Collaborating with Silent Partners
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For years now, I’ve been passing on some advice to new writers that I got from the fabulist short story writer Kelly Link. It involves generating story ideas by making a long, exquisitely specific list of your obsessions. I was reminded of this advice as I read Eleanor Levine’s short story collection, Kissing a Tree Surgeon, published by Guernica Editions. After revisiting Link’s original essay, I realized that I had forgotten much of her nuanced introduction to this advice—which, it turns out, actually comes from Kate Wilhelm. Link writes:
“[Wilhelm] suggests that every writer indirectly collaborates with her subconscious—she calls this collaborator your Silent Partner … Your Silent Partner doesn’t discriminate between the good, the bad, the ugly, and the odd. That’s your job. When you reject certain kinds of ideas, Wilhelm says, the S.P. stops supplying them … When you begin to recognize certain kinds of ideas as useful and welcome, Wilhelm suggests that you stop and offer positive reinforcement. That is, think to yourself, ‘Yes, that’s a terrific idea. More like that, please, S.P.’—and the S.P will begin to produce more and more ideas of these fruitful and generative kinds of ideas.” Reading the stories in Kissing a Tree Surgeon, I gather that Levine and her S.P. are close—really close. Incestuous twin sisters (or “cysters,” as one character calls another in the opening story), maybe. If we can assume Levine has rejected most of the S.P.’s bad ideas, she’s left in all manner of the good, ugly, and odd—narrated to us primarily by Agatha Ravine, a Jewish dyke from Philly who takes her grandmother’s ghost to the movies and has a self-destructive thing for shiksas. It is not my place to guess at what Levine’s list of obsessions might look like if she were to make one, but across 40 stories and 200 pages Agatha (or someone quite like Agatha) readily draws us into hers: WASPy women Zionists Palestinians New Jersey Emily, the ex-girlfriend family ghosts Philip Roth derogatory Yiddish terms pretty boys high school English William S. Burroughs blue-collar jobs Allen Ginsberg dogs |
Imagine then, these obsessions strung together in nonlinear, surreal narratives that play out with an anxiety dream’s logic: These are the stories collected in Kissing a Tree Surgeon—they are comical and often absurd, but there are these throughlines.
Though one could approach this book as a novel-in-stories, some of the pieces stand out, like a stark, hypnopompic hallucination just before waking. Consider, for instance, “Hot Chocolate in the Cupboard,” which begins, “The world is coming to an end, and an impoverished black woman, one of many people dispossessed by a shift in the equator, brings me spaghetti.” The narrator’s brother, however, insists the woman stole the spaghetti from him. Furthermore, he’s not concerned that his sister’s dog is gone, even if it means that the poor pit bull might be forced into a fight. The narrator continues: “I look in the kitchen for my dog and food. There are only clothes and blankets and some hot chocolate, but the dust has ruined the materials we might wear, if we get cold.” The last line reads: “Amid blank tables, the black lady and I hold hands and wait for God.” Though one could approach Kissing a Tree Surgeon as a novel-in-stories, some of the tales stand out: like a stark, hypnopompic hallucination just before waking. Other stories are more lucid. Nostalgic. Queer daydreams. In “The Boy Who Used the Curling Iron” (a story that is actually about recurring character Emily, the ex) we learn about Agatha’s attempt to get a date for the Senior Farewell. She asked ten boys, but it was only the last one who agreed: Alex, “the gay man of my dreams,” “… handsome, although it was clear, clearer than the ocean is green, that he was a girl.” Alex got his ass beat by his father after Agatha ratted him out for attempting to bail on the day: “‘I’m really sorry,’” Agatha tells him later, “grinning, glad Alex was not dead, but grateful his father had been the catalyst for my not staying home to watch Larry Hagman and Barbara Eden dry fuck in I Dream of Jeannie.” Later, Agatha says, “I was sixteen and am now fifty-one, and things have changed not too rapidly. I am no longer attracted to men who look like women and probably more so to women who look like me.”
You or I might not share all of Agatha’s (or Levine’s) obsessions, but Levine (and Agatha) is here to take you on a magical mystery tour through theirs. Kissing a Tree Surgeon is a trip, a recommended romp through your gay, middle-aged, no filter/no chill BFF’s grey matter. |
REVIEWED BY AMANDA KRUPMAN
Amanda is a writer from Cleveland, Ohio. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has appeared in publications including SmokeLong Quarterly, Flapperhouse, Forge Literary Magazine, BLOOM, The New Engagement, Punk Planet, $pread, and Time Out New York. Amanda received an MFA in Fiction from The New School’s graduate writing program. She teaches writing at Pace University in New York City and in community workshop settings.
Amanda is a writer from Cleveland, Ohio. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has appeared in publications including SmokeLong Quarterly, Flapperhouse, Forge Literary Magazine, BLOOM, The New Engagement, Punk Planet, $pread, and Time Out New York. Amanda received an MFA in Fiction from The New School’s graduate writing program. She teaches writing at Pace University in New York City and in community workshop settings.