[April showers
bring May flowers, and May flowers bring, besides
Pilgrims, the end of another semester. So this week I’ll share a few
reflections from my Spring
2019 semester, leading up to a special weekend post on what’s ahead for the
summer and beyond. I’d love to hear your Spring reflections in comments!]
To be honest,
all ten of the stories we read from the Roxane
Gay-edited Best American Short Stories
2018 anthology were amazing; you gotta get that anthology, friends! But
here are three particular standouts from across our five weeks of paired
readings (without saying too much about any of them, because as usual part of
the pleasure of a great short story is in how they unfold):
1)
Alicia
Elliott, “Unearth”:
To say that I was disappointed when John
Sayles’s in-progress film about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School fell
through would be to severely understate the case. The Native American boarding
school is one of the American settings and stories most in need of better
representation in our cultural texts, and I would have loved to see what Sayles
and company did with those histories and stories. Well, we might never get that
film, but we do have Elliott’s short and shattering and yet still somewhat
hopeful story, which takes a very different angle on the schools and their
histories and effects and ends up unearthing so, so much for its protagonist,
its themes, and us all.
2)
Danielle
Evans, “Boys
Go to Jupiter”: On the other hand, the Confederate
flag might seem to be one of the historical and cultural symbols most
thoroughly present in our current collective conversations and memories, most
difficult to view through a new lens. Well, I’m here to tell you that Evans has
provided such a lens, and in so doing has created one of the richest and most multi-layered
short stories I’ve ever read, a text that has a great deal to say about not
only that contested symbol, but also social and digital media and identity,
race and gender and sex, whether and how a young person can establish an adult identity
separate from her starting points, and more. We could have debated the ending
of Evans’s story alone for many more 90-minute class periods, and I’d love to
hear your thoughts on it as well!
3)
Jocelyn
Nicole Johnson, “Control
Negro”: Thanks in no small measure to Get
Out, but also to works like Matt
Ruff’s Lovecraft Country among
others, the intersections between African American identity and the horror
genre have become central to our pop culture over the last couple years. Johnson’s
dark and dense story offers its own such intersections, creating a Poe-like
unreliable first-person narrator who recounts (confesses?) his
Frankenstein-like experiments into race, family, and America. That the story
also reframes one of Charlottesville’s
many violent and painful recent racist
encounters in the process is just one more reason why this story, like all
three of these and really all in this magisterial anthology, is well worth your
time.
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Spring reflections you’d share?
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