30 Days of the Flannery O'Connor Award: Day 11

Lori Ostlund on Jessica Treadway's PLEASE COME BACK TO ME

I prefer to write about work that slightly intimidates me, that leaves me feeling both that I could never quite do justice to it and that I would very much like to try—which is why I chose to review Jessica Treadway's collection Please Come Back To Me. The collection is made up of seven stories and a novella. Treadway touches on a variety of themes—family and the tensions that often exist at its core; the tenuousness of memory; and the suddenness with which tragedy can hit (one’s husband drives drunk and kills someone, a son is accused of an unsettling crime), taking one in a direction neither imagined nor planned for.

I first read the book shortly after it was released in the fall of 2010, and I remember feeling, as I read, that Treadway and I should be friends, by which I simply mean that the things that we want from a book are often the same things that we want from friendships—to be intellectually stimulated, to discover a way of seeing the world that reframes the way that we currently see it rather than just reflecting our view, and to feel pleasure in the other’s presence. In rereading Please Come Back To Me, I felt all of these things all over again, the experience this time one of reuniting with an old friend and feeling that same kinship.

I was struck, again, by the utter precision with which Treadway writes. As a reader, I like feeling that the writer has done the necessary work—has chosen each word with care, has forged each sentence to convey precisely what the author means to say rather than lazily getting close enough. There is no way to cover everything about Treadway’s book that impresses or delights, so instead I will meander through some its pleasing particulars. Let’s begin with Treadway’s details and observations, which are sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, sometimes both. Since the joy in reading begins at the local level of the sentence, let me point out one of my favorites. In “Oregon,” a story about a relationship between two friends who assign different meaning to the friendship, Treadway succinctly establishes the power imbalance in this way: “Elizabeth…dialed Deborah’s number, which she felt embarrassed to know by heart (because surely Deborah would have to open her own address book to locate Elizabeth).”

Sometimes, memories populate Treadway’s stories in such a way that they reveal a fissure in the character’s present life, becoming the “do-over” moment that the character fixates on and which defines his or her regret. This is the case in one of my favorite stories, “Dear Nicole,” in which twelve-year-old Gerald accidentally knocks out a girl with a hockey puck and, in the way of such things, goes on to marry her. The story is set in the present-day of his marriage: he and his wife, Nicole, have two children, and over the years, Gerald has come to see the truth about his wife—that she lacks compassion and generosity of spirit, that he was blinded by guilt and a misplaced sense of responsibility, that this marriage (i.e., that accident) has robbed him of the life he should have had. When another spectator from that evening, a girl named Allie who was sitting next to Nicole and was nearly hit instead, resurfaces, joking in a letter that the puck and thus Gerald were meant for her, Gerald becomes fixated on the accident. I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of parallel lives—that is, the notion that our lives could have gone in a dramatically different direction but for a certain moment or decision. Through the image of the hockey puck, soaring through the night air, Treadway traces the arc of just such an event: “There was a moment during which they all lost time—they knew the puck was flying somewhere, but they couldn’t see it.”

Perhaps all writers are intrigued by memory, by the way that fictionalizing something autobiographical, for example, alters forever our memory of what really happened. We all know, that is, that memories and truth are fluid. In my favorite story in the collection, “Testimony,” Maxine has gone to help her sister Tillie with her new baby. Tillie has, with the assistance of a therapist, recently recalled childhood sexual abuse at the hands of their father. Maxine knows that she is wrong and does not want to talk about it or even think about. Instead, she thinks about the goats:

They’d been given the goats the spring Maxine was eleven and Tillie nine. Tillie went by Tildra now; she corrected anyone who tried to use the nickname, even Maxine, which Maxine considered cheeky because she was here, after all, to do her sister a favor. But back then, in upstate Crete, New York, they had been Max and Tillie and didn’t think twice about what they were called. Together they settled on the names Pete and Smiley for the two goats, which their father had waiting as a surprise in a pen he’d built behind the garage.

When these goats escape and die on the highway, their father brings home yet another goat, this one named Clover. Clover lives a week before succumbing to Vitamin E deficiency. For Maxine, the goats are a symbol of her childhood—of her father’s love as well as a simpler time with her sister, a time before her sister became Tildra and began remembering repressed memories. We soon learn that Tildra does not remember the goats, but this is to be expected. She is angry at Maxine for her disloyalty.

As readers, we imagine that the story might be about false memories. Instead, we get this: the father does not remember the goats either. Everything crumbles—our trust in Maxine’s version of the past, our sense of the story. Rather than moving toward clarity, Treadway leaves us stuck in the muddiness of memory. As a writer, what I am particularly in awe of is the goats. Treadway understood that everything hinged on them, on having details of a memory so unusual, so well-sketched, that to doubt it seemed not even a consideration—three dead goats with names.


 

Lori Ostlund is the author of THE BIGNESS OF THE WORLD (2009). She has taught in Spain, Malaysia, and New Mexico and currently lives and teaches in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in such journals as the Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and Hobart.

30 Days of the Flannery O'Connor Award: Day 10

Tony Ardizzone on Salvatore La Puma's THE BOYS OF BENSONHURST

When asked what advice he would give aspiring writers, Chuck Palahniuk, of Fight Club fame, responded, “Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly—all these make for great stories.” Had he added, “And be sure to go to Sunday Mass, say the rosary and make novenas, and listen to your mother,” he would have described the basic strategy that Salvatore La Puma uses in his 1987 collection of stories The Boys of Bensonhurst, which received not only the Flannery O’Connor Award but also the American Book Award sponsored by the Before Columbus Foundation. Set in the largely Sicilian Brooklyn neighborhood of Bensonhurst during the late 1930's and early 1940's, La Puma’s loosely interconnected stories trace the faith, hopes, desires, and mis-adventures of a handful of neighborhood youths, teenaged boys who are on first-name basis with both the parish priest and the corner hoodlum, and who are still under the influence of their immigrant parents (particularly their Sicilian mothers). La Puma infuses the seven stories that make up this lovely collection with a warm, gentle humor and a subtle blend of magical realism that some critics have compared to the work of Gabriel García-Márquez.

In the collection’s first story, “The Gangster’s Ghost,” young Ernesto Foppa is sent down to the basement to fix a blown fuse. Armed with a pair of burning red votive candles his mother keeps next to a statue of the Virgin Mary, Ernesto imagines he sees the face of his dead father, Romero, a petty crook, in the worn silver backing of a mirror on a dresser that stands next to the fuse box. Soon both Ernesto and his mother, Bianca, find themselves making pilgrimages down to the basement with their red candles to visit the ghost and tell him their troubles and seek his advice. Ernesto confesses that he’s been given a chance to make some real money driving a car involved in a robbery, planned by one of his late father’s friends. Romero responds, advising his son not to make the same mistakes he made in life. Bianca tells her husband’s ghost about her loneliness.

“You been a traitor to me,” she says. “Always I was here. Always I took you between my legs. Sometimes you smelled bad. Your beard was rough, but I took it to my breast. But now you don’t come home no more. I hate you. And I love you. So what am I to do?”

Of course Ernesto ignores his father’s words and takes the job, and with perfectly credible and impressively deft turns of plot the story’s consequences resolve both the boy’s and mother’s concerns. As with all strong fiction, La Puma’s short stories end with a delightful blend of inevitability mixed with just the right amount of surprise.

La Puma’s boys are hardly saints, though they often strive to be one. His characters never devolve into caricatures. “The Mouthpiece” focuses on a boy named Guido, who speaks for his hearing-impaired parents, Alfredo and Sabatina, whose tongues are “as pickled as pork tongues in a jar.” Guido desires to become a priest and, even though he clearly doesn’t have a vocation he obsessively prays for one. A friend, Tonino, puts his plight into perspective. “You’re an idiot,” says Tonino. “You ain’t never going to get laid. You poor bastard. Means I get yours too.”

In “The Jilted Groom,” Carmine Carmellini, who “inherited the looks of the eleventh-century Norman invaders of Sicily, Viking eyes and hair which made blue and yellow sparks in the bold Arab eyes of New Utrecht High’s Sicilian girls,” is blessed with a magnificent singing voice that makes all the girls in his high school swoon. “You could sing Verdi at the Met,” one classmate tells him. Another girl, Julia Albanesi, is also sweet on him. In two sentences that illustrate La Puma’s playful wit along with his skill with metaphor, he describes their physical relationship.

“Julia gave him [Carmine] her saucy red kisses, but he resisted the cookies under her clothes. He wanted to be in the chorus of angels eventually, and not a roasting chestnut.”

The collection’s title story has the Brooklyn boys venturing out into the larger world and features a guardian angel. “The angel whispering in Frankie’s ear warned him to be careful going to New Jersey, but he said ‘Scram’ to the pest, which the other guys thought might be a fly, and they all went up from the BMT subway to Times Square, where lights on billboards, movie houses, restaurants, and shops blinked nervously, and where even the scrounging pigeons were hemmed in.”

It should be obvious that I’m an avid fan of The Boys of Bensonhurst, not only for its rich and engaging cast of characters but also for La Puma’s exquisite use of language, his marvelous, spot-on dialogue, and his impressively clean narrative restraint. The writing in all seven of his stories rings with the truest tones of authenticity, of having been there. Born in 1929, La Puma was born and raised in Bensonhurst, served as a medic in the Korean War, and later moved to California. The Boys of Bensonhurst was published when he was 58. Before his death in 2008 he wrote and published two more books, the novel A Time for Wedding Cake, and a second short story collection titled Teaching Angels to Fly.

In one of the essays collected in Mysteries and Manners, Flannery O’Connor wrote, “A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story.”

Read The Boys of Bensonhurst. La Puma’s stories will charm and delight you.

 
Tony Ardizzone is the author of THE EVENING NEWS (1986). He is the author of eight books, including the novel The Whale Chaser and the story collection The Calling of Saint Matthew: Stories of Rome. He has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as the Pushcart Prize, the Milkweed Editions National Fiction Prize, the Chicago Foundation for Literature Award for Fiction sponsored by the Friends of Literature, and the Virginia Prize for Fiction, among other honors. Ardizzone was born and raised on the North Side of Chicago.

30 Days of the Flannery O'Connor Award: Day 9

Andy Plattner on Wendy Brenner's LARGE ANIMALS IN EVERYDAY LIFE

It was late in 1996 when Charles East called to inform me that I’d won the Flannery O’Connor Award. During the next six months, I talked with him a few times as we worked through the edits of Winter Money. I was pretty green to everything in those days, but even then I understood it was a privilege to work with Charles. Everything he said, every suggestion he made, seemed right. At one point, he thought it would be a good idea for me to see what a finished story collection from the University of Georgia Press looked like, so he sent me a copy of Large Animals in Everyday Life by Wendy Brenner, which had won the Flannery O’Connor the year before.

Such a good book. I remembered thinking that then. It seemed further proof that my collection was in exciting company. Nothing has changed over time when it comes to what I think about Large Animals. My favorite story in Brenner’s collection still is “The Oyster,” an I-don’t-care-how-hot-it-is-I’m-riding-with-the-top-down-in-the-middle-of-August story. It’s a romp, but there’s wonder in the tone. A real curiosity about the world. It’s a story that I continue to show young writers in the fiction-writing classes I teach, especially when I think the young writers seem to be tiring of the writing process overall.

The beginning of this story goes like this:

Pat Boone—not the Pat Boone but only a graduate student in Agricultural Science—was driving the oysters down to Mulberry to have them irradiated. He was used to being the wrong Pat Boone but was nevertheless miserable, careening down Interstate 75 in the windless predawn, gripping the wheel of the Food Science van with his troubled pink fingers.

When I look at this story now—or any story from this collection, actually—I think about the joy this writer finds in her work. It’s a joy derived from knowing how stories can unfold. The writer seems to be reveling in this knowledge, this understanding of the complex world of story writing. “The Oysters” features a character whose name is Pat Boone . . . it’s a story where the feelings of oysters and strawberries are also part of the narrative. It’s a story that does not come with a spoiler alert, so I can tell you how it ends:

[The oysters] felt frustrated, distracted. Where were they going? they wondered. What would happen to them? What were they supposed to do? Oh, they were only oysters! Who was there to tell their story, and who was there to listen?

I still read this collection with a sense of wonder. It’s a book I’m unlikely to part with, not only because of who sent it to me but because of all of the good things that keep happening on every page.

 

Andy Plattner is the author of WINTER MONEY (1997). This Lexington, Kentucky-born author's short fiction has appeared in Paris Review, Southern Review, Sewanee Review, and Epoch. His second story collection, A Marriage of Convenience, was published in 2011. Plattner’s novel Offerings from a Rust Belt Jockey won the inaugural Mid-Career Novel Award from Dzanc Press. He lives in Atlanta.

Press News: The University of Georgia Press Announces New Acquisitions Department Staff

The University of Georgia Press proudly announces two new acquisitions editors.

In February, Patrick Allen moved from the marketing department as exhibits and advertising manager to the acquisitions department as an acquisitions editor. Allen will be developing our food and foodways list, including a new series with the Southern Foodways Alliance. He will also head up our regional trade publishing efforts. Allen has worked at UGA Press for 10 years. Before that, he was co-founder of a very well-respected and vibrant regional publisher, Hill Street Press.

On April 1, Walter Biggins will join the press as senior acquisitions editor, focusing on history, international studies, and culture. Biggins has been at the University Press of Mississippi for the past 14 years. He has developed a stellar reputation among academics and among publishing peers, acquiring in a range of disciplines and exploring notions of the “global south” from an innovative, interdisciplinary perspective.

Please join us as we welcome and congratulate the new members of our acquisitions team!