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Silent Voices Vol. III: A Creative Mosaic of Fiction |
The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.
—Joan Didion
So begins Silent Voices, an anthology of short fiction published annually by Ex Machina  Press. Its third installment follows the success of the second anthology, which won first runner-up prize at the 2006 DIY Book Festival in the anthology category. Silent Voices is known for publishing fiction of diverse style and genre around a theme, each story building upon the one prior, building a universal whole from divergent pieces.
Didion’s quote introduces this most recent collection’s theme, that of home. The stories range from home as external domicile to the interior of one’s mind and emotional state. Eleven stories are featured in the third anthology. Ex Machina Press sponsors a contest for “Best Short Story” and awards a monetary prize and publication to the winning story.
This volume’s winner, Invisible Tunnels by Philip DeRise, is a story about a man’s rise from subway custodial assistant to the penthouse suite of the title Secretary General of the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority. The higher he ascends, the deeper he unknowingly burrows into his own isolation, though the curious, analytic way he goes about his first job hints at an emotional imbalance to begin with:
Gerry was valiant with his mop but he was no match for a fast moving river of spilled coffee…After rush hour one could find Gerry with a bottle of water testing different sections of the concrete, spilling water intentionally and recording the results.
The story is told clearly and with little emotion, almost antiseptically, not unlike a physician’s report. The style serves the story without dampening its poignancy of a man obsessed with his “underground kingdom” and his composed thesis of the moral character of each subway line he rides over and over, as if each line holds its own answers to the mystery of existence both below and above ground.
Internal conflict within the four walls of home and apartment pierce Tod Goldberg’s Living Room and Ed Vega’s Tenants in Common, respectively. Living Room’s rife with humor and crisp dialogue, though at times its style is a bit too hip for its own good. In any case, its preposterous set-up, about a man who decides to convert his living room into a Starbucks open for business for himself only, is a clever metaphor for the denial and distraction we use to avoid facing insurmountable grief. Perhaps all we need is another tall drip, a crumble coffee cake, and a cheery corporate smile to get through the onslaught of days.
Tenants in Common appears to be about Scott and his obsession with fellow apartment tenant Stacy, but the story takes an unexpected turn toward the end. The twist is a little too convenient, but because it is told in such a chilling manner, its underpinnings of the horror genre are revealed. It is the reader’s willingness to suspend belief that allows the story its shocking conclusion without being trite.
The tone lightens considerably (and thankfully) with Nightswimming: A Song for Andrew, Duet, and Collapse. Nightswimming and Duet utilize meta-fiction narratives to tell a story within a story.
In Nightswimming, a man simultaneously attends therapy and writes a fictional story to come to terms with a friend’s death. The story playfully argues narrative concepts such as whether plot is “dead” in modern storytelling, whether tragic leading characters encourage a reader’s sympathy, whether or not the writer maintains his voice while incorporating outside influences, such as a song penned by R.E.M., even the pros and cons of using italics for emphasis. The writer’s psychiatrist assumes the role of a stereotypical “best seller” editor of sorts, questioning his client about his literary choices:
….”They know how he died. They are reading to find out what it means to me.”
“Who gives a shit about that?”
“Well, you damn well better. I’m paying you enough.”
“Ah-ha! Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“Where?”
“Money,” the psychiatrist said.
“What?”
“Everything is about money. Sex, really, but money, too.”
“I might make some money off this story? Is that what you mean?”
“You’ll turn your best-friend-died-pity-party into quick cash. The New Yorker loves a good cancer story.”
“Quick cash? The New Yorker? Do you know anything about writing?”
Duet concerns a writer and his muse as he struggles to lift himself out of the torpor of writer’s block and a nasty break-up. It tells his story through the narrative but also through the poems he writes as he recovers his inspiration by returning to poetry. It has a sort of genial innocence about it, and reads almost like a story for young adults, but at 40 pages, it is the longest of the “short” stories. Though Duet has some interesting points to make regarding the creative process and how one envisions one’s muse, as well as the business of musing, it takes entirely too long to realize these insights. It is a laborious read because of its length and its repetitiveness, but perhaps that is the point: the process of any art making comes with time, patience, and practice, not to mention a little help from one’s muse.
Collapse is wholly surreal and manages to make an absurd, horrific scenario, the literal collapsing of a man’s face, into believable, insightful comedy by way of metaphor, physics, existential philosophy, memory, psychology, the theory of Evolution, and genetic mutation.
B.L. Pawelek’s One with Nature is the shortest of the stories and written with very little dialogue. It is densely descriptive and, as befitting of its title, tells the story of a Marine thrill-seeker who regularly tempts fate by jumping from the Mida Cliffs into the Sea of Japan. The story is unlike the others in this collection in that it almost seems out of place; however, nature as human habitat is not an uncommon theme—after all, it is our beginnings. The inclusion of this story keeps the anthology balanced and bright, as many of the other stories are at times heavy-handed with their brooding, but beautifully expressed, introspection.
The anthology closes with two stories that treat the concept of home as the ultimate void. In Brent Robison’s A Confession of Love and Emptiness, a man mourns the memory of his cruel behavior toward his best friend from elementary school, his own unwillingness toward fatherhood, his wife’s death from cancer, and his unceasing embrace of his life’s emptiness on the eve of surgery for his ailing heart. He assures himself that he has gratitude for his experience and that he will change his life if he is granted its gift once again:
My body is mostly nothingness. My hand that writes this is a moving shape full of space, like the Styrofoam cup, an illusion, and the perfect hand-shaped space that exists there, moving, without the gray burden of flesh and bone, without the clutter of cells and molecules, without the dirt of sub-atomic particles—that living invisible fire of perfect open space that is the soul of my moving hand, that is what writes here, writes truth here, writes unutterable names of things that never were, writes them in invisible ink on an insubstantial page, a page so blank it is merely the thought of a page.
I am learning what I need. I grasp for the solid, the real.
Marlon James’ War in Babylon is an intense survey of the mid- to late 1970’s in the ghettos of Kingston, Jamaica, where neighborhoods are political factions at war with one another, where poverty and starvation are commonplace and the arrival of two men from opposing political parties, each carrying his own gun and determining the city’s fate. Whereas Confession has the possibility of redemption at morning’s light, no such hope exists in Babylon:
“When morning come all gunfighting stop and we sneak out on the road one after the other. A body is just a body and the women all cried out.
We already know what this mean.
Man goin dead.”
Silent Voices III is an eclectic collection by authors living and writing from New York, California, Connecticut, Maryland, Georgia, and Jamaica and New York City. Because it is a collection of stories unafraid to take risk and experiment and is still in its infancy, the anthology looks to have a solid foundation from which to push forth for years to come.
Silent Voices Volume III, copyright 2007 Ex Machina Press, LLC, ISBN: 978-0977276349, $11.08 + shipping, http://www.exmachinapress.com
copyright 2007
Julia
Bemiss |
