Contemporary Authors

• Belly Up - 2018 A Strange Object, Austin, TX

• Tin House - http://tinhouse.com/hover-above-the-body-an-interview-with-rita-bullwinkel/

  QUOTED: "“Belly Up” was the title of a story I wrote that I chose not to include in the collection. It was a story about how, when a family member dies, you have to sit at the morgue and flip through a binder of caskets that are all very expensive and pick one out for the dead to live in, and also how, at a funeral, you have to worry about feeding all the people who are still alive. It was a wonky-shaped, ugly story that I decided I didn’t like. But I did like the title, so I kept it."
  "My friend, the Swedish painter Linnéa Gad, had my favorite thing to say about the title. When I told her the title was Belly Up she said that it’s like when a dog rolls on its back. It gives itself up to you, and lets you pet the most vulnerable part of its body, its soft, susceptible stomach. In that moment, you could hurt the dog if you wanted to. But dogs are almost always right about who wants to hurt them and who doesn’t."
  "I do think that the experience of reading a short work of fiction alongside a much longer work of fiction elicits a unique and delightful reading experience."

  interviews, general | April 25, 2018
  Hover Above the Body: An Interview with Rita Bullwinkel
  REBEKAH BERGMAN
  Rita Bullwinkel’s Belly Up (out May 8 from A Strange Object) has earned high praise from Jeff VanderMeer, Lorrie Moore, and Deb Olin Unferth, among many others. The stories in this debut immerse you in the fragility and neediness of your human body. I had the great luck of meeting Rita in college; the first time I saw her—as I recall it—she was standing at the center of a cramped dorm room telling a captivating story to a group of fellow freshman. Rita‘s humor, eye for odd detail, and ear for language shine in Belly Up. Her deep capacity for empathy, which makes her a brilliant conversationalist and most–generous friend, is on full display as she channels the voices of teenage girls, middle–aged men, widows, the dying, and the dead.

  In a series of emails, Rita and I discussed Belly Up, early childhood injuries, heretical religious texts, and strange dying wishes.

  Rebekah Bergman: In many stories, we see the rituals people develop in the wake of death and the physical reality of what death does to the body. I know you have an academic background in religious studies. Can you talk a little about that? How do you draw from religious texts in your writing, and where else do you draw from?

  Rita Bullwinkel: When I was twenty-two I did have a near-miss at becoming a religious studies academic. I seriously considered, and was encouraged by professors, to continue my undergraduate religious studies research and pursue a PhD. I was researching 4th century heretical Christian and Jewish texts that championed ideas of prayer through sex; god as inherently hermaphroditic, or genderless; and the notion that in the story of Adam and Eve it is the snake that is the true god, because it is the snake that leads Eve to knowledge, and it is knowledge that is divine, not stupidity. There is one text that I made the mistake of falling in love with for its beauty. This text is called Thunder, Perfect Mind. It is structured like a riddle. It presents dualities of what god might be, or isn’t, or what god might contain. I found myself memorizing it, and I confessed this my thesis advisor, who was concerned. Beauty has no place in the academic study of religion, which has fought for a near century to become un-cleaved from the misty grips of the church.

  These religious texts that I studied do, at times, appear in my writing. Sometimes I am not able to recognize that they have appeared until I reread a story I have written for the fourth or fifth time. Perhaps most obviously, I stole bits of the Gnostic story of Norea for some of the stories that Ainsley and Mary tell each other in “Arms Overhead.”

  I’m not sure where else I draw from. It’s so hard to tell, isn’t it? The soup of my unconscious, and how things get in there, and then appear in my writing, has never been clear to me.

  Bergman: Each of your titles works beautifully and in its own way. “Phylum,” for instance, is a clinical, cold word for what becomes a very intimate, human story. When, during your writing process, do you come up with a title? How did you decide on Belly Up as the title for the book?

  Bullwinkel: I find I come to titles differently with different stories. Some stories are born out of titles and some stories live title-less until they are finished. “Decor” did not have a title until very late. “Harp” had its title from the very beginning.

  “Belly Up” was the title of a story I wrote that I chose not to include in the collection. It was a story about how, when a family member dies, you have to sit at the morgue and flip through a binder of caskets that are all very expensive and pick one out for the dead to live in, and also how, at a funeral, you have to worry about feeding all the people who are still alive. It was a wonky-shaped, ugly story that I decided I didn’t like. But I did like the title, so I kept it. My friend, the Swedish painter Linnéa Gad, had my favorite thing to say about the title. When I told her the title was Belly Up she said that it’s like when a dog rolls on its back. It gives itself up to you, and lets you pet the most vulnerable part of its body, its soft, susceptible stomach. In that moment, you could hurt the dog if you wanted to. But dogs are almost always right about who wants to hurt them and who doesn’t.

  And, I couldn’t talk about titles without acknowledging that you, Rebekah Bergman, gifted me the title for “Mouth Full of Fish.” I have no idea what it was called before you read it, and pulled that beautiful title out of sky. I think we are both very sensitive to titles because of the time we’ve spent working for NOON and working with Diane Williams. Diane is a truly brilliant title-ist.

  Bergman: What are some titles that particularly speak to you?

  Bullwinkel: I like titles that imply movement. I also like titles that sound good in the mouth, if you know what I mean. All of the below titles do both of these things.

  You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman

  It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender–Hearted Nature by Diane Williams

  Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem

  Fish in Exile by Vi Khi Nao

  My Private Property by Mary Ruefle

  Pee on Water by Rachel B. Glaser

  The Bend, The Lip, The Kid by Jaimy Gordon

  The Father Costume by Ben Marcus

  The Wallcreeper by Nell Zink

  Bergman: Belly Up features several works of what might be called “flash,” and I’m curious how you see the shorter pieces and longer works playing off one another. Do you see a distinction between a work of flash and a longer work?

  Bullwinkel: I think, ultimately, a story is beautiful, or it is not beautiful. It is either meaningful, or it is not meaningful. Length has almost no bearing on whether or not these things are true. I do think that the experience of reading a short work of fiction alongside a much longer work of fiction elicits a unique and delightful reading experience where a reader has the chance to take a breath of air in a short narrative, and have some white space between stories, before going back under water into the head of a writer for a very long time. This structure manufactures pacing in a way that delights me. From the beginning I knew that I wanted Belly Up to emulate this form and contain both long and very short pieces.

  Bergman: Many widows populate the worlds of Belly Up. To speak, in particular, to “What I Would Be If I Wasn’t What I Am,” where did Franny’s interior voice come from?

  Bullwinkel: Franny bears some biographic similarities with my grandmother, Ann Bullwinkel, to whom Belly Up claims, on its dedication page, that it is partly circling.

  But I feel Franny is, in many ways, just me. As you know, although I’m not married, I’ve been loving the same person for a very long time now. I think most of Franny’s voice came from imagining what I would feel if my partner died, and puzzling through the strangeness of being coupled with someone for so long. It’s a strange thing, to share a life with someone, isn’t it? We’re so fundamentally alone in so many ways. In my lived experience, coupling has been about love but also just about just witnessing the other person’s life and holding that witnessing all together in one mind. Without a doubt, my long-time lover knows me better than anyone on the planet. And I find that so incredibly strange because we are so completely different. People remark on our different-ness frequently. I think Franny finds loving someone strange in the same ways that I do, and that that is where her voice found its energy.

  Bergman: We see many widows also in “Burn.” In that story, food becomes very closely connected to grief. It sounds like “Belly Up”—the story—also examined that connection. How do you see the link between consumption and death?

  Bullwinkel: We require so much and, in the end, there is so very little left of us.

  Bergman: Yes, let’s talk about bodies. Your writing reminds me of the strangeness of having one. The ways a body can atrophy and be ruined are largely irreversible in your stories. In “Black Tongue,” I was surprised to find out that the narrator’s injured tongue heals. Why, in this story, does the injury heal? What can a body recover from? What can’t it?

  Bullwinkel: I think it is remarkable what our bodies can recover from, though I have little understanding of what one can recover from and what one cannot.

  I have a very vivid memory of having my head split open as a child. I was five, and a friend’s older brother hit me with a golf club because I refused to share a ball. I remember being outside and seeing the club coming for my face and then waking up and being totally alone. I was sticky and covered in blood. I got up and went in to the house where there was a large mirror across from the front door and I saw myself then with my head split open and thought, this is it. My body looks so completely and totally broken and split open. All this stuff from my inside is gushing to the outside so that the boundary where my body starts and ends is no longer clear.

  But then, miraculously, I was stitched up and healed, and I have a scar on my face, yes, but there is really very little of that violent act that anyone can still see.

  I think, also, as a former athlete, I was conditioned to separate from my body from a young age. One cannot push oneself to swim six miles a day if one stays in their body. One must hover above the body to do such a thing. It’s the only effective way to keep one’s body moving.

  Bergman: Do you think that learning to dissociate from yourself in that way has served your writing?

  Bullwinkel: I do think there is a connection between my past as a competitive athlete and my writing, though it’s not clear to me what exactly that connection might be. I think both acts require obsessive behavior and the recognition that the acts themselves will most likely result in failure.

  Bergman: What, if anything, do you think can move beyond or between bodies? Can pain and trauma? I’m thinking again of your many widows, also of the pain and trauma in “Mouth Full of Fish” and “Decor.”

  Bullwinkel: I often think about how people are bonded by the trauma they have experienced together, and how trauma can, often, hold two people together closer than they otherwise would be. I think this is the primary bond that binds families. A group of people loves the same person (their mother) and then the mother dies and the group of people (the siblings), despite their many differences and the fact that their souls were randomly chosen for their bodies, feel much closer, because they are experiencing grief together, and have a shared memory of loving a person and then watching that person (the mother) die.

  Bergman: A last question related to death and consumption: I recently learned that a friend’s aunt has requested that when she (the aunt) dies, she (my friend) drink some of her ashes mixed in a liquid (I assume water, but maybe wine). Upon hearing this, I had a very strong sense that I’d read about this exact situation in one of your stories. But I don’t think I have. Have I?

  Bullwinkel: This is not something I have ever written about, but I would love if someone did this with my dead body. If I die, Rebekah, will you please drink my ashes? Mix them with wine and throw a very big dinner party? And then, maybe, make everybody dance so I could be dancing inside everyone’s body at exactly the same time?

  Bergman: Yes, and then you will have a story about this after all.

  Rita Bullwinkel is the author of the story collection Belly Up (forthcoming from A Strange Object on May 8th, 2018). Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s,Tin House, Conjunctions, BOMB, Vice, NOON, and Guernica. She is a recipient of grants and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Brown University, Vanderbilt University, Hawthornden Castle, and The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Both her fiction and her translation have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She lives in San Francisco. Read more about her at ritabullwinkel.com.

  Rebekah Bergman’s fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Cosmonaut’s Avenue, Hobart, Joyland, Passages North, The Nashville Review, Necessary Fiction and Conium Review, among other journals and magazines. She holds a BA in literary arts from Brown University and an MFA in Fiction from The New School. She lives in Brooklyn and is at work on a novel.

• Rita Bullwinkel Home Page - http://ritabullwinkel.com/about/

  Rita Bullwinkel
  is the author of the story collection Belly Up. Her writing has been published in Tin House, Conjunctions, BOMB, Vice, NOON, and Guernica. She is a recipient of grants and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Brown University, Vanderbilt University, Hawthornden Castle, and The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Both her fiction and her translation have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She is an Editor at Large for McSweeney's. She lives in San Francisco.

• Paris Review - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/05/24/this-flesh-container-we-call-a-body-an-interview-with-rita-bullwinkel/

  QUOTED: "I’ve worked many retail jobs where I was meant to be a decorative object whose sole purpose was to enhance the consumer’s purchasing experience. Occasionally I would fold some clothes. But mostly it was just about being a young warm body at the ready to attend to someone’s every need. I think the labor one has to offer the world can be an absurd thing to consider. We have these bodies that can perform tasks and the completion of said tasks can earn us money."
  "We also have to live and think in these bodies, both privately and publicly. The range of things one can do with a body for money is staggering! Surely that, in itself, is absurd. I do find the experience of having a body, especially a female body, to be bizarre."
  "“Decor” took me the longest to write. It used to be much shorter, and it had a different ending. I think it required more time because Ursula, the protagonist of the story, is so angry and delirious with envy that she’s a hard person to sit in for too long. She feels awful. It was difficult for me to sit in that awfulness for long periods of time."
  "I want my writing to be compelling for them. It is so much to ask of someone, to sit with your fiction, and so I am hyperaware of the need for brevity and momentum. In life and fiction, I have found that sentimentality is something that is not to be trusted. It’s not an honest feeling, and so I don’t find it moving. ... This plainness seems the most honest to me."

  This Flesh Container We Call a Body: An Interview with Rita Bullwinkel
  By Patty Yumi Cottrell May 24, 2018
  AT WORK

  Rita Bullwinkel’s first story collection, Belly Up, is a kind of miracle. Imbued with darkness and absurdity, the stories in Belly Up announce Bullwinkel as a writer of deep intelligence and bold style. A snake thinks of himself as a pear in a tree, two high school girls fantasize about turning into plants, and a woman becomes slowly unhinged after witnessing a car accident. Bullwinkel is a gifted technician of words and moods. The quotidian is turned on its side. The economy is so bad that instead of buying a bra, a mother pays a man off Craigslist to hold up her daughter’s breasts. A missing thumb leads to a suicide. Desire for knowledge leads to misery. The dead come back. The scale of what is possible in Bullwinkel’s worlds is overwhelming. Upon finishing this book, I was deeply moved.

  A couple years ago, when Bullwinkel and I first met, she told me that she had walked from where she was staying in East Los Angeles to our meeting place, in Chinatown. In Los Angeles, there are no direct walking routes; there are no grids or city blocks. There are steep hills and chickens in backyards and sidewalks in disrepair. She said the walk took her over an hour. And yet, I was surprised to find, she wasn’t sweating. A year later, I spent a few nights in her apartment above a hardware store in San Francisco, where she lives with her partner, a musician. I remember art on the walls, various musical instruments, and plants with bright-green waxy leaves spilling over the edge of a kitchen table. Bullwinkel is very good at keeping things alive. Her home, like her writing, gives one the impression of a peculiar and generous mind.

  This interview was conducted over email.

  INTERVIEWER

  When you were young, were you focused on writing, or were you interested in other arts?

  BULLWINKEL

  I didn’t start writing until I was in college. Before college I had never read any books of fiction that I liked, so I thought I didn’t like fiction. I used to make all of my own clothes. I also painted and made furniture out of broken surfboards and other trash I found in dumpsters. I was not very good at any of these things, but I knew I liked making things. The thing I was best at as a child was sports. I was recruited to play water polo in college, which I did all four years. I now view that as a completely insane and irrational thing to have done. I have almost no connection anymore to that part of my identity.

  INTERVIEWER

  I think there’s definitely a connection between competitive sports and writing. Both require motivation and rigor if one wants to improve. Do you consider yourself ambitious? What motivates you to keep writing?

  BULLWINKEL

  I suppose the leap from being a reader to a writer is an opaque one. They are intertwined for me. I only became a writer when I became an obsessive reader. I’m not sure why I have a desire to write things, but it makes me feel more human than any other thing has thus far in my life. It makes me feel like I’ve done something worthy of the earth hours I’ve spent doing it. Even if no one else ever reads it, if no one ever wants to publish it, I still feel this way. I don’t think I’m ambitious as much as extremely desirous. Once I’ve decided I desire something it is practically impossible to get me to think about anything else, or to get me to change my mind. I am sure this has something to do with why I was a proficient athlete. Water polo is a brutal sport, and one that requires a great deal of beating up on. My nose and all of my fingers have been broken. One time, when I was sixteen, I vomited for two days straight because of a full-force kick I took directly to the stomach (I later learned I was probably experiencing some type of internal bleeding). It is also notable that literally no one cares about women’s water polo. I cocaptained a top-twenty NCAA Division I team, and we played games for ghost towns. Nobody ever cared if we won or lost. Nobody even knows how the sport is played.

  May I ask, Patty, what motivates you to write fiction? Why do you make these beautiful books and stories that I read out loud to myself and that I so adore?

  INTERVIEWER

  I’ve always read fiction. I didn’t start to write until I was in my late twenties because I ran out of things to do. I tried being a musician, a barista, a teacher, a librarian. For a few months, I pursued a masters in social work, then gave up because there was too much busy work. A few years ago, I decided to write a book because I thought a lot of contemporary fiction wasn’t that good, so I might as well try. I know that sounds arrogant, and I was. I don’t feel that way anymore. Putting a book out into the world has been humbling. Any aversion I had toward contemporary fiction has died down. I’m even dating a contemporary writer.

  BULLWINKEL

  I love the idea that the ultimate embrace of contemporary literature is dating a contemporary writer. I haven’t gotten there yet, but maybe soon!

  INTERVIEWER

  In Belly Up, there’s often a sense of absurdity in relation to every day life. For example, in “Decor,” a woman working at a high-end furniture showroom becomes obsessed with a man in prison who writes to her requesting fabric samples. Where did this story start?

  BULLWINKEL

  I’ve worked many retail jobs where I was meant to be a decorative object whose sole purpose was to enhance the consumer’s purchasing experience. Occasionally I would fold some clothes. But mostly it was just about being a young warm body at the ready to attend to someone’s every need. I think the labor one has to offer the world can be an absurd thing to consider. We have these bodies that can perform tasks and the completion of said tasks can earn us money. We also have to live and think in these bodies, both privately and publicly. The range of things one can do with a body for money is staggering! Surely that, in itself, is absurd. I do find the experience of having a body, especially a female body, to be bizarre.

  INTERVIEWER

  “Black Tongue” begins with a young girl sticking her tongue into an electrical outlet. Later on, she says, “There are good things about having the impulse to throw yourself off the side of a cliff.” How do you understand this line as it connects to the line that appears later in the story—“There is only so much of your body you can ruin”?

  BULLWINKEL

  I think there are good and bad things about having the ability to change oneself completely. It’s a dangerous thing to do, but it’s also a survival tool. I am self aware enough to know I have a type of flight syndrome. My solution to most difficult situations is to leave. This is true for all aspects of my life, except for my love life. I’m always threatening to leave my partner of ten years, but now the threat feels a little tired. He’s my favorite human, so now my fantasies of flight usually involve dragging him along.

  INTERVIEWER

  Would you say you’re an intuitive writer? Or do you work from an outline? As you’re writing, do you know what will happen next?

  BULLWINKEL

  I don’t work from outlines, though I wish I could. Sometimes I make them, and then immediately deviate from their course, so that the outline just becomes this relic of a thing that never could, or never will, be. I do try to wield the momentum of writing when I can grab it, and write in long, drawn-out bouts. There is energy there, when that happens.

  INTERVIEWER

  Which story took the longest to write, and why?

  BULLWINKEL

  “Decor” took me the longest to write. It used to be much shorter, and it had a different ending. I think it required more time because Ursula, the protagonist of the story, is so angry and delirious with envy that she’s a hard person to sit in for too long. She feels awful. It was difficult for me to sit in that awfulness for long periods of time.

  INTERVIEWER

  Many of your stories have a cool temperature. And by that I mean that you approach things from an odd and absurd angle. The reader doesn’t have much access to your characters’ emotions, as this isn’t how they understand the world. I would compare the tone of Belly Up to the coolness of Fleur Jaeggy or Thomas Bernhard. I find this kind of writing incredibly brave and moving, because it trusts that the reader will invest in the world without dangling in front of them some kind of emotional pay off. I’m curious if you think about a reader as you write.

  BULLWINKEL

  I do think about the reader. I want my writing to be compelling for them. It is so much to ask of someone, to sit with your fiction, and so I am hyperaware of the need for brevity and momentum. In life and fiction, I have found that sentimentality is something that is not to be trusted. It’s not an honest feeling, and so I don’t find it moving. It’s a screen feeling, as in, people feel sentimental about something when they are unable to look at the truth of it. I find so much of life to be about making nice with people. We must smile and we must get along. And so, I find it deeply refreshing, when reading, to sit in voices that have stripped all of the superficiality away and tell things plainly. This plainness seems the most honest to me.

  INTERVIEWER

  Do you remember reading the first book that made you want to write?

  BULLWINKEL

  The first book I read that made me want to write fiction was Jesse Ball’s The Way Through Doors. It was assigned to me in a Fiction 1 class taught by the brilliant writer Joanna Howard. Other books on her syllabus included Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners, Lydia Davis’s Almost No Memory, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and Ben Marcus’s magnificently curated Anchor Book of American Short Stories. I loved everything Joanna assigned, and, over the summer, read everything each of the authors had ever written.

  INTERVIEWER

  What has changed in your process since college?

  BULLWINKEL

  My mind feels like a bigger space to play in. I used to only write very short stories, but now I write both very long and very short fiction. I feel I can hold a whole book in me. I wasn’t able to do that ten years ago, when I first began.

  INTERVIEWER

  You’ve worked with Diane Williams on NOON, an innovative fiction literary journal. Diane is an amazing writer, a genius. Her use of language is peculiar and surprising. I read one of her stories aloud to my girlfriend. She said listening to it made her very uncomfortable. Can you tell me a little about what it was like to work with her?

  BULLWINKEL

  Diane is, indeed, a genius. Her story “All American,” which is a masterpiece, was in the Ben Marcus anthology that Joanna Howard first assigned to me, so Diane was one of the writers I read the summer after my sophomore year. When I moved to New York, I wanted desperately to find a way to work for her. I acquired her email address, through a friend of a friend of a friend, and cold emailed her and asked if there was anything I could do in any capacity to work for NOON.

  Diane is an intensely magnetic person to work for. She treats each sentence, each story, like it is the most important thing that anyone ever has, or ever will do. It was intoxicating to be around a person who took sentences so seriously. Perhaps the most bizarre, and most brilliant, thing about working for her was that she made the other editors and I read the stories we were seriously considering out loud to her. We would sit in her living room on beautiful sofas surrounded by her beautiful art and read stories to each other for hours. Diane would often edit out loud. She would ask us to make changes verbally, and then read the stories out loud, with the changes, back to her. I loved working for her.

  INTERVIEWER

  The opening story, “Harp,” has a smooth, placid surface. People are polite to each other and cook nice meals. They drive in cars and go to concerts. But there’s anger coursing underneath the surface as the narrator becomes more and more unhinged.

  BULLWINKEL

  This feeling of impending disaster is a feeling I experience frequently. I think this is because I, like everyone else alive, am constantly having to reckon with all of the things I know are wrong with this world. It’s extremely difficult to carry those wrongs, acknowledged and ignored, around with me while I go get a cup of tea. I assume that many people feel this way. There is a way one feels and a way one must act outwardly. It’s a difficult but universal performance.

  INTERVIEWER

  One of my favorite stories in the collection is “Arms Overhead.” It has this curdled reality that reminds me of Jane Bowles. The protagonists in the story, Mary and Ainsley, are precocious girls entering high school who fantasize about being plants. Later on, they become obsessed with a “man in Japan who wanted to eat both himself and other people.” Can you talk about how you see the grotesque in your stories?

  BULLWINKEL

  I am interested in the grotesque because the most repulsive things are often sheet masks for societal poisons. The grotesque often represents the thing in front the real thing. It’s a lens with which to get the reader’s attention. I think that for grotesque things to be written about successfully they must be turned on their head in some way. One has to make the reader want to get a little a closer and reconsider whether or not the thing they are seeing is grotesque after all.

  INTERVIEWER

  Something I’ve been thinking about lately is what it means to be mortal and to be trapped in this flesh container we call a body. I suppose I’m thinking about this because my cat is very ill, and I love her, but she’s going to die one day. Many of your characters grapple with their own physical being, their physicality, and the ensuing trauma and grief that goes along with that. So I’ll end with, what does it mean to you to have a body?

  BULLWINKEL

  Bodies are such strange vessels to be contained in. I fantasize about growing old and having mine dramatically change. What will my body be like when I am ninety? Will I still be able to see myself inside of me? When I was a small child, I was primarily taken care of by my great-grandparents who were eighty-three and eighty-eight at the time. My great-grandmother spoke to me primarily in Italian, a skill which has, very sadly, completely left me. We went on long walks together every day. She spent hours cooking for me. My favorite thing she fed me was carrots and sweet onions sautéed in butter. My great-grandfather only had nine fingers. He lost the middle finger on his left hand lassoing a bull. He used to own a dairy. They lived in the same neighborhood I now live in, only a bit further north on California Street. I spent so much time with them. I loved them. Even though I was very young, just three or four, I remember being acutely aware of the differences between our human forms. They were the same in some ways. The four us—my great-grandparents, my sister, and I—walked places slowly. I had such a small body.

  Patty Yumi Cottrell is the author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace. She is the winner of a 2018 Whiting Award in fiction and a Barnes and Noble Discover Award.

QUOTED: "When Bullwinkel gives herself a larger canvas to dive into the grief and panic of characters caught between one thing and another, her stories approach brilliance."

Bullwinkel, Rita: BELLY UP
Kirkus Reviews. (Apr. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Bullwinkel, Rita BELLY UP A Strange Object (Adult Fiction) $14.95 5, 8 ISBN: 978-0-9985184-3-5

Characters obsess over physical and emotional metamorphoses in this debut collection.

Ovid's Metamorphoses lurks in the DNA of these 17 stories, as characters reckon with the changing forms of the bodies (and minds) they are in. Two teen girls fantasize about turning into plants, using the story of Apollo and Daphne as their model, after they are sexually harassed ("Arms Overhead"). Bullwinkel also writes movingly of the late middle-aged and the elderly grappling with the transformations of aging, as in "Mouth Full of Fish," about two ill patients going for a night swim. But if Ovid is here, so too is the deep surrealism of Max Ernst. Bullwinkel has a gift for the eye-popping opening line: "People kept dying and I was made to sleep in their beds" begins "Burn," a tale about a middle-age man helping widows through their grief in an unorthodox manner. "Nave," a flash piece about the devouring impulses of religion, starts, "My father told me that our church had a belly." Sometimes the surprise is less in the opening than in the strange turns the tales take once they launch; in one of the collection's standouts, "Decor," a young woman working in a luxury furniture showroom has her ennui punctured by a communication from a prisoner with a flair for home design. In "Clamor," a medium holding a group session must navigate the conflicting desires of her clients, both dead and living. Weirdness is almost de rigeur in short fiction these days, but Bullwinkel also shows impressive range and deep emotional intelligence.

While the shortest pieces in the book can be frustratingly oblique, when Bullwinkel gives herself a larger canvas to dive into the grief and panic of characters caught between one thing and another, her stories approach brilliance.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Bullwinkel, Rita: BELLY UP." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532700583/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f0faa3d8. Accessed 24 June 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A532700583

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/deft-hand-cold-heart-rita-bullwinkels-debut-belly-up/
  Word count: 1277

  QUOTED: "These stories play at the boundary between work that is thought-provoking and work that is thoughtful."
  "It’s hard to find fault with such skillful sentences. Still, what would these stories sound like if they had heart? In Belly Up, a profound talent has manifested, one that is experimental in the best sense. All of these stories unspool in an atmosphere of exploration. But are Bullwinkel’s future explorations going to remain remote dissections of the outside world, her pen as sharp as a scalpel? Or will she, one day, decide to crack her own sternum to see what’s under there?"

  Deft Hand, Cold Heart: Rita Bullwinkel’s Debut “Belly Up”
  By Katharine Coldiron

  35 0 0

  MAY 8, 2018

  RITA BULLWINKEL’S FIRST COLLECTION of short stories, Belly Up, jangles with the voices of other writers. Her fearless characterizations echo Jincy Willett (Jenny and the Jaws of Life); her stark, unsettling sentences evoke Joanna Ruocco (A Compendium of Domestic Incidents); her crafting of a tautological biosphere that only contains the kind of people who would appear in her stories suggests Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You); and, for many reasons, her work calls to mind Guggenheim fellow Mary Gaitskill (Veronica, Don’t Cry). Singing through this braid of whispers is Bullwinkel’s own confident voice, which displays a talent for compression staggering in a debut collection and proves that the prose belongs to her alone.

  Yet the writing feels elusive. This could be a function of narrative distance, something Belly Up has in spades. In one of the longer stories, “Arms Overhead,” events are fairly ordinary, but the two adolescent girls at its center provoke unease. Mary and Ainsley talk about plants, the ouroboros, and school, and a creepy teacher mildly humiliates one of them. But it’s never clear who they really are or what they are really like — by the end of the story are they going to turn cannibal or cheerleader?

  Bullwinkel never shortens this distance, despite delivering insights both mundane and exceptional. In one scene, for instance, Mary watches her baby brother while her mother is in the kitchen:

  He bunched his eyebrows and opened his toothless mouth as if he were going to scream. He sat there for a moment, silent, open-mouthed in his pre-tantrum. Mary looked at him in this state and thought it was one of the scariest things she had ever seen.

  This passage is typical of Bullwinkel: from a certain vantage, yes, a child on the verge of a tantrum is terrifying, and how insightful of the author to point this out with such acute observation. But it’s not clear why it’s terrifying to Mary, or whether it matters that she is afraid.

  In the opening story, “Harp,” the main character, Helen, decides to split and compartmentalize two aspects of herself after she is strongly affected by the sound of harps being tuned. There’s a deliberateness to Bullwinkel’s characterization of Helen that’s meant to indicate a comprehensive profile of the character, but the reader is kept at such a remove that it’s impossible to empathize.

  Which is not to say this is essential for successful fiction, to generate empathy for characters. After all, Gaitskill’s detached stance toward her characters is part of why her work is so hypnotizing. She, too, creates characters without necessarily investing them with empathy-ready qualities, and she, too, writes with a narrative distance that approaches hostility. It’s never clear whose side she is on. Bullwinkel appears to be on the side of language, but beyond that her loyalties are murky.

  Gaitskill’s 1988 debut, Bad Behavior, was a book of extraordinary, mature, complete short stories, none of which had been previously published. Bullwinkel’s collection mirrors this, as well. Her stories have appeared in tough-nut markets such as NOON and Tin House, but most of the longer stories in Belly Up are appearing for the first time, which is a surprise; these stories, like Gaitskill’s, are extraordinary, mature, and complete. They also showcase a knack for killer first sentences — “I was the type of man who got his ears cleaned,” “People kept dying and I was made to sleep in their beds,” and “There was a period of my life in which my primary source of income came from being a piece of furniture,” among them.

  Gaitskill has never quite shaken the reputation — half literary wunderkind, half unabashed dominatrix — bestowed by Bad Behavior, but her later work is more interesting. This prompts curiosity about what Bullwinkel’s third or fourth book is going to be like. Will her stark sentences ever open wider than a fist? Will she combine her remarkable insight with greater empathy for her characters?

  In a scene in “Clamor,” Bullwinkel describes a séance from the perspectives of everyone in the room, including a young military veteran and a retired woman and her granddaughters. Feelings are matter-of-fact and quickly dispensed with, while thoughts go on and on, such as in this passage:

  the older teenage daughter, Izzy, who couldn’t help thinking that for all old peoples’ whining about children being stuck in their computers, that it was the older people who were the ones usually trapped in their own world, trapped in their made-up self-constructed narratives, not the youth. It was the older people like Lillian and her Grandma Carol and most well-off retirees that just told the same origin stories over and over again regardless of whether or not they were even true.

  These stories play at the boundary between work that is thought-provoking and work that is thoughtful. A consequence of the utter lack of sentiment in this volume is the sense that although the reader may be fascinated, it’s hard to say if the author or the characters are. The characters often seem to act out of boredom or routine, and the author seems implacable to the point of incuriosity. Such clinical distance reveals the ineffable from a philosophical perspective but without human warmth.

  Yet, again, warmth is not necessary for exceptional fiction, just as likability is not a necessary trait of female characters, and this clinical distance is generally an asset that makes Bullwinkel’s stories appealingly alien. In “Black Tongue,” for example, the narrator performs a gruesome act and muses on her brother’s inability to cope:

  [T]here are the types of people who constantly envision what it would be like to be beheaded, and there are those who don’t. My brother is the latter. He is very satisfied with his veins and the work they do to keep his blood within him. He never thinks about what would happen if they exploded and it all went wrong.

  It’s hard to find fault with such skillful sentences. Still, what would these stories sound like if they had heart? In Belly Up, a profound talent has manifested, one that is experimental in the best sense. All of these stories unspool in an atmosphere of exploration. But are Bullwinkel’s future explorations going to remain remote dissections of the outside world, her pen as sharp as a scalpel? Or will she, one day, decide to crack her own sternum to see what’s under there?

  ¤

  Katharine Coldiron’s work has appeared in Ms., the Guardian, VIDA, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in California and blogs at the Fictator.

• Literary Review
  http://www.theliteraryreview.org/book-review/a-review-of-belly-up-by-rita-bullwinkel/
  Word count: 1243

  A Review of Belly Up by Rita Bullwinkel
  Trevor Payne

  (Austin, TX: A Strange Object, 2018)
  Belly Up, the title of Rita Bullwinkel’s debut collection, feels like a wave of the hand, beckoning us to cross the threshold of a serving house, walk over to the bar, and lift a shoe onto the brass footrest – and if the bartender standing on the other side of the sticky varnished surface is Rita, then settle in. She has a few stories to tell.

  Even if accidental, the allusion to a serving house as a metaphor for a work of fiction fits Bullwinkel’s sensibility, as she affirms the value of physically sharing time and space in order for us to not feel so alone in the universe. Conversation helps. Argument even. However, nothing replaces the energy transfer that occurs when one body touches another. Otherwise we risk getting trapped in our mindspace, where things can get rather strange in a hurry.

  Because of their focus on the transcendent possibilities of human interaction, the pieces in Belly Up are all, in a way, love stories, or their opposite, which is sort of the same thing. From this starting premise the narratives typically progress in one of two ways: after having drifted into the fantastical, they relax back into a more mundane moment in which existential pain is alleviated, to some degree, by connection; or they move from a common situation to the mystical, which often feels like a phantasmagoria in which the characters’ increased isolation is expressed through a grotesque vision of the physical body.

  Consider “Clamor,” the final story in the collection, where the perspective shifts across the minds of nine characters, eight of whom – Phyllis, Carol, Lillian, Izzy, Olivia, Anna, Cliff, and Sam – have gone to experience the performance-art of the ninth, a medium, in order to contact their dead. Most of them, like most of us, have a cynical appreciation of the psychic’s game, which involves vaguely describing a ‘presence’ of some sort, allowing the people who have agreed to submit themselves to the ritual to project their unresolved traumas into the middle of the circle. We sense the reluctance of the participants to being spritzed with “holy water to keep the ghosts from following them outside her home.” But then, suggesting there indeed might be something to it, the medium seems to see those who are absent more clearly than those with her in the trailer – hence her fantasy of cutting open her clients’ “brain containers” and “dipping into each of their brain buckets with a ladle and pulling out from the depths of their bowls their thoughts, which looked like sticky thick woolen thread.” Has there ever been an image more opposite to the idea of an ethereal soul?

  While these are not linked stories, it does feel that Bullwinkel’s characters have something to say to each other. At first blush, Joe from “Burn” seems like he’d be the type to get how to cope with the vagaries of intimacy, as he has a history of helping widows when the ghosts of their dead husbands won’t leave them alone, in part by feeding their grief with his delicious food. When Nick King dies, Joe marries his wife Miranda, cooks for her, and then when Joe himself dies it turns out Nick’s ghost had been there the entire time, in the attic. When Joe says, “What did you really want me for, Miranda?” he means, Why can I not be everything? It seems Joe could stand for a shot of whimsy contained within the advice Austin gives to his girlfriend in “God’s True Zombies” on how to zig-zag in order to escape an alligator: “They’ll never catch you if you run like a goon.” She proves she understands the metaphorical gist of this idiom when she talks about Austin having dated a stripper who worked at the “world-famous Mons Venus.” These strippers, these experiences, are always there, like a demented ghost: “They dance in your brain…Dancing, dancing till the rest of the plastic lining your brain cracks under the weight of their tiny feet, splintering into the bloodstream, and God decides it’s time for you to leave Florida, it’s time for you to go home,” which means back to her and the more normative life she provides.

  It comes down to perspective. Nick King’s ghost doesn’t have a problem with Joe, because he’s preferred. Whereas conversely the unnamed protagonist of the opening story “Harp” has a problem with her own marriage because she can’t accept the selfless affection of her husband, who, like Joe, expresses love through preparing food. Bemoaning her lack of reciprocation, she says, “Why couldn’t I just take my new feeling and give it to him?”—the ultimate fantasy of the solipsistic introvert. (Oh that we all could subscribe to that service.) She experiences a halting epiphany that allows her to come to terms with the fact that she can’t ever be fully known because she is more than one thing, that it is okay for the halves that comprise her whole to remain unknown to each other. The presence of love in her life will not make her complete, but at the same time this love doesn’t necessarily have to fall apart in concert with the chaos of the universe. However, after a pleasant morning of love making and her husband then serving her “a hearty breakfast of eggs and bacon,” she finds herself again riding the rhythms of her moods, honking at a couple taking too long to cross the street, making “her eyes bulge and look out at them.” We understand. Morning commutes can derail all of our best intentions.

  The “Harp” woman is young. In a later story, “What Would I Be If I Wasn’t What I Am,” Franny, an aging woman coping with the loss of her husband, with whom she had shared over four decades of her life, proves the best love can survive even the death of the person providing it. Franny has gained the wisdom that another’s mind is always, in part, unknowable – and she understands the importance of the physical taking over when language fails. “When we had sex,” she says, “I knew I was coupling with some combination of Ray’s mind and his body, but mostly I just liked thinking of us as two bodies. It was simpler that way and easier for me to understand.” Ray’s presence within her speaks to how we don’t need a frank vocabulary to feel how bodily impulse transcends conscious thought. In the denouement, Franny is by herself at her artist’s residency in Yellowstone, in Cottage 18. She sees “creep in” at the edges of herself “only a wanting, only a desire to not be left…a desire to be more than a single person trembling, a wish to be forever coupling so that [she is] not just simply alone.” Amazing how that “only” feels thankful, that she is able to feel what was right in her long marriage to Ray, despite its problems. Her wish, a prayer, is not just for herself, but for all of us.

  | | |

  Trevor Payne teaches English at Radnor High School in suburban Philadelphia.

• Publishers Weekly
  https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-9985184-3-5
  Word count: 277

  QUOTED: "Despite some unevenness, Bullwinkel’s collection hums with sharp sentences and observations, introducing a startling, off-kilter voice in fiction."

  Belly Up
  Rita Bullwinkel. A Strange Object (SPD, dist.), $14.95 trade paper (192p) ISBN 978-0-9985184-3-5

  The uncanny and the macabre reign supreme in Bullwinkel’s debut, in which high concept meets cool, stylish prose. There are strong biblical and mythical undertones in these stories, in which two teenage girls contemplate cannibalism (“Arms Overhead”) and a snake who masquerades as a poisonous pear has a crisis of identity (“Concerned Humans”). The characters have a tendency toward reticence and Bullwinkel has a tendency toward omniscient description; the stories at their best have an air of allegory and at their worst feel stagnant. This is especially evident in the very short stories, which are strewn throughout the collection. Though some are quite good (such as “God’s True Zombies,” a Saundersesque short in which Florida is made up of “ghosts who are being held in Limbo for punishment of gluttony or for charging interest on loans”), some read more like writing exercises, as in the case of “Passing” and “Nave.” The best stories are the longer ones, in which the characters have room to grow and Bullwinkel’s keen imaginative powers are on full display; in one of these, “Burn,” Joe Engel combines his knacks for cooking and for confronting the supernatural. It comes with a killer first line: “People kept dying and I was made to sleep in their beds.” Despite some unevenness, Bullwinkel’s collection hums with sharp sentences and observations, introducing a startling, off-kilter voice in fiction. (May)

• Millions
  https://themillions.com/2018/05/strange-divine-rita-bullwinkels-belly.html
  Word count: 1317

  The Strange and the Divine: On Rita Bullwinkel’s ‘Belly Up’
  REVIEWS
  Jenessa Abrams
  May 18, 2018 | 6 books mentioned 5 min read
  Related Books:
  Rita Bullwinkel’s debut collection, Belly Up is as exquisite as it is absurd. The real glides so closely against the imagined that when a grieving widow hears her neighbors through their shared wall, she finds it necessary to check that they are real people and not younger manifestations of herself and her husband. She wonders whether she has invented them, and, as readers, we are not quite sure. We’re never entirely certain where these stories of recognition and reinvention are going to go, of what the rules are. What keeps us here is the intelligence and precision of Bullwinkel’s prose, which allows her to mine the deeply strange and deeply intimate with abandon and exactitude.

  In a recent tweet, award-winning author Victor LaValle posited: ‘The last word of your first book was the theme of the whole thing…” If that is the case, the theme of Belly Up is “thread.” That seems apt. Belly Up is woven together with thick, peculiar strands. In the hands of a less-assured writer, these threads might feel loose, disconnected—under Bullwinkel’s guidance, they pull together to arrive at moments of profound revelation.

  These stories are bound by their unwillingness to conform, by their insights into the human mind, by their wicked authenticity. Belly Up is full of reckoning, full of curiosity, full of characters attempting to pull themselves out of the mundane, out of what is expected of them. This feels akin to yanking a plant out of the soil from its root; the experience is intensely odd and simultaneously invigorating.

  Belly Up is perhaps best described by a moment in one of the collection’s best stories, “Arms Overhead,” in which two adolescent girls imagine themselves as plants:

  As Mary read from several psychology journals that posited theories about why one might have the desire to eat oneself, Ainsley put her head in Mary’s lap and listened.

  At the close of the collection’s first story, “Harp,” about a woman whose day, and perhaps, life, is upended by having witnessed a car crash, I jotted down the word: curious in the margins, followed by a cascade of my thoughts: unexpected, unsettled, unusual. Then I paused, indented my pencil and wrote: But, something opens, something begins. All of Bullwinkel’s stories unlock something. The strongest pieces fling the whole thing open. Burn the house down. Others are a mere suggestion of what lies outside, a hint that things are not as they appear. That is like life. Sometimes blaringly loud and other times alarmingly silent.

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  That silence was most deeply felt in the collection’s shorter pieces, which serve as interludes between the more traditional narratives. In their brevity, the often dreamlike vignettes create a gulf between the reader and the work. This may be, in part, because they pulse with intelligence, which can make the text feel inaccessible, or for the reader to feel unwelcome. In their condensed form, the stories were darker, the fantasies more unusual, the phlegm, phlegmier, but they lacked the emotional depth that is so propulsive throughout much of the collection. I was reminded of the ferocious Lydia Davis, whose Varieties of Disturbances dips into philosophical introspection that resists traditional narration. Reading Bullwinkel also called to mind the work of Diane Williams, specifically, her most recent collection, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, in which the prose is equally poignant and exacting.

  These stories are populated with the strange: a child with a black tongue, an insatiably hungry church, the commingling of the dead and the living. It is in this strangeness that we are reminded of our humanity; while we are enchanted by the elaborate conceits, we become vulnerable to Bullwinkel’s talent for emotional wounding. She crafts unexpectedly tender scenes that are ripe with revelation.

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  Bullwinkel finds herself in a lineage of authors who won’t conform. To borrow the title from Lydia Davis’s most recent collection: they Can’t and Won’t. Perhaps what sets Bullwinkel apart is her willingness to fling her narratives off a cliff and to have her characters land, not on stable ground, but on something closer to hot lava than to dirt. The surrealism that floats through these stories feels in conversation with Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, which transcends genre and vibrates with emotional intensity.

  Belly Up’s standout is “What I Would Be if I Wasn’t What I Am,” an epic narrative of marriage, of identity, of grappling with whom we become in the face of both marriage and loss:

  It is difficult for me to distinguish which parts of myself are the original me, which parts of myself predated [my husband], and which parts were developed while I was with him. And, for those parts of me that were developed while I was with him, how am I to tell which parts I would have developed on my own, without him, and which parts of myself never would have come to pass if I had never met him?

  Embedded within all of these surreal narratives are similar moments of contemplation, of reckoning, that sting with incredible precision.

  In the collection’s opening story, the narrator muses: “I wondered if maybe I should suggest that my husband and I stop talking. Perhaps we should only communicate through touch and feel. Maybe that is a truer way to be with someone.”

  At their most profound, the stories in Belly Up name and subsequently interrogate states like adolescence, marriage, self-identification, motherhood. When a mother stares at her son who has just arrived home after driving drunk, she is unable to separate the possibility of what could have happened to him, from what actually did: “…All I could see was a corpse, [my son] dead, an alternate history that had been so close to happening that it drove me mad. People should be driven mad, temporarily, when they see things like that, their son in a near-miss state.”

  By the time we are two stories into Belly Up, when the dead return, we are expecting them; if we flinch, it is not from disbelief, but from the thrill of finding out what it is they’ve come to tell us.

  coverIn thinking about Bullwinkel’s debut, I found myself returning to the work of the great writer Augusto Monterroso, particularly his collection, Complete Works and Other Stories. Monterroso’s stories venture similarly into absurdity, joy, and exuberance, while also being wedded to philosophical rumination. The juxtaposition of the surreal and the introspective strikes a remarkable a balance that is alive and well in Bullwinkel’s collection.

  The characters in Belly Up demand our attention, they demand to be seen, to be recognized. What is perhaps most moving are the moments in which these characters learn to know themselves better. Throughout our reading, we accompany them on their journeys for truth and in the wake of each discovery, we begin to question our own lives, our own interpretations of reality.

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  JENESSA ABRAMS is a Norman Mailer Fiction Fellow. Her writing has been published in Tin House Online, TriQuarterly, Guernica, BOMB Magazine, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center and Columbia University, where she earned her MFA in fiction and literary translation. She is currently pursuing a subsequent graduate degree in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University.