In this week's Relief Recommends, Relief fiction editor Alan Ackmann praises author Alice Munro and her many gifts to the genre of short fiction.

I’m going to pick up on some trendy Olympic terminology and propose that every editor, I suspect, has a kind of literary dream team—a set of writers whose work they not only admire, but delight in, and with whom we would consider it a privilege to work.  For most editors, working with some (okay, most) of these writers is nothing but a pipe dream—that is, unless Thomas Pynchon comes out of seclusion, or James Joyce, John Steinbeck, or F. Scott Fitzgerald come out of, you know, death.  But others writers are more contemporary, and working with them is still tantalizingly plausible.  One of my personal favorites, and a woman whom I consider one of the best writers working today, is Alice Munro.  

A Canadian Born writer whose work regularly appears in Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The O. Henry Awards, and countless other prestigious venues, Munro is best known for some of her most recent collections—most notably her two most recent books: Runaway and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. To my knowledge, she has not written a well-known novel; like Chekhov, her gifts are those of a sprinter not a marathon runner.  In Munro’s case, however, a short story (whether a brief or lengthy one) often has the depth and complexity of a novel, rendering their length considerations somewhat moot.

There is much that is impressive about Munro’s stories.  First and foremost is Munro’s handling of time.  Oftentimes, a character in a Munro story can simply wander through a town, and what they encounter triggers memories and experiences, allowing Munro to reveal an entire history or culture through the character’s associations, and to do it so slyly that the writer does not realize what has happened until after the story is finished.  This frequently makes Munro’s stories structurally complex, requiring both attentiveness and patience.  It also means that Munro’s stories are more prone to dipping into their character’s inner lives, explaining their motivations and thoughts (in contrast to more distant, fly-on-the-wall type writers).  Even though lengthy inner monologues and exposition are often risky for a story—they are easily glossed over, and lack the immediacy of scene—these devices are well-suited to Munro’s gifts, and she makes using them look effortless.  

In contrast to their structural sophistication, the premises for her stories are often quite simple—a young girl takes a train to Toronto, a college student meets the man she’ll marry, a traveling salesman makes an impromptu visit to a former flame—but their emotional landscapes are textured, surprising, individual, and frequently heartbreaking.  Each story, each conflict, arises fully from the characters’ desires and limitations, the complexity of their emotions often far outstripping that of their premises.   

Because of this aesthetic, Munro’s characters are sometimes startlingly recognizable.  Often, by the end of an Alice Munro collection, I get the sense of having encountered people who are both completely familiar and at the same time completely mysterious.  That’s characterization at its finest.

Of the Alice Munro collections I’ve read, my favorite is The Beggar Maid, and this is also the collection I would tell a Munro novice to read first.  Like any favorite book, my reasons for liking it are at least partially personal: I first encountered The Beggar Maid in graduate school, when I was also first realizing what reading was all about—what it could be.  The book features ten stories about two different women—Flo and Rose—and their friendship over decades.  Although the characters interweave, it is not entirely accurate to call these “linked stories”—each stands alone, and together they are neither as contrived nor as densely self-referential as many contemporary “linked” collections.  Of the Munro stories in that book, the title story is my favorite. When I first read it, I had recently finished Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From, and Munro’s lushness and clarity, when contrasted against Carver’s very different gifts of sparseness and distance, was especially dazzling.

In the next few weeks and months, I’ll occasionally post profiles of writers on Wednesdays—both because they are good (the writers, I mean, not the Wednesdays) and because these profiles might give you an idea of what kind of fiction we’re looking for here at the journal.  So once you’ve finished reading the latest edition of Relief, give Alice Munro a look.  

As a final note, even though Alice Munro would probably play point guard on my personal dream team (point guard is a basketball position, right?) that doesn’t diminish the writers we’ve already asked to join our little pick-up game.  After all, discovering a new fantastic writer is one of the only things better than working with a familiar one.  And I feel like, in the past two years, we’ve certainly done our fair share of discovering.       

Previous Articles: 

• One Brick at a Time
• Stuff Other Than Writing
• Using Setting Wisely in Fiction
• The Importance of Characterization
• Introducing Our Crafting Fiction Blog Series
• The Moral of the Story Is...

Hello neighbors, Coach here with a quick introduction to some way cool cats. WordFarm is a small press crew that publishes some fantastic stuff. They've published Relief authors like Stacy Barton and Lucy Shaw , which is way cool, but let me tell you what's really cool. They've got two books of poems that I personally own, and keep in mind, I'm not a poetry guy in general, but I could not resist The Roswell Poems and Tabloid News . Yes, poetry about aliens and the weird stuff you read about on the front cover of the Weekly World News while you're standing in line at the grocery store.

We were privileged to have a booth right next to the WordFarm guys at Calvin's Festival of Faith and Writing, and it was great getting to know them. They have a similar scope and feeling about Christian publishing, being "too secular for Christian publishing, too Christian for secular publishing." They're without a doubt colleagues and kin to us, so if you love Relief, you'll love WordFarm. 

Now go buy some alien poems from them. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll learn important lessons about life. 

Relief Editor-In-Chief, Kimberly Culbertson whole-heartedly recommends My Name is Russell Fink, by Michael Snyder.

Two years ago, when I read Michael's Snyder's fiction submission, "All Healed Up," I actually did a little dance of excitement.  Ben and I were in a restaurant at two in the morning,sifting through the first batch of submissions, and I was really wondering what I had gotten myself into; every submission I read that night was less appropriate then the last, at least according to the vision I was trying to uphold for Relief.  And then I read Michael's story and I knew that this literary journal idea from God made some sense, and that I would be thrilled and proud to publish "All Healed Up."

It's still one of my favorite moments in all of Relief history.  If you haven't read the story, it's the first piece in the first issue, which you can purchase here. OR... You could pick up his recently published book, My Name Is Russell Fink.  It's even got a few elements from his Relief publication, though no toad venom (you'll just have to read the story).  

This often sad, though just as often laugh-out-loud novel spotlights a struggling hypochondriac painter secretly convinced that he caused his sister's cancer at nine years old. In the midst of his unhappy life, he finds his dog dead and the search for the killer helps him to unravel his anger and guilt. The whodunit mystery brings the reader along for a wacky ride complete with a disgraced faith healer father, alcoholic mother, forever-in-trouble brother, freezing astronaut, strangely dressed love interest, self-obsessed fiance, crotchety neighbor, and a not-quite-right private eye. Despite the quirky and wild ride, Russell's journey is poignant and thought provoking.

And there's a flip book at the end.

At Calvin's Festival of Faith and Writing last April, we were pleased to be located across from the Zondervan booth, where Michael's book was front and center.  When we had a chance, we hung out with Andy Meissenheimer and his crew.  I even tried to get Andy to hook me up with a "Dog Gone Good Book" shirt (Sadly they were all allocated.)  I told so many people to purchase Mike's book that two separate people asked me confusedly if I worked for Zondervan. (which prompted questions about where I actually worked, at which point I remembered why I was there and plugged Relief.  Since Zondervan wasn't actually selling books, I think I managed to frustrate a few would be readers by selling them on the story and then explaining that they couldn't actually buy it at the booth--sorry Mike!  I blame Andy.)

Relief offers our congratulations to Michael Snyder, who's pulled off a wonderfully fun debut novel that sits quite comfortably outside the box of stereotypically Christian fiction.  True, there's no toad venom, but he does booze up the dog on occasion :)  

In this week's "Relief Recommends," fiction editor Alan Ackmann talks about one of his favorite places to go on the web, The Brick Testament.

In order to understand this week’s recommendation, you have to understand something about my childhood: I was a blockhead.  

I don’t mean that I was a scholastically late-bloomer (unless you count long-division, which still makes me sweat).  I mean that I was one of those quiet, bookish kids who also loved Legos, creating whole cities and dramas from those clicking, connective bits of plastic.  But for me, it went deeper.  I loved the imagination, and the aesthetics of Legos.  I loved the idea that so much was possible from something so initially unimpressive.  I loved the Rubbermaid bin my grandma gave me for storing blocks, and how it rattled when I took it out of the closet.  One of the triumphs of my childhood is when I couldn’t afford to buy the latest pirate themed Lego set, and so I recreated the whole darn ship myself with what I had.  And you know what?  I’m still pretty proud of that.  

Even today, I’m the guy who has old sets in his parent’s basement (“it’s a pretty big basement” I’d say if the subject came up), the guy who whines that contemporary Legos are more like model sets, which destroys the creativity (“we had three red bricks, two yellow bricks, one weird blue brick with eyes, and we liked it!”), and the guy who is somewhat indignant that he just had to add the word “Lego” to his MS Word Dictionary (“Take that you squiggly red line!”).  

Of course, I’m also the guy who thinks it’s awesome that Brendan Powell Smith created The Brick Testament.

In case you hadn’t guessed, The Brick Testament (to quote their web-site) is “the largest, most comprehensive illustrated Bible in the world, with over 3,600 illustrations that retell more than 300 stories from The Bible.”  And every illustration is made entirely out of Legos.  But the point of the website (and its accompanying hardcover books) is not subversive; it “is to give people an increased knowledge of the contents of The Bible in a way that is fun and compelling while remaining true to the text of the scriptures.”  What follows, then, is a recreation that is not only accurate, but also splendidly artful.

If you don’t believe me, head on over to the site and check out the mammoth Noah’s Ark, the spectacularly detailed Garden of Eden, or the lavishly rampaging hordes of Gideon.  It’s impressive stuff, made even more so by the careful art direction—most camera angles seem precisely chosen, and draw focus to the appropriate parts of the work, whether it is Cain’s snide expression following the murder of his brother, or the forlorn tower of Babel, standing starkly against the horizon once the tribes have been scattered.  Such images add resonance, and invite meditation.

That’s also the main advantage to the format.  Many Bible stories, in their original versions, are written in a way that is artfully efficient but also rather brisk, so that it becomes easy to race through the details and lose the subtlety.  The Brick Testament, by contrast, is leisurely, often progressing at a pace of one illustration per verse (and therefore per page).  This may help thwart a reader’s natural inclination to brush through the narrative, and forces a more languid pace.  And as one of those people who have difficulty reading in a way not at least partially driven by speed (thank you very much, graduate school) I appreciate anything that makes me slow down.  

A few disclaimers: First, I have not looked at the entire site in detail.  I’ve been working my way through in Biblical order, am almost to Exodus, and therefore cannot fully vouch for anything beyond that.  Second, take the ratings system seriously—stories are noted beforehand if the images contain violence, cursing, sexuality, or nudity (strictly the Lego kind), and these might not fully be for children.  After all, these are uncensored stories are from the Bible, and we all know that the Bible can be a pretty brutal book.  But then again…if such a thing bothered you, you probably wouldn’t be trolling the waters of Relief, now would you?

Speaking of Relief, we’ll back again next week with a review of Stacy Barton’s short story collection Surviving Nashville.  Stacy has previously appeared in Relief, and is also forthcoming in our pages.  We love it when nice people do well!  Until then, tide yourself over with The Brick Testament.  Trust me—it’s well worth your time.

Previous Articles: 

• Stuff Other Than Writing
• Using Setting Wisely in Fiction
• The Importance of Characterization
• Introducing Our Crafting Fiction Blog Series
• The Moral of the Story Is...