Barrett, Campbell, Engel, Kolluri and Watts

Short Stories in July, August and September

Whether drawn from a prizelist or discovered via happenstance, these stories capture a variety of reading moods.

This quarter, I returned to one favourite writer and also explored four new-to-me story writers.

The story collections on the Carol Shields longlist arrived in close proximity after weeks of waiting for the orders to be fulfilled from the library (I’ve read eleven of the books from the longlist so far).

Talia Lakshmi Kolluri’s What We Fed to the Manticore (2022) challenged me. Even before its listing, it had caught my interest, but I found some of the stories devastating whereas others left me unmoved. In hindsight, I wondered if it had simply been poor timing, if my responses had more to do with what was unfolding in my day-to-day than with what was unfolding on the page; conversely, I wondered if some of the stories were so personal for the author that I was consigned to the margins. The author’s note captures what initially drew me to the collection:

“Every time I have learned about a different animal, I have wondered what they think about the world they live in. But the inner lives of animals are such a mystery to me, which has made me feel that my understanding of the world is incomplete. I am writing to fill that empty space for myself. In the end I did what I hope my readers will do: I dissolved the distance in my mind between myself and the wild world. Which helped me understand that the story of my life includes the story of all the life that surrounds us.”

Contents: The Good Donkey, What We Fed to the Manticore, Someone Must Watch Over the Dead, The Dog Star Is the Brightest Star in the Sky, May God Forever Bless the Rhino Keepers, The Hunted the Haunted the Hungry the Tame, The Open Ocean Is an Endless Desert, A Level of Tolerance, Let Your Body Meet the Ground

As orchestrated and deliberate as Kolluri’s collection read for me, Francine Cunningham’s God Isn’t Here Today (2022) had an organic and irrepressible straight-from-the-writer’s-notebook feel. Even though I tried to parse out the stories, so their crowded duedates didn’t push me into binge-reading, I always read more a few pieces in this slim volume in a single sitting. Some short manifesto-like passages operate like a chorus or refrain, opening and closing the collection and echoing, interspersed, throughout (titled “Taking Space”). Echoes of the title story also recur, thematically and tonally. But my favourite part is “Complex 2675”, which is a collection of tenants’ perspectives, equal parts plot and character (as much as anything here is plot or character). Even though this sounds chaotic, I really enjoyed it.

Patricia Engel’s The Faraway World (2023) is a world apart stylistically, but I really enjoyed it too. Each story feels as though she has laboured extensively, despite the simple language and sentence structure. But, simultaneously, they feel all-of-a-piece, as though she wrote them all in the same place over a period of time—a spell long enough to allow for substantial editing but not so long as to have had her perspective on the world dramatically upended or altered.

“I write in notebooks. Natasha thinks I have dozens full of my writing, but it’s more like three or four. In my mind I see stories I want to write. I hear the sentences, see each phrase come together like pearls on a string, but when it comes time to write them, they evaporate, and I’m left in the four corners of my room, my mother working on some bare body under a towel; or I’m in Lily’s apartment, her daughter talking to one of the dolls her father sent from Florida; Lily, cooking a meal, humming some old tune, smelling of me under her clothes. If I were a better writer, a real writer, I would know how to make Natasha or Lily my muse. But I can’t even do that.”

Contents: Aida, Fausto, The Book of Saints, Campoamor, Guapa. La Ruta, Ramiro, The Bones of Cristóbel Colón, Libélula, Aguacero

But all this is doubly true of Andrea Barrett’s Natural History (2022). Hers are the kinds of stories that simultaneously make me think I might as well give up any thought of writing stories myself and make me think that there’s nothing more important than telling a good story so I’d best get busy with trying harder. It’s been years since I read Barrett, but I went into this collection with high expectations and I savored every element. Like Madeleine L’Engle, Elizabeth Strout, and Margaret Laurence, Barrett’s creating an entire world in her books, so if you enjoy one of her books, it’s worth looking for more. (And now I want to read what I’ve missed along the way.)

“As soon as she left I went back to work, seeing more clearly than before what might be hiding in my pages. Often I don’t know what I mean; when I try to say what I mean, I lie; it seems I only tell the truth when I’m talking about someone else. In those sketches of Henrietta’s world, my own experiences had metamorphosed. Soon, I thought, when I finished writing about her, I might try something new, related to what Miriam had suggested. Something for Deirdre, a sketch of us at Silver Lake that was but also wasn’t us. If I translated some events, deleted some and transposed others, changed the names but kept the feelings, kept our feelings…?”

Contents: I Wonders of the Shore, The Regimental History, Henrietta and Her Moths, The Accident, Open House II Natural History

Prizelist projects can expose new favourite authors. Both Bill @ The Australian Legend and I had mentioned recently that we’d not been reading as much science-fiction as we once did, that there were new writers we wanted to explore, when the longlist for the Ursula K. LeGuin Fiction Prize was announced. Bill honed in on Rebecca Campbell’s Arboreality (2023) straight away. He practically announced the winner when he reviewed it and, indeed, that’s what happened. Knowing the stories were linked, I made notes from the start: character names and settings, relationships and challenges. But the more important connections between the story are thematic, so I needn’t have worried about the details. These are not intricate, delicate stories: each operates more as an echo and feels similar to the others. There are clear connections against a backdrop of decades passing: main characters in a previous story are referenced in later stories, some characters alter and endure. I’m glad this shortlisting brought Stelliform Press into my stack; they’ve published a new novella by Tiffany Morris recently—billed as eco-horror and swampcore—another curiously compelling story that I’ve just reviewed for World Literature Today.

Contents: Special Collections, Controlled Burn, An Important Failure, Scions and Root Stocks, Pub Food, The Cathedral Arboreal

Stephanie Powell Watts’s We Are Taking Only What We Need (2011) was a lucky find on a library browse. She reminds me of April Sinclair and early Barbara Kingsolver: flourishes of humour with an undertone of no-guff realism. “Besides, Sisters was not the establishment to go to if you are looking for scenery, garnishes, or flourishes to please the eye, food piled in artful stacks, or for watching people. The mission at Sisters is to get all you want to eat and go home full. That’s enough entertainment for anybody.” Her scenes are lifelike and her characters are smart, their perspectives on the world complex. “Every Sunday, for months, I met Aunt Ginny in the living room as I passed by my own mama without a word. We often handled each other like we were hot around the edges, careful not to start another round of the war we both heard rumbling in the near distance.” If you enjoyed Maxine Clair’s Rattlebone (more on that with the Autumn Quarterly), you’d enjoy these too.

Contents: Family Museum of the Ancient Postcards; If You Hit Randolph County, You’ve Gone Too Far; We Are Taking Only What We Need; Unassigned Territory; All the Sad Etc.; Welcome to the City of Dreams; Do You Remember the Summer of Love?; Black Power; Highway 18; There Can Never Be Another Me