Cat Brushing

Deeply resonant, eloquently rendered short stories about women who change and grow with enlightenment amidst the twilight of their lives.

Octogenarian Jane Campbell may be “new” to the publishing industry, but her first book, Cat Brushing, is refreshingly accomplished. The thirteen exquisitely drawn short stories in the collection are woven with wit and bold enlightenment. Each meticulously crafted gem focuses on the lives of aging women who grapple with their shrinking places in the world while coming to terms with feelings and failings, choices and losses.

 

Longing, need and sensuality surprise: A woman who “never put a foot over the line,” lives out her days in a care facility. Having grown distant from her self-interested adult children, the woman experiences an unexpected awakening amidst the gentle touch of her attentive manicurist. A similar theme infuses the tender story of one writerly woman’s life and a sense of loneliness that persists throughout marriages, affairs and motherhood. When she settles alone in a small village later ravaged by a violent storm, she takes in a displaced neighbor whose house is destroyed. The two disparate souls form a bond deeper than either could have imagined.

 

Reflective pleasures abound in the title story, where a woman “judged too old to live alone,” moves in with her son and his younger wife. Feeling “dispossessed… of control and elegance,” the woman and her Siamese cat become fellow inmates. The cat arouses charms and wiles the woman once had in abundance—maybe all is not lost?

 

Many stories deal with women forced to give up rights, respect and desires: An older woman takes a fall that sets in motion a series of events that drag her back to the past and a questionable issue of adoption. A simple lunch resurrects a memory of parental love that suddenly transforms, through the prism of retrospect, into control. A chance meeting on a train depicts the effect of consequential choices. Revenge tastes sweet when an unassuming neighbor privy to a long-suffering, powerless wife and her ogre husband cleverly settles a score.

Aspects of regret, mourning, fantasies, and lost love infuse these eloquently rendered, skillfully plotted stories that pack a wallop. “Ageing is often represented as an accumulation, of disease, of discomforts, of wrinkles,” says the narrator of the title story. However, in these wholly original, late-in-life stories crafted by Jane Campbell, the limitations incurred by aging ultimately become surprising sources of wisdom and empowered liberation.

 

Cat Brushing by Jane Campbell

Grove Press/Grove Atlantic, $26.00 hardcover, 256 pages, 9780802160027

Publication Date: August 9, 2022

To order this book on INDIEBOUND link HERE

 

NOTE: To read this review as published on Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade (June 20, 2022 ), link HERE

 

NOTE: To read a condensed version of this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (August 12, 2022), link HERE

Louise Marburg: Exploring the Many Facets of Human Nature

The Writer’s Life

Louise Marburg is the author of You Have Reached Your Destination (2022; Eastover Press; click HERE to read my review), which won the Eastover Fiction Prize, as well as two previous story collections--No Diving Allowed (2021; Regal House Publishing), which won the W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections, and The Truth About Me, (2017; WTAW Press), which was the winner of the Independent Press Book Award for short story collections and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Marburg's work has appeared in Narrative, Ploughshares, Story Magazine, The Hudson Review, The Southampton Review, Cimarron Review, The Chicago Quarterly Review, and many other publications. Louise studied design at the Kansas City Art Institute, is a graduate of New York University’s Gallatin Division, and holds an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. She has been supported by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Kenyon Writing Workshops, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. A native of Baltimore, she lives in New York City. You can visit her online at louisemarburg.com.

How do you start a story? With a character? A plot idea? What is the seed? 

I do often start with a character in mind, or really a sketch of a character—the fleshing out comes later on. But almost as often it can be a visual, an object, a phrase overheard that gets my mind going toward that special something that snags my imagination and makes me want to explore.

This collection features stories about women at every age from 12 to 91. Did you set out at any point to purposely include such representation? 

I did not set out to write about women of all ages. In fact, I didn’t set out to write specifically about women at all. But as is often the case when I write with a view to a collection, the theme emerges, and I find myself writing toward it almost as if guided by the writing gods! I think what’s on my mind either consciously or unconsciously (usually the latter) finds itself onto the page and often surprises me, which is the magic of it and what all writers live for, the surprise. 

Your stories have been described by Erin McGraw as places in which “characters’ destinations are unexpected, remarkable, and beautifully memorable.” When you begin writing a character’s conflict, do you already know it will be resolved? Also, you never end on a punch line or "wrap it up." How do you determine when the story has ended?

When I begin writing I have no idea what’s going to happen even a few paragraphs later, and I tend to take my time at the beginning of a story to let the plot emerge. The resolution of a story is never planned though sometimes I think maybe it might be resolved in one way only to find it resolves in another way. As to my endings, it’s true that I don’t wrap them up in a bow, I prefer to let my stories end quietly and leave a little something for the reader’s imagination. It never fails that my stories end sooner than I anticipate. I think I have much farther to go, and then boom, I see it, and know I’ve come to the end. So to answer the question, I determine how a story ends by not determining how it ends.

Why do you write short stories as opposed to novels?

The great story writer and novelist Lorrie Moore is quoted as saying, “A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage.” I think that describes the difference between the two perfectly. I love reading stories and always wanted to write them. Writing a novel is a long project. To me, a story is a fascinating puzzle: each piece must fit perfectly into the whole, there is no waste, and I like that. And though I’ve been happily married for more decades than I’d like to admit, in my writing I prefer the affair, it’s more exciting.

Your stories often explore what a character presents as a façade versus what lies beneath. Why is does this interest you?

Growing up I was interested in the many faces adults could present, being sweet to one random person and nasty to the next. Now, as an adult, when someone says to me, “oh isn’t so and so terrific” about someone who I don’t think is so great, I think, or even say, terrific to you. And probably that person has been terrific for whatever reason, but they are not terrific all the time to everyone; nobody is. I’m intrigued by the many facets of human nature, the dark and the light.

Some authors have rituals that help them get into writing, others listen to music, or even clean the house before they can begin to write. What is your process? Do you write every day?

I don’t write every day; when I am in a story, I take my time and might let days pass while I digest what I’ve written. And then there is the excruciating gap between stories when I don’t know what to do with myself!  My process is simple.  I sit down and write.  I have, luckily, the ability to immediately focus.  So, I may write for four hours, or I might sit down for fifteen minutes before I go out to dinner and bang out some sentences. I’m ready to write whenever the mood strikes!   

Writing is often described by authors as painful and difficult. Is that your experience?

I’ve never understood why some authors feel that way. I feel grateful that I’m able to write and have the time to do it. What else would I rather do? What else might I be doing?  I can think of about a million things I would really rather not do. I’m doing what I’m best at and what I love the most. How perfect is that?

Link to INDIEBOUND to learn more about books by Louise Marburg:

You Have Reached Your Final Destination

No Diving Allowed

The Truth About Me

You Have Reached Your Destination

A stellar collection of literary short stories tracing the lives of twelve women who grapple with tests of their character and the meaning of life.

Louise Marburg truly understands people and the human condition. Her prize-winning collections of literary short stories, The Truth About Me and No Diving Allowed, offer deeply perceptive, telling stories of ordinary people, good people, who face tests in life (challenges often thrust upon them), forcing them to navigate complex emotional landscapes.

Building on her strengths, she continues to travel a similar path in You Have Reached Your Destination, a stellar collection of twelve short stories that won the 2021 EastOver Prize for Fiction.  

Marburg mines the lives of women protagonists of various ages who face myriad dilemmas that elicit unexpected twists, turns and life detours: In “Alouette,” a 32-year-old woman faces the travails of conceiving a child she’s not even sure she wants—counseled by modern medicine and a psychic. In “The Weather of Menopause,” a female artist--affected by the angst of middle-aged--becomes riddled with insecurity that totally exasperates those around her. Family hierarchies take center stage in “Even-Steven,” where an adult stepdaughter tries to help reconcile the life of her terminally ill, 59-year-old step-mother—the two resent, but also like each other. The story, “June,” centers on an apparently thriving 91-year-old widow and mother. When a young couple moves into her apartment building, right next door, the contentiousness of the couples’ relationship brings back feelings from June’s past and forces her to question herself. What could have been and what actually is collide in “Dance, Rockette,” where a dinner party points up disappointments in how life turned out for a married couple with young children: the husband longs to return to his former glory days, while the wife invents an exciting (hilariously fictitious) past for herself. In “Double Happiness,” a happy accident reroutes a rather disoriented young woman who had fallen for a new love on Tinder… until she meets another man at a party—one who might or might not be who and all he claims to be. And in the title story, “You Have Reached Your Destination,” a single woman from New York City is summoned to Baltimore to be with her older brother after he suffers a debilitating heart attack. A judgmental, rebellious niece and a visit to the home where she once grew up suddenly reframes the past amidst the chilling reality of the present.

Marburg’s concise, wry storytelling is first-rate. Each protagonist experiences a controlled chaos of loss and grief that is buoyed by Marburg’s unique brand of levity--levity that illuminates absurdities of the human condition on the road to enlightenment.

You Have Reached Your Destination (Short Stories) by Louise Marburg

EastOver Press, $20.00 paperback, 9781958094006, 168 pages

Publication Date: November 10, 2022

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

Click HERE to read my interview with Louise Marburg

Donna Gordon: On Persistence and Passion

 The Writer’s Life

Donna Gordon is an accomplished, prize-winning writer and visual artist from Cambridge, Massachusetts. She graduated from Brown, was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and a PEN and Ploughshares Discovery recipient. Her novel, What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me received the 2018 New Letters Publication Award and was a finalist for the 2019 Black Lawrence Press Big Moose Award. The book was also a semi-finalist for the 2019 Dzanc Books publication award, the 2019 Eludia Award and Hidden River Arts. Gordon's work with former political prisoners culminated in "Putting Faces on the Unimaginable: Portraits and Interviews with Former Prisoners of Conscience," an exhibit launched at Harvard's Fogg Museum.

What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me is Gordon’s debut novel—a story set during the era of Ronald Regan. Lee, a precocious, 13-year-old boy with a premature aging disease holds a special affinity for Benjamin Franklin, the American icon who was an active writer, scientist, inventor, diplomat, printer, publisher and political philosopher. When a mix-up prevents Lee’s financially struggling single mother, Cass--a Broadway Theater make-up artist--to accompany her son on a trip to Philadelphia, Penn. and Washington D.C., Lee’s caretaker, Tomas--a survivor of the Argentina Dirty War, still searching for his wife who was pregnant when they both “disappeared”--agrees to take Lee on the pilgrimage. Their journey becomes a path to self-discovery, resilience and hope.

When you were writing the novel, how did you navigate that balance between each character’s heartbreak and sense of hope?

In order to tell my story, I needed to become each of my characters at different times.  I had to get inside their heads to know what mattered to them—what they were willing to risk and what they feared. Truth and humor guided me, along with what I believed to be each character’s need to survive, their need to belong and to love.  To live with heartbreak and vulnerability, and to be able to go on, is a powerful theme in the book.  It’s a quality each of the characters possesses and recognizes in one another.

 

As a mother, I knew Cass’s deepest fears, and how she had made a lifetime of sacrifices for Lee.  That she had also become estranged in the world.  That she still thought and saw things the way an artist did. Her humility enabled her to go on. She would have done anything to protect her son.

 

Tomás is his own worst enemy.  A survivor of Argentina’s Dirty War, he is the character who shows most of the three how he feels, as he struggles to protect himself from imagining the worst about his missing wife and child. After having been blindfold and tortured, the victim of excruciating physical and mental pain--he perhaps shows his emotional skeleton most clearly.  Still, he guards his hopes that his family is still alive. My experience interviewing survivors of similar atrocities taught me the importance of listening and bearing witness. Writing Tomás’s character was painful to experience in my own mind and emotions, to put him through such horror.  And yet it’s part of his story and couldn’t be overlooked.

 

Lee is perhaps the character I drew most strongly from myself, particularly the part of me who is resilient in the face of all odds.  Even though his best friend Kira has just died, and even though he knows he’ll be next, when Tomás asks for his help, Lee puts worries about himself aside and joins the quest. 

 

His intelligence, curiosity, and fascination with the ingenuity of Ben Franklin propel him through life.  He probably would have lived this way with or without Progeria.  He’s the center of Cass and Tomás’s lives; his courage activates their courage.  His will to live, despite the odds, inspires them to go beyond themselves in ways they didn’t think possible.

 

Together, these three characters form a triangle in which hope goes beyond fear.  It’s how they come together that makes this possible.  Fear of death and disappointment are everywhere in the air, but in this story, what they don’t know is just as powerful as what they do know.  They believe in one another and that anything is possible, despite sensing that a happy ending—for any of them-- is unlikely.

 

 

The story is set during the Ronald Reagan presidency. What advantages did that give you while writing it, and what challenges did that present?

 

Looking back on the era of the Ronald Reagan presidency, I was able to embrace Time in a linear way.  The structure of the story is that of a journey.  The Ronald Reagan era was close in time to when events among Argentina’s Disappeared took place. I was able to use that reality to create Tomás’s urgency towards locating his missing family.

 

I had to do a good amount of research to make sure I got the historical facts right.  I made two trips to Washington, D.C. in order to familiarize myself with the setting and with several landmarks. I educated myself about Ben Franklin’s life, writings, and inventions.  I had to slow myself down in order to absorb it all, and in order to find the link in myself that would become Lee’s link to Franklin.  It was a process of both slowing down and speeding up.  Coming to understand Progeria, I became more and more aware of the acceleration of our lives.

What made you decide to include a quest in the story?

In some ways, each of us is on a quest, or multiple quests, over the course of our lives.  It’s how we learn, live, and love.  How we learn to fight for people we care about.  It’s an essential action.  The fact that Lee and Tomás were searching for something as vital as missing family increased the drama in the story and propelled the narrative.  The structure of a journey enabled me to create sequential steps that brought them closer and closer to discovery and resolution.  I think there is a kind of quest in every story, whether it be structured into action or more emotionally subtle.

 

The novel has been hailed by many as a story that brims with wisdom and light. What life lessons do you hope readers will discover as they engage in the story?

 

What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me is a story of persistence and passion.  Of never underestimating what people are capable of.  Of overriding the odds and the terrible luck that life can throw at someone.  The nearly father-son relationship that develops between Tomás and Lee is proof that anything is possible.  A certain tenderness and understanding grows between them, making them larger than themselves.  Making them reach into a universe that had previously appeared too distant to grasp.  There’s wisdom in the way Cass is able to reconcile with Tomás despite her having been deceived. There’s power in the ferocity she conjures in order to protect her son. Each of these characters is as fragile as dust, yet as indestructible as the language that’s created them.

What were some real-life experiences that inspired you to write this novel?

Two seemingly disparate experiences came together to fuel the writing of this novel: While volunteering at Camp Sunshine in Maine (a camp for children with life-threatening illnesses and their families), I met a boy who had Progeria, a rare, premature aging disease. Most of the kids there had cancer and other serious diseases.  Their bodies were weak, their heads nearly bald from chemotherapy.  The boy, whose name I never learned, stood out with his aged face and small, frail, body.  I had never heard of Progeria before. He stood among the circle of children whose hands were placed on one another’s shoulders, practicing silent meditation.  It was a moment of stillness I’ll never forget.   

 

I had done a documentary photography project with Amnesty International, “Putting Faces on the Unimaginable: Portraits and Interviews with Former Prisoners of Conscience,” for which I photographed and interviewed 15 people on Amnesty's speakers’ list.  The people I met were from all over the world, but living in the U.Ss., people who had been tortured and imprisoned for so-called crimes against the government.  I met students and journalists, mothers and fathers.   I met a man from Argentina who had been among the Disappeared during the late 1970s under the dictatorship of Jorge Videla. I modeled Tomás after him.  The photos with captions I created were exhibited at Harvard’s Fogg Museum, Tufts’ Wessell Library, and Boston’s French Library.  It’s a project I’d like to expand into a book.

 

What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me by Donna Gordon

Regal House Publishing, $19.95 paperback, 9781646032303, 330 pages

Publication Date: June 8, 2022

To order this book on Amazon, link HERE

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

Note: Author Photo by David Kurtis Photography

 

The Patron Saint of Second Chances

A small, diminishing village in Italy--facing financial ruin; threatened with having the entire water supply cut-off--faces a hilarious revitalization by the prospect of an upcoming film shoot.

Community loyalty and the power of taking pride in one’s hometown--doing anything to save it--is the central theme of the very funny debut novel, The Patron Saint of Second Chances by Christine Simon.

Prometto, Italy (fictional) has 212 occupants, and one resident, Signor Giovannino Speranza, believes he has the power to change things—or at least he hopes so. Speranza is of the old school and traditional values. He is a 62-year-old husband, father and grandfather—a vacuum cleaner salesman-repairman disillusioned with young people always on their phones and social media and eagerly determined to leave town. He regularly turns to the saints to guide him and dispel his disappointments and arguments with God. Having always taken pride in Prometto, he’s become something of the local mayor.

Now that the town, in dire financial straits--the budget doesn’t have enough funds to restore the plumbing system and faces having the water turned off, forcing residents to relocate--desperate Speranza concocts a story about how Dante Rinaldi, a heartthrob movie star, is planning to film his next blockbuster near Prometto. The invented news takes off and injects a hopeful jolt of enthusiasm that rallies the town and beyond, including young people and even the local parish priest, while boosting tourism and local businesses in the process. But what will happen when Dante Rinaldi doesn’t descend on Prometto with a film crew and news gets out about the ruse Speranza has crafted?

Simon’s fun, clever story offers a hilarious literary escape. Readers will smile and laugh out loud at her well-drawn cast of quirky characters, those who long--and will do anything--to be a part of the film and its production. The plot snowballs, twisting in madcap ways with turns as sharp as the narrow roads that wind their way through the lovable charm of Prometto.  

The Patron Saint of Second Chances: A Novel by Christine Simon

Atria Book, $27.00 hardcover, 978-1982188771, 360 pages

Publication Date: April 12, 2022

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE 

Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts

A treasure hunt through Boston for the fortune of a deceased billionaire inspires a quirky researcher to join forces with a cast of lovable misfits.

Tuesday Mooney is a single, 30-something loner--a dedicated prospect researcher for Boston General Hospital. There she gathers facts and tracks "digital fingerprints" on rich people in the hope that they will donate their fortunes. Tuesday volunteers to help at a benefit auction and invites along her former coworker and friend Poindexter "Dex" Howard--a financier suffering romantic woes with his younger beau. Both friends get swept up in a night of surprises, including meeting Vincent A. Pryce (an eccentric, cape-wearing, elderly billionaire and collector of Edgar Allan Poe memorabilia) and handsome Nathaniel Arches, an eligible, however notorious, bachelor. Tuesday is drawn to Nathaniel, especially after he makes a whopping $50,000 bid for a meet-and-greet with New Kids, a pop band.

When Vincent Pryce drops dead of an aneurysm at the auction, his obituary launches a treasure hunt through the city of Boston. Whoever can read between the lines of the obit and pursue the cryptic clues set forth will inherit a portion of his wealth. Tuesday--an inquisitive, "human Google"--charges headlong into the quest. But she's not alone: Dex, Nathaniel, Dorothea "Dorry" Bones (Tuesday's precocious 14-year-old, motherless neighbor), a lingering ghost from a sad chapter in Tuesday's adolescence, and a host of competing--often dark, duplicitous--forces are hell-bent on getting to the finish line first.

Kate Racculia (Bellweather Rhapsody) displays an abundance of intellect and imagination in this clever, immensely adventurous story that pays homage to the elaborate mysteries of life and death--and self-discovery.

Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts: A Novel by Kate Racculia

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26.00 Hardcover, 9780358023937, 368 pages

Publication Date: October 8, 2019

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (October 15, 2019), link HERE

Dating Tips for the Unemployed

A mosaic of comical short stories about a 35 year-old single, intellectual woman trying to navigate the complexities of life and love.

Crafty comic writer Iris Smyles returns to exploring the life of her fictional anti-hero, Iris, in Dating Tips for the Unemployed. In Smyles's first novel, Iris Has Free Time, character Iris was a young, single New Yorker grappling with life after college and the pitfalls of young adulthood. In the new novel, Iris is now 35 and still single. She's grown older and while still struggling with hard-won wisdom, she continues her witty, self-deprecating and often self-defeating search for a place in the world.

This time around, character Iris--an aspiring writer largely supported economically by her Greek, politically right-leaning family--starts her journey having now completed her second master's degree and feeling that she needs to find a man and get married "before I gain any more weight, before I get too old, before people start to talk." That quest, channeled through Iris's lovably downtrodden, often absent-minded perspective, is not easy to accomplish. In 24 short, eclectic episodes, Iris--a wry observer and keen philosophical thinker--shares stories centered on men, dating, work (and the lack thereof), loneliness, friendship, sex, literature, costume parties, growing older, time travel, insomnia, Greek mythology and the complete series of Rocky movies. A large cast of characters comprised of family, friends, lovers and strangers enhance the very funny details of Iris's rich, authentic urban odyssey.

Smyles delivers another clever, insightful glimpse into the often absurd existence of an intellectual young woman who makes the idea of floundering in life a laudable art form.

Dating Tips for the Unemployed by Iris Smyles

Mariner Books, $15.95 Paperback, 9780544703384, 320 pp

Publication Date: October 27, 2015

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note: This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (6/28/16), link HERE

BOMB: The Author Interviews

Who better to ask a writer about writing than another writer? For more than 30 years, BOMB, a magazine of essays, literature and visual portfolios, has been publishing in-depth interviews with artists conducted by artists of all disciplines. In BOMB: The Author Interviews, publisher and editor Betsy Sussler collects 35 of the best conversations between influential and intellectual authors of world literature.

The Q&As are intimate and delve into aspects of the writer's craft, including the importance of sentences, rhythm and pacing, creating characters, narrative shaping, literary influences, editing and revision, the publishing industry and the demands of the writer's life amid more mundane concerns. They are intimate and give rare insight into the creative processes, feelings and work habits of contemporary prose writers and poets such as Sam Lipsyte, Steven Millhauser, Courtney Eldridge, Amy Hempel, Tobias Wolff and Jeffrey Eugenides. Each conversation differs in topic and tone. Clipped, clever banter infuses the exchange between Kathy Acker and Mark Magill, while a host of the Q&As convey mutual admiration, as evidenced when Junot Díaz and Edwidge Danticat discuss their ancestry and what it's like to be "book obsessed."

Articulating the complexity of the craft, the challenges of the writing life and the impetus behind certain works sometimes proves difficult, but each dialogue sheds light onto the act of writing itself and the profound satisfaction in having created something lasting on the page. Such revelations are bound to be helpful and insightful to readers and other writers intrigued and mystified by the process.

Bomb: The Author Interviews by Bomb Magazine; Betsy Sussler, ed.

Soho Press, $40.00 Hardcover, 9781616953799, 480 pp

Publication Date: November 4, 2014

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note: This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (11/3/14), click HERE

This review was also featured (in a much longer form) on Shelf Awareness: Book Trade (11/3/14). To read the longer review click HERE