Kyle Coma-Thompson & Tristan Foster, 926
Years, Sublunary Editions, 2020
Through twenty-two linked stories, Tristan Foster and Kyle
Coma-Thompson explore the creative potential of people's native
estrangement from themselves and each other. Two writers who have
never met, who live on opposite sides of the globe--one in Australia,
the other in the United States--tracking the pattern of probable
lives and fates that co-exist between them, from Korea to England,
Senegal to Argentina. Their conclusion/suspicion: imagination is
stronger, and subtler, than God, and offers more than mere
consolation for the difficulties of living.
"The intimate, globe-spanning microportraits of human crisis in
926 Years are at once sobering and uplifting, clarifying and
mystifying. Tristan Foster and Kyle Coma-Thompson's collaboration is
a nonpareil of short-form virtuosity." —Gari Lutz
"Entering the world of '926 Years' was really exciting because
it felt like anything could happen in these stories. Together, Kyle
Coma-Thompson and Tristan Foster have created sharp, seamless prose
that guided me through these inventive, unexpected stories full of
images that will stay with me long after reading." —Chelsea
Hodson
926 Years is a collaboration between Kyle Coma-Thompson and Tristan
Foster. The book consists of 22 stories, each a paragraph long, and
each paragraph no longer than the front and back of a 4.5″ x 7″
page. Each story is titled after a character plus the character’s
age (e.g. “Chaplain Blake, age 60”; “Sebastian, age 30”;
“Marty Fantastic, age 81”). (I have not done the math to see if
all the ages add up to 926.) Although the characters never meet in
the book’s prose, key sentences suggest that they may be connected
via the reader’s imagination.
Indeed, the blurb on the back of 926 Years describes the book as
“twenty-two linked stories.” After reading it twice, I don’t
see 926 Years so much as a collection of connected tales, but rather
as a kind of successful experimental novel, a novel that subtly and
reflexively signals back to its own collaborative origin.
Coma-Thompson lives in Louisville, Kentucky and Foster lives in
Sydney, New South Wales. They’ve never met in person. And yet they
share a common language, of course, and other common cultural forces
surely shape their prose. (Melville’s Ishmael refers to Australia
as “That great America on the other side of the sphere” in Ch. 24
of Moby-Dick.)
The book’s prose offers a consistency to the apparently
discontinuous narrative pieces that comprise 926 Years. My first
assumption was that Coma-Thompson and Foster traded narratives, but
as I read and re-read, the prose’s stylistic consistency struck me
more as a work of synthesis, of two writers tuning to each other and
humming a new frequency. The sentences of 926 Years are predominantly
short, and often fall into fragmentation, or elide their grammatical
subject. Here’s an example from “Shelley Valentine, age 34”:
A
flare of sansho pepper on the tongue tip. Catch the tree at the right
time of year and the fruit bursts, raining peppercorns down. Maybe
like the season when pistachios open, the night snapping like broken
locust song. Used for seasoning eel. Sansho leaves for garnishing
fish. Clap it between the hands for aroma, make a wish, the finishing
touch to the perfect soup. In Korea, the unripe fruit was used for
fishing. Poisonous to the smallest ones. That was cheating wasn’t
it? Or was pulling up the fish all that mattered?
Eventually we can attribute these fragmented thoughts to Shelley
Valentine, now well out of her magic twenties, drinking
sansho-peppered gin and tonics in a “New bar, same lost , of
course.” She’ll leave alone.
The characters in 926 Years move between isolation and connection,
between fragmentation and re-integration. Here’s Larry Hoavis (age
47, by the way), sitting in a lawn chair in his rural backyard:
Why
does it feel lonely, sitting and watching? Nature in its subtle power
and monotony, pre-Internet to the core, unconscious of its enormity.
No one. No one knows he’s even here. The house at his back.
Divorced. His ex elsewhere, how he loved her, hurt her, himself.
Why’s it beautiful, why’s it comforting, that no one knows?
Hoavis’s lonely transcendental private (and tequila-tinged) reverie
of disconnection reinforces 926 Years’ themes of interconnection
coupled with disintegration. In one of my favorite tales, “Lew Wade
Wiley, age 55,” we learn of the “Spoiled heir of the Prudential
fortune” who collects other people’s lives. He has them brought
to his Boston penthouse to offer
…their
worst fears, desires, the messy embarrassments of their
commonalities…these he worked into undead monotone prose, the diary
of Lew Wade Wiley, and so lived fuller than anyone who’d opened a
newspaper to read those advertisements, wrote to that listed address,
knocked at his penthouse door.
The adjective “undead” above fits into a resurrection motif that
floats through 926 Years, whether it be the lifeforce of currency or
the proverbial powers of cats to cheat death. Sometimes the
resurrection is a kind of inspiriting force, as one character,
overwhelmed by aesthetic possibility that “knocked the air out of
him” experiences: “It had reminded him of a moment in a childhood
that wasn’t his.”
Elsewhere, we see resurrection at a genetic level, as in “Mrs.
Anderson, age 67,” whose psychologist describes to her the “cherry
blossom” experiment, the results of which suggest that fear and
anxiety to specific aesthetic stimuli can be passed down from
generation to generation.
Reincarnation becomes both figurative and literal in the case of the
lounge star Marty Fantastic, “Eighty-one-year-old darling with ten
faces (one for each lift)…The plague of identities—who to be
tonight, Peggy Lee, Rod Stewart, Cole Porter, Journey?” The oldest
(and penultimate) character in 926 Years, Marty reflects on his own
death as he gazes at his audience: “The songs of their future–what
about those? They lyrics set in stone, the melodies: unknown.” The
lovely little couplet suggest a complex relationship of aesthetic
substance and aesthetic spirit.
The final piece in 926 Years–well, I won’t spoil it, I’ll
simply say it kept me thinking, made me happy in a strange, nervous
way. It features the youngest character in the book, and it points
clearly if subtly to the book’s affirmation of imaginative and
aesthetic possibility as a kind of crucial lifeforce. I’ll close
instead with something from the book’s third tale, a little moment
early on when 926 Years clicked for me:
Much as the geese and other such birds at the beginning of winter
months fly south towards more temperate climates, it’s the nature
of human beings to move in unconscious arrow formation as well. They
take turns, leading the pack. The burden of cutting resistance
through the air, something they share. Others fly, you see, in the
wake; and that is why they form a V. The wake makes for easy flying,
particularly at the furthest, outermost edges. The ones in the rear
work less, conserve strength, eventually make their way towards the
top of the V, tip of the arrow, then when it’s time and the leader
has tired, assume the vanguard position. It is written into them by
instinct to share the effort, burrowing southwards through the sky;
that nevertheless sky we all live below. -
https://biblioklept.org/2020/01/30/that-nevertheless-sky-we-all-live-below-a-review-of-kyle-coma-thompson-and-tristan-fosters-926-years/
926 years is a collaborative project by two writers who have
purportedly only met via email & in the 17th issue of The
White Review: the Louisville-based Kyle Coma-Thompson, & the
Sydney-based Tristan Foster. According to the book’s witty
annotation, between the two of them, the writers “track the pattern
of probable lives and fates that co-exist between them, from Korea to
England, Senegal to Argentina.” Their conclusion: imagination
“offers more than mere consolation for the difficulties of living.”
926 Years takes its motto from a January 1, 1942 diary entry by
Victor Klemperer: “It is said children still have a sense of
wonder, later one becomes blunted.—Nonsense. A child takes things
for granted, and most people get no further; only an old person, who
thinks, is aware of the wondrous.” The slim book contains 22
single-page-long pieces of micro-fiction which sketch situations—as
meaningful as banal, both repetitive & unique—in the lives of
22 different characters, with the name & age of each protagonist
providing their titles (e.g. “Chaplain Blake, age 60”;
“Sebastian, age 30”; “Marty Fantastic, age 81”). The ages—if
one does do the math—adding up to a total of 926 years. In Joseph
Schreiber’s words, this book is “a sideways glance into 926
cumulative years of human existence”.
To call the stories, as does the annotation, “linked” is to speak
conceptually rather than in the literary terms of plotline
connections or thematic analogies. These 22 characters have never
met, lead very different lives, & face situations of a highly
variegated kind. They are as disconnected by place (geographic
location) & time (age) as they can be: perhaps these vignettes
take place simultaneously, perhaps sequentially, perhaps partly both.
Perhaps they are all set in the weirdly distanced & isolated year
of 2020, perhaps they are atemporal.
Distanced & isolated is the 47 year-old Larry Hoavis, pondering
in the backyard of his native town the looming radio towers, darkly
distant:
Why does it feel lonely, sitting and watching? Nature in its
subtle power and monotony, pre-Internet to the core, unconscious of
its enormity. No one. No one even knows he’s here. The house at his
back. Divorced. His ex elsewhere , how he loved her, hurt her,
himself. Why’s it beautiful, why’s it comforting, that no one
knows? The crickets bleeping in the grass around him, the corn
growing before him. Far lights pulsing like heartbeats, waiting for
lives and bodies to grow around. Loneliness, it’s inarguable isn’t
it? Crowns a person like some kind of common wisdom. Then overthrows
him. (16)
Some stories are thusly wistful & poignant, others are informed
by a Lynchian surreal humour, as in the “Minda, age 35” vignette,
which concerns a couple of hippies who after the birth of their child
eat its afterbirth, only to find out that due to a mix-up they ate
the “wrong slime,” becoming “cannibals” thereby (19).
Following a victory in a year-long suit, they get “the rights to
the afterbirth, which, by this time, mind you, is A YEAR OLD” (20).
Laugh-out-loud stuff.
Many stories are thematically engaged with the subject-as-multitude
motif. “G.W.W., age 54” concerns a woman who spends a lifetime
getting engaged to prison inmates, just at when she has reached her
fortieth engagement, with forty different purses containing forty
different ID’s & identities. “Lew Wade Wiley, age 55,”
tells the tale of the suicide of a Prudentia company heir who
collects other people’s lives by having them brought to his suite &
relate
…their worst fears, desires, the messy embarrassments of their
commonalities…these he worked into undead monotone prose, the diary
of Lew Wade Wiley, and so lived fuller than anyone who’d opened a
newspaper to read those advertisements, wrote to that listed address,
knocked at his penthouse door. (27)
Reviewing 926 Years for Biblioklept, Edwin Turner notes how the
adjective “undead” in the passage above fits into “a
resurrection motif that floats through 926 Years, whether it be the
lifeforce of currency or the proverbial powers of cats to cheat
death.”
These multiple narratives of a “multiple-personality order” reach
a literalised climax in the penultimate instalment with “Marty
Fantastic, 81”, described as “eighty-one-year-old darling with
ten faces (one for each lift)” & who is “plagued by
identities—who to be tonight, Peggy Lee, Rod Stewart, Cole Porter,
Journey?” (51) Marty “do the police in many voices”, but his
own death is only one & his. But perhaps not, perhaps it points
elsewhere, connecting to another place.
When searching for the stories’ interlinkage, Schreiber was
similarly at a loss:
One
imagines each author taking turns, challenging the other, triggering
the next effort. Perhaps there were complex rules, elaborate
algorithms. Perhaps a roll of the dice or a measure of blind faith.
[…] Entering one world after another, spaces filled with souls that
seem somehow disconnected from their lives—from their jobs, their
relationships, their health, or from the simpler beings around them—a
curious reader might be inclined to look for points of reference
loosely linking one story to the next.
Turner even summoned the ghost of the novel:
After
reading it twice, I don’t see 926 Years so much as a collection of
connected tales, but rather as a kind of successful experimental
novel, a novel that subtly and reflexively signals back to its own
collaborative origin. [… The two authors] have never met in person.
And yet they share a common language, of course, and other common
cultural forces surely shape their prose.
One kind of these stories’ cohesion is the stylistic one: “the
same melancholy voice seems to narrate all these pieces” (Mario
Galeano). The sentences of these vignettes are short, & usually
spring from the first-/third-person sphere of the
free-indirect-discourse. Another kind of cohesion is the pragmatic
one: the “effect” of this stories leaves one humbled, aware that
“there are 7.8 billion live people in the world, each with their
own story” (Jyoti Verma).
But if the socially-distanced 2020, happening in quarantine & via
Zoom for so many of us, was the year of “distance connections” &
of “connecting the unconnected,” of loneliness en masse hitherto
unseen, the great connector among these might indeed be their
exploration of “the creative potential of people’s native
estrangement from themselves and each other.” Wildly imaginative,
complexly interlinked, & generically innovative, 926 Years offers
an arresting image for this loneliness in multitude &
connectedness in distance early on, in story no. 3:
Much as the geese and other such birds at the beginning of winter
months fly south towards more temperate climates, it’s the nature
of human beings to move in unconscious arrow formation as well. They
take turns, leading the pack. The burden of cutting resistance
through the air, something they share. Others fly, you see, in the
wake; and that is why they form a V. The wake makes for easy flying,
particularly at the furthest, outermost edges. The ones in the rear
work less, conserve strength, eventually make their way towards the
top of the V, tip of the arrow, then when it’s time and the leader
has tired, assume the vanguard position. It is written into them by
instinct to share the effort, burrowing southwards through the sky;
that nevertheless sky we all live below. (5) - David Vichnar
https://equuspress.wordpress.com/2021/01/08/to-miniaturize-is-also-to-conceal-the-recent-work-of-vik-shirley-jessica-sequeira-christina-tudor-sideri-and-kyle-coma-thompson-tristan-foster-sublunary-editions/
The universe is a big empty space, small clusters of stars and
planets stretch across impossible horizons and, even if you are lucky
enough to find yourself on one of the statistically unlikely chunks
of rock that might just support (apparently) intelligent life, the
chances that you will gather around yourself a few precious
like-minded souls to nourish your own creative dreams and endeavours
within spitting distance is another statistical unlikelihood, though
much less unlikely than finding enough oxygen and water available to
allow for your own existential possibility. Period.
Imagine, then, the good fortune that led one somewhat cynical
Australian writer in Sydney to chance upon the work of an American
(sorry but I have no idea what his temperamental tendencies are)
writer from Louisville, Kentucky in the 17th issue of The White
Review. What started as writerly admiration grew, thanks to the magic
of email, into a friendship and now, some three years or so later a
book-shaped collaboration. Twenty-two pieces of micro fiction. A
literary game of call and response. A sideways glance into 926
cumulative years of human existence.
Each story, or vignette, is titled after the central character and
his or her age. One imagines each author taking turns, challenging
the other, triggering the next effort. Perhaps there were complex
rules, elaborate algorithms. Perhaps a roll of the dice or a measure
of blind faith. I don’t know. Entering one world after another,
spaces filled with souls that seem somehow disconnected from their
lives—from their jobs, their relationships, their health, or from
the simpler beings around them—a curious reader (okay, I’m
guilty) might be inclined to look for points of reference loosely
linking one story to the next. Yet, the opportunity to slip in and
out of a variety of experiences is its own reward. A connection to
the unconnected. Like 47 year-old Larry Hoavis, sitting in his rural
backyard, reflecting on the radio towers in the distance, their
lights flashing in the darkness:
Why
does it feel lonely, sitting and watching? Nature in its subtle power
and monotony, pre-Internet to the core, unconscious of its enormity.
No one. No one even knows he’s here. The house at his back.
Divorced. His ex elsewhere , how he loved her, hurt her, himself.
Why’s it beautiful, why’s it comforting, that no one knows? The
crickets bleeping in the grass around him, the corn growing before
him. Far lights pulsing like heartbeats, waiting for lives and bodies
to grow around. Loneliness, it’s inarguable isn’t it? Crowns a
person like some kind of common wisdom. Then overthrows him.
Each moment, painful, precious, perfect.
926 Years by Kyle-Coma Thompson and Tristan Foster, the American and
Australian co-conspirators, is the second small book to emerge from
Joshua Rothes’ Sublunary Editions (I reviewed the first, Falstaff:
Apotheosis here, and interviewed Rothes for 3:AM Magazine here). The
collaborative effort—not just between the authors but with the
editor/publisher—gives this project its energy and sets a
wonderfully realistic and realizable model for creating literature
that is fresh and original. One that invites and encourages other
like-minded spirits to imagine their own projects and help make this
lonely habitable rock a little less lonely. - https://roughghosts.com/2020/01/22/older-than-yesterday-younger-than-god-926-years-by-kyle-coma-thompson-and-tristan-foster/
This month on the podcast, we’re featuring a conversation betweenTristan Foster and Kyle Coma-Thompson, co-authors of the new book 926
Years, a series of twenty-two linked stories ruminating on
imagination and god and life. It goes deep. It goes there.
Kyle Coma-Thompson is the author of the short story collections The
Lucky Body and Night in the Sun. His work has been anthologized in
New American Stories (Vintage, 2015) and Twenty-Five Rooms
(Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019). He lives in Louisville, Kentucky.
Tristan Foster is a writer from Sydney, Australia. His short story
collection Letter to the Author of the Letter to the Father was
published by Transmission Press.
