Other Voices #39

I just finished reading issue 39 of Other Voices, a literary journal published at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Very fine short fiction throughout, with the most noteworthy contributions being:

Joe Meno, "Happiness Will Be Yours": Elegaic story of two young men who escaped a horrific incident as kids, and are now trying to move on and put their past behind them. They make one last trip to the amusement park that has been their emotional balm ever since the incident. (Meno won last year's Nelson Algren Literary Award for short fiction.)

Leelila Strogov, "Paper Slippers": Wonderful little piece about a woman with an unplanned pregnancy and an inevitably major decision to make. Her thoughts of what her child's life could become, both good and bad, is particularly poignant and points to the excruciating dilemma women face in such a situation. (Strogov is the editor of the recently launched journal Swink.)

Shirley Asano, "Okaachan's Kitchen": A Chinese-American couple runs their own catering business, the latest in a long line of ventures, all of the previous ones having apparently been failures. The pressure the woman feels to be subservient and sacrifice her dignity for the good of her husband's business is quietly compelling.

Christine Sneed, "Optimism": A narrative in diary format which shows the inner thoughts of a directionless, approaching-middle-age woman who is envious of the domestic bliss her ex has recently discovered, and whose only emotional outlet is the possibly troubled "Big Sister" kid she sponsors.

Sharon May, "Curve of Flight": Very little happens in terms of plot, but the writer presents both the setting of a dead-end Australian town and its odd lifer inhabitants very effectively in just a few pages. I could easily see this being developed into a novel.

Stacy Bierlein also had a nice interview with Glen David Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil. Bierlein noted how controlled Gold's prose was ("In the good way—the way a ballet is controlled yet looks effortless"). I'm in the rewrite stage myself at the moment, which made Gold's response particularly resonant:

"The control question has one of those squishy, relative answers. I'm not like Nabokov, who said that fictional trees shed their leaves in fear when he passed by, but I'm not on the other hand like Kafka, blacking out and then waking up with a story in front of me. I wrote at first to surprise myself and to keep the marquee lights flashing, and then when it was time to start reining things in, I made a lot of notes and 3x5 cards about what had to happen when. But still, every scene had to surprise me as I was writing it. In rewriting it, it was all about control and cutting out things that were funny or interesting but which didn't fit."