Short Story Insights
  • Home
  • About Short Story Insights
  • Short Thoughts on Short Stories
  • How I Came to Love Short Stories
  • Favorite Short Story Collections
  • Favorite Short Stories
  • Short Story Resources
  • Contact

Father Brother Keeper: Stories by Nathan Poole

7/24/2015

1 Comment

 
Picture(Sarabande Books, 2015)
Nathan Poole has a "habit of looking closely and thinking deeply."

      --Edith  Pearlman
          "Foreward" to  
          Father Brother  
           Keeper









“Writing is a manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.”    --John Gregory Dunne
  _
Very few beginning writers can afford to quit their day jobs to follow their calling full time.  As Lorrie Moore wisely advises in her short story “How to Become a Writer,” “First try to be something, anything, else.  A movie star/astronaut.  A movie star/missionary.  A movie star/kindergarten teacher.” While some new writers are affiliated with academia, others support their habit with more traditional blue collar jobs. 

Nathan Poole falls into the latter category of writers.  Although he has received several academic fellowships, Poole has primarily worked as a plumber and carpenter to earn a living. In Father Brother Keeper, winner of the 2013 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, Poole turns from manual labor to demonstrate his creative skills in crafting language. 

Set primarily in the often harsh rural landscape of southeastern United States, these stories explore individual and family issues that challenge characters, often over several generations.  In “The Firelighter” and the title story protagonists have to face the failures that have shaped their lives and the decisions they have made that have led into a downward spiral.  In “Year of the Champion Tree” a young man is learning to cope with the suicide of his brother while the young boy who narrates “Stretch Out Your Hand” is learning to cope with the unexpected recovery of his sister after a bout with raw milk fever claims the life of her best friend. 

“The Strength of Fields” contrasts two brothers’ responses to the realization that their father, who has abandoned his family, is mentally ill.  In “Fallow Dog” a young man faces the disappointing truth that his late grandfather was not who he believed him to be when he discovers badly abused bait dogs on his property.  At the end of “Swing Low Sweet Chicken Baby” the protagonist is hit with the startling results of his male fertility test and the reality that he may be alone for a long time.

Parent-child relationships are at the heart of three stories:  “They Were Calling to One Another,” “Lipochrome,” and “Silas.”  In each of these stories parents are learning accept their children, who have become very different individuals than they imagined.   The father-daughter estrangement in “A Map of the Watershed” is fueled by the protagonist’s realization that he is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. 

Shelf-Awareness Reviewer Julia Jenkins summarizes the collection accurately and concisely:

The stories all feature people living simply, accommodating change if not embracing it, and struggling to move forward through whatever life hands them. Poole's voice is original, authentic and starkly honest; he is clearly compassionate toward his characters even as he walks them through terrible everyday calamities.



My Favorites

Pictureilovedogsandpuppies.com
Two dramatically different stories are my favorites in this collection: “Fallow Dog” and “Silas.”  “Fallow Dog” is an edge-of-your-seat, emotionally charged story in which a young man makes a startling discovery about his late grandfather’s abuse of animals, the truth made even worse by his first falsely accusing a neighbor of the brutality.  Jimmy’s compassion for the bait dogs and awakening to the capability of human evil, even among his blood kin, make this story especially strong.

 “Silas” is a much quieter, character-driven story about a father’s acceptance of his unusual son.  Silas is fourth in line to inherit his family’s pecan farm in Georgia but cares nothing about agriculture, to his father’s dismay.   He has “one too many bad habits” for his father to understand.  He runs naked through the pecan grove in the middle of the night, eats food on his plate clockwise, and stares at his hands held beneath his bathwater for hours.   But Silas also has artistic talent which his father discovers and embraces, as he begins down the path to acceptance. 



Nathan Poole's Writing Style

Nathan Poole writes in a lyrical, poetic style that is rich with analogy imagery.  Even when the situation is harsh, his writing is graceful, calm, and smooth.  Poole writes with what Banner Reviewer Adele Gallogly describes as “tranquil intensity.”

Image describes Poole as “a contemporary southern voice that feels at once strange and familiar. His prose has a generous lyricism, an unapologetic love of beauty, and an unhurried pacing that feel classically southern, but a style and freshness that are his own.”

Here are a few of my favorite passages that illustrate his style:

            “The smells came late that summer and left him astounded, muttering.  He had known this was coming, had felt the tremors in his mind and seen familiar objects—his can of shoe polish and his TV remote—transformed in his hand into strange artifacts.” (“A Map of the Watershed,” p. 3)

            “From the road these abandoned tracts—their rotund fields rising and falling away in succession—appeared like conquered giants, large slain things left on their backs in the sun, showing their swollen and furrowed underbellies.” (“Anchor Tree Passing,” pp. 74-75)

            “But there was another side, he realized, a hemisphere waxed always away from him, the tidal lock of an unlit landscape that he couldn’t map or reckon with. “ (“Silas, p. 89)

            “It started at the very top of his head and widened in the center as it slanted toward his right eye.  He brought the hand back in front of his face and rubbed the blood between his thumb and forefinger like he would antifreeze or motor oil, testing the viscosity.” (“Swing Low Sweet Chicken Baby,” p. 166)

           

About Nathan Poole

Picturetwitter.com
Nathan Poole has worked as a plumber and carpenter for much of his adult life. He has now turned to the craft of writing and is serving as the 2014-15 Beebe Fellow at Warren Wilson College, where he earned his MFA.  Poole also considers himself to be an amateur theologian and dendrologist.

Father Brother Keeper
is Poole's first short story collection and was named the 2013 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction award winner.  His first novella, Pathkiller as the Holy Ghost, was awarded the 2014 Quarterly West Novella Contest. He lives in Columbia, South Carolina.
 


Selected Father Brother Keeper Reviews

Father Brother Keeper

Father Brother Keeper

Review:  Father Brother Keeper
1 Comment

Night at the Fiestas: Stories by Kirstin Valdez Quade

7/7/2015

0 Comments

 
PictureW. W. Norton, 2015


"Fiction is about longing and empathy.”

  --
Kirstin Valdez Quade

The ten short stories in Kirstin Valdez Quade’s debut collection are mainly set in small Catholic, Mexican-American communities in New Mexico where "Catholicism mingles with Southwestern folk beliefs."  While some of Quade’s characters embrace this heritage, others seek to break free from what they perceive as a burden. 

The title story is a coming of age tale of a young woman’s first experience at an annual fiesta in Santa Fe.  The fiesta offers the possibility of a more exciting life for a plain girl from a rural town where nothing seems to happen.  “If Frances’ life was to be a novel — as Frances fully intended,” Valdez Quade writes, “then finally, finally, something might happen at the Fiestas that could constitute the first page.” (p.88)  Something happens—but not what Frances anticipated.

Class distinctions present painful realities for women characters in “Cannute Commands the Tides,”  “Mojave Rats,”  and "Jubilee."  Although Monica tries to convince herself she and her family won’t live forever in a trailer park surrounded by trashy people she calls “Mojave Rats,” whom she imagines as sordid victims of mental illness, violent crime, and shattering personal tragedy, she has no evidence that her husband’s geological expeditions will guarantee an escape from Shady Lanes RV Park.  And in "Jubilee" Andrea realizes that no matter how hard she tries, she will always be defined by her birthright:  "She'd forever be checking ethnicity boxes, emphasizing her parents' work: farm laborer, housekeeper.  Trying to prove that she was smart enough, committed enough, pleasant enough, to be granted a trial period in their world." (p. 195)

Parental abandonment are major forces shaping characters’ lives in “The Guesthouse,” “The Manzanos” and “The Five Wounds.”  In “The Guesthouse” to a man who returns to Albuquerque after his grandmother’s death discovers his estranged father has been squatting in her guest house with a pregnant boa constrictor.


My Favorites

Picture(www.bbc.com)
My favorite story in this collection (Quade’s first published short story) is the masterful “The Five Wounds,” in which Amadeo Padilla is chosen to carry a heavy cross in the Holy Week re-enactment of Christ’s Passion that has become an annual event in his small New Mexico hometown.

Amadeo, unambitious, unemployed and still living with his mother at the age of 33, is a "loser in need of redemption":


This is no silky-haired, rosy-cheeked, honey-eyed Jesus, no Jesus-of-the-children, Jesus-with-the-lambs.  Amadeo is pockmarked and bad-toothed, hair shaved close to a scalp scarred from rights, roll of skin where skull meets thick neck.  You name the sin, he’s done it:  gluttony, sloth, fucked a second cousin on the dark bleachers at the high school. (p. 58)

Amaedo is taking his role very seriously.  He believes that if he can just pull off a convincing performance on Good Friday, including having nails pummeled through his hands (a feat only one other community “Jesus” dared decades ago), that he might redeem himself in the eyes of the community.  “Total redemption in one gesture,” he thinks, “if only he can get it right.” (p. 74) 

But as Amaedo is practicing his role on Holy Tuesday, his abandoned daughter turns up on his doorstep, 15-years old and pregnant.  The father-daughter reunion adds another twist to the story that is both humorous and prophetic. The ending sends a heart wrenching bullet.  



Kirstin Valdez Quade’s Writing Style

Kirstin Valdez Quade writes in an engaging storytelling style that captures the diversity of people and the region of northern New Mexico. All of the stories focus on family relationships, often strained with large doses of emotional intensity and pain.  Quade’s quirky details and dark humor add levity to some of the heavier themes such as child abandonment and family estrangement.


About Kirstin Valde Quade

Picture
Kirstin Valdez Quade grew up in New Mexico in a region where her family roots date back to 1695.  Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. She was a Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University and teaches writing as the Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan. She is a winner of the "5 Under 35" award from the National Book Foundation in 2014.

In an interview with National Public Radio, Quade said of her writing: “I've always been so interested in religion and faith. As a child I always spent a lot of time with my older relatives and my extremely Catholic grandmother and great-grandmother. And yet my father is a geochemist so I have this other very scientific background as well. Certainly I think one of the reasons I'm interested in faith is that faith is so much about longing. It's about longing for transcendence, it's longing to be closer to the infinite and longing to connect with others; it's about empathy. And I think that's also the project of fiction. Fiction is about longing and empathy.”

 



Selected Night at the Fiestas Reviews

Night at the Fiestas

'Night At The Fiestas' Spins Stories Of Faith And Family

Night at the Fiestas By Kirstin Valdez Quade
0 Comments

    Author

    I am an avid reader with a special interest in the short story genre. 

    I am a semi-retired  freelance writer, editor, and researcher (susannecarter.com).  I have a masters degree in English with an emphasis in English.

    I now live in Dunedin, FL and am an active volunteer in literacy, dog rescue, and dog therapy projects. When I'm not freelancing, volunteering, working on renovating our 1920s house, gardening, hiking on the Pinellas Trail,  watching egrets on the coast, or grilling grouper, I'm reading short stories.

    Picture

    Archives

    October 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014