Alley Poppy

Behind the last row of houses,
where the stacked garbage bins
mark the end of living space,
where the machine sheds begin,
and the rumble of coupling traincars
begins its roll to the river -
the volunteer poppy, oblivious,
sends paper-thin blooms to shine
and face the cloudy sky.

Best American Short Stories: 2007

I've been filling in the gaps of my BASS collection, and musing on each edition. Here begins some of my findings:

When Stephen King was tapped to do the Best American Short Stories in 2007, I can imagine more than a few literary eyebrows being raised, and a moan of despair as yet another of the bastions of literary America was being sacked by a Visigoth of popularity. King had already wormed his way into the hearts of literary America with stories in the New Yorker, though, even winning an O. Henry award in 1996. His dedication to the short story can hardly be doubted. He's been pounding them out for years, short missives between massive novels - the man is a machine for producing words.

So what kind of collection did he produce? Well, the usual suspects are well represented: greybeard veterans T.C. Boyle, Ann Beatie, and Alice Munro are here. John Barth pokes his head in, as do a host of stories from Tin House and the New Yorker. So King didn't shake the place up too much.

One thing he brought to the table was an introduction worth reading. He writes of walking into the local giant mega-chain bookstores and having to crawl on his knees and poke through the bottom shelves to find the latest small literary journals. A better summation of the state of American Fiction than any other writer made in any other introduction, with their erudite whining of what the definition of a story is, or anecdotes about being swamped in a sea of paper. King's a working-man's writer, out there in the field.

He also brings a good sense of voice to the stories he picked. One of them he found in the magazine Fantasy and Science Fiction. It's called "The Boy in Zaquitos," by Bruce McAllister, whose day job is as a screenplay and writing coach. It's about an American kid in the sixties who wants to work for US intelligence, but he's not too bright. That doesn't matter, though, because the intelligence community finds out he has the proper genetic make-up to be a carrier, spreading plague among enemy countries to de-stabilize them and incite revolution. But it's this character's voice that carries this story, a strong, spoken voice full of pauses and re-definitions - I can't really re-produce it because it's subtle, it sucks you in and carries you along.

Another good piece with a strong voice is "Riding the Doghouse," by Randy DeVita. DeVita is one of those guys with zero internet presence, a ghost of a man just hanging in the weeds of the real world. The story is about a kid riding in his dad's long-haul truck. The doghouse is the cap between the front seats that covers the engine, and it's what the kid sits on most of the time. The kid, who must be getting on to adolescence, starts to question things about his dad, like why he smokes, or why he doesn't work in an office. They argue, then pull into a truck stop, where the kid starts to play with the CB while his dad is away. He gets into a conversation with a shadow stranger named Midnight, who turns into a manifestation of death, really, and the story gets scary as heck.

There's a lot to like about this story, but there's a frame of the kid as an adult watching his own kid sleep through a thunderstorm, and the unanswered question of whether Midnight's is real, and if he is, why is he so obsessed with the boy's father. Despite these slips into melodrama and generic angst, this is a good story, and the conversation with Midnight is authentically terrifying. DeVita writes with a strong voice full of great little details, like this sentence: "Night and the darkness flooded past, washing clean the monotony of day and bruising the spinelike cirrus clouds, which extended toward the horizon." I don't know where the future will take DeVita, but he's lucky King was editing that year's collection, and it's a good lesson to learn that confident writing can cover up a lot of errors.

My feet in the BWCA

We went up north for a few days to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wildnerness. It's hardly a wilderness any more, what with all the day-trippers and hordes of scout troops and visitors from far and near, and the motorboats on some of the lakes, and the moose vanishing due to global climate change, and the satellites that pass by overhead, and the gps and cell phones. But, you know, it's still beautiful and all. It's just not wilderness any more, and maybe never was, unless you count the BWCA that lives in your romantic heart.

My feet at Canterbury Downs

My feet at Canterbury Downs. Not much more to say.