We Live in Water by Jess Walter

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Jess Walter's 2013 short story collection, We Live in Water, was published by Harper Perennial.  I'm going to single out two stories from this collection:

I suppose I've hated Portland since I took a pop there.  It was a shame, too, because it was the perfect Portland scam.  A guy in my building was a volunteer recruiter for Greenpeace, and one day when he left his car unlocked I stole his pamphlets and sign-up logs.  I couldn't use that shit in Seattle so I drove to Union Station in Portland, picked out two lost kids who looked like they could be college students, and put them out downtown.   
--From "Helpless Little Things," pp. 69-81 (first published in Playboy, Vol. 56, No. 2, February 2009).

Wade's lawyers said they could get him transferred back to Seattle for community service, but he didn't want some old client seeing him cleaning pigeon shit in Pioneer Square.  His kids wanted nothing to do with him.  And until the divorce was finalized, he didn't even know which house to go to.
        No, he said, he'd just do his community service in Spokane.  
--From "The Wolf and the Wild," pp. 133-146 (first published in McSweeney's, Issue 41).

These two stories stood out to me, but the collection is really strong as a whole.  My other favorites were "Don't Eat Cat" (pp. 85-105), "Wheelbarrow Kings" (pp. 147-161), and the third of a set of three linked stories, "The Brakes" (127-131).  The last piece here, which appeared in The Best of McSweeney's and inspired me to read more of Jess Walter's work, was "Statistical Abstract for My Hometown, Spokane, Washington" (163-177).

The Best of McSweeney's

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These pieces are all from The Best of McSweeney's, a collection edited by Dave Eggers and Jordan Bass and published by McSweeney's in 2013.  (There is also a deluxe box set edition available here.)

I live in St. Paul, Minnesota.  A nice place where God tries to ice-murder all inhabitants every year.
--Letter from John Moe, pp. 14-15.

I used to think only poor people set fires.  Two reasons for this: (1) I'd never known anyone whose house had burned down, and (2) when I worked for the Social Security Administration, "It burned up in a fire" was a common response to my request for documents.
--Letter from Mary Miller, pp. 15-16.

Five years ago, I played an angry gay teenager in a small coming-of-age film.  
--Letter from Colleen Werthmann, pp. 20-21.  

He is nine.  The other boys and girls have been like this, together, since they were four.  But he is new. 
--From "New Boy," fiction by Roddy Doyle, pp. 39-57.

1. The population of Spokane, Washington, is 203,268.  It is the 104th biggest city in the United States.
2. Even before the recession, in 2008, 36,000 people in Spokane lived below the poverty line--a little more than 18 percent of the population.  That's about the same as it was in Washington, DC, at the time.  The poverty rate was 12.5 percent in Seattle.
--From "Statistical Abstract for My Hometown, Spokane, Washington," fiction by Jess Walter, pp. 59-67.

My wife, the doctor, is not well.  In the end she could be dead.  It started suddenly, on a country weekend, a movie with friends, a pizza, and then pain.
--From "Do Not Disturb," fiction by A.M. Homes, pp. 89-111.

We drove there through a ferocious snowstorm, swaddled in old blankets and sleeping bags, because his car heater had gone out years before...  I huddled up next to him and adjusted the radio stations as they faded in and out of range...
--From "We'll Sleep in My Old Room," a comic by Chris Ware, pp. 128-131.

The trouble happened because I was bored.  At the time, I was twenty-eight days sober.  I was spending my nights playing Internet backgammon.  I should have been going to AA meetings, but I wasn't.  . . .  When I wasn't burning out my eyes on the computer, I was lying in bed, reading.  I was going through the third Raymond Chandler phase of my adulthood.  Read all his books in 1988, then 1999, and now 2007.  Some people re-read Proust or Thomas Mann and improve themselves.  Not me.
--From "Bored to Death," fiction by Jonathan Ames, pp. 361-386 (and his note on the story, pp. 359-360).

Bucks returned to Kenya in short order.  He met a barmaid who became pregnant and left with him for Uganda, where they were soon estranged.  For a while afterward he moved between that country and Kenya, once again attracting scrutiny for exporting protected snakes: his new specialties were Bitis worthingtoni and Bitis parviocula, highland adders from Kenya and Ethiopia.  On New Year's Eve 2005, Bucks was arrested and thrown into a Kenyan jail.  The official charge was something about illegal frogs in one of his terrariums, but Kenya now had a long list of grievances against him, as did Uganda and Ethiopia.  
--From "Benjamin Bucks," nonfiction by Jennie Erin Smith, pp. 457-475.

I first met the Polack when she worked at Fort Worth Gold.  This was before I learned the jewelry business myself and joined [my brother] Baron.  I was only a customer when I met her, buying a stainless-steel Cartier for an institutional client of mine.  It was almost Christmas, and the sales floor stood ten deep with buyers.  It was the fat time.
--From "How to Sell," fiction by Clancy Martin, pp. 543-558.

Mama taught me better.  She could give me a glare that brought me to my knees when she heard me talk about anyone without respect--especially Mabiordit.  It was Mabiordit who had sheltered us when we came to Juba looking for Jal e Jal and ended up stranded, with nothing in Mama's purse but twenty pounds and a battered Nokia mobile that could receive calls but not make them.  
--From "The Bastard," fiction by Nyuol Lueth Tong, pp. 589-602.

This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, a poem by Maria Richardson, and two pieces from McSweeney's

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It is both selfish of me and not
to ask you to stay a little longer. 

The mountains are playing that game
where one of them wears a cloud as a veil

and then the others follow. 
They are forcing us to play. 

They are asking us to dedicate the day
to the books on the bottom shelf. 
...

--From "To You," a poem by Maria Richardson, Best American Poetry blog (January 11, 2014).    

 

The tricky thing about being a writer, or about being any kind of artist, is that in addition to making art you also have to make a living.  My short stories and novels have always filled my life with meaning, but, at least in the first decade of my career, they were no more capable of supporting me than my dog was.  But part of what I love about both novels and dogs is that they are so beautifully oblivious to economic concerns.  We serve them, and in return they thrive.  It isn't their responsibility to figure out where the rent is coming from.  
--From This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, a collection of essays by Ann Patchett (HarperCollins, 2013). 

Dear Class of 1994,

I regret to announce my resignation as “Most Likely to Succeed.” Nearly twenty years since the senior superlative was announced in our yearbook, it’s clear that I’ve fallen short of your expectations.  . . .

--From "An Open Letter to My 1994 High School Class Regarding My Designation of 'Most Likely to Succeed,'" a piece by Eric Corpus, McSweeney's (January 25, 2013). 

Dear TV Snobs,

TV was invented because we were tired of talking to each other and needed something else to do. You, though, keep trying to have intellectual discussions about politics and the arts while we’re watching Dancing with the Stars. Despite your oddity, we’ve tried not to make fun of you. We learned how wrong it is to judge people by watching special episodes of Family Ties and The Brady Bunch.   . . .

--From "An Open Letter to TV Snobs," a piece by Beverly Petravicius, McSweeney's (August 19, 2011). 

A few stories by Miranda July and Aimee Bender

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One looked like a woman but was too tall, or maybe it was just that the other one was so small, like a little boy.  I saw them around Portland all the time that summer.  Were they young or old?  Couldn't tell.  Were they from the present, or another era; i.e., time-travellers?  Wasn't sure.  They were in black and white, neckties and knickers.  A little dirty.  Always leaning on each other.   

--From "TV," a story by Miranda July, The New Yorker (June 9, 2014). 

 

I met Arlene in college, in the freshman dorm.  We were not roommates but suite-mates in the corner section of a squat brick house at the center of a small college campus in the middle of Ohio.  We both had moved from opposite coasts with the desire for a personalized liberal-arts college experience and had become friends due to proximity and availability more than compatibility.  For example, we had nothing in common.  She: Blue Ridge Mountain town.  Me: central Californian suburbs. She: declared international-relations major with three eclectic minors.  Me: not yet totally decided.  The men she liked were brutish jocks; I had located within two weeks every single soulful gentleman on campus who wrote poetry.  I found them by the length of their hair or the wear of their jeans.  She liked big-budget romantic movies; I saw every documentary I could find at the library, and if I’d had any retention ability, I would’ve stored a great deal of knowledge about the world.  She had a perpetual perm, because she felt it added volume to the thinness of her hair and gave her a look of energy; I was hard-pressed to use a brush because I preferred a ponytail, and part of trying to attract those poet-men was to look a little like I had wandered onto campus by accident after having spent ten years with the wolves behind some farmhouse, living off scraps and reveling in the pure air like a half-girl Mowgli, half-woman Thoreau. . . .

--From "Bad Return," a short story by Aimee Bender, published by One Story (Issue 158, January 2011) and reprinted in her collection The Color Master (Doubleday/Random House/Anchor Books, 2013), trade paperback edition pp. 99-129.  

 

I can't remember the words of things.  The words for words.  I have lost my words.  What's this from?  Is it the Internet?  Texting?  E-mail?  I see it in kids, too; it's not an aging thing.  An aging issue.  I do know that at the supermarket yesterday, I asked the guy where the weighing thing was, the thing that weighs other things, flailing around with my hands, indicating, and he crumpled up his forehead and said, "You mean the scale?"

     "Yes"--I said, beaming, pumping his hand--"the scale!"  As if he was the winner of an SAT prize giveaway.  . . .

--From "Wordkeepers," a short story by Aimee Bender, published by McSweeney's (Issue 41, July 2012) and reprinted in her collection The Color Master (Doubleday/Random House/Anchor Books, 2013),  pp. 153-160.   

 

I was at the Bev with Sylv and we were eating Chinese food takeout from Panda Express . . . she was going on about how she'd checked her messages and Jack hadn't called even though he said he would but maybe he was caught in traffic.  Even though he has a phone?  But I'd never say that out loud.  Sylv's the first friend I've had in a long time who really is way high on the friend pyramid, and the way she dances!  She bops around really energetically but she's also still.  Like she's moving her torso but her feet don't move, and then sometimes she'll take one step, and it feels like a thesis statement.  Like it is a topic sentence about her butt.        

--From "Lemonade," a short story by Aimee Bender, published by Tin House (Issue 33, Fall 2007) and reprinted in her collection The Color Master (Doubleday/Random House/Anchor Books, 2013), pp. 85-97.