Improbably enough, the new issue of the Missouri Review contains two amazing stories worth blogging about. And they’re right next to each other! I hope to blog about Jonathan Starke’s “What Happens to Heroes” soon enough, but given the long lapses that tend to pop up between my blog postings… we’ll see…

Here is something that good stories do: make you very scared from very early on that something very bad is going to happen. But then the success or failure of the story is in the dénouement - how does that tension resolve? It needs to surprise you. Either the terrible thing comes to pass, and it’s a DIFFERENT terrible thing than any of the ones you were imagining… or nothing terrible happens, but the nothing happens in a fresh and exciting way.

I’m not going to say which approach Diane Simmons adopts in “Yukon River,” but the reader’s anxiety about all the ways this story can go horribly horribly wrong pays off. Voice is the real achievement here - which you know from the short first paragraph of the story: “It’s mostly drunk Indians where I’m working at the moment. Better than mostly white guys. Indians just drink. White guys, it’s got to be you look like somebody.”

There’s only about three and a half real characters here, revealed in tiny little pieces so that we fill in most of the blanks ourselves. The story feels like something you’ve never heard before, and that’s another thing that good stories do.

Incidentally - here’s some good design. The photo was what stopped me, with its evocative sense of the human world vanishing into the natural one…

Stephen Elliott is one of a tiny handful of writers whose work feels like it’s on fire. Like it’s so full of life and pain and beauty that you burst into flames, just reading it. His novel Happy Baby was easily the best book I read of 2004. I read his story “Where I Slept” (originally published in Tin House ) one rainy day in the reading room of the Mid-Manhattan Library, and when it was done I just stared at the dozens of people sitting around me, feeling special and alone, knowing that none of them could possibly have been so shaken and excited and moved by whatever it was they were reading. And he has this fab new online journal called The Rumpus, which is publishing a lot of really fresh stuff and feels poised to reinvigorate this weird slippery messy concept called online journals. And their Daily Rumpus newsletter lets me get a daily email from my hero Stephen.

There’s a great new essay by him at the Rumpus right now, entitled “Why I Write,” and as I was reading it I got the same sense of excitement I get from his fiction. Excitement, and vulnerability. Like I’m reading something I myself don’t have the courage to say. Like he’s saying the things I want to believe, but don’t. Above all - like he’s saying the things I tell myself. About being a writer, and why I do it, and what I get out of the deal compared to what I put in, and how it doesn’t make any sense, and how I can’t stop. Like I said, his work is on fire - it’s so alive, so vibrant, that it takes you out of yourself. Mattilda does that; James Baldwin did that. Nan Goldin’s photography.

Here’s some of it:

“The urge to publish is a hunger. The drive to write and the drive to publish are virtually the same thing, at least for me. They both come from somewhere deep. Like the drive for sex, they can be explained but the explanation is always incomplete.”

And because I think he’s a cool-looking dude, here’s a picture of Stephen Elliott, taken by Lydia Lunch, taken off his website.

[Note: I read a lot of literary journals. When i find a really phenomenal short story in one of them, I do a short write-up of adoration here.]

This one, from the New England Review, is a night in the life of a woman stranded in a weird city where she knows no one, washing dishes for a lesbian restaurateur who finds her cute enough to forgive her always being late and stoned, living with a man she doesn’t particularly like, saving money to get the hell out of Providence with only the vaguest and most unrealistic plans of how to actually do that.

I almost didnt read past the first paragraph, with its long twisty comma-ridden sentences which felt like someone maybe trying a little too hard to be Literary. But “A Street Guide to Providence” (hereafter ASGTP) really is that well-written, that literary. Told in close-third person, the story gets inside of Nikki’s head while preserving enough objectivity that we see the flaws and warts that make her so compelling. And make her make so many stupid decisions.

Nikki has pulled up all her stakes and moved to Providence to be with a boy she’s in love with. Not long after her arrival, he disappears. Skips town without a word. So she’s stuck, unable to take charge of her own life because it’s easier for her to just float along.

One lovely feature of ASGTP is its refusal to wade too far into what Nikki’s running away from. At a party, she meets a mixed-race woman - “what her mother called an octoroon, such a horrible, nasty word, and this is the kind of filth Nikki has to purge herself of.” This slim scrap elegantly implies her repressive and small-minded family life, yet spares us the need to waste space spelling out every little thing that went wrong in her life - which tends to feel like an author apologizing for her/his creation.

In the end, Nikki’s actions, even the stupid ones, even the ones that fuck over the people who have been good to her, make sense. High on ecstasy, in the middle of a threeway with two people she just met, she finally sees that she has the strength to do what she needs to do in order to move on. To make her own way in life. And even if that means stealing the life savings of one of the few non-creepy characters in the story, we feel that Nikki has come to a place where she’s finally in charge of her own life.

[Note: I read a lot of literary journals. When i find a really phenomenal short story in one of them, I do a short write-up of adoration here.]

“Dialogues of Departure” appeared in the last issue of Tin House, and its the strongest of many strong stories in there (I also loved Kevin Wilson’s “No Joke, This is Going to be Painful.”)

The plot, about a Canadian teaching English in Japan, feels fresh. The story is not the standard Westerner’s feeling of Tokyo alienation and bewilderment. If anything, it’s the narrator’s realization that he feels so at-home in this foreign world because he lived out such a solitary rootlessness in his old life.

For me, what made the story so stellar is one minor plot element, present throughout but suddenly becoming hugely relevant in the end. The narrator buys a second-hand phrase book for learning Japanese, and is amused by the macabre lexicon that frequently pops up: in an early lesson, alongside key words like “pencil” and “store,” is the word “corpse.” Later on he finds additional eerie phrases and sentences whose value, to a Western traveler, seems minimal. “Child massacre,” and detailed dialogue about hunting for children through the rubble of a recent bombing (the actual examples are hilarious, but I can’t quote any because I gave the journal away to a writer friend… because I liked the story so much I had to pass it on). In the end, we learn that the book had caused a scandal - it was written by a professor who had been jailed for pacifism during World War Two, and subsequently dismissed from his university post during the American Occupation for his public stance that Japan was the victim - not the aggressor - and that foreigners were a corrupting influence in Japan and should not stay. His book on Japanese for English speakers becomes a weirdly eloquent protest, as well as an illustration of the way that the overwhelming weight of history stands between people who come from different countries.

The writing and the story are flawless, but it’s this artful device that, for me, makes “Dialogues of Departure” so haunting, and effective.