This is how I fell in love; sober with a walking drunk. Neither of us had a parent to call and tell. I guess that was what we had in common.
-Elizabeth Ellen, “Ted the Golfer”
While the title itself insists on fiction, all three of these short stories feel very real, very personal and very authentic. Featuring three of the most exciting names in contemporary fiction, “Elizabeth and Mary and Elle” promises three compelling shorts and adequately delivers. All three of these writers contribute riveting stories about love and the unenviable situations it puts them in. Each story is an honest portrayal of the most primal human instincts and are woven together by the common thread of wrong guy, wrong place, wrong time; although, that is completely up for interpretation. Maybe everyone is exactly where they’re supposed to be.
Elizabeth Ellen’s contribution, “Ted the Golfer,” is a classic boy meets girl tale except said girl is currently living with an older Republican titular character and said boy is a classic bad boy if that bad boy is a genuine trainwreck. It’s a romance that unfolds quickly and intertwines with the narrator’s obsession with Kurt Cobain and his recent suicide. The romance escalates quickly, fueled by a sudden and unexplainable desire, a manipulative acid trip and culminating in attempting to cross the country in a used Dodge van. Now, I’ve obsessed over Elizabeth Ellen enough to know that “Ted the Golfer” is at least mostly based on reality, but that doesn’t make the story any less relatable or universal. Whether you’re the trainwreck or the romantic, anyone who’s ever been doomed in love can find themselves in these words. “Ted the Golfer” is accessible for all of the wrong reasons and painfully empathetic, but that’s exactly what we’ve come to expect from Ellen and precisely what makes her such an imperative writer. And that’s just the first story.
Mary Miller’s “A Thing of the Past” maintains the book’s momentum with a gripping, downright stressful story of a young woman who drives to a small town a dilipatated, downtrodden house to stay with a dilipatated, downtrodden man. This story is all-too-familiar; the story of a girl falling for the run-of-the-mill guy in a band only to find that, outside of the bar and in the daylight, he’s just a troubled man that pays for things with his laundry quarters and doesn’t clean his bathroom. While “A Thing of the Past” takes a (sort of) dark turn, it’s also insightful, funny and all too relevant. Like the first story, the reader is either one or the other characters in this tale and it almost hurts to realize it. Miller says a lot in these 26 pages, though, exploring a darker side of modern dating and the dangers of wanting love so badly that you give people credit where it’s clearly not due. Miller’s prose is masterful and her sentences are rapid-fire, producing a kind of dark-humor and unnerving astuteness that will keep you glued to the page and ready for the next.
The next being a new masterpiece from Elle Nash, “A Deep Well.” Since reading last year’s incredible “Animals Eat Each Other” I’ve been salivating for anything new from Nash and this short does not disappoint. An incredible powderkeg of emotion and suspense about a little apartment complex and the kind of neighbors that come and go, Nash’s narrator is like a character from an edgy YA novel; all grown-up and pregnant with the lovechild of some misguided father figure. This one makes me the most uneasy and fearful, eliciting genuine concern for it’s narrator and her fucked up little kitten. At only 18-pages, it all happens too fast and leaves the reader feeling helpless, unable to stop the events as they unfold and gritting one’s teeth as the foreshadowing captures that gut-feeling all to well. I’m already waiting for the next work from Nash with baited breath.
“Elizabeth and Mary and Elle” is a quick read, yet it showcases the full gamut of emotion and the need for love in all of us without sugarcoating all of the bad decisions along the way. All three of these writers say so much with so little and create genuine and intense connections that are hard to shake once you’ve reached the last page.
“The cool thing about poetry ,” Joey Grantham tells me, “-or at least a lot of this poetry that we’re talking about- is how little is actually given to you on the page, but how much you feel like you can take away from it.”
There’s a lot to take away from Tom Sawyer. It’s a weird little collection of poems and Joey really disarms the reader with dry wit and clever observations before going right for the gut with relatable and heartbreaking sentiment. And the sadness that sneaks up on you while reading Tom Sawyer only seems to hit harder once it’s been filtered through such gloriously humorous musings. Tom Sawyer is comprised of nothing but raw honesty, whether it’s random observations from the bus, an assessment of the inconsistency of Stereolab or fragments of a lovelorn inner monologue, Joey offers nothing less than genuine and relevant poetry. The work is sweet without being hokey and powerful, but not overbearing. Tom Sawyer explores depression without feeling hopeless, while simultaneously celebrating the tiny beautiful things that are routinely overlooked; it’s the poetry of the mundane filtered through an uncanny intellect and presented as (mostly) minimalist poetry with no affectation or bluster to speak of.
Written mostly while living in New York and working at the independent bookstore McNally Jackson, Joey started Tom Sawyer organically enough:
Tom Sawyer is out now via Civil Coping Mechanisms
“Sometimes I just felt trapped in that bookstore. And that’s why I would write these poems,” he says, “I wrote the majority of Tom Sawyer while I was at work. I wrote them on bookmarks and loose scraps of paper we had. Anytime I was stuck sitting at the register or information desk I would try to.”
Before McNally Jackson, though, Joey attended Bennington College in Vermont, which he describes as “a weird hippie school where you create your own major.” So Joey decided to major in writing.
“I’m sure I made up a fancy way of saying I want to write stories,” he confesses, “But really I just wanted an excuse to read and write. Bennington was where I built up the confidence to send out stories. That’s where I first wrote to Scott McClanahan and I kinda just reached out to people. And people were nice enough to reply back and help me.”
It’s at this point where the Joseph Grantham story turns into some kind of surreal independent literature fairy tale.
“I met Bud (Smith) through the press that I run with my sister because we published one of his books called Dust Bunny City.”
Oh yeah, Joey also runs the exceptional Disorder Press with his sister Mikaela, a fiercely independent press that champions some of the best contemporary authors.
“After I graduated from college and I moved to New York I was close to Bud,” Joey continues, “We were working on his book and I would call him and talk about edits. It made sense to finally just meet up in person and hang out. So I started hanging out with Bud every once in a while and after his book came out I threw a reading for him and I just started hanging out with him a lot more. Scott ended up writing to me when I was working at McNally Jackson. I remember getting an email from him saying like ‘hey, I like everything you’re doing with your press’ and he just started asking me questions like what are you reading and blah blah blah. When he came to New York to do The Sarah Book reading – him and his wife, who I’m sure you know is a really good writer, Juliet Escoria – they were like ‘you should just come live with us and work at Walmart’. And I was planning on being out of New York when my lease was up anyway.”
There’s a poem in Tom Sawyer, ‘poem for scott mcclanahan,’ that is so casually startling that I had to read it at least 3 times before I really absorbed the profundity of it. A lot of Joey’s work is like that, it just eases into the dark parts without warning. He just kind of pulls you down into the depths with his words and it’s hard to tell how you got there.
“As it got closer to the end of my lease Bud was like ‘Joey, why don’t you work at the bookstore for another month and just live in my guestroom and save up paychecks?’ So I lived with Bud for a month and then he drove me to West Virginia and dropped me off at Scott’s and I lived there for like a month and a half.”
Joey and his kitties. He’s holding Tammy Wynette. The lil one in the corner is Possum.
There’s a poem for Bud Smith in there, too. It’s a bit more light-hearted, but still meticulously frank and unadulterated. It’s sort of a light at the end of the tunnel, which Joey tends to pepper throughout the entirety of Tom Sawyer.
After a stay with Scott McClanahan, Joey ended up back in his parents’ house in a suburb right outside of San Francisco – a situation no one wants to find themselves in. He eventually landed a job at another well-known bookstore, City Lights, and got an apartment in the city.
“It was just recreating my New York experience, but with less friends and less stuff going on,” Joey laments, “So that felt like some sick fucked up joke that I played on myself.”
Throughout all of this moving and getting to hang out with other brilliant writers, Joey was turning his poems into a book.
“Michael Seidlinger, who owns Civil Coping Mechanisms, asked me if I had a manuscript when I was working at McNally Jackson,” Joey continues, “I think I had maybe 40 or 50 poems and so I said ‘yeah I have a manuscript I’ll send it to you in like a week’. And I think I sent it to him two weeks later. I started finding every poem I’d written in the last year.”
So, at this point, Joey knows he’s got a publisher and he’s got the content; he just needs to turn it into a cohesive book. This part is the most interesting to me so we’re going to get into the details:
“Some of those are exactly the way they were written on the bookmarks or whatever and then others I ended up working on a lot. I started finding every poem I’d written in the last year. And things I didn’t know were poems like the beginnings of stories. And I thought ‘that’s a poem’. I’d go through the notes in my phone and think ‘this could be in my book’. And I sent it to him and it was probably 90 pages at that point. 90 poems. A week after he got it he said ‘yeah, lets publish this. Let’s do it in like a year’. So I had a year to just look at this thing. I definitely had some time to do some editing. Anytime I was bored or not working on something I would go back to Tom Sawyer and I would fuck with it and move something around. And I’d write poems for Tom Sawyer once I realized it was book. And I really paid attention to the order of the poems. That really mattered to me.”
At a sparse 119 pages, it’s easy to see how much attention Joey paid to detail while writing Tom Sawyer. Each poem is scrupulously crafted and possesses a certain type of charming, if a bit discomfited type of beauty. It becomes obvious that Joey is spilling his guts in this work and he’s not pulling back or hiding behind any of the usual pretenses. In sad poem he writes:
we live in a world
where i write poems
about one person
who made me sad
a long time ago
It’s hard to miss the simplicity in that, but the candor and disaster are just as obvious. Tom Sawyer isn’t a traditional poetry collection because it’s so much more. It’s something that feels so instantaneous and urgent, like sleep-deprived confessions in the pitch-black darkness. Many of these poems read like something you weren’t supposed to see, like you know too much. Tom Sawyer is Joey’s life, but the inner-monologue of Joey’s life, the part of other people we don’t usually get to see.
“It started to become chronological,” Joey says, “It’s amazing when you gather all this stuff from like a year of your life that you don’t think you’ve been writing as one cohesive thing how much of it fits together. And how much of it is about the same kinda stuff. Still when I flip through my book I’m like ‘oh shit that thing relates to that other thing’ or I repeated myself in that poem and this poem over here. And I’m still kinda realizing that, but that’s kinda cool.”
I’m not sure what’s next for Joey and he’s not sure either. He recently moved to rural North Carolina with Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, who happens to be – you guessed it – another brilliant writer. They met through Bud Smith, started talking online and decided to be roommates. This next part has nothing to with the creation of or the content of Tom Sawyer, I just think it’s really fucking cute:
“It wasn’t like romantic at all,” Joey assures me, “I was attracted to Ashleigh, but I made it a point to not fall in love with this person. It was just stupid of me to think that I wouldn’t fall for this person. And when I got here it took me like two days before I was like’ oh fuck, I really like this person and if she doesn’t like me back I’m gonna end up writing another book of sad poems.’ It seems to be working out right now.”
“I didn’t have to smoke these words. They found their way inside me immediately and burned into my chest, drew heat to my face, echoed in my ears. There is no space for me. There is no space for me.”
Exploring common relationship themes and struggles through the lens of a young couple finding their way through sexual identities and polyamory, Vanishing Twinsexpertly uses ballet metaphors and the blurred lines between twins and soul-mates to walk us through a personal and astonishing story.
While Leah Dieterich’s writing is precisely executed and peppered with gorgeous prose, it’s the forthrightness and integrity of her words that really make an impact. There’s a kind of ache – a searching – to Vanishing Twins that brings a sense of fluency while simultaneously being wholly disorienting. The plot moves fast, focusing more on the vast theme of self-discovery rather than the details of a too-linear storyline; essentially skipping to the good stuff and getting to the point.
Vanishing Twins is a stark commentary on social norms and expectations, choosing to fully delve into these subjects as a whole rather than focus on singular experience. The narrator’s journey is full of well-meaning, yet uncertain behaviors that lend themselves to an intriguing read, despite being habitually insular.
Dieterich’s detailed research on absorbed twins and expansive knowledge of ballet, art and philosophy pepper the plot, giving symbolism and much deeper meaning to otherwise straightforward themes. This academic and slightly commanding technique could feel overwrought if it weren’t executed so effortlessly and with so much poise.
The topics in Vanishing Twins can certainly be polarizing in the wrong hands, but Dieterich handles them with such grace and studiousness that, whether you agree with her or not, it’s impossible not to admire her dedication to finding the answers to such emotionally-driven fare. At times, Vanishing Twins almost reads like a captivating research paper – citing sources, backing up theories and drawing surprising connections – yet it never loses its delicate touch and expressive poignancy.
In the end, it’s a commentary on individuality and self-identity while maintaining a marriage, but it’s also a reflection on love and its boundaries and limits. Dieterich has certainly delivered a timely and vital memoir, but rather than get caught up in its seriousness, she presents a stunning and fascinating narrative that delivers a startlingly touching blow.
Sky’s book is avaliable on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other book places
I had to read “Cheap Yellow” twice. It’s such an engaging and entertaining read that I blew through its 170 pages in one sitting. And then the words just wouldn’t sit still – resonating and rumbling through my psyche – until I read it again. I had to be sure that I’d absorbed every infinitesimal facet and buried symbol of Shy Watson’s masterful exposition. Because while “Cheap Yellow” is, on the surface, stark confessional poetry that just goes right for the gut, it’s also full of luxurious wordplay that leads the reader in another direction altogether. It’s a cohesive and dense work, but it also reads like a journal entry because it basically is.
“Some of the poems are older,” author Shy Watson tells me, “Most of them were written like a year and a half ago. I just kept putting poems together into this word doc. And it was this one mass, completely unorganized terrible thing. The working title was “Dunkin Girls” because there’s a poem in there about walking girls to an apartment by a Dunkin Donuts, which is a true thing. I think it was when I got to 90 pages or something I was like ‘oh shit, maybe I should start organizing it’. But I had absolutely no idea how to do that.”
The poems come together under headings named for different (and random) types of yellow. It feels personal and honest, giving the book a specific tempo that lifts its distinctive narrative. “I had noticed there were a lot of yellow mentions in the document,” Shy says, “Maybe it was because My Aura is Cheap Yellow. I just got the idea one day, randomly, to organize it by shades of yellow. And I started thinking of shades of yellow that could arise from the poems. Like “Miller High Life Yellow” because I’m drinking that in there, there’s probably some piss mentioned so that might be where “Dehydrated Piss” comes from and “Stars on a Wizard Hat” just because its mystical things… Then I just made headings for them and thought ‘which poems go under this heading?’ like a sorting hat from Harry Potter or something. And it all kind of naturally fell into place.”
“I think a lot of times, some action happening has extra meaning behind it. And I try to notice those things.”
These headings make the poems flow and intermingle; the pages turn themselves, each gut-wrenching poem more riveting than the next. Reading “Cheap Yellow” is like having a conversation with an old friend, only you want to repeat it almost immediately. It was on the second reading that I was forced to absorb the raw power of Shy’s words. No matter how many times I re-read “Pacsun Yellow.” it doesn’t stop stinging. It’s vulnerable prose that so captures the ennui of mis led suburban youth and sexualization of young girls that it physically hurts to read it.
“Yeah, it’s intense,” Shy says of “Pacsun Yellow,” “It actually wasn’t supposed to be in the final edition, but I think it was meant to be. Michael, my publisher, sent an old version [of the book] on accident to [author] Scott McClanahan to blurb it. And when Michael sent me the blurb it was all about the mall poem. And I was like ‘how does Scott know about the poem about the mall?’ The final .pdf I sent to Michael didn’t have it in there anymore because I felt like maybe it was too heavy. I felt embarrassed by it actually and that might be because it comes from such a vulnerable place. Everything that was in there was like ‘Oh my god, I have to delete that before the final version.’ It’s maybe too close to home literally and figuratively, but… I don’t want to ask Scott to write me a new blurb so maybe it should be in there.”
It definitely should be in there; “Pacsun Yellow” is easily the most powerful and concentrated work in “Cheap Yellow,” but it’s also to understand why Shy struggled with fitting it into the narrative.
“I realized recently that I have a really fucked up family and a really fucked up upbringing, but I never write about that,” Shy tells me, “I don’t think about the past very much honestly so I’m always writing about what’s currently happening in my life. Recently I just had this realization that I had so much shit that I could be mining from my past and back home that I’m not.”
She paints, too!
“I got in this weird place where I was thinking about malls and how depressing they are and I was remembering stuff I’d completely forgotten about from when I was a kid – like getting fingered by that boy in the Hot Topic dressing room. It just feels really dirty thinking about adolescence in the Midwest, hoe-ing it out at the mall within a 30 mile range. It just feels like really dark shit. I definitely want to work more on that sort of stuff. ‘Pacsun Yellow’ is definitely one of the more recent poems in the book so that’s fresh on my mind.”
Shy’s prose has a sense of urgency to it and reading it is like concurrently being a fly on the wall and being in the writer’s head. “I don’t ever think about what I’m writing,” she confesses, “I write what literally happens but those things just so happen to have that extra layer. I think a lot of times, some action happening has extra meaning behind it. And I try to notice those things.”
Her poetry can make the most mundane situation seem like a life-changing event and a life-altering event seem like a shared trauma. It’s because of how deeply personal Shy’s poems are that they’re so relatable. Cheap Yellow isn’t full of hazy metaphors about flowers or meanderings on the concept of heartbreak. And if you’re a fan of vague, lilting Instagram poetry this may be a little too cutting for you; but if you’re a real, living human being who has actually experienced emotional pain, “Cheap Yellow” may as well be about you. If the last two lines of “136 Grattan” don’t break your heart, it’s because you don’t have one.
Through her own personal experiences and through a fresh voice, Shy channels an almost omnipotent tone, channeling the ups and downs of a whole generation raised on the internet, reality TV, Frappuccinos and an obligatory Bright Eyes phase.
Popscure 