Dying & Disease: A Lit Mag Culls Tales of Illness
It is pure coincidence—must be—that three out of six short stories in the Mid-American Review (Vol. 33, Number 2), involve terminal illness. The cover bears no language distinguishing it as their annual terminal illness issue, no eye-catching starburst: “Inside…cancer!” What does this over-abundance of disease say about the state of contemporary short fiction? If the Mid-American Review (MAD) ran three terminal illness stories, how many did it receive? So long, nonspecific ennui and divorced dads! Disease is back on top.
This is maybe an over-harsh first impression of MAD, which is put out by Bowling Green State University in Ohio. It is, on the whole, an excellent journal. But, to clarify the above criticism, disease buys a short story unearned gravitas, unearned stakes. It comes equipped with pathos and horror and humanity, without demanding much originality. It makes a reader care before she’s ready to care. This issue’s fiction contains the following: a toddler with a potentially deadly brain tumor, a stroke that has reduced a youngish father to a vegetable, and cancer that has reduced an oldish mother to, yup, a vegetable.
The best of the pestilence triptych is “Spider Boy” by Chris Drangle, the issue’s opener. It deals with a married couple—a comic book illustrator and her comic book writer husband—whose charming and precocious son develops an arachnoid cyst in his brain, which is exactly as scary as it sounds. The couple, in particular the mother/narrator, must decide whether the boy should have a risky, possibly lethal operation, or leave the cyst alone, to either reside benignly in the boy’s skull for the rest of his life, or kill him one day with no warning. Drangle’s use of comic book visuals is clever, borrowing from the language and conventions of the narrator’s profession to create what is ultimately a gentle and sadly funny story about tragic decisions and self-doubt.
This light touch is missing from another of the disease stories, which follows a woman on the verge of abandoning her teenage son at a hospital (perfectly legal somehow in Nebraska, which has some odd and troubling child abandonment laws) after divorcing his father, the aforementioned immobile vegetable and leaving him to live forevermore in a nursing home.
There is a second trend among the fiction pieces: the collective first person voice. In two cases the stories are told by the denizens of small towns, and in the third, by an aggregate of keyed-up fathers watching their sons run a cross country race. The latter story, “The Meet” by Mark Brazaitis, is comic, with a Barthelme-esque escalation structure, beginning with the fathers running alongside the boys to egg them on. Commence absurdity.
The issue highlights the 2012-2013 winners of MAD’s annual prizes, the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award and the James Wright Poetry Award. Incidentally, the fiction prize went to Woody Skinner’s “Things In Slow Motion,” a well-executed story about a surgeon, which happens to both use the collective voice and be about terminal illness.
The poetry is overall very good. Translations of several of Norwegian poet Helge Torvund’s poems pleasantly defy expectation of Scandinavian terseness. They are warmly humorous and moving.
The editors also seem open to experimentation. Robert Long Foreman’s “On Brian’s Dreams of Submarines” incorporates a meticulous dream journal, in which the eponymous Brian has tracked his dreams with the detachment and detail of a census-taker. There are no less than ten graphs and charts in that one, illustrating everything from the racial makeup of the population of the dreams to the method and frequency with which Dream Brian is butchering people. (Brian’s got problems.)
Also experimental is B.J. Hollars’ “Dispatches from the Drownings,” an essay in forty-six short, numbered sections mostly comprising drowning factoids. One wonders why the author limited himself to just forty-six. The piece has several threads: the death of Percy Bysshe Shelley, a bizarre 1920s CPR machine called the Lungmotor, the murder by drowning of a black boy in Mississippi, the author bathing his infant son. Josef Mengele even makes a surprise appearance. The result is an interesting puzzle that points to, but never fully explains, the author’s complicated and almost obsessive preoccupation with drowning. The other nonfiction piece, “The World is Lucky With Birds” by Emily Arnason Casey, is divided into sections as well. It’s got the wispy seriousness of a lyric essay. Each section bears a title in brackets: [Flesh of the Dead], [Inner Landscapes], [Square Kingdom of Sky].
Still, though these pieces may take a few lunges in the direction of experimentation, the Mid-American Review is largely a straightforward, traditional literary journal showcasing high-quality work by MFAs and PhDs mostly at the beginning of their careers.
