Muddy Backroads

Description

Stories that move away from the norms of daily life to explore the side roads that take us away from the known. Where will those backroads and back alleys take us?

Sujets

• Anthologies
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Madville Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781956440157
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2022 by Madville Publishing
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
FIRST EDITION
Requests for permission to reprint material from this work should be sent to:
Permissions
Madville Publishing
P.O. Box 358
Lake Dallas, TX 75065
Cover Design: Jacqueline Davis
Cover Art: Paul Kanevsky
ISBN: 978-1-956440-14-0 paperback,
ISBN: 978-1-956440-15-7 ebook
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022932007
Contents
Preface
Luanne Smith
Foreword
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Barrio Walden
Luis Alberto Urrea
Memory Stone
Siobhan Wright
Where To Buy Your Weed
Misty Skaggs
Sebou Party
Paula Younger
Once I Lived Like a Stoop-Shouldered Idol
Michael Gaspeny
First There Is a Mountain
David Hartshorne
Hawaiian Odyssey
Henri Bensussen
Area 52
Roger Hart
Thinking’s Deadly
Heather Mateus Sappenfield
The Lavender House
Jen Knox
Jason Who Will Be Famous
Dorothy Allison
I’ve Got a Run
August Tarrier
Jackpots Only
Michael Darcher
The Grass Jesus Walked On
Elizabeth Bruce
Over Massanutten
Lee Scharf
A Perfect Heart Shot
George Drew
The Jungle
Hillary Behrman
Rayme—A Memoir of the Seventies
Jayne Anne Phillips
The Light of Stars, Yes
Melanie Rae Thon
Small Signals
Stephanie Dupal
Why Are You Here?
Mark Lammers
Cold Night in Waterloo
Robert Garner McBrearty
A Degenerate Gambler’s Report
Suzanne Heagy
Phantom Power
Ulrick Casimir
A Friend in Arcady
Walter Evans
Greasy Lake
T. Coraghessan Boyle
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Editors
Preface
Luanne Smith
There’s this short story I taught for decades. Students loved it, no matter the years between its setting and their reality. Like classic rock music, T.C. Boyle’s story, “Greasy Lake,” reached across time and connected.
When writer and friend, Jodi Angel, and I started tossing around ideas for a new anthology, she came up with Muddy Backroads. I immediately thought of “Greasy Lake.” We added the “Stories From Off the Beaten Path” to capture what we both had in mind, those stories that veer away from our comfort zones, away from what we know as routine or normal.
There’s a line in “Greasy Lake,” that takes us where we wanted these stories to go.
Through the center of town, up the strip, past the housing developments and shopping malls, street lights giving way to the thin streaming illumination of the headlights, trees crowding the asphalt in a black unbroken wall: that wasthe way out to Greasy Lake.
Just as T.C. Boyle was inspired by Bruce Springsteen’s “Spirit in the Night” for “Greasy Lake,” I have always been inspired by Boyle’s one-sentence ability to move us away from civilization to a place where anything can happen.
Muddy Backroads is the third anthology I have curated, and in all three, I have sought out stories and memoirs that take us to the edge. In an interview about the second anthology, Taboos & Transgressions: Stories of Wrongdoings , edited by me, Kerry Neville and Devi Laskar, the interviewer asked what drew me to such stories. I’ve been thinking about the answer to that question for a long time now. Yes, those stories and those writers are the ones I prefer to read. Dorothy Allison, Larry Brown, Richard Ford, Russell Banks, Jesmyn Ward, my co-editor for this anthology, Bonnie Jo Campbell. All of them take us away from what we know of civilization. But why am I drawn to these stories and memoirs?
“Because I always have been,” doesn’t sound like a real answer. But I was the kid who left our tiny Kentucky elementary school in third grade on a trip with my parents to New York City for Dad to attend a training session for his job. Upon return when I was asked to tell the class about New York City, I forgot all about the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building and told my classmates about seeing hippies (it was in the 1960’s), about the drunk on all fours in Little Italy throwing up on the sidewalk, about the woman in the bus station riding the escalator up and down singing at the top of her lungs, about the waiter at the deli who only knew how to say, “Hello, may I help you?” in English. It was the individuals of NYC who caught my attention, the outsiders, the ones who did not quite fit, even in that big city.
Around that same time, I watched this movie on our little black and white TV. Television was still a fairly new thing, and my parents had no idea they needed to censor what I watched. So, I sat there on my own and watched Natalie Wood, Charles Bronson, and a young Robert Redford in a film version of Tennessee Williams’ This Property is Condemned . I can’t claim now that I completely understood all of what was going on in that story at that time, but I loved it. It was right up there with 101 Dalmations as my favorite movie. I still love it—and all of Tennessee Williams’ work.
So how do you explain to an interviewer something that probably requires years of professional therapy to understand? I prefer stories that don’t pull punches. I prefer characters who are “off the beaten path.” I prefer riding down that road past the shopping malls and finding myself in a place where anything can happen.
It was a pleasure to read the many stories submitted for consideration for Muddy Backroads . They took us so many places and off so many beaten paths. I want to thank Jodi Angel for brainstorming the theme with me for this book. Jodi had to step away from co-editing for personal reasons, but we still owe a lot to her for the existence of this anthology. I want to thank Bonnie Jo Campbell for co-editing with me. Who better to edit such a book? I want to offer a personal thanks to my friend, Dorothy Allison, who always encourages me, and I’m so happy to include her work here. Special thanks to Cat Smith and Kim Davis from Madville Publishing for all their hard, hard work and for supporting my visions, however dark they may be. Thanks, too, to Alan Heathcock, author of Volt: Stories , who is judging the unsolicited manuscripts within Muddy Backroads for cash prizes. Finally, I don’t know how many times I indirectly thank T.C. Boyle in this foreword, but Mr. Boyle, what an inspiration your work is to me and my many creative writing students. Thank you hardly seems like enough.
Lastly, thank you to all the writers who are in the anthology and all who submitted work. Please, keep walking your own paths, writing your own stories, and taking us to all places where anything can happen.
—Luanne Smith
Foreword
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Like American painting, American writing often returns to landscapes, vistas where the names of flowers and birds and stars and makes and models of automobiles matter—before cars and trucks it was breeds of horses and temperaments of mules. These unpeopled places serve as proving grounds for our social selves and mirrors for our lonely American souls, and they give room and board to our twin longings for freedom and rootedness. When the problem is feeling lost at home, the solution is often a road trip. The stories in this book belong to this tradition of getting ourselves lost in order to find ourselves.
These stories are filled with weather and wildlife, Jesus and canned beer, motels and trailers and marijuana gardens. Some take us to other forms of wilderness, places we get lost while writing a story, while dealing with an icy stepmother, or negotiating with a ghost only we can see. These stories explore emotionally difficult places as well as physically challenging ones, spaces we must enter alone because the rules of the community do not apply. This is how protagonists end up in predicaments from which they (and we , by extension) can be saved only by their ( our ) own wits. In the wilderness, we have the freedom to sing loudly whatever we want, and our greatest fear is that what we sing doesn’t matter.
On a personal note, I’m glad to see so many richly envisioned small-towns, so many fleshed-out rural characters. These are people who struggle against the elements in concrete ways that can serve as metaphors for the more abstract struggles we are working through on a daily basis. Anybody who doubts the importance of understanding small town and rural characters should notice that these places have given birth to our most recent populist political movement, a movement that many consider to be the dangerous to democracy, and that is why it behooves us to explore the isolated places where bitterness and anger brews and where firearms are plentiful.
I want to applaud the writers in this book for showing us what happens at the end of the road, what happens when folks reach the end of their ropes, when they are out on a limb with a handsaw. I want to thank Luanne Smith for brainstorming this project that allows us to explore some of the best-known American back roads voices and new voices from regions we have yet to discover, many of them working class voices. And I want to thank the readers of this book for believing in fiction writers as deliverers of truths and images that matter.
When I teach fiction writing, I ask my students Why do we even need fiction ? We have poetry to explore emotional avenues, and we have non-fiction and journalism to hit us hard with life’s surprising joys and injustices and to spur us to protest and celebration in the streets. We have memoirs to help us reflect upon myriad lives lived and examined. Still, I am certain that fiction can get at the difficult truths in a way those other forms cannot. Only fictional characters are allowed to honestly express the complexity of real human thoughts, the thoughts of the victims and the perpetrators, the dark and the light. Fiction is the most honest literary form, and therefore the most potent and most democratic
Please enjoy these lively, soulful stories we’ve chosen to include in this anthology from among dozens of other worthy tales. They will give you glimpses into backyards, gardens, great sweeping vistas and lonely achi