Morrow’s supple prose is grounded in lyricism, prose unafraid to give the reader both the forest and the trees.

Bradford Morrow’s new novel, a feminist interpretation of fairy-tale tropes, explores the life of Cassandra: single-mother, teacher, dowser.

When you think of it, your past is like your shadow, and your shadow, whether it’s following you or running ahead, away from you, is, nevertheless, attached. Bradford Morrow’s The Diviner’s Tale is as much an exploration of the interstices between fantasy and reality—that space where those two zones collide, no, overlap: the place Morrow describes as the “realm for which there were no logical words”—as it is a flashlight on one flawed but resilient woman’s road to independence. Morrow charts the ways in which that woman’s shadowy past, whether dragging from behind or nagging before her, must be addressed, while realizing that though the addressing may not result in triumph over the past, it may lead to a kind of reconciliation with it. The Diviner’s Tale seems like a response to Robert Graves’s admonition in “Sick Love” to “Walk between dark and dark—a shining space / With the grave’s narrowness, though not its peace.”

Narrated by Cassandra, single-mother, teacher, and dowser, the “first female in a lineage that extended unbroken back to the early nineteenth century,” The Diviner’s Tale might be thought of as a feminist interpolation of fairy tale tropes. Here we find a witch, a girl lost in the woods, and at least one monster, a kind of shade himself:

Then, almost imperceptibly, my problems started up again. The monster took to whispering in my ear. It’s voice sounded like fine-grained sandpaper rasping against stone. It seldom appeared in the form of a beast or being but came to me more like a mystifying cloud in my mind, a cloud of deep rich rose not unlike the color your hand acquires when you cup your palm to a flashlight in the dark…The monster had always been simple and swift as a thought, the merest suggestion or outward trace of a thought. When I was in a period of—what to call it?—remission, I could easily keep these phantom thoughts to myself. But that wasn’t always the case.

It’s easy to surrender to Morrow’s imaginative rendering of Cassandra’s story, to connect with her assorted fears, with the beauty and terrors of the wildernesses she both inhabits and escapes; easy, too, to fall under the spell of his bright, light, and pellucid prose. Morrow’s language is full of evocative descriptions, well-wrought wordplay, and lyrical turns of phrase: “The next day low clouds moved hastily between the ocean and overcast sky like random thoughts under a proven theory”; “Your common sense, Cass, I warned myself, has flown the coop. Then, like that, his coupe appeared in the drive…”;  and “What a ceaselessly spinning spider is memory.” Yes, the spirit of Mnemosyne, as do the gods of sleep and death, hovers in this story. Other references to antiquity abound: Daedalus, Paris, Helen of Troy, and the oracle of Delphi. Two of Cassandra’s cats are named, respectively, Homer, the epic poet, and Sybil, an oracular seer.

Bradford Morrow

Just like her namesake in Greek mythology, Cassandra suffers from “forevisions,” omens of future events; and she’s also seemingly cursed with her own chorus of disbelievers. Ever wise, Cassandra reflects on faith and doubt throughout the story: “Our planet was roiled by believers who despised other believers who didn’t believe what they believed. It was so apocalyptically palpable one could feel the world quivering at the frustration of it all.” Unlike that beauty of antiquity, however, Cassandra doesn’t quite understand the language of animals, but she does have an “affinity” with birds.

Winged things fly around in Morrow’s novel, punctuating scenes with their noise, like the “riotous” warblers “carrying on like some piccolo orchestra gone joyously mad,” or the “murder of crows [crying] like a nursery full of squalling babies.” The “dialogue” of the birds is “clamorous” on one morning; and in “clarion voice…as if nothing in the world would force them to silence.” The birds’ presence is so ubiquitous in Morrow’s novel that when Cassandra discovers a spot in the woods where they are “voiceless,” she muses: “Birds always were to my mind the very freest of all creatures. Why they avoided singing in a landscape so naturally suited to them was beyond me. As if their silence were condemnatory.” Morrow’s supple prose is grounded in lyricism, prose unafraid to give the reader both the forest and the trees.

Among the “cliff hemlocks [giving] way to hundred-year-old cherries, towering beech, and black walnut” you’ll find in the story, you’re also likely to find hawthorns, but what you’ll also find is the spirit of Hawthorne, that is, an unobtrusive threading of Transcendentalist themes within the narrative. References to Dickinson and Emerson also appear; and, at one point, Morrow, in an inspired moment, verbs “Thoreau”: “I found myself exploring bonier, harsher, uninhabited land for people from the city looking to relocate, to Thoreau for themselves a haven upstate.” And you can’t help but think of Walden Pond’s verdant environs while reading The Diviner’s Tale:

Soon enough a misty rain blew down across the hills. The forsythias along the roadside, their many branches festooned with gaudy, cheerful flowers, sparkled with the fresh droplets and nodded up and down and side to side in the freshening gusts, as if offering a host of conflicting opinions.

There are so many things to talk about in this novel: the oscillation between Cassandra’s visions and her father’s fugue states, the way intimations and deductions are mitigated by doubt and fear, the way divining is used as an extended metaphor for the imagination, for creativity and discovery, the meditations on belief and disbelief, and the investigation of how naming might be a means of puncturing the “veil of perception,” that barrier preventing first-hand knowledge of the world. The Diviner’s Tale is a wonder-filled story, brimming with subtle intertextual references, where the narrator reflects: “All we had ever been were stories, and saying ourselves, unveiling our stories, was the best, the only, chance at divining ourselves.” If the stories we tell ourselves are vehicles toward self-discovery, then perhaps the stories told to us, especially lucently rendered stories, like The Diviner’s Tale, might just be a medium for discovery of the other.

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Whenever I read a Gary Lutz collection, each story peopled with isolatos whose skewed views of relationships, intimacy, and sex, make for droll monologues and biting critiques, each short short a kind of sprint, I find myself asking what it would be like if those moods were sustained, those bold characterizations explored and awkward conversations extended to a novel’s marathon length. Reading John Haskell’s Out of My Skin, I think I may have found a kind of answer. With his extended observations, his microscopic scrutiny of his own fleeting thoughts, Haskell’s forlorn writer reminds me of Lutz’s own company of dusty fusspots. Out of My Skin is Lutzean without the syntactical eccentricities, and with deeper explorations of consciousness and a storyline reminiscent of Charlie Kaufman’s conjurings. Think Being John Malkovich meets wry and lonely writer languishing in Lost Angeles.

Out of My Skin features a narrator obsessed with stars from the silver screen, a fascination that results in a questioning and fragmenting of identity. Leaving New York City to live in L.A., after a botched affair—or, rather, “social entanglements” he doesn’t want “to replicate”—the melancholic writer (also named Haskell) interviews a Steve Martin impersonator for an article he’s writing, and ends up imitating the imitator. This Haskell then both suffers and revels in what turns out to be a novel-length identity crisis. After watching the impersonator transform into the famed comedian at a party full of initially disinterested kids and their bemused parents, Haskell reflects:

People who have the gift of letting go of themselves enjoy the gift because, by letting go of who they are, they can afford to let go of what doesn’t work. And the trick, it seemed to me, is to have something waiting, another self or another way of being, something, so that in the moment of letting go, in the sensation of that sense of nothingness, there’s something to hold on to.

And after deciding to, as he describes it, perform an “impersonation of someone’s impersonation of someone I didn’t even know,” Haskell discovers that “because I was this other person, an entirely new world was possible.” His explanation is as individual as it is strange:

This is what I call the realization-that-something-is-necessary-but-not-knowing-what-that-is stage. A necessary thing is any action that makes sense of a given circumstance, that follows naturally what came before, like water flowing down a stream. If you can imagine water, cascading over rocks, actually thinking about something, then what that water is thinking about is the necessary thing, and the beauty of the necessary thing is that it’s true to itself, and by being true to itself, it knows exactly what to do.

John Haskell

As Haskell develops his mimetic technique, his mind jets off into no small number of inquiries, speculations, meditations, and reveries:

“If necessity is the mother of invention, then the father of invention is possibility.”

“The desire to collect art begins with attraction… A work of art is meant to have an effect, and it does, and the original desire changes from simply wanting to be near that beauty to wanting to possess it, wanting to be so close to it that some of the beauty rubs off.”

“Most of us profess a love of freedom. In theory, freedom is admirable and desirable, but how do you make it happen? How do you live, moment to moment, responding honestly to the unknown moment unfolding?”

Out of My Skin is unquestionably brimming with metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological asides and glosses. It also overflows with humor of the deadpan, sardonic variety. It’s also a thoroughly engrossing love story, one that never lapses into sentimentality. And, while Haskell manages to get away with large doses of philosophical inquiry, he also convincingly allows the first-person narration to inexplicably, yet seamlessly, flow into an omniscient point of view. Just before walking into the patio where Jane, his lover, is, the narrator relates that “Jane thought to herself that the past is the past and the world does what it wants to do.” And later in the novel he goes into her mind for pages: “Jane is feeling a numbness in her mind, and because that numbness is spreading to her body, and because she wants to feel something other than numbness, she agrees to go.” This heightened awareness and these sudden moments of omniscience are never explained; but the narrator’s voice, governed by a slanted perception of things, is so convincingly drawn that the reader absorbs it with hardly a second thought.

But Haskell the character’s thoughts don’t languish in the mind; he also reflects on the body, on desire, on sex as “a kind of utopia” that “demands that something be different.” This man who claims he’s no “good at looking below the surface,” is able to see with incredible depth, scope, and clarity. He is, in fact, on a meta-physical quest. We find him “following the fruit of… desire which is love,” hoping that his lover’s “desire would influence [his] desire, and together [their] mutual desire would create a space for happiness.” And while he wants to “reach out past all facades of being,” ultimately he can only wonder, “How do you do it?”

I’m usually distrustful of epiphanic moments, but the sudden illumination near the end of Out of My Skin is an undeniable force, and that it is catalyzed by the seemingly mundane—a shriveled raisin!—makes it all the more irresistible. The set-up is marvelous: On a weekend day where nothing “meant what it normally meant,” Haskell rejects going to a bookstore because “the idea of reading symbols on pieces of paper seemed ridiculous,” walks past a tree and decides that “if I wanted to read something I could read the tree… not read, but see, in the tree, whatever I wanted to know about the world.” In a coffee shop, still in this reverie, he “hears music in the room… background music. Noise. And it mingled with the music of the noise of everything else.” I’m tempted to quote in its entirety what follows as it demonstrates Haskell’s range, his understated erudition, his effortless excavation of a man’s consciousness. Here’s a bit:

And the thing that had once been a raisin sent sweetness into my mouth, and when I swallowed I could feel the sweetness of what was no longer a raisin, but was not something else, something transformed, and I could feel it seeping its way down my body and into my body, and I could feel it, in my arms and legs and brain even, the nourishment of it, the sweetness and life, and Man ist was man isst, I thought, and like an elixir coursing through my arteries, it was flowing through me, altering my blood and the cells that were fed by that blood, and I don’t know how long I sat at the table, but at some point I looked up and realized that yes, the world was still there.

Out of My Skin is strange, moving, engrossing, and flows just like the cascading water the narrator had hoped his decision-making process resembled. Haskell’s novel is not merely symbols on a page, but is, like that tree he reflects on, a portal through which you can see whatever you want to see in the world; the book is, itself, a “necessary thing.”

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Like any classic tragedy, Jamie Iredell’s Prose. Poems. A Novel. is broken up into three acts, in which the troubled hero recounts his life before he moved to Nevada, his life after he moved to Nevada, and his life after that, when he moved to Atlanta. Composed as a series of vignettes, pivotal moments in a troubled man’s peripatetic life, the narrative flits within the gray area between poetry and prose and, while it dispenses with linearity, finally coheres into a portrait of Larry, a fallen high school football star who never quite overcomes his self-destructive habits to live a life full of lasting intimacy and love.

Larry visits cabins, fields, bars, and strip joints peopled by “be-pistoled,” “be-suited,” “bespectacled” ne’er-do-wells fueled by crystal meth, amphetamines, ketamine, mescaline, cigarettes, psilocybin, Chianti, whisky, PBR, Vodka, Jack Beam, Strega, Oxycontin, Crazy Horse, weed, and cocaine with “actual cocaine crushed up into it.” Besides his own downward-spiraling actions, Larry is also troubled by a bear, rattlesnakes, and all kinds of creepy crawlies:

Herds of mosquitoes grazed the alleyways—mosquito-sized vampires—and heaved hordes of citizens above skyscrapers, then dropped the husks of their bodies to Peachtree Street. The hulls of destroyed brick rows lurked underground, and above, fiberglass rocketed into the rain. Hardwood floors lined my apartment, and cockroaches scrawled notes across my chest. With the humidity, I inhabited the inside of a mouth, the space between ass cheeks.

Jamie Iredell

“There was nothing in the way of metaphor about me,” Larry tells us. Fortunately, this isn’t true—his observations are often drenched in carefully crafted metaphor. A lake is a mirror, blood vessels are lightning strikes, tuna cans are shining stars, clouds are saucers, and Larry himself is a “desert rat with a signature.” His similes are even more evident: “Leafless cottonwoods flew past us like enormous hands”; “Cara was like that: skinny as carousel pony poles…”; “The next morning the sun scooped my eyeballs as if they were mounds of ice cream.”

What I enjoyed most about Iredell’s narrative are his lyrical, almost Annie Dillard-like observations of nature, the elements, the landscape. But where Dillard’s evocations are solemn reveries sodden with all kinds of lushness, with prose akin to—[namecheck any American transcendentalist here]—Iredell’s descriptions are prickly, brittle, harboring all kinds of menace and malevolence:

The fog lilts in like a cat—perhaps a bear—as it stalks the coast and harbor, pounces artichoke fields, sinks its claws into the browned hillsides, and the fog’s teeth settles in bones like a cold stalk of broccoli, like the earth in which it grows, sunless black, the recesses of space, above the moon, past the atmosphere, far beyond this Pacific cloud cover, and below water the sharks missile-cruise the forested kelp for seals, for the succulent fat beneath their skin, and between the shark jaws, in place of teeth, flex rusty bear traps, and if the sharks could, and you could maneuver it, they would let you gnaw yourself free and swim a strawberry trail to shore for the lettuce ripening in the valley, and the strawberries reddening in the hills, because fog is also good for this.

Evidently, Iredell has learned his lessons well from Faulkner and Steinbeck, but his sentences are also informed by Kerouac’s cavorting cadences. But these influences are heard and not seen—you don’t think about them as you imagine the narrator’s bloodshot eyes scanning his surroundings. Iredell’s voice is his own.

While Larry doesn’t really change much—or change into much of anything—he is self-reflective and does have at least one moment of honest self-realization: “It’s only now that I can look back and say what kind of idiot I’ve become.” And while fights abound in Prose. Poems. A Novel. it is Iredell’s ability to wrestle beauty out of squalor and depravity that one watches most keenly. Though Iredell’s debut collection may be read as a cautionary tale about drug addiction and alcoholism, it is, paradoxically, also an adventure story through the empty roads of boredom. His chosen form, brief vignettes full of striking imagery, is the perfect vehicle for his sad, hopeless vision: the world can be understood only in glimpses, seen through a glass (bottle), darkly.

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Chelsea Martin’s Everything Was Fine Until Whatever (Future Tense) is a zany collection of sudden fiction, short shorts, prose poems, proems, and lists that blurs the boundaries between fiction and autobiography. It toys with fixed notions of identity in a tired, ironic voice that’s as funny as it is provocative, and often disturbing. Martin is also an accomplished visual artist; EWFUW includes a number of her drawings. After reviewing Martin’s book for The Rumpus, writer John Madera wanted to talk further with Martin, and ask some lingering questions about writing, art, comedy, inspiration, and some of the strategies she uses in her work.

The Rumpus: Let’s talk about your drawings. When I first saw them I thought of Marlene Dumas. They have a similar kind of intimacy, not to mention a similar tonal palette. I know that she uses magazine clippings and Polaroids of lovers, friends, and strangers. Are you doing the same?

Martin: I use my friends and my family and myself.

The Rumpus: Some of these self-portraits?

Martin: Yeah. I like doing self-portraits. I do a lot of them. I’m not a narcissist though. I’m more of a masochist, because my friends always accuse me of being a narcissist and I get embarrassed, but I do it anyway. Maybe that makes me a martyr, not a masochist. Not sure. Maybe it doesn’t have to mean something about my personality. I’m pretty sure I’m not a narcissist.

The Rumpus: One of my favorite series of drawings in Everything Was Fine Until Whatever is the trio of drawings with the horned figure. I find them to be playful but with a kind of menacing undertone, probably because we never see the face of the “monster.” What’s the story behind those drawings?

Martin: I just thought it would be funny to put a monster in a very ordinary social situation, but then not really be able to tell how he’s feeling about that. I used photos of myself for reference for both the monster and the girl.

The Rumpus: Because these are bodies floating in an ambiguous space another artist that comes to mind for me is Leon Golub. Unlike his figures though, yours aren’t anguished, although there is a similar sense of futility. Your drawings also having a comic feeling about them. How did you choose these subjects? What materials/media are you working with?

Martin: I want to draw subjects that seem very boring and everyday… Stuff that would be normal except for one thing. Or two things. Or stuff that’s undeniably weird. I also like drawing dinosaurs and sticks of butter. My artistic process involves pens, gesso, acrylic paint, and markers, all on vellum. I use a window painter’s technique and paint on the backside of my image before I mess with the front.

The Rumpus: Who are some of your favorite visual artists?

Martin: Matt Furie, Anthony Zinonos, Marcel Dzama, Steven Cloud, Jeffrey Brown, David Shrigley.

The Rumpus: Have you considered producing a full-length graphic narrative of some kind? Comic book? Graphic novel?

Martin: I want to do graphic novels. And comics. And screenplays. And children’s books.

The Rumpus: Why did you choose subtitle your collection A Book of Stuff??

Martin: Kevin Sampsell [publisher of Future Tense Books] added that. I don’t know. It seemed appropriate that he added it, because we had such a hard time titling the book, and I would send him long lists of potential titles. I started feeling bad about the book because it didn’t have a title. The title that we ended up choosing has a given-up feeling, which illustrated the whole experience of finding a title. It seems like we could have titled it I Don’t Know Anymore, How About This One and it would have the same effect. I saw that Kevin had added “A book of Stuff” and thought it had the same kind of self-deprecating feel, or like we didn’t trust the title to convey to people that it was a book. And I didn’t really like it. But I just left it.

The Rumpus: Would you talk a bit about your writing process? Do you keep a journal and then transcribe and edit those entries? Where do you like to write?

Martin: I don’t really like to write anywhere but my own apartment. I send a lot of text messages to myself as email when I’m not at home. My texts are usually like, “If I ever break up with my boyfriend I want to date a very angry rapper.” Sometimes they’re more like, “Write down thoughts about game playing happiness martyrdom phone text,” and I have no idea what I was referring to when I sent it. I put all of these texts in Word documents, and add stuff to them, and sort of organize it, and read it all later when I’m drunk or feel like it. Then I add more stuff and a lot of it is really bad.

I have hundreds of Word documents filled with pages of one-liners. If I begin to write a story, or if one of my thoughts leads to more than a couple paragraphs of writing, I’ll go into these documents and pull out lines that I think would work with it. Sometimes I put the same line into three or four things I’m working on. I also hide my documents in many different places on my computer, because I often write things that I would never want anybody to read, at least unedited, and I’m paranoid that someone might figure out what the password to my computer is and maliciously read my Word documents. So a lot of the time I lose things I’ve written and/or completely forget about them.

The Rumpus: I’ve heard Samuel Delany, one of my favorite writers, talk about how many of his stories were inspired by other stories. Were any of your stories inspired by, or responses to, other stories?

Martin: I was inspired to write about a sassy, talkative baby after reading Dallas Wiebe’s story “Going to the Mountain,” which is about a sassy talkative baby who is afraid to go to kindergarten and talks to a philosopher about it.

The Rumpus: In your book you write that “everyone who grew up poor has a somewhat decent sense of humor.” Some of what you write sounds like stand-up comedy of the Bill Hicks variety. Some examples:

“I dated a boy who wouldn’t have sex with me for a long time because he said he liked me too much and didn’t want to ruin anything.
When we finally had sex he put his finger in my butthole.”

“I’m at a point in my life where I wake up in the morning and literally don’t know what to do.
My mom says this feeling is my hormones telling me to have children, but it feels more like my hormones telling me to buy Goosebumps series books on eBay.”

“I’m at the point in my life where I masturbate to memories of cuddling.”

“Once I overheard my mom telling my aunt that I was a mistake… and [when I] told her what I’d heard… she said, ‘What do you want, I’m only five or six years older than you.’”

“I’m confused about my sexuality, not my sexual orientation.
As in, is this my labia minora? It seems big.
Or should I be running out of lube this quickly?”

Have any comedians influenced your writing?

Martin: I love comedians. I love Michael Ian Black, Conan O’Brien, Chelsea Handler, Sarah Silverman, Robin Williams, Kathy Griffin, Steve Martin, Mitch Hedberg, Andy Kaufman. I love anybody funny. I think my ten-year-old sister is really funny. She makes me laugh way more than most people do. I like being around funny people. I think funniness is a sign of intelligence. I think it’s really important to have a sense of humor.

The Rumpus: When film director Pedro Almodóvar was asked if his movie Bad Education was autobiographical, he responded, “Everything that isn’t autobiographical is plagiarism.” So how much of your writing is autobiographical? How much do you distinguish fact from fiction and vice-versa in your writing? Would you talk about the various personas you adopt in these stories?

Martin: I basically have two ways I start writing. Either I’ll start with something about myself, or something that happened to me that seemed important, or I’ll start with some idea I have that doesn’t have much to do with me. But one will always lead to the other.

When something is finished, distinguishing “fact” from “fiction” is a matter of “the first part of that sentence really happened but it leaves out this important detail, and the second and fourth parts of that sentence also came directly from life, but the first and third parts came from some thoughts I had while watching a movie, and the sentence after it I just thought would be really funny.”

I mean, there is a lot of stuff I write that makes it seem like my intention is to make people think I’m speaking about myself entirely, and it is my intention to make people think that, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what it is.

The Rumpus: Even in the midst of the self-deprecation, the ironic and self-conscious asides in EWFUW, there’s also a kind of yearning for connection, for intimacy. You also seem to be saying that technology can be both a conduit and barrier to that connection.

Martin: I don’t know how to talk about technology in a positive or negative way because it’s just the way the world is to me. It seems like talking about the advantages of breathing through holes in our face instead of holes that lead more directly to the lungs. I made my first website when I was ten. I flirted using instant messages all throughout high school. I like the Internet. I like cuddling. I like my cell phone. I like awkward eye contact with strangers. I like hearing people’s voices. I like parties. I like Craigslist. These things don’t seem technologically exclusive to me.

I do think that people yearn for connection and intimacy, and that they’re hard things to achieve. People choose the most flattering photos of themselves to put on Facebook. Text messages can be vague and confusing. But conversations are confusing too. And some people wear lots of makeup. I think it’s just hard to be a person.

The Rumpus: One of my favorite stories in EWFUW is “Maybe Her Pending Corpse is a Window.” What inspired that story?

Martin: www.couchsurfing.com.

The Rumpus: What are you working on right now? What’s next?

Martin: I have a book called The Really Funny Thing about Apathy coming out with Sunnyoutside sometime. And some secret stuff.

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There’s Something Wrong with Sven

With all the hyper-sexed characters and situations in There’s Something Wrong with Sven, Greg Gerke’s story collection might just as well be called In Flagrante Delicto. In “Jolt and La Petite Mort,” Jake, a preteen, after having an inappropriate talk with his mother, has sex with one of his mother’s friends, then gushes: “It was sex, wondrous sex. On and on. Sex, Oh God, and Goddess. Sex. Sex. Sex.” In “Batter Up,” a right fielder, after hearing about the third baseman’s sex with his wife, “wrestles his bat away from the bat boy, clubs the third baseman on the head, jumps into the stands” and has sex with the “woman on top of the dugout.” Ned, in “Why We Love the Germans,” is caught “sucking at Candace’s small, pert nipples.” A poor tour guide in “This Is Where We Keep Vivaldi’s Body” fields questions about his wife’s former career as a porn star and about the disjointedness that enables him to suck himself off.

Characters with strange names like Peter the Pirate, Mother Goose, Tiramasu, Deuce Billygoat, and Pawdy show up in Gerke’s stories, as does a cancer-ridden thousand-pound moth named Sven. Saint James makes a post-grave appearance, as does Vivaldi, albeit as a well-dressed, preserved, and—most importantly—silent corpse. There’s Something Wrong with Sven combines imaginative leaps worthy of Italo Calvino and Kurt Vonnegut with tragicomic irreverence of the George Saunders variety.

Greg Gerke

And that’s just the stories in “Bacchanalian,” the first of Sven’s three sections. In the second, “Saturnine,” Gerke expands his range and widens his scope—violence, dark dreams, fatigue, restlessness, betrayal, and death suffuse these stories. It’s as if they, too, lived in the “house of jaundiced curtains” from one of the stories here. In “Now Come the Days,” a disaffected character asks a fish, “But what is your psychology of death? Your final wishes? Maybe you would prefer to be alone at the end. To swim behind some riverstone, lie down and close your eyes. Without a dirge, without any myth or anecdotes to remember you by.”

Sex does rear its hard head again in “Speak and Sweat,” in which Nick can’t believe “the great firm asses of women he sees at the short rock climbing wall in the local gym” and considers “how he’d love to be smothered by one.” But after being reported for groping the receptionist, he’s put to death in the gym’s basement, “a bungee cord squeezing his windpipe shut.” As a character says about himself in “Dreams of You: Chapter Eleven,” these stories will “only make love when it is dark.”

The moods in the final section change unexpectedly, often jarringly, thus earning its title: “Mercurial.” In “Bach’s Little Secret,” the famed composer tells a young organist that his diet is the reason for prolific and consistent creativity. He elaborates:

“Cut out the beef and sauerkraut. Eat more miso soup. Concentrate on green and yellow vegetables. For snacks I recommend fresh carrot juice and gluten-free stollen.”

A more mundane story concludes with a man going to sleep and waking to find that decades have passed, his parents are long dead, and “everything else—all matters of love, hate, and the quiet rituals of life—remained the same.” “Apples, Epees and Dracula” abruptly ends with the hero suffering from a “mortal wound to his belly.”

Like the house in “Did You Recognize Him?” these stories are “awash in an otherworldliness.” Gerke gets a lot right in There’s Something Wrong with Sven—like navigating through absurd detours, like making simple things strange, like having estranged people find their missing piece or start another puzzle, like getting into it, man, you know, like a… like a sex machine… Like inviting all kinds of misfits, nitwits, and twits to the party, like finding the tragic in the comic and vice-versa. Like dreaming out loud.

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Chelsea Martin is a mood swinger. Sometimes she’s an inveterate self-doubter, a vindictive bitch, a woman who needs to be kept safe from herself. She goes to sleep before the sun sets—she can’t take a happy ending. Bending to whatever winds blow, she lets the hours slip.

At other times, Chelsea Martin has unwavering eyes, wide-open ears, and a pitch-perfect voice. She doesn’t have much time so she cuts through the bullshit. She sees through people whose lives are lived through electronic devices, and in chat rooms where conversations are crammed with FAs (Frequent Acronyms).

But she’s also bored and tells bullshit stories, and her sternum must have a welt from all the times she’s poked it.

Chelsea Martin is a happening waiting to accident.

Some, all, and none of this is true. That’s the trouble with conflating fiction with what happened IRL (In Real Life)—it doesn’t necessarily get you any closer to understanding Martin, her obsessions, her successes, her failures, or her book, Everything Was Fine Until Whatever.

EWFUW begins with “Baby’s First Words,” a log detailing a newborn’s extraordinary growth spurts and “inventive manipulation tendencies,” while also cataloguing the signs of a deteriorating marriage, a marriage in which “time to think” means “practicing infidelity.” And it ends with “What the Tabloids Are Saying about Me,” an unfunny ending to what is often ostensibly the mad memoirs of a meandering mope tromping through her uncertain life. Squeezed between these two pieces is a provocative smattering of sudden fiction, short shorts, prose poems, and lists. Sarcasm and irony are de rigueur.

Chelsea Martin

EWFUW’s characters could have stumbled out of a Harmony Korine film. Like the kids in Kids, they’re young, irresponsible, and unhinged. They disturb like Gummo’s oddballs, the sad sacks swimming in some nameless town’s backwaters. And like Julien Donkey-Boy’s dysfunctional family, they’re often overbearing and abusive. In “Maybe Her Pending Corpse Is a Window,” Ira watches a woman die after presumably being knocked off her bike by a car. An “Internet stranger,” he’d met Kate through “an online social network catering to travelers.” As she dies, Ira, emotionally ill-equipped, clinically describes the events as they happen. Noting “her unfamiliar stomach fat drooping over her pants unpleasantly,” he thinks, “It’s like live reality television.” And later, he thinks about life without blood and

feels himself becoming alone and stranded, sees himself standing on the concrete uselessly, a lone parasite that has found himself without a host, staring blankly at the pending corpse of what was once an abstract sexual fantasy. He sees the thoughts in his head as if they were lines of an instant message:

(3:46) Does the world know it doesn’t need me?

(3:46) It does, it definitely does.

(3:46) Maybe the world needs me. It’s possible, I think. Is it?

(3:47) It doesn’t. It’s not. No.

Like many of Martin’s characters, Ira filters his life through various screens. A woman in another story admits that she tries “[e]ven on Christmas… to be in a text message conversation at all times.” Later, a woman says, “I hope it’s okay that I’m not referring to all the text messages I’ve received while writing this.” And in “Life Is Time Consuming”—a title worthy of Bill Hicks, as are “I’m Not Drunk, I’m Big Boned,” “Do you want me to be sincere or do you want be [sic] to be myself,” and “Today Is the Worst Day of My Entire Life (I Always Live in the Present)”—after a botched attempt at flirting with a telephone operator, a woman begins emailing a guy she used to babysit.

Martin’s hyperactive one-liners act as refractions, and her characters often use self-deprecation to sidestep criticism. “Watch this,” she writes in one aside. “I can make fun of myself in a way that makes you feel bad about yourself and I can do this and make you think I’m insecure at the same time and you will think it’s totally charming.” Another recurring disruptive device is the probing lines running in tiny type at the bottom of some of the stories. “My diary used to be filled with positive body affirmations, but now it is filled with anxiety about debt and weekly observations of this weird mole I have,” reads one. Another says, “Sometimes I read my own poetry and think that’s not right. Or I read it and call my mom and ask her to be nice to me.” In still another: “I accidentally shat on a person once. There, I said it.” These asides have the same cringe-effect you feel when a performer rambles into the microphone about how they don’t deserve to be there, and then lash themselves for their own intellectual and creative lapses. They make for powerful moments of discomfort, but don’t necessarily endear the reader to the writer.

EWFUW opens with a letter detailing what Martin expects from the reader, but it’s really just Martin’s first effort at misdirection, another veil you have to try to pull aside. While I certainly didn’t meet any of her expectations, what EWFUW did do, AFAIK (As Far as I Know), was make me draw my face into a BEG (Big Evil Grin) as I read about people who are FUBAR (Fucked Up beyond All Repair/Recognition), who suffer from FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt), and need to GAL (Get a Life). I don’t mean to be a PITA (Pain in the Ass), but I’m glad her characters are NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard). Sometimes I found myself LOL (Laughing Out Loud), or LMAO (Laughing My Ass Off). And that’s AFN (All for Now).

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