Glover: Well then did you make this one up: the artist character who has had this installation and she calls it "bio-psycho-sphere-menstrual-hot".

Prose: No I made that one up. Again you just assemble the tiny bits and pieces from the culture and just push it a tiny step further and there you are.

Glover: And it's funny! Isis Moonwagon, the leader of this group of women is an amazing character. Initially the basic humor of her is that she is a kind of an attractive, intelligent, academic who has gotten into leading this cult and at the same time is completely accident-prone. She is constantly in the ceremonies setting herself on fire or nearly drowning or whatever. Then that goes through and she is the leader, they all look up to her and everything she does kind of turns to dust in her hands.

Prose: One of the things that I like about her is she is so vain about her career as a Goddess Priestess. She is very ambitious.

Glover: And she bears some resemblance to Aimee Semple McPherson, the people who create great movements behind not drinking or behind religion even nowadays.

Prose: Well, in fact, a couple of people have written to me and I think it was in one or two of the reviews and they said, "Oh it's obvious you have based her on so and so." Not only didn't I, but I have never heard of this person and I just registered long enough to know that they were saying the person so that's who it must have been but I can't even remember who it was. Maybe some sort of California writer about spiritual stuff.

Glover: Now again in describing her, we see this conflation of cultural signs and words: she is a "really centered priestess-shaman-healer." I like that because all those things are put in together and they become ludicrous the more you add because they are all slightly different, really. Then you are very dry about her, because Martha goes to her house.

Prose: Well, right after that the woman says she knew Mother Teresa before she was even famous. Which is also something I got from life. I heard somebody say that.

Glover: Where do you hang out? (Laughs)

Prose: At writers' conferences. (Laughs)

Glover: I knew you were going to say that. Martha comes to her house and notices, this is where you are very dry and things sneak up on us, like the discrepancy between Isis's hunter/gatherer dreams and her real estate holdings, which are quite fabulous on Fire Island for example. Now the book also has a dark side to it. There is a mother-daughter team in this group of women. The daughter's name is Sonoma and she is 13. She is a little overweight and dresses a little weirdly in cowgirl outfits. Well, they all dress weirdly. The mother is constantly at her about her weight, about her eating, about her dressing, about her attitude and it's a nastiness that goes on and the women are incapable of breaking into this darkness that is going on. Of course, this leads to the plot climax of the book where the girl runs into the desert. There is also this woman Hegwitha, who has the cancer recurring so that in fact there is enough that's going on in this book that's real in sense of real pain. Your sympathy comes out here. There are real things that drive the need that are expressed in this religious activity.

Prose: That poor girl. I can't get enough about writing of how people behave towards children.

Glover: This comes up again and again in some ways in your work. This girl, who you do rather well, you do a teenage girl who doesn't talk very much who has an aggressive way of denying that people are hurting her feelings and then she finally blows up and runs away.

Prose: Well I have two teenage sons so I am around teenagers a lot. That was another easy one.

Glover: You're not a mother like this though.

Prose: (Laughs) No of course not. Well in some ways maybe.

Glover: I know in the summer your kids are up here playing basketball.

Prose: In fact, I don't really think I am, but I see so much of it around me, and also from my private terrace, that it might just come percolating up in the books.

Glover: I just want to go back to this humor thing once more. Do you have a model for this type of writing? Evelyn Waugh jumps to mind by the way. Is he in any way a model for what you are doing?

Prose: Ummmmmm no. (Laughs) It is just too far because the cultural details and just the misanthropy. I like Dawn Powell and the contemporaries, Diane Johnson, Deborah Eisenberg. Those are all people I read a lot.

Glover: Do you think of yourself as a funny person or is it only in the writing?

Prose: I don't know how to answer that.

Glover: Truthfully. Were you a comic in high school? Were you a comic personality?

Prose: No. It came over me a little late in life.

Glover: Yeah, because this is quite a bit unlike your earlier writing.

Prose: I am certainly in my family and my kids are both funny and my husband. It's just a laugh a minute.

Glover: Well we are running short of time here but I wanted to check one other thing. Did you make this one up: the women are complaining about the word "seminary," which they derive from the word semen. They want to replace it with the word "ovulary". Did you make that up?

Prose: (Laughs) No I didn't.

Glover: You just hear these things and it works that way? Great jokes. Then there was a sly running thing, which I think I am worried about. Joy, the woman, who has a cast on her leg, is the one who has to drive the van everywhere. Did you mean that or is the joke running through the whole thing?

Prose: Yes, but also, the other thing I was interested in, although I sort of threw it away, was how power was in the way people claimed power in groups and so forth. There is often the one that is the good driver and the competent one, especially in groups of women.

Glover: But she's the one with the cast.

Prose: Well what are you going to do.

Glover: We have to close now. It has been great having you on the show. My guest has been the novelist Francine Prose, author of Hunters & Gatherers just published by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. This is Douglas Glover saying so long for now from The BookShow.

Sunday Gazette Article
Francine Prose
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In a moving, humorous, and thoughtful short-story collection Body Work: Stories (Spring Harbor Press, 2000), Hollis Seamon features "normal," middle-aged women in a singular, invigorating way. I found it an absolute pleasure to read one character in particular, the fabulous Suzanne LaFleshe, who is like an icon for all curvaceous women. Subsequently, Seamon uses the theme of drowning in many of the stories, as a catalyst for the figurative death and rebirth of several characters. From Alice in "Body Work," to Andrea in "Riverkeeper," drowning is also both literal and symbolic. Beginning with the title story, Seamon helps her characters find a way out of the depths of personal distress and onto the shore of equanimity.

In "Body Work," Seamon showcases a bevy of unusual nuns who you wouldn't expect to be the Lord's employees without the author's classification. At the center of this tough lively bunch (including a tattoo-laden former biker chick), is an exception to the eccentric: Alice. Haunted by her infant's recent death, Alice is engulfed by an anguish that she imagines to congeal into internal stones. During the brief retreat, the heavy stones in her belly and breasts weigh her down to the pits of remorse. She slowly descends into the depths, almost drowning in the final chapter within the nearby lake. It is when Alice is enveloped by the dark liquid that she is able to let go of the stones that embodied her pain. It is Beth, the "miracle worker from Chicago," who saves her from letting go of her life, relieving her of the past and reviving her for the future. Now, Alice can finally breathe the air that her baby barely did for less than a day. Alice's guilt is gone and now her new life can begin.

Seamon continues with the drowning theme in several other short stories. In "Learning to Bleed," a near-drowning marks the end of the narrator's youth and the relationship with her best friend. A sad story about two young girls destined to grow apart, this is a memorable tale that I could relate to. Bev, the elder friend, is pressured by her Grandma Stoller to grow up while the nameless narrator struggles with the steady deterioration of her friendship. Growing up, I faced the same difficulties, and Seamon allows me to bring forth those forgotten emotions easily.

In one of the most visual scenes in the story, the narrator is alone in the deserted pool, her foot stuck in the drain at the bottom. She is about to die while her "best friend" lay outside "growing up" with a bunch of teenaged boys. Almost drowning in the abandoning silence exposes the friendship for what it really is: dead. Finally freeing her foot and swimming to the surface, the girl inhales fresh air and exhales her childhood. Drowning is a rebirth in "Riverkeeper." Andrea, a single middle-aged woman, is at the end of an intense affair with a married man. When she drives through her town, she often sees a mother with her two children, walking with the most apathetic expression on her face. Andrea's curiosity in this craggy-faced woman and her golden children is never answered until she accidentally meets her at the Hudson River. Swimming along the currents, Andrea would have drowned if not for the ethereal, wrinkly hands of a strange woman. Both women go into the water strangers and come out united by it and by the fact that they're both expecting. The drowning here provides Andrea an opportunity to revisit her days as a mother. Where Alice lost her baby and will live on in its place, Andrea discovers one of her own to nurture for the rest of her life. Seamon's poetic style enriches this story with sights and sensations that truly capture the essence of each scene.

Treading on the surface for a bit, Seamon invents an outlandish character in Suzanne LaFleshe. "The Strange Sad History of Suzanne LaFleshe" is about a middle-aged woman who decides to quit her strict diet regimen with Weight Watchers and gain all the fat back. "I like my flesh," she exclaims. "I like the way it moves and bounces." She decides to change her name from a dry Ms. Brown to a creamy Suzanne LaFleshe.

When Ms. Brown revels in her "old familiar flesh gathering about [her] ribs and thighs," my first impression was one of disgust. In a society that anathematizes portly people, Suzanne LaFleshe's table of cream and sugar would be decried as the devil's dish. Going on to say that she succeeds in shedding the fat (something that's nearly impossible for many women), but yearns to gain it all back, is pretty exasperating. Fat is protection, a shelter, and sometimes an unconscious concealment of a person's true self. For Suzanne, however, augmenting the glutinous shell that encompasses her bones is as intentional as her newly-formulated surname, LaFleshe.

She loves her fat--not only her body, her fat. This idea is pretty new. Even though there have been numerous stories of heavyset women who like the way they look, the transition is slow from self-hatred to self-assurance. Among the wide variety that I've experienced, the acceptance of their flaws has made them indubitably more confident and, most importantly, happy. What Seamon does to the normal cliché is go a step further: she creates a woman who relishes what other women severely scorn. In fact, as a "healthy" woman, her happiness is lost and salvaged only when she retreats back to the plentiful diet. LaFleshe has never been ashamed of her extra pounds. She is a refreshing character within the collection's dreary sea of insecurity. Expect to see more of Ms. LaFleshe's unequivocal wit in Seamon's first novel, Flesh.

"After the Women's Writing Retreat in Paradox, NY" is the perfect conclusion to this collection in that it is more like a bunch of notes than a narrative. Done with the insertion of several unfinished ideas that would enhance her work, I felt like I was reading the first draft of this piece from inside the narrator's head. The writer seems to drown in her own ideas, unsure of where she wanted to go with this story and suffocating in a plethora of information. She has to research where the drain water in Albany really goes. She has to make a note to remind her to add a few more lines to make a certain passage more suspenseful. She has to make lists of things that fly (hummers included). All of this note-taking is for a writing class that is supposed to "improve" her writing when she obviously knows how. Then, you have to wonder if this person is Seamon or one of her creations. If the former, then she is being a bit too modest as the dozen or so stories before this one show that she is a full-fledged writer ready to swim to the surface and onto the shore.

Hollis Seamon's work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and praised in "Best American Essays" and "The O. Henry Award: Prize Stories." Readers may find more of her work in "Fiction International," "The Nebraska Review," "Calyx," "13th Moon," "The Hudson Review," and "The Chicago Review." Published anthologies include "The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe and Other Stories of Women and Fatness" (The Feminist Press of CUNY, 2003); "Food and Other Enemies" (Essex Press, 2000); "A Line of Cutting Women" (Calyx Books, 1998); and "Sacred Ground: Writings About Home" (Milkweed Editions, 1996). Her first novel "Flesh" (Avocet) was released Fall 2004. Seamon is currently a professor of English at the College of St. Rose.

Lynn Mercredi is an undergraduate English major at the UAlbany and intern at the NYS Writers Institute.

Hollis Seamon
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A brief introduction to any writer's work is a poor thing, a blunt tool to crack open something intended to be studied at length. But in the case of William T. Vollmann, the 7-to-10-minute intro is almost ridiculously insufficient.

Having declared failure, I'll proceed to give a few hopefully helpful facts and thoughts on the career of a writer whose first two decades of published work amount to what I'm fairly sure no one who loves books would regard as anything less than the most ample, ambitious and wide-ranging output of any North American author.

Born in 1959 in Santa Monica, California, Vollmann grew up in New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Bloomington, Ind., developing into a voracious reader as well as a self-described tragic romantic and social outcast. In 1977, he attended Deep Springs College, an unconventional institution just northeast of Death Valley with a working ranch at its center. In addition to its focus on physical labor and a love of the land, Deep Springs' mission was and remains starting its student on a life of service undergirded by ethics and intellectual rigor . After graduating from Deep Springs in 1979, Vollmann attended Cornell University, graduating summa cum laude in literature.

The preceding paragraph could very easily be slotted into the biographies of any number of eager young writers, but the ones that follow defy expectation. In the summer of 1982, Vollmann journeyed to Afghanistan and attempted to join the Mujehedeen rebels in their guerrilla war against the Soviet army. Dysentery and other complications sent him home after six weeks, but the experience provided him with much of the material for his 1992 memoir "An Afghanistan Picture Show, or How I Saved the World."

Vollmann's first novel, 1987's "You Bright and Risen Angels," took place in a world pitched somewhere between the world of insects and office workers, but its thematic concerns - lust, science and the moral questions surrounding violence - would remain in almost every one of the books that followed. "You Bright and Risen Angels" earned favorable comparison to the work of Vollmann's fellow Cornell alum Thomas Pynchon, but the books that followed it put critics in mind of very different writers, including Charles Bukowski and Nelson Algren.

Vollmann's fascination with the San Francisco demimonde - composed of dopesick prostitutes and lovesick johns, addicts and artists, users and used - found expression in the documentary novel 1991's "Whores for Gloria," the linked tales of 1993's "13 Stories and 13 Epitaphs" and - in his most epic examination of the lower depths - the novel "The Royal Family," which was published in 2000.

As these books were being released, Vollmann had embarked upon not one but two long-form projects unlike anything previously attempted. The first was "Seven Dreams," subtitled "A Book of North American Landscapes," a planned cycle of seven novels examining nothing less than 1,000 years of encounters between European and Native American cultures. It began in 1990 with "The Ice Shirt," which chronicles the abortive arrival of the Norsemen in the 10th Century; "Fathers and Crows" follows the brutal interaction of French Jesuits and the Iroquois in Eastern Canada and Northern New York from the 16th to the 18th centuries; "The Rifles" heads far north to tell of the doomed Franklin Expedition, and the catastrophic effects of the introduction of the repeating rifle on the Inuit tribe and their ecosystem; "Argall," the most recent installment in the cycle, recounts the tale of the Jamestown settlement, and the story of John Smith and Pocahontas.

What these pocket descriptions fail to convey is the formal audacity of the Seven Dreams books, in which Vollmann brings together historical documents, typographical pyrotechnics, his own illustrations and more. "Argall" is written entirely in Elizabethan language, while "The Rifles" pauses for Vollmann's extended account to his own perilous 1991 solo excursion to an abandoned weather station near the magnetic north pole.

Vollmann's other monumental project was "Rising Up and Rising Down," an investigation of human violence that he had begun composing even before his first trip to Afghanistan. Into it, Vollmann poured years of research and thought, and his own first-hand accounts of visits to Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq, Cambodia and other nations that at the time Vollmann was visiting can fairly be described as among the worst places on Earth.

Finally published in 2003, "Rising Up and Rising Down" fills seven volumes and more than 3,300 pages. In its complete form, the book sold out its first and so far only printing of 3,500, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Ecco Press has published an abridged single-volume edition.

For years, Vollmann referred to "Rising Up and Rising Down" as his life's work. So what would he do to follow it? The answer is "Europe Central," another expansive and formally daring attempt to examine the past in a way that asks up to consider it as if it were the vibrant, bleeding present.

The terrain runs from Nazi Germany into the heart of Stalinist Russia, and the dramatis personae include Dmitri Shostakovich and Anna Ahkmatova, field marshals and guerrilla fighters, Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin. In its portrait of people on the verge of and submerged in a global calamity, "Europe Central" is work very much of our time.

Vollmann's current plans include "Imperial," his 10-year study of life along the US-Mexico border, and the completion of the "Seven Dreams." Where he goes from there is anyone's guess. The man is, after all, only 45 years old. Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the Writers Institute, it gives me great pleasure to welcome William Vollmann.

By Casey Seiler, Entertainment Editor for the Times Union.

William Vollmann
Times Union Article
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