Lone Star Stories, #27, June 2008

Issue #27 of Lone Star Stories presents a by-now-standard sextet: from the three stories, one is particularly strong, and all three poems are highly recommended. The magazine typically offers challenging stories in a speculative vein, in various narrative styles and tones which make it—fortunately—hard to categorize; this issue is no exception. I have come to the somewhat tentative opinion, after reading a dozen issues, that aesthetic effect is valued over storytelling finesse, and that mood and mode tend to weigh more heavily than extrapolative originality or rigor. I continue to see evidence for this in issue #27 (of course I do, since it’s what I’m looking for!).

Fiction:

Vylar Kaftan brings us a story, at least on the surface, of Death Personified in “Death Follows Us to Restaurants.” The story: Maggie, the protagonist, loses her brother Colin, and Tod, her invisible, unshakable companion through life, which only she can hear and see, doesn’t let her forget it for a moment. It may even be her fault, since she benefited from Colin’s kidney, the reason for her being alive and him being otherwise. Maggie struggles. She dines with her friend Ramona and struggles—she resolves to make life-changes, but continues to struggle and then—

“Tod” means “death” in German. In case we had doubts, at one point Tod says “Inefficient these days” in response to why he doesn’t use a scythe at present. Stories featuring a metaphorical or embodied form of death are so numerous and widespread that I felt myself becoming concerned, as the story progressed, that it didn’t seem to add anything new to this immense body of imaginations. Having a character regularly interact with Death is, to my mind, the speculative equivalent of having a character in a science fiction story board a spaceship or even travel through time: a flashy commonplace, a nice-looking given. But what else happens, and how does this pertain to that? These concerns about lack of originality were not alleviated by the time I finished reading this story.

The narrative failed to engage me for several reasons. It felt like melodrama. The death of a sibling through a kidney donation to the protagonist is not Mild Irony. Also, the climactic scene seemed overwrought (though not descriptively); I felt like Kaftan was trying to tug too hard at my emotions, pulling me out of the experience instead. Most of the story unfolds in well-written scenes of people eating and speaking. I don’t object to a conversational story, as long as the conversation merits it. More importantly, I didn’t develop much of an investment in Maggie or her plight, and her options seemed limited from the start.

The dialogue has a brisk pace and interesting rhythms, and as a result, the story moves quickly. There is some quirky inventiveness on display, and the simple declarative sentences (“Everyone had signed it. The biggest name was Ramona, who of course knew to get daffodils. Ramona was Maggie’s best friend.”) are mostly disarming and balance nicely with the weightiness of the happenings. On the whole, despite these crafty elements, I didn’t feel like this story achieved revelation, though it is perhaps unfair to expect an author to resolve Death in a few thousand words.

Erin Hoffman’s “Whatever Shall Grow There, Dear” is the finest story of the issue. A fable-like interpretation of three lines of poetry from John Donne’s poem “Lover’s Infiniteness,” Annamarie has just turned eight years old and has developed an affinity for collecting pinecones, which provides a respite from the ongoing arguments between her parents and seems to fulfill her need for a connection with something metaphysical. But people are disappearing, and collecting pinecones might prove far deadlier than it might appear.

The story’s weakness, perhaps its only one, is the framework of social critique. From the first paragraph, in reference to vanishing migrant workers:

…nearly ten of them had disappeared, but then, Mother said, according to the labor laws, they had never really existed in the first place.

There’s nothing wrong with making a point about migrant workers and their invisibility; however, I don’t think this story, which is otherwise richly layered and delicately constructed, is the best place in which to make it. True, it does ground the fantastic in the real, but by sacrificing narrative subtlety. Now that that’s out of the way, let me gush about everything else that delighted me in this fiction.

Annamarie’s viewpoint is expertly developed. The way she catches fragments of conversation and meaning from her parent’s arguments but is completely sensitive to the underlying emotional reality of which those arguments are symptomatic rings true. There are numerous images that are beautiful without being ornate, touching and innocent without being sentimental (“Pale late afternoon sunlight filtered through the gauzy white curtains in the living room and made the oiled oak floors glow burnt orange.”) They place us in Annamarie’s world and convey a sense of ethical sensitivity, an almost ennobling naivete, by acting as metaphors for her thoughts and emotions.

The storytelling technique is deceptively simple, and the characters all fully realized. Hoffman centers the tale around Annamarie’s coming-of-age, to great effect, and delivers a knockout ending that bears the bountiful fruits of transformation.

There’s no doubt that Josh Rountree’s “No Leaving New Orleans” is an ambitious piece, but I found it overlong and only partially successful. It’s also the issue’s most “science-fictional” story. In the future, the world is plagued by war, and a Dome is erected over New Orleans. Tech Class citizen Bink lives a life of frustration that seems to be going nowhere; there is Monica, who seems more interested in Bink’s projected image of himself (holo-skin and other upgrades are commonplace), but who has at best a superficial interest in him, and a society full of Drone workers. Until he meets a new woman, and things get crazy.

My main objection to this tale was the abundance of exposition, sometimes redundant. For example, in the second section, the fifth paragraph begins with:

Bink had never seriously considered going Drone, though a few of his buddies had decided that disconnect was their last best hope for survival.

Three paragraphs later we are told that

Bink couldn’t make himself go Drone, no matter how popular it became […]

Sure, some of the ideas are fun, but most are neither new nor plausibly developed. One chapter of William Gibson’s Neuromancer contains more conceptual pizzazz. Of course, it may seem unfair to compare Rountree’s story to Gibson’s classic—a novel, at that—but it serves to prove that more can be done with less. The overall effect of Rountree’s prose is also less like cyberpunk and more like mid-tech dystopia.

There is some justification for the Dome, but I didn’t buy it. I found the political extrapolation strong, but the social technologically enabled caste structure of New Orlean’s future inhabitants raised more questions than it answered. I enjoyed how the setting played an integral part of the story and how the consequences of many of the technologies suggested were often entertaining and unexpected. And Bink’s choices in the final section carry some weight, finally bringing things into tighter focus by concentrating on deeper emotions. The climax is strong, the final image memorable. That’s one part of New Orleans I won’t be leaving, but there’s others I wish I hadn’t visited to begin with.

Poetry:

At the risk of putting some readers off with what follows, I’m going to talk about the beautifully illustrated poetry in this issue of Lone Star Stories in detail. For one, I think the work merits this level of attention—and for another, I’m sure readers will take away (or bring with them) interpretations that vary wildly from my own, so I’d like to offer some textual granularity for my (mis)interpretations.

“The Firework-Makers” by Sonya Taaffe is a challenging, tightly wound, excellently crafted poem, of the sort we are frequently spoiled with by this talented and prolific writer. It’s the most technically “poetic” of the three in the issue due to its use of sound, imagery, its grammatical constructions, and its multiple-metaphor detonations. It’s also the most polysemic.

Who are the “firework-makers” of the title? One possibility is that they represent an elemental force that plays a role in essential creation/destruction cycles: “repaying our debt to the chilling world-glitter.” What starts out on a small scale rapidly expands to cosmic proportions (“gunpowder,” “oak,” “soapstone,” “sweat” in the first two lines, then “embers of stars” and “sloughing nebulae” by the midpoint, and “comets and pulsars” four lines before the last), though naturalist imagery is constant throughout.

Another clue is provided by the conclusion of the phrase referencing the debt, “fire-grist of the dead; their beacons.” It is almost as though in the tracking of the “milky smoke” and the gunpowder and bonfires there is a life-affirming creation, a reversal of the “spent darknesses” and a return to the “birthing hours” that preceded the extinguishing. The dead have beacons; they beckon for the debt of their life’s journeys and their creations, visible in the universe as stars and nebulae, to be repaid, and so there is an ineffable sense of sadness intricately linked to the exuberance of the firework-makers’ achievements. The use of the plural may also suggest the commonality of such a process, of such a rendering of “saltpeter handfuls” and “sparks.”

The poem’s conclusion seems to emphasize the positive or triumphant aspect of the firework-maker’s deeds over the gloomy ruminations but does not discard them altogether. While “this globe turns nightside among the spheres” and the “brand of years” is “burned back to the farthest spiraling bright,” a possible reference to the primordial origin of the universe, it also “sparks our road of light,” revealing the glories of our labor.

It’s possible that the title also alludes to Philip Pullman’s 1995 novel, The Firework-Maker’s Daughter, which I haven’t read. One thing’s for sure, this compact explosion of images and ideas transcends simple fireworks.

J. C. Runolfson blew me away with “Not the Territory,” and I hope the effect never completely leaves. In five artful stanzas inspired by Alfred Korzybski’s dictum, she delivers a clever, rousing, unsentimental deconstruction of the makings of myth as an explication for the search of identity.

The first stanza establishes the “premise”: a “kitchen boy” has been “crowned,” and others wish to uncover the secret of his achievement. The tone and rhythm of “they all want to know how he did it” plays off the words “kingdom” and “royalty” beautifully: those who wish to emulate the achievement are commonplace, perhaps even vulgar, while the achievement itself is noble and extraordinary. Also, the irony of a “route” being able to “confer royalty” is impactful (royalty typically being gained through bloodlines, not physical displacement).

The second stanza elaborates upon the journey of the boy, who has started from the ruinous (sinful?) fundamental decay of the world (“from ruined farm”) and returned to something deep and meaningful (“to ancient capital”). In contrast, once again, we have the loneliness of the wannabes (“Without their own bands of companions brave and true”). We also witness the first glimpse of their attempts to capture the boy’s magic through retro-sophisticated empirical study (“cartographers, […] lumberjacks and herbalists”). In a lovely bit of foreshadowing, Runolfson hints that these efforts are all doomed to failure by the choice of her images: cutting down trees, harvesting “dark-stained” plants.

The thematic core arrives next (“They make the territory the map”). Through an arresting extension of this metaphor, Runolfson creates a vivid image about what the misguided ones do with the map. It is difficult not to be struck by the immediacy of the scene, of the mounting on the wall, the setting on the table, the “fevered fingers.” The contrasts and irony continue to mount in rapid succession: “noble crest of arms,” “great estates,” “line drawn in gold.” It is almost as though the more ostentatious their efforts to reproduce the magic, the more desperately they move away from it. As they point at significant places on the map, their efforts are defined in terms of ignorance and what must be guesswork: “he nearly fell of the mountain pass,” “he might have drowned.”

Pointing, of course, does no good and brings them no closer to comprehension. They “always linger” on the place they believe of importance, because they are destined to repeat their futilities over and over. The “as though” that separates the two worlds not only explicitly severs any possibility of overlay between them but adds more irony; perhaps the emulators are aware of their deep-bound failures but are compelled to pursue them nonetheless. And how distant “well-fed thumbs,” in their complacency, from the mysteries they seek to penetrate.

The final stanza augments the tragedy of their misplaced energies by revealing the heartbreaking truth that “Always the mapping leads them back to themselves”: a return to their emptiness, to their titles and wealth and lack of courage and true emotion. There is a fine sustained opposition between artifice and naturalism that serves to reinforce the idea: “castle,” “pale, beringed hands,” “maps tracing in royal gold,” against “grim forest,” “deadly swamp,” and even simpler, “mountains,” “river.” No matter what they do, they will remain on the “outside” of true wisdom.

Runolfson’s desperate seekers may have made the territory the map, but through this eloquent, tone-perfect poem, she has returned the territory’s natural and urgent contours to us.

“Sibyl” is an intriguing poem on oracular divination by Jo Walton. There appears to be some circularity at work in the tenses. The poem begins with “she does not see you,” which seems to imply that the oracular character’s lack of insight or prediction is occurring at present. This is again confirmed by “she does not see the room you see.” The room “we” are seeing, though, involves the sibyl: “the crystal reflecting you both, as if you stood together.” So far, then, she is unable to see the room that we see, in which she is present; this is a startling, self-referential construct, and it certainly piques our interest and adds a mystical element (appropriate given the mythical theme).

The present tense continues throughout part of the unfolding vision in which she is laying out cards (presumably to tell “our” fortune); it is in the midst of these revelations (“she does not recall the question / you struggled to ask her”) that the temporal transition takes place. In the new timeframe, the sibyl is unable to remember something which has already happened and yet is simultaneously taking place in a present vision. That sense of impending possibilities (what will the card-reading reveal, how will “our” relationship with the oracle evolve?) is heightened by “the expectation of deception.” There is also an ironic implication here, for “we” are expecting a deception from someone who is unable to “see us.” More than deception, this suggests an intrinsic limitation to the divinatory arts—qualified by the requirements of an a-temporal relationship with the subject.

The final three lines, and in particular the last one, intensify the irony and close the circle: “and the darkness of your eyes is her lamp.” If it is the darkness in “our” eyes that provides her with the light necessary to tell the future, then perhaps the converse is also true, and her “inability” to see the future in which we will seek her services is a result of our clear vision of it. It’s also possible that a reversal of expectations is implied, and that “we” are in fact the sibyl. If this were the case, it would explain why “we” see the vision of the card-reading with such clarity—it lies within our divinatory nature. It would also be consistent with the “darkness” of our eyes, a reference to our original “uncertainty” and hesitation on a “threshold”; we do not know how we will act with regards to her, and yet in that uncertainty lies her path forward.

Walton’s choice to address the reader directly through the second person is a sophisticated and successful one, drawing us in into this smoothly flowing but temporally twisted poem. I could have never seen myself reading it and enjoying it as I did, but after the fact have no doubt that I look forward to Walton’s work.