This week, we present Adriana E. Ramirez, reading live at the Fuel & Fuddle Pitt MFA Reading Series, February 2, 2009, hosted by Liberty Hultberg.
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Things That Pass for Love by Allison Amend
(2008, OV Books)
Robert Yune
Alison Amend has a gift for inciting incident, that magical intersection of character and opportunity. Most stories in Things That Pass for Love begin with characters in bizarre situations: a fifth-grade teacher attempts to conduct class as bodies rain from the sky, a government agent tracks cult members at garage sales, and a disabled photographer finds himself lost in Miami.
Although these scenarios seem ripe for cheap thrills and easy humor, Amend uses them as opportunities for psychological exploration. Ms. Gold, the fifth-grade teacher in “Dominion Over Every Erring Thing” is rightly horrified at the splattering bodies in her schoolyard. The fact that no one else seems to mind—her students, the school’s guidance counselor, even Ms. Gold’s husband remain unaffected—proves to be the source of the story’s tension. What initially sounds like a headline from “News of the Weird” becomes, in Ms. Amend’s hands, an examination of control and the quiet freefall that occurs in its absence.
Some stories in this collection map new physical and cultural terrain, such as the numerous destinations the climber/photographer conquers in “What Was Over There is Over Here.” Another, “How Much Greater the Miracle”, juxtaposes the genteel rules on a golf course with the strain of a 25- year marriage. Amend’s views into these worlds is warm and thorough—in many stories, she carves out space for a redemptive moment, something positive to salvage the story from the wreckage that this kind of fiction seems to require. Despite this range of serious subject matter (incest, insanity, suicide golf), Amend’s humor and sympathy for her characters rescues her stories from their own depressing ends.
Half the blurbs on the outer jacket discuss the Amend’s skillful range—and Things That Pass for Love is impressive in its variety of characters, settings, and conflicts. Amend is equally adept at writing from the perspective of a male Vietnam veteran, detailing corporate guidelines, and testifying for an entire town in the flash fiction piece “Bluegrass Banjo.” Although her language is consistently clear and calmly objective, Amend deftly accommodates the voices of her characters, as evidenced by the stylized prose in “The Janus Gate,” which moves swiftly to mimic the frenzied pace of a professor’s relationship with a pupil:
He could throw back his head and cackle with the thought of what he could make her do with his glances and his fingers. He could touch her pinkie next to the computer and feel her stiffen. Repulsion, attraction, surprise, it was all the same to him, so long as he provoked in her a sharp, uncontrolled physical reaction. He could make her scream, he knew, during sex. He did. Not knowing or caring whether it was out of pain or ecstasy, whether she craved or hated him. Whether she did it out of duty or gratitude, desire or curiosity. She was unused to it, he could tell, and he liked to look at her, both of them with their eyes opened wide, hers sparkling with terror or suspense.
Like many stories in this collection, “The Janus Gate” is itself a study in several themes: a racy story about a professor having an affair with a student, a meditation on language and duality, and a wry observation on academic politics.
Here and elsewhere, Amend’s strongest stories provide a multifaceted glimpse of their characters: in “Dominion Over Every Erring Thing,” we see Ms. Gold as a fifth-grade teacher, but also as a novice Hebrew student. Marca, the main character in “The People You Know Best” can navigate the chatty politics of the book clubs she hosts, but she’s also a successful cyberotica writer. It’s fascinating to watch Amend converge her characters’ dual worlds in unexpected ways.
Amend’s collection is impressive for its range, but it’s also an entertaining take on finding the unexpected in the mundane. Though their subjects and situations might appear to test the limits of possibility, these stories take place in our real world. Here, the current pulsing through Amend’s collection—connecting cults, cyberotica, terrorism, and suicide golf—seems to whisper, There is a logical explanation for all of this. And isn’t there? Things That Pass for Love offers a thoughtful, sympathetic, and often surprising view into the world that belongs to its characters, and to us.
Hello, hello! Today is the final day to submit a piece of fiction, nonfiction, criticism, or poetry for consideration in our fourth issue. We accept submissions electronically (see the Call for Entries for further details), so all it takes is the magical click of a button. We look forward to seeing your lovely language, your tall tales, your astute cultural observations!
Many thanks, and happy submitting.
Yours,
The Editors
Dear friends,
We are now accepting submissions for our fourth issue! Please send us your damned finest writing in nonfiction, poetry, criticism, or fiction. Submissions close on September 30, a date that hastens upon us like sleep, the desire for cheese, and the spectre of Ichabod Crane.
See our call for entries. Drink Ovaltine. Submit today!
Yours,
The Editors
PS: Hot Metal Bridge now has a Facebook group. That’s right. Join it.
Hot Metal Bridge’s third issue, “American Light,” is set to debut at any moment. Please expect it by/on April 1.
We apologize for the slight delay and promise to repay you in gold coin — or rather, in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, criticism, and art, all of which we’d take over gold any day.
Yours, with anticipation,
The Editors
Our spring submission deadline is so soon, you can smell it: like that strange perfume your grandmother used to wear, like the shepherd’s pie you forgot you were reheating, like the rugby player who chose to sit next to you on the bus on the rainest day of the year.
Luckily for you, Hot Metal Bridge is both more fortunate and more attractive than a slack-jawed neanderthal. Also, as an online magazine, it has no odor to speak of.
Submit! Submit quickly! And make it good.
Yours,
Kelly and Ashleigh
This is old news but has escaped my attention until now: The Atlantic Monthly is accepting entries for its annual student writing contests. (Student status being of the undergrad or grad varieties.) Entries accepted in fiction, poetry, and something called “personal or journalistic essays” that sounds a lot like creative non-fiction.
Prizes are $1,000 for first place, $500 for second and $250 for third. Postmark deadline is December 1.
The best part? No entry fee.
Full details here. Good luck.
It seems that several times over the last year, I’ve looked in the front matter of a book of short stories I’ve been enjoying, and in the place where the author thanks those publications that originally printed his or her stories, I’ve seen the journal Salt Hill listed as one of them. (Although I can only think of the example of Mary Gaitskill’s Because They Wanted To at the moment.) Google “Salt Hill,” though, and you turn up a bunch of results pertaining to pubs called Salt Hill or, yes, salt hills.
It’s not just me. Fellow fiction ed. Ashleigh heroically compiled a long list of literary magazines over the summer, and her listing for Salt Hill was something like “Not sure this still exists.” We just figured it had gone the way of the dodo, so to speak.
Au contraire! Today, via Pitt’s super-useful “dist list,” comes word that Salt Hill not only exists, but is welcoming submissions for its 21st issue. It turns out too that it’s affiliated with Syracuse University.
Here is relevant info from the aforementioned e-mail, followed by an explanation of why I’m not just putting up a link:
“The editors welcome submissions of poetry, prose, translations, reviews, essays, interviews and artwork submitted by April 1. We do not accept electronic submissions.
“. . .
“To submit address your work to the appropriate editor
(poetry, fiction or nonfiction) at:
“Salt Hill
Syracuse University
English Department
Syracuse, NY 13244″
And now here is the web address they provided: SaltHillJournal.com. Click on it. Type it in yourself and see where it goes.
This is the most utterly mysterious literary magazine I have ever heard of.
-Adam
At a recent University of Pittsburgh panel on how to make money as a nonfiction writer, a successful freelancer advised us on how to get started. “Take anything!†he shouted, pounding his fist on the table. “ANYTHING!†A freelance photographer in the audience snarled, “Don’t use Craigslist. Jobs on there are piss.â€
This summer I needed work, and having paid my dues in food service and public education, it was time for a summer gig that would beef up my writing resume. My requirements were few: work from home (to accommodate two vacations and my internship schedule) and that my work be compensated with money (to accommodate the rest of life). I didn’t want to pay $30 to Writer’s Market, and Media Bistro had mostly full-time gigs in New York and L.A. To Craigslist!
Pittsburgh is unique among the cities I’ve visited or lived in, in that it has a surprising number of homeless literati-lookalikes. While running through Schenley Park last summer, I saw the homeless Samuel Beckett sitting on a bench, his creased and weary hatchet face staring off across the tennis courts. I wasn’t aware of the writer Richard Yates, but a recent photo reminded me vividly of a man I see often around Squirrel Hill, frequently talking to himself. There’s a woman I sometimes see muttering on the street with the same vivid white skunk-stripe that cut across Susan Sontag’s hair.
But there is a special place in my personal pantheon for the George Plimpton of bums. He has the grayish-white hair, patrician face and carriage of the late George Plimpton, editor of The Paris Review and author of such gonzo sports journalism works as Paper Lion and The Bogey Man. He is shorter, though, a little stouter, and in general doesn’t seem to be in as bright a mood as Plimpton often broadcast to the world. I see him in my neighborhood and in Oakland, where Pitt is, haunting coffee shops, Subways, or standing on street corners, waiting patiently to cross but appearing to have no destination in mind.
It happens that I’m in the middle of Paper Lion, for which Plimpton spent training camp with the Detroit Lions as their “last-string quarterback,” and which is great so far. Earlier this week, I was reading it in a coffee shop and, looking up, noticed that the George Plimpton of bums was sitting twenty or so feet away. Perhaps because of the coincidence, I was attuned to all the other ones–even if they were only coincidental within the framework of my life and experience–that popped up as I continued reading.
Plimpton spoke at length to defensive back Dick LeBeau of the Detroit Lions, now retired and a defensive coordinator for . . . the Pittsburgh Steelers. The year that Plimpton went to training camp with the Lions, their other great defensive back, Alex Karras, was suspended for the season (for gambling). Although Plimpton only spoke to him later on, Karras looms as a kind of shadow over the book, with then-current players recalling anecdotes about Karras’s meal-time theatricality, his exaggerated responses to practical jokes, and his ballerina-like agility on the field.
Reading about Karras’s theatrical abilities and hammish tendencies was a bit weird because Karras would go on to have something of an acting career, probably more of one than Plimpton had. Most notable in Karras’s resume, of course, is the TV series Webster, where Karras played former football great George Papadopolis (whose name is weirdly similar to that of a former Greek dictator), who’s stuck raising Webster, a minuscule, insufferably cute black orphan played by Emmanuel Lewis.
Rather than distracting me from Plimpton’s day-by-day account of football camp with the Lions, all this extra-textual stuff has made the reading really fun and a lot weirder than Plimpton probably intended the book when he wrote it forty or so years ago.
(Post-script: I might be wrong about Webster being Karras’s most notable role: I just learned he also had a small role in Porky’s. Let’s call that a toss-up.)