The 2016 Spring Literary Festival welcomes author Stuart Dybek for a reading on Wednesday, April 6, at 8:30 p.m., in Baker Theater, and for a lecture on Friday, April 8, at noon, in Baker Ballroom.
By E.M. Tran
Graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in Fiction
Stuart Dybek’s dreamlike and ethereal, sharp and playful fiction includes Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, The Coast of Chicago, and I Sailed With Magellan. Additionally, he has two collections of poems, Brass Knuckles and Streets in Their Own Ink. That Dybek works in both genres comes as no surprise once you read his work; the conscious and careful word choice and the lyricism of poetry are at home in his fiction, in stories and novels that have been celebrated for decades by readers and awards’ committees alike. He’s won all the big ones: a Lannan Prize, a PEN/Malamud Award, a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, an O. Henry Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship.
Stuart Dybek
In an interview with The Atlantic given during the simultaneous release of his two most recent short story collections, Dybek said of his philosophy of writing, “Even though we all write on computers now, I still think of writing as words on paper. And when you write a story or a poem, it just illuminates. Meaning shines through words like light through cut paper, beaming out into the night, and projecting its image onto another person’s heart.” While he was referring specifically to the title of one of the collections, Paper Lanterns, the statement clearly applies to his work in general. There is a certain intimate, luminescent quality in it—emotions translating across the page as tangible realities that are breathtakingly romantic, quietly hilarious, and utterly heartbreaking. Those features are evident in Paper Lanterns, a more traditional collection containing nine longer stories, and Ecstatic Cahoots, Dybek’s other recent collection, a series of shorter stories (some only a few sentences) that work together to create a loose, novelistic feel, as if one were hearing tales secondhand from different members of the same family.
Despite these differences, Dybek’s writing in every book of his is unmistakable, marked by a wry style and a lonely-wondrous voice. His narrators seem to observe the world with almost unintentional optimism, and the stories tend to speak confidentially: we get to be in on a personal, conspiratorial conversation.
In the beginning of Dybek’s career, he was known for describing Polish life, specifically the daily reality of living in Chicago as an other, but these later collections, while sometimes still set in Chicago, are not so much about the identity of ethnicity and place as they are about the experience of love and loss and innocence. At all stages of his career, though, Dybek has confided in readers and they have responded with an attentive ear.
In the fantastical story, “I Never Told This to Anyone,” the narrator begins by pulling us in with a secret, and we feel special for being chosen—both touched that such information could be entrusted to us and sad to know that there is no one else who might listen. The narrator relates, “I never told this to anyone—there wasn’t anyone to tell it to—but when I was living with my Uncle Kirby on the Edge—the edge of what, I never knew for sure (‘Just livin’ on the Edge, don’t worry where,’ Uncle Kirby would say)—a little bride and groom would come to visit me at night. Naturally, I never mentioned this to Uncle Kirby.”
While the story opens with frequent mentions of an uncle, the narrator actually spends most of his time recounting adventures he has with what appear to be a miniature bride and groom named Jay and Trish. His best friends, in other words, are imaginary cake-toppers. And they are animated and alive and actually married. The resulting story feels magical but still grounded in reality because the cake-toppers are never for a second acknowledged as out of the realm of possibility. Jay and Trish have a honeymoon, have a child, experience loss, pain, sadness, happiness, love, and all those other things that real people deal with. Even when there’s magic or fantasy in Dybek’s work, then, there’s raw emotion, and that is never clearer than when the cake-toppers’ lives are juxtaposed with the child-narrator’s abuse at the hands of his uncle.
This uncle’s dysfunction is at first revealed in snippets, through the plot of the wedding cake figurines when Jay “carried a knitting-needle spear, a bow he’d fashioned from the wishbone of a turkey, and a quiver of arrows—disposable hypodermic needles he’d scavenged from Uncle Kirby’s supplies.” The Uncle’s addiction is somehow flipped upside down, turned into an instrument of whimsy. Later, the Uncle’s abuse becomes more overt as the wedding cake-toppers’ relationship unravels, and as they come closer to abandoning the narrator. The night Jay and Trish leave for good, the narrator describes being imprisoned by his Uncle: “He left me trussed to a kitchen chair, and that night he handcuffed my ankle to the bunk. It was the night of the first snow.” Jay tells the narrator they will name their unborn child, if it’s a boy, after their nickname for him, “Old Boy,” and the narrator “didn’t laugh. When you’re trying to hold back tears, laughing can suddenly make you cry.” This contrast between the innocence of childhood imagination and the reality of abuse recreates in the reader that sensation of wanting to both laugh and cry.
Dybek’s blending of the impossible and the painfully real makes us readers do a double-take, and our grip on what specific reality we’re participating in is consistently shifting. Even though we’re let in on narrative secrets, we aren’t allowed to stand on stable ground.
In his story, “The Bruise,” a male narrator describes a lover’s bruise, which “looked blue underneath the tan mesh of nylon. It was just above the hip, and above it he could see the lacy band of her panties.” And yet, we never learn the origin of the bruise and the characters never discuss it. We only see its physical presence, the minute details that surround the pain. As Dybek creates an image so particular, without actually revealing everything about it, we encounter a symbol for his sometimes elusive, but impossible-to-ignore work. We can’t look away. We can’t stop probing the stories, and “The Bruise” ends with this:
He pressed the bruise again and again. Each time
she reshaped her lips into a vowel that sounded in-
creasingly surprised . . . the summer sun dissolved
into golden, vaporish rays in the trees. The bruise—he
never asked how she got it—spread across the sky.
Dybek manages to make the bruise something figurative in the span of a sentence comprising just 13 words, even after he’s spent the entire story grounding that same bruise in a gritty, concrete reality. We read on, increasingly surprised.
Dybek’s inventive realities are constantly, delightfully, inexplicably coated in the faint lacquer of a dream, and we accept the stories, characters, and events even if we’re not seeing things entirely clearly. In fact, like many of Dybek’s characters, we are enticed to press on, to continue reading and exploring. Perhaps we recognize in his characters a bruise that we know all too well, a loneliness that can only be cured by the sort of intimacy his writing offers. As we read on, we understand better what Stuart Dybek meant in his Atlantic interview. His stories do project onto our hearts, and we’re all the better for the puzzling things we see in the shadows.
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