Brandi Wells - Stories often disguised as instruction manuals, as apologies and confessions, as notes left behind. About the brutal violence by which we live and breathe, the uneven posture we pretend rendered on the page in all its forceful honesty and anger

Brandi Wells, Please Don’t Be Upset, Tiny Hardcore Press, 2011.


"Please Don’t Be Upset is a collection of fifteen perfectly rendered stories–lists, instructions, yearnings, confessions, more–stories about imperfect mothers and daughters, women and men, strange stories about folded bodies and stalking deer, stories about the small, heartbreaking ways we fail each other, yet cling so tightly."

"In stories often disguised as instruction manuals, as apologies and confessions, as notes left behind, Brandi Wells creates a world of tempting baubles, each tiny fiction begging to be discovered, to be stolen away, to be secreted safe and treasured." - Matt Bell

"I read (and thoroughly enjoyed) an e-galley of xTx’s Normally Special, the debut release from Roxane Gay’s Tiny Hardcore Press, but Brandi Wells’ Please Don’t Be Upset was my first look at their physical product itself, and I must start this review by saying how thrilled I am at the values that Gay has put into her titles. The cover is beautiful, the size perfection – so easily shaped to the hand – and the typesetting makes for an effortlessness of reading that all avid readers seek. Tiny Hardcore Press makes a book that we want to read.
So then what is inside of Please Don’t Be Upset, the third release from this fine upstart press? Only the brutal violence by which we live and breathe. Only the uneven posture we pretend rendered on the page in all its forceful honesty and anger. Only the world crushing down around us in love and muscles.
The deer keep coming. They bend their legs and knuckle down onto the grass, the dirt and even the bottom of the porch steps. One of them sits atop the picnic table with its front legs hanging off the side and another one sits awkwardly on a patio chair. All across the yard, bucks and does and fawns are curled up against one another.
Brandi Wells is a surprising writer. She surprises us by a story about instructions for rape told from the victim’s perspective. She surprises us by making nonchalant lists that create heartache. But most importantly, Wells surprises her readers by creating stories that expand exponentially in comparison to their word count – in the smallest of spaces Wells is building relationships of vast complexity and yearning, and she seems to do so with ease.
Somehow the deer get into our house. I don’t know how. Maybe they ran up the back stairs. Maybe the back door was open. Somehow they get in and they come into our bedroom and watch us sleep. I wake, but I don’t move. They look over me, at Ben. They drag him off the bed, pulling him with their mouths. Whatever part of him they can grasp. His clothes, his hair, the loose skin on his arms.
Even if we’ve known the writer online or in print journals for years and years, a debut collection gives us the true writer, the one beneath the glimpsed skin, the one that will be evolving in book form for the duration of a lifetime. Please Don’t Be Upset, for Wells, shows us that for now everything about her writing is even-keeled and yet fraught, calculating in its word choice but vindictive and rash in its meaning. Wells is this tiny body wailing and railing, screaming with a voice that we didn’t expect, a voice that startles us down deep, and one that is raised in honest and moving literary prowess. Wells is telling stories, the most vivid vibrant ones.
I pick up the smallest fawn I can find. It’s heavier than I thought. I lean back and try to position some of its weight on my hip. I look around to see if I’ve disturbed any of the others but I haven’t. They’re all staring at the house. I climb the stairs, set the deer down and pull open the door. I drag the deer across the threshold. It tries to lean back, bear its weight away from me, but I am stronger than a fawn. I am stronger than a fawn.
‘Deer’, the text from which I’ve quoted for this review, is only one of fifteen stories in Wells' collection, each piece a new level of lust and shove, a new way in which Brandi Wells shows us her writer’s guts. But there is only so much we can show in the space of this space, even if Wells knows how to do otherwise. The bottom-line: Please Don’t Be Upset is representative of an up-and-coming author, one to pay attention to, one to seek out. The fiercest angle is in her words, and these sentences are a strangulation." - J. A. Tyler

"Do you love someone? Pause and take a deep breath – you’re about to get the shit kicked out of you.
“Please Don’t Be Upset and Other Stories” by Brandi Wells is a riveting collection of short stories, notable for its clean, clean prose and subtle use of imagery. The title story centers around a woman who attempts to stick her hand in her lover’s throat, something most of us have never tried. Why would anyone do such a thing? The narrator explains herself in an offhand manner – her man doesn’t let her drive the car and “yeah, it didn’t upset me” she says – but you know, you just know, that it really does.
Think about the times you couldn’t do something. You put on a sweater, and then a coat. You put on a scarf, and mittens, and boots. You walked outside in the snow. You couldn’t find it, whatever you were looking for, and God knows, you were looking for a lot of things those days. Every weekend you lost your cellphone, keys, wallet. Every weekend you lost a little bit of yourself – you threw it up and cried it out and other times, just gave it away. Here have this, you said, and no, it doesn’t upset me.
These narrators give their power away. The narrator in “Seven Things I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You” describes her neediness in metaphors: she infiltrates her lover’s closet, she saves his gray hairs (which she claims she will need one day), and she imagines wearing his body like a shirt. She does these things to prove that she can keep him, that one way or another, he’ll be hers forever. That’s sweet, you think – sweetly disgusting and familiar.
In truth, you can never keep anybody. Or rather, you can keep the memory of them, but little else. Their body and thoughts and feelings and tiny fleeting expressions are gone for you, and no amount of gray hairs in a bag will change that. But it doesn’t upset you. Other things upset you: skinned knees, overdraft fees, missed appointments. He doesn’t upset you anymore or ever again. You’ll never again -
The narrator of “Bald” has lost her hair. Has anyone else had that dream? You’re sitting with an attractive man and you bat your eyelashes and run your hands through your hair and suddenly, large clumps fall onto the floor. Dream dictionaries explain that hair represents sexual attraction and seduction. The subconscious mind is terrified of losing her power to entice men, or women, or anyone, into her bed; you dream because you’re scared, you dream because you no longer have him and can’t get him back.
You’ll never again hold hands, or talk about squirrels. You’ll never again giggle at night, kiss his cheek, touch his face with your hands as he tells you a funny story. You’ll never again wait for his texts. You never again discuss him with friends, because they’re sick of him, and you, and the idea of the two of you together. You’ll never again worry about his frown, follow him like a particularly stupid kitten until he smiles again. Such wild uncontainable love. All you want is to kiss his stomach, but this won’t ever happen again.
“A Dozen Notes to Ruben” is about a woman who has a man. She wants to keep him, because she loves him. She’s watched him, played games with his head and heart, made lists about him (as this story attests), but he’s not a perfect man. And yet who cares about perfection when you have someone to kiss in bed?
Maybe you never had him in the first place. Well, all right then; like the narrator in “Contortionist Ballerina” you try to make yourself small. She fits herself into a washing machine, suitcases, duffle bags. People are amused. What’s not funny about a young girl in pajamas, crying over ice cream and then regretting it? What’s not funny about compulsive gym-going or baggy clothes? Be small, be tiny; hug your knees as you balance on a ledge, under the stars alone. This is the dream. This is a better dream that the one where you lose your hair.
You have this dream because you couldn’t do something. Maybe your limbs were paralyzed by fear. Maybe you couldn’t speak any coherent words. Maybe you were caught in the web of your own experiences, stubborn hurtful feelings and the weight of time and memory. Or maybe you just wanted to drive a car. Brandi Wells will tell you. She’ll tell you about stolen wedding rings, blueberry pancakes, fucking him and fucking other people, cracked ribs and bent bones. She won’t teach you how to drive a car, but hey, you can’t have everything." - Nidya Sarria

"Brandi Wells wrote a book and I bought it. Well, the ebook version (I’m not a millionaire). I read all the words in the book on every page and when I got to the last, I was finished with the book. This is how reading works. I enjoyed this book. Throughout the small confessions, notes, lists and letters that make up the short stories of Please Don’t Be Upset, I found myself getting closer and closer to the speaker in the stories and consequently, the author. Wells’ tone always seems familiar, even familial. The voice in my head sounds like the voice of a friend.
I feel like a moron when I try to figure out what exactly it is that Wells and other women writers like her are doing so well in their short stories. I’m not some kid at a magic show trying to figure out how the tricks are done but more like a baseball fan at a game trying to figure out how the hell the pitcher can throw a ball over 100 mph or how Albert Pujols can hit the ball so damn far. Hyperbolic much? Perhaps, but the truth is that writers such as Wells leave their nerves exposed on every page. Her words are dripping with the hardest kind of honesty, a vulnerability on every line that looks you right in the eye.
Please Don’t Be Upset is from Tiny Hardcore Press. This is the second title I’ve read from them, the first being a very strong collection from everybody’s favourite pseudonym xTx entitled Normally Special. Tiny Hardcore Press is very new and very small, but there is already the feeling of a personal touch behind the titles they publish. They believe in their authors and they believe that they are providing strong contributions to the new canon of short fiction that is emerging every day through small presses and Internet journals. Brandi Wells’ book is a fine addition for the Tiny Hardcore catalogue." - Jason Lee Norman


Brandi's blog

Please don't be upset.by Brandi Wells

Deer by Brandi Wells





Poisonhorse by Brandi Wells, Nephew/Mud Luscious Press, 2012.

“Poisonhorse is not only a miracle, but one of the saddest books alive. ‘I had a Time once,’ writes Wells, ‘but I didn’t water it and it never grew.’ It is in this no growing place where dear Poisonhorse and its archivist live, punctuated by fable, philosophy, and the fierce hunger to keep what is loved breathing forever. Wells will yank your heart out, decorate it with fur and dreams, grow it more hearts, a whole tree of hearts, invite you to sit under it, and in this shade you will read this book and tremble. ” – Sabrina Orah Mark


five things i like about brandi wells' poisonhorse

1. The narrator gently poisons a companion horse. It doesn't mind all that much. In fact it sort of craves it. And long walks in the forest. Which is frighteningly, awesomely perfect.
2. Reading is for people who like to make the images move themselves. Wells' weirdly-sad-because-you've-lived-this? dreamscape of anthropomorphic anti-Neoplatanism shouts images of violent tenderness that demand Buddha-like absorption and tree-scaling adaptation. As in, "depth." As in, burrowing into the bowels of a lady who lives at the bottom of a cistern might require some special skills. As in caring about something might require eating it. As in, duh.
3. We've all felt like a severed head trapped in a bear's belly trying (with great difficulty) to make an important point to another severed head trapped in the gastrointestinal tract of a different bear who's lumbering around the same backyard. We just didn't know it 'til now.
4. The cruel and continuous torture and subjugation of rats (especially some nifty little harnesses that "squeeze their bodies too tightly, puncturing fur and skin, digging into muscles, yielding only to bone."). Yeah, I know the book's a fable and the rats in it are sort of unfortunate and defenseless pawns relegated to the wreckage of the narrator and poisonhorse's chaotic relationship but last night an actual rat with a tail as thick as a middle finger ran giddily across my shoe as I walked out of my building and I fucking hate them.
5. This:
"If my poisonhorse is a child, we are all children. If we are all children, we are horses. If we are truly horses, we must be made of poison. If our insides are acidic, rotting lumps pressed together and expanding, then we will never have the capacity to love. We are created without the necessary hollows inside and if there are accidentally hollows in us, we fill them with other things before love can take root, swell, inflate, inhabit, control. Because we are aware that love must be crushed. Eradicated." - christophervola.blogspot.com/