Robert Vaughan - A fast-moving fusion of microfiction and free verse that peers into the places where people keep things most deeply hidden

Robert Vaughan, Addicts & Basements. Civil Coping Mechanism, 2014.

www.robert-vaughan.com/

“We are vulnerable, seeking a far off space where we can find comfort in the tiny little creatures feasting on our psyches. The world we live in has, maybe, a handful of these spaces but that’s why we have books. In books, we find places to hide on every single page.”- Michael Seidlinger

"Drawing its energy from society’s underbelly—the dim corner booths of bars, the stalls of public bathrooms, the thickets of unkempt parks—Vaughan’s book is part prose poem, part fractured sonnet, part Whitmanian love-cry. 'What were your last thoughts, Ophelia?  Were / you loved enough?  Will I ever know when I am?'  When this poet speaks, we are compelled by the plaintive urgency of eros in his voice.  On the edge of a low-lit Interstate highway somewhere between Los Angeles and New York City, Addicts & Basements yawps and pivots and veers, praising its own wreckage.”—Dorianne Laux

"Robert Vaughan’s poems are peopled with painfully human characters, depicted with an unnerving authenticity and irreverent compassion. In ‘Turkey Town,’ a young man working a wedding banquet sneaks out back when the father-of-the-bride dance begins because he misses his own father: 'The cold hurt my lungs, made it hard to breathe.' In ‘The Patio,’ patrons are ‘sucking down margaritas’ and ‘gnawing chips’  at an outdoor restaurant when there’s a car crash and they become witnesses to the scene. In ‘Bonus Question,’ a woman calls into a late-night radio quiz, but instead of giving an answer, she asks, 'Will you love me?' The deejay is unmoved, but the poet says: 'Somewhere, lying in the darkness … someone who has never seen her face whispers yes.' These are poems to break your heart, but Robert Vaughan is always whispering ‘yes.’”—Ellen Bass


"Robert Vaughan is a voice I am glad to know, and his excellent debut, Addicts & Basements, is a collection full of confidence and startling complexity. Pick it up; you won’t be able to put it down.”—Gregory Sherl

A fast-moving fusion of microfiction and free verse that peers into the places where people keep things most deeply hidden.
Vaughan is quick to identify his own motivations for this project. In “Fallout,” one of the shorter flash-fiction vignettes included in this collection, he writes: “He wants to photograph the seed pods, transfixed by the way they morph while they float….He hopes to capture their essence, as if by shooting them, freezing them frame by frame, he might see his own life oozing before him, undulating like festering wounds.” Whether photographers, tourists or children, Vaughan’s narrators approach their own circumstances and feelings with a scientific attention to detail, slicing each specimen down to the thinnest membrane before studying it with a thorough, distanced objectivity, always seeking some answer and often finding something festering. What they discover is that the most powerful addictions have little to do with substances and everything to do with patterns of behavior and belief. “Basements are unsafe” since they’re where loss occurs and, worse, where truth might be found. When his wife calls him pathetic, a stumbling drunk has to admit, “The truth is we’ve been this way for so long, I think I believe her.” Another husband accuses his wife of paranoia for worrying about his revealing their camping spot to a stranger, but inwardly, he thinks, “I wasn’t willing to admit it: he creeped me out, too….I chuckled but knew she was right.” For all their seeking, the truths they find invariably turn out to be their own inadequacies: “I said: // ‘Tell me the truth.’ / And he said, ‘I don’t believe you— // to tell the truth.’ ” Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the collection is its emotional evenness. The scientific examining persists; there is little judgment, little compassion, only observation. The young woman who loses her friend on a trip and the possibly sociopathic teen threatening sexual violence share a kind of detachment bordering on a lack of affect. These attempts to examine the human animal prove to be the collection’s strength, draining though they can be. In his dissections, Vaughan uncovers an astonishing resilience, but it is often wounded and ugly. The few emotionally charged exceptions, such as “On the Wings of a Dove,” are welcome relief.

A fascinating study of human attachment and loss.  -Kirkus Reviews

Robert Vaughan explores addictions and the dark crannies of basements in his collection, Addicts & Basements, which assembles a variety of his works from flash fiction to poetry. There’s a disturbing symmetry in the obsessive nature of the characters, each piece a syringe of  distorted desire injected directly into the nerves of the brain to disrupt synaptic cohesion. Vaughan’s words act as amphetamines and depressants, a lyrical brand of verbal inhalants that capture moments, or as in the story, “Fallout,” a man “hopes to capture their essence (seed pods), as if by shooting them, freezing them frame by frame, he might see his own life oozing before him, undulating like festering wounds.” Many of the stories feature a wound, analyzed, inspected, then ripped back open. The opening story, “The Femur,” is about a strange collection of artifacts the narrator has garnered, from pubic hair given by an ex-girlfriend, to his grandfather’s titular femur. Through the recounting of his history, the femur becomes an anchor and a focal point around which his life is chained. Even as an external joint, he depends on it like a crutch, a thigh enabling locomotion: “Through the years, and multiple moves later, I’d grown attached. It was as if we shared bone. Cartilage. Nerves. Connective tissues.” His addiction is sewed into his muscles and he’d suffer an abasia without it, explaining, in part, his resistance to his wife’s attempts to get rid of it.
In the darkly humorous, “Most Popular Baby Names of 2013,” we’re treated to a list of drugs as metaphor for chemical catharsis, a salvation triggered by receptors and neurotransmitters. The nuclear family gets decimated by drugs in this witty list that is deceptively simplistic. But it’s a short scene in “Disappearance,” that makes for one of the more poignant and subtle family exchanges. A couple gets lost, asks for directions, and a simple slip by the husband about where they’re going—Rivers Glen—leads the wife to chastise her husband.
“I’m sensible. You don’t go giving personal details to complete strangers. That’s all we need. Santa Claus to show up at our fire pit.”
I chuckled but knew she was right. I stared out at the stream, packets of fog in dancing patterns, soaring off the stream, their misty shapes disappearing into sunlight.
He suffers a mix of shame, regret, defiance, and hurt pride. Perhaps he’ll get over it a minute later, perhaps it’ll linger. Through this interaction, Vaughan is expressing something most people experience every day; the little addictions, whether wanting to always be right, or petty regrets, bolstering the psyche with pylons of guilty, even if they vanish into “misty shapes” a moment later.
The bridge of a middle “&” connects to the “Basement,” and the junk and dross tossed in the subterranean cellar is more elusive, requiring more than a glance to fully absorb. Through the manifold exploration of the underground, we see there are as many basements as there are neuroses. Vaughan’s poetry follows the ladder-like structure of a maddening descent downwards as with “In the Suburbs:”

memories but
slices of carefully selected visions
flash before the pallid screen
imagining constant
visitors and beginning
short declarations
with no endings…

Cumulatively, the individual pieces are like “slices of carefully selected visions”—memories—triggered by the a trip into Vaughan’s brain. The boundaries between poetry and fiction become moot in his prose as some of the poems read like fiction and some of the flash reads like poetry. Seeing the different pieces juxtaposed next to one another feels like prying through a neighbor’s basement with a microscope on a time limit. As Vaughan bares his addictions, there’s a slight ululation in my veins: “I never thought it could happen but when he says I own your hole I thought he said heart so I leapt into the sky from a rampart we watched where they’re so gallantly strung, and a frozen custard caught in my throat. It’s just you and me he says…”

Miscommunication and misunderstanding can be another addiction, an albatross dictating the invisible creeds we often cling to. Age, time, desire, lust, and a cacophony of suppressed urges are intimated at in, “The Lost and Erasable Parts of Us: “My identity tied up in a bottle. I craved my smell back, my decency, my shameless will. I grew gills, slithered up the stairs, fettered away, toward some desert city, in undulating waves.” When identity is so intertwined with a bottle, an addiction, or a basement, it’s easy to get lost. In Vaughan’s symphony, those weaknesses are a path back to self-discovery, a melody, however distorted, to guide listeners up into revelation. This isn’t a AAA meeting though as addictions lead to other addictions and there’s no permanent egress, only leaps into oblivion. I’m a Robert Vaughan junkie now. You can find me drowning in his basement. - Peter Tieryas Liu

His first poetry collection, Addicts & Basements has no biographical information, but its witty and moving poems and prose pieces speak for themselves. The Addicts section has many short scenes from imagined lives, often seamy and poignant. The “&” section is a miscellany of short poems with stand-outs among them: “On the Wings of a Dove” (for Matthew Shepard) and “Seven Shades of James.” The Basements section has short fiction mixed in with a few poems. All of these works are original, thought-provoking, and heart-felt. The line between poetry and prose is highly permeable in this gifted writer’s hands. Vaughan leads writing roundtables at Red Oak Writing in Milwaukee. - Will Stotts, Jr

Robert Vaughan – Conversation No. 8

excerpt:
issuu.com/ccmpress/docs/ccmexcerpt2/3?e=6750357/6412882

Gauze, A Medical Dressing, A Scrim

Gauze

When they converted the basement into his room, Billy was too young to know any differently. He just wanted his own space, didn’t want to share it with his five older siblings anymore. Then when he was around ten, he stopped eating dinner with the rest of the family. His mother placed his dinner plate on the top stair every night. In exchange he only communicated by notes he’d send or receive by pulley-pails through the laundry drop.

A Medical Dressing

One time when Ethyl, the family dachshund, accidentally ventured downstairs, she was never seen again. Same for one sister, Darla, who thought she’d left a sweater atop the laundry machine. Disappeared. Eventually Billy was indistinguishable from any basement dweller, resembling the spider realm. Webs. Gossamer silver. Detecting vibrations, lurking toward eventual prey.
The family nearly forgot he existed.

A Scrim

Then one day while folding laundry, his mother noticed a note and she decided to read it aloud to the rest of the children at dinner that night: Here is your stormy day, the one with pressing clouds and chilling breeze. Here is your way you fall in step, synchronize laughs and moderate beliefs, acclimatize moods and medications. Here, then your last vestige of blue sky and fortitude. A mélange of mercurial designations. Bastion of sailboats emptying out horizons.

They all craned their necks toward the basement.

Flip of a Coin

Tails:

The first time he admitted to himself that they were really leaving, really traveling a full day, more or less, twenty-three hours if everything went as planned, was a week before they left when he said, as if propelled by molecules: I’m going to India. But he was at work, in his basement corner cubicle, so he just dialed the next number on his list and asked for Mrs. Matthews in accounts payable. When she said hello, he blurted I’m going to India. There was a long pause, then she said I thought this was India, as if one can speak to an entire country. And in that instant he realized he’d been lumping everyone that he’d ever met into a huge sack of shit, a burlap bag that smothered him before he’d left the womb.

Heads:

Which then made him think hard, deeply, furiously about this we he was a part of, this leaving, traveling caravan called family, this trip that was charted, booked, the every move determined with reservations, drivers, escorts, tour buses. How had he come to this? Always a nomad, a bedouin, he’d traversed lunar landscapes and spelunked into the anus of linked caves of the indian southwest, surviving solely on tar and nicotine. Okay, some cannibus. Man was his nemesis, so the idea of this unit, this we, suddenly made him feel noxious. He fled the basement law offices and ran through the winding streets, destination happily unknown.

Most Popular Baby Names of 2013

Boys:

Aspon, Belt, CD 68, Chlordan, Chlorindan, Chlor-Kil, Chlorotox, Corodane, Cortilan, Dowchlor, Gold Crest C-100, HCS 3260, Intox, Kilex, Kypchlor, M-140, Niran, Octachlor, Oktaterr, Ortho-Klor, Penticklor, Prentox, Starchlor, Sydane, Synklor, Tat Chlor 4, Termex, Topichlor, Toxichlor, Unexan-Koeder, Velsicol 1068

Girls:
Adlehydes, Alcohol, 
Aluminum, 
Arsenic, 
Benzene, 
Cadium, 
Chlordane, 
Chlorinated Dibenzo-p-dioxin (CDDs), 
Chlorine, 
Copper, 
Dioxins, 
Ethylene Glycol, Formaldehyde, 
Freons, 
Hexachlorobenzene, 
Iodine, 
Jet Fuels, 
Lead, 
Malathion, Mercury, 
Metal Dusts, 
Methanol, 
Methyl Parathion, 
Mold 
PBBs & PBDEs, 
PBCs, Pharmaceuticals, 
Pyridine, 
Selenium, 
Styrene,
Sulfites, Vinyl Chloride

The Femur

When my ex Fed-Exed me a small box of her pubic hairs it ranked right up there among the strangest things I’d ever received in the mail. But the oddest was my grandfather’s femur. I was away at college when he passed. Shoved in front of a train by his third wife while visiting Berlin. My mother’s theory.

Then Dad decided to send along the package. When I opened it, I wasn’t quite certain if it was a joke. No note, no return address. Just the bone, suspended and fused inside a rectangular plastic frame, like a tarantula my kid sister had. I placed it on my dorm room closet shelf.

Through the years, and multiple moves later, I’d grown attached. It was as if we shared bone. Cartilage. Nerves. Connective tissues. It was what prompted me to pursue forensics, and I’d tote it, not an easy task, to my yoga classes, or to weekly seminars in Vegas. Cradle it at night, the smooth surface reassuring, hum ourselves to sleep.

After I got married, my wife begged me to get rid of it, wouldn’t listen when I pleaded with her to let it stay. She said it was too creepy. Really? What she doesn’t know is that I snuck it under the mattress, above the box spring on my side of our bed. And I can feel it, every time I lie down, growing.

Six Glimpses of the Uncouth

Street: 1:34 a.m.

His raincoat was splattered with light spots of splayed dirt. The books behind him in the broken shop window were scattered and scarce. It was much later I recalled both his hands stayed in his pockets the entire time we made out. He was groping me through the jacket. Hands like clubs. It was diverse and hazy, like the winter was shedding.

House: 3:40 a.m.

Back at his place, he made me watch these home movies of some unknown person’s life. At first I kept wondering why, who is this, what are we doing? But then I felt privileged, like it was something exotic. A peacock. Then that made me excited. The wilderness stretched out forever; just you and me. And a prescription to keep the hounds at bay.

Statues: Monday

That week he asked me to meet him on the corner of 12^th and Lafayette. On the steps of the huge statue of Gilgamesh. He brought Jean Genet’s play, “The Maids,” and when we read it aloud, he used more than ten different voices. I was amazed, like the first time you realize the tooth fairy is just another lie. Or that big girls don’t cry.

Dancing Queen: Valentine’s Day

We all ran around the back yard playing a home-made game, crazy valentine. And you acted like nothing left. We all ran all around. Susie had hers off completely, Danny poured beer all over us, Fern screamed so loud she spit. The back yard, running around. “Crazy Valentine.” And you lit my hair on fire. Poof, that acrid smell. It was really fun.

Iraq: 1987

After you left for another war, I went looking for him or for traces of him, like a correspondent, like a common genie looking for its self. I wore a uniform of the northern people so I would blend in with Susie, April and Fern. You went AWOL when I ripped my shirt off because of the spilled beer, Fern lent me her shawl. And we couldn’t find you.

Garage: 12:34 today


Another day at work. Phone call, meet me at the garage. I did. Scary because it had been decades, another lifetime. Then you walked in, raincoat still a mess. Talking gibberish and mumbling this and that. Pacing like a panda behind bars. We went walking and cast a pall over the shed skins of the misfortunate. What did I do to make you do the things you did.

Hummingbirds

The day is carved out like a pumpkin, slit open for visitors. My question is when am I perfect, and will you be looking the other way? Here is a sparrow bone to stand in for me. Carry it like the look you gave me when you wanted me naked in meadows under the meteorites.
Tonight we miss the moment to marry, the ring slipping into an imperceptible freedom as we spiral into our own potential. Why do you say it’s too dangerous? It’s like any slide, like any roller-coaster, you’re strapped in, here we are hands- free, watch me! What is danger anyhow?
Over breakfast this morning, Dana told me hummingbirds represent the number eight, infinity. Their wings flapping so quickly they create this symbol. They dart, and dance and one even perched on an inert limb. I told her I’d heard a story once in which a hummingbird went crazy on an intruder. Within a second, poked both his eyes out.

We’ve been here before, you and me, haven’t we? The first time we danced in a fist of a writhing crowd. The first time we kissed in a bowl of neglect. If we could take into consideration how many lives our thoughts and actions impact? Now I know I see you everywhere as if you’ve flown away, and looped back a hundred times.



Robert Vaughn, Diptychs + Triptychs + Lipsticks + Dipshits. Deadly Chaps Press, 2013.

issuu.com/deadlychaps/docs/rv_diptychs.issuu?e=0/6220972

“Vaughan compresses human love and behavior with great precision, evoking people and places with language and images full of wonderment and heartbreak. This book is a marvel, with lines so sharp you will find yourself wanting to return to them often.”-Brandon Hobson

“With singular vision and the perfect, skewed geometry of his prose, Robert Vaughan gifts his readers with fiction that reads like the best possible mash-up of David Lynch and Wes Anderson. A smart, profound, risk-taker of a collection not to be missed.”- Kathy Fish

“Echoes all over the place, resounding in on itself. An addictive, meditative read, often jarring and way huge thought provoking. Often, I felt like the ‘narrators’ were characters from Blue Velvet. Dennis Hopper and his tank of gas. A piece of ear found in a field. Loved the tone, pace and sharpness of this book. I’ll be reading this yearly alongside Jesus’ Son, does it’s own thing, but reminded me of what my favorite pieces of literature made me feel the first time I discovered them. Small press perfection.”- Bud Smith


Looking through a catalog of books last week this title caught my eye: “Secrets to Drawing Realistic Faces”. I wondered what kind of book would have the title, “Secrets to Drawing Unrealistic Faces”. It was one of those little mental jolts, a burst of electricity, a drop of pleasure that enlivens me. I used this energy to write a poem.
My mind may not have moved in that direction had I not been reading Robert Vaughan’s new book of microfictions, Diptychs + Triptychs + Lipsticks + Dipshits, published by Deadly Chaps. He skewed my view of the world, thus freshening my vision. In short he inspired me, and this is what art is supposed to do.
History
Ever since Kafka claimed that Robert Walser was one of his favorite writers, more and more readers of fiction have turned a curious eye on this singular character. And as web-based reading has caused the genre of flash fiction to flourish, Walser has emerged as its patron saint. Weird little things of prose, not quite story or poem—or maybe both—proliferate in contemporary literary journals. But as in every genre, the reader will find a wide range in quality. Microfiction (a term I prefer to “flash fiction”) presents unique challenges to the writer. First of all, writing is not about putting the words down, just as writer’s block is not about lacking words to say. Language is a vast ocean of possibilities. Writing is about erasure, that is, of the endless possibilities swimming before the pen, putting its point down on just the right ones. Writer’s block is the inability to choose. Perfection in writing is all about choice. If writing were not about erasure then anyone could be a writer, because running off at the mouth is the easiest thing to do. This very paragraph is racing perilously close to proving that.
For my taste, Vaughan’s stories are among the most colorful, pleasing, surprising and delightful in the current world of microfiction. There are indeed diptychs and triptychs in the volume, as well as stories of up to ten parts, painted like Picassos and stacked like Judds, handsomely composed artifices decorated with cinematic flourishes.
A list of words that come to mind while reading Diptychs + Triptychs + Lipsticks + Dipshits
Acrobatic
American
Blunt
Brilliant
Funny
Pop
Surreal
Weird
Wicked
Some of my favorites
I wonder if Robert Vaughan was a visual artist in a former life. Like Donald Barthelme (who was a curator for a gallery and whose father was an architect), one can almost see the words in his stories as building blocks—many-colored—carefully placed together, creating vivid modernist images (and like Barthelme he is very funny and has a knack for names, e.g. dogs named “Paprika” and “Perry”). In the diptych Black & White/Color, shapes, spaces and movement collide in a slideshow journey to unknown places. Contrasts compliment this piece in which the unknown is first to be dreaded and second to be embraced.
Common Password Profile Users: God, Love Lust, Money and Private samples bits from the Star Spangled Banner and contains one of Vaughan’s most memorable lines: “He’s been burned so many times he’s crispy.” It is also a story that utilizes the techniques of word personification and contrast-and-compare, the final portion of which illustrates that Vaughan can be poignant in addition to being funny:

Those first days back. Horrible insomnia. 2 a.m. in their guest room, night sweats, bombs bursting in mid-air attacks. No proof, except those hacked memories he wishes he could erase. But he can’t. He opens the adjacent bedside table, retrieves his dogtags. Cradles them in his palm.

One of my favorites refers to the Occupy Movement. The brilliant An Occupy Trifecta is a diptych rather than a triptych, which struck me as odd at first. The piece moves sentence-by-sentence, line-by-line, like a poem (why not call it a poem?), advancing maybe, maybe not. It evokes the somber attitude of a vigil, the pensive mood of a freedom march, in which one knows why one is there but the outcome, connected as it is to so many forces and factors outside an individual’s power to grasp, is unknown. “All of the planets,” Vaughan writes, “seek to sway you to their course.” But

I’m seeing the flaming gate that holds back the other half of existence. We all do.
I burn my hands trying to open it.
I will open it.

In this determination, Vaughan writes, “You have just been born.” Ah, but those planets. When “Your nature is torn like waves in a discordant sea” and the whole thing threatens to devolve, what is left but to

Take my hand before the wind blows you from the rampart.
In a time of revolution, love is the only way forward.

Prayer, Protest, Peace continues that theme. It is a story/poem about yearning for a condition of love, and again Vaughan evokes a sense of human weakness in the face of one’s best efforts. For me, these two pieces are the most beautiful in the collection. They share a characteristic that I love in my favorite paintings. A painting is finished because the painter has stopped, a moment has been frozen, but the movement, the fluidity of the paint lingers in that snapshot. The best paintings are a perfect tension between a sense of completeness and fluidity. In addition there is always a window out of the composition. Something is uncertain, unfinished, open. Robert Vaughan is able to do this with his curious little word things.
Ah, but who are the dipshits?
The final story in the collection, Gauze, a Medical Dressing, a Scrim is a little but creepy, but in a funny way. A kid named Billy refuses to leave his room in the basement. Strange and unsettling things happen. For example the family dog and one of Billy’s sisters disappear and over time Billy himself is nearly forgotten. Then one day a note from the basement arrives, and it reads, strangely, like one of Robert Vaughan’s stories. The family “all craned their necks toward the basement.”

Maybe we’re all dipshits if we can’t have a sense of humor about ourselves. And, fuck it, maybe even if we do. Anyway, Bobby—I mean Robert Vaughan’s first full-length collection is just around the corner and it happens to be titled, Addicts & Basements. Can’t wait to get my copy. - Mark Kerstetter

If mathematics and numerology try to bring quantified order to the madness of existence, Robert Vaughan’s  Diptychs + Triptychs + Lipstick  + Dipshits (Deadly Chaps, 2013), takes huge steps in deciphering the equation of human emotion. Numbers play a key role in these pieces that blend the boundaries between poetry, flash fiction, and numbers. A triptych is defined as: “work of art (usually a panel painting) that is divided into three sections, or three carved panels which are hinged together and can be folded shut or displayed open.” There are variations on themes in the pieces that spur artistic conviction, sometimes playful, other times meditative. Each piece is full of senses, smells, sounds, and glimmers that intimate pain and joy and the entropy of longing. In “Three For Carol,” Vaughan writes:

“When the conversation evaporates, perhaps it’s like the clouds vanishing before the dominance of the sun. When words fail, stay.”

“The dance has hands that reach into us like hunger. Where did you go after we burst against each other? I hear waterfalls,taste saffron, touch elephants. This is how you left me, as night crashes down and the never heard song begins to play.”

The Diptychs are songs we’ve never heard but swear we know, the tune that haunts us even if it is brand new. There’s a familiarity as Vaughan enunciates the inexpressible, the guilt and anger and sorrow we’ve all been conflicted and torn by.

“Hexagon of Life” makes geometric arc lengths of love: “Love is beautiful. Okay, the physical grind, that savory stupor. But some of love was hideous.” And in “Betrayal,” “You could have eviscerated me; removed my innards. I’d have been better off. Blood lets pain subside. Death lurks, slithering in familiar shadows.”

Just when we think we know what Vaughan is saying, he presents a different angle, playing with the shadows, the lights in the form of diction, and then another perspective, and another, the prose facets taking on a troubling familiarity. Even regret leaves lipstick stains we wish others wouldn’t see. Vaughan exposes us and makes us want to hide, then scream, “Flip the page, dipshit.” - Peter Tieryas Liu

Diptychs + Triptychs + Lipsticks + Dipshits by Robert Vaughan was a bit of a puzzle for me at first. I’ve read a couple short pieces by Vaughan before, but I’m still fairly new to his work. Those who know him well as a senior flash fiction editor at JMWW or Lost in Thought and/or as the author of the chapbook Microtones (his first full length book, Addicts and Basements, is forthcoming in February 2014) might be slightly more prepared to know what they were holding in their hands. As for me, I just felt my way along and pondered.
I heard some people describe Diptychs + Triptychs + Lipsticks + Dipshits as micro fiction, though others described it as a mixture of micro fiction and poetry. I’m hesitant to go with either description because I just don’t think it’s that clear.
I’m not the most familiar with micros, but if that’s what these are then Vaughan seems to pioneer his own version of the form, if not his own form entirely. Let’s consider “MOVING TO LOS ANGELES: A SCREENPLAY IN THREE ACTS.” In a section labeled “First Act” we are introduced to a character going to L.A. to complete a screenplay about JOE and LIS, “lovers who eat each other, part by part until there is no ‘other’ left.” In the “Second Act,” we find out that JOE is:

a perfect fuckhead. He’s seeing three other women (all named for European cities, like Sofia) and lies to them all. He’s also a sodomizer, and fronts a band that gets five or ten people to a gig. So, he’s getting fucked, too. JOE figures we all are.

Rounding things out, the “Third Act” tells us that “JOE uses the restroom, never returns” and “LIS catches a Cubs pop fly in her gaping mouth,” causing her suffocate. This is a drastic simplification of the piece, but what it shows certainly doesn’t have the same feel or proceed about things in the same way that I’ve seen in the usual micro fiction I know.
For one thing, there is some of the poem about “MOVING TO LOS ANGELES: A SCREENPLAY IN THREE ACTS.”  The three acts, the symmetry in the portions and the way they play off each other and morph elements as the piece progresses, bear a great deal of resemblance to sections of a poem. Many of the pieces have a poetic structure, the “Diptychs” and “Triptychs” portion of the title being descriptive of some of the contents though quite a few pieces are neither. By way of example, “COMMON PASSWORD PROFILE USERS: GOD, LOVE, LUST, MONEY AND PRIVATE” has portions that jump off from each of the five most commonly used passwords:

Lust:
What the hell kind of a name is Penfield? She wonders while he takes a leak off the back porch. She leans to se fresh bruises in the dawn’s early light. She rolls too far, ends up on the bamboo-planked floor, giggling. Creepy-crawls under the bed to dial 911 on her mobile phone.

However, though having poetic elements, the works in Diptychs + Triptychs + Lipsticks + Dipshits also don’t exactly remind me that much of most poetry I’ve seen. I’m certainly not a poetry expert by any means. I read somewhere around twenty or thirty books of poetry a year, which I think is more than average but not as much as a serious devotee. Regardless, consider “PART OF LIFE: TWO WAYS.” Sections of this work contrast a child’s view of her dad when her teacher releases a “deformed creature” with that of her mother’s view of the same event. In “Dad” we have: “Part of life, I heard Dad say for the millionth time. Just like mom’s lymphoma.” However, “Mom” relates: “The creature didn’t stir, not a peep. I started to salivate. Would it taste better with cumin or cardamom?” Poem? I’m not sure.
I mean, “Dad” is structured in lines perhaps like a poem, but “Mom” is a solid paragraph. Is it a poem mixing stanzas and prose poetry? Is “Mom” just a single long stanza asymmetrical to the pretty much one-line stanzas of “Dad?” As I mentioned, I’m not a poetry expert. Regardless, it seems to me to have an interesting structure when I look at it as a poem.
To me, it almost seems like Vaughan applies poetic techniques to micro fiction writing, resulting in prose that feels a little more on the fiction side but has a fundamental underlying approach that smacks more of poetry. Still, it isn’t something I can completely pin down. Frankly, the word “Stories” on the cover is really the best description, as each definitely conveys a full story via what seems like brush stoke suggestions (this example from “BLACK & WHITE/COLOR”):

I got stuck in a cul-de-sac. The first thing I lost was my glasses, so everything was a smudge, blurred together like rotten trash. In the first house on the circle, a woman was playing Chopin. Her left hand crossed over her right during the allegro section and she nodded with her head to sit down. But I chose her kitchen hoping to find some butterscotcheroos or chex mix, or a ripe avocado at the very least. Came up empty. The next house was topsy turvey: too messy; the third I shipped because if you can’t leave your lights on for wayfarers, then you deserve to be ignored. The fourth house, a Colonial, had a nice built-in pool around back, so I took a quick dip, swam a few laps before I’d realized I’d swam under the foundation and was in a basement dungeon. I fled up the stairs but the door was locked. It took me forever to get out of that place with my bare hands.

I realize that I’ve spent the vast majority of this review just trying to pin down exactly what Diptychs + Triptychs + Lipsticks + Dipshits is. Perhaps it doesn’t really matter as long as one digs the pieces, which I do. However, when writing is this adventurous in form, I don’t think you can adequately consider it without looking a great deal at the form. I can’t help it; the form of the pieces fascinates.
Personally, I would classify Diptychs + Triptychs + Lipsticks + Dipshits as something that is challenging to define but gratifying to experience. There are certainly leaps and turns that by themselves make the book worth looking at for their wildness. It may not take a long time to sit down and read, but that one sitting is by no means the end of a reader’s engagement. Echoes linger long after the actual sound that caused them is gone. - David S. Atkinson



Robert Vaughn, Microtones. Cervena Barva Press, 2013.

'After reading Robert Vaughan’s Microtones over the period of several days, I am still uncovering new facets. As befitting a series of poems that take us through the sometimes gritty and always exasperating story of a family, the perspective is always shifting. The poems thrive on confusion combined with temporary insights that seldom lead to permanent awareness. Vaughan knows that the deepest mysteries are often buried in what at first appear to be moments of revelation.' -- Literary Orphans

'Robert Vaughan sucks us into his luminous vortex with guts, humor and grit. Microtones is as much about transcendence as falling. Vaughan blasts through the subterfuge of the unsaid and lets us "face gravity head-on." This is a fearless, unparalleled collection reminiscent of Lydia Davis that takes us on a "free fall" of a ride we want to jump back on over and over again. Read it!' -- Meg Tuite


"Hip, rousing, and utterly winning, Microtones reveals Robert Vaughan as a sly master of concision, a nimble ringmaster of short-takes and X-ray-savvy mini-portraits. Buoyant, brimming with clear-eyed humor ("I have a bachelor of arts in folding laundry") and a larkish cinema verité candor, leavened with small gusts of compassion and social acumen, this is a chapbook Frank O'Hara would have loved."
—Cyrus Cassells, author of The Crossed-Out Swastika


"Robert Vaughan sucks us into his luminous vortex with guts, humor and grit. Microtones is as much about transcendence as falling. Vaughan blasts through the subterfuge of the unsaid and lets us "face gravity head-on." This is a fearless, unparalleled collection reminiscent of Lydia Davis that takes us on a "free fall" of a ride we want to jump back on over and over again. Read it!"—Meg Tuite, author of Domestic Apparition

If you’ve ever heard Robert Vaughan read, you’ll know that sound plays a critical role in creating the texture and substance of his work. Vaughan’s first chapbook, Microtones—another is scheduled for publication this summer—is a collection of twenty-four moments of sound, of speakers caught up in the dissonance and consonance of memory. Together these tones form a story and a familial history—one might even say, to steal a line from Vaughan’s ‘Elements of K,’ “an entire family, harmonizing like the Van Trapps.”
And they are intimate treatments of these families’ microhistories, many of which are devoted to fathers and mothers. It would be an oversimplification to say these pieces are elegiac; but it is not stretching to say mothers hold a more comfortable place in the speakers’ memories than fathers do, the latter often characterized as stolid (‘When the Time Comes’), cold and pragmatic (‘Part of Life: Two Ways’), missing (‘My Bicycle’) or drunk (‘Wrestling with Genetics’). It is important, at least in my opinion, to see that ‘Wrestling with Genetics,’ the last piece in the chapbook, finally puts father and son in the same text as adults—and finally the son wrestles not only genetics but also memory to the ground . . . and takes the keys. I like this.
Reading Microtones as one story in which the characters, while inhabiting different worlds, represent archetypal opposites of Mother/Father, Lover/Abuser, but also Consciousness and all forms of Death (disappearance, absence, escape, separation, etc.) is like listening to a ballad with a rich harmonic structure—of course all of this in miniature. When I think of the collection in this way, I keep coming back to Vaughan’s image of the entire family harmonizing in the car. This is a rare, major chord in a story that strikes mostly darker tones.
In ‘Legacy’ we are briefly shown a photograph of a girl, a family member, and told that her death is her own fault, damaging to the family, contagious and stupid. In ‘When the Time Comes’ a father tells a similar story about a boy in the news. “The children should have known better” resonates here and elsewhere, sounding more like a comment on the adult than the child. Similarly, in ‘My Bicycle’ responsibility is shifted to the child since the father is missing. This prose poem is possibly about sexual abuse, possibly about a positive sexual encounter with a stranger. Regardless of which, the missing father is the acciaccatura for the sexual encounter—as if its mere and brief mention at the beginning sets up, and somehow explains, the story of the camper.

In terms of physical arrangement, many of these pieces are positioned so that they exist across the page in dialogue with a piece that treats a similar or at least complementary theme. A good example of this: ‘The Upswing of Falling’ and ‘Levitation,’ both about romantic relationships, the former ending, the latter in the throes of passion. I find this opposition, this balance pleasing. - Christopher Allen


In music, microtones represent intervals that are smaller than the traditional semitones of Western music. In that sense, they mark that which falls outside our conventional categorisations. In a similar vein, Microtones, Robert Vaughan’s début chapbook from Červená Barva Press, focuses on the interstitial, whether this involves capturing emotions that cannot be boiled down to one-word descriptions, or blurring the lines between poetry and prose. Or as the Harry Partch epigraph to Microtones puts it, ‘This is my trinity: sound-magic, visual beauty, experience-ritual.’ Gathering together a number of works that have already seen publication in literary journals alongside new pieces, it makes for a handy introduction for newcomers to Vaughan’s work.
The chapbook opens with ‘Outlaw’, a piece that compellingly demonstrates how Vaughan’s language is able to grasp and convey our inner psychological complexity:
‘I slice my pinkie while he watches me chop carrots in his kitchen.
He’s told me endless reasons why moving in would benefit Starr and me.
He’s a good man. Wouldn’t hurt us. I know this, I believe him. But my scars run deep.’
That opening image of injury carries over into ‘my scars run deep’, which already sets up a tension between giving emotional commitment just one more try and thinking that it cannot be worth the risk. The shortest line of the piece, ‘This curmudgeon’ acquires a level of ambiguity because of this. Is it a term of endearment, the sort of half-joking insult that is born from familiarity? Or does it bear genuine criticism, even a degree of self-loathing that ‘this outlaw’ is the person ‘who makes you laugh’ most? By the end, it seems that resignation has set in too: ‘I watch my future run down the drain.’ So there is a lot of emotion packed into this piece of writing that totals less than 100 words.
Elsewhere in Microtones, Vaughan also displays his humorous side. In ‘Part of Life: Two Ways’, the reader is treated to two perspectives of a single event, with the humour arising from the resultant discrepancy. Consider the difference between ‘The teacher released the deformed creature’ and ‘The teacher let the deformed creature go’. While both might seem equally neutral, the latter becomes inflected with regret when the final lines of its section read, ‘The creature didn’t stir, not a peep. I started to salivate. Would it taste better with cumin or cardamom?’ In ‘Bed’, Vaughan derives a sort of bathetic humour from lines like ‘I have a bachelor of arts in folding laundry. I’m certifiable in the tai chi of scrubbing china’, while mixing in some double entendres for good measure: ‘Escort Sammy the sword swallower to church each Sunday’, ‘Each prick a museum piece’.

Whether he is writing about a man who cannot feel anything in his left leg and ‘nearly passes out, not from the pain, but from the lack of pain’ (‘Sometimes He Feels Like It’s Numb’), or two ex-military women pregnant by the same now-deceased man, one telling the other not to smoke (‘Buried’), or a man mourning his father, who ‘just this time, […] won’t barrel down a back road at one hundred miles an hour, straight into the side of a quarrelsome train’ (‘Wrestling with Genetics’), Vaughan’s particular gift is for clarifying the pathos in extraordinary things happening to ordinary people. That he succeeds in doing this by balancing brevity and levity demonstrates a mastery of short-form poetry and flash fiction that shows how length is by no means a prerequisite for achieving depth in one’s writing. - Ian Chung

 Andree Robinson-Neal
There are occasions when reading flash fiction is much akin to eating a gourmet meal: the initial taste is not what is important but rather the underlying flavor, the notes and hints of what makes the recipe special. Robert Vaughan’s Microtones, recently released by Červená Barva Press, offers up tightlywound, fast hitting flash stories and poetry that tackle the intricacies of relationships—between lovers, friends, neighbors, family members, as well as between the conflicted parts of a single individual—in a style that is more than linguistic. Beneath the surface of each offering is an underlying mixture of pain, surprise, angst, and discomfort that pop onto the reader’s palette unexpectedly. His combination of imagery must be savored and explored; this work is not for a singular read but rather must be explored from various angles. Joe nearly passes out, not from the pain, but from the lack of pain. He can barely stand it (“Sometimes He Feels Like It’s Numb”).
Microtones clearly showcases Vaughan’s love of the arts in that he deftly combines his inspirations within its pages. He suggests that although he has been writing and harboring a love of reading since he was young, music was a first love that still serves as muse. There is a lyricism that comes through his poetry (“Semaphores,” “Before and After,” “Legacy”) and in the ebb and flow of the stories as well.  When the trees flamed, I split, like leaves, one limb, then another. My heart was last to go (“Summer of ’66”).
It takes those not faint of heart to taste unfamiliar fare and occasionally such forays into the unknown yield enjoyable surprises. Each page in this collection offer revelations that reveal the plethora of Vaughan’s motivations; the power of his passion for writing is evident and his prose has been sharpened through the support of his writing and public reading community. He is unafraid to tackle tough subject matter, such as the juxtaposition of pregnancy and war (“Buried”), issues of health and illness (“Part of Life: Two Ways,” “A, B, C”), and the kaleidoscope of addictions (“Wrestling with Genetics,” “Recollection”).

This is Vaughan’s first published collection. - Andree Robinson-Neal

'I read Robert Vaughn's Microtones while sitting halfway up a mountain in Connecticut. At first, this detail seemed insignificant; I read books all the time while sitting along West Rock's trap-rock ridge. (I'm currently unemployed. So.) But, as I read on, I found a possible parallel between my experiences hiking through New England and Vaughn's work. And I’m not just talking about the fact that the cover of Microtones features an empty bench atop a mountain. ...
'This is where the tension lies in Microtones, that battle between the competing (and very human) forces of existentialism and optimism. Take the poem 'Turbidity,' which begins like this:
Holidays are hard:
I'm going to take
a walk, escape the
silence of this house

I was never home,
home on the range
hospital corners are still
"beats me?"
'It's a somewhat bleak start--the holidays prove to be difficult because the poem's speaker is isolated in some way, and in fact, always has been. But Vaughn isn't one to drop in some darkness and then hightail it. The poem's final line is this: 'There's something I forgot.' It’s a miniature detail but it injects a small bit of optimism into the piece. The sentence seems to imply that there is still something left. In saying 'There's something I forgot,' as opposed to 'Something has been forgotten,' hope lingers, at least for a little bit, the hope that the ‘something’ may be found.
'More than anything else, Microtones is an understated meditation on isolation, which I think comes as a result of that tension between despair and hope. Specifically, mentions of death are met with the idea that death, no matter the circumstance, is somehow the fault of the fallen. This seems like the highest form of isolation. ...
'Vaughn, if anything, is refreshing in his consistency. Microtones is a balanced and focused work and one that calls for multiple reads. Its true strength lies not necessarily in what's on the page, but in the place where Vaughn’s words and ideas take you.' -- Jake Goldman, The Small Press Review

Podcast: Robert Vaughn interviewed about 'Microtones'

Meg Tuite interviews Robert Vaughan for Counterexample Poetics

Excerpts

Wrestling with Genetics

The sports gene I get from my dead father. He returns to me now as a scent. Waterlogged leaves. He's the tetherball attached to my pole, the flying trapeze of my soul. He runs a bar tab higher than a kite then turns to me and says let's hit the road, son. And when I argue with him about the keys, he says that's a bunch of horseshit. But then I bluff: I know he's an accident waiting to happen. I can see his ailing pickled heart sitting in a laboratory glass jar on a top shelf too high to reach. I wrestle him to the ground, grab the keys, load Dad into the back seat. And for once, just this time, he won't barrel down a back road at one hundred miles an hour, straight into the side of a quarrelsome train.

Legacy

An observer would have
thought her unsuited
for that frame.

I wondered why my
parents kept the photo on
the piano. She’d died over

ten years ago. Died on her
own, by her own stupidity.
A visitor would have

thought her adorable,
precocious, serene.
Unable to see the contagious

recklessness. Unable to see
the damage she inflicted.
How my family came undone.

I slip her photo into
the desk drawer. Underneath
a stack of report cards.

Robert Vaughan, Flash Fiction Fridays. lulu.com, 2012.

Flash Fiction Friday is a monthly radio program aired on WUWM's Lake Effect in Milwaukee, WI. Each month host Robert Vaughan selects local writers who come in, do a quick flash interview and read their flash fiction piece on the air. Then, Robert reads a national writer's piece and ties the two together with a theme that he discusses with his co-host, Stephanie Lecci. After doing this every month in 2011, Vaughan decided to create an anthology to honor the writers who shared their work on the radio program. Writers include Meg Tuite, Sheldon Lee Compton, Susan Gibb, Len Kuntz, Julie Innis, Sam Rasnake, Susan Tepper, Joani Reese, Christopher Allen, Sara Lippmann and many more.