Alexie, Dunning, Piatote and an Anthology

Short Stories in April, May and June

Whether in a dedicated collection or a magazine, these stories capture a variety of reading moods.

This quarter, I returned to a must-read everything author and explored two new-to-me story writers.

The 1998 film “Smoke Signals” brought Sherman Alexie (a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene writer) onto my shelves. Because it was based on a short story in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven, and because that’s a terrific title, I was hooked on his work early on. His style and tone reminded me of Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water: playful and incisive, tender and sorrowful. (King is a Cherokee/German/Greek writer.)

Because I’ve picked up several magazines because just one of his stories was contained therein, I got lazy about reading through the published collections. So much so, that I hadn’t even realized that  Alexie’s War Dances (2009) contains both stories and poems.

NOTE: This is actually perfect for me as a reader; I feel sure that I enjoyed the poems more because I was reading them in singles (I do love finding single poems in a magazine and always read them, whereas in some reading moods, I’m intimidated by an entire collection of verse). Would poems find more readers if they were included with other kinds of narratives?

The first story in War Dances will especially appeal to any writer who has struggled with the concept of mechanics and how they can trip up a narrative. When you’re a beginner, or when you’re unfocussed (or, maybe TOO focussed), you can write a lot of sentences that move your characters around a story, walk between rooms, or interact with objects around a scene that you could leave out of your exposition; with experience, it becomes easier to gauge how much of that kind of description is necessary and how much is clutter.

In “Breaking and Entering” readers receive, directly, the kind of advice an experienced writer might issue on this subject: “The audience understands that a door has been used—the eyes and mind will make the connection—so you can just skip the door.” Simultaneously, the story hinges on an instance in which the door, more specifically an entranceway, is the whole story. This tickles me, because I’m an enthusiastic proponent of the idea that there are exceptions to every single rule about writing.

There are other Alexie-isms in this collection, too, besides the appearance of writer characters. Stories about family life, for instance, and the desire to allow the values we can enact in our families to spill outwards and make positive changes beyond those borders. So we have a passage like this: “That night, my sons climbed into bed with me. We all slept curled around one another like sled dogs in a snowstorm. I woke, hour by hour, and touched my head and neck to check if they had changed shape—to feel if antennae were growing. Some insects ‘hear’ with their antennae. Maybe that’s what was happening to me.” But, this is also a story in which “all of us were dying—were being killed by other sons and fathers who also loved and were loved”, drawing that thread between the personal and the political taut.

There are also self-deprecating jokes (and, of course, not everyone has the same sense of humour, so some have challenged this aspect of Alexie’s work): “True or False?: when a reservation-raised Native American dies of alcoholism it should be considered death by natural causes.” Over the years, I’ve heard many criticisms that Alexie’s creative writing was not “native enough”, that he included images and ideas that some believed supported stereotypes and relied on short-cuts. This is an old debate, particularly in communities which haven’t been fairly or abundantly represented in artistic works–whether to have nuanced and credible characters, or have idealized and superstar characters.

Alexie doesn’t hesitate to poke fun. In “Catechism”, for instance, one character makes this observation: “My late sister studied my mother’s denim quilt and said, ‘That’s a lot of pants. There’s been a lot of ass in those pants. This is a blanket of asses.” In “The Senator’s Son” a character says “’Jeez, come on, I’m not interested in you like that,’ he said. ‘I’m gay, but I’m not blind.’” There are no sacred creatures or quilts in this collection: “My father had always believed in truth, and in the real and vast differences between good and evil. But he’d also taught me, as he had learned, that each man is as fragile and finite as any other.”

Contents: 23 pieces, including 12 poems and 11 stories, beginning with “The Limited” and ending with “Food Chain”.

Sherman Alexie’s Blasphemy (2012) is about twice the size of War Dances, but a handful of them were reprints from that early collection.

As I read through, even recognizing the repetition, I would reread the first few pages of a familiar story and consider rereading in full; I wondered if maybe they would contain news of how the characters had fared since I last read about them, that’s how comfortable they seemed.

One story that I know I’ve read before, “Gentrification” struck a new chord for me this time.

For weeks, throughout this spring’s lockdown, we walked along the marsh and railway trails when possible and along the streets when it was not. Alongside a 1930s-style, brick-walkup building, there was a mattress that someone had dragged outside; it was there for a long time and, then, someone shifted it onto the open space in front of the bank next door. Near the fancy benches, which were maybe installed so that patrons required to follow the building’s capacity rules would have a nice place to sit outdoors, but which, early in the morning were routinely occupied by dogwalkers who sat with their phones and coffees from the chain down the block. The mattress sat there for weeks. It clearly hadn’t originated from the bank, but it sprawled there, next to the nice seating area, like a grimy hand towel in a guest bathroom; until, one day, long after it had seemed that it would ever happen, it was gone. “Gentrification” is about that kind of mattress.

Another element of Alexie’s writing that I rely on for a sense of kinship is his overt bookishness; some writers you sense love the idea of their own published books and maybe they read sometimes, other writers love the idea of other people’s books too and they would not be writers if they had not first been readers and it feels like they have decided to say thank you forever.

And that’s why we have, in “Do You Know Where I Am?”, a passage like this: “We laughed and kissed and made love and read books in bed. We read through years of books, decades of books. There were never enough books for us. Read, partially read, and unread, our books filled the house, stacked on shelves and counters, piled into corners and closets. Our marriage became an eccentric and disorganized library.”

Contents: 31 stories, including a couple of postcard-length stories, sixteen of them new

A remarkable first collection is Inuit writer Norma Dunning’s Annie Muktuk and Other Stories (2017). “One thing white people wanted to see was tradition. Tradition started with how you looked,” she writes, in “The Road Show Eskimo”. Readers can find traditional elements here, and be led by the hand to experience the landscape, for instance, as in “Elipsee”: “We walk along our treeless Northern desert. I feel like I am looking at it for the first time. It is an amazing site of grey boulders, lichen-laden, tiny flowers bouncing around our feet and the air is perfectly crisp. For the first time I feel like I am walking on ground that can only be called one word. Home.” But, there is more to it. And that’s where I start to think this could be a favourite too. As in “Samagiik”: “’Where in hell are you taking me?’ Moses Henry is squished into the ATV sidecar next to me.” There is humour here, also, in “Manisatuq”: “I was the fast runner, the female Atanarjuat. I got to the swings before anyone else.” And there is sorrow, too, as in Kabloona Red:

I close my eyes and tears drool down my face, snot drips from my nose. My heart pounds hard against that cold cement wall. He wiggles this way and that like a snowshoe hare stuck in a snare. The pain slits beads of panic off my forehead. He’s finished. Tucks his thing back under his black robe, slowly peels his hand off my mouth. Mutters to me in French to ‘ferme ta guelule—shush, don’t talk about this,’ And he’s gone. I hear his footsteps down the hallway. I slide down to the cement floor and sob softely. I hurt. I bleed. I don’t know who to tell.

Contents: Kabloona Red, Elipsee, The Road Show Eskimo, Kakoot, Annie Muktuk; Manisatuq; Qunutuittuq; Itsigivaa; Iniqtuiguti; Inurqituq; Tutsiapaa; Nakuusiaq; Qaninngilivuq; Samagiik; Husky; My Sisters and I

Beth H. Piatote’s The Beadworkers (2019) is a contender for my favourites list for this reading year. This Nez Perce storyteller combines many of my favourite elements: believable dialogue, a sense of fun, concise and pertinent imagery, and attention paid to glimmers of the extraordinary in the everyday.

One of my favourite stories illustrates all of these qualities. Take, for instance, this simple but unexpectedly tender observation: “At the powwow, we fell into familiar rituals of work: setting up the dance arbor, hauling picnic chairs from the cars, fetching ice for the coolers, bringing in gallons of ice for the dancers, and snacks for the kids. In this way, we circled around our wounds and each other.”

And this subtle way of translating a gentle unease in a familiar situation: “The clothes were swaying gently on thin hangers behind her. ‘How have you been?’ I asked. ‘You look good.’”

Even though these stories have the sense of being tended to—they feel solid, but not overly precious—there is not a lot of figurative language. What there is, is resonant.

Like this, in Feast III: “Water coughed from the mouth of the hand pump, smacking the floor of the metal bucket, which tipped suddenly from the force.” And, this from “Falling Crows”, which also includes a bit of fun: “This, too, will be a sudden confession, banal and absurd, like a can of store biscuits popping open in the heat. Koof!”

This is Piatote’s first collection; I’m so excited to see what’s next.

Contents: Land and Life (Feast I, II, and III), Indian Wars (The News of the Day; Fish Wars), I Tell My Story I conjure My Powers I Make a Wish (Beading Lesson; wIndin; Rootless; Falling Crows; Katydid), Human Beings (Antìkoni) Note: Each of these sections is also named in the Nez Perce language (which isn’t in my font library).

Taaqtumi: An Anthology of Arctic Horror Stories (2019) compiled by Neil Christopher is a slim volume that landed on my stack because it contains a sequel to one of my favourite Richard van Camp short stories; the other stories are disorienting and disturbing too.

Some could be read as fables or legends, casting an eye towards ancestors and the past: “I lived peacefully, taking only what I needed, never bothering with the humans. That is until they started setting lures and traps. They call to me, once a generation, the ones with the ancient blade. My life stretches back into the earliest times, when the ocean was new and I was but a cub. I have been bested only once, and I will never be again.” (From Thomas Anguti Johnston’s “Revenge”)

Others hang a hook on a more universal, seemingly timeless, door: “Must be the radiators, she thought. Air in the pipes. She crept to the door, listening intently, but the sound had gone.” (From Repo Kempt’s “Strays”)

The door story particularly tickled me. Each story complements and underscores its companions and learning vocabulary via a story is more fun than a language app: “It was a hunting tradition. If you pointed the carcass of an animal toward camp it would bring you better luck; more animals would come to you. Except with ijiraujat, with zombies , they pointed the bodies away from where they lived. Might as well try, right? (From Gayle Kabloona’s “Utiqtuq”)

Keep this in mind for October reading or if you enjoy being scared year-‘round.

Contents: Aviaq Johnston’s The Haunted Blizzard; Ann R. Loverock’s The Door; Richard van Camp’s Wheetago War II: Summoners; Thomas Anguti Johnston’s Revenge; Sean and Rachel Qitsualink-Tinsley’s Lounge; Gayle Kabloona’s Utiqtuq; K.C. Carthew’s Sila; Jay Bulckaert’s The Wildest Game; Repo Kempt’s Strays

And you? Any short stories lately?