Heather Fowler

If you follow my reviews, you'll know that Magical Realism is a great love of mine, especially when combined with Literary Fiction.Short Stories collections are on the rise and justifiably so. The ambiguous closures and underlying themes offer a thousand possibilities to demanding readers. Suspended Heart, a collection by Heather Fowler originally published in 2010, attracted my attention the minute I saw its cover. However, I knew I needed to proceed with caution because the anatomical heart on the front cover made me think of Maggie O’Farrel’s I Am, I Am, I Am and Jen Campbell’s masterpiece The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night. Unfortunately, my apprehension was (for the most part) justified.

This may seem an insignificant detail but I was far from impressed by the Dedication section. It should have been placed in the end of the book, in my opinion. It was too sappy for my taste and a sugary introduction isn't going to win this reader. Anyway, there is always the benefit of doubt, right? Unfortunately, when you end up liking 8 stories out of the 20 included in the collection, there is definitely a problem…

Suspended Heart: A girl loses her heart in a mall. The heart remains there, suspended and worshipped, revealing the true emotions of the people who dare to stand in front of it, but what about its original owner? Would our lives be easier if we didn't have a heart to give?
Bloom in Any Season:A woman blooms -literally- waiting for her lover to return every April. This story is one of the most elegantly sensual texts I've ever read.
The Girl with the Razor Blade Skin: A girl is covered in razors. It is her only armour against a family and a social circle that is too narrow-minded to the point of being tyrannical. A story heavy in symbolism and social commentary.
Godiva: Lady Godiva has survived. She has been making her way through the centuries, changing faces, enticing the crowds by reflecting the nakedness of societies.But what happens when the young crowds in a city in the USA treat her like a common whore?
My Brother Made of Clay:The children of an absurd, highly dysfunctional family try to survive their parents’ indifference and cruelty.
Fear of Snakes:A woman is turned into a snake but only while she’s sleeping. A clever metaphor of the fear of men towards womanhood and independent identity.
The Rose Lamp:Buying antics is an action that requires caution. This is an atmospheric, mysterious story of premonitions, abuse and change.
Channel 59:In a dystopia of the future, the government has launched a channel that aims to control the overpopulation by turning couples into strangers through addiction.Eerie and plausible.

And then, we have talking parrots smoking pot. Not a friend of those stories. They verged on satire and I am not a fan of the genre. Moreover, the emphasis on sex was cheap. For example, there is an interesting story of a pigeon that develops a bond with a young woman but sex (an unnecessary, highly gratuitous subplot) is depicted as something crude and dirty. Aside from the fact that I found this distasteful, it quickly became repetitive, boring and irritating. There is a difference between raw and disgusting. Having characters who desperately want to fall in love or at least have sex in almost every story is not my personal definition of Literature. Also, Red Riding Hood and Sun Tzu. In the same story. No.

So, I found this collection to be a highly mixed bag. There were stories that were memorable, good examples of Magical Realism but they were a glorified minority. 8 out of 20 isn't exactly a success. Still, I’d suggest you read the collection and decide for yourselves. Personally, I wasn't interested in the themes Fowler chose to focus on. She is not Jen Campbell. I won't comment on the audacity of a reviewer who compared Fowler to Marquez and Kafka. I mean, have they ever read anything worthy at all? In any case, a three-star rating seems to me more than fair.

Many thanks to Pink Narcissus Press and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com… (meer)

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

(Originally written for Daniel Casey's Gently Read Literature.)

Ah, the MFA story collection; has a more beguiling trickster ever existed in the literary world? Originally a cutting-edge means of education at a time when "creative writing" was largely seen as an unworthy subject for university study, over the last 75 years this distilled, often intense artistic format has become a victim of its own success, resulting in a world now so oversaturated with short academic pieces that the genre itself has largely become a self-parodying one, the universe now filled with an unending series of obscure trade paperbacks destined to be picked up only by that author's professors and friends (as well as the occasional random book reviewer). And so do these academic and basement presses keep fighting the good fight, putting out hundreds and hundreds more of these compilations with each passing year, the results sometimes great in quality but with it becoming more and more difficult to justify their existence in general, given how little you usually have to travel anymore to find an existing story collection that's already exactly like it.

Take for example two volumes I recently had the chance to look through, Heather Fowler's Suspended Heart from Aqueous Books, and Stacey Levine's The Girl with Brown Fur from Starcherone Books, itself an imprint of Dzanc Books. Both writers are award-winning academes, one from California and the other from the Pacific Northwest; and frankly, both of their collections feel like the pat results of a year's worth of workshopping with their fellow professors and students, a typical grind through the MFA sausage factory that tends to produce stories that all sorta vaguely sound like each other, and that all tend to coalesce in one's head not long after finishing them into a big blurry blob of magical realism and ten-dollar vocabulary words. I mean, take Suspended Heart for example, which I suppose I would call the better of the two, although truthfully there's not a whole lot of difference between them; it's essentially a book's worth of metaphorical fairytales and fables, which in good Postmodernist fashion examines a series of blase real-world issues (bad jobs, terrible boyfriends) through the filter of made-up genre concepts, such as the title tale for a good example, in which a woman at a mall one day literally loses her heart, placed into a glass jar by a janitor and put on display in the hopes of finding its owner, and eventually becoming the source of all these freaky emotional things that happen to couples whenever they walk too close to it.

It's not a bad story by any means, and Fowler is a more than capable writer; but I just can't help but to feel that I've already read stories like these a million times before, which always seems to be my issue with MFA story collections much more than the quality of the collections themselves. And this is even more pronounced with Levine's book, which frankly just a week after finishing I can barely even remember anything about, other than a vague recollection of finishing each story and thinking, "Really? Was that it?" And that of course is one of the lingering problems of the MFA short story that profoundly contributes to their short mental lifespans; that since character development tends to be much more treasured than plot in most academic writing programs, and since the most prominent style in academic writing is ho-hum social realism, and since most academes tend to live sheltered, uneventful lives, the very subjects of the stories themselves tend to command little attention on their own to begin with, the problem then compounded by the lackluster personal style and tendency to overedit that is so endemic to so much academic writing.

It's a question that budding young writers really owe to themselves to ask, when they sit down to start putting together their first professional manuscripts; that now that they have their training under their belt, how are they now going to differentiate themselves from not only what's come before, but from all their contemporaries churning out those five thousand new fiction titles that are currently being published each year in the United States, every single year without fail? It's a question that academic programs tend not to address, because in many ways it's not the academic world's job to address it -- it's their job instead to crank out well-trained writers, and to make sure by graduation time that they are literal Masters at the fundamentals of the English language and the three-act structure -- but as Fowler and Levine's earnest yet forgettable volumes prove, for a writer to have a true success in the 21st century, they need to know more than just how to dot all their I's and cross all their T's.

Out of 10: 7.5… (meer)