Kelly Cherry

A great and groundbreaking idea for an anthology! Poems range from biting, scary, just plain sick, and too prophetic to feel comfortable about. Some are very Edward Gory-esque (e.g. Phrenology, How Yard Games are Invented). Some tackle extinction (Invention of the Trees). Others are very current and sharp in applicability (Octet for My Unnameable Killer Apps). "3-D Printed Skin" and "Little Bone Robot Boy" beg the question of how much living tissue, naturally made, is required for the preservation of one person's humanity or society's humanity. These are only a sample of the diversity. Best read in a sunny, open place like a meadow where you won't scare too easily from the poignancy.… (mehr)

A teacher, scholar, and former Poet Laureate of Virginia, Kelly Cherry has published some thirty books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, as well as a couple of classical translations. With this latest story collection, Cherry completes a trilogy which began with My Life & Dr. Joyce Brothers: A Novel in Stories (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1990), and continued with The Society of Friends: Stories (University of Missouri Press, 1999). I find it interesting that Cherry chose the short story form for writing a trilogy, since it is no secret that story collections are often a hard sell in the book trade. But I have read all three books now and it became quickly obvious that Cherry is a master of the form. And here’s where it gets interesting. Any one of these books can be read as a stand-alone ‘novel,’ because yes, the stories are all interconnected. But what’s even more amazing is that each one of the stories can also stand alone. It’s like a hat trick within a hat trick, a kind of literary magic.

The glue that holds it all together is one central character, Nina Bryant, a Southerner by birth, raised haphazardly by eccentric classical musician parents, and now a writer and teacher at the University of Wisconsin in Madison (where the author taught for more than twenty years). She lives in a close-knit neighborhood (there are some neighbors’ stories in here too) with her husband and adopted daughter, Tavy (Octavia). In the two earlier books, we followed a forty-ish Nina, still recovering from an unsuccessful early marriage and an incestuous episode with her older brother (a talented artist and musician who drank himself to death), and desperately trying to find love and family. Ironically, she suddenly finds herself the adoptive mother of Tavy, the illegitimate child of her brother’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Babette. (Yes, she is actually her daughter’s great-aunt.) And, after a few near misses with various prospective suitors, she meets and marries Palmer Wright, a professor of medieval history. And oh, yes – there is also Nina’s “little dog,” who figures prominently throughout all three books and is important because he taught her she was capable of loving and taking care of another living creature before she got Tavy.

In this latest installment of the Nina trilogy, following a brief recap of her family history, presented charmingly in “Prologue: On Familiar Terms,” we learn more of Tavy’s biological mother. In “Shooting Star,” twenty-five years after she gave up her child to Nina, Babette is now BB, a Hollywood actress, still with Tavy’s father, a director and filmmaker. In “The Autobiography of My Mother(s),” when, as a teenager, Tavy wanted to know who her real father was, and Nina told her his name was Roy, Tavy thought, “I pictured him on horseback.” Then, when Nina added, Roy Dante – “I pictured him riding a horse into an inferno.” It made me laugh, that unlikely juxtaposition of Roy Rogers and Dante’s “Inferno.” And this is only one example of Cherry’s trademark use of comic relief, found often in all three books. And also perhaps a clue to the Dantean progression of Nina’s life – from her own personal hell, to purgatory, and, finally, to Paradise.

BB does come back to Madison to meet the daughter she abandoned so many years ago, as well as a granddaughter, Callie (Calliope). Because, like her mother, Tavy too had a child out of wedlock, but, unlike her mother, she kept the baby, and, with the full support of Nina and Palmer, is raising the child and pursuing her own passion as a painter.

Nina Bryant’s story is a generational one – her grandparents, her parents, her own troubled life, and that of her daughter, and beyond. But most of all it is Nina’s own story, a writer’s life lived in full. Nearing seventy, partly deaf with incipient cataracts, she is stricken with inoperable pancreatic cancer. In “Faith, Hope and Clarity,” Nina thinks back on her life and her “so-called career … because, to her, writing was not a career; it was a calling.” Knowing she is dying, plagued by progressing weakness and pain, she struggles to write one final thing, a paragraph at a time, a story with a protagonist named Nina. In one of these paragraphs she writes –
Style is the struggle for clarity, she knew. Hemingway or Henry James – each tried to get onto the page his vision, and as clearly as possible. A writer has a vision, and it precedes language: there are no words for it. She spends her time on earth in search of the right words and the right rhythms for them, that is, the words and rhythms that will convey her vision.
Like her character, Nina, author Kelly Cherry recognizes writing as a calling. She must. Why else would she have devoted more than twenty-five years to this trilogy? Perhaps the best explanation is provided by Nina herself, who, in explaining to Tavy why she continued to write in spite of her apparent lack of success, told her –
… it was about making something that would bring aesthetic happiness into the world … [i.e.] It’s what happens when you feel so fully and deeply that if you don’t share it you’ll burst. It’s what makes a person an artist.
Make no mistake: writing is an art, and Kelly Cherry is a great artist. Her vision has been achieved, and Nina Bryant may be her masterpiece. Read this book. Read the whole trilogy. You will laugh. You will cry. And, finally, you will grieve. I loved this book – these books. This is fiction at its finest. My highest recommendation.

(This review was originally published online in The Internet Review of Books in April 2015)

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (mehr)

TEMPORIUM is the ninth Kelly Cherry book I have read. I first discovered her work a couple years ago with TWELVE WOMEN IN A COUNTRY CALLED AMERICA. The stories in that book were just so damn good I had to read more. So then I read her trilogy of linked story collections, MY LIFE & DR. JOYCE BROTHERS, THE SOCIETY OF FRIENDS, and A KIND OF DREAM, all of which simply blew me away. I wanted know more about this writer, so then I read a couple collections of autobiographical essays, WRITING THE WORLD and GIRL IN A LIBRARY, which provided insights into this woman and her fascinating life. But I wanted more, so then I tried a poetry chapbook, WEATHER, followed by a book length prose poem, QUARTET FOR J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER. I loved both of them, and I’m usually not much of a poetry person.

And now there’s this new ‘thing,’ TEMPORIUM: BEFORE THE BEGINNING TO AFTER THE END: FICTIONS. I’m still kind of scratching my head over it. And it’s not that I didn’t like it. Because I did. I just don’t quite know what to make of it. If it is ‘fiction,’ then you’d have to file it under ‘flash fiction,’ and there is quite a lot of that going around these days. The pieces here range from just a handful of words to a few pages. Here’s a sample of a super short one called “Six Words” – “Shark eats man, dies of hiccups.” You see? What do you MAKE of this? As a ‘fiction,’ I mean. Here’s another one called “Defining the Indefinable” - “’Not infrequently’ is slightly fewer that ‘fairly often.’” After thinking about it, I LIKE that one. Here are a couple more that I like very much. They’re both called “Six Words.” The first: “Morning to night: a daily adventure.” And the second: “Night to morning: the courageous return.”

These last two reflect, I think, thoughts by someone who’s been around for a while. I understand them. Because Cherry and I are both of an age, well into our seventies, that makes us think often of our own mortality and how time seems to go faster and faster as we age. Indeed her title, TEMPORIUM (tempus + emporium) suggests a huge general store of time itself. There are more than seventy short ‘fictions’ contained in this ‘emporium’ – in a book of less than 200 pages. In an introductory note, Cherry herself seems unsure what to call these “bits and pieces,” finally defining them as “moments of time,” which she has arranged “more or less chronologically.” She continues: “I think of the book as a museum, curating, harboring, or displaying the moments collected herein. Hence the title.”

And so I have tried to understand this strange collection – as a chronological collection of odds and ends, written over a long and illustrious career, by a woman with a poet-philosopher, searcher sensibility. And, unsurprisingly, they are all about time. A couple more samples –

“Of the generations who preceded her, of the ones to follow, she thinks: Time experiences itself as energy. To be alive is to feel alive.” (from “Beginning as Other”)

And this one, which seems especially prescient, given the recent devastating wildfires out West –

“Will Californians continue to stay in their state? What if the forests catch on fire? But they already do. They are likely to do so again. (from “Drought”)

Another piece, “The Doorbell” seems particularly meaningful, about a woman writer cleaning out her office of papers, “Rough drafts, mostly.” She wonders if they should be saved, at first throwing a whole file of papers into the trash, then retrieving it, thinking –

“… maybe she should hang on to it, you never know. Someone might want her papers after all.”

If the woman here is indeed Kelly Cherry, then yes, please keep those papers, Kelly. Don’t throw anything away. Everything you have written is valuable. You are not “a lady who scribbles.” You are a Writer.

A collection like TEMPORIUM may at first seem an anomaly, a mystery, a puzzle. But it works – as an intriguing ‘frame’ for a career spanning nearly fifty years of writing. Good writing. Writing that matters. I enjoyed the hell out of this book, and will recommend it highly. Well done, Ms. Cherry.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (mehr)