Rabbit Cake & Snail-Slow Freight Trains

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From Lewis Nordan’s Music of the Swamp: 

My mother made me a birthday cake in the shape of a rabbit–she had a cake pan molded in that shape–and she decorated it with chocolate icing and stuck on carrot slices for the eyes. It was a difficult cake to make stand up straight, but with various props it would balance on its hind legs on the plate, so that when I came into the room it looked almost real standing there, its little front feet tucked up to its chest.

At the sight of the rabbit I started to cry. My mother was startled by my tears. She had been standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room. The table was set with a white tablecloth and linen napkins, three settings for my birthday dinner.

I could not stop crying, looking at that rabbit cake. I knew that my mother loved me, I knew something of her grief–something in the desperate innocence of the rabbit, its little carrot eyes. I thought of the hopelessness of all love, and that is why I was crying, I think.

My mother came to me and held me to her and I felt her warmth and smelled her woman-smell. I wanted to dance with her at the Legion Hut. I wanted to give her a gift of earthworms (69).

………………………

When I was a child of eleven, there as a snail-slow freight train of a dozen cars or less that dragged its back legs through town each morning like a sorry dog and even stopped momentarily for God knows what reason at the Arrow Catcher depot and rested itself long to catch its breath and then, as if hopelessly, gathered its strength once again and set out on its asthmatic straining greasy little diesel motion towards the Mississippi River, some forty miles west of where I lived. (71)

Monday Text: Ron Rash’s “Night Hawks”

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Ron Rash is a masterful short story writer–one of my favorites. Many people think of his novels first, but his short story collections are top notch and my favorite books of his. Burning Bright and, his most recent release, Nothing Gold Can Stay, are two of the best collections published in the 21st C.

I also take a selfish pride in my love for Rash’s work because I knew of him before he became nationally known. He read at East Carolina University in the late 90s, where I did my undergrad, and it was the first reading I’d ever attended. At that time he had a poetry collection–Eureka Mill–and a short story collection that’s now out-of-print, The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth, both published by small presses in South Carolina (Hub City, which has grown in recent years and now has a national reputation, and Bench Press, which I’m pretty sure is now defunct–copies of Rash’s first story collection are going for $600+ on Amazon!).

Anyway, I remember the value Rash placed on emotion. You’d be surprised how much contemporary fiction avoids emotion, as if our post-post-post-whatever-modern world is too cool and cynical to acknowledge that yes, our daily lives are still defined by basic emotional truths. Of course, this isn’t to say Rash’s work is sentimental. His work is usually quiet and introspective yet still surprising, dark, and Gothic. Flannery O’Connor famously said, and I paraphrase here, that the greatest writerly sins are sentimentality and pornography. Rash is neither sentimental nor “pornographic”/pulpish, and O’Connor’s point is that sentimentality exists on both ends of the spectrum–mushiness on one end, nihilistic pulp on the other. Rash is a writer who clearly writes within the Southern Gothic tradition of Flannery O’Connor, as well as Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers, among many others.

“Night Hawks,” which originally appeared in Grist and appears in Nothing Gold Can Stay, is such a story. Without spoiling, I’ll say the story features a maimed protagonist, Ginny, who has a rather large scar on her face from an accident that occurs within the plot. She’s a teacher and has to leave her job at the local high school, one she was having trouble with before the accident occurred. She’s always been isolated and misunderstood, an introvert and hermit, and the scar only makes matters worse. Did I not tell you Rash does the Southern Gothic thing?

The story’s title comes from her job as a graveyard shift DJ on a local AM radio show. It’s the perfect job for her because she can connect with people from afar, without the shame of her disfigurement. Like many radio DJs, she creates a moniker, and it’s perfect: the Night Hawk. She’s an immediate success and connects with people–lonely people who need a voice to fall asleep to at night, for instance–yet, throughout the story, she’s still alone herself and severely depressed; her depression is a debilitating, chronic variety, fraught with anxiety and hints of paranoia. This isn’t a simplistic story where the damaged protagonist “finds herself” through her new job, more than one where the new job is the only thing keeping her alive. 

I’m posting the story’s ending, which I don’t think will ruin the story for you. It’s quite beautiful. And, if you haven’t purchased Nothing Gold Can Stay, I highly recommend it. Also, check out Silas House’s wonderful interview with Rash on House’s show, Hillbilly Solid. Not only is the interview great, but so is the music, and much of it fits the mood of Rash’s work. Here’s the story’s ending:

At the radio station she would unlock the door, and soon enough Buddy Harper would end his broadcast and leave. She would say, This is the Night Hawk, and play “After Midnight.” Ginny would speak to people in bedrooms, to clerks drenched in the fluorescent light of convenience stores, to millworkers driving back roads home after graveyard shifts. She would speak to the drunk and sober, the godly and the godless. All the while high above where she sat, the station’s red beacon would pulse like a heart, as if giving bearings to all those in the dark adrift and alone. (225)

Fire

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I just burned a story draft I’d been working on since the beginning of summer break that was to be the first story in my new book manuscript. The story lacked heart and the characters came from my head, not my gut. It’s often assumed that revision is every story’s birthright, but burning is as much a birthright as revision, and who says burning can’t be part of the revision process? Sometimes, it helps to reset with a blank page, but resetting in this instance can’t occur without the ritual of draft-burning. I mention this as an excuse to post one of my favorite Harry Crews bits:

75 Books Every Man Should Read Using Esquire’s Stupid Methodology

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Here’s Esquire’s “The 75 Books Every Man Should Read,” which includes one woman writer out of seventy-five names, ’cause men are supposedly too stupid and insecure to read serious fiction written by women–unless, of course, that woman is Flannery O’Connor, every poorly/lazily read male reader’s go-to or default woman writer. It’s not that she can’t be a reasonable favorite, more that it’s the weird rate at which she’s mentioned as the token woman writer on male-dominated lists. To be clear, I love FOC, but I’ve left her off my list for this reason.

1) Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
2) The Collected Stories, Eudora Welty
3) Middlemarch, George Eliot
4) Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
5) Emma, Jane Austen
6) The Collected Stories, Caroline Gordon
7) The Women of Brewster Place, Gloria Naylor
8) Maud Martha, Gwendolyn Brooks
9) Honored Guest, Joy Williams
10) The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
11) The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros
12) Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
13) Creatures of Habit, Jill McCorkle
14) The Country of Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett
15) Beloved, Toni Morrison
16) Lilus Kikus and Other Stories, Elena Poniatowska
17) In Love and Trouble, Alice Walker
18) Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
19) Gorilla, My Love, Toni Cade Bambara
20) Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
21) North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell
22) At The Bottom of The River, Jamaica Kincaid
23) Sexing The Cherry, Jeanette Winterson
24) The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
25) Sweet Talk, Stephanie Vaughn
26) Two Serious Ladies, Jane Bowles
27) Passing, Nella Larsen
28) Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
29) Lord of Misrule, Jaimy Gordon
30) Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
31) Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
32) Barren Ground, Ellen Glasgow
33) Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
34) Tracks, Louise Erdrich
35) My Antonia, Willa Cather
36) Three Lives, Gertrude Stein
37) The Shipping News, Annie Proulx
38) Corregidora, Gayle Jones
39) How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Julia Alvarez
40) Monkeys, Susan Minot
41) Shiloh, Bobbie Ann Mason
42) Daughter of Fortune, Isabel Allende
43) Bloodchild, Octavia Butler
44) Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Joan Didion
45) The Collected Stories, Cynthia Ozick
46) The Collected Stories, Katherine Anne Porter
47) Storyteller, Leslie Marmon Silko
48) Life in The Iron Mills, Rebecca Harding Davis
49) The Street, Ann Petry
50) Black Tickets, Jayne Phillips
51) Self Help, Lorrie Moore
52) The Quick and The Dead, Joy Williams
53) Ship Fever, Andrea Barrett
54) The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
55) The Collected Stories, Lydia Davis
56) White Teeth, Zadie Smith
57) Breathing Lessons, Anne Tyler
58) Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, ZZ Packer
59) Ahab’s Wife, Sena Jeter Naslund
60) Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
61) Where You’ll Find Me and Other Stories, Anne Beattie
62) The Collected Stories, Amy Hempel
63) Talking in Bed, Antonya Nelson
64) Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
65) Collected Stories of Jean, Jean Stafford
66) Leaving Atlanta, Tayari Jones
67) Mona in The Promised Land, Gish Jen
68) Water Street, Crystal Wilkinson
69) Victory Over Japan, Ellen Gilchrist
70) Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
71) The Color Purple, Alice Walker
72) The Meat and Spirit Plan, Selah Saterstrom
73) Selected Stories, Alice Munro
74) Collected Stories, Grace Paley
75) The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

Monday Text: Melinda Moustakis’s “Trigger”

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Melinda Moustakis’s short short, “Trigger,” originally appeared as “MooseBlind” in Kenyon Review Online and subsequently as “Trigger” in her Flannery O’Connor award winning short story collection, Bear Down, Bear North. I love this piece, particularly its use of refrain. “Trigger” appears first in Bear Down, Bear North and establishes the book’s recurring exploration of, to borrow from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, “story truth” vs. “happening truth”—how the characters navigate the tension between their imaginations and Alaska’s harsh realities. I had a chance to ask Melinda two quick questions about “Trigger”:

Q: Do you consider “Trigger” a poem?

Moustakis: I consider it to be many things at once. I consider “Trigger” to be the introduction to the world of my book, to a particular Alaska. In half a page, so many themes are introduced: inheritance, family, mythology, death, hunting, conception. I’ve called it a short short, a prose poem, a chapter, maybe even a micro-universe. I did realize much later I had written my own personal version of a particular favorite poem about genealogy. Writing in this concentrated manner is both one of my strengths and failings as a writer–I think of a scene and expect to have five pages down and realize, with much frustration, that I’ve got half a page.

Q: That reminds me of Ron Carlson’s distinction between writers who are either “ekers” or “gushers.” So you’re an eker. How is eking a strength?

Moustakis: I’m going to steal these terms. It could save me a lot of future embarrassment. I once told an editor how I often explain the writing process to my students as being a puker vs kidney stoner and then realized how too-bodily-fluid-descriptive my explanation was. Being a eker can be a strength in that you’re writing very slowly and paying attention to each sentence and every word. But then you can become bogged down with the minutiae and not see the bigger narrative arc. Often I wish I was more of gusher, especially now that I’m in the process of writing a novel.

Read  “Trigger” under its previous title.