Stories

Invisible Theater (Scoundrel Time)

Not long after the Loma Prieta earthquake, our collective decided to stage an Invisible Theater performance in the atrium restaurant of a grand hotel in San Francisco’s Financial District. When Eva and I walked in, she nodded to our brother Robert, who was sitting forward in his seat several tables away and lit up with pre-show adrenalin. He pretended not to see us. Eva, who’d never been at one of our disruptions, gave an annoyed shrug. I tried to avoid exchanging looks with the Electric Disciples scattered throughout the room, nursing cups of soup or the cheapest possible drinks. Not all of us were performing tonight, but we were there to support each other in case we were needed.

Stage Fright (Valparaiso Fiction Review)

Julia splurged on a bucket-shop, round-the-world ticket, a month of travel between leaving San Francisco and landing in New York to start rehearsals. She’d be spending everything she had on the trip, with just enough left to get a cheap place to live in New York. Her older brother Robert was furious with her, first of all for leaving their own company, but also, apparently, on behalf of the honor of experimental dance-theater in general. He said, “You have some idea that doing Shaw in New York will make you a real actress. You’re a real actress here, even if it’s not all talk-talk-talk. But fine, go for a year. You’re going to hate all that artifice and clawing for position. Just let me know when you’re ready to come home.”

News of the World (Ploughshares)

We were the News-of-the-World Theater Collective, moving from city to city together; we were all married to each other and to the idea of what you could pull from the streams of the news that ran over and around and through our lives. We wanted no one to let that information splash over them without thinking, so much unnoticed linguistic and conceptual sewage. Selene and I were with the company for six years – in the Tenderloin, in various U.S. cities during the year when we were touring by bus, and then back home in San Francisco, where it all broke apart for us.

Rising with the Seas (Image)

First come the fires, the neglected grid breaking down and sparking the dry fields. Next a week of clouds, so dark, so heavy, like nothing we’ve ever seen. Methuselah’s death has put all the humans in a panic. They miscounted the days; they thought the rains would start later, much later, or perhaps would never come. The future is here; this is that very moment. I run down the streets, looking for my sister, my twin, Azy, who’s broken out of our pen again. Restless Azy, perfect in a way I have never wanted to be. I am always afraid for her.

Sarah’s Blessings (Or, Is There Such a Thing as Inappropriate Laughter) (Image)

We can’t imagine that anyone can believe God announcing a miracle. Most miracles are hilarious. Abraham threw himself on his face and laughed, as he said to himself, “Can a child be born to a man one hundred years old, or can Sarah bear a child at ninety?” It was Ishmael he was worried about, Hagar’s child playing by the water, not yet the father of twelve chieftains but the kid who made boats of bark and hid when he was called in to dinner.

Earthly Delights (Image)

Tigers nuzzling antelopes. Ocelots and lemurs napping. Small cats picking their way along the riverbank. The moss smells of morning and memory; water curls under and around the trees. A shimmer of wind on fur, first drops of rain falling.

He wakes and moves through the garden, dazed, surrounded by the animals, who may or may not be paying any attention to him.

“Hiding Places” and “The Dinner Guest” (LEON Literary Review)

At dinner, my friend says that her favorite game as a child was running away and hiding. She would get the other children to find a place they could be safe. We’d been talking about how old we were when we first learned our family histories. Her family, considering the neighbors, asked, who would hide us?

Three Stories Inspired by Sylvia Fein Paintings (100 Word Story)

From the site: “In honor of ‘Midwest Surrealist’ Sylvia Fein’s 100th birthday, the Berkeley Art Museum put on an exhibition of Fein’s work, exploring such characteristic themes and motifs as water, trees, eyes, cats, and the cosmos. “Three Bay Area writers, Ron Nyren, Maw Shein Win, and Sarah Stone wrote 100-word stories inspired by Fein’s fantastical imagery. And Evan Karp scored each of their readings to his own musical interpretations of the stories and the paintings.” See, and hear, the paintings, stories, and Evan’s scores here.

Selected Craft Essays, Reviews, and Interviews

Mystery vs. Confusion (CRAFT)

In writing fiction, we’re always looking for ways to manage the release and restraint of information, introducing our characters and situations while avoiding the dreaded exposition junk pile at the beginning (many of us do have a great fondness for exposition junk piles when they’re intriguingly full of bright objects). When we’re writing the first draft of a story or novel, the process can feel like an unsettling dream: we’re attending a party in the dark. Is it a funeral? A wedding? The birthday party of an old friend or enemy? What are we doing and why? We fumble around trying to figure out who else is in the room as we trip over the furniture and bump into walls.

‘Consciousness, Splintered,’ Venita Blackburn’s Dead in Long Beach, California (Alta Journal online for the California Book Club):

In Venita Blackburn’s original, fierce first novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, Coral E. Brown, a graphic sci-fi novelist, finds her brother dead by suicide and splinters into separate selves. As she fends off grief and horror, the futuristic machines she’s invented to narrate her own novel step in to tell the story with tender, wry curiosity about humanity. As these machines say from the start, “We are responsible for telling this story, mostly because Coral cannot.” Of course, since the machines are her creation, she is telling the story, but obliquely, as a novelist does. They investigate her deep past and family and report on her thoughts and actions after her brother’s death. They draw conclusions about human relationships to destructiveness, debt, desire, minor fame, avoidance, denial, fan fic, and the devastating, insatiable human craving for “More.”

Self-Awareness & Self-Deception: Beyond the Unreliable Narrator (A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft, anthology, Trinity University Press, also in The Writer’s Chronicle)

We refer to reality as if it were tangible--a geographical location or an absolute and identifiable state--but writers often arrive at the reality of the world of their story, if ever, as a kind of byproduct of the characters' everyday self-delusions.

The term "unreliable narrator" suggests that unreliability is a special category and that most narrators (and people) are clear-sighted, rational, and honest. Even a fairly casual consideration of an ordinary day, however, let alone a crisis, suggests otherwise; there's substantial narrative interest in the chaos of the "normal" human mind. It's a little scary, even for people who consider themselves to be recklessly truthful, to count the number of lies (social lies, kind lies, self-serving lies, small semi-truths to avoid long explanations, and outright lies) we tell. Often, we don't allow ourselves to know when we're lying. It's even scarier to look back over the decisions we've made and to try to remember what made those choices seem so smart or so necessary. So one aim in our ongoing project of writing and reading is the passionate desire to get an accurate view of reality.

‘Only Because It’s Forbidden’: Seduction and Loss in Jessica Hagedorn’s The Gangster of Love (Alta Journal online for the California Book Club):

Jessica Hagedorn’s fiercely exuberant 1996 novel, The Gangster of Love, hurtles through a kaleidoscope of tones, mixing eruptions of imagination with elements from her lived experience as an immigrant child and then as a punk rock musician in 1980s New York. Hagedorn—novelist, playwright, musician, and multimedia performer—is, most of all, a collagist, including in her earlier novel, the American Book Award–winning Dogeaters, a marvelous cacophony of voices and modes set in Manila.

Hilary Mantel, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher (Review, San Francisco Chronicle)

Hilary Mantel’s works — brilliant, elusive, inventive, psychologically acute and gorgeously written — vary more exuberantly in style and subject matter than almost any other great author. Nonetheless, they consistently track certain obsessions in theme and subject matter: cruelty, the uses and misuses of power, the shocks of illness and mortality, and the invasions of the spirit world. As much as Mantel is celebrated for exploring the workings of long-vanished monarchies, she’s vilified for her temerity in considering contemporary power issues, whether she’s writing an opinion piece that mentions the symbolic role played by a photogenic princess or a short story about the imagined assassination of a former prime minister. None of this seems to slow her down.

Cristina Henríquez, Book of Unknown Americans (Review, San Francisco Chronicle)

Oral histories, real or fictional, exist both on and off the page: Readers are always trying to look behind the stories, to hear what isn't being said, to come to our own conclusions about the meanings and interpretation of a life. These histories can reinforce what we know about the world, delineating experiences like our own in ways that help us make sense of them, or can bring us into lives we saw from the outside but didn't understand.

Edan Lepucki, California (Review, San Francisco Chronicle)

Edan Lepucki's ambitious, powerful, frightening first novel, "California," takes place, like the 1980s TV show "Max Headroom," "20 minutes into the future." Cal and Frida - two escapees from the dystopian hellhole of Lepucki's Los Angeles - have lost everything but each other and a few precious, talismanic objects, like a ratty family sweater or Frida's secret, cherished glass turkey baster, still wearing its price tag. They live in the "afterlife," Frida's private name for the green place she imagined they would find when they left L.A. But their life in the woods is almost unimaginably hard - their survival only possible because of Cal's stint in a tiny, all-male, idealistic back-to the-land college called Plank. They're both haunted by the loss of Frida's charismatic brother, Cal's roommate at Plank, who became a revolutionary and the center of a violent tragedy.

A Classic Nightmare: On Emily Fridlund’s  History of Wolves (Review, The Millions)

In one classic nightmare, you seem to keep waking up only to experience a new version of the same terror. Or you’re running away from a monstrous being, and then, just when you think you’re safe, he comes from behind and looms over you. Emily Fridlund’s unnerving, beautifully crafted first novel, History of Wolves, recreates these implacable structures, moving back and forth in time, evading and then confronting trauma.

Sylvia Brownrigg (Interview, Necessary Fiction)

Joan Silber (Interview, The Believer)

Anita Felicelli (Interview, Full Stop)

Dubravka Ugresic, The Ministry of Pain (Review, The Believer)

Stacey D'Erasmo, Blood, Breath, Bone, String: A Seahorse Year (Review, The Believer)

Politics and the Imagination: How to Get Away with Just about Anything (in Ten Not-So-Easy Lessons) (Dedicated to the People of Darfur: Writings on Fear, Risk, and Hope, anthology,  Rutgers University Press, also in The Writer’s Chronicle)

The Pleasures of Hell (The Writer’s Chronicle)

Teeming with Villains & Villainesses, or, Taking Sides (The Writer’s Chronicle)