Sophie Klahr and Corey Zeller, There Is Only
One Ghost in the World. Fiction Collective 2,
2023
There Is Only One Ghost in the World follows the fragmented meditations of a multilayered voice, an intimate witness to our times that delicately and bluntly reveals the best and the worst in all of us. It is a kaleidoscopic investigation into the loneliness of modern American life as well as family relationships, exploring the truths and lies that families tell one another, and why, with empathy, sorrow, and humility. We travel from the oil-slicked beaches of California and the alleys of New Orleans to the steps of the Capitol. Here: the raw nerves of gender and identity. Here: the lessons of heartbreak. Here: true myths, fake news, and old rumors. Here: the legacies of art and incisors of seasons. Incompletable Venn diagrams, sibling porn stars, addiction and climate change, shootings and stolen x-rays, the lyrics of disco and the taxonomy of slot machines, steel monoliths and 99-cent stores, last meals and unearthed mummies. There Is Only One Ghost in the World is a book about what happened just before you woke up, and what happened just after. And what happened next.
You have our unmailed letters. You have your addresses of the dead.
You have a view, a contagion. You imagine a body bare and undazed,
look at your empty hands. The days peel out like copies.
Copies of copies.
As someone who runs a small press, I have encountered quite a few manuscripts with the same conceit as There is Only One Ghost in the World, wherein two authors collaborate on the same piece to stave off COVID ennui. Something inside me is hesitant to invest in these works because it feels like more time is needed to really understand what happened (is happening?). Like the dearth of books about Sept. 11 in its immediate aftermath, it feels like we need some time to properly evaluate the past few years. However, this work isn’t a contemplation on COVID itself. Rather, There is Only One Ghost in the World uses COVID as an impetus to explore existential questions. Sophie Klahr and Corey Zeller’s book reads like a hand-off of notes between two friends, sharing memories and sad stories from their lives as they contemplate existence and our fragile mortality.
There is no traditional narrative arc here; instead, it is a patchwork of impressions. A half-sister kills her donkey; a lover tries to explain constellations; wandering thoughts about pangolins, post-it notes, and porn stars. What separates this from other works that seem like a series of non sequiturs is the authors’ use of language. These pages are littered with beautiful moments. In a story about finding baby mice that had fallen from the rafters, one of the authors imagines the mother mouse “sleeping in her somewhere, holding at least one of the lives she made.” Another particular favorite:
Someone tells you that Brian Wilson wrote “God Only Knows What I’d Be Without You” to impress his father. His father wasn’t impressed. Years later, he went to see his childhood home and there was only an overpass, and the shambled dirt all overpasses hold beneath them. The arc of eulogy. You want to put a heron in the eulogy, an egret. A living shape that stills the sky.
And another:
The kid with leukemia who sat in front of you would pass you the pictures they drew. Stick figure drawing a stick figure. Stick figure drawing a house. You drew your own body and passed it back. One day the kid was a solid. Later a gas. Then he evaporated. This, the teacher said, is how you make a cloud.
We look for meaning in randomness and I found moments of serendipity in these pages. The vignettes start with first person or third person perspectives but shift somewhere until almost every passage becomes second person. I was taught that second person perspective creates a sense of intimacy between the reader and the speaker(s) but, to me, it seemed to do that opposite here—you seems distant, you is not me. You operate in ways imagined but always unknown to the speaker. You and I are apart, in distance, in COVID isolation, in ultimate understanding. There were also repeated subjects in this book, most notably in the form of a donkey. Towards the beginning of this collection, a woman kills her donkey in a story that questions mercy and at the very end, there is a story about a blind donkey named Stella. Stella struggles to survive but ultimately her carers realize that she appreciates music, ‘dances’ to it. These animals suffer but they both experience beauty, the first through its friendship with a sheep and Stella through her remaining senses. These donkeys represent all living things, whose life is struggle punctuated by moments of joy. There is Only One Ghost in the World feels very much like two people living through something, and it’s convinced me that analysis can be fruitful at all points in a crisis, even in the thick of it. - Jesi Bender
My mother was reading a book to me in bed when we saw the reflection of flames on my bedroom wall. Across the street, the neighbor’s house was burning. I remember being outside in my nightgown, barefoot, my feet in the runoff the firetruck bled, ambulance-men rustling onto the stretcher something dark. My parents told me later that our neighbor, the old woman I called Aunt Heppy, had died, and that her old white dog had died too, but that her German shepherd puppy had survived. It jumped through the big glass window of the living room, breaking the broad pane. At school, everything was uniform. The kids all wore the same outfits and their parents all had the same medications. You looked out the window most of the time. You learned more than anyone should ever know about the sky. You drew a line with a stick in the new snow and dared a friend on the other side to cross it. Once you cross it, you can never come back, you told him. He was reduced to tears, and you got in trouble, even though his explanation made no sense to anyone. They told me I could never come back, he wailed. Only when I was grown-up did I realize that it couldn’t be true, that the puppy could not have broken the glass. I asked my mother, and she admitted it wasn’t true.
Selected as the winner of the 2022 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest is Sophie Klahr and Corey Zeller’s collaborative There Is Only One Ghost in the World (Tuscaloosa AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2023), an accumulation of untitled self-contained first-person stories, none of which are each longer than a single page, that appear to connect or thread only loosely through structure and tone. I’m startled by how each narrative of seemingly random turns allows for a different kind of structure, one that composes fiction almost akin to the arc of a poem, moving from moment to moment, and allowing the collision and accumulation of these varying threads to provide connection only through the act of reading, and the reader themselves. There is nothing straightforward here, and there are some stunning and powerful moments throughout these pieces, woven into the larger fabric of this incredibly interconnected book-length quilt, offering wisdoms, comforts and important truths. “A girl you loved once loved you more and got angry when you didn’t love her like that,” the two of them write, “like, back enough. She is angry enough to say that you aren’t queer enough. This is always the problem—others drawing little boxes around your desire, waiting at a long panel like a spelling bee competition, waiting for you to fumble.” Another piece offers: “Optimism is a chandelier. It swings to one side catching some light. It swings back and catches the dark. Pessimism, on the other hand, is nothing but a weathervane, a lightning rod.” Or elsewhere: “A piece of what elegy can do is hold an absence by naming it, as if, by saying its endlessness, it is, for a moment fixed in time, when so often there seems no end to grief, only its opening. Even a poem on endlessness has an ending, a hand, for a moment, resting on one’s shoulder.”
The stories touch on, and even return, like a skipping stone bouncing across water, to subjects including queer desire, loneliness, trauma, politics and culture wars, hope and memory, one thought immediately following another, moving through moments and references that fade in and out of view with remarkable clarity. As one piece offers: “Being pansexual doesn’t mean that you are attracted to more people than anyone straight or gay might be. It just means that desire is a kaleidoscope, and you are all of the pieces inside.” I’m curious at how the back-and-forth between these two authors worked, exactly, if each composed individual pieces that bled together, or if each piece itself has the hands of both authors within; in a certain way, none of it matters. There are certain directions that make me wonder if a handful of pieces were written by one author over the other, but on the whole, the tone is incredibly consistent, providing a wonderfully coherent whole between these two writers, during the pandemic era. As they write as their “Note on Creation” at the end of the collection: “This book was written collaboratively over the course of eight months during the Coronavirus pandemic (November 2020-August 2021), in a single shared Word document, from six states away.” I’m now curious to see further of their individual works: on her part, Los Angeles poet and editor Sophie Klahr is the author of the poetry collections Meet Me Here at Dawn (YesYes Books, 2016) and Two Open Doors in a Field (Backwaters press, 2023), and Corey Zeller is the author of MAN VS. SKY (YesYes Books, 2013) and YOU AND OTHER PIECES (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2015), none of which I’ve seen (I’m clearly behind on my reading). Oh, this is a book I wished I’d written; and I am terribly jealous.
Fish have something in them called a lateral line—this is what helps their schools stay together. When they want to stay still, they face upward. Into the current. The day closes itself like an orphan’s locket, the lip of a candle resembling lace almost touching the inside of a thigh. Now, and only now, you fail to find a difference. Some handless beauty. Blinking and squinting at the clearest possible scene. Truth reversed does not make a lie. A lie reversed does not make truth. The truth of a person is different than the truth of the poem. You try to make a Venn diagram of this, but can’t figure out what to put in the third circle or in the pill shape of the intersection. A certain type of ants collect the skulls of other ants to decorate its nest. There is a type of shark that new theories say may have a lifespan of up to six hundred years. In Greenland, one is caught that scientists estimate as being between two hundred and seventy-two years old and five hundred and twelve years old. There are certain types of crystals in the eyes of this shark. The oldest type of poetry is poetry with a riddle inside. - Rob McLennan
https://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2023/10/sophie-klahr-and-corey-zeller-there-is.html
Poems (the momentist)
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