Jim Breslin

Our next book signing for Chester County Fiction will take place at Chester County Book Company on Saturday, October 22nd at 1pm. A few of the authors in the anthology contributed to this book trailer introducing the authors and celebrating Chester County.

The book is available at Chester County Book Company, Wellington Square Bookshop, wiLLow on State, BookPlace and Amazon.

I’m a bit stunned and a little tired.

We launched a new short story anthology, Chester County Fiction, yesterday at the iconic Baldwin’s Book Barn in West Chester, PA. The turnout was overwhelming as approximately 150 friends, family and book lovers turned out to support local fiction!

Juggling glasses of wine and their own books, authors signed copies for happy attendees. Several local folks stopped in for the book launch and also toured the five-floor barn, one of America’s most unique used bookstores.

Twelve of the thirteen writers were on hand to celebrate the release of this anthology, along with David James, who shot the beautiful cover photograph for the book. It was fun to watch authors getting their own books autographed by their peers. The thirteen authors included in this collection are: Virginia Beards, Robb Cadigan, Wayne Anthony Conaway, Peter Cunniffe, Michael Dolan, Ronald D. Giles, Terry Heyman, Joan Hill, Nicole Valentine, Jacob Asher Michael, Eli Silberman, Christine Yurick, and Jim Breslin.

Baldwin’s Book Barn was a stellar venue for this unique event. I want to express my sincere gratitude to the Baldwin Family, Donna and Ken for their hospitality. Did you know they offer their beautiful space to the community for free? Baldwin’s Book Barn is truly an American treasure.

My only wish was that I had more time to chat with everyone. I met several new friends and reconnected with old friends but some I only had a chance to wave to across the crowded room.

Thanks so much to everyone who came out on a rainy Sunday to support our efforts. I hope you enjoy the stories that we all worked diligently to craft. If you missed the event but would like to purchase a copy, here’s a list of places where you can find Chester County Fiction:

Chester County Book Company – The book is available now! Several authors will be signing on Saturday, October 22nd from 1pm-3pm. Please stop by!

Willow On State – The book will be available starting Tuesday, October 5th. Several authors will be at Willow On State on Friday night, October 7th during the First Friday Art Stroll. Willow On State will be unveiling their new art show on this night and the band 100 Acre Woods is performing.

BookPlace – several authors will be on hand on Sunday, November 7th from 4pm – 6pm for a book signing.

Amazon is now carrying Chester County Fiction. Click here to purchase.

Over the past few years, a community of writers has formed around critique groups and the West Chester Story Slam. So in January of 2011, I made a list of local fiction writers I’ve come to know and admire. These writers all share a passion for crafting short stories. Some of the writers I’ve worked with professionally over the years, others I’ve met through the local groups and Twitter. Each writer is someone seriously pursuing the craft, though we all have different genres and styles. After making the list I reached out and asked each writer if they would contribute a story for a collection called Chester County Fiction. I was thrilled when everyone said “yes!” (Read more below…)

Although Chester County Fiction is considered a short story collection, I believe the reader should approach this book as a sampler. Each writer has their own unique voice and style. Reading this book is similar to ordering the beer sampler at Victory Brewing Company or Iron Hill Brewery. There’s an assortment of stories for the reader to taste and see which stories most suits their palate.

The writers featured in Chester County Fiction are: Virginia Beards, Robb Cadigan, Wayne Anthony Conaway, Peter Cunniffe, Michael Dolan, Ronald D. Giles, Terry Heyman, Joan Hill, Nicole Valentine, Jacob Asher Michael, Eli Silberman, Christine Yurick and Jim Breslin.

Two professional editors, Sue Gregson and Christine Yurick, agreed to edit each story and draw out the author’s voice.

For the cover, graphic designer Larry Geiger offered to create one of his unique designs. As we sat at Iron Hill Brewery discussing the project one night, Larry deemed we needed a photographer and David James soon joined the collaborative effort.

Authors labored over their short stories and handed in drafts by the June 30th deadline. We edited and returned the stories to authors. Second and third drafts were passed back and forth. We are in the final stage of proofing. We are in the final sprint.

After our book launch, we will hold a few events in our awesome local independent bookstores and art galleries. We are doing small publishing runs of the book — I am calling it nano-publishing. After six months, we’ll count the money earned and the collaborative team will vote on what we should do with the profits. We may throw a party or donate the money to a local literacy campaign. If we’re really lucky, we’ll have enough to do both!

The book launch for Chester County Fiction will be held on October 2nd, from 2p.m. to 5p.m. at the iconic Baldwin’s Book Barn, located on Route 52 as you head south out of West Chester. Baldwin’s Book Barn is a Chester County landmark and possibly the best used book store in the country. We will have free beer and more. YOU are cordially invited!

Legendary radio personality “Fran the Man” recently interviewed me on WGMD 92.7, The Talk of Delmarva, about the process of writing, editing and publishing my short story collection Elephant. This interview took place on Sunday, September 3rd, 2011. Big thanks to my friend Kurt for recording a file. Click on the link below if you would like to listen.

Jim Breslin Interview from WGMD

One Story Magazine recently listed their top ten favorite short stories, along with an additional twenty-six stories to flush out the “long list.” Amy Bloom’s Love is Not a Pie made the long list.

Wow! Amy Bloom’s Love is Not a Pie has been the best surprise story of my summer reading project. I had not read Amy Bloom until I read Silver Water earlier for this project. That was an excellent read but I thought this story was even better. It starts:

In the middle of the eulogy at my mother’s boring and heart-breaking funeral, I began to think about calling off the wedding.

What a packed sentence! The narrator is Ellen and as she sits at the service she has the feeling her mother would not want her to marry them man she is engaged to. After the funeral, Ellen, her sister Lizzie and their father return to the house to entertain friends. When Mr. DeCuervo enters the room, their father goes over and hugs this man “in a passionate, musicless waltz.”

My sister and I sat down on the couch, pressed against each other, watching our father cry all over his friend, our mother’s lover.

The bulk of the story is then a remembrance of vacations on a lake when Ellen was a kid. Bloom vividly describes the joys and thrills of spending summers running around in the woods and swimming. Mr. DeCuervo and his daughter would often come stay for part of the vacation at the cabin. Many times, Mrs. DeCuervo was away tending to some family business. Ellen recalls once waking up and going downstairs to find her mother and Mr. DeCuervo in an embrace. Another time, she woke up with stomach cramps and went to wake her parents.

I pushed open the creaky door and saw my mother spooned up against my father’s back, as she always was, and Mr. DeCuervo spooned up against her, his arm over the covers, his other hand resting on the top her her head.

After the mourners have left the house, the father and Mr DeCuervo sit in the living room and drink while Ellen and her sister Lizzie sit in the kitchen. Lizzie reveals that while their mother was sick, Mr. DeCuervo called every day. Lizzie explains how she was confused about their relationship and asked her mother directly about it. Her mother said, “Honey, nobody loves me more than Bolivar.”

Lizzie goes on to explain that the next day, her mother told her a story about how Mr. DeCuervo had moved and replanted some apple trees that were in bloom when they first met. The first time Mr. DeCuervo met their father, they drank together and watched soccer. The mother then said:

And when the two of them are in the room together and you two girls are with us, I know that I am living in a state of grace.

In what is truly a remarkable passage, the mother explains to Lizzie how she loves both the men differently. “Love is not a pie, honey.” After Lizzie explains the conversation, Ellen tells her sister about the sightings she had when she was a kid.

Both men come into the kitchen and compliment the daughters on how beautiful they are, how they each resemble their mother in different ways.

Alone in the kitchen, Ellen thinks about how she can describe this situation to her fiance. She wonders how he would react to this story of her mother and her lover.

I knew I couldn’t tell him the rest and that I couldn’t marry a man I couldn’t tell this story too.

Love is Not a Pie is an excellent story that inverts the traditional beliefs of love and marriage in a daring and profound way. It was truly a pleasure to read and reflect upon.

One Story Magazine recently listed their top ten favorite short stories, along with an additional twenty-six stories to flush out the “long list.” Mavis Gallant’s When We Were Nearly Young made the long list. Having read 28 of the stories out of the 36, I’m unclear on how this story made this list.

As soon as I started reading When We Were Nearly Young, I remembered having listened to it on the New Yorker Fiction podcast a year ago. I recalled thinking how I had not cared for the story then, but I pulled out my ipod and listened while reading the short story from The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant. Unfortunately, the story did not grow on me.

What I really enjoyed though was the discussion between writer Antonya Nelson and New Yorker Fiction Editor Deborah Treisman. They discussed how Gallant was influenced by Checkhov and Hemingway, and about the state of the short story today, and how some students find them “depressing and inconclusive.”

Gallant’s story, When We Were Young, doesn’t have much of a plot. It’s a first person account of a young woman trying to discover herself while living in Spain during the Franco era. She is waiting for money to arrive from the United States. She has three Spanish friends, two men and one women, who also seem to be in a state of waiting. The story starts:

In Madrid, nine years ago, we lived on the thought of money.

They live simple lives, eating in the cheapest of restaurants and loafing around, trying to enjoy what they can with their meager funds. It’s as if their lives are in a state of suspension. In the end, the narrator receives her long awaited check and this changes her relationship with her friends, for they are waiting in a different sense. They have no chance of real money or opportunity coming to them.

They understood that my new fortune had cast me out.

After the reading of the story on the podcast, Treisman tells an interesting account about how Gallant did live in Spain waiting for her agent to sell a story and send her money. Unfortunately, her agent had been cheating her; he had been selling her stories but he had not been sending the money. Nelson also tells how Gallant had once sent in a story to the New Yorker and William Maxwell had turned it down, but thirty years later he admitted he was wrong and said he believed it was a good story.

Have you read this Mavis Gallant story? If so, did you like it and why? For those who haven’t read it but want to check it out, I recommend listening to the audio reading here on the New Yorker website.

One Story Magazine recently listed their top ten favorite short stories, along with an additional twenty-six stories to flush out the “long list.” Michael Cunningham’s White Angel made the short list.

Michael Cunningham’s White Angel is a story I should love. It has everything I like in a short story: sex, drugs, love, and rock ‘n roll. I first read White Angel a few years ago, and revisited it this weekend. It’s an interesting tale well told, yet for some reason, I’ve not learned to love the story. It starts out:

We lived then in Cleveland, in the middle of everything. It was the sixties – our radios sang out love all day long.

Frisco goes on to tell the story about his relationship with his older brother Carlton. Carlton taught Frisco about sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll when they were teens. Carlton is sixteen, and Frisco is only nine. They drank Southern Comfort and smoked joints in the cemetery behind their house.

A single stone angel, small-breasted and determined, rose amid the more conservative markers close to our house.

Cunningham doesn’t foreshadow, but actually tells us a key moment early on:

Here is Carlton several months before his death, in an hour or so alive with snow that earth and sky are identically white.

Frisco and Cartlon are tripping. They’ve dropped acid and Carlton is guiding Frisco through the process as they hang out in the cemetery.

“Stay loose, Frisco,” he says. “There’s not a thing in this pretty little world to be afraid of. I’m here.”

A few days later, Carlton and his girlfriend are having sex in the graveyard. Frisco stumbles upon the scene and watches, until Carlton becomes aware of his presence.

We lock eyes and spend a moment in mutual decision. The girl keeps on clutching at Carlton’s skinny back. He decides to smile at me. He decides to wink.

One night as their parents are hosting a party, Carlton’s friends show up and start partying with the adults. There is a moment where Frisco’s parents tell him he must go up to bed because it’s getting late.

Around midnight, dim-witted Frank announces he has seen a flying saucer hovering over the back yard.

Frisco sneaks down as everyone empties into the backyard. After looking toward the sky, people return and start dancing but Carlton has apparently jumped the fence into the cemetery for some quiet time.

As Frisco watches from inside the living room, Carlton comes sprinting through the backyard toward the shut sliding glass door.

Carlton’s girlfriend looks lazily out, touching base with her own reflection. I look, too. Carlton is running toward our house. I hesitate. Then I figure he can bump his nose. It will be a good joke on him. I let him keep coming. His girlfriend sees him through her own reflection, starts to scream a warning just as Carlton hits the glass.

This is Carlton’s demise. He has broken through.

Carlton reaches up to take a shard of glass that is stuck in his neck, and that is when the blood starts.

He dies in the arms of his girlfriend before an ambulance arrives. They bury him in the cemetery. The story ends with Frisco explaining how Carlton’s girlfriend cried so hard at the funeral, and how she and her family have moved to Denver.

At least she had protected herself by trying to warn him.

In contrast to the girlfriend, Frisco appears to have been left numb.

This story is often anthologized and used in creative writing classrooms, so it’s a bit intimidating to acknowledge I don’t love it. It’s not the subject matter I don’t like, but I think it’s more the structure. Learning early that Carlton is going to die took the tension out of the story when I first read it. Cunningham appears to have written this story in a way to take the tension out, possibly to mirror the numbness of Frisco as he reflects on his younger years. There is some question as to how reliable a narrator Frisco could be, and this is fine. After all, he is a nine-year-old kid on acid. More than that though, I just didn’t empathize with the narrator or Carlton and wasn’t drawn into the story.

I’ve now read 28 of the 36 short stories has listed as their “favorite stories,” and am looking forward to tackling the final eight and recapping my summer project.

Earlier this year, One Story Magazine listed their top ten favorite short stories, along with an additional twenty-six stories to flush out the “long list.” Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find made the short list. Deservedly so.

In this story, a grandmother navigates her son and his family to their death at the hands of “The Misfit.” She is a self absorbed character, her memory possibly fading with age. The story starts off with her railing against her son Bailey, saying they shouldn’t make this trip to Florida because of a killer on the loose. Her young grandkids mock her, because they know she won’t pass up taking the trip with them.

The next morning, she’s the first one in the car, seated in the center of the back seat with the kids on either side of her. She has snuck her cat into the car. As they drive, the grandmother spouts off her arcane beliefs. The irony in this paragraph is remarkable:

“In my time,” said the grandmother, folding her thin veined fingers, “children were more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else. People did right then. Oh look at the cute little pickaninny!” she said and pointed to a Negro child standing in the door of a shack. “Wouldn’t that make a picture now?”

When they stop for barbecue sandwiches, the proprietor Red Sammy and the grandmother converse.

“A good man is hard to find,” Red Sammy said. “Everything is getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more.”

As they continue on their trip, the grandmother has a recollection of a grand house she believes she once visited and describes it in almost heavenly terms.

She said the house had six white column across the front and that there was an avenue of oaks leading up to it and two little wooden trellis arbors on either side…

She gets the children riled up about seeing the house because it allegedly has a secret compartment. Bailey grows irritated but agrees to turn off down a side road to see this house. As they drive down the desolate road, the grandmother recalls she has made a mistake and the house she was thinking of is actually in Tennessee. This realization shocks her. She lifts up her feet and the cat jumps up on Bailey’s shoulder as he drives. The car flips over in a ditch and the family is injured.

As they sort things out, a car meanders along the road and three men climb out and look down on the family. One of the men is described as the leader.

His hair was just beginning to gray and he wore silver-rimmed spectacles that gave him a scholarly look.

The grandmother has an eerie sense she has seen the leader of the three men before.

She scrambled to her feet and stood staring. “You’re the Misfit!” she said. “I recognized you at once.”

The grandmother starts immediately trying to placate the Misfit.

“I know you’re a good man. You don’t look a bit like you have common blood. I know you must come from nice people!”

The Misfit instructs his men to escort Bailey and the grandson into the woods away from the family. The grandmother keeps trying to insist to The Misfit he is a good man and he should pray. After they disappear into the woods, two gunshots are heard.

The grandmother continues pleading with the Misfit, “You are a good man.”

As they escort the daughter in law and girl back into the woods, the grandmother pleads more.

At one point, the Misfit says to the grandmother, “Does it seem right to you lady, that one is punished a heap and another ain’t punished at all?”

More gunshots are heard from the woods.

…The grandmother raised her head like a parched old turkey hen crying for water and called, “Bailey Boy, Bailey Boy!” as if her heart would break.

The Misfit says,

“Jesus was the only one to raise the dead, and he shouldn’t have done it. If He did what He did, there is nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can – by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness.”

The grandmother says in a delirious way, “You’re one of my own children!” She reaches out and touches the Misfit. He jumps back and shoots her dead.

“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

O’Connor’s Catholic faith was at the core of her stories. She was devout in her belief that the Eucharist was actually the body and blood of Christ. She famously said one time, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” Her faith played an important part in her writing, and particularly so in this story. The grandmother claims she lives an upstanding Christian life, but in truth she is self absorbed, believing that people come from “good blood” and that’s what can save them. Much has been written about the ending when she reaches out to the Misfit and says, “You’re one of my own children.” The statement leads one to believe O’Connor is asking – what really breeds evil in this world. The Misfit’s final words echo the idea of living one’s live with faith throughout, and not just at the end of one’s life. Although I first read this thirty years ago, it remains a startling story with a deep message about faith.

One Story Magazine recently listed their top ten favorite short stories, along with an additional twenty-six stories to flush out the “long list.” Maile Meloy’s ”Travis, B.” made the long list.

This was a beautiful tale of a disfigured cowboy who tries to reach out in the vast western space and has his heart broken. It starts:

Chet Moran grew up in Logan, Montana, at a time when kids weren’t supposed to get polio anymore.

But Chet did get polio. His mother thought he would die young. Now, as the story unfolds, he is twenty-two years old and works on a farm feeding the cows. He’s led a tough life after surviving polio. Through the years, he’s broken several bones riding horses and had a rod put in his leg.

From then on, he walked as though he were turning to himself to ask a question.

He spends harsh winters in insulated rooms off the barn.

He got afraid of himself that winter; he sensed something dangerous that would break free if he kept much alone.

One night, Chet is bored and drives through town looking for something to do on a cold winter night. He sees people walking into a school and he joins them, sitting in the back of the room. A lawyer named Beth Travis is starting a class for teachers. The class will take place on Tuesday and Thursday nights.

After the class, Chet strikes up a conversation with Beth. She reveals that she is in a tough predicament. She lives eight hours away, and after agreeing to teach this class because she had no job, she found a job at home. She laments having to drive through the night to show up for work the next morning. It’s an impossible routine, and she is very unhappy about her circumstance. Chet offers to show her the local cafe so she can eat before her long drive.

Chet returns to the class on Thursday, and thinks about Beth through the weekend. On the following Tuesday, he rides a horse into town to the meeting. After class, he convinces her to ride to the cafe on the back of the horse. It’s a beautiful sight, and it seems to lift her spirits. Chet kisses her, but he is too shy and uneducated to start a real relationship.

When Chet shows up for the Thursday class, Beth is absent. The class is informed she will not be returning. Chet immediately drives through the night to her hometown, and looks her up in the phone book. He finds her office and catches her as she is heading into work.

“I just knew that if I didn’t start driving, I wasn’t going to see you again, and I didn’t want that. That’s all.”

He stood there waiting, thinking she might say something, meet him halfway. He wanted to hear her voice again. He wanted to touch her, any part of her, just her arms maybe, just her waist. She stood out of reach, waiting for him to go.

Heartbreaking.

Chet returns to his home and for awhile hopes he’s planted a seed and she will come to him, but she doesn’t. The story ends:

He fished her phone number out of his pocket and studied it in the moonlight, until he knew it by heart, and wouldn’t forget it. Then he did what he knew he should do, and rolled it into a ball, and threw it away.

This story is as spare as the landscape in which it’s set. It’s an excellent metaphor for the loneliness Chet experiences. His solitary life, without an opportunity to “practice” with girls is painfully sad. This is a nicely written realist story, which intrigues me and makes me want to try a few more of Meloy’s stories.

One Story Magazine recently listed their top ten favorite short stories, along with an additional twenty-six stories to flush out the “long list.” Franz Kafka’s A Hunger Artist made the long list.

This allegory stunned me the first time I read it a few years ago, and it’s still as haunting on the second read. I expect nothing less from Kafka. After all, this is the man who wrote about a man turning into a cockroach.

Kafka’s A Hunger Artist starts:

Over the last few decades, the interest in hunger-artists has suffered a marked decline.

The hunger-artist is a man who fasts while sitting in a cage in front of the townspeople. This is the man’s art form. He willingly starves himself, though his manager makes him break his fast after forty days. Certain “warders” stay at the cage all night to insure he doesn’t sneak food.

This was purely a formality, introduced to ease the minds of the public, because the cognoscenti were well aware that during a period of starvation, no hunger-artist would have eaten the least thing under any circumstances not even under duress; the honour code of his art forbade it.

Still the hunger artist is not satisfied with his art. Despite the honor given during his fasts, the artist is “made still gloomier by virtue of that fact that no one took it seriously.”

He would like to fast for more than forty days, but his manager has deemed the audience loses interest at around this time, so it’s best to pull the hunger artist out of the cage and feed him to regain his strength. He performs his forty days of fasting repeatedly over many years, but eventually the audience loses interest in watching the hunger-artist.

Even if he starved to the very best of his ability, and so he did, nothing could rescue him any more, people walked past him.

In the end, the artist is forgotten in his cage for some time. Someone eventually wonders why the empty cage is sitting there. They find the hunger artist near death. In his final words, the hunger-artist states that his starving should not be admired by others and admits he believes he had no choice but to starve.

When the overseer asks, “And why can’t you do anything else?” The hunger-artist replies:

Because I couldn’t find any food I liked. If I had found any, believe me, I would have eaten to my heart’s content, just like you or anyone else.

After the hunger-artist dies, the cage is used to house a panther and spectators crowd around the cage.

My take on this allegory is that Kafka is equating the suffering in starving to the suffering a writer undertakes in crafting a story. The hunger artist wants his work to be pure but is handcuffed by the demands of his manager and the audience. It’s a strange and disturbing metaphor. Kafka “went deep” in his writing, unearthing classic existential truths, trying to find something pure through his work. It’s not hard to imagine Kafka would feel his own stories were not taken as seriously as he would have wished.

A writer suffers for their art, but in the end the written word becomes entertainment for the reader. This reminded me of an interview Raymond Carver gave to the Paris Review. Carver said:

“After all, art is a form of entertainment, yes? For both the maker and the consumer. I mean in a way it’s like shooting billiards or playing cards, or bowling – it’s just a different, and I would say higher, form of amusement. I’m not saying there isn’t spiritual nourishment involved, too. There is, of course. Listening to a Beethoven concerto or spending time in front of a van Gogh painting or reading a poem by Blake can be a profound experience on a scale that playing bridge or bowling a 220 game can never be. Art is all the things art is supposed to be. But art is also a superior amusement. Am I wrong in thinking this?”

Note: In an earlier post, I believe I commented that the short story A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez was the only story originally written in a foreign language to be included on the One Story list. I was wrong. A Hunger Artist originally written in German. Another story I’m tracking down, Junot Diaz’s Aguantando, was written in Spanish. So far, I’m unable to find Aguatundo in an English translation.