Fiona McFarlane on “The Tomb of Wrestling” by Jo Ann Beard
From among these remarkable stories I’ve chosen Jo Ann Beard’s “The Tomb of Wrestling” as my favorite. In twelve thousand words it manages to include all the large, small, secret, shameful, silly, gorgeous, terrible parts of a life. Many lives, in fact: furious, funny Joan with her embarrassing cheese who saves turtles from the highway; Roy, who, with a marvelous series of stepladder jumps, leaps into life; the stranger, whose brain flickers in and out of ordinary horror. Not only human lives, but those of sweet Spock and clever Pilgrim, the dogs whose tender, animate worlds coexist with snakes and frogs and coyotes and also Joan’s world, which relies on them. And just as, in the story, Joan remembers the advice to let the weight of the hammer work for you, Beard allows the story to work its own terrible swing: here is a woman alone in her own house with a man, a stranger, who means to do her harm. Here is every part of that violence—large and small, past and present. The story focuses on the minute twitch of a hidden finger; it expands to take in past marriages; it narrows to the parasols and roses of old wallpaper and expands until the shadow of a heron flying past a kitchen window is part of the world in the same way a man breaking a woman’s nose is part of the world. It manages to ask questions about art, violence, men and women, animals, weapons, and bodies, and to do this on a scale that is horrifying for being so conceivable. This story makes me laugh, and gasp in astonishment and admiration, and see the world, and check the lock on my door. And it’s generous, too: it closes with an awful gift. It’s a story for this year, and this century, and all the centuries before this one.
Ottessa Moshfegh on “Counterblast” by Marjorie Celona
Rarely can I read simply for pleasure. When I do, the book is usually the autobiography of a swami or the journals of a creative genius—always a text that is deeply personal, apparently careless in its form, and effortless in its persuasion. I like when secret truths are revealed, insights are conveyed coolly, with grace and distance, not boastfully or aggressively. I like a relaxed narrator. And I like when the narrator speaks directly to me. It’s easier to listen that way.
With fiction, however, I often have trouble. I am always peeking behind the veil of the prose, asking the text to show me its seams. I can’t easily relinquish my seriousness around craft and relax into the world on the page. I study stories and novels with the obsessive acuity of someone trolling the beach for diamonds. Most days I find none, sadly. So reading fiction feels like work with little reward a lot of the time. And to be honest, I’m usually watching out for the writer’s mistakes: Where did he start to go wrong? Where is she being sloppy or delusional? What would I have done instead? What kind of person wrote this? Does he know anything new about life? Would I want to talk to her at a party? What does this fiction have to teach me about myself?
When a story can shut me up, I fall in love.
“Counterblast” by Marjorie Celona is a perfect story. Not perfect in its uniformity or flawlessness—that’s for factory-made products. Not perfect in its characters—the people in the story aren’t “perfect” by any means (who is?). But the personalities are drawn with expert strokes, not too many of them, so that I see perfectly who these people are without extraneous details to distract me. Grace in economy is one mark of a mature and humble writer! The subjectivity of this story’s narrative voice dances between sarcasm, self-awareness, and self-deception. That is extremely hard to do while maintaining continuity of personality, not to mention an air of vulnerability and firm perspective. Praise God, subtlety is not a lost art! The emotional range of the story is both deep and narrow: I feel what the characters feel and not much else. Although that may sound limiting or limited, controlling the emotional experience of the reader is precisely what a writer must do. I was more than ecstatic to relinquish control to this author. “Counterblast” inspires in me only exclamations of awe, no questions: that is how true it feels.
It would be silly for me to try to analyze its fictional content or say what is exciting about the plot. Read it and find out what happens between the characters. And when you do, look at how you lose yourself in the story. You are in deft hands, but you won’t see them in the text. They are invisible hands, like the hands of all great writers of fiction.
Elizabeth Tallent on “The Tomb of Wrestling” by Jo Ann Beard
If this can be said of prose, “The Tomb of Wrestling” doesn’t mind getting its hands dirty—a good thing, since it’s fascinated by violence’s ability to mess with reality, to walk in through the door of an ordinary afternoon and take our breath away. Violence is such a big deal that it arranges stories around itself, pretty often; it’s not that violence is exalted, it’s just that the story is always, in every adjective and image, aware violence is coming; its importance is irresistibly manifest. But what “The Tomb of Wrestling” does is different: violence gets only the most necessary slice of its impartially beautiful attention. The rest belongs to—is devoted to—life.
The story disenchants violence by depriving it of its usual prideful immanence. Instead it’s dispensed in the story’s first verb, struck. The pronoun before struck has a similarly unemphatic strangeness: she.
Shes don’t usually strike, certainly not in the head with a shovel, but it’s where the sentence goes in the wake of struck that’s really remarkable, because instead of blood or struggle or any what-happens-next-ness the narration turns to the shovel and from the shovel to snapping turtles and Joan’s habit of rescuing them from the road, and thus—that fast!—Joan becomes for the reader, as she is for herself, a likably conscientious person, inclined to rescue creatures who, without her intervention, often enough end up “strewn like pottery shards across the road.” The question I would have thought inevitable—Isn’t there a human skull she’s just struck, and is it in shards?—is coolly sidelined. In times of hard trying, nonchalance is good, wrote Marianne Moore, and I’ve often wondered if what she esteemed was nonchalance’s indifference to aim and ambition, an indifference that loosens up focus and lets in errancy and drift and diversion.
A note scribbled in the margins of my first reading of “The Tomb of Wrestling”: “ADRENALINE.” I was amazed to find the narrative’s quantum nimbleness, its irregular but searching interiority, infusions of memory, bits of ekphrasis, spontaneous point of view shifts, and offhandedly lacerating absurdities in complete harmony with the terror and seriousness of its mortal stakes. Under investigation are many shadings and kinds of consciousness, which the narration tenderly, mercilessly inhabits. The erratically obsessive terrier cognition of Joan’s smaller dog, Spock, is funny and real, as is the reverie of a coyote gnawing a deer bone, as is the lethal cerebration of a heron stalking a frog. Panicked by the possibility of her attacker’s regaining consciousness, unable to find rope to tie his hands with, Joan finds her own kitchen “strangely beautiful. [She] looked down and saw flowers foaming at her feet last week as she took a shortcut through the Queen Anne’s lace….[Time] was swirling instead of linear, like pouring strands of purple and green paint into a bucket of white and giving it one stir. Now was also then was also another then.” Who writes “one stir”? It’s beautiful! Uncensored attention garners not only beauty but a whole lot of weirdness and incongruity, this story proves—it’s like life, having fun with even the darkest stuff.
Honoring its title’s nod to surrealism, the weird and wrongful deployment of objects and bodies fascinates “The Tomb of Wrestling.” The abuse of a child is chronicled, and errors in erotic improvisation, too; tools are misappropriated, and so are lives. Knocked out by the shovel blow, Joan’s would-be murderer is returned to a childhood classroom where the teacher “had used a pencil to lift a human skull….He had felt an illicit jolt right at the moment the pencil disappeared into the eyehole; the deep, almost shuddering pleasure of it.” In the next paragraph he feels he is “wedged somewhere…the big hollow dome of his head resting against s
omething hard. Wherever this was, it felt like he was filling the space completely.” His “oversized and momentous” head evokes the flaring scarlet rose facing the viewer from a plain room scarcely big enough to hold it in Magritte’s painting The Tomb of the Wrestlers. The rose, like consciousness, is mysteriously there. Given the smallness and plainness and permeability of its room, its vividness feels hazardous, about to spill out of bounds.
Magritte: “Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.” What I love most about this story is how deeply it lets us see into what we can’t see.
Writing The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018
The Writers on Their Work
Lauren Alwan, “An Amount of Discretion”
My grandmother was fairly young when my father was born, and of those child-rearing years she often said, “We grew up together.” I feel the same about “An Amount of Discretion.” The story has been with me from nearly the beginning, from the time I first began writing. That was about eighteen years ago, and since then, the story has traveled with me to writing conferences, workshops, online classes, and grad school. During that time, other stories were drafted and finished while work on “An Amount” continued. The long process has to do, in part, with coming to know the character of Seline. People who hold their feelings in reserve are hard to know, and it was the same here. Her character was for so long a mystery because her actions were nonactions—the important things weren’t said or done. It took time to understand and to build a situation that would draw out responses that felt correct to her nature. Yet as the story changed, and characters came and went, I always felt a commitment to Seline, to the yearning she feels for the incomplete nature of her relationship with her stepson, Finn, and the loss she feels at the story’s conclusion. Even when I knew little else, I knew I was writing toward that finality.
And while the story is founded on that loss, to me it’s also a story about art-making. Before I began writing, I was a figurative painter. I come from a family of artists and grew up drawing and painting. In college, I studied at the Art Institute in San Francisco and in the graduate program at San Francisco State. But in my thirties, I began to feel the limits of that visual form. Slowly, the paintings became more narrative, then words began to creep in. Soon after, I set the pictures aside altogether and began to write. So I like to think that part of this story comes out of that intersection of painting and writing.
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Lauren Alwan was born in New York City in 1955 and grew up in Pasadena, California. Her work has appeared in ZYZZYVA, StoryQuarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Sycamore Review, among other publications. She is the recipient of Bellevue Literary Review’s 2016 Goldenberg Prize for Fiction. She lives in Northern California.
Jo Ann Beard, “The Tomb of Wrestling”
The first sentence of this story came to me when I was cleaning out the trunk of my car—it was summer, past turtle time, and as I held the shovel, trying to decide whether to put it in the barn or back in the trunk, I noticed the heft of it. For just a moment I had a great urge to swing it really hard and smack an imaginary person’s head with it. I was not at all in a bad mood, by the way, and had no urge to do it to a real person. There’s where writing a short story comes in, so I sat down on the front porch—I still remember just how I was sitting, computer on lap, feet up on railing—and wrote the first sentence. Then, oh joy of joys, I had to figure out why Joan had done such a thing and who she had done it to. The story took a long time to finish, not because of the writing, but because there were key questions I couldn’t answer. Like, why didn’t she run away and why didn’t she call the police. I was committed to only going forward and never going backward, making it a challenge for myself, and I knew there was a mistake on the first page that I would have to make right by the end, which was kind of interesting. Along the way, someone sent me a postcard of the Magritte pipe painting, and it happened to be propped where I could stare at it while thinking. The deepest mystery in the story—why she didn’t run and didn’t call the police—was answered for me eventually, though I didn’t put it in the story. If I did, then a pipe would just be a pipe.
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Jo Ann Beard was born and grew up in Moline, Illinois. She is the author of The Boys of My Youth, a collection of autobiographical essays, and In Zanesville, a novel. Beard has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a Whiting Award. She lives in upstate New York.
Thomas Bolt, “Inversion of Marcia”
Many ingredients have gone into “Inversion of Marcia,” including the Italian highway sign that gave me the title, news clippings about wild boar encounters, the kiss timer from a charm bracelet I assembled for my wife, unsupervised libraries, some of my own adventures as a teenager (along with those of several young informants and old friends), and a long and fruitful study of the names of lipsticks. Add to that an actual villa with none of the drawbacks of the one in the story, a dash of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a glass or two of Greco di Tufo, a couple of volcanoes, and the scene is set. Though, for me, the only essential ingredient is Mary, a young woman who has the adventure of paying attention.
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Thomas Bolt was born in Washington, D.C. His writing has appeared in BOMB, Epiphany, Southwest Review, AGNI, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Nuovi Argomenti, and Poberezh’e. Nightmaze, a multimedia work for live instrumental ensemble, spoken voice, and video projection, created with composer Sebastian Currier, has been performed in Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York City. Thomas Bolt’s past awards include Ingram Merrill Foundation and New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, and the Rome Prize for literature. He lives in West Virginia and Toronto.
Marjorie Celona, “Counterblast”
The opening scene of this story is true: my husband did lose his wedding ring on an airplane, and we did find it, eventually and improbably, in another passenger’s backpack. I’d never done that before—dramatized a scene from my life—but it was too funny not to write about, especially the desperation with which my husband searched his shoes. Of course my husband insists I tell you that he isn’t the husband in this story—and he isn’t—and I’m not the wife, though we have similar anxious thoughts. I wrote this story in a panic. My daughter had just turned one, and we’d put her in day care for the first time. I’d never felt so guilty, leaving her in a brightly lit room on the other side of town. I lasted three weeks, then pulled her out. But those mornings—eight a.m. to noon, I think it was—were enough to get the story out. I wrote it because I was angry at all the wrongheaded advice I was given about babies—stuff I found cruel, much of it from doctors. This story, to me, is a kind of corrective—a way of saying, I hope with humor, that any move away from love is a move toward ugliness and a move toward sorrow. And, I guess, a warning to married people everywhere not to take their rings off on a plane.
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Marjorie Celona was born in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1981. She is the author of the novel Y, which won France’s Grand Prix Littéraire de l’Héroïne for Best Foreign Novel. Her work has appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Southern Review, Harvard Review, The Globe and Mail, and elsewhere. Her second novel is forthcoming in 2019. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she lives in Oregon.
Youmna Chlala, “Nayla”
“Nayla” began as a way of making sense of a friend’s very sudden loss. Hers was among many during a time when it felt that most people I knew were either in crisis or experiencing a collective loss. Were we all destined to now exist because of absences? How could I write about the scale of what I was feeling and witnessing? I set the story in the not-so-distant future as part of a novella I had been working on but put aside because it felt too close to what was happ
ening around me. As the characters transformed the spaces of confinement, the story became about recognition, intimacy, and friendship. These are the ways we not only survive but also find ways of breathing and moving.
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Youmna Chlala was born in Beirut. She is the author of The Paper Camera, a collection of poetry, and the recipient of a Joseph Henry Jackson Award. She is the founding editor of Eleven Eleven (1111): Journal of Literature & Art. Her writing has appeared in publications such as BOMB, Guernica, Bespoke, Aster(ix), CURA, and The MIT Journal of Middle East Studies. She is an associate professor in humanities and media studies in the Graduate Writing Program at the Pratt Institute. She lives in New York City.
Dounia Choukri, “Past Perfect Continuous”
I was an anxious child, and I think that anxious people tend to gravitate toward the past, rather than the future. The past was my treasure chest, and the stories from my German mother’s side were like the ornate rings and necklaces she never wore but took out of the jewel box once a year. Growing up, I didn’t feel connected to the town my parents had moved to, but, listening to these family stories, I could conveniently and comfortingly connect to a fascinating past simply by being my mother’s daughter and my grandmother’s granddaughter.
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 Page 37
