Category: Writing

  • Short Story Review: “Lu, Reshaping” by Madeleine Thien

    (The short story, “Lu, Reshaping” by Madeline Thien appeared in the December 20th, 2021 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Over the past year, I have been asking myself, why do I like short stories so much? I would rather read a short story collection than a novel. I think it is a very challenging form of storytelling that fails more than it succeeds. For a writer to make a reader care about a story in a thousand or so words is impressive. To make a reader identify with a character is the same space of words, well, that’s impressive.

    “Lu, Reshaping” by Madeline Thien is a story about a character going through a midlife crisis, and I am not being flippant with that description. As a white male entering the early stages of midlife, these stories have a certain appeal to me. (In fact, I would dare argue that there is a whole unidentified genre in literature of novels about white men going through a midlife crisis, which normally involve affairs, children and/or a spouse who no longer understands, and ends with a death.) I feel like Thien took all of those midlife crisis tropes, and with her character Lu, feed them in and created a different but also familiar result.

    I don’t want to give anything away with how the plot unfolds, because of the language that Thien uses to describe situations, and also Lu’s use of phrases from Cantonese that are translated into English. I loved the words that were crafted for this story, and how they transferred the feeling of loneliness, of life passing you by, and questioning the decisions one has made, and that search for happiness, however fleeting, but also being adult enough to know that momentary pleasure should be let go, and not thought about again.

    Lu is not like me. She is a woman, immigrant from Hong Kong, English is not her first language, she is a mother, working a corporate job in, what I think is, Vancouver, and in a marriage that is not fulfilling. But, I could understand where she was coming from, what she was feeling, and how she viewed life. I was especially taken by a sentence in the last paragraph:

    One day, you were an immigrant, loaded down with inexplicable shame; the next you were middle-aged, a mother, and all the risks you’d taken – to live freely, to not be subdued – also made you feel ashamed, as if you’d done nothing but kick tangerines around.

    I understood where Lu was in her life. How ramifications from past decisions can shape how we evolve to the next version of ourselves, even though some emotions never ever leave us, no matter how much we change. All of that is a few words.

  • Short Story Review: “A Shooting in Rathreedane” by Colin Barrett

    (The short story, “A Shooting in Rathreedane: by Colin Barrett appeared in the December 13th, 2021 issue of The New Yorker.)

    This was a good, old school, short story. “A Shooting in Rathreedane” by Colin Barrett even starts off with a good title. A shooting is dramatic; what happens?

    Not making lite of the story, but to sum up – The local police are called when a shooting happens on a remote farm in the Irish countryside. The police and an ambulance arrive at the farm, and then there is the fall out of all of these actions.

    Yet, what really happens is this story is seeing characters unfold. Our protagonist is Sargent Jackie Noonan, a forty-five-year-old police woman, and I liked how Barrett kept dropping these little nuggets of her personality as the story developed. The way she drank her coffee, took notes, talked to other officers. And though the story clearly was meant to stick with her, the other characters who came along were all given depth, and actions that fit accordingly to their characters. I also appreciated that the solving of the shooting wasn’t the point of this story. That the shooting was the starting off point to watch how these characters interacted and dealt with the situation. The story also did a very good job of avoiding cliché traps, that I think lesser writers would have fallen for. The caveat to that statement was I found the run in with the local teenagers predictable, but that is a minor critique.

    And when I said old school before, this story reminded me of the short fiction that was assigned to read in high school, like in a Sherwood Anderson ilk. Not that Anderson ever wrote like this, and I can also say that Anderson is the wrong author to compare Barrett to. (Go with me on this…) It’s the feeling that both authors created characters in rural places that were compelling, and you wanted to know what they are going to do tomorrow because you felt you knew them. As “A Shooting in Rathreedane” concluded, I wanted to know, what is tomorrow going to be like for Sgt. Noonan?

  • I Wrote a Blog Today

    Not very inspired.

    I have been trying to think of a subject to write about, and I just couldn’t come up with something that would inspire me. Often, I can come up with an idea while walking the kid to school, but not this morning. We were running late, and had to rush, so we didn’t really get a chance to have one of those cute father/daughter conversations.

    I thought that while doing laundry something would strike me, but not really. I just folded laundry and watched First Take.

    I planned for dinner, which will be a sheet-pan meal from the NYTimes Cooking Page. I’m going to add a side of rice, and make a butter lemon sauce to round out the whole thing.

    The only thing of note, when it comes to the blog, is that some people came by today and read my short story review of “Detective Dog” by Gish Jen. In fact, more people read it today than when I originally posted it. I wonder if it was Gish Jen?

    I think this post is falling into the category of “keeping up the quota.” I made the rule that I need to post one blog a day, Monday through Friday. So, no matter what, I have to put something up. Clearly, this isn’t one that will make the book.

    Oh, did I mention that one day all of these blog will be published in a book. Well, not all of them. Just a select few, like a greatest hits. But then, several years later, a book will be published that will contain all of the blogs, and that will be more like a collector’s edition, unabridged version. Now, thinking about it, yes, I guess this blog will eventually be published, so I guess, this one does make the book.

    If you made it this far I the blog, then I congratulate you. That shows a level of dedication to a very half-baked concept that I am making up on the fly, to justify my existence, and to also give myself a feeling of accomplishment.

    I’ll do better tomorrow.

  • What Defines Us

    Some people are great at coming up with a tagline for themselves, or a witty one liner that can define who they are. I love Roxane Gay’s Twitter Profile which says, “I want a tiny baby elephant. You clap, I clap back.” Man, that shit is awesome. I feel like I now know that she is funny, and don’t fuck with her.

    In the marketing world, there is the 15 second “elevator pitch,” which I always felt I sucked at. I was never able to concisely say to someone what I was all about, so they could feel comfortable and understand who I was. I felt like I was more like a tv show; you needed to get about three episodes in before I started to get good and become worth your time.

    I say all of this because last night I looked at my Twitter profile, specifically my tagline; “Theater, Pictures, and Words… Just Not In That Order.” I mean, it’s always been a placeholder until I came up with something better… because it sucks, you know.

    But what really stuck in my craw and bothered me most was the first word, “Theatre.”

    I haven’t done a show in three years. Does that word even apply to me anymore? Also, I haven’t perused any theatre work in two years. I’m not sure that word defines me.

    Now, if my puppetry friends and colleagues were to call me up and ask me to help out on a show, I would be there is a heartbeat. Yet, I can fully admit that I would be there for them, because they are my friends, and I believe in their talent and creativity.

    I think the passion for theatre has gone out of me. For twenty years, it was that thig that burned in me, that I thought about, and wanted to experience, and know about and discover new ideas about, and meet people who are trying new things in theatre. I don’t feel that now.

    When I hear about friends in shows, I do want to go out and see them, and support them. Or I see that the show that they are working on is opening, or started rehearsal, or is casting, or whatever; I am excited for them. But, I don’t feel the desire to do that career anymore.

    In fact, when I think about a theatre career, I feel like I have broken up with it. Like, “It’s not you, theatre. It’s me.”

    To be honest, this isn’t the first time I have felt like this. I was crazy passionate about theatre from like 15 to about 20. I was a high school theatre nerd, and when I first went away to college. I wrote plays, and acted, and directed, and was way too dramatic for my own good. And then one day, when I was at the University of North Texas, I just didn’t want to do it anymore, so I dropped out of school. In the meantime, I wrote, I worked shitty jobs, tried my hand as a sort of a roadie for a friend’s band, I explored playing drums in a band, and really just farted around with my friends.

    And then one of my friends went back to college, and joined the theatre department. I made friends with his theatre friends, by drinking at the same bar. Then one day while drinking with the theatre people, they told me they had a class project and were one actor short. “You used to act; can you help us out?” they asked. And I did. And it was so much fun.

    And I went back to school, and became a theatre major again. I had a really great time, and made some amazing friends. And I moved to New York City to have a theatre career, and married my wife, and had a kid. And here I am.

    So, I don’t know. Maybe this is a phase. Maybe this feeling is my new reality. Maybe looking back at it all, theatre still does define who I am.

    I do need to come up with a better tagline, though.

  • Short Story Review: “The Hollow” by Greg Jackson

    (The shot story, “The Hollow” by Greg Jackson appeared in the November 29th, 2021 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Okay, no cutesy introduction here, I didn’t get this story, and I’m not sure whose fault it is. Greg Jackson? The New Yorker’s fiction editor? Is it me?

    Here’s the story: Jonah Valente is a college football player who quits the team and wants to become a painter. Jonah is so earnest about his new vocation, it takes on a level of ridicule from other classmates… Like Jack. Though Jack doesn’t think of Jonah often. Fast-forward several years, and Jack is married to Sophie, and they buy a home off in the county away from the city where they had been living. But then Jack loses his job, and Sophie leaves him. Alone in this old farm house, a college friend of Jack’s, Daniel, tells Jack that Jonah lives in the next county over. Jack reaches out to Jonah, and the two begin to hangout. Jonah lives with his mother, coaches a girl’s rugby team at a local high school, is still pursuing painting, and peppers all his conversations with stories about Van Gogh and Picasso. One of the days hanging out Jonah points out to Jack that his home has a hollow space in the middle of the house, which could be a hidden or sealed up room. On another evening, as Jonah tells another story about Picasso, and in a fit of frustration, Jack tells Jonah he will never make it as a painter. Jonah storms off, and then the two lose touch. Later, a letter shows up from Jonah telling Jack that after their fight, he got drunk and fell off a water tower he was trying to paint, and the reason he tells all those stories of Van Gogh and Picasso is because it makes him feel better. Jump some more years, and Jack and Sophie are back together, living in the farm house with a kid now. At a local fair, Jack runs into Jonah sitting at a booth with some awful paintings in it. Jonah claims the paintings aren’t his, and he is helping out a friend by watching his booth. Jack and Jonah share a laugh and never see each other again, and seriously, what the hell is this?

    First, 100% respect for Greg Jackson on getting a story in The New Yorker, because that is a goal of a great number of writers, and the majority, myself included, never attain it.

    But…

    I had so many issues with this story that all seem like very basic questions an editor should have asked. Such as; were Jack and Jonah friends in college? If yes, what was their relationship back then like? If not, then how does Jonah know who Jack is? The story starts off implying that Jonah was a person people at college knew of, but weren’t actually friends with, but when Jack contact Jonah, Jonah’s reaction is as if he knows who Jack is. Well… which one is it? Also, it feels like Jonah is the character that is imparting some sort of wisdom toward Jack, but the tone of the story, and Jack’s attitude, seem to make Jonah the butt of a joke. And if Jonah is not the protagonist of this story, then what is Jack’s heroic act? Then, why does Sophie come back? Did Jack change? Then there is the whole hollow thing. Is the metaphor really just the hidden part of ourselves that no one can access? Really? Following the Chekhov Rule, if it’s in the story, it has to have a purpose, so what was the purpose of the hollow? Being that the story drips a realistic tone, then I don’t believe that there is a modernist/surliest twist going on here. It has to have a meaning.

    As I began to puzzle these questions over and over again, I started to wonder, is the problem with me? Is this story executing some new theory when it comes to what a short story is? What if Jackson presented a story that feigned logic, when it was in fact disassembling what a story’s internal logic could be, thus making the reader question what was really necessary to tell a story.

    No. That’s not what was happening in this story.

    Sadly, it felt like the basic, but essential, work of laying the structure of the story’s internal logic was not fully formed, and thus left the central relationship between Jack and Jonah feeling incomplete, and half-baked. And I don’t think that was the, attempted, point of the story.

    If I’m wrong, then please, someone explain this story to me.