Experimental Lit Mag is Heavy on Variety, Light on Diversity

What if Helen Keller tripped on mushrooms? What if 18th literary scholars created and played basketball with the first “ball” and “hoop” being a crumpled-up poem slam-dunked into an urn? What if the president had to box his way into office? Can you imagine?

The authors in Journal of Experimental Fiction 50 can. Each story presents a situation to the reader, as if the author is saying “what if…?” The author then spends the rest of his[1] story trying to imagine what the answer to his what if question would be.

One part of answering this question, of figuring out what a situation would look like were it to occur is through the structure used for each story. The stories in the journal are in one of the following formats: play, narrative and timeline. “A Fondness for Children,” for example, is a play. The author, Sean Gill, uses this format as it is perhaps the best way in which to tell his story—a scene of a committee meeting where the people present argue with each other and make snide remarks.

In “The Coffee Diaries,” Chelsey Albert structures her story with a timeline of events as she describes different situations that occur between coworkers over one weekend. And in “Marathon,” Trevor Laurence Jockims tells about the adventures of a writer through a more traditional narrative—though even then Jockims still plays with form as he also uses lists in his story.

This leads into questioning what about these stories categorize them as experimental. Some of the stories are experimental in the ways in which they are told—plays, timelines, narratives with structural twists—while most (if not all) of them are experimental in regards to the content of each story. Hellen Keller on magical mushrooms, for instance.

Related to the ways in which stories are experimental, the writing devices the authors use to tell these stories range from very allusive and poetic to those straight-forward narratives. The language used in each story creates the story’s tone, which guides the reader through the text. Whether a personable tone is used or a poetic one, the language is at times what keeps the story going. For instance, I'm not quite sure what Ben Pullar’s “Hinge Facto” is about, but I do know that his writing style, the craft techniques he implements, and the intentional turns he makes is what kept me reading even though I felt lost in the story. Sentences such as, “Submarine blue light and ink smells were not conducive to cheerful splurges of new creativity,” or, further down on that same page, “Wallace felt his lips turning blue with noise” kept me interested solely to see what metaphor he would come up with next.

The various tones throughout the text also keep the reader from feeling numb/overwhelmed with the similar language and format. Where a poetic language can keep a reading going, so, too, can a personable tone. In Mark Axerlrod’s “The BAUDELAIRE-BIRD CONNECTION; or, How the Celtics Got to Be That Way,” the reader feels as if she is being told the story of basketball, that here is an interesting history lesson related through an approachable voice, and that she is spoken to directly.

The diversity in the content and delivery of these stories, which is wide and variant, leads one to believe there is no specific type of experimental fiction the editor is looking for, that he just wants stories with interesting premises and engaging prose. That said, there is one facet of the Journal of Experimental Fiction 50 that the editor might not have done intentionally, but the prevalence of this element does suggest that the editor favors more “masculine” stories. In other words, he’s a fan of the dudes. The entire issue—seventeen new experimental stories—only has two female authors in it. That’s two out of seventeen. Thus, the universal “he” I used earlier on to discuss the authors in this issue.

While I do not want to reinforce the stereotype that men only write about action or sex, or “masculine” subjects as defined by social constructions, that stereotype stands true for this issue. There’s D. Harlan Wilson’s story “Presidency,” in which the president literally has to fight his way into the White House, and there’s Seamus Scanlan’s “Killing the Laffeys” which starts out with two people firing handguns. The gender of characters in these stories are overwhelmingly male, and all of these characters have traditionally masculine voices. None of the pieces here challenge or complicate the narrator’s gender or identity in the story. That said, there are some stories that do not involve violence, and these stories are the ones that are more poetic.

An example of this is Felissia Cappelletti’s “Mynd” in which she uses poetic language not to get some concrete point across, but to create a specific tone and scene. She states, “Upon it all comes a ventuergirl. Framed in the mind-scape of finding her escape, she has journeyed for my ideons. Wandering to wonder far, she has gathered all her thoughts and possessabilities and left the nearness of her world away far away from someone else’s head. Instead, she gathers the verdant-sing quilted hillspread of yonder—here behind her like the folds of a skirt. She is looking to un-dis-cover the imag-junle-action of this place which is Mynd." Here, the poetic language is what the author employs to reach out to the reader, and in turn is what brings the reader to the page. Instead of violence or some wacky, fast-paced plot, it is the sound of the story that stands out.

The stories in Journal of Experimental Fiction 50 are capable of presenting all sorts of different places, images, and story lines whether in poetic prose, narrative, or even in a script. This is one of the diverse aspects of the journal, though again there are a lot of men and just two female authors included in the issue. It would be nice to see the gender dynamic more balanced. In terms of aesthetic, the tone of each piece does start to bleed into the next one after the halfway point of the journal.

I obviously do not know if the editor intended to include more men than women, but either way he perhaps needs to engage with a concept that Todd Michael Cox presents in “A Shroom with a View.” Similar to how Cox describes how if Helen Keller got her eyesight back, then she would suddenly be “opened to all possibilities," I believe the next issue of Journal of Experimental Fiction 50 needs to open up to all possibilities of what “experimental fiction” can be by including a more diverse group of writers—both in their personal identity, but even more so in their subject matter.