The Millions posted today my review of Suzanne Rivecca’s debut short fiction collection, Death Is Not an Option. This is my fifth review for The Millions, which is a site I admire greatly. I’m always thrilled to see my name up on their front page, and am gratified that they publish my literary criticism.
Likewise, I’m honored to have the opportunity to review a great writer like Rivecca, who had a story in the same Best New American Voices![""](http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=theunini-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B003E7EU8Y&camp=217145&creative=399373")
June turned out to be all about new short stories for me. I completely reworked one short story, wrote a new one, and put the final touches on yet another. I’d planned on drafting new material for the novel this month, but was really swept up in the short form for a few weeks and had to put off any new writing for the novel. It had been so long since I had much passion for writing short fiction, I didn’t want to miss the opportunity. It felt pretty good to pump out a few stories in a small period of time, after working on one project for nearly two years now. To hear some new voices, to deal with different types of problems—those faced by married people, by people alive in this century, by those from the middle class—was kind of nice. It will also be nice to have some new stories to send out to journals this fall, which hasn’t been the case for a while.
In other news this past month:
-Mixer Publishing released my short story “The Housekeeper” on Amazon, available for download on Kindle or PDF. The story was originally published on Flatmancrooked earlier this year, but they have apparently taken down their entire site. That sucks.
-And if you’re already on Amazon, you might as well download the spring issue of The Kenyon Review, which features my short story “How to Die Young in a Nebraska Winter.”
-A story that just so happened to be reviewed on the blog Perpetual Folly as part of its Short Story Month 2011.
-Also, The Kenyon Review released their summer reading recommendations, including two of my picks.
-My review of Richard Burgin’s novel Rivers Last Longer appeared in the Pleiades Book Review.
-In other review news, The Millions will be running my review of Suzanne Rivecca’s debut short story collection Death is Not an Option sometime this month.
Dispatch from “Impertinent, Triumphant”
“We talked about marriage for a long time. About the good stuff, then the bad, then the qualifications and excuses of what we’d said before. Something happened to Anna, she was emotional, she calmed down, something else happened a few weeks after that, and it wasn’t until later that she remembered the first thing, the original outrage, and by then it was too late for her to do something about it. My stories were the same, structurally. Eventually we turned listless and bleak, hearing about each others’ marriage wounds. They lacked finality. We wanted firm endings, closure, but that wasn’t possible.”
Personal Rejection Notes, Requests for More, and Other Nice Versions of No Thanks
Florida Review for “Attend the Way.”
Just Finished
The Names by Don DeLillo. I’ve read nearly all of DeLillo’s work now, and this is by far the most underappreciated novel of his I’ve come across. It’s really pretty good. One from his espionage meme, with a domestic twist, about a spy for the CIA who doesn’t know he’s working as a spy for the CIA. The only thing I can think of to explain its lack of recognition is that The Names, for one, comes from DeLillo’s first period of work, before he was famous, and, secondly, that it covers a lot of similar ground as some of his later intelligence novels, like Mao II, Underworld(my favorite!) and, to some extent, Libra.
Now Reading
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.
Up Next
The Call by Yannick Murphy.
I learned something very exciting this week, as it looks like my story about an Iraq War veteran returning home from the desert–“Welcome Home”— was in fact used as part of the City College of San Francisco’s Veterans Educational Transition Services! If you look down at the “Homework” section at the link below, my story is listed, right next Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. How awesome is that?! And humbling. It makes me a little nervous and queasy.
You can find a description of the class here: Foundations of Military Experience: Stress, Challenge, and Success.
Throughout time and history all nations face the challenge of how to reintegrate their military service members into the civilain world. Most societies have processes to accomplish this. The Samurai were not allowed back into villages until they spent a month or so in mountain retreat spas. Ancient Greeks had plays where they enacted the challenges faced by returning warriors for the whole society to witness. Native Americans had sweat lodges and story telling rituals to pass on hard won wisdom.
I’m very excited and proud to have my fiction be a part of this class and program. Hopefully it works well for them, as the program looks to have great potential for improving the lives of our servicemen and their families. Awesome.
“Welcome Home” originally appeared in Boulevard and was anthologized in Best New American Voices 2009. So another round of thanks is in order for Richard Burgin (Boulevard editor), John Kulka and Natalie Danford (BNAV editors), and Mary Gaitskill (BNAV guest editor) for getting this story out into the world. Thanks!
[Please note, btw, that Best New American Voices 2009 is down to $4.09 at Amazon.com right now. So if you’re interested in the story, that’s over seventy percent off the cover price, it might be a good time to buy.]
Also, if you know of any vets who might be interested in participating in one of these classes, please pass along this link. It looks like a lot of the classes are free, they get college credit, and they can participate online if they don’t happen to live in the Bay Area. This is a pilot program, and I’m sure UCSF would appreciate all the help they can get in developing quality courses.
For Day 8
of Mixer Publishing’s countdown to the launch of their web site, they released my short story “The Housekeeper” via Amazon.com in Kindle format. This is pretty cool. I love the art they are using (see right) which I believe is the cover for their forthcoming anthology of Love and Death: heartburn, headaches & hangovers.
Mixer calls the story a “dark Chekhovian gem.” Here’s what else they have to say:
In “The Housekeeper,” Scott Ritter is haunted by the embarrassing memory of his father Frank, an author of seedy pulp novels. Does he struggle with his father’s ambiguous sexual preferences, or his own? Like Chekhov, Theodore Wheeler paints a devastating psychological portrait of denial, and refuses to wrap the answers up with a pretty bow.
Thanks so much to Steve Owen, Rebekah Hall, and everyone involved with Mixer. It all seems to be coming together very nicely for them as they launch the venture. The aesthetic is sharp and some great writers are on board. I’m excited to be a part of it. As you may remember, “The Housekeeper” was originally slated to appear in Flatmancrooked 4, but that didn’t happen, of course, once FMC shuttered. Steve, formerly an editor there, stepped up and saved the anthology, reviving it for Mixer. I’m so happy he did, as it looks to be an excellent compilation.
You can find links to the other stories featured in Mixer’s launch countdown here, on their Facebook page, and on Amazon. There’s work by Myfanwy Collins, Kate Braverman, Daniel Grandbois, R. Neal Bonser, and more. You will also be able to find them at mixerpublishing.com very soon.
I made my debut in the Pleiades Book Review this week with an assessment of Richard Burgin’s excellent novel Rivers Last Longer.
The issue also includes a short story by Burgin, fyi, plus work from Jim Daniels, Amina Gautier, and David Wagoner, among others. It looks like a good one.
The Kenyon Review
offered up its summer reading recommendations today in its June newsletter. You can find my contribution at the bottom of the page. Second from the bottom actually, thank you very much Robert Yune.
I decided to go with Rahul Mehta’s collection of short fiction, Quarantine, and the new novel from Dean Bakopoulos, My American Unhappiness.
Be sure to check the link out if you’re looking for something to read these hot and lazy days. There are some great recommendations from Kenyon Review editors, staff, book reviewers, and contributors.
I’ve been working on a few new short stories lately, but the majority of May was devoted to beginning the initial drafting process for Part 5 of my novel The Hyphenates of Jackson County—the final section of the book. It’s all kind of a big mess right now, but it’s good to get into it. This always happens after I spend a couple months in revision, and this time was no different. The writing comes tough, in small amounts, 500-1000 words a day. It’s mostly blocking scenes, organizing notes, working out important descriptions and finding where symbolism might emerge. It takes a while to build some momentum and get a feel for how this part of the story should be told.
The narrative style I use is pretty steady throughout the book—third-person, through the point-of-view of my main character Jacob Bressler, although I’m experimenting with some brief first-person sections, too—but the main issue comes from the time scope of the book. The present-time thread of the novel takes place over three years, from 1917-1919, or starting when the United States declares war on Germany in 1917 and ending with the Red Summer and Omaha Race Riot of 1919. It’s not a huge amount of time for a novel, gratefully, although there is a lot going on, and it’s a challenge to account for the lost, un-narrated time between parts. Particularly in first drafts, I think I pay too much attention to what’s happened in the time gaps, instead of just getting into the action at hand. A lot of that will be eliminated soon enough, most of it in the initial edits. But it makes things a little clunky and difficult in the first draft.
Anyway, I’m really excited to be this close to finishing a draft of my first novel. I hope to be done with a rough version of Part 5 by the end of the summer. And since I’ve been editing the other parts as I’ve gone along, there isn’t a tremendous amount of work yet to be done, relatively. (I’ve been working on the book for about two years now.) If all goes well, I should have a decent draft of The Hyphenates of Jackson County finished by Spring 2012. Here’s hoping anyway. It’s not like I’m on deadline or anything.
In other news this past month:
-“The Current State of the Universe” is featured in the new issue of The Cincinnati Review. The story won their Schiff Prize for Prose last year, and I’m very excited to make it into this journal.
–Prairie Schooner accepted my review of David Philip Mullins’ Greetings from Below for publication. This will be my third review for PS, where I’m also currently a senior fiction reader.
-On cue, my second review for Prairie Schooner—of Nadifa Mohamed’s Black Mamba Boy—appears in our current summer issue. Check it out. It’s a pretty good one. (The issue, I mean. (The review is okay too.))
-In April we learned that Kwame Dawes was coming in as the new Editor of Prairie Schooner; in May we learned that Managing Editor James Engelhardt was leaving. James secured a position as the acquisitions editor for University of Alaska Press, and leaves for Fairbanks early in June. (Actually, today I think.) I owe a great debt to James for all he’s done for my editing and reviewing career, if I can call it that. James took me on as a reader after I received my MA from Creighton. I was looking to maintain some involvement in the literary world, and volunteering for Prairie Schooner has been a great anchor for me. After a year-and-a-half, I made my way up to a senior reader position; PS accepted my first book review, after some editorial help from James; my first two trips to AWP came with funding assistance from PS as well. I feel very grateful for what Prairie Schooner has done for me, in giving me the opportunity to work, particularly as someone who isn’t otherwise involved in the English Department at the University of Nebraska—and I owe much of that gratitude do James, I believe. Best of luck to him and his family on their Alaskan adventure! (And additional thanks for the fact that now, when I think of Alaska, I won’t think of Sarah Palin.)
-Nicole and I celebrated our fifth anniversary in San Francisco!
-This blog featured a longish post about researching the lynching of Will Brown, and coming across a great NPR feature about the execution of Willie McGee and his granddaughter’s quest to find out the truth about him many decades later.
Dispatch from The Hyphenates of Jackson County
“Jacob returned to Omaha the same morning President Wilson arrived from St. Paul. It was only partly coincidental it happened that way. Jacob was planning on coming back to Omaha that week anyway, to visit his friend Reinhold Bock, and then he read in the papers that Wilson was to arrive by train to the Union Station early Monday morning, before giving a speech on the League of Nations that afternoon. A parade route was planned out where Wilson’s car would meander the city. When Jacob read this, he went down to the station in Lincoln and got a ticket to Omaha for the next morning. He bought himself a suitcase too, at the store there that sold them. It was something simple, with cardboard sides, that didn’t lock. It wouldn’t have to last forever. Jacob didn’t know what he was going to do—he had no plan for the next year, or month, or for the next three days for that matter—but he wanted to see the president. He’d find a spot on Scandal Flats and wait for Wilson’s car to pass by. It felt like it would be significant to do that. Jacob didn’t know why. He just felt he needed to see the man. He needed to see the man as a man, that was it.”
Personal Rejection Notes, Requests for More, and Other Nice Versions of No Thanks
West Branch for “On a Train from the Place Called Valentine”; Southeast Review and Conjunctions for “Attend the Way”; Missouri Review for “Shame Cycle.”
Just Finished
The Cailiff’s of Baghdad, GA 
by Mary Helen Stefaniak. An excellent historical novel about racism and confronting the Other in depression-era Georgia, with a detour to the more famous Baghdad in ancient times. Very well done.
Quarantine by Rahul Mehta. I really enjoyed this collection—which revolves around the lives and loves of second-generation, homosexual, Indian-Americans—and will be reviewing it.
Now Reading
The Names by Don DeLillo.
Up Next
The Call by Yannick Murphy.
Theodore Wheeler 