Stories and Poems About Family

The theme of New Letters Vol 76 No. 2 is Families. As Robert Stewart, editor of New Letters, writes in his editor’s note, “We found families everywhere in the writing—someone admiring a family, or running from a family, or recovering from the loss of family, and someone trying to save a family.”

The issue includes the essay, poem, and story award winners of New Letters’ 25^th Literary Award series. The winner from each genre dramatizes the idea of family in different ways. Rose Bunch’s “Norman Mailer is Coming to Dinner” won best essay (judged by Robin Hemley). “Norman Mailer” describes the terrain of a marriage stranded in Arkansas.

The narrator craves more than her husband, Grant, and life in Russellville can supply though she gives it a good try. One day Grant announces that Norman Mailer is coming to his mother’s house for dinner. His mother apparently knew Mailer’s wife (this was 2000) who was scheduled to come back to Russellville, her hometown, to read from her new book. Breaking bread with Norman Mailer promises a dash of needed culture to break the tedium and small-town remoteness where the most exciting part of the week is drinking beer and watching pressurized water shoot through the Arkansas River Dam under the glow of the local nuclear power plant.

This year’s poetry award winner, judged by Kim Addonizio, is Heather Bell whose trilogy of poems, “Aunt Marjorie”, “Hide”, and “Blue Belly”, are nightmare landscapes of incest, pedophilia, snuff films, pornography, and rape, reducing the idea of family to a bond we are lucky to survive.

In language both straightforward and lyrical, these stark poems seem narrated by one young woman along the brutal arc of a single life. She’s raised in a household that includes Aunt Marjorie who does things to her young niece after which she says, “Love is like this. Don’t tell anyone.”  In “Hide”, the narrator is addicted to pornography and hides it from her boyfriend. She’s obsessed by death, anticipating a snuff film arriving by mail, musing, “The point from alive to dead, where is it?” By the end of “Blue Belly”, she has become a perpetrator of abuse, someone for whom atrocities have become commonplace, everyday.

“Inside the Break” is the award-winning story for fiction, judged by Benjamin Percy, and written by Siobhán Fallon. The story introduces Kailani, a young woman who watches her husband, Manny, leave for a second tour in Iraq. Also leaving with Manny’s unit is a force of fifteen non-combats—cooks, mail clerks, truck drivers—in this case, all women. “Inside the Break” exemplifies the idea of family in multiple ways—for a husband and wife, for a father and his two young children, for a soldier and the U.S. military.

During Manny’s tour Kailani discovers evidence that he cheated on her with one of the non-combats. He denies all charges. When his tour ends, he returns home thin and weak. Kailani must decide whether to confront him or support him when he has trouble readjusting to home life. After one of his recurring nightmares, “…she put her arm around his sharp hip, trying not to cling too tightly, needing to feel the wholeness of him next to her, his heat and breath, his flesh and bone.”

Fallon articulates the universal feeling that army wives feel during their spouses’ deployment, and afterwards. The struggle to understand, the struggle to keep life and family normalized after a tour.

With a wholly different take on the idea of family, the respective love lives of two men in their 60s are chronicled in the story “Turbulence” by Speer Morgan, and in the memoir/prose narrative piece “Adventures of an Old Dude” by Thomas E. Kennedy.

“Turbulence” is written as a post on a blog that generally sticks to topics like “the direct numerical simulation of turbulence.” Our male narrator has sold a simple yet lucrative invention and now lives a quiet, independently wealthy life in Palo Alto. He holds grudges against certain large corporations (IBM, Google) for one reason or another. He meets Blanca, a former Miss Costa Rica, who blows his mind, sexually speaking. He’s ready to marry her until he discovers her association with one of his enemy corporations. Written with insider parlance, “Turbulence” is an enjoyable ride into the mind of a geeky curmudgeon enjoying a sexual renaissance.