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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Molly Gaudry - Cubist Fairy Tale: rags, hunger, wish fulfillment, magical dresses, the loss of a mother, rebirth, but set in different landscape

Molly Gaudry, We Take Me Apart (Mud Luscious Press, 2009)

"There is no more perfect place to be than in Molly Gaudry’s tender, dirt-floored novel(la), WE TAKE ME APART. Oh cabbage leaves, oh roses, oh orange-slice childhood grins: this book broke my heart. Its sad memory-tropes come from fairy tales & childhood books. With language, Gaudry is as loving & careful as one is with a matchbook... when wishing to set the whole word on fire." - Kate Bernheimer

"Molly Gaudry’s debut evokes the spirit of iconic fairy tales that have transported readers for centuries. Her variations on these themes delineate the psychological journey from girlhood to womanhood. But WE TAKE ME APART is more than a retelling. In it, Gaudry reconstitutes the essence of what makes fairy tales compelling, & she does so imaginatively & with great attention to language, the earmarks of poetry." - Christopher Kennedy

"It’s gossamer & emotional, but it’s also a story of transformation over space & time, a story of love for mothers, partners, food & lace. It’s a story that slips between fable & experience, but seems somewhat unsure which is which." - Mathias Svalina

"It appears to be maybe the dissection of a young woman's mind, where language spawns chains of images and feelings that accumulate with the movement of the text. I like the way the piece lives in the borderland between prose and poetry, which serves the stream-of-consciousness-ness of it well. Gaudry makes good use of repetition and makes poetic use of technical language blended into the text." - Josh Maday

"Molly Gaudry's We Take Me Apart is a dazzleflage of a book. The stuttering disrupted language of this cubist concoction disappears before your ears, sinks into your eyes. This aggressive dress camouflage reweaves Gertrude Stein's rewoven grammar of worsted silk-screened gabardine into a fully ripped patois-ed pattern of stunning wonder." - Michael Martone

"Back when I first set about to become a book editor, Molly Gaudry is the kind of uncommon writing talent that I idealistically hoped/expected to semi-routinely discover and cultivate. But I spent enough time on the trade book publishing scene to understand that having something like this come across an editor’s desk is much more of a red-letter privilege than any kind of a right.
An epic poem of epic mastery, We Take Me Apart centers on a girl (the narrator) who grows into a woman who grows into a heroine. And like most bona fide heroines, she remains nameless and fanfare-free.
Brought up in an undisclosed non-American country, the narrator introduces the reader to the inner workings of the socioeconomic class divide through the eyes of a child who’s a member of (what’s considered) the wrong caste. Her only nearest and dearest is her mother, a domestic worker who cooks and cleans for wealthy families. So predictable are their days and hours that they “have no need for a timepiece.”
Despite all of the material suffering, the narrator is raised to “scrub away” the unkind words of “fine tall ladies with short tempers.” When other children tease her about the way she looks or when she overhears one of the snobs in her midst “define play clothes as rags,” it’s her mother’s words (assuring her that her appearance “was not so bad”) and her mother’s actions (anointing her with a homespun crown of red leaves, declaring her a queen) that stick.
As the narrator segues into young womanhood, she develops into a gifted seamstress, someone who stitches together disconnected pieces and fragments to make them whole. A random male houseguest whisks her away from home, gallantly offering to pluck her from the bleak tedium, and help her launch a more lucrative dressmaking career. He becomes both her lover and her entrée into the world of creature comforts.
She’s not the only impoverished ingénue to run off with the first seductively solvent male stranger that saunters along. But this narrator isn’t as emotionally vulnerable as many of those who have stood in her “canvas sneakers.” And it quickly becomes pretty clear that this inner strength and groundedness—a “single red leaf was worth more to [her] than a dozen red roses’ petals scattered on [her] bed with pink candles all around”—is moored in the wholeness of her mother’s unshakeable love. As soon as she realizes that her knight has a few too many chinks in his not-so-shining armor, and their honeymoon period comes to a violently screeching halt, she cuts her losses and takes her wanderlust elsewhere (with the couple’s household dog in tow). An itinerant seamstress weaving in and out of setting after setting, and new experience after new experience, she gathers the fragments of each setting and experience to stitch together a self-made tapestry of a life.
There are some who never stop nursing their grudges about the indignities their hardscrabble journeys have hurled their way. But this narrator-heroine chooses to become a healer instead of a hater, leveraging her craft into a singular art form. For example, she designs (avowedly impermanent) dresses out of flowers, to make other women feel distinctively stylish, attractive, and “protected,” if only for a day.
The same visions of community empowerment lead her to fantasize about taking a messianic mission trip with her mom, flying over huddled assemblages of people who have had to struggle the way that they have, to “take away all hurt” and “wash them at length with [their] tears until there is no longer any such thing as complication in their lives.” A seamstress of the human situation, she won’t abide by the notion that there are any prescribed limits to mending bits and pieces of scraps and fragments into something respectably whole.
Much like her flower dresses, this heroine’s seemingly indefatigable stamina turns out to be impermanent. The lurking, hulking ogre of pain eventually succeeds in pushing itself into the forefront. Yet even then, she takes her edges off by losing herself in flashbacks of her “kind,” “capable,” and “never disappointed” mother—her own, stitched-together pain management system.
There’s a languid, yet firm, Marguerite Duras quality to Gaudry’s writing and, like a Duras masterpiece, We Take Me Apart is as savorable as an expensive, hard-to-come-by bottle of Burgundy. This is the kind of book that you not only can read in one sitting, but one that you probably should try to drink in all at once, slowly and solemnly, in order to fully appreciate the adulation-worthy undulation of Gaudry’s verses. Don’t settle on taking We Take Me Apart apart—submit to the majesty of its wholeness." - Kadzi Mutizwa

"Inspired by fairytales & Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Molly Gaudry’s We Take Me Apart, is the first novel(la) from J. A. Tyler’s mud luscious offshoot. Described by Gaudry herself as a “novella in verse,” the book does indeed read like a lengthy, narrative poem in spite of the author’s hesitation with the latter label. While there’s little punctuation, followers of mud luscious will immediately notice the publication’s calling card—ampersands replacing the word “and”—as well as the all-caps dialogue. For example, “I once asked BUT WHAT ABOUT THE GIRL IN THE GLASS DRESS & Mother’s answer was JUST COUNT YOUR LUCKY STARS YOU’RE SAFE IN BED & NOT A COOK FOR A RICH MAN”.
Story-wise, WTMA contains three characters: the protagonist daughter, her mother, & the daughter’s significant other. Though much of the book is in first person, it shifts to second when referring to the daughter’s love interest. Successful, too, is Gaudry’s adept use of voice, which changes as the main character grows older. I also enjoy the language she employs, drawing attention to diction & repetition a la Karen Lillis’s The Second Elizabeth & Peter Markus’s Bob, or Man on Boat.
Because the text alludes to other works of literature, those unfamiliar with such references won’t have quite as full a read as those who do—a gamble on the author’s part for sure, but one that doesn’t significantly alter the plot. Lamentably, the narrative meanders in the middle, lowering the dramatic tension that the beginning sets up so well. The end, however, is a saving grace. Not only is it unpredictable, it’s a refreshing jolt that avoids the formulaic by refusing to stoop to a happy (fairytale?) resolution for the main characters." - Jason Jordan

"The remarkable thing about love is how it operates as an entity—something born miraculously with a fast unraveling life span. Love lives, dies then haunts. The human body seems merely a house within which love can sully the sheets and leave its fingerprints on everything. Molly Gaudry’s protagonist in We Take Me Apart houses a love that ravishes her interior until all that’s left is a frame—walls with gaping wounds for anyone to enter. The last lines of the book reads, “Listen / if nothing else / I am at least a woman who has known & loved / the company of a lamp in a dark & empty room.” Lines such as these expose humanity’s exquisite vulnerability. Gaudry’s work implies that life, at its most essential, is the memory of love, hope, and the rooms it has occupied.
The plot of We Take Me Apart is made from reconstructed fairytales that center around the lives of three women: a mother, daughter, and the daughter’s lesbian lover. The lover leaves, the mother dies and the daughter is abandoned with no desire to experience more loss. Gaudry’s prose does not offer the comfort of a “Happily Ever After.” The novella ends with the main character cutting out her own eyes to prevent anymore ghosts—or rather memories—from overwhelming her. She has had enough. She wishes to remain with what life has already given her— to make time for reconciliation with her past.
It is the novella’s twisted fairytale quality that gives the reader the feeling that he or she has just had their umbilical cord cut a second time. The ending is necessarily visceral and suggests that there are multiple realities—that loss births its own children in us that require nurturing. Gaudry’s novella is a reminder that love is intangible and it demands our undivided attention. By gouging out her eyes, Gaudry’s character becomes a kind of ghost. She can no longer see our world. She has resigned herself to the past entirely.
We Take Me Apart begins with an homage to Gertrude Stein and could be read as a reinterpretation of the three-line poem, “A Carafe that is a Blind Glass.” This approach is an act of pure courage on Gaudry’s part. Only a brave and talented writer would dare mess with the perfection of Gertrude Stein. Add this offense to your favorite childhood fairytale being reimagined and We Take Me Apart reads like a novella about to implode. And yet, as if by magic, the story holds even as the narrative spins out of control.
Gaudry writes:
If there is a how to describe the what
I feel then a dead-red-roses-filled &
fingerprint-smudged carafe on the center of a
table in the center of a room in the center of a
house in a place called before the stitching years
where I have long collected dust
forgotten skin
fallen hair
sloughed cells that nowhere rise with the
entrance of a body
yours
perhaps
There is something brutally honest in Gaudry’s interpretation: she does mess with perfection and does so quite well. She continues by writing, “they stir me into steaming cups until I am gone.” Just as the three-line mastery of Gertrude Stein’s poem is gutted, the main character is consumed by her acts of self-sacrifice. Where Gertrude Stein was perfection, Molly Gaudry is human which is, in and of itself a different kind of perfection.
Not only does We Take Me Apart reimagine the works of others, the novella revises itself as it is being read.
This can be seen in the lines:
WHAT I WANT IS TO TASTE WITH
DELIBERATION THE WAY A
QUIET MEADOW BECOMES DIMMER AFTER
A WETTING AROUND THE EDGES
I said this not long ago for no reason really
except that by taste with deliberation I meant
hope & by quiet meadow I meant baby & by
dimmer I meant calm & by a wetting I meant
pink lips & by around the edges I meant clamp
mother’s breast
a revision
then
of what I want
which is to hope the way a baby becomes calm
after pink lips clamp mother’s breast
Truth is flexible in We Take Me Apart and evolves as the main character recreates herself after each loss she survives. This flexibility of truth adds to the sense that multiple realities are co-existing in Gaudry’s book. What one means is not what one says. What one feels is not necessarily mutual. That doesn’t make the words and / or feeling any less real. Gaudry’s character seems to be collecting herself—to be housing multiples of herself from different stages of life. The book shows adulthood to be our multiple selves craving wholeness.
I wish I could say for certain I knew how Gaudry does it. She uses such simple language to create an epic and moving tale. We Take Me Apart is an exercise in empathy for the reader. It is pure song and story. This book is a gift." - Nicelle Davis

"It begins, “Long ago,” and so you know that Molly Gaudry’s We Take Me Apart is going to be a fairy tale of sorts. But the next part of the sentence, “in a different version,” signals clearly that this will not be a tale you’ve heard before. And the repetition of that key phrase, in a different version, lets you know throughout this wild novella that this will be no comfortable, well-worn tale.
Sure, it’s full of the familiar trappings of the fairy tale: rags, hunger, wish fulfillment, magical dresses, the loss of a mother, red roses and cabbages and rebirth, both literal and figurative. But this is a different version, a different vision of the landscape that lies between girlhood and womanhood. Like the very best fairy tales, its heart is the dark forest that comes wrapped in lovely, evocative language, beautiful word pictures.
It’s clear immediately that the narrator is telling her tale from a distance. She is locked away now, it seems in some kind of institution, in a place where the plates “are not of the shattering kind.” And so right away we know this tale has no bright Disney ending.
The story is that of her passage from childhood into adulthood, and coming to terms with what being a woman means, to others and herself. Like Rapunzel, she is fiercely protected by a mother figure, and like the fairy tale maiden, she leaves the mother figure for a man. I was almost reminded more, though, of the version of the witch from Sondheim’s Into the Woods. She alone knows the danger of the woods, of men, of women alone in the dark, and yet even she can only protect her daughter so long before protection becomes a prison. Gaudry’s narrator reminds us that though we heed the warnings, we will eventually leave the nest and be caught by the pain of growing up and old.
The idyllic fairy tale, at first, is intact: we are introduced to a mother and daughter living humbly–but mostly, it seems, happily. Gaudry writes:
I quite often felt as if we were
two women in a garden in a famous painting
sitting as we were beneath a parasol of petals
protecting us from the sun
But then, appropriately arriving in a rainstorm and in need of a bed, the stranger appears and the mother and daughter duo is broken apart:
But then you came along & in this version
happiness was my hoped for ever after for us
One of the greatest strengths of the novella is Gaudry’s mastery of language. This “novel(la),” as it’s described on the cover, is really a prose poem; the language comprising it ebbs and flows, drifts and spurts and sometimes dries up almost entirely, in a manner that gives a clear urgency, but also a backwards pull, the gravity of nostalgia, to the narrator’s prose.
All childhood becomes a fairy of sorts to adults, and adulthood is myth of sorts to children. We don’t know quite what lies there; it’s undiscovered country. And Gaudry’s use of silence surrounding the words perfectly captures this unspoken unknown. As Calvino wrote:
Myth is the hidden part of every story, the bured part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words.
The silence, the wet white space around the burn of language, reads at times as if a character from Beckett had crawled or hobbled into a fairy tale–the kind of Beckett character that keeps his or her silence, only to suddenly wax eloquent in manic bursts. Consider this passage from We Take Me Apart:
when she spoke her words were a flurried rush from the shallow space mistaken for her throat
scratched
papered
I begged her not to speak & learned the actions of her bidding
Did them because I could not bear to hear her voice
Which in the past had been the bursting of winter into the green of spring but had become a memory in the middle of her bed in which she rested no like vegetables in a salad but vegetables in canned soup
The language can be florid and fluid, but also economic, sometimes achingly so. Phrases like this one: “Gratitude is a cousin to the squeezing of a heart” are sadder in their brevity than a full paragraph could ever be.
Gaudry also plays, skillfully, with contrasts throughout the novel. The use throughout of food and fertility, often coupled together, stands in stark contrast to the images of death and endings in the book. Consider this passage:
I like to think of those women growing larger with the growths of grapes and cherries and apples inside them
anything but citruses
of course
for I had given up citruses
Food is both a source of life and a path to endings, just as fertility itself leads to birth but also, eventually, to death.
Gaudry uses this same double contrast with food when the narrator returns to her mother, who has now gone from strong to weak and wasting. The narrator explains how she can’t even call her mother “Mother” anymore, because “Mother” is, in her vocabulary, a strength word. Instead her mother finally must go by her real name, and the foods associated with her have changed as well. She says:
Mother had been black cherries in a bowl& Susan had become chewed up & pit-spit out & Mother had been days & Susan was seconds…Mother had been pepper & Susan was the mistake the ruins a meal
Perhaps it’s not surprising that the narrator would choose food metaphors for her mother and herself; throughout the book, as here, the women’s worth always seems measured by others, literally parceled out and spooned up and sifted and served, as shown here:
the well-known people
they scoop me with a tiny spoon
you are the spoon in me dividing me
and in phrases like, “they stir me into steaming cups.”
Of course, there is no eventual savior for the women in this novella, after the mother’s death and a ghastly final act by the narrator. But though destroyed by the past, the narrator’s happiness is also salvaged, a little, by the grace of myth and memory. “When I think of Mother now,” she says, “I think of us as little women wearing white dresses with red ribbons woven into our hair.”
The child and the woman have merged, have gone back to the days of innocence to live in memory and in a woman’s strength, gone back to being whole, unparceled and able to eat the reddest fruits once again. Gaudry’s beautiful story is ultimately a tragic tale, but a kind of redemption mingles with the sadness: you can never go back again, but you can wander the halls of the permanent past for as long as you like." - amber noelle sparks

"HTMLGIANT: Can you explain your decision to write a “novel in verse.” How do you differentiate this from a narrative poem. What is verse to you.
- The term “novel in verse” was introduced to me by Abigail Beckel, of Rose Metal Press. We were chatting over drinks at some bar in Baltimore, and Abby mentioned Peter Jay Shippy’s novel in verse HOW TO BUILD THE GHOST IN YOUR ATTIC. Interestingly enough, it’s billed as a “book-length poem” on the Rose Metal Press website. Go figure.
Anyway, at that time, I was working on an early draft of WTMA. Though it doesn’t much resemble the final product, that first version was what I thought to be too long to be a poem and too short to be anything else. So when Abby said, “novel in verse,” I thought, “Damn, I guess that’s what I’ve been working on.” I consider that woman an angel of some sort, sent to make my life make sense. Having that term led to a breakthrough, truly.
I’m hesitant to provide an answer about verse and what I think it is. I feel I’m not really qualified to give it a crack just yet. Maybe in a few years, after I’ve taken a few more poetry courses, filled in this big gaping hole in my literary education. From 1999 to 2006, I was always, in some way, involved in a literature or fiction writing course or group. In my time away from school, I seem to have developed an intense interest in poets and poems. I plan to apply to MFA programs this year, and all of them for poetry. I’m looking to find my answer to “what is verse” as well.
Would you say there are any precedents to this book that you had in mind when writing WTMA... What I mean is, when constructing your book, did you have any previous book in mind that guided you. I believe you already answered this maybe by stating you didn’t even know what you were writing. But what about other books, irrespective of form. and also, I am now interested in personal motive if you had one.
- When I first began WTMA, I did not have any external guidance except Anatomy for the Artist, from which I borrowed chapter titles. That was the beginning, but then I scrapped the first version and moved on to something totally new, from scratch. I borrowed a lot of words from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and started threading them together, into a new narrative.
Personal motive: I think, looking back now, I wanted to be in love. I thought about how being in love, theoretically, could put a person back together again. I thought about how a person might be taken apart. I said, “we take me apart” over and over and over as I drove fourteen hours from Chicago to Philadelphia, and when I arrived, after I closed my fingers around the key to that room I’d rented, I began to write.
I get a sense that maternity and its residue in the child are important themes here. Am I wrong. Elaborate.
- You are not wrong. I’m very glad you picked up on this theme, actually. One of the storylines that never made it into this manuscript is that the speaker/narrator intensely desired to have children. Instead, I suppose, she creates other things. And she later returns home to take care of her ailing mother. The roles of mother and child are reversed, for a time. And I wonder if, perhaps, as a result of maternity (and the lack of maternity) “and its residue” within her, she turns to destroying her mother and then herself.
What do you do when you get nervous.
- If in public, I wear too much makeup and pace. If in private, I wear sweatpants and bunny slippers and pace.
You use second person in this book. Since in second person, the object of the narrative was witness to what happened, second person seems to me to be about confession. Am I wrong here. On page 66 you say “the idea of again binding two or more parts to/make a whole thing/to put together stitch by stitch” i think this evidences what i am trying to suggest about your themes. that “stitching”, which could be seen as a writing act, is the way to take parts, which can be seen as memory or individual consciouses, and make them something new, something new that will still bear the marks of its combination (stitches). I think this is further suggested by the title, “We Take Me Apart.” the title is inclusive, and references parts. That in this taking apart, or invesitgating, two people are involved, and the stitching is the book.
- Is the second person about confession? I’m not sure. I lifted the use of this particular kind of second person from Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body. And before I had anything else, I had the title, We Take Me Apart. And the question was, “Who are ‘we’?” I knew I didn’t want “we” to be too simple, with just two people, so I thought, “How can I have more than two people who take a person apart?” This led to a mother, a daughter, and the daughter’s love interest.
The lines you reference are really interesting; you are very perceptive, Senor Pink! I mean, I had never thought of “stitching” as writing. I always thought of “stitching” as, you know, sewing. With a needle. With thread. But in this context, yes, it really does work the way you suggest. Thank you for that. That is really lovely.
Continuing with the thread/stitch/writing metaphor, on page 68 you begin, “a great many things are strong/thread/for instance/which can be snapped in two with a quick pull/can also be wound into binding that cannot be broken.” I think this, to borrow from the title, takes apart the earlier concept of stitching. More specifically, you took apar what was taken apart. When something is stitched, it was once less than itself, and was brought together. It is still two or more things but seen from far enough away is only one thing. Does this represent further effort to explore relationships? If a break in a relationship, like thread, “can be snapped in two with a quick pull”, is it better to entwine slowly with another, to ensure strength in bonding. Speak on this.
- Wow, this is a difficult question to answer. The relationships in WTMA are central to the story. They are, as I seem to be bludgeoning to death, the meaning behind the title’s “We” and “Me.” I think, perhaps, that the relationship between the daughter and her mother is strong, wound and entwined, whereas the relationship between the daughter and her lover is easily snapped, easily broken. Yet, both are formative for her; and each lives on to haunt her, long after they no longer exist. The speaker is clearly weaker without these two others in her life.
On a personal level, I’m just not sure. Most of my relationships–and I don’t necessarily mean romantic–have snapped “with a quick pull.” Whether due to moving around so much or being a very private person, I’ve had few lasting relationships. Despite this, those that have endured have certainly benefited from slow entwining. I think in this sense, “entwine” means to in some way have suffered through and survived something together. I guess this is where strength comes from. Odd, then, that something so desired–strong human connections–happens so often as a result of pain and suffering.
It seems like fairy tales, maybe pieces of fairy tales, are incorporated in WTMA. What is the place of fairy tale in WTMA, according to you.
- Certainly, key objects from the more well-known fairy tales (and, of course, the more well-known versions of those fairy tales) have been recast in WTMA, just as key words (objects) from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons were also recast. As for the place of fairy tale in WTMA, I consciously borrowed the rule of three. There are three main characters (a mother (she), her daughter (I), the daughter’s love interest (you))–and they are the collective “we” in “We Take Me Apart.” There are also three main settings (a village, the rest of the world, and a ward), as well as three main time periods (childhood, adulthood, old age). Fairy tales, too, are almost entirely rooted in the women’s sphere, usually very domestic, so I also borrowed that. But I wanted to subvert the heterosexual fairy tale romance storyline by including an ungendered love interest. And, of course, I hope I was able to escape the need for a happy ending.
In any case, it all started with Stein. There was a lot of food I didn’t really know what to do with. “cocoa,” for instance, made me think of “cocoa bean,” and “bean” made me think of “pea” and “The Princess and the Pea.” Usually, some food item led me to some fairy tale. All of it was very much like this, with the word associations, etc. It has turned out to be a useful method for me. The project I’m working on now uses words from Jeanette Winterson’s story, “The Poetics of Sex.”
I remember reading something about you teaching writing and environmental issues. What is the discipline of your mind when trying to discuss writing and environment, how do you bring the two together and from what perspective environmentally.
- It’s true. I’m not much of a theorist–not yet, anyway–but in the years to come I hope to be able to contribute to the field of ecocriticism (the study of literature and the environment). Unlike most ecocritics, however, I’m interested in representations of the natural world that aren’t realistic. There is a place for magical realism in ecocritical discourse, and I intend to be someone who speaks out (or writes) on its behalf. Take, for instance, the rain of flower petals in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the rain of fish and leeches in Kafka on the Shore, the (unsurprisingly, yet still beautiful) metaphorical (but literal) rain at the end of Blindness, and the many forms of rain in Scorch Atlas. Although these rains are not the product of realists, not the product of environmentalists (or nature writers), is the message any less clear? Rain isn’t always cleansing; it isn’t always symbolic of rebirth. This is what ecocritics, I hope, would want people to understand. Texts like these are important contributions to this field, I think.
Here’s the kicker: I’m no nature lover. I don’t hike, I don’t camp, I don’t fish, I don’t hunt, I don’t garden, I don’t commune. I’m an indoor type of gal who enjoys, occasionally, a walk on a path, a cabrewing trip, a county fair. Still, I believe in the balance of our ecosystem, in the reality of global warming and potentially catastrophic and irreparable climate change. As human beings, we need to have more awareness of and care for the natural world. Engaging in literature and exploring its relationship(s) to the natural world, publishing stories and poems that do the same (Willows Wept Review), I hope to help (maybe subconsciously) create that awareness (among other bookish and indoor types, who don’t care any less than the next person).
Does fairy tale have a specific tendency for environmental address.
- Absolutely. And what a good question, Sam! You get bonus points!
Nature is perhaps the most consistent character in fairy tales, across the board. If not as character, then certainly as setting. There are woods, fields, meadows, moons, bodies of water, magical animals and trees. I worry that the Disney versions of the fairy tales we know only help to perpetuate this problem of ours–how we humans so sorely mistreat the rest of the world’s creatures. In these versions, the natural world and all its inhabitants serve to aid and/or rescue the human characters (the pumpkin chariot and seamstress mice in Cinderella, the boar’s heart in place of Snow White’s). This goes back to Christianity’s creation myth, does it not? God provides animals (and plants) for Adam (man) to name and possess. They are his to do with as he pleases; they exist to serve him. It’s something to be aware of, is all I’m saying–the why and how we got to where we are today. Literature may play a larger role than we’re willing to admit, and if this is true then literature must also do what it can to undo damage. Which is, of course, where ecocriticism comes into play." - Interview with Sam Pink

"DE: Describe to me how this novella in verses came about? It’s available for pre-order now, and hits for real in December? What’s it like working with JA? One of the coolest things I’ve seen, blurb-wise, is “With language, Gaudry is as loving and careful as one is with a matchbook… when wishing to set the whole word on fire.” How does reading that feel?
- The novella in verse came about as a result of my move to Philadelphia in February of 2009, immediately following the AWP conference. I’d packed my bags, hit the road for the conference, moved into the Hilton, then hit the road for Philly, with a brief pit-stop in Cleveland where I slept for a few hours. On the drive from Ohio to Philadelphia, I repeated the phrase “we take me apart” over and over again. I loved everything about it—its suggestiveness, its aural qualities, and the way it prompted all these thoughts about the literal and metaphorical process of dissembling a human body, mine. Upon arrival to Philadelphia, I moved into my room-for-rent, shut the door, and wrote a ten-page, single-spaced poem that I then blogged about. I said it was too long to be a poem, too short to be a story, too weird to be either, really, and the best thing I’d ever put on paper. I knew that if anyone would get it, that person would be J. A. Tyler. I queried him for the mini-chapbook series, told him I knew it was over the 1,000 word limit but wondered if he’d make an exception. He said he’d give it a read.
I then blogged about how I thought it could become something longer, a full-length work, perhaps. He read that post, I guess, and a few days later sent me a note saying he’d like to read it again when I’d turned what I had into a longer work. We set a deadline, and as it approached I began to freak out. What I’d sent him just wasn’t going anywhere. I kept trying to force this longer storyline, and it was awful. The deadline grew closer and closer, and at the final hour I abandoned all the new pages and started over from scratch, borrowing key phrases from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. I sent J. A. a note saying, “Hey, I started over, I hope you don’t mind, and here’s what I’ve got,” and he was nothing but encouraging. I think, probably, most publishers would have pulled the plug right there, but J. A. supported the new material. When the deadline arrived, I sent him the first draft of what is now We Take Me Apart. In no way does it resemble the original poem (which is to be published as an e-chapbook titled Anatomy for the Artist by Blossombones), but the essence of the initial idea—the taking apart and putting back together again—remains. Without the pressure to deliver (on time) to the guy who was willing to publish my first book, and without his support and encouragement, and, later, his editorial genius, I might have given up altogether. I will be eternally grateful to him for everything he gave me—most importantly, his belief in me.
As for Kate Bernheimer’s blurb, I’m still in shock. Here’s a woman whose writing I absolutely love, a writer who ignored all my fan mail, a (now-former) professor at the university that rejected my MFA application, and what does she do for me totally out of the blue? She writes the best damn blurb a doe-eyed fan could have asked for. I want to hug her. I will hug her. When she calls security and I’m led kicking and screaming from this year’s AWP, you’ll know why." - Interview with David Erlewine


An excerpt :

long ago
in a different version
it was not a glass slipper but a glass dress
it was not beautiful
it was not flowing like a stream
it did not have a train wider than an acre
in this version everyone could see everything
nothing was left to the imagination
due to the drought
all the people in the town
children too
used their spades to uproot the vegetable gardens
day after day
after day
the day finally came when all they could do was look into the cloudiness & pray
disgraced
for why else would the gray lining of their clear sky withhold unless it had been
decided that the only useful thing was for them to suffer
there was not so much as a cabbage leaf that year
cold came to be known as night
heaviness was no longer a worry
the town turned to violence
a rich man's cook was discovered making sauce in the heart of his house
as everyone knows that food does not smell until it boils
until it sweats
the people still there
who had not yet gone away
their bellies round with malnutrition
tongues useless calluses
detected that woman's sauce
came for her with a knife
the first ingredient they added was her toe
cut at a neat incline
they called it butter
they added her bottom half
called it custard
her top half
they called tea
when she cried they heard only the whistles of their stomachs filled with her
they raised their glasses
toasted
*
this is the story Mother told to get me to behave
tucked into my bedding
I once asked BUT WHAT ABOUT THE GIRL IN THE
GLASS DRESS & Mother's answer was JUST COUNT
YOUR LUCKY STARS YOU'RE SAFE IN BED & NOT A
COOK FOR A RICH MAN
the way he made her feel
the way he looked at her
she left nothing to the imagination"


Molly Gaudry, Parts (Mud Luscious Press )

"Stories in verse, as a concept, are fairly amorphous. Abstract yet accessible. After all, literature (all of it) stems from them and the oral tradition. With this plethora of history, you’d think talking about modern stories in verse would be easy. Instead the discussion often becomes mired in debates about form. What is a prose poem, what’s the difference between a story in verse and a regular poem, when is a story a story? Each link of this chain is broader than the last. Have we yet asked when is writing writing? If not, we will soon.
Parts by Molly Gaudry is an excerpt of We Take Me Apart, and while, like any good writerly-nerd, I am intrigued by all the questions of form and content that so often plague discussions of “genre-confused” (for lack of a wittier description) work, I decided to simplify things and think of Gaudry’s piece in two ways: first, as a poem, and second, as a story.
Parts poetically fits into the grand tradition of the feminist canon, by which I mean to invoke the reclamation of the female gender as an identity, as it is so beautifully rendered in the work of Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Ellen Bass, and many others. Gaudry defines the femininity of her subject with an adept strokes that move from the women’s outer shell (their clothing) to their inner terrain (their bodies). She begins:
I began to produce several dresses a week &
in the making of them not a single flower
part was left out because every part has a function…
While the narrator’s gender remains ambiguous, Gaudry here has introduced the subject of gender with a single word, namely, “dresses”. Two stanzas later she writes, “for we are more than our parts,” letting the reader know, this poem isn’t just about what makes us or what separates us, it’s about the human condition, the ultimate muse of great poets. As the poem moves on, the parts of the flowers are given, acting in the absence of the what that is not given: the body. Gaudry, working almost the way a Soviet montage in film works, weaves images of the tailor putting dresses together with the flowers, these disparate images inferring different meanings, allowing open-ended interpretations:
I sewed buttons so that
those dresses would not come undone &
leave those women bare without their
wanting to be
This passage is followed up by the word “stalks”, a stanza unto itself, listing the next flower part, but also playing off the idea of a woman bared. Not a sexual image, but one of an identity having been stripped away. But in the end nothing is hidden from the tailor:
I like to think now of these
women in the moment of their undressing
fragmentary
ripe for fertilization
These final lines tie the whole piece together, bring us back to the beginning of the poem where Gaudry writes, “we are all of us more than our parts.” At the same time, though there is the feeling that though we may be more, there is no escaping our parts, just as the flower cannot shed its petals without remaining a flower. And though this assertion is humbling, and possibly, given your mood, morose, it is also comforting, especially to the tailor, one can assume, as he or she clearly finds solace in his or her occupation which only exists because of the parts in the first place.
In a story one must look at plot or at the very least the arc from the beginning to the end. What happens, where does the story take you as a reader? Parts, ostensibly, is about a tailor, working on a dress detailed with flowers, reflecting o what they mean to the women who wear them. The tailor likes to
think of these women sitting
cross-ankled on park benches thinking of
their ovaries
We are, of course, drawn back to reflect on gender, but not in a banal way, as the next stanza reads:
I liked to think of these women thinking of
how to decrease the contamination of their
ovaries
The women in the tailor’s imagination are not concerned with the latest fashions, with reality television shows, or making babies. They are concerned with the health of their womanhood, as represented here by their ovaries. Fertilization is a pervasive theme in Parts, as the word is used once for every two pages of the chapbook. But here it is a source of conflict. As the tailor sees the women as “ripe for fertilization” he or she also feels the need to give the women shelter: I made
hidden pockets because every woman
should have a place to hide her personals
While she clearly sees the utilitarian view of fertilization, the tailor wants to give women protection, a way to secrete themselves from the world if need be.
More than anything, Parts, as a story, is a learning process. A character study. The reader is given a chance to learn how the tailor’s mind works, how he or she views the world." - Ryan W. Bradley

Claudia Smith - Touching the wings of a creature you couldn’t see but knew to be beautiful simply from the feel

Claudia Smith, Put Your Head In My Lap (Future Tense Book, 2009)

"It is like Claudia Smith is trying to bury me in words, one on another, and they are little words and very unassuming so that even as they steep and mount and touch my chin, I am still only smiling at the way they are used.
Put Your Head In My Lap by Claudia Smith is the latest release from the ever-present Future Tense Books and is basically a whirlwind of subtle wit, clever linguistic arrangements, and complex emotional states pulled together under the guise of simple story-telling.

from Marks:

“When he falls asleep, she leaves and looks in on their child. Transparent hair and blue eyes; perhaps his eyes, his hair. She would like to touch the whorl on the back of his head, but it would wake him.”

An especially unique feature of Claudia Smith’s work is how she maneuvers within and around dialogue without losing the intensity of phrasing or the aggressive hold on each scene. Too often dialogue becomes either a stopgap for exposition or a stumbling, bumbling kind of imaginary world, leaning on what we think is spoken dialogue rather than what is actually our phrasing, but Smith instead holds her poetic fists and makes the conversations tackle the natural mode of our speaking while still fitting the rhythmic pull of each narrative.

from Leak:

“Mom, you know what you do when you stir like that?” “I’m simmering the vegetables.” “You shimmer it. It’s called you shimmer it, Mom.”
The moon was pressing against the back door, leaking slivers of light in through the cracks. The house wasn’t well insulated. Her son asked if it was a monster.
“It won’t get in, don’t worry,” she told her son. “How do you know?” “I won’t let it.”

Put Your Head In My Lap accomplishes what so many young flash/vignette writers are attempting at every online and print journal with a pension for the shortest of stories: a crisp, clean, complex narrative woven with invisible plot and seamed by tangible characters who do not require thousands of words in order to exist. Claudia Smith makes them real, shapes their faces, and does so in a quiet avalanche of small words, one at a time, until we are unknowingly bricked into her humanity.

from Pillow:

“The sky was an over-bleached sheet, stretched to the point of ripping. Everything worn but clean. He was saying he’d be happier if we lived in Canada. The sun seemed very close, like a star at the top of a Christmas tree. Maybe I could pull it down. Our baby had died, but he didn’t call it a baby. This was the year we lived on 32nd Street.”

Go get Put Your Head In My Lap. It will pile words on your chest, and you will smile as you suffocate." - J. A. Tyler


"For years I've been finding these little Claudia Smith stories. They draw me in so easily, with something familiar if slightly odd, and before I know it I'm consumed by a world far deeper than so few lines have any right to contain. In Put Your Head In My Lap, each of the stories is anxious, intimate, and powerful. Yet together they form a narrative of love and separation--like a flash novel. She's a terrific writer." - Robert Shapard


"Swiss artist Urs Fischer says “art works best in people’s memories” by which he means “it’s not just the act of going to see it on the wall.” Fischer is talking about visual art, but, in the case of Claudia Smith’s Put Your Head in My Lap, at least, the same could apply to literature. The 16 short short stories in this 41-page chapbook are compelling and immersive when you’re in the act of reading them, but they get even better when you’ve finished and moved onto recalling them.
This may be because the stories operate like memories, sharp and edgy on some points, like when the narrator of one recalls, “The air smelled of clean laundry and coffee. It smelled so good,” but also blurred and dreamy at other points and seeming altered by the process of recollection as when another protagonist says, “Four years ago, my son wore mittens with elastic at the wrists, so he wouldn’t scratch his face. He looked like a little lobster […] His eyes were a still sky on a rainy day.”
Small details make the stories feel lifelike, inhabited, and even well-documented as if they could almost be nonfiction, like when a protagonist says of a rough time in her life, “I shopped from a list. I made pretzel Jell-O. My grandmother had made it; I Googled the recipe.”
The final paragraph of the book depicts the speaker of the last story this way: “She is remembering, holding her face up to the flakes the way she’d read about and seen in Christmas movies. It happened, it happened, she’ll say and you can’t take it back.” These stories feel, in the best sense, like they are true things, like they are things that happened." -Kathleen Rooney


"The sixteen short-short stories in Claudia Smith’s Put Your Head in My Lap convey such tenderness it’s difficult not to develop a big-ass lump in my throat, the kind that causes tears to well and fall. This is a collection to read alone, wrapped in a blanket beside a crackling fire, a steaming cup of tea nearby. But beware: anyone who’s experienced heartbreak will relive that sorrow, those losses. Proceed, however, and be brave. Your reward is to discover prose that resonates with simplicity, prose that prompts aching and, subsequently, hope. You will want to reach for someone dear; you will want to dial up an old friend and catch up, someone whose voice once soothed. This is the complication in Smith’s writing: her words remind us of our pain, but the pain reminds us, inspires us, to reconcile with that, or those, we have lost.
In Submarine Dreams, a mother says, simply, “We came here a year ago. I was hopeful.” An obvious, but unstated, divorce later, she closes this story with the lines: “My son sleeps with me now. I sing to him, Mariposa, sweet dreams, butterfly, close your eyes.” And when she asks, “It’s a bad pattern to set, isn’t it?” I’m not sure whether she’s addressing us or her departed husband. “Good luck,” she sings, because her son “gets scared, dreaming, at night.” In the next story, “Valentine,” the narrator recalls how she and an unnamed “you” first fell in love; after falling “asleep together on the floor,” she kisses her lover’s forehead. She says, “I did it suddenly and softly, startling myself,” and I, too, am startled by her admission. It seems so natural, that kiss. And yet, it “was like touching the wings of a creature you couldn’t see but knew to be beautiful simply from the feel.” What she does next is just as startling: “I stood up and walked out of the apartment, down the stairs, into the street. It was cold and I wasn’t wearing a coat, but I kept walking anyway, thinking I couldn’t go back there because you’d be gone.”
A fiction professor once told me—and this is some of the best advice I’ve ever received—that physical objects in a story are best utilized when they pull double, or even triple, duty. What he meant was that though a coat can just be a coat, when it actually means something more than that, magic is born. The triple duty, or the magic, of the coat in Valentine is that while it is dormant back at the apartment, beyond reach, its presence tells us something about this narrator—that she’s willing to go without it, despite the chill, because the physical consequences are nothing compared to the emotional; to return to her apartment, to find the object of her affection gone, will leave her more bare than she already is, and the idea and fear of such exposure is something she’s unwilling, just yet, to face. It’s interesting, then, that this particular story opens with the line, “You once gave me an apple off a tree, and I thought about its significance, and wondered if you meant something by that, or if you were just handing me an apple.” An apple, a coat, a sleeping son: in Smith’s careful hands, they are more than anything we’ve ever encountered; they are precious cargo, worthy of quiet meditation and further exploration.
In the next story, Half, the unnamed narrator wears a locket her mother-in-law gave her; inside the locket, her husband’s black hair. She says, “I wore the locket at all times, even when I took a shower. I thought about the thin layer of gold between his lock and the flesh on my collarbone.” A locket, hair, a collarbone: again, the familiarity of such physical objects is recast in such a way that readers can’t help but ponder their symbolic meanings; again, Smith’s words—their simplicity, their frankness, the magic of their admissions, their very utterances—become more than words; they become experiences, revealed to us. And are we worthy? When else have we been entrusted with so much? I can’t say I’ve ever felt such a connection to a writer’s (dare I say?) soul.
In Marks, a woman learns the meaning of what it is to be touched, to be the one who does the touching. The father of her child has “a strawberry mark behind his left shoulder. When she traces it, he stands up and goes to lie down on the stone floor in the bathroom. She watches him through the opened door.” The door here—a physical object that can be opened or closed—is, while open, closed. The threshold is impassable. Her touch has gone, worse than unnoticed, unwanted, and, from worse to worst, even after they have had sex; and all she can do is continue to watch him until, when “he falls asleep, she leaves and looks in on their child.” It is up to us to learn the meaning of a touch, and when we read that she “would like to touch the whorl on the back of his head, but it would wake him,” there is only a deep sense of loss, something unexplainably clear: this is what it is to want to reach out, this is what it is to stop yourself.
I can feel my throat tightening now. Who wouldn’t? Fitting, then, that the collection’s final story, Ice, opens with this: “They will break one another’s hearts—well, at least, he will break hers, she’s not sure now about his.” And having read the other stories in the meantime, we, too, can’t help but be unsure about his, though we do know the fate of hers. Which is why, I’m sure, I opened this review with the word “tenderness.” If these aren’t prime examples, I don’t know what else I can offer in my desperate urging that will compel you to buy this chapbook. It is required reading for any human being; perhaps, more specifically, any woman whose life hasn’t quite turned out the way she hoped it would at some youthful age when she was freshly scrubbed and innocent. We may still be freshly scrubbed, but the scrubbing, over the years, will have certainly taken on a different purpose: no longer to cleanse but to cast away the sorrows of our past and present lives. Claudia Smith understands this; and I can’t help but think it’s because she’s been there. So tonight, wrapped in a blanket, I will raise my cup of tea to her and hope that as I blow away steam, so too will I blow away her hurt, if only for even a moment. - Molly Gaudry

"HAPPILY-EVER-AFTER fell short. It’s not raining, but the sky is full of “bruised clouds.” That gift from your husband makes you feel worthless, and the only person capable of articulating hopelessness seems to be your three-year-old. So why are you still piecing together what happened a year ago? Claudia Smith offers us a kind of answer with Put Your Head in My Lap. This collection of shorts explores how we fail at love, and how we split our fingernails trying to cling to it.
Smith’s characters represent many of the roles women play in a spoiled relationship—the abandoned, the unrelenting, the witness—but they also share a stillness-in-motion, characters stuck inside the memories of what they no longer have. In many shorts we travel from memory to present only to end in memory again, placing us in an elliptical world where the present is less important than the events that made it this way.
The world becomes even more elliptical when we draw connections between stories. These connections—from a dark-haired husband’s refrain of “stop talking” to a son’s love of Spiderman to the aftershocks of a miscarriage—build on each other so that we too feel lost in the memories, that each short is another scene in the story of where happily-ever-after went. A story like “Two and Two,” though a sweet moment between a couple, is turned sour by what we already know. That dark hair and that conversation about future children let us know exactly how this ends. I find connections between every story, even when I have to make a stretch. The compelling “Hook”—maybe the largest departure from the stories in this collection—can even be related back with one moment of dialogue in “Ice.” But whether these characters are intended to be related or not, Smith gives us just enough, and leaves out just enough, for us to fill in the rest. And we don’t fill it in so hopefully.
So what about redemption? Maybe it’s in a mother and child pretending the moon is a monster, or how a dog’s nose feels like velvet, in the beautiful details found even in a hopeless situation, or that failed love was at least proven love once. Maybe we find ourselves like Smith’s characters when asked, with our knowledge of how it all turns out, if we’d burn the memories. We’d rather relive them. These stories are what we have left so we’ll hold them in our laps. Not let go." - Christine Crutchfield


 
Claudia Smith, Quarry Light, Magic Helicopter Press, 2013.
 
 
Girls sleep on the balcony overlooking the water. Men wait by the bonfire, green bottles in the sand, coral necklaces. A rat scratches behind the walls a father has painted and left. A man sends his daughter a friend request. A woman thinks her heart should be beating fast, but it isn’t. A man draws a woman pictures she doesn’t want, of her hair wound around her neck. She sleeps in a closet with the dog she found on the porch.
In the stories of Claudia Smith’s debut collection Quarry Light, women search for life after darkness and breath after violence. They listen to the song with the line about the cat in the dark. Their mother swims in quarry water the coolest, deepest green they have ever seen.

"Before I fell in love with Mary Miller, I fell in love with Claudia Smith. Claudia was the first writer I identified with on the Internet. Her stories felt not unfamiliar to my own, (not just the ones I wrote, but the ones I grew up inside): stories of single mothers and lonely daughters, alcoholic women just trying to scrape by, teenage girls wanting nothing more than to be thought of as “normal,” men neither of them really knew. Claudia has the unique ability to put you right back in childhood, right back in the summer you were thirteen and terrified of everything, especially yourself. I read Claudia Smith's stories to better understand my own. I read Claudia Smith's stories to remember where I came from. I read Claudia Smith because she is like the sister I never had but always wanted; someone with whom to share these stories; someone who understands." — Elizabeth Ellen

"Claudia Smith's Quarry Light is a remarkable collection rife with strange doings, comings and goings, beings of the sort uncommonly troubled and beautiful in equal measures. The writing is elegant, sharp, sublime. The stories are frightening and heartbreaking. One doesn't want to mention names, but she brings to mind other sorely missed Southern women writers whose remarkable work we all still read with awe." — Frederick Barthelme

"What I love most about Claudia Smith's stories is their way of making familiar things seem new. It's a great gift—she restores to grown-up eyes the alertness of children." — James Whorton Jr.

"Claudia Smith's Quarry Light is by turns dazzling, electric, and terrifying, a story that will never, in Kurosawa's phrase, avert the eye.  She's a talent to be reckoned with, and celebrated." — Steven Barthelme
 

 

"Babyfat" in NOÖ"Red" in Night Train
 
   
The Sky Is A Well And Other Shorts was reprinted in Rose Metal Press's book A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness