Well-Told Stories

Well-told stories are the heart of Glimmer Train and themes in the Winter 2011 issue range from the anguish of a stateless young man in Hasanthika Sirisena’s “Third-Country National”, to the tender losses associated with a parent’s dying in Anne de Marcken’s delicately drawn “Best Western” and Josh Weil’s dark “Malvern Hill”, to an adolescent’s awakening perception of the misdeeds and chaos of parental lives in Carrie Brown’s “Bomb” and Jon Chopan’s “This Form of Grieving.” Of particular power is the unexpected link Brown’s story, “Bomb,” skillfully draws between a terrorist’s bomb and hidden events within her own family, seen from the perspective of both the adolescent child and the adult daughter. Brown writes, “there was really no true way to tell the story of your life [. . . ] no way of understanding the events. You just took them in, like an explosion inside your body that you tried to contain so as not to harm anyone near you, and you went on” [52].

Equally powerful is Josh Weil’s “Malvern Hill”, calling to mind Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, with its exploration of the blurred boundaries between child and adult. Weil’s setting is the American South and his strategy, a very effecting one, is the use of an old tale from a Civil War battle to render the bond between a 21^st century son and his dying father, both in their ways relics of a by-gone era of wounded, macho men: “He must have awoken in the house alone,” Weil writes, “and realized that if he did not do whatever he could to keep me, he would lose me, that there were no other possibilities in between” [159].

“Malvern Hill” is not the only story here to explore close male bonds. Rolf Yngve’s moving and beautifully paced “Going After His Brother” follows an aging business executive as he returns on an icy winter night to the place where he and his brother grew up. Standing in the dark in the middle of a frozen lake in wet shoes, having just seen a lynx, he calls his brother on his I-phone to reveal a long-kept secret. Seeing the lynx, he muses,

He’d forgotten about wild things. He’d forgotten how looking into the wild eye thrilled and frightened him, the absence of concern, that wildness one could catch, even kill, but never incarcerate, one that never understood its debt, never wanted to regain anything lost.

Several authors in this issue use humor and eccentric characters to carry their narratives: Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, for example, sets up a quirky love-triangle in “The Bridge Is Moving.” Aaron Carmichael devises a strange sinewy penance for a man who lets it slip at a public meeting that he does not love his wife, in “Driver Yu’s Penance.”

Among the narratives and interviews, a humanitarian appeal and political alert from Sara Whyatt, Program Director of the Writers in Prison Committee of International PEN, in London, stands out. Whyatt’s appeal concerns the imprisonment of Adnan Hajizde and Emin Milli, two young independent journalists and internet activists framed in Baku for crimes they did not commit and sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison in Azerbaijan.

Also included in this issue are stories by Jessi Phillips, Evan Christopher Burton, and M.P. Lacrampe. Jeremiah Chamberlin interviews novelist and short-story writer Travis Holland, and Margo Williams interviews Bret Anthony Johnston, a short-story writer whose story “Soldier of Fortune” also appears in this issue. (Johnston is also the  editor of the bestselling Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer.)

Glimmer Train employs sassy and inventive ways of presenting its authors, obviously encouraging personal reminiscences, along with comical, revealing photos and snapshots.