Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Expense of a View
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://pollybuckingham.com/
CITY: Spokane
STATE: WA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://sites.ewu.edu/mfa/the-people/polly-buckingham/ * http://pollybuckingham.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/PollyBuckinghamResume062016.pdf
RESEARCHER NOTES: WHY IS JOINT ENTRY BO
LC control no.: no 00021190
Descriptive conventions:
rda
LC classification: PS3602.U2624
Personal name heading:
Buckingham, Polly
Located: Spokane (Wash.)
Birth date: 1967-05-25
Affiliation: Eastern Washington University
Stringtown Press
Profession or occupation:
College teachers
Found in: StringTown, issue 1: [p. 1] (Polly Buckingham)
The expense of a view, 2016: ECIP title page (Buckingham
Polly) data view (birth date: May 25 1967; lives in
Spokane, Washington; teaches at Eastern Washington
University and runs StringTown Press; previous book was
A Year of Silence in 2014)
Associated language:
eng
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PERSONAL
Born May 25, 1967.
EDUCATION:Eckerd College, B.A., 1989; Eastern Washington University, M.F.A., 2001; also University of Washington Extension Program, certification in advanced literary fiction, 1997.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Current, Astoria, OR, editor and layout person, 1992-94; OUT!, Astoria, OR, founding editor, 1994-95; Fremont Place Book News, Seattle, WA, editor and design artist, 1997-98; StringTown, Medical Lake, WA, founding editor, 1998-; StringTown Press, Medical Lake, WA, founding editor 2000-; Willow Springs Books, associate director, 2014-; Eastern Washington University, English and creative writing faculty member, 2001-15.
Memorial Chapbook Award, 2014, for A Year of Silence; Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, University of North Texas Press, 2015, for The Expense of a View.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Wilde Stories 2008: The Best of the Year’s Gay Speculative Fiction, edited by Steve Berman, Lethe Press, 2009; Lilac City Fairy Tales, edited by Sharma Shields, Cup of Stars Press, 2014; Railtown Almanac: A Spokane Poetry Anthology, edited by Jeffrey G. Dodd and Thomas Edward Caraway, Sage Hill Press, 2014; and Lilac City Fairy Tales, edited by Sharma Shields, 2016. Contributor of short fiction to periodicals, including Eckerd College Review, Gettysburg Review, Heliotrope, Literary Review, Moth, New Orleans Review, North American Review, Pembroke Review, Potomac Review, Raven Chronicles, Siren, Spokesman Review, Tampa Review, and Zone. Contributor of poetry to periodicals, including Albatross, Kalliope, Cascadia Review, Chattahoochee Review, Cirque, Confrontation, Hiram, Louisville Review, Marble, Mo, Red Branch, Three Penny Review, Wandering Hermit, Whitefish Review, and Wisconsin Review. Also contributing writer to African American Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia of Multiculturalism, Salem Press, 1992-93; coeditor of Rain magazine, 1993-95.
SIDELIGHTS
Polly Buckingham is a poet and fiction writer whose poetry and short fiction have appeared in periodicals and anthologies. At her website, Buckingham, a three-time finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Prize, stated that she was influenced by surrealist poets, including Pablo Neruda, Marosa DiGiorgio, Laura Kasischke, Robert Bly, Jean Valentine, and Tomas Tranströmer. As for her fiction writing, she points to influences such as John Cheever, Alice Munro, Joy Williams, Gabriel García Márquez, William Faulkner, José Saramago, Jeannette Winterson, Muriel Spark, and Kevin McIlvoy.
Buckingham’s debut collection of short stories, The Expense of a View, won the 2016 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. The fourteen stories in The Expense of a View primarily revolve around characters under extreme pressure. “As the title of the book suggests, these stories are preoccupied with people who don’t have the capital to obtain a view—either literal or figurative,” noted Masters Review website contributor Sarah Hoenicke.
The Expense of a View begins with a story titled “Honey,” which focuses on a woman who has a new job and, as a result, has come to live in a new place where she has no new friends. The story addresses the woman’s observations of the things around her, from graffiti accusing a former neighbor of being a “snitch” to a dog that has died in her woodshed. “Buckingham plays with the language, evoking things there and not there, the sense of two worlds coexisting,” wrote Masters Review website contributor Hoenick, For example, Hoenick poses the question of whether or not the dog in the story is really dead. Hoenick noted: “These differing interpretations of observed phenomena provide the reader with insight into the stories that follow and the collection as a whole.”
The title story finds a young women named Grace trying to break up with her boyfriend, Lang. Grace eventually decides to move across the country to get away from her past. “The rest of the story, Gracie seems to be in a holding pattern, trying to move on from Lang, attempting to regain traction,” wrote Mike Czyz in a review for the Story 366 website. An example of Grace’s inability to move on is her throwing an empty suitcase into the Columbia River numerous times.
Another story titled “My Doppelganger’s Arms” features a lonely woman who has an intimate encounter on a beach with a young woman drifter. The drifter soon disappears afterward, only to be found by the protagonist “with a needle in her arm against a surreal sky,” as noted by New York Journal of Books website contributor Michael Adelberg, who added: “The reader is left wondering if the protagonist and the drifter are, in fact, the same person.” In an interview with Jan Bowman for the Jan Bowman Writer website, Buckingham noted that “My Doppelganger’s Arms” is one of her favorite stories and was based on a dream she had. She told Bowman: “This is a story that had been around over ten years before it got picked up. It is one of my stranger stories, … and when I brought it to workshops people used to say, ‘You can’t do that.’ Well, I did.”
Yet another story, “Festival,” focuses on Sheila and Nick, teenage parents who take their baby, Michelle, to a music festival. The underlying feeling is that both Shiela and Nick are too young to be parents and form a successful family. Nick goes around thinking that he is no longer free and wishing he could return to his carefree days. Eventually, however, Nick comes to accept that he is now an adult with responsibilities and a child whom he loves.
“Though the circumstances here are often dismally bleak, at her best Buckingham offers glimmers of pale but definite hope,” wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor. New York Journal of Books contributor Adelberg noted “Buckingham’s consistently smart (and slightly sad) narration” and went on to write: “Her stories are united by characters … achieving a small measure of peace and grace amid difficult circumstances.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Internet Bookwatch, February, 2017, review of The Expense of a View.
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2016, review of The Expense of a View.
Spokesman-Review (Spokane WA), December 11, 2015, Carolyn Lamberson, “EWU’s Buckingham Wins Short Fiction Prize.”
ONLINE
Eastern Washington University WordPress Platform, https://sites.ewu.edu/ (June 27, 2017), author faculty profile.
Jan Bowman Writer, http://janbowmanwriter.blogspot.com/ (February 26, 2013), Jan Bowman, “Entry # 137—Polly Buckingham, Interview with Editor & Writer.”
Masters Review, https://mastersreview.com/ (June 27, 2017), Sarah Hoenicke, review of Expense of a View.
New York Journal of Books, http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (June 27, 2017), Michael Adelberg, review of Expense of a View.
Polly Buckingham Website, http://pollybuckingham.com (June 27, 2017).
Story 366, https://story366blog.wordpress.com/ (November 18, 2016), Mike Czyz, review of Expense of a View.
Polly Buckingham’s collection The Expense of a View won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction.
Her chapbook A Year of Silence won the Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award for Fiction (2014), and she was the recipient of a 2014 Washington State Artists Trust fellowship.
Her work appears in The Gettysburg Review, The Threepenny Review, Hanging Loose, Witness, North American Review, The Moth, New Orleans Review, Poetry Daily and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award in 2011, 2012, and 2013.
Polly Buckingham is founding editor of StringTown Press. She teaches creative writing at Eastern Washington University and is associate director of Willow Springs Books, Eastern’s student run literary press.
Artist’s Statement
As a poet and fiction writer, I am more interested in what is unknown than what is known. I value mystery above empiricism. This notion is a political one in that it rejects the dominant culture’s need for data and facts and instead values magical thinking and the messiness of what it means to be human. My stories explore the psychological, the spiritual, and the natural worlds because these are the areas where mystery resides. My fiction is driven less by plot and more by images, patterns, and characters. My characters are typically deeply introspective, often rural and often under great psychological duress or up against enormous changes in their lives. They find themselves lost, disoriented, and unclear about what is real and what is not. My intent is to push readers to value those moments of hesitation so that they too might slow down and appreciate the world for its greatest mysteries: the dream world, the natural world, and the world of the psyche. The title of my most recent collection of stories, What the Dead Know, exemplifies the way in which I find solace in the unknown.
I am influenced by deep image and surrealist poets such as Pablo Neruda, Marosa DiGiorgio, Laura Kasischke, Robert Bly, Jean Valentine and Tomas Transtromer for their ability to pull the world of order out from under our feet and push us to feel our way through the poem instead of think our way through it. In fiction, I am drawn to the speculative and the experimental as well as to writers who have a strong sense of region and of the natural world: John Cheever, Alice Munro, Joy Williams, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, William Faulkner, Jose Saramago, Jeannette Winterson, Muriel Spark, and Kevin McIlvoy.
POLLY BUCKINGHAM Writer ’s Resume P.O. Box 1406 Medical Lake WA 99022- 1406 Home: 509 299- 7535 EWU Office: 509 359- 6022 Email: pollymbuckingham@gmail.com; pbuckingham@ewu.edu Education 2001 M.F.A. Creative Writing Fiction —Eastern Washington Unive rsity awarded Spring 2001, 4.0 GPA 1989 BA in Creative Writing, Eckerd College, St. Petersburg FL awarded 1989 —thesis received A with Honors 1997 Certification in Advanced Literary Fiction —University of Washington Extension Program, Seattle awarded 1997 2000 Writing workshop with Robert Abel —Oregon Writers, Cannon Beach OR, Summer 2000 1991 Attended three summer writing conferences: University of Indiana Bloomington, Haystack in Cannon Beach OR and Centrum in Port Townsend WA, Summer 1991 Publications Books 2016 The Expense of a View . Winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Award for Short Fiction, forthcoming from the University of North Texas Press. 2014 A Year of Silence . Winn er of the Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Contest for Fiction . Orlando: Florida Review Press. Fiction 2016 "Three of Swords." Pembroke Review 48: 73 -82. "Clown Motel." Lilac City Fairy Tales . Ed. Sharma Shields. Spokane: Scablands Press: 51 -53. 2015 “Horrible Stories About Mice.” Gettysburg Review , 533 -554 . "Festival." Witness XXXVII.3 (Fall): web. "Honey." Signs of Life: Contemporary Jewelry Art and Literature . Seattle: Facere Jewelry Art Gallery. 2014 “The Ghost Fair at Panamint City.” Lilac City Fairy Tales . Ed. Sharma Shields. Spokane: Cup of Stars Press: 98 -101. “Mirage.” Spokesman Review , Summer Stories Series, 17 August 2014: D1, D7. “Void of Course.” Zone 3 29.2 (Fall): 17- 27. “The Ghost Hole.” Catch and Release (blog for Columbia: A Journal ), March 28, web. 2013 “My Old Man.” Potomac Review , 53 (Fall): 126 -138. “The Apology,” The Moth , Issue 12, Spring : 34-35. 2012 “Burial,” a novel excerpt from Long White Robe , Cirque 3.2: 66- 69. 2009 “Monster Movie.” The Literary Review 53.1: 147 -160. “Compliance.” New Orleans Review 34.2: 130 -139. “Burial Chapter 8.” Repr inted in Wilde Stories 2008: The Best of the Year’s gay Speculative Fiction . Ed. Steve Berman. Lethe Press: Maple Shade NJ. 163 -175. 2007 “My Doppelganger’s Arms.” North American Review . May/Aug : 28- 32. “Burial: Chapter 8” (novel excerpt). Raven Chronicl es 13.1: 18-24. 2006 “Burial: Chapter 7” (novel excerpt). Raven Chronicles 12.2 : 33- 38. 2004 “Night Train” Tampa Review 25 (2004): 69- 75. Nominated for a Pushcart. 2003 “How to Make an Island.” Heliotrope Iss ue 7: 55- 63. Buckingham 2 “Hickory Dickory Dock.” Raven Chronicles 10.3 : 8 -12. 1998 “White Street.” Eckerd College Review 1.1 : 53- 59. 1996 “Freak Show .” The Siren 3.1 : 49- 57. Poetry 2016 "The Bell and the Ocean," "My Own Best Messenger," Milo's Alive" forthcoming in The Poetry Review . "Blue King,” “Disturbanc e,” “Contemplation” forthcoming Hanging Loose 107. "I Fell Into Morbid Pond" and "Dead People's Clothes" forthcoming in Mudfish . "Florida Morning." Confrontation 119 (Spring): 75. "Contemplation." Wisconsin Review , 49.2 (Spring): 14. 2015 “Winter on the Chicken Farm " and “the old city.” Hanging Loose 105. 2014 “The River People,” “The Last Day of January.” Railtown Almanac : A Spokane Poetry Anthology . Ed. Dodd and Caraway. Sage Hill Press: Spokane. 12 -13. “The Moment of Death.” Hubbub , Winter. Winner of the Kenneth O. Hanson Award. “The Knocking.” The Louisville Review 76 (Fall): 9. “Recalibration.” Reposted on Poetry Daily, Sep 23: http://poems.com/poem.php?date=16337 . “Recalibration.” Threepenny Review 139 (Fall): 13 . “Your Big Toe.” Hiram 75 (Spring): 28. “The Radio on Salnave Road.” Red Branch 4 (Spring): 68- 69. “After You’re Gone” (Pushcart nominee) and “Morning Wash,” Green Hills Literary Lantern XXV (June): web . “The Thinker,” “The River People,” “The Last Day of January.” “Savior,” “Driving Home,” “This Thin Road,” and “Spirits.” Cascadia Review, January . 2013 “The Giant’s Heart,” The Moth 15 (Winter ): 35. “Exile.” Cirque 4.2 : 9. 2012 “The Crone.” Chattahoochee Review 32.1: 76. “Where I’ve Sprinkled Seeds.” Whitefish Review 11: 111. 2008 “Landscape” and “The Sound of Longing” MO: Writings from the River 3.1 : 53 -55. 2007 “The Temple Steps,” “Hangman Creek,” and “My Country.” Marble: a Poetry Journal 2.1: 37, 40, 42. “The bridge the conference woman is building.” Cranky 2.3: 92. 2005 “Laws of Thermodynamics.” Wandering Hermit 1: 86 -87. “The Ferry Ride,” “Nocturne,” Redactions 4/5 : 6 -7. 2004 “The Fish Devour Us,” “Russian Snow,” and “Drinking Wine with the Dog.” Redactions 3. “Ms. Chisolm’s Red Jacket.” Hubbub 20 : 45. 2002 “Perdita's Wedding and the Dodge Scamp.” Firebrush 1: 10- 11. “September” and “Night Life.” Heliotrope 5 : 17- 19. 2001 “Easter Morning ” and “Grieving at the Longest Traffic Light.” Candlelight Bard 1 (2001): 15 -16. “Wash Me Clean.” Manzanita Quarterly 3.2 : 15. 2000 “Here in the White Room ” and “MoonBoy.” Snow Monkey 2.1 : 14 -15. “Perkins Lane Underwater Park.” Farm Pulp 37: Millennial Dinner Music 2000. 1999 “The Virgin Mother” and “My Youngest Child.” Windblown Sheets: Poems by Mothers and Daughters. Ast oria, Oregon: Clatsop Community College. 1999: 31, 66. 1997 “The Big Sky.” Point No Point Spring/Summer 1997: 11. 1995 “Baby’s Gone Away.” Exquisite Corpse 54 : 13. 1992 “Hotel Florida.” Kalliope XIV.2 : 13. “Middle Beach.” Albatross 1992 (excerpted in 1993 Poet’s Market ) Buckingham 3 Other 2008 Editor Work Stories: An Anthology of Student Writing. I c ompiled, edited and published a collection of student narratives about work. The compilation covers some six years of the best student work stories from my 101 classroom. I wrote the Preface (for students) and the Introduction, an essay on the teaching of narrative in the composition classroom, for instructors. This project was paid for through a grant from EWU’s Teaching and Learning Cent er. 750 copies were printed for use by the Composition Program at Eastern. I visit TA classrooms and introduce the book and have also provided online support. 2008. 2005 Contributor to Bylines : 2005 Writer’s Desk Calendar edit ed and published by Linda Hagen Miller: Spokane, Washington. Grants, Awards and Residencies Writing 2016 Kenneth O. Hanson Award from Hubbub for a poem judged by Ken Germer EWU College of Arts and Letters Scholarly & Creative Excellence Award for 2015 -2016 Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction Contest: Honorable Mention for "The Grandmother's Vision" 2015 Winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, UNT Press for The Expense of a View Finalist for the Tampa Review Prize in Poetry (one of ten) for A Day Like This Semifinalist for the Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize for The Stolen Child and Other Stories 2014 Washington State Artists Trust Fund Fellowship for $7,500 Pushcart nomination for "After You're Gone" from Green Hills Literary Lantern 2013 Finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Book Award for What the Dead Know (one of ten) Sou’wester Artists Residency, two weeks, Seaview WA 2012 Finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Book Award for The Stolen Child and Other Stories Finalist of the Bakeless Prize for The Stolen Child and Other Stories Finalist Whidbey Island Emerging Writers Contest for Long White Robe (a novel) 2011 Finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Book Award for The Stolen Child and Other Stories 2008 Visiting Writing for Illwaco School District, paid by the Espy Foundation, 2007- 2008 Spokane Prize for Fiction: Semifinalist for The Expense of a View , stories Blue Lynx Prize: Semifinalist for The River People , poetry Snake Nation Review Prize: Finalist for The Expense of a View , storie s 2007 Spokane Prize for Fiction: Semifinalist for The Expense of a View , stories 2006 Scotia House Writer in Residence, Newport, WA, 2006- present Soapstone Residency: awarded a two week writing residency on the coast of Oregon 2004 Pushcart nomination for fiction from Tampa Review Editors’ Choice Award from Heliotrope for fiction 1995 Oregon Fellowship for Literary Fiction from the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts 1994 Grant from the Oregon Coast Council for the Arts to complete draft of a novel, 1994 1989 Writing and Honors scholarships towards undergraduate tuition, 1985- 1989 Teaching 2012 Faculty Merit Award in Teaching , $1,500 award, judged a t the university level. 2007 Teaching and Learning Center Grant: awarded to compile, e dit and publish Work Stories: An Anthology of Student Writing , including onli ne support for instructors . 2006 Teaching and Learning Center Technology Grant, Teaching and Learning Cent er, EWU: awarded to set up and facilitate Open Composition, a Blackboard site desig ned to help new TA’s. The site includes audio clips from lecturers on topics in teaching composition and other teaching material: prompts, samples papers, etc... provided by lecturers and other TA’s. It is designed to help Buckingham 4 facilitate cooperative sharing of materials in the department between TA’s and lecturers. 2004 Title III Technology Grant , Teaching and Learning Center, EW U: awarded to transition move a distance learning course online (Introduction to Creative Writing). Publishing 2005 Cultura l Development Authority of King County and the Seat tle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs awarded to Sybil James and StringTown Press to publish her memoir Ho Chi Mihn’s Motorbike , fall . Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, City of Seattle awarded to M att Briggs and StringTown Press to publish his collection of short stories The Moss Gatherers, Spring. 2003 Seattle Arts Commission grant awarded to Anna Mockler and StringTown Pres s to publish her collection of short stories, Burning Salt . Teaching Experience SENIOR LECTURER OF CREATIVE WRITING . Eastern Washington University , Cheney WA 2001- 2015 3/3/3 load in creative writing, literature, and composition Creative Writing 515: Literary Editing and Design: Literary Publishing, Fall 2013 -present Creative Writing 698: Internship in Instruction (Writers’ in the Community), Fall 2013 Creative Writing 417: Creative Writing Workshop: Poetry, Spring 2013- present Creative Writing 311: Form and Theory of Fiction, Winter 2013- present Creative Writing 417: Creative Writing Workshop: Fiction, Fall 2012- present Creative Writing 315: Advanced Fiction, Online Learning, 2004- present Creative Writing 314: Advanced Poetry, Online Learning, 2002- present Creative Writing 210: Introduction to Creative Writing , Online Learning, 2002- present Creative Writing 210: In troduction to Creative Writing, Summer 2003 English 695B: Internship: Teach Lit (Intro. to Lit), 2012 -present English 170: Introduction to Literature Instructor for a 45 student class from 2002- 2008. Lecturer for one week each quarter for a 300 person class. My lectures include Poetry of Witness and Contemporary Speculative Fiction, 2010 -present Co -director of 300 person lecture class, 2011- present English 270: Introduction to Fiction, Online Learning Spring 2009- present English 270: Introduction to Fiction, 2006- present English 271: Introduction to Poetry, 2004- present English 100: Fundamentals of Standard English, 2001- present English 101: Exposition and Argumentation, 2001- present English 201: Analysis, Research, and Documentation, 2001- present CREATIVE WRITING INSTRUCTOR . Clatsop Community College, Astoria OR 1994- 95 Courses taught: Writing for Publication: Fiction Writing for Publication: Poetry CREATIVE WRITING INSTRUCTOR . Parnassus Books, Astoria OR 1993 Courses taught: Writ ing Workshop, Poetry and Fiction, three ten week classes Literary Editing and Publications Experience ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF WILLOW SPRINGS BOOKS . 2014- present Willow Sprin gs Books is a graduate and undergraduate student run literary press publishing the Spokane Prize for Fiction and the ACME Poetry Series of surrealistic Buckingham 5 chapbooks under the direction of Christopher Howell and Polly Buckingham. FOUNDING EDITOR OF STRINGTOWN . 1998- present Founding editor, publisher, distributor and volunteer coordinator. StringTown is a Northwest annual literary magazine, circulation ava ilable in Northwest independent bookstores and online. FOUNDING EDITOR STRINGTOWN PRESS. 2000- present Most recent titles include the following: The Last Woro Woro to Teichvill e , Nonfiction by Sibyl James, 2011, Handbook for Drowning : a Novel in Stories (reprint) by David Shields, 2007. See http://www.home.earthlink.net/~stringtown/index.html. CO -EDITOR RAIN Magazine. 1993- 1995 Editing, layout and design for a community lite rary magazine funded by Clatsop Community College . Commercial and Nonprofit Writing, Editing, Design and Layout Experience EDITOR . Casey Family Employee Guidelines for Casey Family Program, Seattle WA. 1999 Layout, creation of index, copyediting and proofreading for employee manual EDITOR AND DESIGN ARTIST . Fremont Place Book News , Seattle WA. 1997- 1998 Wrote book reviews , designed and edited newsletter for an i ndependent bookstore. FOUNDING EDITOR : OUT! on the Coast , Astoria OR 1994- 1995 A quarterly newsletter published by the North Coast Pride Network PAC GHOST WRITER . 1996 “The Best Possible Life,” by Pat Lavis published in Grapevine , Dec. EDITOR AND LAYOUT PERSON . The Current , Astoria OR. 1992- 1994 Wrote articles and did layout for a monthly newsl etter for KMUN Community Radio. WRITER AND RESEARCHER . Salem Press, Pasadena CA. 1992- 1993 Contributing writer to African American Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia of Multiculturalism Public Readings and Editors’ Panels Public Readings 2016 Get Lit!, Spokane WA Lilac City Fairytales reading at the Bing, Spokane WA Washtucna School District reading, Washtucna WA 2015 Timberland Libraries readings in South Bend, Illwaco, Ocean Park, Raymond, and Naselle to fulfill of the Meet the Artist requirement for the Washington State Artist Trust Fellowship Othello High School reading, Othello WA Reading with Steve Cl eveland at Book People of Moscow WA 2014 Auntie’s Bookstore, opening night for A Year of Silence Get Lit!, Spokane WA Buckingham 6 Voice Over, Spokane WA 2013 Sou’wester Artist’s Residency Reading, December 2008 Spokane Community College Readings Series, April 2006 First Night Spokane, December EWU English Department Works -in-Progress Symposium, October 2005 EWU Alumni Reading, Spokane, April 2004 Whatcom Poetry Series, Bellingham WA 2001 Bumbershoot, Seattle WA September 1999 Globe Café paid featured reader, Seattle WA Titlewave Books Reading Series, Seattle WA 1998 11 th Hour Production’s reading series at Bellevue Art Gallery, Bellevue WA Reading Series at Richard Hugo House curated by Rebecca Brown, Seattle WA 1994 Rain Reading Series, Astoria OR 1992 CAMS Coffee House featured reader, St. Petersburg FL Editors’ Panels 2004 Writers in the Park editors’ panel, Seattle WA 2003 Richard Hugo House editors’ panel, Seattle WA Events Coordinating and Community Service and Other Related Experiences WRITI NG WORKSHOP FACILITATOR . Newport WA 2005 Organized and taught a one day w riting workshop at Scotia House, summer. KYRS THIN AIR COMMUNITY RADIO PROGRAMMER . Spokane . 2006- present. Eloise’s Feast, a weekly music show. FREMONT PLACE BOOK COMPANY . Se attle WA. 1996- 1998 Coordinator: Autumn Night Readings featuring N orthwest authors Book Group Facilitator PARNASSUS BOOKS . Astoria OR. 1993- 1995 Coordinator of Parnassus Reading Series featuri ng Northwest authors. Produced recordings of Parnassus readings for radio. NORTH COAST PRIDE NETWORK : Astoria . 1992- 1995 Coordinator North Coast Queer Film Series and other events Coordinator of meetings bringing together Northwest Coast human dignity groups KMUN COMMUNITY RADIO . Astoria OR. 1993- 1995 Organizer, founder and emcee of monthly local open mike —poetry and music Regular programmer: women’s music, folk/eclectic, and late night/eclectic Interim Music Coordinator Instructor for summer youth program INTERNSHIP . St. Petersburg Elementary School, St. Petersburg FL. 1987 Led a weekly creative writi ng workshop for gifted students . TUTOR . Robin Hood Summer Camp, Sedgwick ME. 1987 Taught English as a second language and basic writing skills . Buckingham 7 References Christopher Howell Professor of Poetry, MFA Program Inland Northwest Center for Writers 501 N Riverpoint Blvd Suite 425 Spokane WA 99202 509- 359 -4966 cnhowell@ewu.ed u Elenore Long Visiting Professor of English Arizona State University Department of Engl ish, Box 870302 Tempe, AZ 85287 509- 251 -3585 elenorelong@gmail.com John Keeble Professor Emeritus in Fiction Inland Northwest Center for Writers 501 N Riverpoint Blvd Suite 425 Spokane WA 99202 509- 359 -4956 jrkeeble@earthlink.net Greg Spatz Professor of Fiction, MFA Program Inland Northwest Center for Writers 501 N Riverpoint Blvd Suite 425 Spokane WA 99202 509- 359 -4956 gspatz1@earthlink.net
EWU English and Creative Writing Faculty and INCW mentor Polly Buckingham will be signing her new fiction chapbook A Year of Silence at AWP 2014. The book is the winner of the 2012 Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award, sponsored by University of Central Florida’s The Florida Review.
Polly Buckingham’s stories and poems appear or are forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, The New Orleans Review, The North American Review, The Tampa Review, (Pushcart nomination),Exquisite Corpse, The Literary Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Hubbub, The Potomac Review, The Moth and elsewhere. She was a finalist for Flannery O’Connor Award in 2011, 2012, and 2013. Polly is founding editor of StringTown Press and teaches creative writing and literature at Eastern Washington University.
The Expense of a View
Buckingham, Polly
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Paperback Price: $14.95 Buy
Paperback ISBN-13: 9781574416473
Physical Description: 5 1/2 x 8 1/2. 196 pp.
Publication Date: November 2016
Series: Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction | Volume: 15
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Award(s):
Winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction 2016
About Author:
POLLY BUCKINGHAM teaches at Eastern Washington University. She is founding editor of StringTown Press and Associate Director of EWU's Willow Springs Books. Author of A Year of Silence (Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award 2014), her poetry and short stories have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Spokane.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Entry # 137 - Polly Buckingham, Interview with Editor & Writer
Background Notes
Polly Buckingham is the editor of StringTown, a Northwest magazine of creative writing, and of StringTown Press, publishing new Northwest authors (http://stringtownpress.org/).
She teaches creative writing and literature at Eastern Washington University. In addition to teaching, she has worked as an editor, independent bookseller, transcriptionist, ghost writer, abridger, fisher person and deckhand. Her fiction and poetry appear in national literary magazines. Her work appears in The Literary Review, The New Orleans Review, The North American Review, The Tampa Review (Pushcart nomination), Exquisite Corpse, Kalliope, Hubbub, The Chattahoochee Review and elsewhere. Her books have been finalists or semifinalists for the following awards: Flannery O‚Connor Award (twice), Bakeless Prize, Blue Lynx Prize, Whidbey Island Emerging Writers Contest, the Snake Nation Review Contest, and the Spokane Prize (twice). Polly teaches all of EWU's online creative writing courses: intro. to creative writing, advanced short story writing, and advanced poetry. For more information, follow this link: http://outreach.ewu.edu/online/courses/course-list.html
Jan: Thank you for taking the time from your busy schedule to talk about your work as a writer and editor. As a founding editor of String Town in Washington State, what was the impetus in 1998 to establish an annual literary journal?
Polly: I’d worked on a number of literary journals and loved the process. The idea of coupling a contribution to the community of writers with something I loved doing was really appealing. I love reading the work and finding pieces that might otherwise go unnoticed, and I love design and layout—the cover, the art work, the ordering of the work, even detail-oriented technical stuff engages me.
I was living in Astoria, Oregon when I decided I would start a journal of my own. I’d written encyclopedia articles for Salem Press (in my mid-twenties) on 101 famous women, and many of them had been publishers, and publishers of multiple journals and newsletters and political publications. I was awed by the role publication played in enacting change. All these women were famous for their contributions, and these publications were part of that. At the time, I was editing a newsletter for the local community radio station for pay, and soon after, as a political activist, spearheaded a newsletter called Out of the Coast as part of a movement against the anti-gay initiatives in Oregon (mid 1990’s). StringTown just seemed like a no-brainer.
Jan: Describe your involvement in the start-up process and your role now?
Polly: I actually started the journal (before the press) in Seattle where I’d have a larger audience to draw on. It wasn’t something I debated. It just seemed like what I should do, and what I wanted to do. I did it all pretty much on my own. I didn’t do a lot of research; I learned by doing, which is generally how I operate. I printed up postcards calling for submissions and put them in bookstores and coffee shops.
Every year for the first ten years, I drove up and down the coast of Oregon and Washington and sold the magazine to independent bookstores. I’d been a bookseller for eight years before returning to college (grad school) and later teaching in college, so I felt real allegiance to these stores. I camped and walked the beaches with whatever dog I had at the time and always bought way too many books.
I left submission postcards all along the way. I noticed that distributors mostly stuck to the cities; rural areas didn’t have literary magazines—it wasn’t worth anybody’s money to go out there and sell them. But I didn’t much care about money. I wanted the magazine to represent those areas. I have had co-editors now and then--mostly they read submissions and go through the selection process with me, and I do the rest. I’ve always done 75% of the work or more. Volunteers come and go. They get good experience, and I get a little help now and then.
Jan: What kinds of work are you looking for when you, and your volunteer staff, sift though the stories, poems, essays, and art submissions?
Polly: Authenticity, emotional integrity, resonance. I used to say and still say, if it makes me cry, I take it. I read an article once on editing a journal that said sometimes there’s only a very fine line between the best stuff and the worst stuff, and the best editors know that line. I like that. I like work that takes risks, risks that other editors and readers might really balk at, but I see something in it. I don’t like to compromise on these things. I don’t like journals with big editorial boards where the best stuff gets weeded out for the bland stuff everyone agrees on. People don’t agree on great literature. Much of it got panned in its time. That’s actually one of my favorite parts—finding those thrilling pieces no one else notices. I think I’m good at that.
Jan: In your opinion, what is essential for beginning writers to know about publishing today?
Polly: A friend quoted me in the beginning of her book saying, “you can’t get published if you don’t submit.” That’s really it. Rejections are good because you’ll have to rack up 50 or 100 of them before you’ll get an acceptance. People think I’m crazy when I say I have 100 things in the mail. But that’s what it takes, and almost no one escapes that. Don’t take it personally. It’s not you. It’s the crazy world that doesn’t value this stuff enough. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.
Jan: What can you say about publishing and self-publishing from both an editor’s and a writer’s perspective? What factors do you think are helping to establish the legitimacy of self-publishing?
Polly: I’m in academia where self-publishing is forbidden, but as a young person, I put together a couple books of poetry and gave them to my friends. It was fun. I liked the process. But I don’t take them seriously, not now and not then. I think the process of finding an editor, a journal, a publisher, ideally (key word here), is a marvelous one: we get better because our peers assess our work, not because we said it was good and goddammit someone should read it.
Literature gets better, keeps its quality, improves, because we offer each other a critical eye, because we create honest publication space for new schools of thought that help prevent literature from stagnating. The relationship between an editor and writer is perhaps as sacred, and as important, as the relationship between a writer and the work. And I don’t think it’s a step you want to leave out. It’s too crucial to your development as a writer: preparing a manuscript for the right audience and getting the approval of your peers. (That absolutely does not mean thinking about audience while you’re creating.) Self publishing is a one way street. It can lead to lazy writing and to an unwillingness to improve, an unwillingness to see yourself as part of a community dedicated to quality literary work that really moves people. I’m not saying we need gatekeepers. I’m saying we need each other.
Jan: What are the benefits and problems associated with social media for writers? In your opinion, which of the social media venues gives the biggest bang for the time and effort?
Polly: None. I really can’t quite engage in social media. It makes me itchy. And I have tried. I just get disengaged pretty quickly. You know, I suppose an internet presence is a good thing for a writer and I do look at author websites a lot. But there are so many different venues and so much stuff out there that isn’t vetted in any way. I find it impossible to weed through, and my time is important: I don’t want to spend it online. It’s never going to replace the process of publication. It’s always going to come down to the work: at least that’s the way it should be, to my mind, and I like to operate out of that ideal. I love sites that contribute to discussions on writing, that post live readings, interviews, that kind of thing. But I find promoting myself through social media sites really difficult and unpleasant and antithetical in many ways to what I do and love.
Jan: What do you see as the future role of agents? Do you think agents will become obsolete?
Polly: I struggle with agents. As John Keeble, my greatest fiction mentor, said to me, if you don’t have a connection with one, it’s like spitting into the wind. For me, it began to feel like a waste of time. I have an unpublished novel, and it’s gotten really positive feedback and I’ve had some chapters published in journals, but I am definitely discouraged by the limited availability of places to reasonably submit it.
Small presses focus on story collections and poetry collections, not novels. And large presses are closed without an agent. Because novels actually sell, it can feel nearly impossible to get them published. Damn the role money plays in all this. That’s what I love about poetry: no poet ever expected it would pay.
Jan: Congratulations on your impressive list of published poetry and fiction. In your opinion who is more likely to find a literary journal to publish work in today’s literary climate: poets or short fiction writers?
Polly: Both are really tough, but definitely I’ve had more poems published than short stories, proportionally and otherwise—and I pretty sure I’m a far better fiction writer than poet. Again, fiction pays more, on all sorts of levels, so it’s more competitive, and it takes up more space in a journal, so fewer pieces are accepted. Money really does corrupt the process.
Fiction writers are often taken more seriously, which baffles me since poets know the language better than any other type of writer. But I suppose people think, “oh, that’s only a few lines—that’s easy.” And then, so much of the public has no idea what the hell poetry is. But everyone knows a good story. So poetry exists in this wonderful little bubble. The downside is - you never quite get treated well.
The upside is you’re more likely to get published and you can ignore the rat race that publishing fiction can feel like. Poets, for example, don’t get “three book deals” or $50,000 advances. They don’t get much, actually. “Just” the respect and awe of a small audience. And yet, they are our greatest visionaries.
Jan: Tell me about your favorite published poem and short story that you have written? What was the spark that helped each burn into a powerful finished work?
Polly: That’s hard. My favorite works haven’t been published. But…my favorite published poem would have to be “The Crone.” This was recently published in The Chattahoochee Review. I wrote it after my sister’s death. It has a lot of dream imagery in it and brings me back into the experience of grieving. That space isn’t a bad space. It’s a necessary space, a respite, and seeing this poem on the page, published eight years after I wrote it, reminds me of that.
The story would have to be “My Doppelganger’s Arms” published in The North American Review. This is a story that had been around over ten years before it got picked up. It is one of my stranger stories, also based on a dream, and when I brought it to workshops people used to say, “You can’t do that.” Well, I did. This week I had another strange, strange story (“The Apology”), also about my sister’s death, accepted by a new journal called The Moth in Ireland. The thing that really struck me was that they accepted it in seven days. And when I commented on how quick it was, the editor, Rebecca O’Connor, wrote, “It’s beautiful, Polly. I’m not normally that fast!” The story is really experimental, something difficult to place. I feel really good when a piece is so clearly appreciated, when it seems to have found a very welcome home. I will send them more work.
Jan: If a great poem tells a story, which of yours provides the richest narrative?
Polly: The last lines of “Sacred Window” are below. I chose them because they tell the story about the sacred relationship of writer to publisher that I’ve been discussing. This is what it is when it works: you’ve found your audience. They are the ones (and maybe only a few) willing to go out in the rain and listen. You have to listen to that, even if the audience is a small one. This is the think that poets understand more than fiction writers, I think.
…Why shouldn’t I
choose my audience, those willing
to travel this far, willing to sit by the river
in a veil of May rain and listen,
each gift unwrapped in a tumble of words.
Jan: Yes. I see what you’re saying and it is represented in this poem. So what are you working on now?
Polly: I finished a new collection of poems (my second) this summer, though I don’t feel secure enough with it to submit it as a whole yet, and I’m rewriting the last three stories in a new collection of stories called What the Dead Know. It’s my third collection. I’m really proud of it and am in the stage of loving it more than I love anything.
I have a four-day writing retreat coming up in a few weeks to finish up, and then I’ll start submitting it when I return.
Jan: What have you recently read that you loved and would recommend to readers and writers?
Polly: Oh gosh—so much: Jose Saramago (Blindness, The Stone Raft, The Cave—all stunning). Kevin McIlvoy—I’ve read three recently—his most recent The Complete History of New Mexico, but Little Peg and A Waltz are both stunningly weird and transcendent also.
I read and reread this summer the Collected Stories of John Cheever and fell in love with him all over again. I reread Joy Williams’ Taking Care, one of my favorite story collections. I reread all of William Stafford’s work last spring. Others: Neruda’s Selected Poems—with various translators; Christopher Howell’s Gaze; Tomas Transformer’s Selected Poems (edited by Robert Haas); Antonya Nelson’s novel Bound and her collection Nothing Right; I’m working on Albert Goldbarth’s Everyday People (poems) and Ramona Ausubel’s No One is Here Except All of Us—first novel. These are all stunning. You see a lot of rereading because I’m teaching some of these authors to my own writing students.
Jan: What is the advice about writing that you have chosen to ignore?
Polly:
“You can’t do that”
“Get rid of the dream”
“Tell us more about the mother”
Jan: What is the best advice anyone ever gave you and that you would like to pass on to other writers?
Polly: For me the best advice has more to do with living, since writing was never the problem: taking care of myself and living well was.
Here’s this from a William Stafford poem:
For it is important that awake people be awake,
Or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
The signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
Should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
This applies communication, love, and also writing.
And this from a recent interview with Christopher Howell:
“He believes having a good attitude is very important for writing poetry, and the worst attitudes to have while writing are envy and anger. Howell believes a poem should be something that encourages people.”
Jan: Thank you for taking the time for this interview, Polly. What advice would you share with aspiring writers about nurturing the creative process?
Polly: Write a lot. Trust yourself. Take care of yourself. Be generous. Forget about an audience while you’re writing. Forget about externalities. Writing is intrinsic. It needs to be yours. And you need to do it because, well, you need to do it, not because you have expectations about how it will be received. It should be like love: that good, that hard, that risky, and that important. Nothing bad can come of it.
To obtain submission guidelines or to obtain a copy of String Town send an email to: stringtown@earthlink.net
Polly Buckingham: THE EXPENSE OF A VIEW
(Sept. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Polly Buckingham THE EXPENSE OF A VIEW Univ. of North Texas Press (Adult Fiction) 11.96 11, 15 ISBN: 978-1-57441-647-3
Buckingham’s 14 stories about loss, abandonment, and loneliness won the 2016 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction.Wherever they live, from St. Petersburg, Florida, to Seattle to rural Oregon, the characters here are damaged goods, sometimes to the point of suicidal hopelessness, as in "The Island of Cats,” or merely caricature, like the family of criminals and deadbeats in “The Grandmother’s Vision.” Whether the cause is actual abandonment, as in “Three of Swords,” or a parent’s death, in “How to Make an Island,” the result tends to be a fearful adult like Myer in “Thinking About Carson,” who is unable to sustain a relationship. But not always. One of the most moving stories, “Festival,” concerns two teenage parents, Sheila and Nick, attending a music festival with their baby, Michelle; escaping troubled families, the two seem doomed to fail as parents and as a couple, especially Nick, who meanders through the festival wishing he could return to his former carefree irresponsibility. But as he grudgingly begins to accept the mantle of dependable adulthood, he discovers the grace of loving his child. Less intense is the examination of lost possibilities, represented in the story “Honey” by a dead dog, or of unadorned loneliness examined in the title story about a young woman whose attempt to break up with her boyfriend doesn’t quite work out. The fragility of children figures prominently in some of the best stories. In “My Old Man,” a mother caring for her cancer-ridden 7-year-old son learns to do whatever it takes; “Night Train” weaves a powerful web of memories while exploring a man’s mix of guilt and grief over his son’s accidental death; and in “Blue Plastic Shades,” the travails of a small boy grappling with his mother’s mysterious disappearance and his father, who's lost to grief, gradually soften into a possibility that father and son might heal together. Though the circumstances here are often dismally bleak, at her best Buckingham offers glimmers of pale but definite hope.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Polly Buckingham: THE EXPENSE OF A VIEW." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463216047&it=r&asid=8141113bd26f827aad57c7088a765272. Accessed 11 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A463216047
The Expense of a View
(Feb. 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
The Expense of a View
Polly Buckingham
University of North Texas Press
1155 Union Circle #311336, Denton, TX 76203-5017
www.untpress.unt.edu
9781574416473, $14.95, PB, 196pp, www.amazon.com
The fourteen short stories by Polly Buckingham that comprise "The Expense of a View" explore the psyches of characters under extreme duress. In the title story, 'The Expense of a View', a woman who has moved across the country in an attempt to leave her past behind dumps an empty suitcase into the Columbia River over and over again. In another story, a woman who wakes up mornings only to discover she's been shooting heroin in a night trance, meets her doppelganger on a rainy Oregon beach. Most of the characters are displaced and disturbed; they suffer from dissociative disorders, denial, and delusions. The settings, ranging from Florida, to eastern Washington, to Seattle, to the Oregon coast, mirror their lunacies. While refusing to look at what's right in front of themselves might destroy them, it's equally likely to be just what they need. A consistently compelling and engaging read from cover to cover, "The Expense of a View" is very highly recommended for community and academic library Contemporary Literary Fiction collections. For personal reading lists it should be noted that "The Expense of a View" is also available in a Kindle format ($11.96).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Expense of a View." Internet Bookwatch, Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA486309611&it=r&asid=2514aa4491894ac2d91af7b74b69fb33. Accessed 11 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A486309611
EWU's Buckingham wins short fiction prize
(Dec. 11, 2015): Business News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 The Spokesman-Review
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Byline: Carolyn Lamberson
Dec. 11--The end of the year love is beginning and three local writers are feeling it. Polly Buckingham, a senior lecturer in the English department at Eastern Washington University, has won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Short Fiction, awarded by the University of North Texas Press. The prize comes with a $1,000 cash award as well as publication of her story collection. "The Expense of a View" will be released in November 2016. The prize was judged by novelist/memorist Chris Offutt ("The Good Brother"). Buckingham, who teaches creative writing, is a three-time finalist for the Flannery O'Connor Prize, and a previous winner of the Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award for Fiction from the Florida Review Press. She is the founding editor of StringTown Press and an associate director of Willow Springs, Eastern's literary journal. Her work has appeared in the Gettysburg Review, the Threepenny Review and several other journals. She also was among the writers featured in the first season of The Spokesman-Review's Summer Stories series, in 2014. Her story, "Mirage," is available online at www.spokesman.com/longform/ summer-stories/. S.M. Hulse's debut novel "Black River" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015) has been selected as one of the best books of 2015 by the Seattle Times. The taut modern Western, about a former prison guard dealing with the aftermath of a riot that changed his life, was among 16 works of fiction selected by Times' critics. Other fiction books on the list include Jonathan Franzen's "Purity," "Grant Park" by Leonard Pitts Jr., Nick Hornby's "Funny Girl" and "Finders Keepers" Stephen King. In selecting "Black River," critic Barbara Lloyd McMichael noted the book "is an intricate work that layers faith with broken promises, broken bones, and broken hearts. This is a story of people shaped irrevocably by place and circumstance." "Black River" is being released in paperback on Jan. 5. Hulse also was featured in the Summer Stories series, in 2015's Lake Edition. Her story, "Across the Water" can be found at www.spokesman.com/ summer-stories-lake-edition. "The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly," by Stephanie Oakes, has been named a finalist for the 2016 Morris Award, presented by the American Library Association. The award honors the best book written for young adult audiences by a previously unpublished author. Oakes' harrowing novel, published by Dial Books, centers on a young girl who is raised as a member of a cult in the Montana woods. Her decision to stand up to the Prophet has devastating consequences, but she manages to break free. In her rage and confusion, she commits an act of terrible violence and is forced to confront her past. Other finalists are: "Because You'll Never Meet Me" by Leah Thomas (Bloomsbury Children's Books); "Conviction" by Kelly Loy Gilbert (Hyperion) "Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda" by Becky Albertalli (Balzer & Bray; and "The Weight of Feathers" by Anna-Marie McLemore (Thomas Dunne Books) The winner will be announced Jan. 11.
___
(c)2015 The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, Wash.)
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By Carolyn Lamberson
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"EWU's Buckingham wins short fiction prize." Spokesman-Review [Spokane, WA], 11 Dec. 2015. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA437198161&it=r&asid=38262b807d64f1c81a746ac18e3078bb. Accessed 11 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A437198161
Book Review: The Expense of a View by Polly Buckingham
Our current political conversation often revolves around the financial disparities rampant in American culture. Polly Buckingham’s recent story collection, The Expense of a View, hones in on the lives most impacted by the inequalities this gaping imbalance engenders. Buckingham tells the stories of the system’s most vulnerable—the ill, the partnerless, the parentless, the addicted, the poor, the isolated—exploring what it means to try to be a “healthy” adult when life has always lacked a major component of stability. The Expense of a View won the 2016 Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Short Fiction, and was released this past fall from the University of North Texas Press.
The inaugural story, “Honey,” is one of the collection’s best. In it, Buckingham gives a glimpse into the life of a “transplant”—a woman in a new place, “with a new job and no new friends.” She’s observant of the graffiti calling a former neighbor “snitch,” of the “dismembered motorcycle,” of the dog that’s died in her wood shed. Buckingham plays with the language, evoking things there and not there, the sense of two worlds coexisting. Is the Labrador sleeping or dead? Is its face pockmarked or shadowed? These differing interpretations of observed phenomena provide the reader with insight into the stories that follow and the collection as a whole. The point of view is half of the story. It controls how events and people are understood, placing blame or vindicating, vilifying or lionizing. The onus is on the readers, in part, to question what bias we bring with us. “Honey,” like many of the pieces that follow it, presents a believable picture of a depressed place that is all too full of dark realities.
Buckingham is concerned with the effect of environment on mindset, and vice versa. About the protagonist of “Night Train,” she writes, “His office is dark, except for sudden flickers of light shining into the porch.” This sentence perfectly describes the interior of this character’s mind as he descends further into emotional shadow after a family death. And on addiction, Buckingham is subtly observant: “Adjusting meds doesn’t work if you bury them in the potted plants.” As the title of the book suggests, these stories are preoccupied with people who don’t have the capital to obtain a view—either literal or figurative.
The book falls apart in a couple of ways. The first one occurs at the micro level, as descriptions are repeated across stories: “unshaven legs,” the same cigarettes, the same comparison of owls and doves, and multiple “no trespassing” signs. This makes the characters feel less than individual. They’re oddly joined by these details, and not fully their own believable selves.
The second occurs on a larger scale. For short stories to work, they must prize economy and astute observation. They must have a point, at least for the author. If there’s confusion in the author, it will show up for the reader too—and this is sometimes the case in Buckingham’s debut collection. In the story, “Three of Swords,” the characters feel more like caricatures—drawings of strangers in which only the blatant features stand out, dilated. It’s clear that Buckingham was attempting to convey the scrambled mindset of this story’s narrator, who tells us very quickly that she sees “things other people can’t see.” This sets the reader up for disbelief of a story that’s already far-fetched and not quite fleshed out. The protagonist knows a girl has been abducted, is living in a woman’s barn, hides tarot cards, and eschews eating. There are several nice turns of phrase, but the story lacks a through-line and leaves the reader confused by a world in which it is difficult to find footing between the real and unreal.
With that said, there are beautiful, true moments, but they don’t stand out as much as they could because of the stories’ lack of artistic control. “My Old Man,” a story about a single mother and her sickly child, contains many such moments. One happens when the protagonist is at the hospital trying to coax her son into seeing the doctor:
“Quentin,” I say. But he doesn’t answer. He’s crying. I slip onto the floor, and…peer under the black bench. He’s pressed against the wall. There is fear and stubborn refusal in his red face. His eyes are wide and he’s pinching his arms. My eyes well up.
This story gains much of its power and continuity from its point of view. It’s told by the mother, and can thus convincingly and closely detail her surroundings and emotions and how those two play into each other.
Though, undoubtedly, these stories need to be told, I wish they’d been more fully revised and, in some cases, fleshed out. Now, more than ever, we need to hear from and about the disenfranchised. We need powerful storytelling. But even the decisions made on the sentence-level of a story have a large impact. I don’t regret having read this book, and I applaud Buckingham’s efforts. There’s much to learn about writing here. Unfortunately, it’s often the strongest books that hide their tricks best. Those who have mastered their craft don’t leave erasure marks and pencil shavings. They give the finished, seamless product to the reader, leaving little hint to how it arrived in that final state. I hope Buckingham writes again, because it’s clear she has something to say.
Publication Date: November 15, 2016
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
Reviewed by Sarah Hoenicke
November 17: “The Expense of a View” by Polly Buckingham
On November 18, 2016 By mikeczyz
Right after all this went down, I went outside, sat on that stoop, waited for my little one’s bus, and read from Polly Buckingham‘s The Expense of a View, out from the University of North Texas Press as the latest winner of their Katherine Anne Porter Prize. I read a few stories from the collection and found a lot of commonality between them. All of the stories focused on protagonists who were alone, living in mostly isolated areas (seemingly the South), at turning points in their lives. They seem like they’re nearing middle age, but perhaps have just a breath’s worth of youth left in them; it’s like they’re at crossroads, deciding how they want to enter the second half of their lives. Buckingham isn’t direct about any of this, but it seems like they are all ready to either make a go at something better or curl up and accept the kind of sadness that comes from a life of bad decisions and missed opportunities. I like that as a theme for a collection, and while I’m not sure if all of the stories in Buckingham’s book are like this, that’s the vibe I’m feeling three stories in.
No story better represents all this than the title story, “The Expense of a View.” This story opens with its protagonist, Gracie, greeting her boyfriend and lover, Lang, at the door. Lang has brought flowers and is ready to spend the night with her, doing what they’ve been doing for the last two years. Gracie, however, has other plans, as she’s chosen this night to break it off with Lang, who is confused and saddened. Gracie lets him stay the night, lets him hold her tight (he might sob a little), which doesn’t make it any easier to make him leave in the morning. So, a pretty intense, though quiet opening scene for a story.
What’s really interesting about all this, I realized by the story’s end, is how we never know why Gracie breaks it off with Lang. Lang seems nice, flowers, sentimentality, a gentleness, so we can only speculate. A lot of my suspicion stems from what I’ve said about the theme, that Gracie is at a point in her life where she’s either going to pursue some dream, make a move for something better, or fall back and settle for the familiar, the simple. Lang is familiar and simple, but for whatever reason, that’s not what Gracie is quite ready to embrace. She doesn’t have a plan, but she knows that whatever it is, it won’t include Lang, this town. She’s moved on before, two years here, two years there, so it’s likely she’s just come upon her two-year itch. In that regard, Lang, this town, this house, this existence, never had a chance.
The rest of the story, Gracie seems to be in a holding pattern, trying to move on from Lang, attempting to regain traction. She meets a guy out on the street in town who appears to be mentally handicapped, who in one late scene in the story is beaten, nearly to death, by some bullies. Gracie friends him, helps him recover. She also meets a man, casually, who invites her over to his place to smoke a little grass, an invitation she accepts, one that leads to her spending the night—perhaps only after she feels it’s not in her interest to say no. Lang is still calling her, stopping by, not giving in. Her cat, Edith Piaf, keeps dumping over her water dish.
“The Expense of a View” is a subtle story, something I’d even call minimalism, Gracie a quiet character whose actions speak more than her words, more than any internal monologue or exposition provided by Buckingham. Gracie is a woman who does things and we as readers can only guess as to why. There isn’t any explanatory backstory, either, something that clearly outlines why she can’t get close to people, why she can’t stay in one place, what’s turned her into this vagabond. Instead, we enjoy one true sentence after another in this story, a refreshing style for 2016, not quite Hemingway, not quite Carver, but inspired by each, with a modern twist, a voice all of Buckingham’s own.
I enjoyed the stories in The Expense of a View and am pleased to discover Polly Buckingham and her work for the first time.
The Expense of a View (Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction)
Image of The Expense of a View (Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction)
Author(s):
Polly Buckingham
Release Date:
November 4, 2016
Publisher/Imprint:
University of North Texas Press
Pages:
196
Buy on Amazon
Reviewed by:
Michael Adelberg
“ambitious and thought provoking.”
A young couple—Nick and Sheila—bring their baby with them to a large festival full of music, carnival attractions, and performers. Nick needs to take it all in, to see everything—as he’s done with Sheila for each of the last few years. Sheila needs to nurse the baby. Without any drama, they find a shady spot and split up for a few hours. When they reunite that evening, Sheila is spent and weepy. Nick takes the baby and, as they board a bus, promises to be more supportive.
This understated character portrait, “Festival,” is a good example of the 14 short stories in Polly Bukingham’s new collection, The Expense of a View. Across this collection, Buckingham tells small, realistic stories. Most of Buckingham’s stories are about the strains of being a young adult; most are set in the Northwest.
What ultimately makes The Expense of a View a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts is Buckingham’s consistently smart (and slightly sad) narration. Her stories are united by characters—usually talented, young women coping with loss or a difficult relationship—achieving a small measure of peace and grace amid difficult circumstances.
Other commonalities interspersed across several of the stories include: estranged couples, noble pets, unhelpful friends, mental illness, and detours from realism into magical realism. Only a few of Buckingham’s the stories deviate from these commonalities.
One story that deviates quite successfully is “My Doppelganger’s Arms,” in which a lonely woman protagonist meets up with a young woman drifter who is just like the protagonist in many ways. They become intimate on a beach, and then the drifter runs off. The protagonist eventually finds her companion with a needle in her arm against a surreal sky. The reader is left wondering if the protagonist and the drifter are, in fact, the same person.
A story that deviates from Buckingham’s commonalities less successfully is “The Grandmother’s Vision,” in which a grandmother discusses relationships with a family that is too dysfunctional for Jerry Springer, and too disaffected for a Donald Trump rally. While there is empathy in most of Buckingham’s narratives, empathy is notably absent from this story.
Buckingham’s writing is literary and perceptive, but has moments of excess. The paragraph below from “Thinking about Carson” provides an example of Buckingham overcooking her prose:
“Before Oregon, the world was broken up in pieces. Landscapes were broken up into streets and buildings and windows and doors and cars and faces; people were broken apart by words and hands and boots and objects sailing wickedly through the air. Imagine a square and clean kitchen floor covered by glass. Imagine a quiet night, white curtains billowed with a steady wind. You are a child dreaming peacefully. You are woken by unremitting screams, the screams of someone else’s nightmare where the breaking down process is no longer variable but constant.”
In balance, Buckingham deserves considerable credit for bringing a humane voice to difficult topics, and finding the right balance of light and dark in her characters. While The Expense of a View is not perfect, it is ambitious and thought provoking. For readers of challenging literary fiction, this is a worthwhile and enjoyable collection.