Issue 33.4 (Winter 2010): Blindsided

Joan Didion’s 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking describes the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, of cardiac arrest in their apartment in 2003.  Some time before her husband’s death, her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, had been hospitalized for a mysterious case of pneumonia that had developed into septic shock.  Quintana was unconscious at the time of her father’s death and later, just before the publication of her mother’s book, died of pancreatitis.  With her usual close observation and detachment, Didion examines the bizarre states of mind that accompany life’s shocks, including behaviors that amount to temporary delusion and even insanity: speaking to people who aren’t there, the powerful emotional need to keep certain possessions and the magical thinking which assumes that performing particular actions can change reality. Didion gives unashamed and potent examples of how the most rational person can be made irrational when they are blindsided by such calamity.

Because much of the literature about this subject is by nature corrective—offering solutions easy answers and descriptions of “stages”—it is oddly refreshing and useful to see an author describe and fully recognize the derangement of grief and trauma. At least someone who is suffering such agony knows she isn’t the only crazy person out there.

In this issue, our authors face everything from a terminally sick child to being uprooted and living in an alien environment to abandonment by a spouse.  Dan Stolar’s story “Emma Won’t Get Better” describes how the unexpected tragedy of a child’s illness can undermine even a stable and happy family.  Jennie Lin’s “In the Quiet” is the tale of a girl who has been sent to live in China with an uncle who are farmers.  Her cousin ignores her, the uncle and aunt leave her untended most of the time while they work in the fields, and the grandmother is senile.  It is a story of being exiled in a place that seems almost in a different century, where nothing looks right or familiar. Karl Taro Greenfeld’s story “Even the Gargoyle is Frightened” is a first-person fictional narrative from the point of view of a young Japanese naval officer with high connections who has been assigned to do increasingly irrelevant work on an aircraft carrier, including investigating the murder of a pilot who failed in his assignment to fulfill a suicide mission.  This leads the young officer to even darker discoveries in the demented world of total war.

In Carol Ghiglieri’s ironically light-toned “Fergus,” her protagonist, Jackie, seems to be undergoing a terrible time, at least on the surface.  Her husband precipitously gave up his dental practice and disappeared on an extended sailing voyage.  Jackie adopts a dog that is anything but a perfect companion, yet she finds herself able to cope surprisingly well, particularly when you-know-who comes slinking back in the door.  Adam Krause’s wonderful “Gandhi is Dead” is another first-person story with a tone of muted irony. Protagonist Sampuran runs a slum tourism business in New Delhi, exploiting both altruistic tourists who want to help in the developing world and the people of the slums, from whom he receives large kickbacks.  Yet he defends himself as someone who at least has some positive influence, providing infrastructure and facilities that improves lives in the neighborhood.

Danielle Ofri’s essay “Unstrung” describes her experience as an ER doctor dealing with a patient who has apparently experienced a psychotic break.  The woman is a middle-aged Polish janitor who has up to now led a seemingly normal life.  In the ER she violently resists all drugs to sedate her and continues to fight and scream and threaten the doctors and nurses trying to administer her tests.   It is a story about puzzling through a diagnosis made all the more difficult by sheer physical desperation and about how the mind can suddenly snap without warning or apparent reason.  In his essay “I’m OK, You’re OK,” Danielle Mueller recalls hitchhiking as a young man to Alaska, under the illusion that he is going to make a small fortune during the fishing season.  He is picked up en route by a man who works as a clown at children’s parties, and while the young Mueller is seemingly oblivious to it, the reader senses the ominousness of the situation.  It’s an essay both about the blessing of youthful naïveté and, paradoxically, the potential danger of it, as a seemingly harmless person may out of the blue become something else.

In his interview with Polly Rosenwaike, writer Michael Byers talks about his recent novel Percival’s Planet.  Byers is a former Missouri Review Editors’ Prize winner, whom we are happy to have published four times over the years.  His story collection The Coast of Good Intentions was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and both it and his first novel, Long for this World, were New York Times Notable Books.  His new novel is set during the Depression and moves between the tales of Clyde Tombaugh, a Kansas kid who became famous for his discovery of Pluto, and the Harvard astronomers who preceded him at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, as well as a couple of connecting stories, including one occurring at an archaeological dig for dinosaur bones.  As in his other writing, Byers in his new novel makes intimate and interesting observations about human creativity, obsessive pursuit and selflessness, as well as about some of our less attractive traits.

Tarfia Faizullah’s poems are profoundly visceral, with their central image being the body and its response to different scenarios.  “Reading Tranströmer in Bangladesh” is an elegy to her grandmother as well as a narrative about the sudden death of a young boy.  Its final line is a central theme in all of her work: “There are so many bodies inside this clumsy one.”  Faizullah evokes the disorienting transitions between countries, languages, and between the past and the present.   Many of Brian Brodeur’s poems are also narratives of extremity.  The widower in “He Asks the New Owner to Look After his Trees” is still in shock after losing his wife and is embarrassed that people will think he is “tapped.”  Another of them is a brutal narrative recalling the rape of a Tutsi woman, about how she cannot convince her rescuers of the violence she has lived through; “Kandahar” is an elegy for a returning soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder who tries to come to terms with the loss of a brother. Maria Hummel’s group of poems concern a son who is “beautiful and ill.”  They are frank looks at the vulnerability and pain that are involved in parenthood.

SM

Speer Morgan is the editor of The Missouri Review.

After much editing and formatting and organizing and planning, our new online anthology is finally ready and everything (well, almost everything) is set. There are a few extra materials that still need to be reworked a bit, but all of the stories and essays scheduled to be a part of the initial launch are ready and posted.

Here it is:

textBOX: an anthology of exceptional fiction, essays and poetry originally published in The Missouri Review.

I owe a huge thank you to all of the amazing interns who have contributed to this project; it very literally could not have been done without them. We’ve been lucky to have such talented and dedicated students assist in transforming this project from an idea into a reality.

As with any new website, I’m sure there will be kinks to work out, but I hope you’ll both bear with us and also send us notes and suggestions for improvement as you explore the site. Our goal is to make textBOX not only a place to find some of the best work we’ve published over the years, but also a resource for teachers and students. In the coming months we will continue to add to both the collection of literature and the supplementary materials accompanying each piece. We will also be developing the poetry section of the site and hope to have at least a small collection of pieces ready by the end of the spring semester.

We would love to hear what you think of the new site! You can comment on this post, or email us directly at tmranthology@missouri.edu.

Recovery

Walking along my front porch, I rub my swollen

     belly like I did, years ago, when I was expecting

a miracle. I am empty now, gutted

     like the old farmhouse across the street,

every room pared down to the frame’s

     bare bones. Even the floors have been removed.

All I want is a day when pain

     breaks. I’ve had so many surgeries—

adhesions excised like splinters,

     four rundown organs

pulled out like windows and walls.

     Here in mid-life, I’m nothing but pure

ruin. And part of me would like to give up,

     dissolve into dust like my neighbor’s brick.

But in the ash trees that line our road,

     in flawless iambs, the sparrows chant

preserve, preserve, preserve, preserve.

     And I step into our yard where bees,

persistent as repeated pleas,

     poise themselves before the roses,

then bury their faces in the velvet

     breasts, suckling sugar, tasting

grace as insistent as the tune they hum.

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

During my long and complicated recuperation from open surgery last spring, my neighbors across the street were remodeling their farmhouse, a homestead that’s been in their family for many generations. As I followed doctors’ orders and “moved around,” hobbling along my front porch and sidewalk, I watched the builder working on the house and caught the poem’s insistent “germ.”  I tried resisting it: I thought it was too obvious a metaphor, too easy. (Besides, I thought, surely other women have already written about hysterectomies!) Yet, this neighbor’s brother-in-law, who’s another neighbor of mine  (this is rural, southwest Ohio where farm families live along the same tract of land they own), shared with me the tremendous cost of saving the home, a cost the owners could easily have avoided by simply razing the house and starting fresh. After all, even the fireplace’s brick had ground down to dust. I was that house; we all, at some point, become that house. The poem, like prayer, helped me endure pain and uncertainty as it spilled over into gratitude for those who choose preservation as a way of life, gratitude for such grace.

The sensation of a shared small-town coming of age is the connection that leaves Strayed feeling powerfully linked to Alice Munro. Follow along as Strayed learns the balance between embracing this link to her past and following her own path to the future.

And several writers who have previously been published in TMR are back with new work: Tom Ireland’s essay about cohabitation is utterly and pleasurably domestic: Can men and women live together happily in late-life relationships? he asks. J. Malcolm Garcia’s memoir about being on the scene in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 asks a very different kind of question:  What will happen to women in a culture suddenly liberated from Taliban repression? 

There’s more: new poems by Kerry Hardie, short fiction by Gary Fincke, Nathan Oates’s essay review on novels that address terror post 9/11, and a delightful interview with Julian Barnes. . . .