Spinning to Mars by Meg Pokrass (Blue Light Press, June 2021) is an introspective collection of linked micro-fiction. For those who might be unfamiliar with this form, micro-fiction is an even more abbreviated style of storytelling than flash fiction, though micro still technically falls under flash’s umbrella. Pokrass is an award-winning expert of the genre, and reading this collection highlights the form’s charms, strengths, and possibilities.
The inciting incident of the book as a whole is the loss of the protagonist’s father when she is five years old. The feeling of his absence permeates the sequence. It is as though he is on another planet, unreachable and alien. The fatherless protagonist grows up spinning (sometimes sure of what she wants, other times disoriented and confused).…
One of the strengths of fiction is its ability to allow readers to live as another person. We not only move with characters through their time and space, but we also sense and feel with them. We learn more about what it means to be human—widening our experience of living—by reading novels. We practice the skill of empathy.
Australian writer Madeleine Ryan’s debut novel, A Room Called Earth (Penguin Books, 2020), offers a delightful and unique character for her readers, one that shocked me not by her strangeness, but by the extreme degree of relation and familiarity I felt for her.
A Room Called Earth follows an unnamed autistic woman getting ready for and attending a party. The events of the book take place in twenty-four hours or less, but the richness of the unnamed protagonist’s stream of consciousness taps infinity.…
The Central Park Pact Series is a romance series comprising three books: Passion on Park Avenue, Love on Lexington Avenue, and Marriage on Madison Avenue. They center on three women—Naomi, Claire, and Audrey—who were all duped by the same man, Brayden Hayes. Claire is the wife, who believed her husband was faithful, if absent. Audrey was the girlfriend, who believed he was going through a divorce and would marry her someday. Naomi was the mistress, who thought Brayden was single, and having a fling. All three find out the truth when Brayden dies in a freak accident. The wife, girlfriend, and mistress connect and become unlikely friends, striving to protect each other in their future romantic endeavors.…
Despite being written and published decades apart, Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions and Shena McAuliffe’s The Good Echo bear similarities in how each novel breaks the fourth wall in order to engross the reader. While the novels also have differences in this approach (Vonnegut’s work utilizes drawings while McAuliffe’s novel utilizes a father’s dentistry notes where his story is told in his journal’s footnotes), the most notable similarity is that each novel utilizes a first-person narrator who at first seems disassociated from the story but slowly becomes more and more involved. In the case of Breakfast of Champions, the first-person narrator can be interpreted as the author; in The Good Echo, the first-person narrator is 12-year old Ben, the deceased son of Cliff and Frances Bell, who died from a botched root canal performed by his father.…
As a student in the Sierra Nevada University MFA program, I recently got to sit down with Suzanne Roberts to discuss her latest book, the memoir Bad Tourist (University of Nebraska Press, 2020). Beyond being a writing instructor, Roberts is an accomplished travel writer, named “The Next Great Travel Writer” by National GeographicTraveler Magazine. Her previous book Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail (Bison Books, 2012) won the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award. Roberts has also published four volumes of poetry.
Even though I have had classes with Roberts and have attended literary events where she was in attendance, until I read Bad Tourist, I can’t really say that I knew her. To be honest, she intimidated me: she is a demanding instructor, and while friendly, she is unabashedly forthright.…
Beate Sigriddaughter, author of hundreds of poems, is the winner of the 2014 Jack Grapes Prize and a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee. She has promoted women’s writing at her blog, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, for many years, an activity which grew out of her earlier Glass Woman Prize. Siggriddaughter is the author of Emily(review below) and Dancing in Santa Fe and Other Poems. Her forthcoming Dona Nobis Pacem will be issued in December 2021 by Unsolicited Press.
Emily, in your latest collection, you assume a unique voice, so different from the personas you presented in Dancing in Santa Fe. Can you tell us a little about how Emily originated? Did the collection fall together, for example, over a period of months, or years?…
Michael Montlack’s poetry collection Daddy (NYQ Books, September 7, 2020, 88 pages) is a sweeping vista of allegories and witticisms, and a benevolent contemplation on being a son, a brother, a poet, and a gay man in America.
The book cover is Christopher Shields’ pencil drawing of a man’s muscular arm sporting a tattoo of a seahorse; arresting and intriguing, it’s a warning of the nuanced play on femininity and masculinity that is to come. Appropriately enough, the book opens with a poem, “How to Mother Like a Man,” that talks about a male seahorse giving birth to help the female exhausted from egg production. This sets the tone for the entire collection—a compassionate memoir that transcends defined gender roles and is a celebration of grace, forgiveness, acceptance, and family.…
