Amelia Gray - A true Wunderkammer: a talking armadillo, a serial killer named God, a woman who amputates her toes for dinner

Amelia Gray, Museum of the Weird, Fiction Collective 2, 2010.

"A monogrammed cube appears in your town. Your landlord cheats you out of first place in the annual Christmas decorating contest. You need to learn how to love and care for your mate—a paring knife. These situations and more reveal the wondrous play and surreal humor that make up the stories in Amelia Gray’s stunning collection of stories: Museum of the Weird.
Acerbic wit and luminous prose mark these shorts, while sickness and death lurk amidst the humor. Characters find their footing in these bizarre scenarios and manage to fall into redemption and rebirth. Museum of the Weird invites you into its hallways, then beguiles, bewitches, and reveals a writer who has discovered a manner of storytelling all her own.

“Museum of the Weird is a stone cold masterpiece.” —Kyle Minor

“Amelia Gray’s Museum of the Weird is a cabinet of curiosities—a talking armadillo, a serial killer named God, a woman who amputates her toes for dinner, a man married to a paring knife—this collection of stories is so good and funny and wondrous that I couldn’t look away from her dark and curious imagination.” — Michael Kimball

“To say Amelia Gray belongs in the hilariously inventive hallows of Ann Quin and Rikki Ducornet would be to miss her light. This book is gleaming evidence of the author as a trophy case unto herself, wrought of magic equally surprising, wicked, giddy, and loaded with a megaton of Boom.” — Blake Butler

“Museum of the Weird lives up to its name: it’s super freaking weird. It’s so weird, its blurbs don’t even make sense.” —Eugenia Williamson

“At times I worry that an author has maybe opted to go with an idea that is a bit of a reach, even for their many talents. I’ve learned to quit doing that with Amelia Gray and her stories, and after reading a couple of sentences, always decide to scrunch back in my chair and really settle in, as who knows where the hell she’s taking it. In what is becoming a very long streak, Gray has never gone anywhere that hasn’t amazed me.” —Dan Wickett

"In Museum of the Weird, the stories combine to form a true wunderkammer. The first story of the collection “Baby” sets the tone: strange things are happening, babies being born and the characters stop just shy of reasoning out the ‘why’ of it; they accept it and the story continues out of sight. You live the unusual life you’re given. In “The Darkness,” an armadillo and a penguin make small talk in a bar, find it impossible to connect. In “Waste” a medical waste collector finds a partner in a woman obsessed with consuming flesh in a more carnivorous way. In “The Tortoise and the Hare,” the rivalry of the eponymous characters is both amplified and more gently considered. In “There Will Be Sense”, a man constructs his life from the meals he’s been served by a woman, items ordered from a religious supply catalog, his ability to look at his reality from a third person persepctive. Gray’s imagination and ability to bundle unlikely elements into a meaningful unit within her brain skin is exciting and truthful. There are lessons to be learned here, and sometimes the lesson is to learn that there’s no lesson at all. " - Jac Jemc

"We put so much pressure on our babies. For nine months we expect them, hoping that they’ll arrive Happy and Healthy, that they’ll grow up to be Smart and Strong. We have secret plans - intentions, if you will - for how they will be received in the world. And then there are the babies of “Babies”, the opening story in Amelia Gray’s new book, Museum of the Weird, who arrive unexpected and overnight - over and over again. Even after several of these surprise births you still don’t know what to expect from the babies or from Ms. Gray, but you do know that, Damn - she makes giving birth sound easy.
It’s the same with her words. Weird, Love, Armadillo - you can’t just throw those words around this town, we have expectations for each of those, too. But Gray is refreshingly fearless with the words she uses and lets them live lives all their own. In her story, “Thoughts While Strolling” she writes, “A language is born: the manner in which the black silk ribbon is tied determines the personality of the girl who ties it…The children steal a black silk ribbon and tie it round a frog.” This delightful manipulation of language and imagery is solid throughout the book as each story happily knocks over the display cases that enclose our most valuable words. Love is a brick and God is a serial killer in a collection of stories that are just flat out different than anything you’ve read before.
Just like Gray’s successful debut collection AM/PM, Museum of the Weird continues to play with the layered expectations that surround our communication, revealing within it some deeper hope. Funny, sad, and overwhelmingly smart, Museum of the Weird will stick in your ear. And listen, it came out on Tuesday and now it’s Friday, but don’t blame us if it takes you any longer to go out and get it!" - Sarah Wambold

"The opening sentence of Amelia Gray’s “Museum of the Weird” — “One morning, I woke to discover I had given birth overnight” — could serve as a metaphor for the creation of a certain type of story. While many stories come into being through intense ­authorial diligence and cogitation, others spring into existence in an instant, discharging themselves onto the page almost by magic.
Experienced writers know to approach these latter specimens with skepticism. Inspiration has a seductive power: it wants you to believe that its products are profound and important. Sometimes, miraculously, they are. I don’t know what kind of process Gray employed to write the 24 uncategorizable stories in her eccentric and intermittently arresting new collection, but they bear the signs of having been born overnight. They feel inspired, and embody all the weird energy that word implies, even as they struggle under its burdens.
The opening story, “Babies,” is a fine example of the virtues of inspiration. Just over a page long, it gives us a first-­person narrator who inexplicably produces two babies in two days. She and her boyfriend settle into a semblance of domestic harmony and declare their love for their sudden children. But, says the boyfriend, “I hope you don’t have another one overnight.” A few lines and four babies later, we exit the story in horror. I love the neat, jarring transition here, the way Gray signals mortality’s dark presence without succumbing to sentimentality. Her prose is clipped and dry; it achieves a kind of deceptive primness even as it sneaks around behind to clock you on the head.
“Thoughts While Strolling” and “The Movement” comprise philosophical and narrative riffs on what seem to be found texts or fragments of historical trivia. The first gives us scenes from 1930s small-town life, as observed through a homey newspaper column; Gray imagines the dreary existences of the town’s inhabitants, frozen in time, plagued by black magic and the strange cruelty of the natural world. The second story uses the coincidence of Prokofiev’s death falling on the same day as Stalin’s as a springboard for a series of meditations on music, musicians and political tyranny.
The author is at her best here; the prose is simultaneously dreamy and precise, and recalls the genre-blurring poetic essays of Jenny Boully and Anne Carson. Emotion takes physical form in deceptively simple, yet powerful, sentences: “One understands the feeling, thinking back with some shame to a dress heavy like soaking wet lead, like a velvet bag full of bullets. Everything you touch turns to fire.”
Elsewhere, though, the book succumbs to randomness: non sequiturs, lists of objects, zany fictional conceits (usually involving animals or food) pushed beyond their limits. Too many stories open with cute gambits — a penguin and an armadillo in a bar; two men married, respectively, to a paring knife and some frozen fish; an armed standoff managed by a pack of javelinas. A few of these manage to pan out. I like the one where the tortoise and the hare meet again on the hare’s deathbed. “There never was a race,” the tortoise tries to explain.
But too often, these tales collapse into nonsensical events or long, bland verbal exchanges between indistinguishable characters. They are motionless, like word sculptures, and cleave too closely to the familiar tics of contemporary “wacky” fiction. Whereas the best stories in “Museum of the Weird” register as leaps of faith, brave excursions into the realms of the unreal — and convince me that Gray may yet prove an important voice in experimental writing." -
J. Robert Lennon
Amelia Gray, AM/PM, Featherproof, 2009.

"If anything’s going to save the characters in Amelia Gray’s debut from their troubled romances, their social improprieties, or their hands turning into claws, it’s a John Mayer concert tee. In AM/PM, Gray’s flash-fiction collection, impish humor is on full display. Tour through the lives of 23 characters across 120 stories full of lizard tails, Schrödinger boxes and volcano love. Follow June, who wakes up one morning covered in seeds; Leonard, who falls in love with a chaise lounge; and Andrew, who talks to his house in times of crisis. An intermittent love story as seen through a darkly comic lens, Gray mixes poetry and prose, humor and hubris to create a truly original piece of fiction."

“At moments screwy, prickly and pleasantly surprising, Gray’s short shorts deliver youthful snapshots about being nuts in love… A delectable debut.”—Publishers Weekly

“The stories in AM/PM have ruined me as a reader of shorts. I will no longer be satisfied by the merely beautiful, the singularly clever, or the one big thought purely rendered. I want all those things in a two hundred word package. I want to be highly amused and deeply sad at the exact same time. Amelia Gray packs more power in a paragraph than I thought possible.” —Stacey Swann

“[Amelia Gray's] visions are direct, devastating, funny and vibrant; it’s not everyone who can find such inspiration in a John Mayer concert T-shirt…”—Eugene Weekly

“AM/PM by Amanda Gray is a little miracle of a novel — if that’s what it is — each chapter an incident or a part of an incident, nothing longer than a page. Chet, Missy, Charles, Carla, Hazel, Tess, and John Mayer Concert Tee. I notice the author calls them stories, but I read them quickly, and I felt I was reading a post-modern novel. A little like Elizabeth Crane broken into tiny pieces. At any rate it gave me huge pleasure and a high opinion of Featherproof.” —Paul Ingram

“AM/PM is a refreshing, magical book, equipped with so much lucid linage that its hard not to want to read each page again and again, extending each small punch of threaded pleasure.…”- HTMLgiant

“At last, a book I can read over and over again. No, seriously. I’m not that guy. This is an important book. I wish that I could just somehow telepathically communicate this fact to you. If you’ve ever trusted any of my recommendations, then trust this one.”—MADOREABLE

“Perhaps the book I was most looking forward to picking up while driving towards AWP and nearly done reading it, it hasn’t disappointed at all. Sadly, I didn’t even know there was an Amelia Gray about two months ago and now I’ve scoured the web to find any publishings she’s done. This conveniently puts many of them together and is just a fantastic read. Also caught her reading at The Beat Kitchen and had a bit of a chance to talk to her afterward and she’s as nice as she is talented. Rush over to the Featherproof site and you can get this one free if you subscribe to their awesome new subscription series.”—Dan Wickett

“Amelia Gray is one of my favorite writers publishing online, and I’ve been looking forward to her book AM/PM. It’s a collection of very short stories or sketches or observations or jokes or all the above, really, that at times reminded me of a play I was in once called Comings and Goings and at other times of the recurring Muppet Show segment in which ballroom dancers tell jokes (these are both good things).”—Tawny Grammar

“In concise and often brutal prose, these brief stories give surprisingly comprehensive glimpses into ongoing lives. Each story’s laser-beam focus on a single instant uncovers what’s really happening in the small moments of life, those moments that fit between two blinks of the eyes.”—Literary License

"1. AM/PM is a slideshow of offstage moments.
2. AM/PM is sweetly sick and madly stark.
3. AM/PM is so many cells to break.
4. AM/PM is a fuzzy nectared bumblebee dusting pollen off.
5. AM/PM is a silent slipping between sheets.
6. AM/PM has hands on its time.
It was still dark, but Terrence's eyes adjusted enough that he could sense the movement of his hand before his face. "Charles," he said. "I believe we are in a small box."
"Indeed," Charles said, from the darkness. Terrence judged him to be about five feet away, but when he reached his arm out, he touched Charles's knee, which startled them both. The knee was cold and hairy. Charles's knee made Terrence more nervous than the existence of the small box.
He leaned back and startled again when he touched the soft walls of the box. The thick velvet felt deep enough to sink his fingers into, but he didn't want to know what was down there and instead let his hand rest on the surface.
Terrence considered the letter he would write to his girlfriend when he was free. He thought fondly of the time they ate cotton candy and she vomited. (AM:30)
7. AM/PM is wondering what the violet stain is underneath a friend's nose and mouthing to your wife, "What the hell is that," and she writes down rosacea, and later asking, "What is rosacea?" mispronouncing it, and hearing her say, "roh-ZAY-sha" waiting for it to sink in like downspout drops into dry dirt.
8. AM/PM is carrying moldy corrugated cardboard boxes up three flights and unpacking the dusty books without anyone to help.
9. AM/PM is telling your husband of course you don't think of someone else when he's on top of you when even then you're thinking of the beefy cashier whose fingers grazed your palm when he handed you your change.
10. AM/PM believes in grace when everything points to the contrary.
11. AM/PM is telling somebody you feel sad about an artist who died recently and they say, "I'd probably like them since most of the stuff I like to look at was made by dead people."
12. AM/PM is learning that the butterfly's powdery iridescence on your fingertips are scales and it needs them to fly.
Andrew's problem with women was that he was analytical and they were always, always emotional. Women made fun of him for measuring out salt and spices when he cooked. Even the ones who never cooked would criticize him, leaning against the doorway of the kitchen as if they knew they shouldn't trespass but teasing him anyway. At the movies they smacked him with popcorn buckets for commenting on an incongruous detail while they were building the stamina to cry. None of it made sense to Andrew. He was very loving, and concerned, and simply knew where to place sadness and fear and anger, so that it could be accessed with great efficiency when needed.
"It's just you and me, house," Andrew said.
The house was not so sure. (A.M. 34)
13. AM/PM is seeing a young man with tattooed arrows radiating from his eyes and wondering what he was going to think when he looked at himself thirty years later.
14. AM/PM is bristling at every sound because the scrit scrit of pencil sharpeners, the crackle of crumpled up looseleaf, the bell's tinny insistence, the chair legs' industrial scrape had shaven away any kind of self-control you had before you started to teach.
15. AM/PM jettisons any extra ballast.
16. AM/PM is wondering whether the feeling felt was crimped or cramped.
17. AM/PM likes John Mayer but loves David Ryan Harris.
18. AM/PM is a murder weapon and a suicide note.
19. AM/PM is a man, a hole, and a cover.
And may the women hold their brave faces to the sun as the men become afflicted with a terrible pestilence, and may their flesh rain upon the heads of the chosen people. May their hair clog the sewers of the streets, and their broken bodies tumble into the sea! May their useless fury fail to stir the tapestries in the temple, and may the LORD find solace in their swift destruction! (49:PM)
20. AM/PM is after the fun and games when someone lost an eye.
21. AM/PM is learning leopards have rosettes not spots.
22. AM/PM breathes in with every dig of his thumbs.
23. AM/PM is a biblical affliction.
24. AM/PM is a kit filled with dissecting pins, dissection needles, dropping pipette, iris scissors, probe with angled tip, rigid metal ruler, scalpel blades, scalpel handle, surgical scissors, and tissue forceps inside it.
Olivia dreams that her body becomes pliable enough that she can stretch very thin and cover most of the rooms of the house. Her body is so thin that the bones are clearly visible, and the veins stretch, and the blood has more distance to travel and as a result, the edges of her body are very cold. Reginald opens the front door, removes his shoes, and takes only one step before recoiling in horror at the chilly mass that is Olivia's body, stretched and waiting. In her dreams, she controls every aspect of her life. (43:PM)
25. AM/PM is as symbol as it seams.
26. AM/PM is a ruse to put you off the scent.
27. AM/PM is a masterful display of lighter-than-air craft.
28. AM/PM is tomorrow answers no such thing.
29. AM/PM constellated wonders
30. AM/PM is a cresty wave.
31. AM/PM can't help yearning.
32. AM/PM will stretch and stretch you.
Frances needed a man she could sink her life into. The perfect man, she observed, would like her but not really enjoy her friends, and the feeling would be mutual. She and her perfect man would eventually stop going to their friends for advice. They would eventually see each other only, and one morning, they would wake up to find that they had fused together, just slightly, at the upper thigh. The fusion would not be uncomfortable, and would allow for some level of privacy for each. the days of uncertainty, and annoyance, and misunderstanding, would not be entirely over, but whenever such feelings arose, Frances or her perfect man would simply reach to their thigh area and gently pluck the shared skin like a harp string. (AM:68)
33. AM/PM lifts the anchor.
34. AM/PM is a waking nightmare about a cracked devil in a sleeping church.
35. AM/PM is a tailored afternoon of sharpened memory.
36. AM/PM is painful philosophy within tempting music.
37. AM/PM is tempting philosophy within painful music.
38. AM/PM is the muffled argument that provokes the librarian.
39. AM/PM needs an immediate listener.
40. AM/PM. is a multi-chambered mollusk shell.
41. AM/PM's every command is my wish.
42. AM/PM doesn't care as long as you'll stay.
43. AM/PM is a wind-up key for thinking outside of your box.
Are you growing mistrustful of others? Do you suspect your wife does not actually have cancer? Is every trip to the mailbox and exercise in loathing and remorse? Are your coworkers having trouble finding anything interesting to say when they talk about you behind your back? Do you deeply despise people who possess many of the same opinions and motives as your own? (AM:72)
44. AM/PM rises up from the flashes.
45. AM/PM accuses you of taking the woman's side all the time and then apologizes because it was not true.
46. AM/PM is finding a dead and dried out songbird on a driveway and using a plastic cup to scoop it up, carrying the thing to your home, and pouring it into a plastic bag to bury in the backyard when you return late evening.
47. AM/PM is not finding your way out of a sick relationship, or staying out of a sick relationship, but finding and staying in a healthy relationship.
48. AM/PM is learning that Om is the sound the universe makes, is infinity, or something like that, and not feeling peace in the knowing.
49. AM/PM is what angels might be thinking.
50. AM/PM drives you to wreck and bluing.
51. AM/PM is an eyesight puzzle.
52. AM/PM is a drizzle of balsamic vinegar on leafy greens.
53. AM/PM cries and displays affection in public.
54. AM/PM is forever under the weather.
55 AM/PM does not send emoticons.
Olivia sees a butter knife on the banister atop the stairs. She fantasizes wildly about the ways in which it might plunge into the ones she loves.
The butter knife makes the entire room feel dangerous. An intruder might not have any desire to stab her until he reached the top of the stairs and felt the butter knife under his hand. Olivia cannot go on until she collects the butter knife and puts it in the sink, where it belongs. (AM:76)
56. AM/PM threatens to press a pillow against your face while you sleep and watch until your arms and legs stop flailing like a dancing marionette.
57. AM/PM is what demons might tinker with.
58. AM/PM is reminiscent of a proverb that says "even in laughter the heart is sorrowful."
59. AM/PM is the whiff of evergreen as she talks right past you.
60. AM/PM debunks myths like the one that says that hair and nails grow after death.
61. AM/PM creates myths like one that says swallowing an ice cube a day will create immunity to seasonal affective disorder.
"They're gold flakes," Wallace said, reaching to touch them on his back. "Genuine."
Tess held her hand against the textured gold on Wallace's tattoo. She drew her fingers back. "Are not," she said.
"Indeed they are. The artist was fantastic. He literally fused the metal to my skin, and I have to get it retouched every five years."
The gold leaf made a pattern of fish scales across his spine.
"It's beautiful," she said.
"You're beautiful," he said, turning his head halfway.
"Not as beautiful as a gold flake."
He considered it. "Maybe not. It was a very special process."
"Must have been," Tess said. She felt sure she would die alone. (79:PM)
62. AM/PM is a do-it-yourself kit to protect imagination.
63. AM/PM is tragic realism.
64. AM/PM is an upper room experience.
65. AM/PM is seeing a woman covered in spots and pointing her out to your husband and he says, "Nice tattoo," and you say, "No, she's a cheetah taking human form," and he says, "You and your wild imagination," and you say, "Yes—wild."
66. AM/PM mumbled some stuff.
67. AM/PM is squeezing its eyes together to help them along.
68. AM/PM is screaming in your face about something you didn't see.
69. AM/PM is rain, wind, and sun duking it out for rule of the day.
70. AM/PM is where the world is dead to you.
71. AM/PM overhears conversations and unravels.
72. AM/PM is always touching something it shouldn't.
They were in love! Carla wore her hair up and Andrew saw everything as a sign. They spent an entire afternoon sitting side by side in a coffee shop, taking more meaning than necessary from the world around them. A man wearing boxing gloves walked down the sidewalk in front of them and they took that to mean they would be together forever. (AM:111)
73. AM/PM is searching through old selves.
74. AM/PM has a headache and wonders when he will stop talking trash.
75. AM/PM boosts the happiness quotient in your life.
76. AM/PM has good relationships with other persons.
77. AM/PM adapts maturely to life's changes and crises.
78. AM/PM is the shiver lining everything.
79. AM/PM is out of service.
80. AM/PM takes notice of nothing and nothing escapes it.
Why does the rain make us feel so romantic and strange? Maybe it's the fact that we are unnatural spectators of it, from inside our homes, and it is a reminder that we have the power to live our whole lives like this, if we choose. It's not the smell of fertile ground kicked up by raindrops, or the slick leaves, or the way we must amplify our voices to be heard over this larger presence. It's the power of the rooftop that makes us want to fuck under it. (AM:82)
81. AM/PM is a word horde like Beowulf or something.
82. AM/PM dishes the dirt while smoking cigarettes.
83. AM/PM gave me the eye.
84. AM/PM is in the park with you.
85. AM/PM is a body of language pushed away by the small world at large.
86. AM/PM had one, but the time ran out on it.
Olivia's whole body shook, not like a leaf but like the tree itself, a deep kind of shudder that only happened at the hands of loggers. A tree feels its deepest movement in those final seconds. She once watched a program on television where a falling tree snapped at the trunk, creating a ten-foot-long catapult that tossed a logger fifty feet into the air. The called it kickback. (99:PM)
87. AM/PM doesn't feel the connection we used to feel together.
88. AM/PM has sunken eyes and invents beguiling excuses.
89. AM/PM is an apricot's tomb.
90. AM/PM is an accusing perfume.
91. AM/PM gives free rain.
92. AM/PM commits nightly idolatry.
93. AM/PM is wasting away from grievances.
94. AM/PM is sweat between sad breasts.
Frances's pale skin felt stretched so thin that if she scratched her face or her arms, she would mangle herself. She imagined the skin would peel up underneath her fingers like lacquer from a table. Perhaps she wasn't drinking enough water, she thought, perhaps she was sleeping too much again. When she slept, she had wonderful dreams. (103:PM)
95. AM/PM is a balmy olive.
96. AM/PM disappears like a stain.
97. AM/PM is a lip of physic foam.
98. AM/PM is unwillingly patient.
99. AM/PM is not going to have it.
100. AM/PM is tapping its canvas-sneakered foot to Megadeth at the library.
101. AM/PM is the junk inside you, the teeth you grind, the bear you cross.
Tess kept a secret: her left hand was turning into a claw. She felt the tendons tightening up in her forearm the week before, and had written it off as the onset of carpal tunnel but the tendons continued to tighten. The feeling spread to her hand, which began to curve like a scythe, the bones lengthening a little and then bending, almost imperceptibly, until her fingers hardened into one immobile point and her left hand was fully a claw.
Tess kept the secret, but compensated by repeating it to herself. She would lie in bed, curled around her left hand, holding it gently to her knees. My hand is a claw. My hand is a claw. (109:PM)
102. AM/PM is mad about being treated like some charity case.
103. AM/PM is meditative poetry on the unseemly.
104. AM/PM thinks outside of the boxing gloves.
105. AM/PM breaks the rules before it's forced to follow them.
106. AM/PM is that man complaining that pictures fall from their nails on the wall every time you walk across your floor above him.
107. AM/PM is that acrid breather working next to you in the library.
108. AM/PM is a worm snapping around in a child's fingers.
June woke up covered in seeds. They were small, toasted sesame seeds, thousands of them all over her body. She had never been covered in seeds before and it was a strange feeling, like a snake might feel in sand. There was no explanation, as far as she could see, for the sudden appearance of all the seeds. It was a comforting feeling, and June turned over three times in the slippery weightlessness before falling back asleep. (AM:110)
109. AM/PM is spiritedly speechless.
110. AM/PM wants to hear a story about a monster that eats a man and hides itself in the woods.
111. AM/PM is a cake made of soap and water.
112. AM/PM is a furtive clicking key.
113. AM/PM comes home with less judgment than it left with.
114. AM/PM has a stain in its mouth and cannot speak.
One day everyone stopped over-thinking. We started thinking just as much as we should, and not any more than necessary. There were no more misunderstandings whatsoever. Minor disagreements were forgotten, not turned into proof of larger things. Trivial errors of speech or judgment were just as important as items on the breakfast menu: one chose waffles and the other chose eggs and it was a god damn miracle. (AM:120)
115. AM/PM is whatever might have been before.
116. AM/PM is the salvation just after dark that day.
117. AM/PM is a deserted body.
118. AM/PM is a brazen head filled with books.
119. AM/PM lays in its birth.
120. AM/PM read "unfettered clock" when it said "unletter'd clerk." - John Madera

"My webcam cannot do the design of “AM/PM” by Amelia Gray justice. The design is what had kept me away from the book, but not too distant that I wouldn’t fondle its pages every single time I went to the book store. I always thought, “This book is much too pretty to be any good.” Even after I fell in love with her blog a few months ago, I still couldn’t quite get myself to read the book. Gray was nice enough (more than nice enough!) to send me a copy of the book, published by Featherproof, and that’s when I decided to go beyond the pretty.
This gem arrived in the mail this morning, and I read it during all the gaps of my day (lunch break at work, pre-nap daze, the wait for my tattoo). The vignettes feel fresh and alive in my head.
I thought this would be short story after different short story after flash fiction, but all the little tales are somehow connected. Each tale is shorter than a page, sometimes hardly even a paragraph full. Most characters re-occur. They’re all friends, I think, I assume. It’s not easy to keep track of who is who or what happens when. Tess is friends with Heather is friends with Martha. Frances is fat. Olivia left her husband. Charles disappoints Doreen, but Doreen reminds seems like an annoying and fussy mom. Two guys are stuck in a box, being philosophical. A dad owns a business. One guys loves a chair, but his wife doesn’t want to play games anymore. The John Mayer Concert shirt is the hero that connects the vignettes together.
It’s fine that there is no linear story. That didn’t bother me in the slightest. The stories fit. What ties the stories together, it seems, are the disjointed relationships. Everyone is in a relationship in which they feel jipped. (Sometimes I wonder how much of my life I put into books the I read.) Even Betty, who was able to come up with great symbols or representations of her love, such as the man in boxing gloves who walked down the street, or the bottle of wine, or fingernails, all of these great symbols– even Betty broke. The fine things that were a symbol of her love turned into “this funny-smelling couch,” “this mechanical litterbox,” “this year of loneliness,” and even “this concert tee.” If you ask me, those symbols are not of love.
Gray imaginatively combined real life weird with whimsy weird, a Miranda July-esque weird. And she did it so well. There’s a letter from Terrence to June, informing June the seriousness of his promise to not wash his hands. That letter borders real life weird and whimsy weird. There’s the realistic portrayal of what it feels like to sleep on damp sheets. There’s the game Amish or Vietnamish. I bet that’s a real game to some people in the world. Then there’s the whimsy weird part about the John Mayer Concert shirt having babies with soft, jersey skin. I never raised my eyebrow for more than a beat.
There were so many beautiful sentences. I made a list in my journal. “He thought fondly of the time they ate cotton candy until she vomitted.” (17) “The thrill of acting on instinct should never require an apology. An apology would be an act of belittlement; receiving it, an act of humiliation.” (18) And “Just because you made it warm doesn’t make it yours: a lesson for felines.” (34)
I’ll re-read many parts of the book again. It seems as if there are many more hidden beauties in this text. What a great summer read.
What a great surprise, this book." - Nancy Lili

"Amelia Gray is one of my favorite writers publishing online, and I’ve been looking forward to her book AM/PM from Featherproof Books. It’s a collection of very short stories or sketches or observations or jokes or all the above, really, that at times reminded me of a play I was in once called Comings and Goings and at other times of the recurring Muppet Show segment in which ballroom dancers tell jokes (these are both good things).
The stories capture the quirks of people and their relationships, sometimes realistically and at other times in more absurd, surreal ways. Sometimes that focus became too tight, though, as if all the stories were taking place in the velvet-lined box where two of the recurring characters appear in Beckettish conversation about the very firm boundaries of their fictional world. At times I wanted the stories to acknowledge a world beyond themselves, I guess, or to acknowledge more fully the artificial walls of their lives or even of their genre (as the scenes in the box do so well). They’re funny and sad and compelling just as they are, but one after another they became a bit claustrophobic. That I think so probably says more about me as a reader than it does about anything else; it may even be unfair to a book in which a character’s admission of “the hatred she felt for the people and things over which she had no control” echoes through the collection.
No surprise, then, that the stories I was most engaged by were those in which the world shows through the walls — often in the form of trees, or animals, or weather — and those things that can’t be controlled intrude on the tidy, tight world of fiction. In fact, there’s a sequence of these beginning about two-thirds through the book which made that alternation between narrower and wider scope all the more powerful and graceful and skillful. It complicated the book just when I wanted it to become complicated, and made me rethink what I’d already read even as I read onward — what more can a reader ask for than that?" - Steve Himmer
"Amelia Gray was born in Tucson, AZ, and had a safe and happy childhood. What Amelia mostly remembers is laughing a lot and the funny things her sister and parents did. For a childhood, it was just about as good as anybody could hope for. Around 10, Amelia started playing the violin. In 4th grade, Amelia wrote a science fiction story where everyone wore clothes that changed colors according to their moods, which was the beginning of the inventive fiction writer she has turned into today. Amelia went to Arizona State University for her BA in literature, and, when she was 20, she rode Greyhound buses everywhere. She’s afraid of flying, partly because of the way things rattle around inside an airplane. She thinks she might feel better if she could sit on the wing and hear how strongly everything is constructed. Amelia went to Texas State University for her MFA, and now she holds four jobs (transcribing a WWII veteran's journal, freelance writing, and teaching at two universities), which allows her to work all day while also avoiding work all day, depending on which project she focuses on. It's weirdly motivating. Amelia has night terrors that make her do funny things in her sleep like stand on the bed and run down the stairs. Once, she kicked out a window. Also, Amelia has two cats (Republic, who got his name because she found him in the dumpster behind the Banana Republic where she used to work, and Turkish, who got her name from the fact that she is big like an ottoman), but no boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, or dog. She wants a boyfriend like she wants 180 pounds of cotton candy. She has been the cotton candy in many relationships and she has been the person with the cotton candy on her hands in other relationships. It might make her sick, but she could fit either thing (a boyfriend or 180 pounds of cotton candy) into her lovely two-bedroom apartment in Austin (of which, by some small-world logic, MK’s brother-in-law is the landlord, and, she says, the best landlord ever). Besides that, Amelia has written a screenplay and a flash fiction collection in the past year. Right now, she’s working on a novel. She’s trying to figure out what type of writing is the most fun, which, right now, is flash fiction, which she’s trying to figure out how to accumulate into a novel, which she will.
[Note: I loved Amelia's first collection, AM/PM. Amelia's second collection, Museum of the Weird, just won the 2008 Ronald Sukenick American Book Review Prize for Innovative Fiction (FC2). Judge Lidia Yuknavitch chose Museum of the Weird for a Spring/Summer 2010 release. A complex and piercing collection, as poetic as it is poignant, Museum of the Weird features twenty four short stories that collectively expose both the hilarity and heartbreak of life in the twenty first century.]" -Michael Kimball

"I just realized we have the same last initial. Looking at "AG" and "MG," I thought, "Aggie and Maggie," and then "Harold and Maude," and then "Benny and Joon." What is your favorite "______ and ______" pairing?
- Bonnie and Clyde. I've been getting the facts on Bonnie and Clyde this week.
Good answer. Can you share why you're fact-gathering?
- There's no purpose at the moment. I get into fact-gathering. I made the mistake of watching Warren Beatty's Bonnie and Clyde on my computer. I couldn't get through it without researching every little question I had: Is that guy in the background drawn from real life? Did this scene really happen? Where are they buried? What book is Beyoncé reading in the empty swimming pool in the video for 'Bonnie and Clyde '03'? I can really take all the magic out of watching a movie.
Tell us about the John Mayer concert T-shirt. Do you have one? (For those who do not understand this reference, would you provide a little recap?)
- I had an Alan Jackson concert T-shirt, which I bought at Goodwill because it looked like his head was floating on the front, and on the back it read DON'T ROCK THE JUKEBOX. It was cool. I don't know where it is now. I might have given it to my sister. It ended up becoming a John Mayer Concert Tee in AM/PM because I have more complicated feelings towards John Mayer and his merchandise: in my mind, the John Mayer Concert Tee looks like one of those Phantom of the Opera shirts kids wear at a performing arts middle school, but instead of the mask, it's John Mayer's face.
What are five things (other than the T) in AM/PM that have some real-life significance for you? Or, hell, fantasy-life significance? Whichever you prefer.
- While writing AM/PM, 1) I was drinking a lot of flaxseed oil, 2) I went on a date with a guy whose parents had just survived a plane crash, 3) I had just moved into a place with serious squirrel nesting troubles, 4) My cats had worms, and 5) I observed a gas station setting on fire while I was waiting in line for the pump.
Is there a particular character from AM/PM that you feel most connected to? If yes, who and why? If no, why not?
- Not really. One of my goals in writing the book was to create characters that, good or bad, were each an accurate depiction of some believable element of person-hood. In the first draft, nobody had a name. Later I decided to tie them all together under different characters.
How long did it take to write AM/PM, from start to finish?
- The generation period was one story in the morning and one at night for two months. Then I spent about a year on and off editing it.
How or why did you decide to publish it with Featherproof?
- I was going from of the experience of looking at their books at an AWP three or four years ago. When most of the other tables were offering peppermints and pens, the Featherproof table was giving away their mini-books, and I liked what that meant. Otherwise, I knew precious little about the publishing world when I found them. I got lucky.
Can you tell us about your experience with Featherproof?
- Featherproof has this perfect combination of design and story interest. There's nothing finer than working with a couple of people who are sharp at what they do and care a ton about the final product. The stories I hear from people at bigger publishing houses involve editors jumping ship, a total lack of control over design, contract wars. I don't know why anyone would actively wish for something like that to happen for their first book.
Here's a funny (or maybe not) story from last year's AWP: you and I crossed paths in a bar, we were both a bit tanked, we recognized one another, you said you would be at the Featherproof table the next day, and the next day I searched far and wide to find it. Finally, I gave up, returned to the Keyhole table, and asked some folks at nearby tables where in the heck that dang Featherproof table was. Someone pointed, I turned, and there you were, behind me, sitting on the floor. These many months later, was it [AWP] as good for you as it was for me?
- Oh, Molly! AWP was good. I got to meet all the people I've worked with for a while. One night I walked alone to the Quickies reading and sat by myself at the bar and just felt excited to be there. This is a good damn time for readers and writers in America. I'm looking forward to Denver.
Tell us about Five Things.
- Five Things is a once every-other-monthly reading and music show I put on in Austin with my co-host Stacy Muszynski. We take five objects, images, or ideas, and task five writers with creating a five-minute piece. The idea comes from the Dollar Store Show and Quickies. We just celebrated our first anniversary with a 'Best of Austin' nod. We're thinking of doing a party around the Texas Book Festival, and a writing contest after that.
Let's discuss your forthcoming collection, Museum of the Weird. How long had you been working on the manuscript? Why did you choose to submit it to FC2? What did you do when you learned you won? Details, woman, details!
- The oldest story in the collection is about four years old, but I had been fussing with the more-or-less finished manuscript for about a year before I submitted it to the contest. A friend of mine who works in the FC2 office encouraged me to submit. Obviously, the submissions were all anonymous, and my friend didn't know I had even entered until she connected the winning manuscript's assigned number to my name after she got them back from the judge. So, once she found out that I had entered and also had won, she called me and left a cryptic message. I was on a flight from Tucson to Austin and got the voicemail when the plane touched down. I wasn't sure if the good news was that she was pregnant or that the manuscript had won.
Oh wow, we are so at the age where all of our girlfriends call to say they're either getting married or pregnant. Oof. What say you?
- God bless girlfriends with babies! There's a special place in heaven reserved for girlfriends that let us say hello to the babies when they're cute and then take them away when they mess themselves. I think of having a baby from a practical standpoint and wonder at the women who write and work and do the motherhood thing at the same time. I can barely keep the litter box clean some days, you know?
Why is it that caring for other living things, people included, and taking care of their excrement is so often synonymous? Anyway, back to Museum of the Weird. If you had to provide the back cover synopsis, how (or what) would it read?
- Oh no, I'm horrible at this, I'm an awful pitchman. Here's part of what the FC2 marketing people wrote for me: "A monogrammed cube appears in your town. Your landlord cheats you out of first place in the annual Christmas contest. You need to learn how to love and care for your mate—-a paring knife. These situations and more reveal the wondrous play and surreal humor that make up the stories in Amelia Gray’s stunning" etc.
So are you done with the edits for Museum of the Weird? Are you working on anything new?
- I'm done! It's weird to have to let it go for a year before it's out. I'm working on a couple new things and mostly returning to old habits, which means starting small, writing a lot of handwritten notes that go nowhere, paragraphs in voice, violent little short-short stories, empty threats, and sprawling openings to novels that are immediately shelved. Nothing has emerged quite yet. I've been lucky to have some little projects, thanks to Drew Burk at Spork and others.
I think this is interesting--your process of getting started. Best-case scenario, what will happen (and how) as a result of these notes and paragraphs?
- I'd like very much to write a novel. It is going to take a while and I'll probably end up with eight little chapbooks or a book of sonnets. We can't always get what we want! But if we try sometimes, you know, we get what we need." - Interview with Molly Gaudry