CANR
WORK TITLE: We Show What We Have Learned
WORK NOTES: PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize longlist
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1982
WEBSITE: http://www.clarebeams.com/
CITY: Pittsburgh
STATE: PA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME:
http://www.startribune.com/review-we-show-what-we-have-learned-and-other-stories-by-clare-beams/399913901/ * https://www.arts.gov/writers-corner/bio/clare-beams * http://haydensferryreview.com/haydensferryreview/2010/02/contributor-spotlight-clare-beams.html?rq=clare%20beams * https://www.facebook.com/fcalabro80
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1982; married; children: daughter.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author; teaches creative writing at Saint Vincent College and Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. Formerly taught high school in Falmouth, MA.
AWARDS:PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize longlist, 2017, for We Show What We Have Learned; also received awards from National Endowment for the Arts and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Pittsburgh-based author Clare Beams’ debut collection is We Show What We Have Learned and Other Stories, a work that has been compared to the writings of such luminaries as Alice Munro and Shirley Jackson. “I wrote my first novel and my first published short stories over eight stop-and-start years, during most of which I was also teaching high-school English—work that I loved and felt lucky to do, but that sometimes seemed as if it would overtake every last corner of my life,” Beams said in an author’s statement issued when she received an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. “Now the miraculous little person who is my daughter has overtaken those corners. The real world has such a beautiful, loud voice. And the part of me that spins stories … keeps asking for a little quiet. This award brings more stretches of that quiet, in the form of childcare.”
Reviewers note that Beams’ stories combine elements of magical realism with feminist sensibilities. “Beams’ stories, a cross between Aimee Bender’s and Karen Russell’s,” declared Stephanie Reents in the Rumpus, “are set in dreamy otherworldly places that are almost recognizable—but not quite. By making her metaphors literal, Beams creates magical-realist pieces that often calculate the high cost of being a woman…. These stories have been called feminist; the downside of the some feminist literature is that it may focus too exclusively on how men and a patriarchal society victimize women and how women damage each other in competition for men…. At every turn the characters have to try to unlearn what society or school has taught them.” “The literary, historic, and fantastic collide in these wise and exquisitely unsettling stories,” explained an interviewer in the introduction to a Littsburgh conversation with Beams. “From bewildering assemblies in school auditoriums to the murky waters of a Depression-era health resort, Beams’s landscapes are tinged with otherworldliness, and her characters’ desires stretch the limits of reality.” “I don’t think of myself as exclusively a surreal writer,” Beams told Andrew Moore in the Pittsburgh City Paper. “But I do feel there has to be something that feels sort of magical–whether that’s in the setting, or the actual place, or the time period.” “I don’t write on this paper very often,” Beam declared in the Haydens Ferry Review. “When I’m falling asleep, I’m usually not thinking up story ideas. I’m thinking about what I need to photocopy before I teach in the morning, or about how my ninth-graders may very well forget what they wrote their essays about by the time I actually manage to get them back, or about how tomorrow is trash day and we forgot to carry the recycling out again…. Or the falling-asleep process gives way quickly to, well, sleep.” “Beams’ collection skillfully and alluringly navigates the border between the familiar and the unexpected,” stated Malcolm Forbes in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “and beguiles and unsettles in equal measure. Just like Melody in Miss Caper’s poetry class [in ‘Hourglass’], we should immerse ourselves and read each story ‘swimmily, floating in its currents.’” “It is this gap between what the world seems and what is,” said a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “that Beams tackles so memorably in this collection.” “Like uncanny settings and untrustworthy narrators, doppelgangers are another hallmark of the gothic,” observed Emily Nagin in the Fiction Writers Review. “So maybe Beams’ book is a collection of ghost stories after all: if a ghost is a present absence, then these stories are full of ghosts. Beams writes landscapes and characters taunted by past selves and impossible dreams. Her work is evasive and direct, fantastical and deeply real. In We Show What We Have Learned [and Other Stories], Beams has crafted a true haunting.
Critics expressed fervent appreciation for Beams’ debut collection. The author’s “embrace of uncertainty and the otherworldly,” wrote Wendeline O. Wright in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “… makes this collection a devastating illustration of the trajectories our lives can take, for better or worse, and the relative powerlessness an individual has to alter those trajectories. The author’s dark subjects, combined with a brutal honesty about the human capacity for change, remind us that transformations mean we create ourselves anew–whether we want to or not.” “Beams’ entire collection bewitches–and features complex female characters and feminist takes on broader themes to boot,” asserted Christine An in Paste. “A sharp eye for detail and an appreciation for emotional nuance underpin Beams’ ability to captivate readers, even as she eschews neat endings.” “The result,” asserted a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “is a powerful collection about what we need from others and, in turn, what we can offer others of ourselves.” “Stories as well executed as these are their own reward,” stated John Williams in the New York Times, “but it’s also clear … that Ms. Beams has novels’ worth of worlds inside her.” “For fans of realistic fiction tinged with elements of the fantastic,” concluded Christine Canfield in Foreword Reviews, “We Show What We Have Learned [and Other Stories] is a collection that will quickly become a favorite.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2016, review of We Show What We Have Learned and Other Stories.
New York Times, December 1, 2016, John Williams, “Books by Clare Beams, Hans Herbert Grimm, April Ayers Lawson and Kelly Luce,” p. C4.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 4, 2016, Wendeline O. Wright, “’We Show What We Have Learned’: Pittsburgh Author Clare Beams’ Unsettling Literary Triumph.”
Publishers Weekly, August 8, 2016, review of We Show What We Have Learned and Other Stories, p. 38.
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), November 4, 2016, Malcolm Forbes, review of We Show What We Have Learned and Other Stories.
ONLINE
Clare Beams Home Page, http://www.clarebeams.com (February 20, 2017), author profile.
Fiction Writers Review, http://fictionwritersreview.com/ (October 31, 2016), Emily Nagin, review of We Show What We Have Learned and Other Stories.
Foreword Reviews, https://www.forewordreviews.com/ (August 26, 2016), Christine Canfield, review of We Show What We Have Learned and Other Stories.
Haydens Ferry Review, http://haydensferryreview.com/ (February 20, 2017), author profile.
Littsburgh, http://www.littsburgh.com/ (February 20, 2017), “5 Questions: Clare Beams.”
National Endowment for the Arts, https://www.arts.gov/ (February 20, 2017), author profile.
Paste, https://www.pastemagazine.com/ (October 28, 2016), Christine An, “Clare Beams Proves She’s a Captivating Literary Voice with We Show What We Have Learned.”
Pittsburgh City Paper, http://www.pghcitypaper.com/ (October 19, 2016), Andrew Moore, “A Conversation with Clare Beams.”
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (December 5, 2016), Stephanie Reents, review of We Show What We Have Learned and Other Stories.
Clare Beams is the author of the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, a finalist for the 2017 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award for Debut Fiction. Her stories appear in One Story, n+1, Ecotone, The Common, the Kenyon Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and have received special mention in The Best American Short Stories 2013 and The Pushcart Prize XXXV. She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and currently blogs for Ploughshares. After teaching high school English for six years in Falmouth, Massachusetts, she moved with her husband and daughter to Pittsburgh, where she teaches creative writing at Saint Vincent College and the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.
5 Questions: Clare Beams
LOCAL AUTHOR
Clare Beams is the author of the story collection We Show What We Have Learned (Lookout Books, Oct. 2016). Her stories appear in One Story, n+1, Ecotone, The Common, the Kenyon Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and have received special mention in The Best American Short Stories 2013 and The Pushcart Prize XXXV. She recently moved with her husband and daughter to Pittsburgh, where she teaches creative writing at Saint Vincent College and the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts — and will be launching We Show What We Have Learned at White Whale Bookstore on October 25th!
EVENT INFORMATION
From the publisher: “The literary, historic, and fantastic collide in these wise and exquisitely unsettling stories. From bewildering assemblies in school auditoriums to the murky waters of a Depression-era health resort, Beams’s landscapes are tinged with otherworldliness, and her characters’ desires stretch the limits of reality.”
START READING
Joyce Carol Oates: “A dazzling story collection—as if, by a rare sort of magic, Alice Munro and Shirley Jackson had conspired together to imagine a female/feminist voice for the twenty-first century that is wickedly sharp-eyed, wholly unpredictable, and wholly engaging.”
weshowwhatwehavelearnedcoverWhat comes to mind when you think of Pittsburgh? (And living here, where is your favorite spot to read, think, or write?)
We moved here three years ago, when my daughter was 6 months old, so I think what comes to mind for me now is her babyhood/toddlerhood — it turns out this is an amazing place to raise a kid. I suppose this is another way of saying that Pittsburgh has become home.
For thinking, I love walks in Frick Park. Most of my reading and writing happens in my house, or yard, just because I focus best when it’s quiet.
What books are on your nightstand?
Right now, Kelly Link’s Get In Trouble, Munro Leaf’s The Story of Ferdinand (a current hit with my daughter), Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s Record of a School (for an essay I’m writing), and Helen Oyeyemi’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours.
Is there a book you’d like to see made into a film?
Movies made from books I love tend to make me a little nervous. I just don’t want the images in my head messed with. But the whole time I was reading Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life I kept wondering how would you film this?, because of that book’s fascinating structure. And I just Googled and it looks like a movie’s maybe in the works, so I might get to find out!
What did you do when you first read the glowing magical blurb from Joyce Carol Oates describing you as the modern feminist spawn of Alice Munro and Shirley Jackson?
It was Christmas Eve, and I think my husband and I were driving our daughter somewhere (to a playground, maybe? I seem to remember it was weirdly warm out). I think I shrieked. I can’t imagine two names she could have chosen to make me happier.
Who would you most want to share a plate of pierogis with?
You know who’s coming to mind? Margaret Atwood. I’d love to get her take on the pierogi, and many other things.
Author photo by Kristi Jan Hoover.
October 19, 2016 BOOKS » BOOK REVIEWS + FEATURES
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A Conversation with Clare Beams
Local author discusses her debut story collection
By Andrew Moore
Clare Beams
Photo courtesy of Kristi Jan Hoover
Clare Beams
CLARE BEAMS
7 p.m. Tue., Oct. 25. White Whale Bookstore, 4754 Liberty Ave., Bloomfield. Free. 412-224-2847 or whitewhalebookstore.com
In Clare Beams’ debut story collection, We Show What We Have Learned (Lookout Books), characters struggle with change, loss and rejection, in settings including a plague-ravaged Europe, a secretive all-girl boarding school, and the mysterious healing waters of New England. Joyce Carol Oates has called Beams “[a] female/feminist voice for the 21st century.” Beams’ book-launch party is Oct. 25 at White Whale Bookstore (formerly East End Book Exchange). Beams spoke with CP by phone from her home in Edgewood.
You’ve been compared to Alice Munro, Shirley Jackson and Margaret Atwood. How did you react?
I couldn’t believe it. Those are books and stories that shaped me not just as a writer but the way that I look at the world. So that just felt like a really huge gift.
Many of your stories have surreal elements. Yet those with regular human emotions and situations can be just as haunting. What does that say about your characters, and also about reality and imagination?
I don’t think of myself as exclusively a surreal writer. But I do feel there has to be something that feels sort of magical — whether that’s in the setting, or the actual place, or the time period, or … the extremity of the situation that the characters find themselves in. I think life is pretty strange enough.
In one of your stories, a character says, “[words can] change you, if you let them … if you want them to.” How do words affect characters in your book, and how has writing these stories changed you?
In “The Renaissance Person Tournament,” the teacher character ends up telling this dramatic lie to this student that she loves in order to try to save her. And I think that the telling of that lie changes her, and makes her see herself in a different light. In terms of the way that the stories have changed me — when I write … you’re almost dreaming while you’re doing it. It’s not exactly the rational part of your brain in charge. I will look back and read something that I wrote and be like, “I do think that. That is a thing I think about the world.” The stories perhaps change me in that they make me look at things that I probably always thought, or always knew, but never acknowledged.
Clare Beams
2014 Prose
Author's Statement
When I filled out my NEA application, I was eight-and-a-half-months pregnant. When I got the phone call telling me I’d won, I was a new mother, living in a new city, in the midst of the slow processes of trying to sell my first novel and trying to get my second off the ground. My daughter, who had yet another cold, had finally gone down for a nap, and I was squeezing in some writing. The ringing of the phone woke her up. Perfect, I thought. Yes, it was.
I wrote my first novel and my first published short stories over eight stop-and-start years, during most of which I was also teaching high-school English—work that I loved and felt lucky to do, but that sometimes seemed as if it would overtake every last corner of my life. Now the miraculous little person who is my daughter has overtaken those corners. The real world has such a beautiful, loud voice. And the part of me that spins stories—the part that started up because of a love for books and words that has been one of the most vital loves of my life—keeps asking for a little quiet. This award brings more stretches of that quiet, in the form of childcare and fewer teaching commitments; it also brings affirmation that the work itself has a place in my life and in the world that’s worth defending. I’m still astonished that my name will now be listed alongside the names of other winners whose writing has meant so much to me. I’m proud to live in a country that nurtures literature and the arts in this way. Most of all I’m grateful, though that seems too small a word.
Excert from "World's End"
By the time the World’s End job came to him, the architect was twenty-six but no longer considered himself young, if he ever had. He felt his professional life had begun. He shaped land, not buildings: he was a builder of landscapes, one of the first of his kind in New York, though this was the 1880s and Olmsted had already carved out Central Park, strange hole in time and space, in the middle of the skyward-straining city.
These were the days when wealthy people were just coming to realize what their commerce had paved and grimed over, and to miss that green in the pure religious way they missed the childhood of their earliest memories. The architect had a knack for making the lost thing feel less lost, for sculpting expansiveness into a city courtyard. The clients who had hired him for his five paying jobs so far seemed to consider this a kind of magic. To the architect himself, summoning space felt simple as instinct. In the two-room apartment on the Lower East Side where he had grown up, with six brothers and sisters, he had learned to thirst for it.
Still, even the architect could see that the World’s End job was one he had no real business having. It was no city courtyard. Robert Cale, the Boston businessman who owned the land, hinted in his letter at vastness. Cale had heard about the architect through a former trading partner, for whom the architect had designed a plot the year before: vines rioting over terraced rock, creating an effect like a shallow green bowl. But Cale seemed not to know that the architect had never had a job of this size and in fact had never even been out of New York. “B. says you’re the best,” the letter read. “Come convince me.”
So the architect took a train to Boston. He tried to relax into the motion of the car, as the prosperous-looking people around him were doing. He did not like tight spaces, though, had not since the week, in his thirteenth year, when three of his siblings had died of the measles in his family’s cramped apartment. Finally, pinned against the window by his seatmate’s arm, he managed the shallow hemmed-in sleep he remembered from childhood, in which any kick or roll brought contact with flesh.
When the train arrived, a carriage was waiting to take him to Cale’s. The drive took hours, and for that whole time the architect couldn’t stop staring out the windows. He was studying the way money looked up here. The way it showed itself in the stately, expressionless faces of the houses he passed. He had long dreamed he might one day move freely through houses like these, yet he had the feeling now that they were judging him as he went by and finding him lacking.
The Cale house was no different, formidable atop its wide green lawn. It had clearly been built by men who had forgotten how to build anything but ships: its whole bulk yearned forward, and a flagpole jutted from its wide white forehead at the exact angle of a bowsprit. Perhaps those long-ago builders had known water, the architect thought, but they had not understood land. They had flattened most of it and piled the rest beneath the structure, in a stylized bulbous hill that worried at his eyes. The effect was like a cherub’s cheek carved into a living face.
The door of the house opened and a man the architect assumed was Cale walked out onto the front steps to survey the approaching carriage. The architect shifted nervously in his seat. Bennett, his former client, had told him that Cale had tripled his family’s whaling fortune in the manufacturing of hosiery, then left the business. Something about this progression, open seas to delicate fabrics to nothing, had given the architect a vivid picture of Cale’s features: a hawk’s cutting beak swathed in trembly old-man wattles. But Cale in the flesh was broad-chested, his hair still as black as the architect’s own. When the carriage stopped and the architect climbed out, feeling travel-stained and stiff in the hips and knees, Cale offered a strong, perfectly smooth hand for him to shake.
“We walk from here,” Cale said next. With no further greeting, he started down the drive, crunching the gravel underfoot. The architect ran a few paces so he could walk alongside and not behind him.
They turned left down the road. “The land’s a peninsula,” Cale told him. “I’ve bought it all up. Every farmer around here owned his piece, but nobody took much convincing. I know them—go out in the mornings sometimes and look my acreage over, same as they do—so they trust me. And they all decided their cows could eat grass somewhere else once they saw my offer.” Cale laughed a big showpiece of a laugh. He spoke in hard bursts and had a bandy-legged way of walking, pivoting his shoulders from side to side as if he were trying to take on the elements. His vowels, though, had been pinched flat by fancy schools. “What I want to do is put up houses. Sell them. People said I should talk to somebody before I bring in the builders, so we put everything in the right place.” Then, with no audible pause, “You’re younger than I thought.”
“Well,” the architect said, but couldn’t think what to add.
“Course I barely had to shave when I opened my first factory.”
After some steps in silence—they were coming to the end of the road now, the architect could see it up ahead of them, thick with trees—the architect asked, “How much land is it? Your letter didn’t say.”
“Just over two hundred acres, ” Cale said.
The architect bit the insides of his lips with wanting.
“There are men I could hire in Boston,” Cale continued. “But Bennett says you’re different. Says he’s never seen anything like the work you did for him.”
("World's End" orginally appeared in One Story)
Clare Beams
Clare Beams’s fiction has appeared in One Story, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011, Amazon’s Day One, FiveChapters, Willow Springs, Hayden’s Ferry, online at n+1, and elsewhere. Her stories have received special mention in Best American Short Stories 2013 and the Pushcart Prize XXXV. She held a Graham Fellowship at Columbia, where she received her MFA. After teaching ninth-grade English in Massachusetts for six years, she moved to Pittsburgh with her husband and one-year-old daughter. She recently finished her first novel and is working on her second.
Photo by Finnegan Calabro
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Contributor Spotlight: Clare Beams
On inspiration, and what I’m doing while the muses are talking to other people
You know those writers who talk about how their characters just speak to them and tell them the story? How they’re not in charge, they’re really just taking dictation? These people make me nervous. (When it comes to writing, many things make me nervous. The copious quantities of time I always manage to spend not writing. The copious clumsiness of so many of the things I produce when I do. Reading certain passages in wonderful books, which make me think both I am so overjoyed that someone did that and why do I even bother?) Listening to the dictation-takers’ dreamy-eyed accounts, my nervousness is mixed with envy. The experience they are describing just sounds so much easier than the way I go about things. My characters are, apparently, lacking in initiative. They usually just kind of sit there until I make them say and do things, and often it takes me a very long time to figure out what those things should be. If there are muses, they have chosen other people to talk to. I have been repeatedly stood up.
That being said, I’ve discovered something. It is a very good idea for me to leave a pen and some paper by the bed when I am falling asleep.
I don’t write on this paper very often. When I’m falling asleep, I’m usually not thinking up story ideas. I’m thinking about what I need to photocopy before I teach in the morning, or about how my ninth-graders may very well forget what they wrote their essays about by the time I actually manage to get them back, or about how tomorrow is trash day and we forgot to carry the recycling out again, or about how it’s probably pretty awful to need to be reminded about your mother’s birthday two years in a row. Or the falling-asleep process gives way quickly to, well, sleep.
But every so often, while I’m in that half-dreaming state where nothing makes much sense, I will reach for the paper and I will write something down. I don’t turn on the light to do this. Unsurprisingly, in the morning, this thing usually turns out to be totally incomprehensible. Sometimes I can’t even read the handwriting, which—done in the dark—never looks much like mine. Other times, the words are legible but might as well not be. “The itch began at the top of my head,” I will find. Or “peach suit.”
A couple of times, though, waiting for me there in the morning, in that not-so-recognizable handwriting, I’ve found a beginning. Or maybe just the beginning of a beginning. A word, a phrase, that makes me want to try to write another one. “We Show What We Have Learned” began that way.
When I think about it rationally, I know that these falling-asleep ideas aren’t much different from ideas I could have at any other time. The only difference, I think, is a certain voice that’s very loud in my wakeful life—the one that chimes in one short beat after the first glimmer of an idea to say Well that’s stupid or I’ll never be able to pull off—must go to sleep first, because it isn’t alert enough to prevent my hand from reaching for the pen. And though the better of these ideas can feel like unexpected gifts, they come with serious strings attached. The first seed may be planted without too much conscious effort on my part, but the story is no more likely to grow on its own than usual. If I want it to become anything, I have to do the work of hauling it out of the ground myself, and I inevitably blister my hands and crumple some leaves and come to doubt the value of the whole enterprise in the process, since the shape of the thing is never quite what I’d envisioned. My paper by the bed is no pipeline to the muses, in other words. I’m still not convinced the muses really exist, at least for me. My characters do not arrive and declaim their histories and set forth the plots of their stories in the dark. Those are still things I have to try to do for them when it’s light out again.
Even the less rational part of me nods its head in agreement with all of this. It can’t really argue with something so true. So it nods, and smiles, and then makes sure the paper by the bed is still in place.
*
Clare Beams was born in 1982 and earned her MFA from Columbia in 2006. Her fiction has appeared in Word Riot and Inkwell, where it was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and is forthcoming from The Ledge, where it was a finalist for the 2009 Fiction Prize. She lives in Norwell, Massachusetts with her husband and is currently working on a novel and teaching 9th-grade English and Creative Writing on Cape Cod. She promises that “We Show What We Have Learned” does not reflect her non-fictional experiences with teaching, which she deeply loves. Her story, "We Show What We Have Learned," is forthcoming in HFR #46.
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We Show What We Have Learned
Publishers Weekly. 263.32 (Aug. 8, 2016): p38.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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We Show What We Have Learned
Clare Beams. Lookout, $17.95 trade paper (184p) ISBN 978-1-940596-14-3
The captivating stories in Beams's debut collection are impressively varied in both setting and character. In "Hourglass," a young girl attends a strange, possibly sinister boarding school to receive a "transformational education" and ends up learning about the true meaning--and cost--of beauty. "World's End," the collection's tour de force, follows the journey of a young architect in his effort to prove himself in his profession by taking on a project that might be beyond his means, but which ultimately changes him forever. A young woman fresh off a breakup takes her ailing grandmother on a trip in "Granna," mostly to prove to her ex that she is capable of being a selfless person. The story's conclusion is a dazzling exploration of the emotional costs of true empathy. Several stories explore the pain of unrequited love, such as "The Saltwater Cure," in which a teenage boy working at an inn becomes infatuated with one of the guests and subsequently learns hard lessons about accepting one's lot in life, and "The Renaissance Person Tournament," a nuanced portrait of a teacher whose lessons for her young pupil in the titular tournament are more complicated than they seem. Beams is an expert at providing odd and surprising details that make her stories come alive, and the result is a powerful collection about what we need from others and, in turn, what we can offer others of ourselves. (Oct.)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Books by Clare Beams, Hans Herbert Grimm, April Ayers Lawson and Kelly Luce
John Williams
The New York Times. (Dec. 1, 2016): Arts and Entertainment: pC4(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The New York Times Company
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We Show What We Have Learned
And Other Stories
By Clare Beams 174 pages. Lookout. $17.95.
Several of the stories in Clare Beams's debut collection are infused with a subtle form of magical realism, in which bent rules are hinted at more than fully established. In ''Granna,'' a woman suspects her grandmother is counteracting the effects of old age with middle-of-the-night visits to a mysterious lake. In the aftermath of a school shooting, in ''All the Keys to All the Doors,'' a woman discovers she can cause objects (and possibly people) to disappear by locking them into a certain room. And in the title story (where the magic is far less subtle), a teacher starts painlessly shedding body parts in front of her horrified elementary school students, in response to the ''hammering blows of the humiliation'' they deliver to her.
Better still are two of the most realistic stories. ''The Saltwater Cure'' is about a 16-year-old boy in the 1930s, helping his mother run Pilgrim's Inn, a sham institution where people come to bathe in a marsh to be ''cured'' of abscesses, limps and other troubles. He falls instantly in love with a redheaded visitor who seems both healthy and skeptical. (''Rob felt suddenly sure that Anne-Marie had come here to undo everything. He was surprised by his own eagerness to see what everything would look like, undone.'') It's a potent coming-of-age story told in just 21 pages. And in ''Ailments,'' a woman narrates the story of her sibling rivalry with her sister, whose husband is a doctor during the spread of the Great Plague. The story ends with a haunting image of mistaken identity. Stories as well executed as these are their own reward, but it's also clear from the capaciousness on display here that Ms. Beams has novels' worth of worlds inside her.
'We Show What We Have Learned': Pittsburgh author Clare Beams' unsettling literary triumph
December 4, 2016 12:00 AM
Clare Beams author-2
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Clare Beams author-2 Clare Beams.
©Kristi Jan Hoover
Clare Beams.
By Wendeline O. Wright
Is it possible to truly transform ourselves, or are we merely subject to outside factors beyond our control? Can we help or hinder the changes another person may undergo? In her debut short story collection, “We Show What We Have Learned & Other Stories,” Pittsburgh-based author Clare Beams uses magical realism to explore the darker side of personal transformation.
"WE SHOW WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED & OTHER STORIES"
By Clare Beams
Lookout Books ($17.95).
Imaginative, unsettling and relentlessly sharp, the nine stories of the book are full of immersive detail and fully realized narrators that give believability to the fantastic. Weaving different eras, locations and circumstances together, Ms. Beams, who teachers fiction at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, creates a cohesive collection about change — why we do it and why we don’t.
Often, the transformation so many of us strive for is to become a “better” person, whether physically or mentally. The first story of the collection, “Hourglass,” points out the sheer effort it takes to change. Melody is an unhappy teenager at a boarding school run by a peculiar yet charismatic headmaster; eventually, her desperation to become perfect means that she happily submits to the increasingly outrageous demands of the headmaster. Melody swings between the ecstasy of fitting in and the despair of not being good enough as she tries to reach perfection, looking for “a change that was not reversible.”
The desire to be better, of course, is not exclusive to youth. In “Granna,” Teresa embarks on a trip to secluded mountain cabins with the women in her family. As her 90-year-old grandmother suddenly begins to grow younger during the trip, Teresa must confront her own inability to change. In contrast with her grandmother’s reclamation of her independence, Teresa struggles under the weight of her choices.
Ms. Beams is also interested in how we change as we become adults. In the titular story, a class of fifth-graders are unaware of the changes ahead of them in adolescence. Their lack of self-awareness sees them humiliating their anxious teacher, Ms. Swenson, until she literally begins to fall apart in front of them. Her disintegration culminates in a final lesson where the children feel themselves “becoming divisible” in preparation for the myriad injuries and heartaches that accompany adulthood.
That same loss of control over the changes in one’s life forms the backbone of the most haunting story of the book, “All the Keys to All the Doors.” Set in the aftermath of a small-town mass murder, it explores the gap between the need to control our surroundings and the actual lack of control we may have. Cele is a wealthy elderly widow who has spent decades constructing new public buildings for her town. The buildings never age or get dirty: They literally absorb disorder, and Cele believes this brings stability and happiness to the town. After the massacre unmoors the town, however, Cele’s dedication to removing the ensuing pain results in the realization that this time, her buildings won’t help. The transformative nature of grief overwhelms her and her community, resulting in the realization that her attempts to keep the world from changing around her have been for naught.
Taken individually, each story in “We Show What We Have Learned & Other Stories” tends to be an uncomfortably close look at the interior lives of people struggling to make sense of themselves and those around them. Ms. Beams’ style favors ambiguous endings, which may frustrate some readers who would prefer clearer resolutions.
The author’s embrace of uncertainty and the otherworldly, however, makes this collection a devastating illustration of the trajectories our lives can take, for better or worse, and the relative powerlessness an individual has to alter those trajectories. The author’s dark subjects, combined with a brutal honesty about the human capacity for change, remind us that transformations mean we create ourselves anew — whether we want to or not.
Wendy Wright is a freelance editor and writer living in Pittsburgh.
WE SHOW WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED BY CLARE BEAMS
REVIEWED BY STEPHANIE REENTS
December 5th, 2016
In the title story of Clare Beams’ lush, imaginative debut collection, We Show What We Have Learned, a fifth-grade teacher begins to fall apart in front of her students after a boy makes a crude joke about vaginas. Her “disintegration” isn’t merely symbolic, though; it’s real: “Here are the parts that Mrs. Swenson lost in the days that followed: three molars, the end of her nose, a chunk of one shoulder, which she shook from her sleeve, her lower lip, and assorted fingers and toes…” Beams’ stories, a cross between Aimee Bender’s and Karen Russell’s, are set in dreamy otherworldly places that are almost recognizable—but not quite. By making her metaphors literal, Beams creates magical-realist pieces that often calculate the high cost of being a woman.
In “Hourglass,” the narrator, Melody, enrolls in the all-girls Gilchrist School because it offers a “transformational education.” Though Melody’s home life is only hinted at, it’s clear that her mother isn’t happy with who Melody is—the kind of girl who likes nothing better than to hole up in her room with a Nancy Drew mystery—and wants to see her “blossom.” As the story unfolds, we learn that the headmaster, Mr. Pax, possesses rather old-fashioned notions about education. First appearances are everything to him, and looks matter. Melody dons a dress, a hat, and finally a corset because girls ought to be pleasing to the eye. And this is just the beginning of the transformations Mr. Pax envisions for his young female pupils. In “The Drop,” Lily Baker’s fiancé, Martin, brings home the parachute that saved him in the war and asks Lily to fashion it into her wedding dress. Lily is unhappy. The dress is not what she wanted, but that’s just a trifling matter in this cautionary tale about the sacrifices required of wives, especially the wives of soldiers traumatized by the war.
These stories have been called feminist; the downside of the some feminist literature is that it may focus too exclusively on how men and a patriarchal society victimize women and how women damage each other in competition for men. There’s a bit of that dynamic at play in We Show What We Have Learned. “Ailments,” set during the plague in England, explores how competition almost divides two sisters. The narrator, who clearly thinks she is intellectually superior to her sister, Frances, is practically undone by her desire for Frances’ husband. She’s also deeply suspicious of how her sister could possibly be stimulating enough for her doctor husband. Even after the narrator observes something important (I won’t give it away) that shows her sister in a more favorable light, the narrator’s ardor for the doctor barely cools, and the story ends before we see how this information might change her relationship with her sister. “The Renaissance Person Tournament” turns on a lie that one woman tells another in order to help her. The narrator, a middle-aged female teacher, sets up her protégé to win an academic tournament by bluntly informing the high school girl that the boy is she is competing against is not romantically interested in her. It’s true that the teacher has good reason to be suspicious of the boy’s intentions, but it’s also depressing that the only way to help her student is by wounding her.
But even when their plots feel slightly didactic, these stories are constructed from gorgeous, finely fashioned sentences. Beams’ flair and originality, and her ability to make sense of the objects of the world, are striking. When one of the teachers at Gilchrist sheds her dress and corset, she is “nothing but the filling-in of a corset, something poured inside to allow the corset to stand up, walk around, and go about its life.” A cottage in “Ailments” has the “blank-eyed look of a slow child” and the heat of the day makes the “leaves of the trees… limp; they looked as fat and wet as eating-greens.” The teacher’s detached earlobe in “We Show What We Have Learned” sits “on the ground like a fat, self-satisfied grub, one that had perhaps eaten its brethren. Mrs. Swenson’s small gold hoop earring was still in place, puckering the roundest part of the lobe’s belly.”
Beams’ triumph comes in “World’s End,” a story about loss and longing told through the eyes of an architect who is preparing a vast peninsula outside of Boston for development. Landscape writing can feel so static, but Beams’ descriptions make both buildings and geographical features come alive. Cale, the tycoon who hires the architect, lives in a big house on a hill. “They had flattened most of it,” the architect observes, “and piled the rest beneath the structure, in a stylized bulbous hill that worried at his eyes. The effect was like a cherub’s cheek carved into a living face.” The peninsula, itself, “rolled and pitched as if it lived, as if it had only momentarily consented to be still.” He designs a road so that it will “just lip the breast of the hill…” Beams’ descriptions dazzle here; indeed, the young architect is so transported by the vistas he has had a hand in creating at World’s End that he fails to see himself very clearly and nearly ruins his career. That’s the danger in We Show What We Have Learned where at every turn the characters have to try to unlearn what society or school has taught them.
Clare Beams Proves She's a Captivating Literary Voice with We Show What We Have Learned
By Christine An | October 28, 2016 | 4:03pm
BOOKS REVIEWS CLARE BEAMS
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Clare Beams Proves She's a Captivating Literary Voice with We Show What We Have Learned
In her debut collection of short stories, We Show What We Have Learned, Clare Beams offers readers haunting narratives of individuals and communities under transformation. While these tales feature a variety of characters and settings, what unites them is how a combination of the otherworldly and the mundane illuminates the psychic undercurrents of change.
Four of the nine stories in Beams’ collection take place in schools, which is fitting as they are institutions dedicated to transformation. As the headmaster in the opening story “Hourglass” declares, “Education is nothing less than the shaping of the soul.”
1showlearnedcover.jpgWith “Hourglass,” Beams highlights the sinister side of conversion mediated by education. A new student at a boarding school advertising a “Transformational Education” for girls learns to fit into a literal corset. As she acclimates to her physical reformation into an hourglass shape, she figuratively incorporates the headmaster’s vision for beauty and truth. Adding to this mordant take on education is the titular story “We Show What We Have Learned,” which features a meek teacher’s disintegration in front of her disengaged students. As her body parts fall off and begin accumulating in a desk drawer, the students’ boredom transforms into a fearful enthrallment. By the time the teacher expires after her final lesson, the students have learned the hefty price of growing up.
Other stories in Beams’ collection focus on individuals navigating evolving social narratives as they come of age. “The Saltwater Cure” follows a teen working at a dubious health resort where guests bathe in marsh waters in hopes of curing their ailments. As the teen falls for one of the guests, a young woman who has lost feeling in her hands, he grapples with the chicanery people sell and believe in for survival. While “World’s End” follows a landscape architect as he escapes his youth in the suffocating tenements of 1880s New York City and lands his first major project developing an industrialist’s seaside estate. The architect obsesses over the transformation of the estate into his masterpiece and fantasizes about a romance with the industrialist’s daughter, but the cold realities of class send him back home to New York City.
Beams entire collection bewitches—and features complex female characters and feminist takes on broader themes to boot. A sharp eye for detail and an appreciation for emotional nuance underpin Beams’ ability to captivate readers, even as she eschews neat endings in favor of mysteries that linger into discomfort. We Show What We Have Learned reveals that transformations are rarely liberatory; they are rather a continuation of a struggle with the traps that haunt our reality.
Rating: 9.0
Review: 'We Show What We Have Learned and Other Stories,' by Clare Beams
FICTION: A debut short-story collection keenly examines human nature at work within possible dramas and absurd fantasies.
By MALCOLM FORBES Special to the Star Tribune NOVEMBER 4, 2016 — 11:12AM
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In recent years, many a debut short-story collection has come filled with off-the-wall tall tales that snag our attention, then warp our minds. Such collections are now a dime a dozen — so much so that it can be tricky finding one of real value. How to hear a genuinely original voice above the boisterously competitive crowd?
Clare Beams’ voice rings true throughout her masterful first collection, “We Show What We Have Learned and Other Stories.” Cannily, she covers more than one base, appealing to readers who prefer disjointed, otherworldly scenarios and those who like their fiction grounded in recognizable reality. She also ensures that every situation or flourish, fantastic or otherwise, is infused with or informed by credible human instincts and emotion.
Pittsburgh-based Beams previously taught high school English in Falmouth, Mass. One hopes that the four stories she sets in or around schools are not based on personal experience. In the book’s title story, both the shortest and the strangest, a beleaguered teacher quite literally comes unstuck and goes to pieces in front of her fifth-graders. In another, a prominent town donor endures the aftershocks of an undisclosed school tragedy — one that has rocked the community and reduced a group of mothers to “a tribe of grief.”
But it is Beams’ first story, “Hourglass,” which is by far her most memorable school outing. We follow Melody as she arrives at the Gilchrist School for a “transformational” education. Despite the best efforts of her teacher, Miss Caper, and headmaster, Mr. Pax (“our great shaper”), Melody refuses to fit in — that is, until she is made to. The story acquires mystery when one of Melody’s classmates disappears, then turns sinister when we learn of Pax’s “special project” for his protégées and his definition of “beauty and bettering.”
Several stories take the reader back in time and explore missed opportunities, aborted plans and unrequited love. In late 19th-century Boston, a young architect embarks on a huge venture but ends up falling for his wealthy employer’s daughter. In 1932, a teenage boy becomes infatuated with a married guest at a dubious health resort. And in London during the outbreak of the Great Plague, a woman hides her love for her infected sister’s healthy husband.
In all nine tales, Beams downplays drama by treading lightly and providing the subtlest of touches: teasing out details, hinting rather than announcing, letting characters explain their actions and oddities in their own time. Only in “The Drop” do we encounter authorial heavy-handedness and a too-thin conceit — a wedding-dress made from a parachute — stretched to snapping point.
“We Show What We Have Learned and Other Stories,” by Clare Beams
“We Show What We Have Learned and Other Stories,” by Clare Beams
Beams’ collection skillfully and alluringly navigates the border between the familiar and the unexpected, and beguiles and unsettles in equal measure. Just like Melody in Miss Caper’s poetry class, we should immerse ourselves and read each story “swimmily, floating in its currents.”
Malcolm Forbes has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist and the Daily Beast. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
We Show What We Have Learned and Other Stories
By: Clare Beams.
Publisher: Lookout Books, 178 pages, $17.95
WE SHOW WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED by Clare BeamsKirkus Star
WE SHOW WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED
& Other Stories
by Clare Beams
Best of 2016
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KIRKUS REVIEW
Nine stories that reveal the strangeness underpinning even the most ordinary of lives.
In the title story of Beams’ debut collection, an elementary school teacher shocks her students by falling apart—quite literally—in front of the class. At eight pages, it’s the book’s smallest story, but it’s emblematic of Beams’ approach, in which ordinary characters are transformed, often in extraordinary, otherworldly ways. In “All the Keys to All the Doors,” a little-used room in the town hall may provide unexpected solace to a community reeling in the aftermath of a school shooting. In “Granna,” the newly single narrator takes her grandmother back to a family vacation spot and witnesses the mysterious effect it has on the older woman. Not all the stories are tinged with fantastical elements; Beams is equally interested in stepping into other realms by reaching into odd corners of history, as in “Ailments,” in which a young woman becomes obsessed with her sister’s husband, a doctor, during London’s Great Plague. But even when the stories do draw from the tradition of fabulism, they always feel wholly Beams’ own, from the unflagging elegance of the prose to the wisdom with which Beams approaches the complex emotional terrain her characters navigate. With other authors, this philosophizing can feel forced; not so here. Take this for example, from “Granna,” in which the narrator muses on her ex-boyfriend’s assertion that she should not have a child because she didn’t seem maternal: “Yet it seemed terrible of him not to have given her a chance, that largest of all possible chances, to transcend the way she seemed.” It is this gap between what the world seems and what is that Beams tackles so memorably in this collection.
A richly imagined and impeccably crafted debut.
Pub Date: Oct. 25th, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-940596-14-3
Page count: 184pp
Publisher: Lookout Books
Review Posted Online: July 28th, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15th, 2016
REVIEWS | OCTOBER 31, 2016
We Show What We Have Learned & Other Stories, by Clare Beams
"Any adult who has spent significant time with young people knows these feelings—the loss of a childhood self, the urge to save a teenager from your own mistakes. We Show What We Have Learned is full of these moments of doubling and their accompanying ache."
by EMILY NAGIN
How do you write a ghost story? Not the stale, ghost-in-the-attic kind, but a really good one? You need the right setting. It should be familiar yet eerie, a house just like the one you grew up in, except all the windows are boarded up and the TV plays static. You need a hero whose personality teeters between arrogance and guile, the kind of person who’d mess around in a haunted house. And you need that thread of doubt: does the hero fear ghosts or does she want to be one? After all, no one goes into a haunted house without a death wish. In a ghost story, the thing you fear is also the thing you most long for.
Ghost stories are delicate, hard to pull off. Henry James did it in Turn of the Screw. Shirley Jackson, in The Haunting of Hill House. And Clare Beams does it in her debut collection, We Show What We Have Learned & Other Stories (Lookout Books), which reads like a collection of ghost stories without the ghosts.
Is that a confusing thing to say? Well, Beams’ work is hard to categorize. The stories in We Show What We have Learned feel outside of time. Though some are explicitly historical fiction, even the ones taking place in the present-day have an antique quality. Her work is full of gothic echoes: like Henry James and Charlotte Brontë, Beams populates her stories with unmarried women, many of them teachers. Like the mansion in Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, setting in We Show What We Have Learned is claustrophobic and constantly morphing. In “World’s End,” an enigmatic robber baron commissions a landscape architect to construct a utopian community; “All the Keys To All the Doors” features a cookie-cutter community tormented by disappearances; “The Saltwater Cure” is set in an actual swamp supposedly possessed of curative powers.
There’s a feeling of anarchic possibility in Beams’ work that is both delightful and unsettling. If you like Kelly Link and Karen Russell, you’ll love Clare Beams. And like Link and Russell, Beams’ work plays with stylistic choices that often appear in Young Adult novels. Even in morally ambiguous situations, her narrators command loyalty. I would have loved this book at seventeen just as much as I did at twenty-seven.
Author photo by Kristi Jan Hoover
Author photo by Kristi Jan Hoover
This blend of gothic and Young Adult is particularly vivid in “Hourglass,” the collection’s opening story, which follows a teenage girl during her first year at a boarding school promising a “transformational education.” Melody is shy and quiet, a misfit lover of mystery novels. Gilchrist School is old-fashioned, askew in a way that’s initially hard to put your finger on. It’s a classically creepy set-up, and I was primed for Melody to become an unlikely hero, resisting the school’s philosophy and eventually discovering a dark secret that only she can explode.
I wasn’t entirely wrong: Gilchrist is sinister. Run by a charismatic but overbearing headmaster named Mr. Pax, the school aims to shape the girls into a demure ideal of womanhood by controlling every aspect of their lives. But I was wrong about Melody: the more violent and frightening the school’s restrictions grow, the more she embraces them. “If this man wants to try to change me,” she silently vows one morning in Mr. Pax’s office, “I will let him.”
“Hourglass” makes a fairly blunt point about the abusive standards imposed on women’s bodies—if there’s a critique to be made of Beams’ work, it’s that her writing is occasionally heavy-handed—but Melody’s pliability is ultimately what makes the story so haunting. It would have been easy for Beams voice her critique of normative beauty standards through a narrator who shares her objections. Instead, she wrote Melody. Not the girl who resists the shaping but the girl who longs to be shaped. In “Hourglass,” Beams captures the perverse satisfaction of fitting in by hurting yourself in exactly the right way.
And this was the quality that not only kept me reading, but made We Show What We Have Learned impossible to put down: in every story, I recognized some shade of myself. (When I said I would have loved this collection at seventeen, what I really meant was, I could’ve used it.) Beams’ stories have a laser-focused honesty that reminds you of the pieces of yourself you’d rather not look at—the conformist, the manipulator, the egotist—yet her work is also profoundly generous, circling back again and again to the tremendous need that makes us behave in ways that are less than noble.
This circularity is mirrored in the collection’s structure, which begins and ends with stories about school. While “Hourglass” is told through the eyes of a student, the final story is narrated by a teacher. In “The Renaissance Tournament,” a high school English teacher named Julia coaches her top student, Emily Branch, through a grueling academic triathlon. As the competition progresses, Julia begins to see troubling echoes of her younger self in Emily. When Julia confronts her, Emily—in high teenage form—asks if it’s her scores that Julia is concerned about. The passage in which Julia ponders her response is one of the loveliest and most astute in the collection:
I wonder how to explain it to her: that it’s the way she’s playing that frightens me. That in her life she has the capacity to become wondrous, but not if she makes the choice I fear she’s making while we all watch, to put something else ahead of her brain. It’s not a choice you can revise later. You think it is, while you’re succumbing to an experience of love that really you’re lifting right out of all of your books…The books themselves make you think that maybe books aren’t the most important thing after all…[but] when you go to look for those books…they aren’t where you left them, aren’t any place you know, anymore, how to find.
Any adult who has spent significant time with young people knows these feelings—the loss of a childhood self, the urge to save a teenager from your own mistakes. We Show What We Have Learned is full of these moments of doubling and their accompanying ache.
Like uncanny settings and untrustworthy narrators, doppelgangers are another hallmark of the gothic. So maybe Beams’ book is a collection of ghost stories after all: if a ghost is a present absence, then these stories are full of ghosts. Beams writes landscapes and characters taunted by past selves and impossible dreams. Her work is evasive and direct, fantastical and deeply real. In We Show What We Have Learned, Beams has crafted a true haunting.
We Show What We Have Learned
Reviewed by Christine Canfield
August 26, 2016
We Show What We Have Learned evinces keen insight into the inner workings of human hearts and minds.
Clare Beams takes her characters on a stroll through eerily fantastical landscapes in her short-story collection, We Show What We Have Learned. From a bride whose WWII parachute turned wedding dress gives her visions of her groom’s experience in battle, to an elderly woman pulled from her nursing home to once again visit the magical New England woods of her youth, Beams’s characters are drawn with emotional care and complexity.
Beams’s stories have appeared in many publications, including The Best American Nonrequired Reading, but this is her first collection. With her stories presented together, it is easy to see the themes of transformation and emotional turning points in her work. Some of the transformations are physical, like the corseted boarding-school girls who strive to shape themselves into their headmaster’s vision of femininity, and others are intangible, like the disappointed longing of unrequited young love. Many take place in dreamy worlds where animalistic shadows hold the promise of renewal, or buildings mysteriously heal themselves. Within these boundaries, each story focuses a brilliant shaft of light on one person’s emotions as they reveal insecurities and secret longings, resulting in vulnerability and intimacy.
We Show What We Have Learned evinces keen insight into the inner workings of human hearts and minds. The broad range of its characters and settings invite a wide audience. Through all these varied settings and protagonists, Beams’s voice remains true to its essence while feeling fully appropriate for the particular time and place. Each story’s pace is just languid enough to lend an eerie contrast to the increasing tension of the plot without bogging down the story.
For fans of realistic fiction tinged with elements of the fantastic, We Show What We Have Learned is a collection that will quickly become a favorite, and leave them looking forward to what comes next.
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The author of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the author for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.