A Clear View of the Southern Sky

Mary Hood

Description

A Clear View of the Southern Sky reveals women in the twenty-first century doing what women have always done in pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. In each of the ten tales from southern storyteller Mary Hood, women have come—by circumstances and choice—to the very edge of their known worlds. Some find courage to winnow and move on; others seek the patience to risk and to stay. Along the way hearts, bonds, speed limits, fingernails, and the Ten Commandments get broken. Dust settles, but these women do not.

In the title story, a satellite dish company promises that happiness—or at least access to its programming—requires just a TV and a clear view of the southern sky. The short story itself reveals the journey of a Hispanic woman whose mission is to assassinate a mass murderer, an agenda triggered by post-traumatic stress wrought by seeing the murderer's cynical grin on a news program. We follow her into the shadow of an enormous satellite dish on a roof across the street from the courthouse and ultimately into a women's prison English-as-Second-Language class where she must confront her life. She has slept but never dreamed, and now she wakes.

In other stories Hood introduces us to a kindergarten teacher, stunned by a student's blurted-out question, as she discovers her deepest vocation and the mystery of its source. We meet a widow who befriends a young neighbor, only to realize they must keep secrets from each other and hold fast to their hope. A woman trucker discovers the depth of her love as she imagines her cell phone calls—and her sweetheart's own messages—winging their way, tower to tower, along her interstate route. Two stories deal with one man and two of his wives and how they learn the lessons only love can teach about the reach and limitations of ownership and forever. The collection concludes with the novella "Seambusters," in which a diverse cast of women workers in a rural Georgia mill sew camouflage for U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. The women are part of a larger purpose, and they know it. When the shadow of death passes over the factory, each woman and the entire community find out what it really means to have American Pride.

New York Times best-selling writer and Story River Books editor at large Pat Conroy provides a foreword to the collection.

Sujets

• Tampón (menstruación)
• Plumping
• Make A Difference
• Round hand
• Southern Living
• High ground
• Formality
• Dry rot
• White bread
• The Slippery Slope
• Mrs.
• Can opener
• Fresh water
• Hurricane Andrew
• Single-shot
• Short story
• Short Stories
• Tampax
• Alice Munro
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 30 juillet 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611175011
• Langue: English

Extrait

A CLEAR VIEW OF THE SOUTHERN SKY

Pat Conroy, Editor at Large
A CLEAR VIEW OF THE SOUTHERN SKY
Stories
MARY HOOD
Foreword by Pat Conroy
2015 Mary Hood
Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-500-4 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-61117-501-1 (ebook)
The All and Nothing It Had Come To, Mad Woman in the Attic, Some Stranger s Bed, A Clear View of the Southern Sky, Witnessing, Leaving Room and Virga first appeared in The Georgia Review .
The Teacher first appeared in descant .
Come and Go Blues first appeared in Atlanta Magazine .
Seam Busters first appeared as a standalone novella from the University of South Carolina Press.
Front cover photograph: istockphoto.com/ilbusca
Do not say, Why were the old days better than these? Ecclesiastes 7:10
CONTENTS
Foreword Pat Conroy

A Clear View of the Southern Sky
The Teacher
Witnessing
Mad Woman in the Attic
Virga
Some Stranger s Bed
Leaving Room
The All and Nothing It Had Come To
Come and Go Blues
Seam Busters
FOREWORD
Since I first read her fiction, I ve wanted to write a hymn of praise for the Georgia writer May Hood. Not only did I find her work significant, I found her voice one of a kind and sensational. She came into the writing world fully formed, nonpareil, and her short stories reminded me of Alice Munro, George Eliot, Margaret Atwood, and her strange immensities made me think about the long ago summer when I applied myself to Balzac and Chekov. The great writers of the world affect me like that and I find myself prisoner and catechist of their superb gifts. She blew into my reading life with hurricane force winds. Early on, I found myself enamored by the breadth and ambitious scope of her writing. I believe she is one of the great writers of our time and I have shouted that out to anyone I know who wants to encounter the best American writing that comes from small towns around our vast country where literature goes to hide.
In the early 1980s I met the legendary Stanley Lindberg, the editor of the Georgia Review, as we were both searching for great books at the Old New York Book Shop in Atlanta. Mr. Lindberg was in the process of making the Georgia Review one of the best literary magazines ever published in this country. On that first day of our introduction, he told me about the discovery of a great Georgia writer I had never heard of by the name of Mary Hood. I read the first story of Mary s he published and later read her stunning first collection of stories How Far She Went. Now we know how far she went. I believe today, and I ve believed for a long time, that Mary Hood is one of the three or four best writers ever produced by her complicated, rough-hewn state. On November 10 of last year, it was one of the great honors of my literary life to introduce Mary Hood at her induction into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame and to see her honored as one of the greatest artists ever to grow up in the sunshine and dark winds of Georgia.
When I read How Far She Went, I made a phone call to my young editor at Houghton Mifflin, Jonathan Galassi. At that time, Jonathan thought I was over-excitable and I believed he was not excitable enough. But he passed her book around and a subsidiary of Houghton Mifflin, the highly literary and distinguished Ticknor and Fields, announced they were publishing Mary Hood s second book, the delicious and unforgettable And Venus is Blue. I m not sure my phone call had a single thing to do with the publication of her second book of short stories, but I now know that history works its easy magic in the strangest ways. Terry Kay had just published his first novel with Houghton Mifflin and soon after that I heard from a beautiful young editor that Ticknor and Fields was publishing Olive Ann Burns splendid novel Cold Sassy Tree. The destiny of four Georgia writers began to arrange itself into a constellation of cold stars that would manifest its presence again in Mary s selection to the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.
In the hardscrabble world of Mary Hood s fiction, none of her characters in their Georgia-haunted lives could ever dream of such a fate as their creator has made for herself. She enslaves the creatures of her story with the whole airborne gamut of human emotions-dignity in the loneliness and agonies of their foreclosed lives-but she never grants them the genius that has brought her to the Hall of Fame. Mary Hood, daughter of Georgia, stood before us that day as one of the state s most honored storytellers. Indigenous, she is as much a part of that red clay soil as Vidalia onions, Stone Mountain, boiled peanuts, the Bulldog football team, or the burning of Atlanta. I believe her writing will live forever.
Here s why. I don t believe that Mary Hood is capable of writing an uninteresting sentence. She can say in three words what I can say in a hundred and sixty. I come across very few southern writers who sound like no one else who has ever written, and Mary Hood is one of them. Each of her short stories is self-contained and self-sufficient, like some Noah-less ark adrift in black storms. In Mary s floods, there are never any destinations-only arrivals at the point where the water grounds you, at the exact spot that Mary Hood has imagined for all her readers. She creates with a jeweler s eye and the patient craft of a watchmaker whose devotion to precision can make the whole world beat to her infallible sense of timing.
I would love to be a garden in her books and hate to be a dog. She writes about wildflowers as though they were citizens of the silent world saddened by the south she makes for her suffering humans. In one early story, Mary makes small havoc out of an abandoned woman who cannot master the secret of growing a plant called Solomon s Seal. Mary turns it into a moral flaw as some relevant mystery to a life grown hopeless.
Many of the poor dogs in Mary s books run off, get shot at, get poisoned, and one favorite pet gets drowned. It is part of Mary s golden wizardry that the death of this pet is also a selfless act of pure love. Yet even when Mary goes dark on us (and, God, we southern writers love to wax dark) she leaves us enlivened, shrewder, even hopeful about the state of the world she brings out for our inspection.
Last year, I agreed to be the editor for a new series of fiction that would publish Southern Literature. When Jonathan Haupt, the publisher of USC Press, asked me to serve in this capacity, he asked me what writer I d choose above all others if I could have any wish as an editor come true. I said Mary Hood. My next three choices were Mary Hood, Mary Hood, and Mary Hood again.
Mary s prose style seems moon-driven and airy as fallen snow. It contains the weight of myth and the lightness of a corps de ballet. Her dialogue forms the perfect shape that her characters will take. Like all the truly great writers, Mary Hood has mastered these high wires of brevity, abbreviation, and conciseness. The courage of her writing comes from a careful balance of whisper and fury. She possesses perfect pitch and never sounds a false note. Her deeply imagined characters speak as if they are offering their own true and often forlorn commentary on the book of life itself. A man can utter a toss-away sentence aloud and reveal the entire dimension of his own fate. A woman can answer him and seal her own. Yet she is funny as hell and has made her gift into a priceless treasury of art.
Please note that I ve not mentioned that giantess of southern letters who was born in Savannah and grew up in Milledgeville and who makes of any southern writer-man or woman-weak with envy. You know the one I mean-the woman who tied a peacock to the tracks of the Dixie Limited and set a high standard for all the writers in the world. I think that Mary Hood has been compared to her far too often and I believe it has cluttered Mary s own extraordinary achievement. Mary Hood stands alone and no comparison can do justice to the body of literature she herself has created.
In this brilliant new work A Clear View of the Southern Sky, Mary Hood is writing at the top of her form. In her title story, she begins with the words, Sometimes you just can t kill the ones you need to. Again, with swiftness and authority, she leads you into those back roads and small towns of Georgia where people s lives are simple, except when they are not. She has affinity for the rural southern poor where women wear yard shoes and the men carry rifles in their pickups and the pastries are filled with fruit and jellies and vegetables put up for the winter. She can make a blood drive seem like an encounter at the OK Corral. Some of the stories you are about to read will find themselves in the anthologies of our grandchildren. Already, her short stories, in their vessels of fire and stone, are read by college students with discerning teachers all across the land. Three or four of these stories rank among her finest and she has set a high bar for herself. She writes about Georgia, but the whole universe, known and unknown, can be discovered here in the glory that is hers alone.
An acknowledged master of the short story, Mary Hood finished this book with a novella that is the crowning achievement of the collection. Seam Busters takes us into a factory that makes camouflage gear for our nation s soldiers. I believe Irene Morgan is the deepest and most singular character ever to grace the work of Mary Hood. The factory where Irene works becomes a fictional world as real as the plantation in Yoknapatawpha. Th