Contemporary Authors

• Virgin and Other Stories Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York, NY), 2016

1. Virgin and Other Stories LCCN 2016002077 Type of material Book Personal name Lawson, April Ayers, 1979- author. Uniform title Short stories. Selections Main title Virgin and Other Stories / April Ayers Lawson. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. Description 179 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9780865478695 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PS3612.A9515 A6 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Indy Week - https://www.indyweek.com/arts/archives/2016/11/02/interview-april-ayers-lawson-a-visiting-writer-at-unc-discusses-her-paris-review-prize-winning-story-virgin

  Quoted in Sidelights: “I was writing with a lot of anxiety,” . “And then I wrote ‘Virgin.’ The frustration and anxiety can actually drive you into a deeper state of flow if you keep trying to write instead of giving into it. It also makes you feel like your self is dividing, because one part of you kind of does give up, and the part of you that is maybe more determined or willful just keeps doing it anyway. So writing that story was an intense, feverish, weird sort of experience. Then it ended up at The Paris Review.” “radically changed my life,”
  UNC Visiting Writer April Ayers Lawson Discusses Her Paris Review Prize-Winning Story "Virgin"
  Posted by Kendra Langdon Juskus on Wed, Nov 2, 2016 at 4:02 PM
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  April Ayers Lawson - PHOTO BY JASON AYERS
  photo by Jason Ayers
  April Ayers Lawson
  April Ayers Lawson and Clare Beams
  Friday, Nov. 4, 7 p.m., free
  Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill

  April Ayers Lawson made her surprise literary debut—her third publication ever—in The Paris Review’s Fall 2010 issue, with the smart, sensual, and devastating “Virgin,” a finely observed story of lust and infidelity that begins with the sentence, "Jake hadn't meant to stare at her breasts, but there they were, absurdly beautiful, almost glowing above the plunging neckline of the faded blue dress." In 2011, the publication’s board unanimously chose the story to receive its Plimpton Prize for Fiction.

  Now “Virgin” and four more emotionally and sexually tense stories of intimacy, faith, and the desire to be known will be published in Lawson’s first collection, Virgin and Other Stories, out November 1 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The book has received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, and Huffington Post named it one of “20 New Books You’ll Need for Your Shelf in Fall 2016.”

  Lawson is currently the Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC-Chapel Hill, where she is teaching and working on more stories. As she prepares to launch Virgin at Flyleaf Books—reading with Clare Beams, another author with a new debut story collection—We met up to talk about the writing process, healing, psychology, and sex.

  INDY: Tell me how you ended up sending "Virgin" to The Paris Review. It sounds like maybe the whole process changed your life.

  APRIL AYERS LAWSON: It radically changed my life. I was sending stories out, and I would get notes back, but assistant editors would want something, and then the main editor would say no. At the same time, I had been writing with Donald Antrim, and he had been reading [my stories], and he showed them to his agent at the Wylie Agency. I was really surprised that they accepted me on the basis of those stories.

  I wanted to prove to myself that I could do this, because it was such a big leap. I was writing with a lot of anxiety. And then I wrote “Virgin.” The frustration and anxiety can actually drive you into a deeper state of flow if you keep trying to write instead of giving into it. It also makes you feel like your self is dividing, because one part of you kind of does give up, and the part of you that is maybe more determined or willful just keeps doing it anyway. So writing that story was an intense, feverish, weird sort of experience. Then it ended up at The Paris Review.

  How long have you lived with these stories?

  The last one in the collection [“Vulnerability”] I tried to write for a couple of years, and I just wasn’t ready to do it yet. In the meantime, I learned so much that informed the final writing of it. I had several life crises at the same time, and I kind of had a nervous breakdown. I was writing during that period, but if you know anything about how trauma works, you lose some mental flexibility, like your sense of humor and your sense of irony. It’s almost like you lose a little bit of a surface all together, and there’s this feeling of being submerged. I would end up writing into stuff that would be toxic, because I hadn’t dealt with it yet. Every time I hit something, instead of dodging it, I had to go all the way into it to try to get all of that sludge out. And then I had the idea: if I do this for all of it, I can write clearly again.

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  It seems that you, as a person and in your work, have a capacity to sit in uncomfortable places. I think of [the second story in the collection] “Three Friends in a Hammock,” and this acknowledgement of the sexual tension between these friends. You sit in it.

  That story was post-nervous breakdown. And I think that having gone through that made it possible to be able to write about some of that stuff, because there’s a weird energy that’s actually good. Just because it’s uncomfortable, there’s this fresh pressure. And that pressure can be really productive, creatively.

  It’s like you’re reintegrating the trauma into the rest of the life you have to live, the rest of the person you are.

  You create more possibilities for emotional honesty when you make it fictional. And then it will feel like the past. For me to be able to write, to finish a story and to work, even if I’m making it up, I have to make it real, so that when I’m done it’s like, “Oh, that happened, that’s my past.” I just don’t feel like the same person.

  I noticed in the stories where sex is a primary theme that there is a very fine line between romance and violence, between consent and assault. That’s another uncomfortable place you bring people: you’re not writing about sex to be sexy.

  Yeah, definitely not writing about sex to be sexy.

  So what are you doing with sex? Why did you choose that as a theme?

  [In “Vulnerability”], there’s a betrayal bonding experience, basically. But some people don’t realize that. And I wanted it to be confusing. I wanted to enter into how confusing a thing like that actually is. Because it’s catastrophic in terms of your psyche.

  So you’re getting into the psyche through the action of the story.

  The psychological stuff interests me more than the sex. What’s interesting about the sex is what it brings out about people: what it says about their way of being intimate or avoiding intimacy. What does it actually say about their psychology and their character and their approach to bonding?

  I think about Flannery O’Connor and how when you read her stories you’re like, “Well, that wasn’t attractive. I’m not sure I want to reread that.” But she manages to dredge some grace out of those stories. Do you feel like you’ve tried to dredge some grace from your stories?

  I do. In “Vulnerability,” for example, even though it goes to a really uncomfortable place, she’s telling it in retrospect. And then it ends with light. She’s reaching some illumination about what really happened with this person and about accepting it. And I do feel that there’s grace in that.

• Fanzine - http://thefanzine.com/an-interview-with-april-ayers-lawson/

  “FEMALE WRITERS AREN’T SUPPOSED TO”: AN INTERVIEW WITH APRIL AYERS LAWSONJULIET ESCORIA30.01.17

  I read April Ayers Lawson’s Virgin and Other Stories in the bathtub. My intention was to read a single story, and then switch back to the poetry book I was already reading. But the title story, the first in the collection, got its hooks in me, and I sat there reading and reading until the water was no longer warm. The experience was pleasant so the next night I repeated it. There is something appropriate about reading her stories in the bath: the stories are ones that take their time to build, lingering over fine detail. They are stories about bodies: sex, discomfort, abuse, a disconnect between the mind and the limbs it controls.

  A review I read for the collection said her stories are ‘meaty,’ and they are. Long, but also rich, each paragraph there because it needs to be, each section further complicating the ending it builds to. Lawson has a precision to her language, deftly alternating the musical with the succinct, the concrete with the ethereal. There is also a gossipy quality to her writing, a feeling of voyeurism, that made me feel as if by reading them I was complicit in something salacious. But unlike juicy gossip, there is nothing frivolous or superficial about her work. Again: meaty.

  April and I discussed religion, politics, online attacks, writing while female, and more, over a Google doc and a series of emails.

  Juliet Escoria: A lot of your stories have to do with Christianity and also the frustration and awkwardness that comes from having a body. I guess I’m always curious about writers’ spiritual beliefs because the act of writing and reading can be tied to the divine, but I was especially curious about yours. Did Jesus die for our sins? Is the soul only temporarily tethered to the body? Do we even have a soul?

  April Ayers Lawson: It seems to me someone who’d say, “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing” about the people who persuaded Pilate to have him crucified–as he was dying on a cross—would have to be both human and more than human. He sounded like someone quite sure of who he was and what he was here for, and he wasn’t insane. I think we do have souls. I know people who don’t believe in the soul and yet have had moments where they’re scared they’re losing theirs, which is interesting.

  Last night I was reading Disgrace by Jim Coetzee and was struck by the part of the story where the father has a vision–it comes in sleep but he distinguishes it is different from a dream–in which his daughter who’s recently been raped and is staying in the next room says to him, ‘Come to me, save me!’ He gets up, goes to the daughter’s room, checks to see if she was calling him, but she says she wasn’t, tells him to go back to sleep. So he tries to go back to sleep, but he can’t. He goes back into her room, sits in a chair by the bed. He senses she’s been awake all this time. She doesn’t acknowledge his presence but after a long while he senses her relaxing; then hears her snore. He wonders if some part of her was calling out to him for comfort, another part of her unaware. Coetzee writes, “Is it possible that Lucy’s soul did indeed leave her body and come to him? May people who do not believe in souls yet have them, and may their souls lead an independent life?”

  There’s a similar idea in a Mary Gaitskill story called “Mirror Ball”—this idea that our souls can be in communication with other souls without our being aware of it, and that our soul may be trying to communicate things to others that we’re not consciously aware of. I’m not saying I believe this is the case—I haven’t decided I disbelieve it either—but that it interests me lately. I mean, obviously there’s something mysterious and of value in us that is also us, yet somehow feels distinctive from the surface-level us, and we’re all in one way or another, at some point in our lives, aware of it.

  JE: Now that we’ve covered religion, let’s go onto the other taboo of polite conversation: politics. Obviously we’re going through a contentious political time that has a lot of progressive-minded people (justifiably) upset. Do you think writers have a responsibility to be political? If so, how can a writer best integrate their politics into their work?

  AAL: Yes, we should definitely follow religion with politics. Hmm…nah, I don’t think writers have a responsibility to be political. Though I think those who are apt observers of human nature usually at some point end up writing about stuff that involves power, power dynamic, use and abuse of power. If by a certain age you’re not noticing power dynamics, you’re not paying enough attention to what’s happening around you or to your relations with other people and entities run by people.

  Artists of all mediums have a responsibility to be true to their vision. The other day someone told me writing honestly is political; we were talking about gender relations and I think he meant writing honestly about gender relations is political. So in that way you could say a writer could best integrate their politics into their work by being as true as possible to what they observe about their world and human nature. Your political beliefs—even if you don’t come out and clearly state them, even if you don’t intend to write something that involves politics—have a presence in your writing at some level, because they affect how you see the world.

  JE: In “Vulnerability,” the longest story in your collection (which is technically a novella, right?), you shift from first person to third to first again. This is a pretty bold move, but I really like the way you pulled it off and the effect it creates for the reader. Was this switch something you thought about a lot, or was it more intuitive?

  AAL: Yes, a novella. I did it intuitively, without understanding why. But after, I understood it made sense because it’s a trauma narrative (in which shifts like that often occur). She’s looking back on this life-altering event, analyzing what led up to it, desperate to see the full reality of it, which in memory is composed of pieces, fragments contradictions. The interesting thing about serious trauma is that it becomes so important in your memory because you remember most what happens in states of charged emotion, emotional arousal–when you’re afraid, you often remember what happens then the very most–and so events can take on what seems like undue significance; you don’t decide This Is One Of The Most Important Things That Happened To Me–which is what we would like to think, that we decide what’s important in our lives, that we’re always choosing what to give significance to in our narrative, but isn’t totally possible when you have a body. What happens with trauma is that sometimes our physiology decides This Is A Huge Deal and then we play catch up. We assemble the pieces of reality that led up to it, trying to understand. Then we are in a sense building our narrative, our reality, but it’s a faceted reality that we can’t see in the way we’re used to seeing; it’s almost like the truth of what happened is more than we can handle–it’s like we’re trying to see more than what we’re equipped to see while maintaining sanity. I wanted it to have that essence to it–her describing what happened with an air of I am still trying to understand what happened to me, what this means, why it altered me, and I can’t completely.

  I read Fear Of Flying by Erica Jong after I’d done it and noticed she went into third person in a part of it too. The different POVs create different levels of distance and intimacy, I think, too, and in a story like “Vulnerability” that is particularly useful.

  JE: The Lover does the POV switch too, I think for many of the reasons you explained.

  AAL: I have actually not read that but I have the book on my shelf. You’re the third person to mention it to me so I guess I really need to read it.

  JE: Oh, you should definitely read it. I think you’d love it.

  The majority of the stories in Virgin are written from the point of view of a woman, which is, of course, expected from female writers, but a couple of them are written from the perspective of a man. Is there something inherently feminist or anti-feminist about a woman inhabiting the mind of a man in her fiction?

  April_May2015-9AAL: That question makes sense to me–that it’s something people would wonder, I mean. But I don’t think it’s either. I think a woman should (like a man) have the freedom to write from the perspective of either gender without it necessarily being a political statement. For people to consider a story of mine either feminist or anti-feminist for the sole reason it is from the perspective of a man is–at least to me–an unfair limitation thrown at me as an artist that I would actually view as being sexist.

  The first time I set out to write from the perspective of a man it was an experiment. I’d been asking my then-partner about growing up as a man–just out of curiosity, wanting to know what he’d tell me about being male, wanting to understand. And the curiosity fed my art. Pretending to be a boy was highly entertaining, also, because I think guys are funny; I mean the ways in which they differ from women are funny to me; and also it’s entertaining to try to imagine being a man finding a woman funny.

  I will say I’ve occasionally wondered if writing from an adult male third-person perspective is (initially) what got me taken seriously by critics. That I had to do that to get my other stories taken seriously in the critical sense. But of course I don’t know; once I start thinking about it I can come up with examples of women who immediately got attention for writing that was from the point of view of a female.

  What do you think about a woman writing from a man’s perspective?

  JE: I think I’d agree with you–that we should have the freedom to write about whatever we want. I feel like a lot of men, when writing from the POV of a women, do it in a very silly way, and I think I’d be afraid of doing something equally silly. Which seems silly of me to be concerned about. I guess I haven’t written much fiction (maybe anything?) that wasn’t filtered through some version of myself, though. Sometimes I wonder if this might be why my stories aren’t taken more seriously. I remember feeling in grad school like people value made-up stories more than thinly-veiled autobiographical writing.

  AAL: People who don’t take your stories seriously are not reading very well. I have for the past two weeks had the feeling my book is getting taken more seriously in the UK and have been wondering why.

  About more made-up stuff versus thinly-veiled autobiography–well had Harold Brodkey been a woman…I can imagine the female version of him in workshop and people being like, “This is obviously autobiographical Haroldina”–and meaning it as a criticism. “There are too many observations and perceptions and analyses here, stick to the real story.” What I theorize those criticisms boil down to is: female writers aren’t supposed to assume that what happens to them and their perception of it at an intellectual level has the same significance that a male writer may without question assume in his narrative.

  JE: I wanted to ask you about winning the George Plimpton Prize in 2011 for “Virgin,” and what the process was like and how it felt to win and if you feel like it ‘opened any doors’ for you. But then when I was Googling to make sure I got the story and year right, I came across this, which seems really insane and nasty but also like, naive or something. As though The Paris Review is supposed to pull from the slush pile rather than querying writers they already like, and giving priority to agented submissions. As though The Paris Review must have a slush pile of just a handful of stories, and a huge, well-paid slush pile reading staff. (The anonymous author of the site also seems to think autobiographical fiction lacks merit.) How did it feel to be so pettily attacked so early on in your writing career?

  AAL: Yeah, that’s hilarious. When I saw that I wondered who’d pretended to be nice to me on FB to get me to friend them and then wrote that because my page was not public when that happened. Highly creepy. I mean this person–who is too cowardly to put a name to what they write–harshly attacks all these people but seems to think it is okay to under false pretenses go onto a (then) young woman’s FB page, gather what he perceives to be “evidence” and then slander her in public online in an argument attacking other people’s ethics and perspectives. He criticizes people using other people while obviously using me. He also asserts photos of me–in which I am obviously very happy (and also not on my honeymoon)–in London (where I spent a semester abroad actually) prove his slanderous and ridiculous accusations. I think I could sue him for defamation. What it doesn’t say is that the year before, I was published in Crazyhorse, which is a very well respected and difficult-to-get-into place, and I did it through the slush pile, after submitting that story (“The Way You Must Play Always”)–which some people like the most of those in my collection–to dozens of other places.

  Probably it goes without saying–but just in case, for anyone who doesn’t understand this–if a powerful agent is sending out your work it’s because that agent thinks it’s very good; you as a writer don’t pay the agent to do this. It’s not like you’ve hired some henchman to go around forcing your work on people. It’s that someone believes in what you wrote enough to send it under their name without even knowing if they’ll get paid for their effort. They take a percentage if they’re able to sell it.

  Oh, and initially it made me paranoid about people on my FB page. I was under a lot of stress at that point in my life and unwell and even my FB page suddenly seemed unsafe because, like I said, someone had under false pretenses gotten me to “friend” them and then slandered my name on the Internet because they didn’t get into Paris Review and needed to feel powerful.

  And this thing about very made-up fiction versus thinly-veiled autobiography–it doesn’t matter! I have trouble understanding these people who make it into a huge thing, like one is right and one is wrong. There’s a spectrum. Sometimes I write at one end of it, sometimes another, sometimes more in the middle. They’re all valid. If some people can’t do one of them well then they declare what they can’t do isn’t as valid. If they can’t do both well, then they write angry anonymous blogs attacking strangers for kicks. People are particularly interested in knowing if what women write is autobiographical, I think, most especially if it involves fucking. It’s down now, but this one dude had my photo on his blog with a kind of flashing Christmas-light sort of frame, calling me a literary princess and insinuating that was why I got published, as if the photo itself–because I was an okay-looking young woman not wearing a pair of huge eyeglasses rather than a big formidable-yet-sensitive-looking male who hadn’t bathed in a while–proved I did not deserve to get published in a good place.

  JE: Jesus Christ! That’s insane. This was all from winning the Plimpton Prize, or were they pissed about something else? It seems like the world hates smart women, but they really hate smart, attractive women.

  virginAAL: Just the Plimpton Prize. At the time it was quite a shock–that a single short story for which I won an award could arouse the hatred of two creeps who’d never even met me. There was a third guy, too, who wrote some amateurish review shaming Paris Review for publishing me and it felt so hatred-generated that another stranger wrote in to shame him for writing about me that way. Also though, what’s so interesting and horrible about it—well in every one of these the ultimate target was the editor of Paris Review. They were using me to try to challenge the authority of another male because I as a (at that time) young unknown female author seemed to be the most apparent area of vulnerability. In other words, I was the girl. I didn’t really count as a complete human being. Notice when a male author is attacked it is typically after he’s published several books and received widespread critical acclaim; he’s like the biggest guy in the room and people want to prove themselves by taking him down. But the female author—she might be attacked just for her career even beginning. Anyway, I think it’s better now than it was when this happened to me. There are so many talented female authors in what you could call high lit getting acclaim.

  JE: I’m curious what works influenced you when you were writing this book. Other books, of course, but I’m especially curious about movies, music, fine art, and even simple daily interactions that influenced you to view certain things a certain way, or shaped the emotions or themes you wanted to touch on, or changed the way certain themes were presented.

  AAL: While I can’t remember everything, I do remember that when I wrote the first draft of “Vulnerability”…well I was walking around a Barnes and Noble with my closest friend in the evening and while I’m usually a morning writer I suddenly felt this weird flood of electric energy, knew I was going to stay up all night adding to a page I’d written at a coffee shop that morning (that at the time I thought wasn’t going anywhere), and so I drank a bunch of coffee, went home and stayed up all night writing, finished the draft at sunrise. And so in that sense I very much consider the night–the surrounding dark outside my room that was in the country, next to woods–itself to be a primary influence. But to prevent any misassumption, I should add that the story as it is in the book took much longer than one night, before the night I speak of involved many failed attempts for more than a year, and after then involved lots of rewriting and expansion and revision and editing, a lot of work to fully express what needed to be there; but the very first draft was only about 22 pages. The whole time I kept playing “The Sound Of Silence” by Simon & Garfunkel and “I’ll Stop The World And Melt With You” by Modern English. Like over and over and over and over and over and over again.

  With “Three Friends In A Hammock”–well being in a hammock, as you might imagine. I felt inspired to write “The Way You Must Play Always” after reading the work of Marjorie Sandor, Eudora Welty, and Kate Chopin (all of whom have written stories about piano players/teachers). Haruki Murakami, JD Salinger, Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, “A Widow For One Year” by John Irving, and Harold Brodkey were also influences in a general way during a good bit of the writing of the book. With “The Negative Effects Of Homeschooling,” some of the inspiration was the aforementioned conversations with my former partner about boys and, as may be apparent from the story, Andrew Wyeth paintings. “Virgin”…the color blue, white dresses (the idea of a white dress), and a conversation about flirting.

  I watch some movies over and over in the same way I listen to songs over and over and some of the movies I watched a lot when I was writing some of these stories are Blue (the Kieslowski film), The Squid And The Whale, Closer, 21 Grams, The Royal Tenenbaums, Lost In Translation, Donnie Darko, and The Skin I Live In.

• Granta - http://grantabooks.com/april-ayers-lawson

  April Ayers Lawson is the recipient of the 2011 George Plimpton Award for Fiction, as well as a 2015 writing fellowship from The Corporation of Yaddo. 'Virgin' was also named a 2011 favourite short story of the year by Flavorwire Magazine and anthologized in The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from the Paris Review (Penguin 2016). Her fiction has appeared in the Norwegian version of Granta, Oxford American, Vice, ZYZZYVA Crazyhorse, and Five Chapters, among others. She has lectured in the Creative Writing Department at Emory University, and is the 2016-2017 Kenan Visiting Writer at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Virgin and Other Stories is her first book.

• April Ayers Lawson Home Page - https://aprilayerslawson.com/

  BIO
  April Ayers Lawson is the author of Virgin and Other Stories [Farrar, Straus and Giroux; and Granta Books], which in addition to being named a best book of the year by Vice, BOMB, Southern Living, and Refinery29 is also being translated for publication in Germany, Italy, Norway, and Spain. She has received the George Plimpton Award for Fiction, as well as a writing fellowship from The Corporation of Yaddo. Her fiction has appeared in Paris Review, Granta, and Oxford American, among others, has been cited as notable in Best American Short Stories, and was anthologized in The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from The Paris Review. She has lectured in the creative writing department at Emory University, and as the 2016-17 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

• Vice - https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/dpkyn7/virgin-and-other-stories-is-a-brilliant-book-about-sex-and-god-in-the-south

  Quoted in Sidelights: “I think the extreme focus on sex—the privileging of this over other matters in some churches—might have more to do with an anxiety over contamination and loss of control than Christianity,” “Like in the title story, ‘Virgin,’ where the character’s virginity [is] almost a fetish. Sexual purity continues to be something more associated with women than men, most especially in religion. … But I want to stress, too, that I don’t think all churches and Christians in the South are like that.”

  'Virgin and Other Stories' Is a Brilliant Book About Sex and God in the South
  We caught up with debut author April Ayers Lawson to talk about her beautifully disturbing new collection of stories.

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  DAVID GORDON
  Nov 7 2016, 11:00pm

  Photo of April Ayers Lawson by Jason Ayers/courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  I first met April Ayers Lawson in 2012. She was kind enough to write me about a story of mine that she had liked. This was especially flattering, considering that her own story, "Virgin," had won the Paris Review's prestigious Plimpton Prize. In her story, a young bride from a religious home insists on waiting until marriage to sleep with her non-religious fiancé. Her virginity first heightens his desire, then becomes nightmarish and threatening as her deeper issues and sexuality surface. Meanwhile another character, a cancer survivor, grows in importance, her mastectomy becoming a symbol of sexual and maternal power. I had never read anything quite like it: Strange, funny, beautifully disturbing, it felt completely alien yet completely true on some unconscious level. I became a fan, and have been awaiting her debut collection ever since.

  Though I'd read some of these stories in earlier states, the finished book, Virgin and Other Stories (an excerpt from which appeared in VICE magazine), as a whole struck me as extraordinarily intense. She pins raw emotional truth to the page with the pressure of a style that is elegant, cool, hyper-intelligent, and witty. The stories are both more upsetting and funnier than I recalled. Over email, we recently discussed, God, trauma, childhood sexuality, the South, the importance of smell, desire, and the endless complexities of human connection.

  VICE: Scent seems to be extremely important in this book. Nearly every story mentions it, while most writers rely on sight and sound.
  April Ayers Lawson: I have pollen allergies and live in one of the worst places for that—North Carolina—and so half of the time I don't smell much of anything. But when I do, I think my sense of smell is pretty sensitive. As a writer, I think some moments need scent to come fully alive. Also, if we have normal sight, then we trust what we see the most. It's "real" if we can see it. Scent is more elusive, unstable, mysterious—when you're out, you can get a distinct whiff of something suddenly in passing and be like, What is that? And then it's gone before you figure it out.

  Childhood sexual trauma, as well as other scenes of young people being sexually shamed, plays a role in several stories. Yet the innocent are often highly sexual beings themselves.
  I think a fair number of people start becoming aware of sexual response at an early age. Some boys are born with erections, but they don't understand it—it's like a physiological thing. Kids want attention. This can be easily exploited by sick and selfish people. Even if the kid willingly participated, the kid doesn't understand the whole picture—it's not the kid's fault. But it's very easy to shame and fault an abused person. People who've been abused struggle with blaming themselves anyway, in part because it would make more sense if they'd deserved it.

  And these kids are growing up in very religious backgrounds, which doesn't seem to help.
  In a context in which people are highly religious but maybe not so self-aware or psychologically astute, there's the tendency to want to assert one's goodness by pointing out what seems identifiably "bad" in others. At, say, a conservative Christian college, you can walk in and catch someone drinking or in the act of fornicating, but you can't walk in and catch the condition of someone's heart. You can't very easily walk in on someone being self-righteous; you can't walk in on someone doing a good deed out of ego rather than compassion; or having racist or sexist thoughts. I think the extreme focus on sex—the privileging of this over other matters in some churches—might have more to do with an anxiety over contamination and loss of control than Christianity.

  Like in the title story, "Virgin," where the character's virginity it almost a fetish.
  Sexual purity continues to be something more associated with women than men, most especially in religion. The way it's still set up in some people's heads—there's such an emphasis on a woman's purity, implying that to lose it ruins her. But human beings get sexually abused and raped. Does that mean they've lost their spiritual purity? What is this purity we're talking about, then? It's targeted toward the female, and it does as much damage as what it portends to protect her from. Christ was a revolutionary who emphasized the condition of a person's heart, forgiveness, compassion. But from some people in the South today, you'd get the idea he must have been someone who went around scaring girls into equating their value with being virgins before marriage and stopping people from having alcohol and gay sex.

  But I want to stress, too, that I don't think all churches and Christians in the South are like that. It's just those are often the pushiest and loudest and quickest to attempt to control others—and therefore draw more attention and are the ones people from other places hear about in the news. There are also true Christians in the South who do life-altering things for people out of loving hearts and don't resort to shaming to control.

  "Sex with someone you don't know very well is dangerous."

  The female characters also seem to often be preyed upon by the men and their victimization is made harrowingly real. Disturbingly, they also seem to be offering themselves as prey. Was this an intentional theme?
  To say they offer themselves as prey would imply they aren't already easy to harm; that they are offering to become what they already are. For example, in the story "The Way You Must Play Always," Gretchen isn't fully cognizant of the big picture in regards to what's happening between her and Wesley. She's seeking the same intensity of attention she got from her cousin with an older man, who is pretty much the only guy she gets to talk to alone at this point in her life. She wants connection and intimacy—she wants to be wanted. Becoming an object for someone, even before touch, has a palpable quality. It's not love, but it's a form of attachment. I mean, she thinks she loves the guy. Maybe she does.

  In "Vulnerability," the longest and most devastating story, the main character, an unhappily married artist, falls in love with two men over the phone. She arrives in New York and is brutally assaulted by one of them. Yet this barely scratches the surface of the manifold disturbing currents at work here. The narrator seduces men who resemble her molester into posing for her. This places her in jeopardy, yet she is the hunter. Similarly, she is drawn inexorably toward her abuser. Yet we learn that he is vulnerable, too. I wonder what you are thinking about in these cycles of mutual use and abuse.
  Well, she wants to take advantage of them. I think maybe she thinks it balances things out in the way people taking advantage of other people often enough do until they realize that type of empowerment is cheap and short-lived. While I knew in advance what would happen, events-wise, I did not know how she would end up seeing it. The surprise to me as writer wasn't what happened, but how she sees herself going through it, her evolving recognition of the cycle you speak of. I believe people do come out of these kinds of cycles—that people grow and change, but I think it's often a very long and messy journey. Though at the end, I questioned myself, like, "Shouldn't I write something with a more obviously positive message for women who've been abused or are still going through it?" I couldn't.

  "Vulnerability is learning what it means to be in a body."

  And she keeps thinking of these volatile and immediate connections as "love."
  Sex with someone you don't know very well is dangerous. Biological bonding stuff happens that can be very hard to wrest yourself from, physically and emotionally. Learning humility is maybe not fashionable now, but I think too the protagonist of "Vulnerability" is learning what it means to be in a body. And that's humbling.

  In your stories, characters are frequently concerned with religious matters. Yet they live in a world that is not only secular, but I would say, often feverishly carnal and even deeply Freudian. Can you talk about the role religion plays in your work?
  I believe there's a God—a conscious, omnipotent entity. I have felt it since childhood. Though my reasons for believing it as an adult have to do with more than just feeling and intuition. But I am in a state of question as to what that entails. I go to church, but there's always a tension for me in the sense that religion as a system is inevitably flawed, though I believe the potential good outweighs the potential bad. The church is people. People always have and cause problems. Fiction requires people having problems. Forgiveness, redemption, and that kind of thing—it means nothing outside of a carnal, material world. I am not interested in a Tupperware-container kind of faith in which I seal myself off from anything potentially challenging, messy. As for Freud—well, I think Freud is fun.

  Follow David Gordon on Twitter.

Quoted in Sidelights: “Lawson’s stories, at once forensic and mysterious, show how insistent our wants can be and how hard they are to understand.”Counting the ways
Hannah Rosefield
New Statesman. 146.5349 (Jan. 13, 2017): p47.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
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Virgin and Other Stories

April Ayers Lawson

Granta Books, 192pp, 12.99 [pounds sterling]

The title story of April Ayers Lawson's debut collection, which won the Paris Review's Plimpton Prize for Fiction in 2011, begins with a man staring at a woman's breasts. The breasts belong to Rachel, a recent survivor of breast cancer and a wealthy donor to the hospital where Jake works. His attraction to Rachel grows in tandem with his suspicions about his wife, Sheila, who was a virgin when they married. Jake "thought ... that she couldn't wait to lose her virginity to him". It didn't turn out like that. Sheila was first horrified by, and then indifferent to, sex. But why does she smile at strange men in the street? Why does she come home so late from orchestra practice? The story ends on the brink of infidelity but the infidelity is Jake's own.

"Virgin" is a fitting introduction to the animating question of Lawson's fiction: who feels what and for whom? The narrator of the second story lists the similarities between her and the two women with whom, at a summer party, she sits in a hammock. "All three of us were divorced or about to be legally so. All three of us were artists ... All three of us were attractive but insecure and attracted to each other," she begins. A couple of pages later, this accounting becomes more like a maths puzzle that seems to promise, if only it could be solved, a complete account of each woman and her relation to the others. "Two of us were pale with freckles. Two of us had dark hair and green eyes ... One of us didn't talk to her mother and one of our fathers had left and one of our sets of parents had not divorced ... Two of us had at some point had agoraphobia and all of us had problems with depression ..." It goes on.

Reading the five stories of Virgin and Other Stories, trying to catch the echoes that bounce between them, I caught myself performing the same move. One story is fewer than ten pages and one more than 60. Two are narrated in the first person and one in a mix of first and third. Two have teenage protagonists and two have young, married protagonists. Two protagonists steal works from a public library. Two stories mention Zelda Fitzgerald. Four contain women who have experienced sexual abuse, or experience it in the course of the story. Four are set partly or wholly in the American South. All five feature characters struggling with powerful and inconvenient desire.

Evangelical Christianity skirts the edges of Lawson's stories. Her characters are seldom devout but they are raised in an atmosphere of fanatical devotion. The 16year-old Conner narrates the collection's funniest story, "The Negative Effects of Homeschooling". "I saw women only at church," he says. "Though ... we went to a progressive church, our women looked the opposite of progressive to me: big glasses and no make-up, long skirts and cropped haircuts. You couldn't imagine any of them posing naked." He has "hard-ons ten or 12 times a day", pores over Andrew Wyeth's Helga Pictures, is furious about his mother's intense friendship with a transgender woman and obsesses over a pretty, aloof girl from church. In another story, the 13-yearold Gretchen is fascinated by her piano teacher's sick brother. Surrounded by people talking in religious platitudes, the two teenagers lack a language for their complicated feelings, re-narrating them as love.

The collection's last and longest story, "Vulnerability", suggests that this lasts beyond adolescence. The brutal, joyless sex that takes place near the story's end is all the more disturbing because of the long, complicated sentences of the 60 preceding pages, in which the narrator tries to make sense of her interactions with two men. By turns she desires them, feels nothing for them and wants them to desire her. Yet brutal though the sex is, its aftermath brings a moment of peace that makes the reader wonder whether she should reconsider her interpretation of what came before. Lawson's stories, at once forensic and mysterious, show how insistent our wants can be and how hard they are to understand.

Hannah Rosefield is a writer and a doctoral candidate in English at Harvard University
Quoted in Sidelights: “superb” “uncertain ground that feels, in the hands of this talented young writer, remarkably concrete.” \
Virgin and Other Stories
Publishers Weekly. 263.37 (Sept. 12, 2016): p31.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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* Virgin and Other Stories

April Ayers Lawson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $23 (192p) ISBN 978-0-86547-869-5

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The five stories in Lawson's superb debut collection explore youth in extremis, through voices at once elegant in their phrasing and unrestrained in their emotion. In the title story, a young husband suspects his emotionally unavailable wife of infidelity, only to find himself tempted by the same at a society party. "The Way You Must Play Always" recalls the power dynamics of Carson McCullers's "Wunderkind," detailing a teenage piano student's infatuation with her instructor's sickly homebound brother. "Three Friends in a Hammock" measures the growing interpersonal distances among three longtime friends who reunite at a birthday party. A boy wrestles with his mother's complicated relationship with a recently deceased transgender woman in "The Negative Effects of Homeschooling," and, in the collection's longest and most freewheeling story, "Vulnerability," a talented painter contemplates and eventually consummates an affair with a peculiar but charming art dealer. The precision of Lawson's prose brilliantly contrasts with the messy inner lives of her characters. These are stories that dare to tread where they shouldn't, on uncertain ground that feels, in the hands of this talented young writer, remarkably concrete. Agent: Rebecca Nagel, the Wylie Agency. (Nov.)

Books by Clare Beams, Hans Herbert Grimm, April Ayers Lawson and Kelly Luce
John Williams
The New York Times. (Dec. 1, 2016): Arts and Entertainment: pC4(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com

[...]

Virgin

And Other Stories

By April Ayers Lawson 179 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $23.

There are just five stories in this confident debut collection, in which characters grapple with unresolvable issues of sex and faith. The title story, for which Ms. Lawson won the Paris Review's Plimpton Prize for Fiction in 2011, is about the troubled sexual life of Jake and Sheila, newlyweds dealing with the fallout of abuse Sheila suffered as a child. She's not the only one of Ms. Lawson's characters to have been abused. In a recent interview, Ms. Lawson described the role sex plays in her stories: ''What's interesting about the sex is what it brings out about people: what it says about their way of being intimate or avoiding intimacy.''

''The Way You Must Play Always'' best expresses Ms. Lawson's themes about the vexing nature of sexual curiosity. In that story, a 13-year-old girl named Gretchen takes piano lessons that she resents at a local teacher's house, interested mostly in the teacher's mysterious ailing brother, who rarely leaves the room in which he's convalescing. She pays him illicit visits, and their relationship is unnerving and well described, like all the best parts of this book.

Rosefield, Hannah. "Counting the ways." New Statesman, 13 Jan. 2017, p. 47. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480489662&it=r&asid=c5ce4f97115bb7dcfb84b11504a7fcfa. Accessed 30 Sept. 2017. "Virgin and Other Stories." Publishers Weekly, 12 Sept. 2016, p. 31. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464046222&it=r&asid=9a57da8d8d758b85ddec80e8c8469420. Accessed 30 Sept. 2017. Williams, John. "Books by Clare Beams, Hans Herbert Grimm, April Ayers Lawson and Kelly Luce." New York Times, 1 Dec. 2016, p. C4(L). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472236009&it=r&asid=7cd4ef030043db759f30b5058b05fd70. Accessed 30 Sept. 2017.

• Kirkus
  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/april-ayers-lawson/virgin-and-other-stories/
  Word count: 422

  Quoted in Sidelights: “are among the recurrent subjects handled frankly yet with a delicate touch.” “meaty, satisfying tales of a substance that suggests Lawson would make a fine novelist.”

  VIRGIN AND OTHER STORIES
  by April Ayers Lawson
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  KIRKUS REVIEW
  Debut collection limns a variety of troubled characters searching for solace of both sexual and spiritual varieties in the contemporary South.

  The title story investigates the frustrations of Jake, who learns after they marry that his young wife, Sheila, was manipulated into “heavy petting” by an uncle when she was 12 and then, when they were caught, blamed for it by her conservative Christian parents, who afterward considered their daughter damaged goods. Though this trauma seems to have permanently turned her off sex, Jake still fears that Sheila is cheating on him, while he is tempted by a wealthy cancer survivor who's a major donor to the hospital where he works. This is the first of several lurid scenarios that could have devolved into standard-issue Southern Gothic but instead convey compassion for Lawson’s damaged protagonists in straightforward but sharply perceptive prose. Teenagers roiled by sexual desire drive the action in “The Way You Must Play Always” and “The Negative Effects of Homeschooling,” and they are surrounded by adults equally confused and unhappy. Indeed, it might have made more thematic sense for the collection to take its name from “Vulnerability,” the closing and longest piece; that title pinpoints an essential human quality on abundant display here. In that story, Lawson takes the first-person narrator, a painter, to New York to meet a famous artist and an art dealer who for all their sophistication are as needy as the husband she left back in her Southern hometown drinking scotch and watching porn in a backyard shed. Faltering marriages, uneasy connections to fundamentalist religious backgrounds, and the gray areas where powerful teenage sexuality meets adult desire in relationships that may or may not constitute abuse—these are among the recurrent subjects handled frankly yet with a delicate touch.

  Meaty, satisfying tales of a substance that suggests Lawson would make a fine novelist.

  Pub Date: Nov. 1st, 2016
  ISBN: 978-0-86547-869-5
  Page count: 176pp
  Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  Review Posted Online: Aug. 16th, 2016
  Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1st, 2016

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/fractals-fractals-april-ayers-lawsons-virgin-stories/#!
  Word count: 2027

  Quoted in Sidelights: “It is as if the book is not only stories written by Lawson, but a collage made from these stories which ultimately poses to the reader a nearly answerable question,” . “A puzzle in which each reader decides what the ending image will be; each reader gets to be a small god.” “Uncertainty means stories live on, their meanings change, they pop up when you least expect it. It means the book is eminently rereadable, because you’ve certainly missed something in your first pass. And it means that the author has created lives that are complex, maddening, baffling, filled with heart and breath and life.”

  Fractals of Fractals: on April Ayers Lawson’s “Virgin and Other Stories”
  By Lindsay Hunter

  95 0 1

  NOVEMBER 1, 2016

  THE COVER of Ayers Lawson’s excellent debut collection, Virgin and Other Stories, is a puzzle, its pieces comprising images of an eye, fingers, and snippets of flesh arranged in different patterns. Look at it this way. Now look at it this way. Is it a woman? A man? Is this arousal, or fear? Lawson’s stories disorient in the same way. They are linked thematically, in details great and small, but they never provide a complete and graspable image. In each of her five tales, Lawson seems to be saying: Have fun assembling this anti-puzzle.
  There’s an old writing exercise in which you ask a group of people to write the same story. You provide the basic plot points and some details, and then later read what they’ve separately come up with. The results are usually wildly different, because the writers are different people and the details they notice and deem important are different, and because the characters they write are different and thus the story they tell will be different, and on and on and on. In Virgin and Other Stories, I felt as though I was reading fractals that had fractaled; I got the sense that each story was a piece of a larger object, that there was a storyteller outside each storyteller. Of course, there is the actual storyteller, Lawson herself, who received the 2011 George Plimpton Award for Fiction as well as a 2015 writing fellowship from The Corporation of Yaddo — no slouch of a storyteller — but it feels as though there is another force at play here, some source or being that collects, arranges, reveals, and hides. It is as if the book is not only stories written by Lawson, but a collage made from these stories which ultimately poses to the reader a nearly answerable question. A puzzle in which each reader decides what the ending image will be; each reader gets to be a small god.
  Religion appears in every story, along with varying levels of sexual awakening. The first, entitled “Virgin,” begins with a man named Jake noticing a woman’s breasts. Jake’s wife Sheila, a graduate of an evangelical college (as is Lawson) and a woman who “saved herself” for marriage, no longer wants to have sex with Jake. The reason why is complicated and never fully explained. She was molested as a child; she may be having an affair. Both seem like equally plausible reasons for her disinterest in sex with Jake. In long passages, Jake describes the tension in his marriage when it was new. He sees Sheila as secretive and damaged. Is the story about him, or his wife? Is the story about the woman, Rachel, whose breasts he notices? I found myself squinting, rereading, searching. I was bewildered and excited. I had the sense that the story was happening beyond Jake, Sheila, and Rachel. I was looking the wrong way, and if I shifted my eyes quickly enough, there my answer would be.
  “Virgin” concludes, gorgeously, with Jake and Rachel alone in a room:
  In the soft light and emptiness, the room might have been any room or every room he had ever known, and she had always been in this place that was also herself, waiting. The muted laughter from the party could no longer be heard. Faintly, the music he had not noticed below announced itself through the floor.
  In one sense, the story is about want finally laid bare. In another sense, it’s about distraction from that want. The laughter disappears; the music rises. The story ends with the promise of touch — but not actual touch. They are simply two beings in a room that could be any room they’ve ever known. It is not a sad or happy ending; it’s not really an ending at all.
  I have a theory about the arrangement of stories in a collection: the first and last, of course, act as bookends — or rather, like inverted parentheses, funnels, one gathering you in and the other ejecting you out the other side. The second story is the one to really pay attention to. If the collection is any good at all, goes my theory, it’s where an important pivot occurs, where readers get a sense of what they’re truly in for. Virgin and Other Stories is a case in point. Its second story, “Three Friends in a Hammock,” is a tangle, purposely disorienting, and it is the true guidepost for the book as a whole. It pivots violently, spilling coffee all over your jeans. It is the shortest story in the collection, and the strangest. It’s a story about a “we,” though it’s told by an “I.” It feels like a long algebra problem — there is a character called “X,” and there are commonalities, like divorce, between the characters, and it seems as if the narrator is trying to work it all out in smudgy pencil etchings on the edge of a crumpled piece of paper. The narrator is perceptive, noticing and noting more, it seems, than the other characters give her credit for: “I knew what it was like to have found out some vital information about the person in the next room that he wouldn’t want you to have, and I also knew what it was like to be the one to whom such information was presented.” It’s purposely oblique, as pure as a middle schooler new to gossip, yet cunning and nearly omniscient. This kind of voice makes for a twisty pretzel of a story; for me, its weirdness continues to echo throughout the book.
  “The Way You Must Play Always” intensifies that perplexing sense that the real story is happening outside of the visible frame. Gretchen is a teenager, forced to take piano lessons from a wilted genius named Miss Grant after being caught kissing and petting and et cetera-ing with her cousin. The story could be about Gretchen’s burgeoning sexuality, the power with which it endows her; it is that old tale of a girl-who-yearns-to-be-touched-so-she-can-mistake-it-for-love. But Miss Grant and her odd brother Jeremy complicate that picture — there is something happening in the house beyond Jeremy’s brain tumor, beyond his illness-induced ennui, beyond normal sibling tension. Jeremy whispers, “God, but I love her,” into Gretchen’s hair, leaving us to wonder who the “her” is. Could it be Miss Grant? The story ends with Miss Grant’s other student, Fiona, staring at Gretchen while she cries: “The rain had stopped but ran off from the roof and fell like a clear, shiny curtain before Fiona’s curious face.” Both girls appear to have wet faces as they look at each other. Fiona’s curiosity in the face of Gretchen’s tears is an interesting subversion. We end on an outsider’s reaction; again, we are looking elsewhere for missing pieces of the tale.
  In “The Negative Effects of Homeschooling” we meet Conner, a teenage boy indulging and fighting his burgeoning sexual urges (“I had hard-ons ten or twelve times a day”) while also telling the story of his mom’s friendship with Charlene, “a woman who used to be a man.” It’s not entirely clear at first why Conner feels such disgust and anger toward Charlene, but it becomes clear he is jealous of the side of his mother that Charlene brings out. She accepts his mother as a whole person, something Conner is incapable of doing. Lawson so masterfully renders the mind of a teenage boy — myopic, literal — that the source of his rage isn’t revealed until the final scene. His mother, wearing a fur gifted from the now-deceased Charlene, is confronted by an animal rights group. Conner, screaming and crying, shoves one of them to the ground. His mother tries to calm him, and the story concludes with, “‘See, Conner?’ Her eyes caught mine and held them. The wind lifted her hair from her face. ‘I’m okay now. I’m okay.’” The side of his mother to which Charlene had access was foreign to him, a confusion, something that didn’t include him. In the final moments of the story, Conner wants to protect the mother he knows. He is exorcising the fear and alienation Charlene brought into his young life, and his mother sees it. All along, the story has been about what Conner sees, but in these final moments we truly see Conner.
  Many of the threads winding their way through the stories converge in “Vulnerability,” the final tale in the collection. Friends in “The Negative Effects of Homeschooling” talk about the Zelda Fitzgerald biography they’re reading; in “Vulnerability” an art dealer and the artist discuss F. Scott Fitzgerald. An Albanian ex-husband appears in “Three Friends in a Hammock,” and an Albanian fiancé in “Vulnerability.” The wife in “Virgin” wears very short skirts and was sexually abused as a child; the same is true for the artist in “Vulnerability.” I’d characterize these echoes as seeds, planted in the first four stories that finally blossom in the fifth. What does Lawson want us to think about these details? That there is meaning in coincidence or similarity? That we are all missing something, that we are all connected in these weird tiny ways? That we are all part of the same giant brain, traveling the same dreamscape?
  “Vulnerability” is the collection’s most ambitious story. A married painter travels to New York to meet with an artist she believes she is in love with, as well as with an art dealer who has expressed interest in her work. It is the art dealer she ultimately falls for, though the story ends with a startling, violent sexual encounter that forces the narrator to reflect on the abuse she suffered as a child and how it affected her sexual relationships for her entire life. At the same time, Lawson messes with the whole notion of “storytelling,” switching voice from first to second to third person, and back to first person. At times, she uses language that is purposely clunky, overdone, calling attention to the writing of the story one is reading. The book masterfully creates the sense that the world is chaos, and that in order to really see it you must avert your eyes. Lawson ends on the line, “There is nowhere else to go now. The room fills with light,” leaving the reader with the feeling that the collection’s true author, who has been hovering in the corners of each story, revealing and hiding and reusing, is bowing out, is all done now. She has told the story as best she can and it’s up to the reader to fit the pieces together.
  The effect of this, for me, is the realization that ambivalence is highly underrated. Uncertainty means stories live on, their meanings change, they pop up when you least expect it. It means the book is eminently rereadable, because you’ve certainly missed something in your first pass. And it means that the author has created lives that are complex, maddening, baffling, filled with heart and breath and life.
  ¤
  Lindsay Hunter is the author of the novel Ugly Girls and the story collections Don’t Kiss Me and Daddy’s.

• NPR
  http://www.npr.org/2016/11/01/499654807/faith-sex-and-the-south-intersect-in-virgin
  Word count: 748

  Quoted in Sidelights: “The audacious but vulnerable young Southerners who populate these five tales live in a world where the ordinary uncertainties of relationships and physical intimacy are amplified and distorted by their devout, fundamentalist Christian upbringing, and in several cases, a history of childhood sexual abuse,” “zeroes in on the hard-won, highly charged moments of awakening in these conflicted lives” “impressively polished debut collection,”

  Faith, Sex And The South Intersect In 'Virgin'

  November 1, 20167:00 AM ET
  HELLER MCALPIN
  Virgin and Other Stories
  Virgin and Other Stories
  by April Ayers Lawson

  Hardcover, 179 pages purchase

  Sex is a fraught subject in April Ayers Lawson's impressively polished debut collection of stories. The audacious but vulnerable young Southerners who populate these five tales live in a world where the ordinary uncertainties of relationships and physical intimacy are amplified and distorted by their devout, fundamentalist Christian upbringing, and in several cases, a history of childhood sexual abuse. Despite her limpid, supple prose, there's a creepy cast to Lawson's vision, with shades of Flannery O'Connor's dark humor and Southern Gothic sensibility.

  Lawson's sheltered characters struggle with "misplaced affection" and inappropriate attractions – whether their own or those of others. In the richly nuanced title story, which made a splash when it won the 2011 George Plimpton Award for Fiction, a young husband wrestles with extramarital temptation and bafflement over his unfathomable, emotionally inaccessible wife. "The Way You Must Play Always" is a coming-of-age tale about a pubescent girl who, caught fooling around with her cousin, develops an even more problematic crush on her strange piano teacher's sour, dying brother.

  In "Vulnerability," the longest story, about a dicey but life-altering affair, Lawson has room to show off her skill. It begins with a straightforward declaration that sets the events firmly in the past: "Once I fell for my art dealer." When the narrator's paintings — of strangers who remind her of the family friend/babysitter who molested her as a child — attract the attention of a New York gallerist, she channels her "vague unrest" and frustration with her distant, depressed husband into an unhealthy fixation on this dealer.

  Against a background of suppressed passions and sublimation, 'Virgin and Other Stories' zeroes in on the hard-won, highly charged moments of awakening in these conflicted lives.
  Heller McAlpin
  Tunneling deep into the artist's wounded psyche, Lawson captures her obsessive re-examination of her risky behavior from all sides – which results in a tricky narrative that frequently switches perspectives. Her confessional first person periodically gives way to the more distant, out-of-body present-tense third-person point of view, which is particularly well-suited to the couple's brutally alienating intercourse: "She has no feelings about the act. He doesn't seem put off but rather turned on by the stunned-animal quality of her." Yet despite their warped dynamic, the woman confesses well after their affair has ended that "In my dreams he appeals to me still."

  Writing convincingly from the male perspective in "The Negative Effects of Homeschooling," Lawson depicts adolescent desire with humor and warmth. Conner, the earnest, homeschooled narrator, is touchingly aware of his social awkwardness as he tries to connect with one of the few girls he meets through church and wrap his head around his mother's complex friendship with a transgender woman who has recently died. He has an ungainly but endearing knack for saying or doing the wrong thing, as when "for no reason, I ran into my room one day and tried to hurdle my desk chair" — a mishap that sidelines him from soccer for the season, further exacerbating his social isolation. And he becomes obsessed with Andrew Wyeth's nude portraits of Helga, about whom he comments with remarkable acuity, "She looked more real than real life. Always alone but also not alone, because the pictures were so full of want. Sometimes I didn't know where Wyeth's want ended and mine began."

  In Lawson's intense stories, desire is often coupled with shame, and a yearning to overcome an inability to connect is often scantily cloaked in risqué clothing. Her characters must reconcile the hellish, unending afterlife of childhood abuse with a culture in which John Lennon's "Imagine" is "deemed sacrilegious because of the line, 'Imagine there's no heaven.'" Against a background of suppressed passions and sublimation, Virgin and Other Stories zeroes in on the hard-won, highly charged moments of awakening in these conflicted lives.

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