You know when the men are gone by Siobhan Fallon

I don't often finish a collection of short stories.  I tend to finish one story, feel satisfied, and then move onto something else.  The storytelling in this fine new collection of home front war tales was so even and so captivating that I really wanted to read every one.

All of the tales (save one) in this collection are set at Fort Hood in Texas and all relate to the men who deploy to Iraq and their spouses who wait for them back home.   All the subjects are universal:  infidelity, grief, childhood, teen rebellion, and of course, divorce, and they are set uniquely against the back drop of the people who are left behind when men go to war.

I thoroughly enjoyed this look at a culture and customs that evolve around this interesting group of people.  What unique circumstances threw these people together and how do they make sense of all the craziness? The stories are very loosely connected by a character here and there, so you know that all the characters are part of the same big picture story.

As a writer, I am always looking for new ways to tell some universal themes, and I felt that Ms Fallon mined some clever ideas.  My only regret is that this was not longer.  I know from a life well lived, that for each of these perfectly rendered stories of chaos in the time of war, there are are at least 1,000 more.  I hope there are more, many many more.  This would make a great spring break read.

This book should be readily available at your local public library or, of course, on Amazon.

On Finding things

A few weeks ago I wrote about my newfound love of FOUND magazine which chronicles the flotsam and jetsam people find on the streets and in library books of life.  Davy Rothbart, who has made a cottage industry out of finding things and writing about them, edited a book of short stories by writers and celebrities about things they have found.

Requiem for a Paper Bag is an eclectic assortment of short tales (some are true some are fiction) all about the things people find that have created stories and stuck with them over the years.  The book itself is a tribute to storytelling of the most basic and most beautiful form: clever observations about finding a lucky rock or returning someone's wallet or reading an old store clerk's diary after she dies, or finding a photo of a stranger in an unusual place.  These are the stories that surround us at the dinner table or cocktail parties.  This is the bread and butter of our lives.

A few of the entries were ruminations on found objects that tried to tell the fictional tale of why the note was written or why the photo appeared where it did.  These stories were also fun and clever twists on the theme.

As a writer and storyteller I am captivated by how we tell stories and how we find the stories we tell to begin with.  This volume gives me more thoughts about good storytelling and how we find those stories and peer into them.  I hope my writing friends out there will use this idea as a prompt...what have you found and how has it stayed with you over the years?  Did it change your life?  Or what story can you create behind the found object?

I am certainly going to begin watching for things and noticing more finds.  What have you found?

February Fiction V: Apparition and Late Fictions by Thomas Lynch

Thomas Lynch is better known in literary circles as the poet-undertaker. Mr. Lynch has written several collections of poetry and books of essays about his life's work--the town undertaker, in small town Michigan.

I have always been drawn to poets who turn their attention to prose. The writing always seems perfect, as if poets know better than the rest of us how to place words so they sing and make sense. Poets have an excellent sense of rhyme and meter in all they attempt to portray on paper. Add this to his interesting life's work, and it was a collection I had to read. Published in January 2010, I was the first one to check it out of the local library.

Apparition consisted of 4 short stories and a novella. I couldn't help but shake the feeling that while well written, they were all fairly similar. They were from the point of view of middle-aged white men, sort of sad and lonely and disappointed by life. The one exception would be the story narrated by a middle-aged white women sort of sad and lonely and dissatisfied with life.

They all have stories of death and tragedy woven in and this strange sort of mouth agape puzzlement about how they ended up where they did. Life held so much promise and now look.

The first story, Catch and Release, about a son setting his father's ashes down the river was the most beautiful: an elegy for a beautiful relationship between father and son. The novella, (which in general I find hard to read) Apparition, was also very good. It had elements, as they all did, of being a sweeping story. The tales of whole lives summed up in patient metaphors. This was no minimalist fiction.

I would recommend this if you like short sad epic stories and are curious about undertakers who write. Mr. Lynch knows how to write about death in all it's iterations.

Fiction February Part IV: Water by Alyce Miller

I took a class at IU recently from Ms. Miller, and was surprised when it was over that after all we had talked about and critiqued and discussed, I had never thought to read something she had written. In honor of Fiction February and her fabulous writing class, I picked up her recent award winning collection of short stories called Water.

I don't often read short story collections. I like them and as a fiction writer it is the type of writing that engages me the most. I don't read them because it is too easy to put the book down after one story and move onto something else. The short narratives end and my attention moves somewhere else.

I did leave this and come back to it several times, but finished all nine stories and found every one of them to be interesting and unique. Each story was published previously in other literary reviews. I read them in random order choosing for length depending on what I had time for. Ms. Miller has a spellbinding narrative style. The longer stories were especially captivating and pushed me to read and keep reading, each page turned itself as I was drawn into many different types of life, most rooted firmly in the landscape of the midwest. Several deal squarely with race from the point of view of African American children and young adults which I found really thought provoking.

The strongest stories were the long narratives like My Summer of Love, Friends: An Elegy, and and Hawaii. All of them tore me apart in different ways. They were full of tenderness and confusion about coming of age and straddling disparate worlds. Each story and situation uniquely rendered. If you are looking for short lovely fiction for the coffee shop or the bus ride home, this might be the collection for you. And if you are in the market for a good fiction workshop, I highly recommend her as a teacher as well.