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WORK TITLE: Magic for Unlucky Girls
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Balaskovits, Alison
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.aabalaskovits.com/
CITY:
STATE: SC
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.aabalaskovits.com/about/ * http://sfwp.com/profile-grand-prize-winner-a-a-balaskovits/ * https://www.shimmerzine.com/authors/author-page-a-a-balaskovits/ * https://www.shimmerzine.com/authors/author-page-a-a-balaskovits/interview-with-a-a-balaskovits/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2016045896
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2016045896
HEADING: Balaskovits, A. A.
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670 __ |a Magic for unlucky girls, 2017: |b ECIP t.p. (A.A. Balaskovits) data view (A. A. Balaskovits won the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards grand prize in 2015. Her work appears in Indiana Review, The Madison Review, The Southeast Review, Booth, Wigleaf and many others. She is the social media editor for Cartridge Lit.)
PERSONAL
Married.
EDUCATION:Loras College, B.A.; Bowling Green State University, M.F.A.; the University of Missouri, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and editor. Cartridge Lit, social media editor; previously served as an assistant fiction editor for the Mid-American Review and as the social media editor for the Missouri Review. Also held various jobs, including working at nonprofits, as a teacher, and in customer service.
AWARDS:Literary Awards grand prize winner, Sante Fe Writers Project (SFWP), 2015, for Magic for Unlucky Girls.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Indiana Review, the Madison Review, and the Southeast Review, and to literary Web sites, including Booth and Wigleaf.
SIDELIGHTS
A.A. Balaskovits is an editor and writer who primarily writes short fiction. She has served in editorial positions for literary Web sites, including launching the Web logs the Working Writer Series, which focused on interviewing writers without major publications, and Literature on Lockdown, which featured essays by incarcerated or formerly incarcerated writers and by their teachers. Balaskovits’s first collection, Magic for Unlucky Girls: Stories, features fourteen tales that often take on the familiar tropes of fairy tales with a twist.
According to Balaskovits, the writer Angela Carter, who was especially known for her magical realism, has been a major influence on Balaskovits’s writing. “She has this line in The Sadeian Woman: ‘A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster,’” Balaskovits noted in an article on the Sante Fe Writers Project Web site, adding: “That’s been at the back of my mind while I was writing this collection.”
Balaskovits worked on the Magic for Unlucky Girls stories for almost nine years. Many of the stories are retelling of fairy tales. For example, a story somewhat like Little Red Riding Hood and titled “Beasts” features a girl named Little Red and her grandmother, who warns of societal problems, not a wolf. Other stories feature an alternate universe. “Balaskovits has built these stories from lore, urban legend, and fairy tale and she relishes the capacity for strange that the fantastical genre allows,” wrote Atticus Review Web site contributor Ashley Miller. For example, in the story titled “Put Back Together Again,” Balaskovits features a man with superpowers who seems unable to communicate but is the only hope for a city that has experienced devastating earthquakes.
“When I started this collection, it was going to be straight retellings of classic fairy tales,” Balaskovits noted in an interview with Misha Rai for Southeast Review Online, adding: “That changed over time because there were some things I wanted to explore that I felt I was not able to with the constraints of the fairy tale as a tradition.” Baslaskovits noted that the story “The Romantic Agony of Lemonhead” falls into this category and was inspired somewhat from Balaskovits’s reading of Reviving Ophelia, which examines societal pressure on youngAmerican girls.
“There isn’t a single tired trope here—in fact, there are few familiar elements at all,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor. Jen Michalski, writing for the Washington Independent Review of Books Web site, remarked: “Balaskovits creates her own mythology that transcends time and upends traditional ideas about helpless damsels and men-as-beasts.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, December 12, 2016, review of Magic for Unlucky Girls, p. 127.
ONLINE
A.A. Balaskovitz Home Page, http://www.aabalaskovits.com (October 30, 2017).
Atticus Review, https://atticusreview.org/ (March 20, 2017), Ashley Miller, review of Magic for Unlucky Girls.
Cartridge Lit, https://cartridgelit.com/ (April 19, 2016), Joel Hans and Justin Daugherty, “Welcome our new editor: A.A. Balaskovits!”
Santa Fe Writers Project Web site, http://sfwp.com/ (February 16, 2016), K.E. Semmel, “Profile: Grand Prize Winner A.A. Balaskovits.”
Sequestrum, https://www.sequestrum.org/ (October 30, 2017), “Contributor Spotlight: A.A. Balaskovits,” author interview.
Shimmer, https://www.shimmerzine.com/ (October 30, 2017), “Interview with A.A. Balaskovits.”
SmokeLong Quarterly, http://www.smokelong.com/ (June 20, 2016), Tara Laskowski, “Smoke and Mirrors: An Interview with A.A. Balaskovits;” (October 14, 2017), Tara Laskowski, “’Every Word Works’—An Interview With Guest Reader A.A. Balaskovits.”
Southeast Review Online, http://southeastreview.org/ (April 1, 2017), Colleen Mayo, “Author Q&A: A.A. Balaskovits,” interview by Misha Rai.
Washington Independant Review of Books, http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/ (April 7, 2017), Jen Michalski, review of Magic for Unlucky Girls.*
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13775797_10101895806066265_8055016685926273233_nOriginally from the Chicagoland area, A.A. Balaskovits has lived all across the American Midwest but currently calls South Carolina her home. She received her B.A. from Loras College, her MFA from Bowling Green State University and her Ph.D. from The University of Missouri.
She has served as an Assistant Fiction Editor for The Mid American Review and the Social Media Editor for The Missouri Review, where she launched two series for the blog: the Working Writers Series which interviewed writers without major publications and Literature on Lockdown, which curated essays by currently or former incarcerated writers as well as the people who teach them.
Currently, she is the Social Media Editor for Cartridge Lit, an online journal of video game literature.
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Profile: Grand Prize Winner A.A. Balaskovits
by K.E. Semmel | Feb 16, 2016 | Literary Awards Program, Profile, Uncategorized |
By Anne Pinkerton
Credit: Angela Wood
Credit: Angela Wood
A.A. Balaskovits is the Grand Prize winner of SFWP’s 2015 Literary Awards Program for her book of stories Magic for Unlucky Girls, a collection that consists largely of re-imaginings of fairy tales, “though one is a retelling of Superman and one the Garden of Eden,” she says. “They’re the kind of fairy tales I wish I had read when I was a child.”
Balaskovits has been working on the stories for nearly nine years, writing new material and culling old, shaping the work and letting the theme of the book evolve. “Ultimately, the collection is about women,” Alison explains, “though you cannot ever write about women without commenting on men as well, so it’s about all of us, and how we make do in systems that are set up to be against us from the get-go, and the small ways we tweak them, even if the tweaking ends up disastrous for us at the end.”
The writer who inspires her most is Angela Carter. “She has this line in The Sadeian Woman: ‘A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.’” Says Balaskovits, “That’s been at the back of my mind while I was writing this collection, what the monstrous woman would look like, and how that plays out in stories we have read before.”
Balaskovits’ advice to writers: “I’d recommend, as you write, to consider the message that you’re putting out: Is it honest? Does it speak beyond yourself? Does it prop up the messages that are already propped up or does it twist and tinker away at what is readily accepted? The latter are stories that I want to read more of. Please write those.”
Originally from Chicago, A.A. Balaskovits currently resides in South Carolina with her husband. She holds a Bachelor’s degree from Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, an MFA from Bowling Green State University in Ohio, and a PhD from the University of Missouri.
“I’ve had a lot of odd jobs,” she says, listing positions at literary magazines and nonprofits, teaching gigs, customer service jobs, and editorial work. “I’ve applied to be an assistant cheese maker several times but they never take me.”
***
Anne Pinkerton is an MFA candidate at Bay Path University in Longmeadow, MA. She holds a BA from Hampshire College and works at Mount Holyoke College directing digital communications for their Alumnae Association. She lives with her husband, two dogs, and four cats. In her limited free time, she volunteers at a local animal welfare organization and plays music.
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Smoke and Mirrors: An Interview with A.A. Balaskovits
by Tara Laskowski Read the Story June 20, 2016
story art
Art by Dave Petraglia
Is this story part of your upcoming book Magic for Unlucky Girls? Can you tell me a little more about that book?
It isn’t, sadly. This was written right after I finished the collection when I went through a rush of spouting off as many short tales as I could (I’ve since collected all of those into a short, separate chapbook of fairy tales). It would have fit perfectly in the collection, however, since it matches the theme: sad girls and women just trying to survive their strange worlds and being helped, though often hurt, by magic in equal amounts. I think I was always suspicious about magic while reading those stories as a kid. They only seemed to help a certain kind of person, and I always wondered what happened to women left out of that mold.
What is your favorite fairy tale? Why?
It used to be “The Handless Maiden” until I stumbled across “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering” in a Grimm’s collection. It’s an odd little duck of a tale with no magic, per se, just some kids who like to watch pigs getting butchered and then get it in their heads to play pretend and kill a friend of theirs; sort of a cruel mimicry. The adults, all aghast at the children acting as adults do (as we all know, kids are never violent) offer the murder-child an apple or a coin. If he chooses the apple, he gets to live. If he chooses the coin, he is going to be sentenced to death. It’s so rich with symbolism and what we imagine childhood must be, as well as ignoring what it often is: hardly innocent, innately cruel, and full of play.
If you could have a fully functioning silver body part, which part would you choose?
I love this question! It might actually be a possibility as we improve cyborg technology, though I’m not sure if silver would be the best option (too malleable). I’d like a silver eye, I think.
You’re working with Cartridge Lit right now as a social media editor. I’m an NES nerd, though shallowly, so I’m curious what your favorite game is.
Earthbound! Though there is always love in my heart for Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross, as well as Secret of Mana, the Witcher III…I actually could go on forever. I play an inordinate amount of video games.
What is the best thing you’ve read in the last few months?
I just bought Giambattista Basile’s collection, A Tale of Tales after watching the movie with the same name. They’re a true delight! The foul language is exceptional. I’ve actually learned far more creative ways to curse. I love that it has a framing story for the tales, much like De Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom and One Thousand and One Nights with women sharing their stories for the empowered class. Not a huge fan of the blatant sexism and racism, but perhaps these tales can do with a little updating.
About the Author:
A. A. Balaskovits is the author of Magic for Unlucky Girls (SFWP, 2017) which won the Santa Fe Writers Project program awards grand prize in 2015. Her works appears or will appear in Indiana Review, The Madison Review, The Southeast Review, Booth, Wigleaf and many others. She is the social media editor for Cartridge Lit.
About the Interviewer:
Tara Laskowski has been editor at SmokeLong Quarterly since 2010. Her short story collection Bystanders was hailed by Jennifer Egan as "a bold, riveting mash-up of Hitchcockian suspense and campfire-tale chills." She is also the author of Modern Manners For Your Inner Demons, tales of dark etiquette. Her fiction has been published in the Norton anthology Flash Fiction International, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Mid-American Review, and numerous other journals, magazines, and anthologies. Tara lives and works in a suburb of Washington, D.C.
About the Artist:
A Best Small Fictions 2015 Winner, Dave Petraglia's writing and art have appeared in Agave, Apeiron Review, Chicago Literati, Crack the Spine, Foliate Oak, Gravel, Jersey Devil Press, Necessary Fiction, Loco Magazine, New Pop Lit, North American Review, Pithead Chapel, Popular Science, Prairie Schooner, Stoneboat, theNewerYork, Vine Leaves, and elsewhere. He is a Contributing Editor at Arcadia Magazine.
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This interview appeared in Issue Fifty-Two of SmokeLong Quarterly.
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“Every Word Works”–An Interview With Guest Reader A.A. Balaskovits
by Tara Laskowski See all Guest Readers
story art
Photo by Angela Wood
A.A. Balaskovits’ book Magic for Unlucky Girls was called “a wonderful, truly original work” by Station Eleven author Emily St. John Mandel. Publisher’s Weekly says, “There isn’t a single tired trope here—in fact, there are few familiar elements at all—so readers looking for something askew from any fantasy they’ve read before will want to get to know the unlucky but determined girls of Balaskovits’s stories.”
Balaskovits will send a copy of her story collection to the author of the story she selects during her reading week. Here’s more about her and what she’s looking for in our queue.
Your collection of stories Magic for Unlucky Girls is filled with all the things I love: twisted fairy tales, dark logic, brutal, honest writing, and women kicking ass. What kinds of topics/themes do you most like to read, and what would you like to see arrive in our queue this week?
I do, do adore twisted fantasy tales, but as I think about it, a lot of my favorite short works actually bend more realist. Robert Hass’ “A Story About the Body” and Bess Winter’s “Signs” are two flash pieces I think about quite often, because they are so startling in their imagery that they cut into my brain and settled there. For me, the theme or topic doesn’t matter, so long as the writing is good. And by good, I mean that every word works towards cutting into the reader and making sure they remember it. Flash is so limited by its word count, which makes it a little knife. The best pieces cut, infect and fester, no matter their theme or genre.
You are one of the editors of Cartridge Lit, an online literary publication dedicated to stories and poetry about video games. What’s been the most fun about that gig? The most challenging?
I adore video games. In a way that is almost obsessive. I grew up playing everything on the Nintendo I could get my hand on, and right now I currently have every Nintendo system ever made (except the original—it was lost in a fire), three generations of Playstations, and enough handhelds to make it seem like we’re collecting (my husband is). I have probably spent more time playing Mass Effect than I have working on my exams. I love that there is so much interaction between the player and the story in that medium, and Cartridge Lit allows the player to have a place to showcase the kind of affection, liberation, and storytelling they may have only been able to share with close friends before. It’s so exciting to see how much art comes from this medium, especially since it’s caught up in a political whirlwind right now. The main struggle, of course, is when I am unfamiliar with the game that is being written about, and then I have to do some research. But that’s actually kind of fun, too.
What’s the biggest mistake that writers make when submitting their stories for publication?
I think the biggest mistake, and one that I make, is that when you know your strengths, you focus too much on those and forget about how much every part of writing needs to come together. A lot of times I read excellent stories that have interesting conceits, but the language could be so much tighter for maximum impact. Or I read a story that has so many beautiful words, but nothing seems to happen, and at the end I could not verbalize what it was about. Sure, some pieces work without the other, but the ones that I’ve been drawn to really have a nice melding of action and language.
What are you working on now?
Like everyone else, I’m working on a novel. Much like Magic For Unlucky Girls, it’s a fantastical piece with fairy tale influences, but also, somewhat accidentally, influences from video games as well, particularly the Legend of Zelda and Mario series. I’ve always been drawn to video games where you’re essentially playing the same story over and over again, and wonder why the characters put up with it—or the programmers. Perhaps, if they were made aware of their past, repetitive lives, that they might choose a different direction. History tells us we do that in our own real lives anyway, repeating the same actions and making the same mistakes in a mad whirl, expecting some alternative result. Politically, we’re doing it right now, and there is a screaming child inside of me saying, no, no, no. So that novel is that screaming child.
About the Reader:
A.A. Balaskovits was born in the Chicagoland area but now resides in South Carolina. She is the author of Magic for Unlucky Girls (Santa Fe Writers Project 2017). Her fiction and essays appear in Indiana Review, The Madison Review, The Southeast Review, Gargoyle, Apex Magazine, Shimmer and numerous other magazines and anthologies. She was awarded the New Writers Award from Sequestrum in 2015 and won the grand prize for the 2015 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards series. She is the co-Editor in Chief of Cartridge Lit.
About the Interviewer:
Tara Laskowski has been editor at SmokeLong Quarterly since 2010. Her short story collection Bystanders was hailed by Jennifer Egan as "a bold, riveting mash-up of Hitchcockian suspense and campfire-tale chills." She is also the author of Modern Manners For Your Inner Demons, tales of dark etiquette. Her fiction has been published in the Norton anthology Flash Fiction International, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Mid-American Review, and numerous other journals, magazines, and anthologies. Tara lives and works in a suburb of Washington, D.C.
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Author Q&A: A.A. Balaskovits
by Colleen Mayo on April 1, 2017 in Interviews
Interview by Misha Rai
Originally from the Chicagoland area, A.A. Balaskovits has lived all across the American Midwest but currently calls South Carolina her home. She received her B.A. from Loras College, her MFA from Bowling Green State University and her Ph.D. from The University of Missouri.She has served as an Assistant Fiction Editor for The Mid American Review and the Social Media Editor for The Missouri Review, where she launched two series for the blog: the Working Writers Series which interviewed writers without major publications and Literature on Lockdown, which curated essays by currently or former incarcerated writers as well as the people who teach them.Currently, she is the Social Media Editor for Cartridge Lit, an online journal of video game.
Your debut collection is deliciously dark and terrifying in the way that brilliant fiction tends to be. Congratulations! In equal measure the collection is thought provoking, groundbreaking in its depiction and range of female characters within the stories, and entertaining. I noticed too that in your acknowledgments you thank Angela Carter—another writer whose work changed and added to the landscape of feminist and fairy tale/magical realism literature—so I wondered whether there are particular stories in the collection that you think are natural heirs to the kind of stories Carter was telling. If yes, how so? And whether there are particular stories that break from the tradition in Carter’s work and push to become a Balaskovits original story?
A.A. Balaskovits
Thank you so much for your kind words. Absolutely, Angela Carter has been a big influence on my work and writing. Many of the stories in Magic for Unlucky Girls were directly influenced by The Bloody Chamber, most especially “Beasts” and “Food My Father Feeds Me, Love My Husband Shows Me”. My reading of Carter is that she was reclaiming these tales for women: centering their experiences in these traditional tales and fleshing out their characters, so they were not an abstract, flat thing that gets pushed around the narrative. I try to do the same, because it is necessary to do that kind of writing today. My work differs from Carter’s in that she, at least in my reading, had a very positive outlook about the fates of women. Their mothers save them from their beastly husbands or they take the wolf into their own bed with a delight that is pure and salacious. Most of the tales she tells has a hopefulness that borders on liberation for the fates of those women: they take control in a narrative that allows them space to do so. I am much more pessimistic about my view of women’s lives as they currently stand. While there are moments when they do triumph in my stories, it is always at the expense of either someone else, or they have to lose something. I question whether an oppressed group can really struggle against what brings them low into the earth and get out unscathed. I don’t think so, not without causing some pain and scars to ourselves or others.
The fourteen stories in the collection are largely either retellings of fairytales/stories a reader may have encountered before like “Eden,” which is loosely based on the Garden of Eden, or operate in an alternate universe like that wonderful first story in which Superman is fragile and weeps because of his inability to communicate with other people, but the collection also has three startlingly original stories—“The Ibex Girl of Qumran,” “The Romantic Agony of Lemon head,” and “All Who Tremble”—and I wanted to know where the inspiration for these narratives came from? When you were writing this collection did you have a plan to include original work? I found that the “The Ibex Girl of Qumran,” was the more traditional story of the three where as the other two, especially “The Romantic Agony of Lemon head,” go into very interesting places; talk to me a little bit about what these stories are in conversation with?
When I started this collection, it was going to be straight re-tellings of classic fairy tales (and most of the ones that are those are earlier works – except “Juniper”, which was fairly recent). That changed over time because there were some things I wanted to explore that I felt I was not able to with the constraints of the fairy tale as a tradition. For example, “The Romantic Agony of Lemonhead” was incredibly loosely inspired from reading Reviving Ophelia, which inexplicably was in the bathroom of my parent’s household while I was growing up (not sure what the implications are there) and, while it isn’t a terrible book by any means, I am always a bit wary of catch-all’s for how to raise up good girls, as if their experience is limited to their central girlness. I did try to match that to a fairy tale, and Baba Yaga makes an appearance, but ultimately decided I could just write my own. “The Ibex Girl of Qumran” is, in its own way, about family folklore and the tales we pass down to one another, so I was still exploring fairy tales as narrative in that way, but it isn’t based on any actual story (that I am aware of).
I’ve mentioned earlier that in the collection there are a variety of female characters, almost all of them strong, independent, and often just plain vicious. Both “Bloody Mary” and “Beasts” took my breath away. What attracts you to write such type female characters? Why do violence and mutilation make up the backbone of your work?
Fairy tales are pretty violent! The Grimms brothers actually had two versions of the tales when they originally collected them from the women who told them: the first, for scholars, were very sexual and kind of violent. When they realized there was a market for children, they toned down the sex but increased the violence to the point of absurdity. Beyond that, the world is a violent place, and I don’t see a reason to not write what is a reflection of reality, even in a fantastical way. For many women, violence is a part of our lives, even in small unconscious ways, and I think fairy tales allow us to tap into that in a safe way, because the violence is usually over the top.
Women don’t often get to be violent themselves. We are taught from a young age to suppress those feelings and desires. When we read about ourselves in fiction, especially older works that form the canon, we don’t see ourselves acting out much, we are usually acted upon. I remember this one novel, which I cannot remember the name of but it came from the Modernist tradition, about a painter who on a date with a woman he fancied, and from his point of view she was so delicate she could not even tear a piece of hard bread in half because her wrist might break. That made me laugh, but also made me angry. We are as violent, or as hard, as men, even if we are trained very well not to act on it. We are born into a violent world and we understand it very well. It takes root. Part of the drive of this collection was to explore women as monsters in some fashion, either by birth or by effect of simply living longer than a few moments in the world. The idea of womanness is often portrayed as a kind of othere’d, monstrous, incomprehensible thing – why not embrace that which terrifies others?
Absolutely. I completely agree with that. Keeping that in mind, I was looking at the way the stories in the book are curated and realized that we begin with a long short story which features Superman (big-ass symbol of patriarchy) but as the stories progress, and although men play an important role in them they are mostly flat characters/are the supporting cast, the narrative of the women and their interactions is where the meat within the collection is with it ending with a young girl deciding on a course of action that may or may not end well in “All Who Tremble,” so I wondered what kind of female-female relationships were you interested in exploring as you were writing this collection?
That was the reversal: even in fairy tales which has flat characters as a rule, the men, for the most part, get to do things. They follow their dreams and are not always simply reacting to something bad happening to them, like encountering a wolf in the woods or getting kicked out of the home and forced to kill a witch they encounter. Of course, there are stories where women do do these things in traditional narratives, but we don’t tell them as often as we tell the passive-princess story. And there’s a sinister reason for that. So, in turn, I made the men flat characters (with the exception of “Eden” and “Suburban Alchemy”, which feature male protagonists). A few of the stories do feature lesbian relationships, which are not in fairy tales at all (unless you really squint at Rapunzel or just read Anne Sexton as canon). I’m bisexual, so I wanted to feature that part of my own identity, which is lacking in these stories. I can’t think of any that are particularly queer unless you read between the lines. So these stories need to be queer’d. I also explore the mother/daughter relationship in these tales quite often, because one of the trends of fairy tales, and actually a lot of fiction regardless, is that the mother is dead from the beginning. Why is the mother always dead? It’s like she does her duty to the narrative by birthing the protagonist and then, having nothing left to contribute, fades from existence. So I have to have mothers. Bad mothers, good mothers, and mothers who are good but do bad things.
Makes sense. Which bring me to (in a round about way but through a story about a dead mother) to Britney! I have to ask. I literally screeched when I read the words “Britney woman,” in “Suburban Alchemy” and realized that Solanum was obsessed with Britney Spears! I totally was at one time, so was my baby brother who had on one wall a poster of Christina Aguilera and on the other Britney Spears in a sort of face-off. I’m going to assume that your own obsession with Britney made it into the story but talk to me about it. Tell me also, how you came to include this classic pop culture icon in your work?
I. Love. Britney. Spears. I mean this with utter seriousness. That’s so funny about your brother: he had to choose one or the other. You couldn’t love both of them in that manufactured reality of the 1990s. It was pop star war. Pick a side.
Britney Spears is sort of a fairy tale unto herself to me: the most American fairy tale of all. A beautiful, white, blond girl who gets everything you could possibly imagine one would want at a young age and is still unhappy. She is, from all accounts, somewhat of a flat character in her own narrative. From a young age, she was pushed into various roles and marketed as an object: a thing to desire, a thing to pity, a thing to curse at, a thing to make you feel better about yourself. When she had that breakdown and shaved her head and attacked the car with an umbrella, it felt like we were seeing some sort of internalized reaction to having no control over your own life boil over, or a human being coming into consciousness. This is, of course, conjecture, because any celebrity is not human to their audience (not even me, who loves her so), not really, and we project onto them because their role is to give their audience a moment of catharsis.
So true and so dark this idea of the celebrity not being human! Something I’ve brought up earlier is the fact that the collection too is dark and portrays a full gamut of taboo relations and perhaps because of that it is also entertaining; the language kept purposefully simple although there is lyricism in the language of some of the stories, as anyone who reads “Bloody Mary” would agree, and I was interested in your take on the role language plays in making such troubled narratives accessible. Did you make a decision to use language in a particular way?
I do. It is very important to me to use accessible language because I don’t want to limit my audience. I don’t think there is anything wrong with using lyrical or dense language, but it isn’t my style for the most part. It is, also, really the only way I can think of to encounter horrible, taboo subjects: how much do you really want to wax poetic about incest, bestiality, rape and mutilation? Beautiful language would cover up the terror of it, and when we are encountered with horror, all pretty words are lost: language is lost in its entirety, actually. How do you express grief and pain, in the moment that it happens, except in the guttural? Reflection and beautiful language comes later to heal, but in the moment, there are no words.
There are two short-shorts in the collection, one—“Postpartum” (published proudly in The Southeast Review as “Pricked”)—close to the beginning and the second—“Mermaid”—close to the end, and in both of them women are torn apart/torn down either physically or metaphorically. In the latter, specifically, I wondered whether the story was symptomatic of a specific kind of feminist ideology where the death and dominance over a man is the only way for women to survive and perhaps prosper. I get that “Mermaid,” is a revenge tale but I was curious about the type of feminist ideology it speaks to.
I don’t think that killing men is necessarily the way women are going to prosper, though metaphorically you do have to tear down plenty of institutions that are dominated by men of a certain sort: sexism, racism, classism, ableism, transphobia, homophobia, etc. My own take on feminism is summed up by a line from Angela Carter’s work on De Sade: “A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.” Society has yet to find liberation.
Part of the work that feminists have to do is break down old stories that form our ideologies about our bodies, our minds, and our destinies. To do so, we’re pushing against not only the folks in power, but the ideals we grew up loving and later learned were manufactured and false. In “Postpartum”, I’m revisiting Sleeping Beauty, which is 100% a story of a romanticized rape. There is an Italian version that actually is pretty similar to what I wrote, where she does not wake up with a kiss and gives birth while still under the spell, but she marries the man who raped her and they live happily ever after. Even in versions where he only forces himself on her with his lips, it’s heavily romanticized and taught to be an ideal about how relationships between men and women are acted out. These narratives becomes sacred and a part of our cultural and personal identities – when we question them, rewrite them, or expose their underbelly, that’s a kind of psychic violence we’re performing: tearing apart the old stories that we have always cherished and making us question why we act the way we always have. It is dangerous to do so, because even though everyone suspects there is a man behind the curtain, it’s not the man we get mad at when we see he is there – we get mad at the hand that pulled the curtain back.
For “Mermaid”, that’s a different sort of exploration. The narrative voices – mermaid sisters to the famous one – are murdering the man their sister loves. We hurt the ones we love, even if we believe we are acting in their self interest. It’s a choice you have to make, and I don’t think it’s ever going to be clear one or not cause pain. There isn’t a good, perfect way to perform feminism, though there are certainly a lot of bad ways to do so.
I’m curious whether you write in other genres, perhaps realist fiction or romances or westerns (why not?) and if not how did you come to find your métier? And why are you primarily attracted to fairy tales (the form of which is so antiquated) or narrative that has elements of the marvellous or magical realism?
“Eden” actually started out as a dare from one of my MFA cohorts to write a realist story, and it is the only piece in the collection without a hint of the magical – though it’s certainly weird. I write non-fiction from time to time, but I mostly feel grounded in speculative.
I like writing fairy tales because I hate them, and I think it is important to critique it. Fairy tales are beloved because they are tied to a cultural identity, and they also reinforce how the world – presumably – works: the prince will marry the “true” princess, the wolf will be defeated by a cunning girl (though in too many version, it’s the woodsman who pops in at the third act who saves granny and little red) and the boy who works hard enough will be given rewards equal to his talents. However, fairy tales are also so flat and abstract that anyone can tune into their power and rewrite them for their own ends. The Nazi’s had a book of fairy tales which glorified antisemitism (moreso than the Grimms tales, which were plenty antisemitic already). The NRA came out with their own versions where they inserted a gun into Little Red Riding Hood, effectively making the hero of her story a firearm – which, considering how many people shoot wildly at what they are afraid of, is irresponsible at best. I recently found a line of skin lightening cremes that were branded Snow White. I’m drawn to these stories because they are malleable, and that malleability makes them extremely dangerous. They are familiar and simple enough where people latch on to them, possibly as a reminder of childhood, or because they have little justices played out and everything wraps up neat and tidy at the end. But if you change the ideology to fit your own and brand it with a cultural icon – then your ideology had better be in the service of dis-empowered people – not the people in charge, not the naked emperor, and not the foot at your throat.
So I’m aware that you are one of those writers who isn’t working in academia or is part of the publishing world in order to support herself and perhaps has one of those real world jobs that has helped so many writers survive and I wondered how do you balance work with your writing? Also, what are you working on right now?
I did try adjuncting for awhile, and here is my subsequent rant: It was not for me. I did it part-time while I was finishing my degree (I had moved away from my program to join my husband at his PhD during my comprehensive exam year) as well as a slew of other temporary gigs to stay afloat. When I finished my program, I went into adjuncting full-time. It was a miserable experience. While I expect to be exploited at any job I work because that is the nature of capitalism, I do not expect to be so flagrantly so. Working 60 hours minimum a week (and that was a week where there was no grading) for barely enough to cover my rent did not seem worth the mental and physical work, nor do I believe that academia was going to reward me at any point for toiling for scraps. That is, perhaps, the most fairy tale of all fairy tales. So I quit and now work full-time for a start-up out of California. While there is something unromantic about a 9-5, it pays well and once my hours are done, I don’t have to think about it. I have time to write at night and the weekends. Jobs are not something I see as personally fulfilling: they are the thing I perform to give myself time, space, and nourishment to perform what I actually want to do.
I’m currently working on a novel. It is not terribly different in theme from this collection: basically, a young girl in a fantastical setting sets out on a journey to save the world, but by the end she is going to have to make the choice of whether it is worth saving or not. There are elements of fairy tales in it, because I have a love-hate, vaguely co-dependent relationship with the genre.
Misha Rai is the first-ever PhD in Fiction to be awarded the Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies for her novel-in-progress, Blood We Did Not Spill. She is also a 2016-2017 Edward H. and Mary C. Kingsbury Fellow at Florida State University and has been the recipient of the 2015 George M. Harper Award. Her prose has appeared in Indiana Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Sonora Review and The Missouri Review blog. Misha Rai was born in Sonepat, Haryana and brought up in India. She currently serves as Fiction Editor for The Southeast Review and as Associate Reviews Editor for Pleiades.
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A.A. BalaskotvitsA.A. Balaskovits is a graduate of the MFA program at Bowling Green State University and a current PhD candidate at The University of Missouri. She lives with two fancy rats, Turing and Fermi. Her work can be found or is upcoming in Gargoyle Magazine, The Mad Hatters Review, The Allegheny Review, and in the Rapunzel’s Daughters anthology from Pink Narcissus Press. She can be mailed at alison.balaskovits@gmail.com.
A.A.’s Shimmer stories:
“Food My Father Feeds Me, Love My Husband Shows Me,” Shimmer #14
Interview With A.A. Balaskovits
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We've rolled up our sleeves and are ready to #resist. This quarter, all profits from our badger merchandise in our shop will go to support the SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER. Journals, tees, stickers, totes, and more! SHOP and #RESIST
Shimmer aspires to publish excellent fiction across lines of race, income, nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, geography, and culture, and therefore encourages submissions of diverse stories from diverse authors. This includes, but is not limited to: people of color, LBGTQIA, women, the impoverished, the elderly, and those with disabilities. We are not interested in acquiring fiction that denigrates or perpetuates stereotypes of the above groups.
We encourage authors of all backgrounds to write stories that include characters and settings as diverse and wondrous as the people and places of the world we live in. Every story sent to us should be well-researched, respectful, and conscientious.
SHIMMER 2016: THE COLLECTED STORIES
From the depths of the woods to the vast spaces between planets, this year of Shimmer will take you anywhere you want to go. Warm swamps, steaming devil hearts, a house where women craft the children they never had; a haunted orchard, a haunted house, a thousand haunted hearts. More about Shimmer 2016
SHIMMER 2015: THE COLLECTED STORIES
Our 2015 annual, hot off the presses! Fiction from Malon Edwards, Roshani Chokshi, Sunny Moraine, Maria Dahvana Headley, and more!
Kindle + Print
Join the Shimmer mailing list and never miss an update!
We'll send you a monthly update with news, sneak previews, and other goodies.
You'll also get Kelly Barnhill's short story "Dreadful Young Ladies" as a special bonus.
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Your purchase of Shimmer allows us to pay our artists and authors! Thanks for your support!
BROWSE STORIES BY TAG!
ai apocalypse archaeology art awesome birds children climate change daughters death detective fairy family flash forest foxes ghosts girls goddess grandmothers haunted haunted house heartbreak history hope light longing lost things love monsters mothers mystery noir non-binary road trip scientists shapeshifters space time travel trickster wacky war witches women zombie
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WELCOME TO SHIMMER! SUBSCRIBE! BACK ISSUES
SHIMMER 2014: THE COLLECTED STORIES
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SHIMMER 2016: THE COLLECTED STORIES
FICTION GUIDELINES AUTHORS BLOG ABOUT US
SHIMMERY PEOPLE
EMERITUS STAFF
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INTERVIEW WITH A.A. BALASKOVITS
A.A. BalaskotvitsA.A. Balaskovits is a graduate of the MFA program at Bowling Green State University and a current PhD candidate at The University of Missouri. She lives with two fancy rats, Turing and Fermi. Her work can be found or is upcoming in Gargoyle Magazine, The Mad Hatters Review, The Allegheny Review, and in the Rapunzel’s Daughters anthology from Pink Narcissus Press. She can be mailed at alison.balaskovits@gmail.com. Her story “Food My Father Feeds Me, Love My Husband Shows Me” appears in Shimmer #14.
Do you have favorite characters? Any characters, yours or others, are applicable.
I really love bland characters – red riding hood, bluebeard, the devil, superman, Britney Spears, etc. – because they don’t have an apparent personality or identity. It’s always a joy to be able to retell or rework stories with widely known blank-slate characters, because I feel like I’m filling in part of their collective identity. And I hope that readers and writers and general stand-arounders will also add new layers to them.
Do you work with a critique or writers group?
My current academic program requires that I send in work to be looked over by a group of my peers which is absolutely fantastic, but I also have a small writing group over e-mail with a few ladies that I trust with my writing and, to be sentimental, my heart. They understand my intentions without me having to voice them. My fiancé also reads my work, usually in their terrible early stages. I occasionally throw sentences at him that, without context, he attempts to extrapolate their meanings. He’s a saint.
Favorite book you’ve read recently?
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn and Saints and Strangers by Angela Carter. What absolutely fabulous ladies! I’m currently reading The Great Frustration by Seth Fried (love it!), as well as a collection of Russian fairy tales (delightful!).
How do you explain what writing is like? Is it something that you think about? Do you ever find yourself debating it with strangers?
I wish I knew who said this originally, but I read somewhere that writing is like a deformed, demented, bleeding, vomiting child that follows you wherever you go, sobbing its poor little malformed face off. You can’t ignore it, and it has the worst habit of showing up at fancy dinner parties or during movies you’d really like to watch. Writing, to me, is that poor baby – a part of you that is always aware, always asking for attention, never satiated, never fulfilled, never healed. I haven’t found myself debating writing with strangers, but possibly I haven’t met the right unknown person yet?
If you could choose any five literary people — real or imagined, living or not, friends or otherwise — for a tea party… who would they be? A night on the town, karaoke, whatever suits.
I want to go drinking with Kurt Vonnegut, rest his crazy old man head. To fulfill a childhood fantasy I’d love to go to tea with Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, and probably get into bed (a 1950’s bed, so two beds across the room from one another) with Angela Carter and whichever half of the Grimm’s brother’s was more attractive.
What was the absolute worst piece of advice someone gave you about writing?
That old standard, write what you know. I don’t know very much, and what I do know I don’t feel like sharing, nor is it particularly interesting. Writers generally know one thing, writing and other writers, and how often can you read a story about a writer without wanting to gag uncontrollably? I think we should write what we don’t know. The pursuit of discovering the intricacies of our ignorance is probably going to be a lot more satisfying on the page.
After all, if I was only writing what I knew, I’d have a lot of stories about a girl playing video games and eating guacamole.
Have you ever wanted to let your character[s] run your interview?
Dear lords, no. They’re generally unpleasant.
Is there something you do that no one ever asks you about? This can be anything — something unusual you eat, playing poker as a day job, a hobby, whatever you like.
I am a huge snuggie enthusiast.
LEAVE A REPLY
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BADGER ARMY
We've rolled up our sleeves and are ready to #resist. This quarter, all profits from our badger merchandise in our shop will go to support the SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER. Journals, tees, stickers, totes, and more! SHOP and #RESIST
Shimmer aspires to publish excellent fiction across lines of race, income, nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, geography, and culture, and therefore encourages submissions of diverse stories from diverse authors. This includes, but is not limited to: people of color, LBGTQIA, women, the impoverished, the elderly, and those with disabilities. We are not interested in acquiring fiction that denigrates or perpetuates stereotypes of the above groups.
We encourage authors of all backgrounds to write stories that include characters and settings as diverse and wondrous as the people and places of the world we live in. Every story sent to us should be well-researched, respectful, and conscientious.
SHIMMER 2016: THE COLLECTED STORIES
From the depths of the woods to the vast spaces between planets, this year of Shimmer will take you anywhere you want to go. Warm swamps, steaming devil hearts, a house where women craft the children they never had; a haunted orchard, a haunted house, a thousand haunted hearts. More about Shimmer 2016
SHIMMER 2015: THE COLLECTED STORIES
Our 2015 annual, hot off the presses! Fiction from Malon Edwards, Roshani Chokshi, Sunny Moraine, Maria Dahvana Headley, and more!
Kindle + Print
Join the Shimmer mailing list and never miss an update!
We'll send you a monthly update with news, sneak previews, and other goodies.
You'll also get Kelly Barnhill's short story "Dreadful Young Ladies" as a special bonus.
email address
SUBSCRIBE
WHERE TO FIND SHIMMER
Shimmer can be purchased from:
Weightless Books,
Amazon, and
Shimmer.
Your purchase of Shimmer allows us to pay our artists and authors! Thanks for your support!
BROWSE STORIES BY TAG!
ai apocalypse archaeology art awesome birds children climate change daughters death detective fairy family flash forest foxes ghosts girls goddess grandmothers haunted haunted house heartbreak history hope light longing lost things love monsters mothers mystery noir non-binary road trip scientists shapeshifters space time travel trickster wacky war witches women zombie
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Contributor Spotlight: A.A. Balaskovits
The short story “Put Back Together Again,” by A.A. Balaskovits was published in our Spring ’16 Issue and can be read here.
Tell us a little about “Put Back Together Again.”
ProfilePic2I’ve always been interested in writing about Superman and this is the closest I will get (while hopefully avoiding a lawsuit). I think he is the worst superhero in that he is (excepting current iterations or alternative versions) so very untouchable: a god pretending he is as weak as human beings, while also the only thing who can save us from… ourselves? There’s something very paternalistic there. Almost fascist. Yet, very attractive as well. So I wanted to write a Superman story where the Lois Lane character is less about trying to uncover who the guy flying about Metropolis is and more invested in, and disassociated by, all the other little horrors that happen: disease, smaller-than-world-ending-violence, interpersonal traumas. You know, things people, not gods, have to live with, and which there is often no easy fix for. So I wanted to pitch a very human Lane against a very, very untouchable Superman. This is what came out of it.
What was the most difficult part of this particular piece(s)?
Balancing everything. The earthquakes plus the miracle man plus Lizzy’s relationship with the narrator plus the narrators relationship with cigarettes… and the city as well! There’s a lot of elements that are at play here and it’s hard to try to figure out what looks like a structured chaos versus what just looks like an unintentional Pollock.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
I’m going to recommend a YA series that doesn’t get that much love: the Abarat series by Clive Barker. It’s a lovely, horrific romp that’s so clever and imaginative. When my neices are a little older, this is the kind of stuff I want them gobbling up.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be?
If they are paying? All of them.
Nah, totally China Mieville. He writes what I wish I had the courage, and the ability, to write. So I could learn a thing or eight.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
A few things. I’m trying to put together a science fiction short story, because I’ve never worked in that genre before though I am a huge fan of it. The problem is my poor understanding of how machines work and their potential to work. The other, major project is my novel which seems to be unwritten as much as it is written. That one is, oddly inspired by The Legend of Zelda and Mario games, about a young woman stuck living through her history again and again, and the consequences of breaking out of it.
Our thanks to A.A. Balaskovits for taking the time to answer a few questions and share her work. Read “Put Back Together Again” here: www.sequestrum.org/put-back-together-again
____________________________________
A.A. Balaskovits received her Ph.D. from the University of Missouri and her MFA from Bowling Green State University. Her work can be found in The Southeast Review, The Madison Review, Gargoyle, Booth, Wigleaf and many others. She recently finished a collection of stories, of which “Put Back Together Again” is part, and is working on a novel. She lives in South Carolina.
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Cartridge Lit About Submissions Contributors Masthead Fiction Poetry Non-fiction Issues Chapbooks The Airship (blog)
Welcome our new editor: A.A. Balaskovits!
Joel Hans & Justin Daugherty April 19, 2016
We’d like to take a moment to officially welcome A.A. Balaskovits, who we are bringing on as the third editor of Cartridge Lit. She will be helming up new social media initiatives, reading submissions, doing the kind of outreach we haven’t even thought of before, and generally keeping the airship afloat with her supreme delegation skills. We couldn’t be more thrilled to have her.
(And, yes, we know there’s only three of us still, but the gif was too good to pass up.)
Cartridge Lit has been around for two years—in that time, we’ve published a huge catalog of stories, poems, and essays, many of which arrived in the two issues we’ve put together thus far (with another coming very soon). We’ve published two chapbooks we’re incredibly proud of, held a chapbook contest, and have three more chapbooks planned for 2016. We think we’ve come a long way in the two years we’ve been around. But, back in late 2015, we (as in Justin and Joel) started to feel as though Cartridge Lit could do so much more. We have a good audience, but the gaming community is absolutely massive, and we think they could find a huge amount of value in what we do—if only they knew we existed.
We started a search for someone with specific skills and ideas relating to social media, and got some remarkable candidates. These kinds of choices are never easy, but A.A. had a combination of skills that we think fit well with the current dynamic: she has deep experience in social media from her time with The Missouri Review, and understands better than we do how to publicize the journal, both on Twitter and via the wider game journalism community. She’s an incredible writer, a gamer through and through, and she loves EarthBound (again, hence the gif), which is always a good thing.
We wanted to give A.A. a space to introduce herself:
Hey! I’m beyond excited to work with Joel and Justin on Cartridge Lit. This is a magazine I’ve admired for awhile, so being on staff feels as exciting as that moment when Crono kicks it in Chrono Trigger and you can finally have the far superior Lucca lead the party. Also, belated spoiler alert.
I’ve been a gamer since I could hold a controller and an avid fan of VG fanfiction, so send your words over! I’m really stoked to read them.
And for the more professional biography:
A.A. Balaskovits lives in South Carolina with three cats. She is the author of Magic for Unlucky Girls (SFWP, 2017), which won the grand prize at the Santa Fe Writers Program in 2015. Her work appears in The Southeast Review, Wigleaf, Gargoyle, The Madison Review, Booth and many others. She’d love to read your SNES RPG inspired work.
All in all, Cartridge Lit is about to become a cooler and more dynamic place than it’s ever been. In celebration of that, let’s all give A.A. the welcome she deserves: tweet her with some well-deserved congratulations!
Joel Hans and Justin Daugherty are the editors of Cartridge Lit. And, now, so is A.A. Balaskovits. @joelhans @JDaugherty1081 @AABalaskovits
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Magic for Unlucky Girls
Publishers Weekly.
263.51 (Dec. 12, 2016): p127.
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Full Text:
Magic for Unlucky Girls
A.A. Balaskovits. Santa Fe Writers Project,
$14.95 trade paper (230p) ISBN 978-1939650-66-5
The mundane and bizarre walk hand in hand--or sometimes run around, setting fire to everything in their
path--in Balaskovits's stories about girls and women thrust into strange circumstances. A mysterious
unspeaking man with apparent superpowers becomes the hope of a city wracked by earthquakes in "Put
Back Together Again." The alchemist of "Suburban Alchemy" learns that being a master of the changeable
art doesn't mean he can cope with the changes in his tween daughter. A woman takes her ailing grandfather
to Israel in search of an old family story that may be about her in "The Ibex Girl of Qumran." The evils of
strict religion and abuse lead a group of desperate girls to try to escape through a sacrifice in "Bloody
Mary." There isn't a single tired trope here--in fact, there are few familiar elements at all--so readers looking
for something askew from any fantasy they've read before will want to get to know the unlucky but
determined girls of Balaskovits's stories. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Magic for Unlucky Girls." Publishers Weekly, 12 Dec. 2016, p. 127. General OneFile,
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p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475225059&it=r&asid=a4162ef70e63b4d91b3ae7b5022d22d8.
Accessed 14 Sept. 2017.
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Survive and You Can Do Anything: A Review of Magic for Unlucky Girls by A.A. Balaskovits 0
BY ASHLEY MILLER ON MARCH 20, 2017 BOOK REVIEWS
Magic for Unlucky Girls
By A.A. Balaskovits
SFWP, April 2017
226 pages, $14.95
Reviewed by Ashley Miller
Fairy tales and folklore, birthed in pre-text society and tumbled through time as fireside ghost stories, printed books, and animated films, have largely been bred with the same intentions. Tales should entertain, but most importantly impose lessons on a rapt audience. How better to teach children not to be little piggies than to threaten them with a witch who will eat their fattened bones? Magic for Unlucky Girls, A.A. Balaskovits’ collection of fourteen stories, is steeped in this historical intent. Balaskovits has built these stories from lore, urban legend, and fairy tale and she relishes the capacity for strange that the fantastical genre allows. Balaskovits even thanks her mentors in the acknowledgments section for supporting her infatuation with “weird stories” and she flaunts this infatuation with ease. But her stories go beyond mere “weird story” and while they tend to defy easy moral, a moral is still there and it is strong.
In each story Balaskovits, artfully cannibalizes familiar characters or situations from lore—we get tastes of Rapunzel, the Little Mermaid, King Midas, and Eve—and chews and regurgitates them into new, unexpected stories. Her flawed characters search for the magic of redemption only to meet raw, chopped endings that fester like open wounds compared to blasé happily-ever-afters.
The stories themselves are so weird and chopped (and entertaining) that the collection may easily be thought of as just weird stories; fun revamped fairy tales for a modern reader. The autonomous nature of each story, set in their own disparate worlds with their own laws and time and independent characters, assists this sort of thinking. Settings jump from modern, like a city built on fault lines and a middle-America farm town, to ancient castles, rural, pre-electricity hamlets, and then back to a more familiar, contemporary suburbia. While a pulsing vein of magic ties the collection together, the promise of theme, purpose, or lesson is so subtle at times that there seems to be little that encourages a reader to dig deeper.
This is far from reason to pass on Magic for Unlucky Girls. Balaskovits’ stories are spectacularly entertaining and artfully executed. But why play with fairy tale, such a loaded genre, if not to play with the ideas of lesson and moral? Where is the moral? The bloodline this book springs from demands that readers peel back the oddity of plot to expose this ancient moral heart.
These stories twist recognizable princesses and heroines into stronger, sharper, sometimes villainous things—one fair maiden craves blood more than books, Balaskovits’ Red Riding Hood enslaves the Wolf, her Rapunzel snips her husband’s eyes from his skull—and sometimes paint beasts with sharp teeth as victims. Gore and violence are twisted as well; in easily grotesque prose, Balaskovits describes tearing flesh with teeth as “a strange, un-soft thing… all spice and sorrow” and makes feeding a rotting loved one’s corpse to a wolf as perfunctory as a grocery list. These grisly reiterations of familiar tales are stylish and gory enough to keep little piggies entertained, but the ancient moral heart thrums in these, the only predictable elements of the collection; the presence of magic and the understanding that the world is unpredictably harsh, but you must be harsher to survive.
Be tough or perish is the moral within the stories that press women to be harder than any beast, ghost, or person that crosses their path. The crown jewels of the collection, “Food My Father Feeds Me, Love My Husband Shows Me,” “Bloody Mary,” and “Let Down Your Long Hair and Then Yourself” with characters who are anything but frail maidens, embody this lesson the fullest. These three stories center on women who unexpectedly blossom into stronger or more cunning versions of their adversaries and deliver some of the clearest understandings of what it means to be a woman, or a girl, in a hard, cruel world.
While male characters throughout the collection strive for similar growth, only women seem able to fully embody their potential, as if by some intrinsic magic in womanhood. “All girls…” Balaskovits spells out in “Bloody Mary,” “[know]from the moment they hit the outside air that they [are]in for a heavy dose of unfairness and pain” which makes that intrinsic magic spark in every girl who is unlucky enough to exist.
Like the outside air, Magic for Unlucky Girls is unapologetically violent, more in tune with dark Germanic fairy tales than inoculated Disney versions, and is served rare. Rape, murder, neglect, all the sad, dark things imaginable—it’s just a day in Balaskovits’ Magic Kingdom—but don’t look away too quickly, there is heart and magic here as well.
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ASHLEY MILLER
Ashley Miller is a writer living in the suburbs of Chicago. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts from the University of Baltimore and has had writing published in MiddleWestern Voice and Welter.
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Book Review in Fiction, Short Stories
Magic for Unlucky Girls: Stories
By A.A. Balaskovits Santa Fe Writers Project 230 pp.
Reviewed by Jen Michalski
April 7, 2017
Fairytales and foreboding dominate this atmospheric collection.
“It’s always been a man-beast, she scoffed, her throat rioting up into a hack. Can’t tell the story right, she said, spitting into the cold hearth, unless you tell it like it’s always been told.”
So says Gran-ma-ma in “Beasts,” from A.A. Balaskovits’ debut collection, Magic for Unlucky Girls, winner of the Literary Awards Program from the press Santa Fe Writers Project. But the similarities to the tale of Little Red Riding Hood end there: Little Red and her grandmother are not devoured by a wolf, nor saved by a woodsman.
Instead, “Beasts” warns of the dangers of domestication, of turning those we purport to love into people they are not. It also hints that the real power brokers of the forest (and beyond) are the fairer sex.
Balaskovits explores similar themes of magic and savagery in these pages; like “Beasts,” some reimagine fairytales such as Rapunzel (“Let Down Your Long Hair and Then Yourself”); others invoke the gauzy, Eastern European settings of fairytales, but with industrial, Kafka-esque updates (“All Who Tremble”); and yet others have no predictable markers of time or place (“The Romantic Agony of Lemon Head” and “Juniper”).
In this way, Balaskovits creates her own mythology that transcends time and upends traditional ideas about helpless damsels and men-as-beasts.
Although the fairytales in Magic are evocative, their aforementioned gauziness clouds together if you read more than a few at a time. What really draws blood in this collection are the stories in which the fairytale elements are spliced into more conventional, modern narratives. Such is the case in the opening story, “Put Back Together Again,” which evokes The Mothman Prophecies.
In a town besieged by increasing earthquakes, our protagonist, a female med student who works in an ER piecing back together the lower, snake-bitten strata of society (jadedly called the hump dumps), encounters a miracle man. As he begins to save lives during increasingly disruptive earthquakes (including the narrator’s own), the town splits into factions: Christ versus anti-Christ. Here, the truth never matters, only the camp that one is in: salvation or fate.
Another standout, “Eden,” evokes a strange feminine cruelty reminiscent of Shirley Jackson. “Everyone called him a horse fucker,” the teenage boy narrator says of Rolo, who works in a stable on the outskirts of town. The boy and his friends watch Rolo work while they smoke and ogle nude pictures.
Once a year, there’s an Apple Fest where the proverbial Apple Queen is both virgin and whore, tempting the narrator and his friends, and eventually Rolo. When a rumor circulates about the father of the suddenly pregnant Apple Queen, the women of the town are judge and jury, and savage ones at that. How do we atone for our sins? In a tale of virginity and innocence lost, atonement occurs at casting the first stone.
The jewel of the collection is “Bloody Mary.” Salter and her gritty, impoverished girlfriends find both safety and power in a place that’s secluded from their prying town’s eyes. Witches Castle is “a stone building covered in graffiti and moss,” where they bring items they have shoplifted or stolen from their parents to share and to fetishize in hopes of escaping their lives, their sexually abusive fathers and brothers, and the scornful judgments of those who glance at their desperate situations and see only outer savagery.
One of the girls, Salter’s girlfriend-girlfriend, Helene, plump and pretty and kind like her name, lives in a slightly better part of town and daydreams with Salter that they will live together when their parents die: “Salter took comfort in that goodness, though she never voiced how afraid she was that it might all be only wishes.” One day, Salter brings a book she has snuck out of the library, The Lives of Witches, and convinces the girls to take part in the ritual of Bloody Mary.
The risk, albeit high, seems worth it to a girl like Salter, who has nothing to lose. Or does she? A new girl, Mary, transfers to their school from Los Angeles after her father, a lawyer, takes a job at the town glass factory.
Helene is immediately friendly with shy, youngish, Mary, perhaps a little too friendly, convincing Salter that the girls need to perform the ritual immediately, but not to involve Helene “because Helene was, they all agreed, something like beautiful, and there was no reason to get beauty messed up in performance.” Especially now that Salter has found the perfect sacrifice to Bloody Mary.
Like the townswomen of “Eden,” who misguidedly think they are righting wrongs, the tragedy of “Bloody Mary” is manifold when Salter learns that “she had tapped into a cruel, wrong sort of magic after all.” It’s a heartbreaking tale, and we ache for Salter as much as we recoil from her unspeakable brutality.
“Magic,” for unlucky girls, Balaskovits reveals throughout, is never really magic at all, at least not the kind with princes and castles and ever after. It’s the illusory promise, the truth laid bare; the only antidote is to swallow the bitter pill and hope it makes you not only wiser, but stronger.
Jen Michalski is author of the novels The Summer She Was Under Water and The Tide King, the collections From Here and Close Encounters, and a couplet of novellas called Could You Be With Her Now. She is managing editor of jmww and host of the monthly fiction reading series “Starts Here!”
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