Year of the LitMag: New England Review, Vol. 32, No. 3

[This is the 6^th installment in my Year of the LitMag Feature. If you are interested in writing about an issue of a literary magazine, please leave a comment or send me an email.]

There’s a lot to absorb in the latest issue of New England Review, Vol. 32, No. 3, including seven stories, several essays, and lots of poems. NER is one of my favorite literary magazines, and it shows up near the top of the rankings: #12 in Fiction, # 45 in Nonfiction, and #7 in Poetry.

Since I keep sending them short stories (no luck yet), I’m always curious about the stories they publish. There’s quite a range in this issue, but there might be some characteristics that tie them together.

Let me start with James Magruder’s “Matthew Aiken’s Vie Bohème” since Jim is a friend (we were Fellows at Sewanee together and recently had overlapping residencies at VCCA). This story, from his novel in stories, Let Me See It, due out in May, is set in 1981, when Matthew Aiken, a young gay man, is studying in Paris. He doesn’t get along with his host family, the amusing and emotional Sirjean family, or with his roommate, Bruce. But he does manage to meet a man at the Beaubourg, with unhappy (but amusing for the reader) results. Let me just say that I learned a new French word: la chtouille. Funny and sad, a terrific read.

I also really enjoyed Scott Southwick’s “Time Keeps on Slipping, etc.” in which time does, indeed, slip into the future, relentlessly. Nicky is in grade school and his babysitter tells him he has the most beautiful eyes. In high school he becomes a reporter for the student paper and his teacher remarks on his eyes. His father out of the picture, Nicky is on his own when his mother dies suddenly, and the future is now. Fast forward . . . “Brad Pitt played him in the movie version.” Nicky’s life has its ups and downs and we get them all in this quirky story.

“Confession, with Wolves” by Carol Keeley is a monologue, a wife speaking to her husband about their marriage. As with most monologues, this one is about the voice, in this case an unreliable narrator confessing to her husband about her . . . transgressions. And, in the process, the present circumstances are revealed. It’s an interesting technique, the monologue, and this is a good one.

“Manga Dolls on Skype” by Sandra Leong was fun, but I was rooting for it to turn out differently. Michael Coffey’s “I Thought You Were Dale” was funny, although it felt like there was an inside joke I was missing. (Also it’s an odd structure—all sections and no paragraphs.) While most of the stories are funny, “Keeping an Eye on Jakobson” by Anne Raeff is not. It’s a straightforward dramatic story about, among other things, the sorrows of war.

And there’s more, including poems by both the Director and the Assistant Director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Michael Collier and Jennifer Grotz, which, like the New England Review, is also connected to Middlebury College. There’s a poem by Chelsea Rathburn, a friend from Sewanee. And there are several notable essays, including one by Michael Milburn about his brother Frank: “My Brother, the Writer.” I especially enjoyed this because we published an essay by Milburn in Prime Number Magazine recently: “My Memoir.”

It's an excellent issue from a wonderful magazine.

Short Story Month 2011: New England Review -- Kathleen Ford (#ssm2011)

New England Review has long been one of my favorite magazines. My story of the day is "Man on the Run" by Kathleen Ford, in the current issue, Volume 31, No. 4.

The story reminds me of another story I've read in the past couple of years, the name of which escapes me. That story also involved older siblings living together, increasingly unable to care for themselves. Certainly the ending of this story distinguishes it, however, and despite the slight familiarity I liked the story very much.

Rosemary and Betty are elderly sisters who live together in upstate New York. They come from a large Irish family and seem to have outlived many of their relatives, including Rosemary's beautiful daughter Moira, killed in a car accident 50 years ago, an accident for which Rosemary still blames herself.

On this occasion, though, the sisters have taken in their great-niece Linda, the victim of domestic abuse. Linda, like Moira, has beautiful hair, and Rosemary, although she can't really manage stairs any longer, makes the difficult climb in order to watch Linda while she sleeps. When Linda comes down for breakfast, Rosemary observes the extent of the beating she has taken, and imagines what more damage might be hidden by the girl's robe. Along the way, we learn that it's difficult for the sisters to get out. There used to be a student occupying a nearby apartment to did chores for them, but he's moved on and they haven't found a replacement. While the exterior of the house is taken care of--preserving their investment--the interior is falling apart: cracks in the plaster, peeling wallpaper. We also learn that there isn't money to do much more.

The arrival of Linda also brings to mind--for Rosemary, at least, although Betty was too young at the time--another "man on the run" their family took in back in 1919, a leader of the Easter Rising of 1916, in Ireland.

And then the abusive boyfriend shows up, discovering Linda's location through the carelessness of her sister. Confrontation ensues.

Although I liked the story a lot, I don't know that it does enough with the reference to the earlier fugitive the McGuire family harbored. And in the climax of the story, where Tommy, the boyfriend, confronts Linda and the sisters, a gun goes off. I won't say what happens, but I do have a question. If it is true, as we've learned from Chekhov, that a gun hanging over the mantel in the first act must be fired in the last act, isn't it also true that if a gun is fired in the last act it must be hanging over the mantel in the first? That is, isn't it too convenient that the gun shows up in the end? (It isn't Tommy's.) Or perhaps--and this seems both plausible and reasonable--the author realized that if readers saw a gun early in the story we'd fully expect it to be fired in the end. (I know I would.) So, in fact, Ford may just be working counter to expectations, which is probably a good thing.

These are small quarrels. It's a very good story.