Kyle McCord and Nick Courtright Southwest Reading Tour--May 14 in Phoenix!

Kyle McCord (who had a poem in HFR52) and Nick Courtright will be reading tomorrow (Wednesday), May 14th at 11th Monk3y Industries at 7 PM with alum Bojan Luis!

Nick Courtright is the author of Let There Be Light, out now from Gold Wake Press, and Punchline, a 2012 National Poetry Series finalist. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, AGNI, Boston Review, and Kenyon Review Online, among numerous others, and a chapbook, Elegy for the Builder’s Wife, is available from Blue Hour Press. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, Michelle, and sons, William and Samuel; also, he teaches writing and literature at Concordia University.

Kyle McCord is the author of five books of poetry including You Are Indeed an Elk, But This is Not the Forest You Were Born to Graze (Gold Wake 2015) and Gentle, World, Gentler (Ampersand Books 2015). He has work featured in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly and elsewhere, and has received grants from the Academy of American Poets, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Baltic Writing Residency. He co-edits iO: A Journal of New American Poetry and American Microreviews and Interviews and teaches at the University of North Texas in Denton where he runs the Kraken Reading Series.

Where Are They Now: An Interview with Past Contributors (Part 1)

With fifty-three issues published, nearly twenty-five hundred contributors accepted and tens of thousands of submissions read, we start to wonder where our previous contributors have run off to. Fortunately, I was able to catch up with a few of them, and we were able to go through a round-table discussion of questions and answers in order to find out what some of them have been up to!

Anthony Varallo is a fiction contributor in Issue 47; Hugh Sheehy is a fiction contributor in Issue 36; and Liz Prato is a nonfiction contributor in Issue 50.

Sophean Soeun: What are you currently working on? What have you accomplished since your publication in HFR? 

Anthony Varallo

Anthony Varallo: I am currently working on a novel and a collection of short-short stories. Since publishing my story “No One at All” in HFR, I’ve published my third collection of short stories, Think of Me and I’ll Know (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press). “No One at All” is included in the collection—thanks, HFR!

Hugh Sheehy: I’m nearly finished with a collection of stories and in the process of drafting a novel. Since publishing in HFR, I’ve published a first book, The Invisibles, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award in 2012. I’ve also made a sort of half-hearted run at reviewing books and drawn up plans for a few essays; I hope to get to those when I finish these next two books.

Liz Prato: I’m editing a short story anthology for Forest Avenue Press, which comes out in May 2014. I’m working on strengthening my short story collection, and have had a couple of stories and essays published, including a piece on The Rumpus which is an excerpt from my memoir-in-progress. So, yeah -- that’s the big thing I’m working on, a memoir, which I swore I’d never write. It surprised the hell out of me, but there I was one day -- writing a memoir.

SS: Where do some of your ideas originate from? Has there ever been a time where an idea came from somewhere you least expected? Do you have an idea you know you have to write but haven’t figured out how to do it yet?

AV: My ideas usually come from a) some small recollection of something in my past and b) other short stories I love. So, for example, “No One at All,” is a story about two boys vacationing at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, a place I remember visiting when I was a kid, a place where I used to see all these beach shops selling hermit crabs, even though I never bought one. But I remember those hermit crabs clinging to the sides of their cages--that memory was the point of departure for the story. The rest was me wanting to write a story about childhood in the style of John Updike (especially stories like “Pigeon Feathers” or “A Sense of Shelter”), James Joyce (“Araby,” of course), Sherwood Anderson (“I Want to Know Why”), and every other great story I’ve ever tried to shamelessly imitate in my writing. I have one story that was given to me--I mean just given--to me by my then 5-year-old son. One day my son started referring to one of his kindergarten classmates as “my enemy” as in “today at lunch I sat with Mark, Allison, James, and my enemy” or, referring to a TV show we were watching: “This is my enemy’s favorite show!” Well, even though I told my son we should not refer to people as “my enemy,” I secretly loved the idea of that, and ended up writing a story, “My Enemy” about a guy who believes his enemy is out to get him. I always credit my son with the idea, though. He’s kind of proud of that.

Hugh Sheehy

HS: I’m kind of always on the lookout for an idea. I can definitely identify with the motivations and process Anthony describes; that said, I look for stories most actively in my interactions with others and experiences of place. The other day, I made a discovery of a story idea I’ve since begun working on in the sparest of my spare time while talking on the telephone with a hotel receptionist who made an offhand comment about international tourism. I suspect that the mechanism for recognition of a potential story is, in my case, literary in a some way, though whether that’s primary or secondary is harder to say with much certainty; I think I recognize the structures and materials of my favorite works of fiction in my observations. But I’m never sure what came first: the fiction I read before I came up with the idea or the story I made out my experience and imagination. Beyond that, though--the grasping of the idea--I use whatever comes to hand to get the story drafted, then go back and refine, whether junking useless additions or working up weak parts into something strong, until the story seems to read itself to me when I look it over again, which is a way, I hope, of replying to your last question, a way of saying, yes, I never know how it’s going to happen on the page except in some general way.

LP: Ideas are rarely a problem. It’s just a matter of paying attention to my surroundings and actually writing stuff down. I tend to get these really great ideas when I’m lying in bed at night -- you know, when the subconscious mind is starting to creep in -- but I’m too stubborn/stupid to get up and write them down. I always think, “Oh, that’s such a great idea of course I’ll still remember it in the morning.” And I never do. Lather, rinse, repeat. I went through a LONG stretch after my dad and brother died when I had no ideas. Zippo. Zero. Nadda. That scared the living crap out of me. As far as an idea I have that I can’t figure out how to write about, yes -- I have a novel like that. I get back to it every two years thinking, “I know how to write it now!” and do a total re-write and take it to writers group or workshop or wherever, and hear, “Nope. Still not working.” I recently mentioned that project to a friend who I met in workshop 10 years ago. She sighed and said, “That poor novel.” I think Anthony’s onto something though . . . maybe I need to get a kid to steal some ideas from!

SS: How do you title your pieces? (Is it a process? Does it just come naturally? Are they usually relevant to the piece or irrelevant? Do you do it before? After? During?) 

AV: It depends on the story. Sometimes the title just sort of presents itself, ta-da, as you’re writing, but sometimes you finish a story and realize you are writing a Story That Has No Title. So, for example, one of the stories in my new collection, was titled “Story With a Gun in It,” which was the filename until I realized I couldn’t possibly call it that, and changed the title to “Time Apart Together” after I’d revised the story a few times. I once published a story under the title “Places of Comfort,” until a writing friend of mine said, “Dude, you cannot call a story ‘Places of Comfort.’” He was right; I changed the title.

HS: I title my stories after I’ve written them. I prefer titles that reveal a second meaning once one has read the story, titles that close a piece, like a coda. So I usually have to wait to figure out that part.

LP: I like titles that are voicey or idiosyncratic in some way, so it usually involves writing and understanding the language of my piece first. I often end up taking a line from the story itself. There are times, though, when I’ll just default to something sort-of-descriptive, but easy. One of my best experiences is when David Leavitt asked me to come up with a different title for a story. The previous title was really received -- something like “What She Left Behind,” and what David’s urging brought me to was “Underneath the Magnolia Trees When Magnolias Were in Bloom.” It has more words in it, which must mean it’s better, right?

SS: What is the most bizarre idea you have written about or thought of writing?

AV: That’s really hard to answer. I mean, all ideas seem pretty bizarre—or do I mean bad?—as you are writing them. The only thing I know is that if the idea seems somehow “unworthy” of being written about (hey, like two kids going to Rehoboth Beach!) that usually means it’s actually a pretty good idea for a story, but if the idea seems like a GREAT idea that everyone is sure to LOVE, that usually means you’re about to write a terrible story. It’s kind of cruel, when you think about it.

HS: I can’t be too forthcoming here because I’m still hoping to make several strange ideas I’ve found spellbinding for several years work in various pieces of fiction. But I will tell you that, as an undergraduate, I wrote very strange allegorical stories for my workshops, one of which ran to sixty pages (or would have, had I not handed it in 10 point font, and single-spaced--I was kind of a brat and feel I should go on apologizing): in one of these, four nearly identical figures make a road trip to California, only to discover, among many other things, that the state has fallen into the sea, and that, on the new western coastline, a very large orgy is underway.

Liz Prato

LP: Well, I’m instantly jealous of Hugh, because I seriously lack bizarre ideas. It’s a big fear of mine, that one of my greatest failings as a writer is my lack of imagination. I keep writing about the same themes -- love and loss -- again and again. There are no mystical portals or creatures which transmute, or really, any laws of the physical universe being broken. There is just someone losing someone they love and trying to figure out how to survive -- or not survive -- in that new world.

HS: It’s funny. I think writers who lean toward the visionary tend to envy writers who strive primarily for verisimilitude. In the end, though, I think the deep subjects Liz mentions tend to maintain pretty consistently across the spectrum between the visionary and the verisimilar, which disappear into each other anyway, or at least tend to in the literature I love most--the way Hemingway’s “The Killers,” to cherry-pick my example, reads as both a vaudeville act and a ‘realistic’ representation of possible events.

***
Check back here next week for part two!

ASU to host literary 'counterfeiter' in reading series Nov. 13!

Article/interview by Jake Adler

The writer Michael Martone is perhaps best recognized for his book titled … well: Michael Martone.

Not quite the same as a musical artist’s self-titled first album, this writer’s eighth book of fiction is comprised of a series of surreal and absurd contributor’s notes – false, mini-biographies.

“Rather than telling stories, I’m more interested in discovering how different kinds of prose can be fictive,” said Martone.

Martone will read selections from his work at 7:30 p.m., Nov. 13, in the Memorial Union room 202 on ASU’s Tempe campus. The reading is free of charge and open to the public. It is part of the Department of English’s MFA Reading Series, hosted by English’s creative writing program and co-sponsored by the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, all units in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at ASU.

Martone's most recent books are Four for a Quarter, Not Normal, Illinois: Peculiar Fiction from the Flyover, Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins, a collection of essays, and Double-wide, his collected early stories. His stories and essays have appeared and been cited in the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Stories and The Best American Essays anthologies.

Martone has a talent for recontextualizing established forms and smashing them wide open, as seen in one of his earlier books, The Blue Guide to Indiana, a brilliantly disguised faux travel guide, which, to this day, finds its home on book store shelves in the travel section. “I’m more of a counterfeiter than a storyteller,” said Martone.

The author is bent on acting as a literary trickster, continually questioning conventional forms and blurring the boundaries between genres to shake up his audiences. “My job as an artist is to confuse categories,” said Martone, “to open states of wonder, surprise and bafflement for the reader. [We] don’t make something new out of nothing – [we] take things we already know and rearrange them to create a new perspective.”

Currently, Martone is working on several projects, one of which is titled Winesburg, Indiana, described by the author as a “hybrid of an anthology and a parody of the memoir.” Martone is branching out into science fiction as well, with another work set in Indiana, called Amish in Space. The author is also chipping away at two additional creative nonfiction projects: The Complete Writings of Art Smith: The Bird Boy of Indiana, Edited by Michael Martone, a work centering around the authentic pioneer of sky-writing, and Philo in Fort Wayne, which illustrates the bizarre career of the inventor of television, Philo T. Farnsworth. “I’ve never written a novel,” commented Martone, “but I have done books.”

Martone’s wry sense of humor and prolific prose characterize his trickster persona and aid him in reconfiguring conventional forms to continually offer readers something they’ve never seen before. He could be described as a sort of wizard of literature, but Martone says that it’s the up-and-coming generation of writers who really have the potential to change the game.

“[My generation] saw the computer as just a souped-up typewriter, but today’s students recognize its true potential and are chomping at the bit to see what it can really do,” said Martone. “In about 1980, students in universities were taught to write stories with narrative realism, modeled after authors like Hemingway. They were told, ‘This is the type of story all writers ought to be able to write,’ but recently I’ve noticed a change: students are saying, ‘No, no, no, it’s all up for grabs,’ and they’re figuring out how to use the computer artistically after 20 or 30 years of suppression.”

Martone is keenly aware of the way in which the industry of literature is changing in the 21st century, noting that in his fiction workshop courses at the University of Alabama, he instructs his students to compose using their iPhones, to begin thinking differently as a new generation of writers. “Reader, editor, writer and publisher all used to be static positions, but not anymore,” said Martone. “More and more, people are doing it all.” The boundaries of the literary world are starting to overlap in the same way Martone is working to blur the lines of genre in his own work.

“You never hear poets saying, ‘This is a fictional poem or a nonfictional poem,’” Martone said. “They’re all just poems. Literary criticism is only about sorting and division – it’s our duty as artists to attack that tendency; to mess things up.”

For more information about the MFA Reading Series, please visit: http://english.clas.asu.edu/mfareadingseries

Book Review: This is the Ocean by Robert Krut

This is the Ocean
by Robert Krut
Bona Fide Books
Poetry collection

Review by Carly Corderman


Robert Krut’s latest poetry collection, This Is the Ocean, embodies the same continuity and connectedness as the ocean itself. Patterns of sound and imagery are reincarnated within every poem, coming full-circle back to several themes of the human experience: introversive solitude, interpersonal bonds, and enlightenment through observation. By way of Krut’s authorial direction, we are submersed in the fluid essence of life, with paradoxical juxtapositions of natural elements with urban/suburban counterparts, lyrical moments with cacophony and violent imagery, and the psychological struggle between isolation and social acceptance.

The first poem from the collection accurately foreshadows the effect of Krut’s work within its title: “Admission Is a Promise, the Exit Is a Lie,” as the ending tone of his poems will often leave you second-guessing whether you truly understood what took place. Re-reading each poem reveals subsequent meanings; one instant may capture Krut’s stance of societal resistance, such as in the lines, “The world may be trying to crush/ me into a diamond, but all it does / is carve my knuckles into rubies,” showcasing strength and resolve in the face of imposed hardships, and “the disembodied middle fingers, / ghost-held candelabras” as a dissidence with the stereotypical.

In other moments, however, Krut’s tone softens, expressing the joys of companionship and intimacy: “I am you and together we live / in the space between the hands / of my clock, frozen on the wall.” Such contradictory sentiments are reminiscent of the broader emotional scope behind our psyches; we are not always one way or another, inclusive or exclusive.

Krut’s collection continually calls us to question this dichotomy of the individual versus the whole, personified through our relationships with one another, in a contemplation of whether “every person in our lives / is just a projection of ourselves— / that no one is real, that each is a peripheral / psychic appendage,” implying that even our closest connections are self-serving on some level. Yet, Krut also levels with the reader over the importance of shared humanity in breaking up the negative aspects of life, particularly within the poem “The Two of Us and the Sky’s Dividing Line:”

I hold you with one arm,
stab the collapsed ceiling with
a broken branch, hoping to poke a hole— 

make a star through the strangling sky,
slice a lightning bolt to let that bright,
bright light through, and burn up
the night in one swollen gasp
as we are marked in negative,
but grateful for breath,
grateful for each other.

On a technical level, Krut employs his genius with special attention to musicality, imagery, and form, whether it is the structure of the physical poem or the story within the poem. His language “moves languidly as the bar’s sound / [and] comes through the door like the breath / from a conch shell’s mouth.” The initial stanza of the poem “Rest” is a testament to Krut’s skill as a lyricist and painter of mental murals:

The road ahead like a girl’s last
strand of hair resting, strung
across the green open palm of land,
under the lazy magnolia awning.

Vastly differing images within this collection often share the same sentiment, but with a twist in tone; the loneliness of “the quiet vein that is Ventura Boulevard at four a.m., / just waiting to be slit open” holds the same solitude as the lines, “not a human sound for miles, / for years, all that remains here / are actions and the days / becoming their fossils,” but there is solace in the tone of the latter stanza, from the poem “Rest.” In the context of “Rest,” that stanza augments the pastoral feeling behind the rest of the piece, as opposed to bringing about the sense of foreboding seen in the first two lines.

Additionally, the repetition of hand and fingerprint imagery serve as a metaphors for individuality, with fears over its loss emanating from such lines as, “I tugged the end of my fingerprint, / and now pull it from my hand like / a thread from a sweater…when I remove it all, the world will end,” in “The Campus Before Sunrise” and the peeled, wind-blown fingerprints within “Our Journey Will Be Treacherous.”

Krut plays with the forms of stories created by repeated images not only within the collection as a whole, but within individual poems, such as in “Sea Salt,” where the inversion of meaning behind several body parts and natural entities leaves us in an entirely different place than where we started. He even breaks out the traditional sestina form in “39 Poems Left in the House When Henry Walked Out and Disappeared”—a form that is difficult to make viable, unless the poet has enough skill to subtly tweak the connotation of each image, generating an altered meaning in successive read-throughs.

Like links in a chain, Krut’s poems are bound together through the use of deftly subtle craft and fantastical imagery as a lens for illuminating our understanding of life’s cyclical fashion, and an individual’s place within the world. In this respect, Krut’s voice ascribes value to the transference of transparency between poet and reader, saying “this window is your eye, / and your eye is the sun, and my hand / reaches with burnt fingerprints,” as found in the poem “There Is No Name Inscribed on Bone.”

Krut brings us to a point in which strangeness begins to make more sense than the reality of the world, which “is real because it is / too barren to not be,” becoming the most accurate medium for conveying the meaning behind these flights of fancy, in which we “fly with a manner / that does not feel like flying / so much as simply holding the air, / the air holding [us].”

Krut definitely delivers on his initial promise that “every breath will exhale lightning” on this meditative journey; through his lyrical and technical prowess, he proves over and over again his ability to “tattoo your secrets / on the back of the moon”—the poet’s prerogative to immortalize the human condition within timeless imagery and lyricism.

Book Review: What You Are Now Enjoying by Sarah Gerkensmeyer

What You are Now Enjoying
by Sarah Gerkensmeyer
Autumn House Press, 2013.
Fiction Collection.

Review by Debrah Lechner.

The fascinating metaphysical content in the writing of Sarah Gerkensmeyer benefits from her style, which is spare, uncluttered with the excess to which metafiction sometimes gives license.

Whatever the plot of these stories—whether it involves the search for missing twins that never existed, or women being treated for emotional illness by breast-feeding infants whose reality is open to question but who must, in any case, be returned to the unimaginable place they came from—the action is fixed firmly in a location most of us recognize as “real life.”

This anchor both opposes and accentuates the sense of disorientation that Gerksmeyer’s prose creates as it departs from real life as we know it, and travels ever deeper into a phantasmagoric, unmapped wilderness that continues to be convincing all the way through to the last sentence. It produces a powerful pull to emotion, and an urgent impulse to re-examine our reality as we know it, to look at life again and see if, maybe, we’ve missed something.

This is the possibility of transformation that all the best writing offers.

My favorite story in this collection is “The Rockport Falls Retirement Village Rescuers,” in which retirees are paired together to help each other recover from tumbles and falls, thereby allowing each other to live independently and to avoid the shadow of the nursing home on the property that “lurks over simply everything.”

This is so close to a program that might exist that it’s impossible not to begin believing in the story immediately.

The rescuers are trained to call to each other’s souls, and to sit with the fallen person, looking into their eyes until together they can finally both get up together. It is a touching story that speaks of loss and hope simultaneously.

She grips onto my arms and I can feel all the strength in the world in her soft, papery hands alone. I know we’ll be just fine. We are both patient, staring at each other and waiting for our strength to build up enough. It’s hard to describe how it works.

 . . .

I can’t describe the feeling that takes over when your equilibrium first starts to go. It’s not about the technical stuff: the workings of the inner ear and balance and the weight of the body versus gravity. It’s about all of your memories and experiences and moments—the stretch of your entire life—becoming suddenly off-kilter, wavering precariously over the edge of nothing but blackness.

And when the narrator contemplates falling into an ominous pond on the condominium property, it is this strong friendship that comforts her:

I get sucked into staring into the horrible shine of that pond’s surface so easily. What if I fell in? There’s a belief, tucked deep inside, that she could save me. That even though it would be impossible, she would find a way. It would be Nora. Not my dead husband or my dead father... it would be Nora.

Life is sweet, harrowing, and sometimes horrifying. Sometimes there is loss, but sometimes there is rescue. There is a tender, tenuous line between the two, and Gerkensmeyer walks it brilliantly in What You are Now Enjoying.

***
The title story of Sarah Gerkensmeyer’s What You Are Now Enjoying appeared in issue 41 of Hayden’s Ferry Review.

Book Review: Marcus Wicker-Maybe the Saddest Thing

Maybe the Saddest Thing

Marcus Wicker

Harper Perennial, 2012. Poetry.

Reviewed by Christine Holm

            In the penultimate poem of his debut collection, Marcus Wicker takes his readers from 1992 Dr. Dre –  floating through the mind of “the mother” after two hits from a green bong – to a supermarket, to a Christmas morning, to a countryside, before slowly and carefully turning the gaze, where

                                                                                    in

                                    double-wides & mansions

                        this is happening. & these people sit

                                    inches from your cubicle.

                        They teach in your schools & sing

                                    in your choir. Make your lattes

                        & dental appointments. They walk

                                    your streets & sleep in

                        your bed. & on & on & on. &

                                    sometimes these people

                        are you.

This is Wicker at his best: a quietness of details, a precedence of his own flow over the history of hip hop and jazz that make footholds throughout Maybe the Saddest Thing, and a means to manage making his readers participants. With lovely subtlety, the posturing of self-talk and reflections open up poems of identity – and, in some ways, a coming of age – for not only the speaker himself, but also those of us who never wrote love poems to the likes of RuPaul or Pam Grier, but maybe Justin Timberlake, except by way of collective memory.

            Maybe the Saddest Thing echos and extends our poetic pull and play with pop culture. In particular, Wicker's second half of the book – “Beats, Breaks & B-Sides” – makes use of hip hop stylings of sampling, similar to some of the work done by John Murillo in his 2010 Up Jump the Boogie, and 2008 National Poetry Series winner Adrian Matejka's Mixology. Calling up the laid-back grooves of A Tribe Called Quest, Common and J-Live, Wicker's poetic voice seems to find an authority. This confidence allows the closing couplet of “Who in their right mind thinks...” to read not as a challenge, but a sincerity:

                        True story. The boy never left that room.

                        Go ahead. You can ask me how I know.

Here, again, we readers are given an extended hand, a young man ready to share his observations if we are willing to inquire. There are no tricks, no sharp turns, regrets or apologies. In the final poem, “The Break Beat Break,” Wicker concludes,

                                                      Baby, when the break starts

                        knocking everything you think turns to music.

                        And dancing never felt so motherfucking right.

He reminds us of a beauty in the body's response to a rhythm made hot by the history inhabited in that minute space of silence before it drops again. 

Book Review: The Road to Happiness by Johnathon Williams

The Road to Happiness
Johnathon Williams
Antilever, 2012. Poetry.
Review by Debrah Lechner
Debrah.Lechner@gmail.com

The theme of this volume of poetry is the road, though not necessarily the trip. It’s a trip anyway.

The movement is through Arkansas, but in the process it covers a much larger territory. Childhood, love, sex, hope, hopelessness, death. But not by turns. All at once.

It’s often dark on this road. The utterly striking poem “Camping in the Ouachita National Forest,” for example:

Midnight, and my father's God can't see

in the dark. Coyotes do unto others

by the tinctures of blood, their panting

Like the whispered chansons of saints.

nightcrawlers know a kind of scripture,

driven to air on the ballasting dew.

. . .Pit stones carry their own commandments

read nightly in the flame's clipped tongue.

I recognize the language but not the words.

I grew up in woods like these, but for years

could not stand the sound of a summer night,

how something as fragile as cricket's legs,

multiplied like the seraphim, host upon host,

might rattle the earth with their need.

The tone of Williams’ work is consistently reverential, sexual, rural and lost, mapped and immediate. Above all, the tone is confidential, so don’t be surprised when you meet a remark that reflects a little disappointment with life. From “Head of Household”:

CEO of this nuclear unit, you must not let

your particles drift. If divorce is fission,

marriage is plutonium. Come. Sit down.

Warm your hands by its constant decay.

You’ve had conversations like these before. Perhaps you’ve just never recognized their potential for iconography, as the possible inspiration for repousse on warm metal. This satisfying and pleasurable collection of poems will remind you of their meaning.

Book Review: Into the Wilderness by David Ebenbach

Into the Wilderness
David Ebenbach
Washington Writer’s Publishing House, 2012
Short Story Collection
Review by Debrah Lechner
Debrah.Lechner@gmail.com

The creation of a family brings joy, but also bridges life and death, and exposes our mortality. That exposure demands balancing forces: tenderness, humor, hope and faith. All of that is present in Into the Wilderness, but the element that gives piquant impact to these short stories is the fearlessness of the author in acknowledging the whole experience of parenthood, even when it is dark.

The urgency to create a family in the face of the inability to conceive and the emotion that engenders is brilliantly evoked in the simple four-page story “Is Anything too Hard for the Lord?” in which a childless couple of spiritual faith wait for a truck to turn into the parking lot of a store selling pornographic videos. The couple separately and silently prays that the driver will not make this turn.

Let him no longer turn away from the straight path, she prayed. She was surprised at the aptness of the words. . . she was sorting through the words stray neither to the left nor to the right, feeling a powerful prayer build, when the gap in traffic reached them . . Luisa exulted. Even now with this opportunity the truck driver could change his mind and drive forward. The truck, in fact, was not turning! In full joy she let the words Love is a straight path rise up, but before she could add the words to You, she saw the woman—the woman and her stroller.

The suspense in this quiet moment is palpable and as fully capable of causing the intake and holding of breath as a scene in any thriller.

There is a great deal of joy in this collection that reinforces the tenderness and devotion of parenthood. The mood and message of the Into the Wilderness is well articulated in a scene between father and son from the short story “Hungry to Eat”:

. . .The thing is that now, for the first time, now that you’ve had this thing happen to you, because you heart’s broken, I can tell you—it’s only now that you're going to be able to go on and love somebody for real. . .like the person you're going to marry. . .like a child.

Into the Wilderness is touching, profound, and above all, eminently readable.

***
David Ebenbach appears in Hayden’s Ferry Review 49.