June 13: What the Hellya Reading, Jennifer Howard, "How to End Up," Piece of My Mind

He kept standing there.  He was exactly the kind of guy that wouldn't get out of your light when you asked him to.  He'd do it, finally, but it took him a lot longer if you asked him to.  "What the hellya reading?" he said.

Holden Caulfield can't stand Ackley, his suite mate at school.  Ackley has a lot of unsavory habits, like not brushing his teeth and barging into Holden's dorm room uninvited.  But Ackley also asks Holden the question that I want to answer today:  What the hellya reading?


I just finished a great chapbook of short stories by Jennifer Howard.  The book is titled How to End Up, and it was the winner of New Delta Review's 2012-2013 Chapbook Contest.  Jen is a colleague of mine at the university, and she is also the editor of Passages North, the English Department's literary magazine.  Above all, Jen is a fantastic writer.

How to End Up is a strange hybrid of a book, part fiction, part poetry.  It falls into that literary limbo sometimes called flash fiction or sudden fiction, sometimes called prose poetry.  No matter what label is placed on these stories, they are filled with weirdness and heartbreak and stunning imagery.  Each story holds the best elements of fiction and poetry:  humanity coupled with surprising moments of revelatory beauty.

One of my favorite stories in the collection is titled "No, They Do Everything on Porpoise."  It's told from the point of view of a female dolphin having an affair with a human man.  While the set-up sounds just this side of absurd, Howard extracts from this quasi-fable an emotional power and depth, with an ending that could anatomize any modern relationship:

...The dolphin stayed where she was for a long time, looking up at the sky and imagining she could feel the moon pulling her upward, out of the water.  She thought about what to have for dinner, and the bulls waiting for her back home, and about why it mattered if the man went home to sleep inside a dry grotto with the woman.  What would she do, anyway, if the man lived in the water with her, all the time swimming around so deliberately with those hopeless legs?  She'd have to keep him from breathing in any water and find him a place to rest and worry about him looking at her sisters.  She'd be responsible if a shark ate him.  Worst, she would never again be able to swim out too far, where the water was best, without worrying about how he was.

There's a brand of courage in Jen Howard's fictions.  She doesn't shy away from characters who make unpopular or puzzling choices.  Women enter and leave marriages.  Children suffer from metaphorical and literal defects of the heart.  Sex is a vehicle of connection and separation.  The final story of the collection, "Though Bob Eubanks is Still Alive and Kicking," ends with these lines, which resonate through the entire book:  ""Nobody has asked it of you yet, but you worry that someday, when you are older, when you have figured out exactly how it is that you will die, someone will.  That they will ask you who was the love of your life and you won't know the answer even though you have loved and loved."

I love and love Jennifer Howard's How to End Up.  It's a smart and haunting volume.

And that's a piece of Saint Marty's mind.

Get it, read it, love it