BACK IN THE ’80S, I used to complain about what passed for “regional” literature here in the PacNW, as officially defined by a certain clique. Quaint little nature poems depicting still-life scenes devoid of human presence; humorless prose about rugged living-off-the-land types.
Back in the ’90s, I noted the apparent passing of nature-lit, and also recounted some of the diverse writings that have come from here that weren’t like that.
Now, a few of these other strains have finally gotten their recognition as a “genre” of sorts, thanks to the new trade-paperback anthology Northwest Edge: Deviant Fictions, edited by Lidia Yuknavitch and L. N. Pearson and published under their Portland-based Two Girls imprint.
It’s a fast-paced, well-rounded revue of stories and experimental prose-works, with a few photo-narrative pieces (mostly by Richard Kract and L.N. Pearson) mixed in for relief.
Among the highlights:
- Chuck (FIght Club) Palahniuk’s “Survivor,” in which a clueless rich couple is totally dependent upon their impoverished house servant to instruct them in proper deportment at bigtime dinner parties.
- Paula Coomer’s “Almost Plum,” a light and sincere love triangle among drag-queen cowgirls in Spokane.
- Steven Shaviro’s three terse essays on UFO abductions, transsexual-vampire fiction, and Italian horror movies.
- Allison Owens’s “Waiting,” a brisk little tale abruptly juxtaposing tragedy and childhood “innocence.”
- Lance Olsen’s “Strategies in the Overexposure of a Well-Lit Space,” a surrealistic nightmare of complete TV immersion gone utterly weird.
- Our pal Doug Nufer’s “Restraining Order,” a cleverly laid-out dark-comic vignette about your basic Co-Worker from Heck.
- Meagan Atiyeh’s “What It Lacks,” a disciplined, taut short-short of exquisitely-described loneliness (“Raising a glass of water for a pill the maid had brought, she is aware of her own restlessness, a vague and cloudy nature full of sediment, full of doubt, full of phrases and notes to be made in pocketbooks”).
Virtually none of the pieces revel in the old nature-poet Northwest of herons and seals and sunsets on the beach. And some of them simply reflect a global bohemian zeitgeist.
But the best of them depict a Northwest state of mind. It’s a hard thing to encapsulate, but it comprises hefty doses of droll skepticism, dry humor, and a BS detector set to eleven.
MONDAY: Political conventions–I say let’s keep ’em.
ELSEWHERE:
