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I Get It; I Hear You: Vanessa Cuti’s ‘Our Children’ - BASS Review 2021

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On the wall at Explora Kids Museum, Albuquerque  I read this story for the second time, attempting to annotate, as I followed my kids around Explora, a children’s museum in Albuquerque, NM. Despite the overstimulation everywhere, children’s museums are not typically places where I fantasize about abandoning my children. I am usually in awe of them in places like this, watching them think in ways I’d never considered, being little scientists. And yet I get it , Vanessa Cuti , and your unnamed protagonist. I tried to write this analysis many times in our domestic settings, as we moved from Albuquerque to Flagstaff, and my copy of BASS 2021 just got shifted around the houses, ever optimistic, ever accommodating toy cars and science experiments and felt-tipped pens, the demands on my attention too great to finish this piece. I didn’t want anything as cold as a glacier, but I was craving a clear expanse.     All the women and children are unnamed in this story. I immediately noticed the l
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BASS Review 2021: Demands of Religion in ‘The Miracle Girl’

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Part of Hand Anatomy by Basquiat. I've been reading about him in the house we are staying at in Albuquerque, and was glad to find something that worked here!    Note: Some spoilers for Midnight Mass; proceed with caution! I read Chang-Eppig’s ‘The Miracle Girl’ at the same time as watching Mike Flanagan’s ‘Midnight Mass’ on Netflix, and kept comparing the two. The connections are apparent: the worship of miracles in Catholicism, all the blood (why is there so much blood stuff in Christianity? I know the answer, but still—isn’t it a bit much?), the poisoning of oneself to reach a kind of holiness.  Perhaps ‘reaching holiness’ isn’t quite the motivation of Xiao Xue, our protagonist in ‘The Miracle Girl’. She is fairly skeptical of the religion that has been imposed on her community by the missionaries—or if not fully skeptical, at least unmoved. She is a pragmatist, seeing her religiosity more as a means to get warmth and kindness from the adults in her life, who otherwise can
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Kansas Leaves

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The backyard in Olathe November is my favorite time of year. No-one in this neighborhood of Olathe, KS, has done any raking yet, so the road and pavement are carpeted in yellow and brown leaves that fly up whenever a car drives past. The leaves have fallen fast here, on account of the wind, which sometimes shakes this house. We had a lot of thunderstorms in the Chicago suburbs, but these ones are different. The thunder isn’t so much a loud clap as it is a giant, murderous fox-gremlin screeching right outside your window because it knows you’re in there.  The leaves have made their way inside the house, covering most of the kitchen floor. This is largely due to the hoarding tendencies of our kids and the false promise of using them for crafts. Exactly one leaf has been turned into a Christmas tree, with pom-poms glued onto the points. The rest of them are just getting crushed into crumbs under our feet. The kids have done a lot of art projects here, for several reasons. One is the av
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BASS Review 2021: Identity in ‘To Buffalo Eastward’ by Gabriel Bump

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What life on the road looks like with kids! I almost bailed before I’d begun. First I lost my copy of BASS 2021, with all the notes I’d written around this story; then the travel I’m doing got too much and I was thrown out of every small routine I’d established for myself. I wonder if I would have persevered quite so much if this story wasn’t one about the flux state of travel, and the feature of being on the road that forces you to examine your identity. Having an actual submission deadline coming up gave me the burst of creative procrastination I needed to see this across the line. I’ve been traveling with my family (husband and two young kids) since August 2020. We do it slowly and then in bursts. Hole up somewhere for a couple of months, get restless, destabilize ourselves for a month in transition. This is all intended and meant to be fun and enriching. Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, Colorado; far too long in Wyoming; a month of short stays to get to the Chicago suburbs, wher
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What is Happening Here?

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“A pretty sight, a lady with a book.”                                                                                  - Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle Me a year ago, reading in the hallway of the Historic Central Hotel in Burns, Oregon This is where I write a nice, easy introduction regarding who I am and what I’m doing here with a new blog. I’m typing one-handed because I’m holding my sleeping daughter, who was worried I’d go back out into the night and who “can’t get warm without you, Mummy.” I’m at a cheese-filled table in an apartment in St. Louis (not supposed to eat cheese but we are traveling ), where I’ve watched so many horror shows since arriving last week that I’m almost as scared as my daughter at night, with the long, skinny hallway and blinds that do not close. My husband is opposite me, catching up on work at ten p.m. that he couldn’t do during the day because everyone else was on a Halloween hangover and quite short on patience and very quick to s
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