Boundless: An Anthology of Prose

Publisher

Editor’s Introduction

David G. Collins

When Yolanda Ciolli called to ask if I would edit a new anthology of prose from Compass Flower Press, I was excited. Not that I didn’t have other projects lined up three deep on my desk. My own first book was just weeks from publication and I knew I would be heavily involved in publicizing it through the fall and early winter. I had sworn to type up and edit my father’s World War II letters to my mother from battlefields and hospitals across Europe, had been thinking about writing the story they lived as part of the greatest generation. And I wanted very much to get back to my own long-term, much postponed project, a book of walking tours of literary Paris.

But from the moment of Yolanda’s ask I knew I wouldn’t be able to resist. Though I had retired three years earlier after forty years as a professor of English at Westminster College, I could feel the teacher in me rising. The chance to read through a wide swath of selections, choosing the best for the proposed anthology, to get a sense of what writers wanted to talk about, how they wanted to talk about it as they moved more and more into the twenty-first century—turning away from that simply isn’t part of my DNA. I would learn, I thought, from seasoned writers and accomplished newcomers who had mastered their craft, perhaps help a few promising writers to fine-tune their work for publication. This was the kind of work, I knew, that I wanted to do. In effect, the kind of work I had done all my life. And so, I said yes.

The anthology I would help to shape was to be titled Boundless, and the Call for Submissions sought to prime the pump by suggesting possible implementations of the boundless theme: The limitless nature of our lives and relationships, an uncontained joy or profound emotion as a result of a life event, an unpredictable outcome to happenstance. Working my way through the impossibly high stack of stories and essays submitted, I realized quickly that limitless was the word most often on my lips.

But as the other readers and I gradually narrowed the field, settled into the hard work of choosing what we would print, what we would set aside, I realized that the proposed theme had prompted a torrent of first-rate work. We had under our hands stories and essays that would help readers to understand the nature of America, this place in this time—and others that looked beyond our shores, to Slovenia and to India, to examine the common strands that link us as human beings and make many into one. We had stories, too, and essays, that seemed timeless, set in worlds of their authors’ creation, here, possibly there, possibly in a world not yet known to our daylight selves. Joy and sorrow, hope and despair, even a few works that we knew would get under readers’ skin in a positive way, like a grain of sand that has slipped under the shell of an oyster and would in time produce a pearl. It was all there, waiting for us to pry open the shell and bring it into the world.

As is inevitably the case when publication and prize money are at stake, when I read the work submitted for Boundless I knew neither the name of the author nor where he or she lived. Names and places came my way only when a piece was accepted for publication—and when they arrived, I discovered that the anthology growing under my hand would be boundless not only in its theme, but in the geographical distribution of its authors. Boundary-less. As befits an anthology published by a press in Columbia, Missouri, the heartland is well-represented. Four of the authors included here are Missourians, three from Columbia, a fourth from St. Peters. A fifth makes her home in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Other authors whose work was chosen for Boundless spread across the country—and beyond. Four live on the east coast—Farmington, Maine; Beverly, Massachusetts; Brooklyn and Southold, New York. Four more write from homes in the south: Simpsonville and Louisville, Kentucky; Chapel Hill, North Carolina; and Georgia. Two are Californians, one from Fresno, another from Los Gatos. One dropped south across the Canadian border from Richmond, British Columbia. The geographical range of our authors is exceeded only by the talent manifest in their work.

Is it a sign of the times that so many of the stories included in Boundless take us into other worlds where for a moment we can look away from caustic problems that challenge our idea of what it means to be human? Evan Guilford-Blake’s The Box, a lyrical piece that begins when a mysterious man approaches a young woman’s door with a no less mysterious gift, took first-place in the Boundless competition. Though old and wrinkled, the man nonetheless stands tall, lean, and unbent . . . like a late autumn birch flailed by years of winter storms—an encouraging example of strength in difficult times. Similarly, Sharon Buzzard’s The Empty Nest takes us to a realm where a childless couple, happy together but incomplete, wake one morning to a surprise that will change their lives. Told with wit and humor, playing constantly with echoes of classical mythology, The Empty Nest will take readers to a happy place.

Not all of the other worlds into which contributors to Boundless have transported readers are quite so reassuring. In Alien Bodies Matthue Roth imagines the life of a young American mathematician who, reeling from culture shock during a post-doc in far away Slovenia, finds love and comfort with a local woman. All goes well until the couple returns to the new world—where she is now the one displaced and off-balance—and his new bride wanders after an argument into a field of corn in search of answers. The effect of Rosemary McKinley’s Clarissa’s Portal is no less unsettling. Clarissa, a young woman labeled slow since her first-grade teacher spoke out, finds herself emotionally adrift, unable to cope with an unsettling world, when her mother’s death leaves her desperately alone. Beguiled, drawn into her world, we go with her through the portal into a world where she can be happy again—until one day that ever-so-carefully constructed world collapses around her.

Marcia Forecki’s Green River Flow is set in a supposedly real place, Tebb’s Bend in Adair County, Kentucky, beside a very real bridge where Union and Confederate troops once fought a minor battle. But in Forecki’s rendering of Tebb’s Bend there is more than a touch of southern gothic, an other worldly quality that defies the limits and sureties of the physical world. Listening as Cal, an earnest young man who struggles to appear capable in spite of his limited mental capacity, talks with Miss Ondine, a lonely, rudderless woman who lost her way when she was torn from her home in Louisiana, who cannot read but recites endless verses from the bible she holds on her lap and slips at times into a trancelike state, we’re drawn into a kind of twilight zone where spirits rising from the shadows would come as no surprise. So it is, too, in Anneliese Schultz’s Figment of Footlights and Reverb. Set in contemporary New Delhi, anchored by reference to real places there, Figment seems at first as solid real as the McDonald’s at the next intersection. But it is the story of a young woman, Princess, disappointed by her parents’ choices for her, tempted to turn away from life, who wanders from a too noisy concert in Ramlila Maidan Square into the darkness of small streets and alleyways that seem at once to threaten danger and promise salvation, another world where she encounters a shadowy figure, the ambiguous helper that appears so often in mythological tales, who helps her to find a way forward.

Of course, not all of the stories and essays in Boundless look away from the contentious issues that constitute so many of today’s headlines. More than a few confront them head-on. In Awakenings Linda Johnson asks What would happen if a middle-aged man, seemingly happy in his marriage but uncomfortable for years in his male body, decided one day to take action and shared the news with his wife and family? The result is a tender account of a man and a woman, their son and daughter, struggling as they awaken in so many ways to a new reality—a story as brave as it is honest. Peonies and Cigars, William Mesce’s story of a college student struggling to accept that in middle-age his mother continues to have sexual needs, struggling still more as he meets the man she has chosen to fulfill those needs is at once funny and poignant, a quiet look at ageism and the just-below-the-surface racism that lingers still in our country. In A Freak Confession Julia Simpson-Urrutia looks at difference though the eyes of a little person, Dolores, relieved and happy to have found refuge from judgmental eyes in Dreamland, the colony of living curiosities Samuel W. Gompertz established on Coney Island in the early years of the twentieth century. What from a lesser hand might have become an exercise in sentimentality, emerges here as a witheringly honest account of a flawed life; Dolores, who struggles with people who objectify her, is herself an imperfect human being, a convincing mix of faults and prejudices—and aware of her human frailty.

Lest the burden of serious stories seem overwhelming, there is humor enough in Boundless, an ounce of civet as Romeo might have said, to sweeten the imagination. Ida Fogle’s Posthumous Divorce is a ghost story with a difference, the story of a woman so troubled by intrusive visits from her recently deceased husband that see seeks help from his former partner to ensure a final separation—and to find the freedom she needs to live her own life. In A Ferret’s Lot, a story told in epistolary form with a refreshingly light touch calculated to bring a smile, Von Pittman introduces readers to Robert Raymond, a prisoner in the Big Mound Correctional Center so emboldened by his own pride and by a string of useless degrees from for-profit diploma mills that amount to nothing more than initials behind his name that he tries to bully his way to the legitimate degree his probation officer demands as evidence of rehabilitation.

Readers seeking stories of familial love, and sometimes of loss, of people recovering from emotional blows strong enough to stop a heart, will find stories enough in Boundless, stories both real and imagined, to satisfy their yearnings. In Donna Volkenannt’s More Than Love, a mother and daughter, both harboring life-changing secrets, find themselves perpetually at odds as they drive from Texas to Missouri at the end of the school year, each struggling quietly to come to terms with the pain of a son and brother lost to death. Until, that is, they meet Brigid, a half-crazy old woman, yet another incarnation of the mythological helper. The same feeling of familial love, of ordinary life affirmed, comes through in Ellen Birkett Morris’s Small, a variation on the classic tale of a woman trapped in a too-small town where supposed secrets are common knowledge who looks again from a new vantage point and recognizes the value of what she has.

Falling in Maine, Peggy DeKay’s poignant memoir of a husband who strayed, of a marriage broken, turns first to sadness, her account of a trip to Maine intended to bring husband and wife together in spite of his numerous infidelities—a strategy that worked only for the briefest time. Early on, we see the husband as the villain who shattered, temporarily, two lives—until the author admits to her own cruelty, winning the reader with her honesty. Dawn Paul’s The Blue Hour, an autumnal meditation on the enduring pain of losing a mother, is cut from the same cloth. Surprised by the memory of a scent—her mother’s ever-present bottle of Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleu—the narrator compares her loss to Joan Didion’s loss of her daughter, Quintana Roo, but at the same time distances herself from Didion, claiming the right to her own different but no less valuable experience, her own way of reading the world. And finally, Tribal Journeys by Mary Curtis, another memoir of loss and of the journey that brought her to a better place, a story that demonstrates our need to remember what has passed, even when remembrance is pain, and that highlights the importance of ritual in easing pain. Told in a rich voice that rises in another world and reaches into our own, the voice of a soothsayer or prophet that hints at knowledge beyond what can be spoken, Tribal Journeys is a rich tone poem that invites us to apprehend what we cannot comprehend.

Working to bring Boundless to life, collaborating with Yolanda Ciolli, the publisher,