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Out Across the Nowhere

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Amy Willoughby-Burle

October 2012

Jodi Paloni

In her debut collection, Out Across the Nowhere, Amy Willoughby-Burle tells vast and vibrant stories (fourteen of them) in a scant (ninety-three) number of pages. Think bright and miniature, resembling the fireflies in her title story: “. . . like all the stars have left the sky to come roost in the tree limbs.” Think of their impact and largeness, and they make us feel that “We could swallow them and make little galaxies in our empty stomachs.”

In her debut collection, Out Across the Nowhere, Amy Willoughby-Burle tells vast and vibrant stories (fourteen of them) in a scant (ninety-three) number of pages. Think bright and miniature, resembling the fireflies in her title story: “. . . like all the stars have left the sky to come roost in the tree limbs.” Think of their impact and largeness, and they make us feel that “We could swallow them and make little galaxies in our empty stomachs.”

Taking the firefly metaphor further, the light in these stories is compelling because it shines in stark juxtaposition to the darkness. What you sense as magic—fireflies—is what you come to understand as mystery in the way characters rivet their attention to their sorrows. Likewise, if sadness flooded the page without relief, it would seem flat or unworthy. Time and again, Willoughby-Burle’s characters see their choices reflected both by the light and the dark.

“Nobody Next Door” tells the story of shy love on the brink of fulfillment when tragedy strikes: “She moved to an apartment on the fifth floor to avoid seeing someone come for his things or to notice a new tenant. This way, she would not have to know and hopefully, she could encounter him in the future . . .”

The woman’s despair morphed into denial, along with our shattered expectations for their success (for they make such a sweet and odd pair) is tempered with the chance that perhaps it could work out for them in the end. If the character believes it to be possible, why shouldn’t we? There is always one final firefly lingering in the night sky.

Recently, I came across notes from a lecture, a list of questions to consider when thinking over the success of a story. The stories in Out Across the Nowhere seemed up for the challenge.

1) Ask why?

Why write “Stone Jesus in the Front Yard,” in which two young children await an absent mother’s return even though their “mother’s closet is empty and her new hairbrush is gone”? Why write “Hungry,” about a homeless mother who will do almost anything to feed and protect her children, but won’t let them go? Why write “Stepping Out in Front of a Train” and show the degradation a young girl would surely feel under the perverse authority of her preacher stepfather?

Why? Because doesn’t fiction serve a purpose to expand awareness?

Mark Twain said, “Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities.” While the impossibility of the realities met by Willoughby-Burle’s characters doesn’t always include the one sparkling glimmer of hope in the end, her characters do demonstrate resiliency, blatant or otherwise tucked somewhere hidden in the narrative. If a conclusion is harsh, the reader may take heart that characters will go on. How? Willougby-Burle achieves it by responding to the next question in the positive.

2) Are the images imaginable?

In “Days Untended,” children are left to contend with a grieving mother who acts out her suffering in one extreme and unforgettable act. But it is a quiet moment that gives the reader a sense of her possible recovery. The moment is conjured by an image:

Some nights we’d catch her huddled in the corner of their closet where she breathed in blue overalls that he once wore, white shirts worn thin, straw hat with a hole in the back of the brim. We planted ourselves like tiger lilies outside her bedroom door when she cried—tried to spread out and make her happy. We were three little girls like stair steps, high enough to raise her up, too small to take her anywhere.

In “The Conspicuous Absence of Knowing” an adult daughter faces the reality of her father’s death when she gets a nose bleed and pulls over to a service station, the same service station where her father taught her how to deal with her first nose bleed when she was ten.

Now I sit here in that Texaco and close my eyes around the memory of the sweet soda that my father bought me after the bleeding stopped and of the handful of peanuts he gave me once we were all back in the car, peanuts from his jar, Daddy’s jar. The world warps out of perspective and for a minute I remember the magnitude of what small pleasure like that can mean to a child.

Not only do we see the handful, we smell peanuts and taste soda. We even imagine the blood though the bleeding has been staunched.

So far, these stories show both purpose and imagination that’s believable, but as for the prose…

3) How does it sound when you read it out loud?

There’s only one way to find out. Try this, from “Limbo”:

It’s not so much what he says as the way he says it—low and soft so you have to lean in, so that everything is intimate, so that should this be the last of it, you pull away with his breath in your ear like a passenger from where he’s stuck to wherever you’re going.

Eighteen s sounds and the gasps of a dying man are realized without the use of the word whisper.

I could go on with my list. Is it told from a fresh perspective? Yes. Can you map tension? Check. Count the decisions the protagonist has made. Mark agency. Define character. Feel rhythm. Distinguish voice. Amy Willougby-Burle hits every mark with concise generosity, firefly-like.

Spread the word!