Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Unpleasantries
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Fairbanks
STATE: AK
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.akarts.org/frank-soos * http://juneauempire.com/art/2014-12-18/husband-and-wife-soos-and-klass-both-honored-governors-awards * http://www.alaskawritersdirectory.com/authors/soos_frank.shtml
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married Margo Klass (an artist).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Educator and writer. University of Alaska, Fairbanks, instructor, became professor of English, 1986-2004, then professor emeritus.
AWARDS:Alaska State Writer Laureate, 2015.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Frank Soos is a writer and academic. He is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Alaska, in Fairbanks, where he worked for nearly two decades. He has published numerous works of short fiction and essays. In 2015 he was named the Alaska State Writer Laureate.
Unified Field Theory and Bamboo Fly Rod Suite
Soos published Unified Field Theory in 1998. The collection of seven short stories won the Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction. Therein, Soos features characters who operate in gray areas of ethical behavior and often in clouds of uncertainty. Conflict abounds as couples find cause to attack each other. Booklist contributor Frank Caso claimed that reading each of these short stories “is like focusing a microscope on a particular attitude or manner of the human condition.” In a review in Library Journal, Christine DeZelarTiedman observed that the male characters are usually “more interesting and fully drawn than the female characters.”
Soos published Bamboo Fly Rod Suite: Reflections on Fishing and the Geography of Grace in 1999. With illustrations by Kesler Woodward, the account centers on a fishing trip for which Soos restored a Shakespeare Bamboo fly rod from the 1930s. Soos ponders the purpose of such an old rod and what place it has in the modern age. During this trip of discovery, Soos learns about the culture of fly fishing, the background of bamboo rods, and the value in resurrecting such a relic as the one he brought on his trip. A critic reviewing the book in the Fishing for History blog called it “one of the more beautiful little books on fishing and bamboo rods I’ve read in recent memory.” The same reviewer concluded that “Bamboo Fly Rod Suite itself is a panacea for troubled times, a small book to be read slowly, every word pondered until the last sentence—which rivals Norman MacLean—is done.”
Double Moon
In 2009 Soos collaborated with Margo Klass, his wife, to produce Double Moon: Constructions and Conversations. Klass used found objects to create scenes in boxes or altarpieces reminiscent of medieval styles. These were then paired with essays that Soos wrote in response to the scenes. The book is divided into sections called “Narratives,” “Maine,” “Japan,” “Altarpieces,” and “Alaska.”
Writing in the Rattle Web site, Janis Lull admitted: “I’m probably not a typical reader of Double Moon. My guess is that Kes Woodward fits that description better. In his ‘Afterword’ to the book, Kes writes that his approach is to study Margo’s sculptures first, putting off as long as possible reading Frank’s words, because the texts somehow lead him away from his ‘own experience.'” Lull continued: “Maybe this is what one should do. It’s what I probably would do if I were looking at a more conventional display of artwork plus explanatory labels. But I already know that’s not a good description of Double Moon, so I let myself read the words first if I want to, or I look, then read, then look again. I might just feel more at home with writing than any other art form. Kes is a painter, and he goes at these things differently.” Lull later wrote, “The art of Margo Klass is a contemplative art. It does not shove anything in anyone’s face, certainly not a rusty nail. Frank Soos, on the other hand, is pushier. That could be why Margo didn’t like Frank’s stories at first, and why she now welcomes his collaboration. There’s nothing necessarily threatening about lovely rusted objects in a hand-made box, but when one starts to think of rust ‘sneaking around’ defining life by its relentless decay, the tension is inescapable.” Lull, in describing the collaboration between Soos and Klass, reasoned that “neither would be complete without the other.”
A critic reviewing the book in the BookLust Web site said that “you bring your own life experiences and memories and passions to art, and those are reflected in your experience of it. It’s very interactive, and Double Moon gives you the ability to do it with someone else.” Reviewing the book in Juneau’s Capital City Weekly, Katie Spielberger confessed that “it’s easy to be lulled into Frank Soos’ short prose poems and be tempted to adopt the style yourself. It’s equally tempting to reflect on different permutations of Klass’s objects in her boxes.” Spielberger related that she can “imagine picking this book up for a moment in the morning for a quick jolt of inspiration.”
Unpleasantries
Soos published Unpleasantries: Considerations of Difficult Questions in 2016. This collection combines essays that have been published since the early 1990s with other unpublished works that explore states of being, philosophical topics, and literature. Soos uses his trademark style of writing by approaching his topic from a sideways, questioning manner and linking ideas and concepts that seem distant.
A contributor to Publishers Weekly noted that although some elements are repeated across the essays, “this feels less like repetition than like viewing the same image from another vantage point.” In Foreword Reviews, Karl Helicher insisted that Soos’s writing “flows gracefully and clearly. He points his lance at the windmills of the human condition and offers some solace for those coming to terms with age, loss, the past, and the future.” Reviewing the collection in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, Addley Fanin wrote, “Overall, Unpleasantries is a work perhaps best suited to be saved for a rainy day, not because there’s anything wrong with it, but because that environment would best fit its overall tone: not tortured, gloomy or depressing, but an emotional downbeat with a glimmer of hope at the end.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 1, 1998, Frank Caso, review of Unified Field Theory: Stories, p. 69.
Capital City Weekly, May 13, 2009, review of Double Moon: Constructions and Conversations.
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, June 5, 2016, Addley Fanin, review of Unpleasantries: Considerations of Difficult Questions.
Library Journal, August 1, 1998, Christine DeZelarTiedman, review of Unified Field Theory, p. 137.
Publishers Weekly, April 25, 2016, review of Unpleasantries, p. 81.
ONLINE
Alaska Arts & Culture Foundation Web site, https://www.akarts.org/ (June 30, 2015), author profile.
Alaska Writers Directory, http://www.alaskawritersdirectory.com/ (February 21, 2017), author profile.
BookLust, http://www.aartichapati.com/ (June 2, 2009), review of Double Moon.
Fishing for History, http://fishinghistory.blogspot.com/ (August 6, 2009), review of Bamboo Fly Rod Suite: Reflections on Fishing and the Geography of Grace.
Foreword Reviews, https://www.forewordreviews.com/ (May 27, 2016), Karl Helicher, review of Unpleasantries.
Juneau Empire, http://juneauempire.com/ (December 18, 2014), Amy Fletcher, “Husband and Wife Named Alaska State Writer Laureate and Individual Artist for 2015.”
Rattle, http://www.rattle.com/ (May 25, 2016), Janis Lull, review of Double Moon.
Frank Soos
Where: Fairbanks
Genre(s): Fiction, Essays
Job(s): Retired teacher
Email: fmsoos@alaska.edu
Favorite Places in Alaska:
Here
Bio:
Frank Soos taught English and creative writing at UAF from 1986-2004. He lives in Fairbanks with artist Margo Klass.
Books:
Double Moon: Constructions and Conversations with Margo Klass, Boreal Books, 2009
Under Northern Lights: Writers and Artists on the Alaskan Landscape co-edited with Kes Woodward, 2000
Bamboo Fly Rod Suite (stories) University of Georgia, 1999
Unified Field Theory (stories) University of Georgia, 1998
Early Yet (stories) St. Andrews Press, 1998
Availability:
Please contact me for readings, workshops, classes, lectures
Audience:
I work with any audience.
Special Interests:
I have a particular interest in being resistant to classification.
Posted December 18, 2014 12:01 am - Updated December 18, 2014 08:34 am
By By AMY FLETCHER JUNEAU EMPIRE
Husband and wife named Alaska State Writer Laureate and Individual Artist for 2015
Awards highlight Soos' and Klass' shared focus on books
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"Mendenhall Glacier," a mixed media construction by Margo Klass.
The cover of "Bamboo Fly Rod Suite" by Frank Soos.
It’s been a good week for Fairbanks writer Frank Soos and his wife, visual artist Margo Klass.
First, Soos found out in a phone call that he’d been named the new Alaska State Writer Laureate as part of the Governors Awards for the Arts for 2015. Seconds later, he learned that his wife would also be receiving an award, as the state’s Individual Artist honoree for 2015.
Reached at home in Fairbanks Wednesday, Klass said though she was in the room when her husband got the call from arts council chairman Ben Brown, Soos didn’t tell her what had been said before handing her the phone, and she was completely taken by surprise.
“Frank said, ‘That’s wonderful news,’ and then ‘Oh, she’s right here,’ and he just handed the phone to me, he didn’t tell me anything,” Klass said with a laugh. “That’s Frank, he’s not effusive.”
“It was a huge surprise and a huge honor, for sure.”
The news was made public Tuesday by the Alaska State Council on the Arts.
The awards will be officially bestowed during the Governor’s Awards for the Arts and Humanities award ceremony to be held in Juneau on Jan. 29.
Soos, professor emeritus of English at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, has published several works of fiction, including the short story collections “Early Yet” (1998) and “Unified Field Theory,” (1998) and a book of essays “Bamboo Fly Rod Suite: Reflections on Fishing and the Geography of Grace,” (1999), illustrated by Alaska artist Kesler Woodward. “Unified Field Theory” earned him the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in 1997. He is also co-editor with Woodward of “Under Northern Lights: Artists and Writers on the Alaskan Landscape,” (2000).
In a release about Soos’ nomination, artist Woodward praised Soos’ skills as a mentor as well as a writer.
“Frank is not only one of the best writers, but is the best teacher and mentor of writers I have ever known,” Woodword wrote in the release. “He is the most dedicated nurturer of students and writers at all levels, and perhaps the most flexible and broadly scholarly thinker with whom I have ever worked.”
Klass is a visual artist who shares her husband’s passion for books and the literary arts. Her work includes artist books and modified forms of artist books which she calls box constructions and altar pieces. These mixed media pieces feature found and natural objects meticulously arranged to create evocative visual landscapes.
Klass has works in the permanent collections of the Anchorage Museum and the Museum of the North, and has exhibited her work all over the country, including in Juneau. In 2012, she exhibited work in two shows at the Alaska State Museum, a solo show, “An Alaskan Book of Hours,” and a three-way exhibit, “Boreal Birch,” that also featured Woodward and Barry McWayne. She has also exhibited as part of the Earth Fire and Fibre statewide exhibit.
One of the exciting things about being named together, Klass said, is the potential for collaboration, something the couple is already known for.
Since 2004, they’ve exhibited their work in joint shows that pair Klass’ box constructions and altar pieces with textual responses in the form of short prose pieces written by Soos. Their joint work was first exhibited in Juneau in May 2010 at the Juneau Arts & Humanities Council. A more extensive collection was also published in their joint book. “Double Moon: Constructions and Conversations” published by Boreal Books.
With the announcement Tuesday, Klass and Soos have already been talking about how to make the most of their artistic partnership and shared focus.
“We are talking about how the writer duties are going to play out and how we can participate together in that,” she said. “My interest is in the book arts and so my hope is that it might provide some opportunity for me to spread the news about book arts and what it means and how it is a wonderful collaboration with literacy and the literary arts.”
The Alaska State Writer Laureate Program was created in the early 1960s to honor Alaskan poets and has since evolved into a broader program that honors all genres of writing -- the only program in the U.S. to do so. A new Writer Laureate is named every two years. The position was most recently held by Juneau writer Nora Marks Dauenhauer, who stepped down last month (Read more here: http://juneauempire.com/art/2014-11-20/sharing-her-point-view)
Like Soos and Klass, Dauenhauer and her husband, Richard, were unique in having both held the title of Alaska Writer Laureate. Soos and Klass are believed to be the only couple to be honored at the same time in different disciplines.
JUNE 30, 2015
Frank-Soos-240x3002014 Alaska Literary Award
Fairbanks
Frank Soos has taught English at the University of Alaska since 1986, and currently is Professor Emeritus. He has written many published works including books, short stories and essays. Currently he is working on the following projects:
The Team We Got, a book-length work of non-fiction, completed, currently under consideration by several small presses.
Unpleasantries, a collection of personal essays, currently under consideration by small and university presses.
One & One, a longer work of prose fiction to be completed in 2013-15. The World’s 100 Best Ideas, short prose pieces on 100 objects and ideas.
He is the winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and individual fellowship awards fromthe National Endowment for the Arts and the Alaska State Council on the Arts.
Following are selections from The World’s 100 Best Ideas:
“Around four years ago, I began this project as a mocking response to a mailer I received offering a course in just that topic, The World’s 100 Best Ideas, including a list of such items as rule of law, representative democracy, monotheism. My own ideas are more and less mundane, and have become more cryptic as the list has grown. I’m approaching seventy ideas I’m pleased with, and do intend to go for 100. Here are a few from the current year. I am offering these to various small magazines with mixed success.”
Flying Saucers
No, I don’t think I believe they’ve been here. But I want to. I want to hope that some beings, smarter, better, might come our way and straighten us out.
And supposing they aren’t very nice—as the movies suggest, warty, tentacled things—maybe that would be OK, too.
Something, I would ask them, just bring us something to focus the mind, open the heart.
Kites
We made these simple tests to learn if the wind could be our friend. That wind always seeming to be against us, knocking over our feeble efforts to make this place our own.
High up, playful, the wind made us offers: Come. Go beyond.
Pets
When my brother’s dog, that crazy dog bent on chasing every delivery truck coming down the road until it finally caught one, caught one and broke its jaw when it took hold of the truck and tried to bring it down, that same crazy dog, that one ran under our mother’s legs, knocked her over.
She got up crying a child’s tears. Our mother—fierce, tough, demanding we be tough—our mother impatient with the tears of others (I had never seen her cry)–now she wailed, “Tosha tripped me.”
Just then our father was in the hospital dying and trying not to die. Too often we wonder what pets might be good for.
Sea
Admittedly, we didn’t make the sea; it made us. But might it be to our credit that we recognized it for what it is: flashing, always, giver of life?
So when those first aspirants crawled out and away from all they knew, what were they thinking?
Foolish, too eager to make our way, here we are. We’ve made a mess of ourselves and the sea, too. No point in asking forgiveness, the sea won’t answer. It will always be the sea, it’s we who cannot go back.
Silence
I have come to this place on the river not so much to find fish, but to find myself alone. Sometimes I hear the sound of the river, sometimes I hear the rattle of my line as it settles in the guides at the end of my cast. The fly makes a noise noiseless to my ears and drops onto the water.
Lately, I find I have less to say to others and more to say to myself. No need to say it aloud. No need for words. Just wade the river and fish to the point where thought itself will disappear.
The seen pop of a bubble, sound-not-sound.
Touch
Before we had words, maybe before we had tongues to speak them, we knew through our skins, our cabled nerves inside running there and back and back. Bringing us news of all the world offers: warm or cold, smooth or sharp, wet or dry.
And more: All we grasp arced across from flesh to flesh. Who are you? The press of pleasure, the slap of pain.
All we come to know but cannot say.
Unpleasantries: Considerations of Difficult
Questions
Publishers Weekly.
263.17 (Apr. 25, 2016): p81.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Unpleasantries: Considerations of Difficult Questions
Frank Soos. Univ. of Washington, $28.95 (208p) ISBN 9780295998404
Soos (Bamboo Fly Rod Suite), the 20152016 Alaska writer laureate, combines essays published over the last 25 years
with previously unpublished content in a collection that uses the random occurrences of life to jumpstart discursive,
folksy explorations of philosophy, literature, and being. Soos's writing has a daisychain quality, drawing connections
between ideas seemingly at random or through "sideways questioning." The reader, once accustomed to the style, will
find the rewards plentiful. Whether using a noninjurious car accident to contemplate Jorge Luis Borges and alternate
realities ("UpsideDown with Borges and Bob") or finding echoes of the art of essaywriting in the paintings of Jackson
Pollock and in his own work handcrafting a boat ("I Built a Little Boat; or, The Necessity of Failure"), Soos delights by
finding unusual ways to ask big questions. The essays come from across a wide range of time and often plumb personal
history, so some retelling occurs, but this feels less like repetition than like viewing the same image from another
vantage point. Even those essays that don't reach the same heights of beauty and insight as the best selections still
engage and entertain. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Unpleasantries: Considerations of Difficult Questions." Publishers Weekly, 25 Apr. 2016, p. 81. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA450904596&it=r&asid=7857f412a7347bda552be2d9740974c0.
Accessed 4 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A450904596
2/4/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1486249109830 2/3
Unified Field Theory
Frank Caso
Booklist.
95.1 (Sept. 1, 1998): p69.
COPYRIGHT 1998 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
This debut collection of seven stories is the latest winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Reading
each of these gems is like focusing a microscope on a particular attitude or manner of the human condition. The
characters, while cognizant of an ethical black and white that affects their lives, ultimately exist and move about in the
foggy, dominant grays of reality. Uncertainty rules, sometimes bad decisions weigh heavily, and people often misfire
with one another especially spouses and lovers and exes for whom familiarity has indeed bred contempt. There is
Nickerson ("Nickerson's Luck"), an accountant whose luck is certainly the residue of his design. Blind to the decisions
that circumscribe his own life, he nevertheless understands that "people who loved him were in pain." In the title story,
Hawkins, forever unable to please his father, comes to terms with the older man's gruffness and infidelities, his mother's
newfound independence and religion. And his sometime, mostly platonic girlfriend, Bjorn Toulouse, whose selfendowed
name best signifies the kind of ironic deflation upon which most of the characters teeter.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Caso, Frank. "Unified Field Theory." Booklist, 1 Sept. 1998, p. 69. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA21259426&it=r&asid=f31c23bb30b0394635f81b7f251badbd.
Accessed 4 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A21259426
2/4/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1486249109830 3/3
Unified Field Theory
Christine DeZelarTiedman
Library Journal.
123.13 (Aug. 1998): p137.
COPYRIGHT 1998 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Soos, Frank. Unified Field Theory. Univ. of Georgia. Oct. 1998. c. 175p. LC 9814342. ISBN 082032048X. $24.95.
F
Each of the stories in this collection, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, follows a similar
pattern. With one exception, all are written in the third person, with narration that is omniscient in regard to both time
and character. We follow the thoughts of three or four characters whose relationships with children, present and former
spouses, and new, old, or potential lovers are troubled and complicated. The men are usually quirky and obsessive but
more interesting and fully drawn than the female characters. "Ray's Boat" demonstrates the author's I misconceptions
about library work and education, but this will probably annoy only librarians, and at least the librarian herself is not a
stereotype. For larger collections.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
DeZelarTiedman, Christine. "Unified Field Theory." Library Journal, Aug. 1998, p. 137. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA21071818&it=r&asid=a551087ab6f9cbfd1f64d207024e72d6.
Accessed 4 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A21071818
Unpleasantries
Considerations of Difficult Questions
Reviewed by Karl Helicher
May 27, 2016
Frank Soos points his lance at the windmills of the human condition and offers some solace.
In Unpleasantries, Frank Soos presents a self-consciously messy collection of essays—essays being, he says, a naturally messy form of writing. These works are enjoyable, are worth pondering, and invite head-scratching responses.
Like his essays, Soos acknowledges that he is a “messy guy.” Through this literary form, he finds himself able to explore his life, and his relationships with people and animals, comfortably. The text declares that Soos has lived a good life, though its events are related through dark essays in which painful lessons are often the best way to learn.
The text revels in its chaotic medium, characterized by a nonlinear style and a resistance to closure. Readers used to reading neatly tied-up endings won’t necessarily find them here—which is not to say that they’ll be disappointed by what does arise.
These essays careen from one story to another, as with a jokester who says, “Hey, have you heard this one?” then interrupts his own story to go off on some tangent. Indeed, one essay is built around a racially tinged joke and a second raunchy one, both told by his uncles. These stories are springboards for anecdotes of the author’s childhood in Pocahontas, Virginia, a small, decaying coal-mining hamlet, and relate how African Americans were tolerated but not accepted, while also describing the misogynistic social rules that governed women’s lives. Once readers adjust to abrupt shifts between locales or topics, they can become engaged in the essays and may likely relate to the experiences Soos shares.
Essays juxtapose Soos’s rural Virginia childhood with his years in Alaska, where he encounters deaths—one nearly being his own—divorce, and the natural beauty and ruggedness that appeal to his loner side. Death, especially, is a prominent theme throughout, including that of his father, a young uncle, a former student, and a fellow teacher (who was the son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes). Soos and readers his age likely spend an increasing amount of time pondering death. These essays challenge the reader to accept its inevitability of as part of life.
The author’s writing, like that of his inspirations Alice Munro and Michel de Montaigne, flows gracefully and clearly. He points his lance at the windmills of the human condition and offers some solace for those coming to terms with age, loss, the past, and the future.
'Unpleasantries': A melancholy slice of life wrapped in hope
Addley Fanin, Book Reviews Jun 5, 2016 (0)
FAIRBANKS - The sixth book from Frank Soos, current Alaska State Writer Laureate and former University of Alaska Fairbanks professor, “Unpleasantries” diverts from the author’s established retinue of short fiction to instead offer a collection of personal essays reflecting on the inexplicable realities of life that is, in his own words, “too messy” for fiction. From inexplicable early deaths and harsh truths about society, to accidents that barely avoided tragedy, “Unpleasantries” offers a scattered and melancholy, but ultimately, oddly uplifting perspective.
Being a personal essay collection, the work is fundamentally self-indulgent and concerned entirely with the personal meditations of a single man. But, unlike so many other similar collections, for once there’s no pretention toward universal truth or profound understanding. There’s no self-aggrandizing, no presumption, simply unfiltered access to a single person’s rambling thoughts.
In genre that’s full of people who want to show you they’re special, it’s a relief to find one book that feels like an intimate talk with a favorite teacher. The humility and appreciation for life despite the “difficult questions” is much appreciated throughout the entire work.
Though it may take a few essays to get used to Soos’s style — which mixes stream-of-consciousness with deliberately fragmented pacing to the point that it’s tricky to tell where one ends and the other begins — once a piece hooks a particular reader’s interest it’s almost guaranteed to hold on to the end and stay with you for a while after. That one essay, “A Little Iliad,” managed to tug at my heartstrings despite being framed through high school sports — a topic despised by every fiber of my being — should be proof enough of that.
The unique style also raises some interesting questions about how the author himself was aware of sharing. This is perhaps best seen in a reflection on jokes that (seemingly) want to be about race and gender relations that instead bumps up against the concept of white privilege and toxic masculinity without ever using either term.
Were the earlier talking points an intention feint? Did Soos aim for one argument and land, by chance, in another? Or is the piece simply open enough that an educated reader can bring their own interpretations to the field with ease? It’s difficult to say, and in that there’s a sort of brilliance.
If there’s fault to be found, it’s that Soos is indeed full of wonder, but not of answers or concrete opinions. Some essays, including those previously mentioned, seem to be leading towards a particular statement or conclusion and then never quite get there. This may have been done in a deliberate effort to allow the reader to draw their own conclusions and leave the mystery of Soos’s intentions open, but it is occasionally jarring to have what feels like a fully-fleshed argument not quite stick the landing.
There’s also the more than occasional indulgence in the old English-major vice of name-checking obscure authors to establish academic clout.
Overall, “Unpleasantries” is a work perhaps best suited to be saved for a rainy day, not because there’s anything wrong with it, but because that environment would best fit its overall tone: not tortured, gloomy or depressing, but an emotional downbeat with a glimmer of hope at the end.
Addley Fannin is a freelance writer and graduate student in Northern studies at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She can be reached at addleyfannin@gmail.com, on Twitter at twitter.com/addleyfannin or on Tumblr at adelinecappuccino.tumblr.com.
May 25, 2010
DOUBLE MOON: CONSTRUCTIONS & CONVERSATIONS by Margo Klass and Frank Soos
Review by Janis Lull
DOUBLE MOON: CONSTRUCTIONS & CONVERSATIONS
by Margo Klass and Frank Soos
borealbooks
100 Cushman Street Suite 210
Fairbanks AK 99701-4674
ISBN 9781597091411
2009, 66 pp., $19.95
www.borealbooks.org
Double Moon reproduces pieces from several exhibitions by two Alaskan artists. My daughter and I went to see one of these shows in Fairbanks because we know the artists and their work. Margo Klass makes boxes, usually, and inside them are all kinds of found objects–nails, eggs, birch bark, sheet music. Frank Soos is a writer. The “Double Moon” of the book title suggests their collaboration. It is also the title of a construction pictured in the book and in close-up on the cover. This particular box holds an old pair of goggles with a luminous white seashell placed behind each lens. The “miniature essay” that goes with it asks, “Will we always crave more light?” This is the way Margo and Frank collaborate. She makes a construction and he responds to it in words. The combination doesn’t produce poems, exactly, and if you had stood in the door of that Alaskan gallery with us, your first thoughts would probably not have been about poetry. You might have thought you were standing in a room full of sculptures with labels next to them. But that’s not really what was in that space, and it’s not what’s in the book, either. On the page, where the photos and the text are more nearly the same size, the words seem to grow in prominence, and so does the particular selection of objects in the boxes. It’s as if the art exhibits have become a book of double poems.
Margo was a bookbinder before she made boxes, and her constructions are as carefully wrapped in cloth or paper as a finely hand-bound book. You can’t really see this perfectionism in the photos, which is a limitation. They’re beautiful photos, as beautiful as any I’ve seen of, say, Joseph Cornell’s boxes, but not as beautiful as the works are in person. Like Cornell’s, Margo’s constructions are enigmatic, although hers are more spare and less quirky than most of his. They have a classical look, even when they contain things like a pair of pliers or an old spatula. In the box, each object is transformed or re-formed into something both recognizable and new. The spatula, for example–or maybe it’s an little old baking tool for extracting small loaves from the hot oven?–stands erect on its long stem in a tall, thin box. An old ring hangs on the wall behind the spoon, maybe a pot hook or a drawer pull, just a little larger than the flattened-out scoop of the utensil. The box that holds them is open in the front and it’s covered in hand-made Japanese paper. The title is “Icon.”
Although I haven’t looked at everything in the box, by the time I get this far, I want to read Frank’s text: “What would the minimum requirements for sainthood be? A halo, of course, for effect. And the shrinkage of the body to the advantage of the soul. How little of the one and how much of the other? At least a modicum of personhood remaining? Personhood with all its attendant needs and wishes, yes, that would be the problem, wouldn’t it?”
Well, yes. I’m looking at a spatula, after all. It’s standing on its handle with its head in the air and an iron hoop for a halo, but just the same, it’s meant for handling food. It speaks of “attendant needs.” There’s more to see in this box, and in this text, but I’m satisfied with the way they go together. Whatever Margo was thinking when she housed these objects in a space the size of shoe-box, she called the assemblage “Icon,” certainly evoking saints. Frank’s response came after the construction and its title, but Margo read the response and was content to leave the two side-by-side. Whether they’re two works or one, I feel free to take the photo and the text as a pair.
I’ve been interested in Frank’s writing for a long time, especially his lyrical short stories and non-fiction (Unified Field Theory, Bamboo Fly Rod Suite). In the acknowledgments for Double Moon, he mentions me as a source of “artistic support,” although I’ve never offered (or been asked) for any critiques of his writings about the visual arts. Frank has collaborated with other artists, notably the painter Kesler Woodward. I know Kes, too, and my painting of Alaskan birches by him is the only thing I ever insure when I move. It’s irreplaceable. A box by Margo Klass would be irreplaceable in the same way, if I owned one. Kes, Margo, and Frank are all Alaskan artists, even though they don’t always make works about Alaska. Maybe only a quarter of the constructions in Double Moon is contained in the “Alaska” section. Other works were inspired by the Maine seacoast, for example, where Margo also has a studio, or by architecture, especially that of Japan, or by medieval altarpieces. Frank’s essays, a paragraph or so for each piece of art, react to rather than describe the visual work. He’s been responding this way to Margo’s art for a while now, and as he says, “As time went on, abstractions set in, wanderings in both word and image went further afield . . .“ So Margo constructs and Frank writes. You and I are left to read and interpret the conversation between them–if that’s what it is–knowing that each has chosen to let the piece and response stand together for whatever they stand for.
I’m probably not a typical reader of Double Moon. My guess is that Kes Woodward fits that description better. In his “Afterword” to the book, Kes writes that his approach is to study Margo’s sculptures first, putting off as long as possible reading Frank’s words, because the texts somehow lead him away from his “own experience.” Maybe this is what one should do. It’s what I probably would do if I were looking at a more conventional display of artwork plus explanatory labels. But I already know that’s not a good description of Double Moon, so I let myself read the words first if I want to, or I look, then read, then look again. I might just feel more at home with writing than any other art form. Kes is a painter, and he goes at these things differently.
The double art of Klass and Soos strikes most people as a variation on ekphrasis, a term from Greek rhetoric that refers to the describing or defining of one kind of art by means of another. Because I know them, I decided to interview the artists about whether they view their collaboration this way. Margo, whose works come first, does not see herself as describing or defining anything. She says she starts with composition–the arrangement of found objects in a rectangle–just a two-dimensional space at first. When she has finished assembling and arranging the objects, she begins taking some away. This adding and subtracting on a flat surface can take a long time. I saw one such “first draft” in her studio–nails and twigs laid out on a carefully ruled rectangle about the size of a piece of typing paper. When she’s finally satisfied with the flat composition, she starts thinking about building a three-dimensional box for the objects, which will naturally force her to revise her earlier ideas.
I have the impression that Frank does not look at the constructions at all until Margo considers them finished. His turn comes after hers. As in traditional ekphrasis, the writer is more likely to be seen as the definer or describer. This is how Kes Woodward evidently sees him, and why he waits until last to read the words. Do these two artists, I wondered, ever work the other way around? Does Frank ever write something and then ask Margo to create a box in response?
“Everyone asks that,” they said, but they have not done so, although they are beginning to think about the possibilities. Frank doesn’t consider himself a poet, but I would call the “mini-essays” in this book “prose poems,” and I can imagine another book (although perhaps not a gallery show) in which the words preceded the sculptures. Yet the boxes would not simply be illustrations of the writing, any more than Frank’s prose poems are descriptions or definitions of the boxes. Maybe text and photo could be displayed on facing pages.
Klass and Soos are a couple, but according to them, their artistic partnership preceded the personal one. They met when they were both in residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and had never seen one another’s work.
“He came to my first show,” Margo said. “I was very nervous, but he looked around and then put his arm around me. That was the first time we touched.”
Later, she read some of Frank’s stories, which unlike her own work, are not classical, spare or abstract. “I was a little put off, actually,” she says now, and yet the tone of Frank’s responses to her work is very much the tone of his stories–colloquial, personal, sometimes abrupt. Here’s a typical introduction to a character from the title story of his collection, Unified Field Theory: “Bjorn Toulouse is temporarily stranded as a waitress in a truck stop off I-85 where drivers in their tractor caps read her name tag and don’t get it.” There are tricky narrators in Frank’s stories, and this device also appears in his responses to Margo’s art. Narrators known as “I” or “we” show up quite often in the “mini essays,” but it can be hard to tell if the narrator is supposed to be Frank or Margo or Frank and Margo, or somebody else entirely. The composition called “Rock Paper Scissors III,” for instance, has only a few elements: A background of old handwritten text, the kind Margo collects from second-hand stores, a pair of needle-nose pliers standing on its handles in open position, an egg-shaped object between the handles, both objects set on an old block of wood. Here’s what the text says:
Notice the size of the scissors. We’ve entered the delicate phase of the procedure. Yes, there will be cuts, but they will be made with greater precision. And the rock? Smaller, too. Made for a more accurate aim. Will it still hurt? We haven’t figured that part out yet.
About “Rock Paper Scissors III,” Margo says, “To me, it’s pure abstraction–square, circle, triangle. It’s so satisfying working with these primal elements.” An egg, a pair of pliers, a title from an old and not unpainful game. Could this piece be about a forceps delivery or anything like that? Not to the artist, or so she says. To the writer, maybe so. Readers are left to ponder this, along with the question of who “we” are who have entered “the delicate phase.” Were there two phases before “Rock Paper Scissors III”? What were the procedures? Did they hurt? Margo: I think an artist almost has to be open to just about any interpretation from the audience. I do not intend to teach anyone with my art. I simply invite people into the spaces I create.” As Frank puts it, “didacticism has become a little bit more aggressive in art since the end of abstract expressionism.” Both artists intend to buck that trend. They use words such as “evoke,” interrogate,” and “invite” in talking about their collaboration. “We are not,” Margo says, “shoving it in people’s faces.” Occasionally, however, a piece will have a personal and very specific meaning, and like Frank’s fictional waitress, Bjorn Toulouse, Margo is happy if people “get” it.
The box called “Three,” for example, encloses three stones, two light egg-shaped ones and one darker and squarer. They are held in place by two sticks that seem to join at the top, just out of sight. “What would these little souls have been bound for?” asks the text. Some viewers have seen this as a piece about three miscarriages, and that really is its origin, according to the artists. Although they do not mean their work to be didactic or limited to personal meanings, they do mean in some sense to communicate. It’s an aesthetic that T. S. Eliot would have understood.
My personal favorite among the collaborations in Double Moon is “Sugimoto I,” a box inspired by the Japanese-born photographer and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto. This is one of those pieces in which some objects–in this case a handful of rusty nails and similar-sized pieces of metal–are partly hidden. The viewer has to look into a mirrored chamber– an enclosure within the enclosure–to see them. The main compartment also contains a piece of rusted metal, this time a thin sheet. The marbled rust patterns on this panel provide a lovely surface to look at, once the object is displayed to us as art, in a fancy box that could be a miniature Japanese house. And yet there are those other objects hiding there, sort of. Sharp things. This is the text:
Rust has always been the enemy of my life, always sneaking around, never taking a break, reminding me that nothing human ever lasts, reminding me that molecules have minds of their own.
Rust, I owe you everything.
The art of Margo Klass is a contemplative art. It does not shove anything in anyone’s face, certainly not a rusty nail. Frank Soos, on the other hand, is pushier. That could be why Margo didn’t like Frank’s stories at first, and why she now welcomes his collaboration. There’s nothing necessarily threatening about lovely rusted objects in a hand-made box, but when one starts to think of rust “sneaking around” defining life by its relentless decay, the tension is inescapable. Whoever is speaking in Frank’s poem says he or she or they owe “everything” to rust, to the harsh, incessant pressure of molecules that “have minds of their own.” Frank’s text affects the apparent stasis, the “pure abstraction” of Margo’s box or reliquary or whatever it is, moving it back toward the hostile reality of time, in which a former Catholic waitress named Bjorn Toulouse, “can’t face any nuns, they give me flashbacks.” The artistic spaces of Double Moon embrace both Margo’s serenity and Frank’s insistence that things tell stories. Neither would be complete without the other.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Double Moon
Title: Double Moon
Authors: Margo Klass & Frank Soos
Publisher: Boreal Books
# of Pages: 67
Favorite Line:
What's so bad about not knowing exactly where you are? To round the corner and be taken by surprise? To look out the window and find a new world is waiting outside? With my driver's license safely in my pocket, I have permission to get out and go, to find a place where I might learn better who I am.
I received this book for free to review.
Product Description
At the heart of this collaboration is the complex interplay between two spirited minds. Each of Margo Klass's box constructions is an invitation to enter among objects in space and make of them what one might. Frank Soos has taken up that invitation. Margo's constructions and Frank's responses talk to each other, sometimes agreeably, sometimes ironically, sometimes earnestly, and sometimes flippantly. This collection stands as a representation of five years of their aesthetic sparring. Whoever picks up this book is invited to play along.
I imagine a published collaboration between my close friend Beth Rooney and her sister Kathleen Rooney would be something like this book. Beth is a fantastic photographer and Kathy is a much-lauded poet. And, well, Margo Klass is an artist and Frank Soos is a writer. It's not too odd a comparison to make. In any case, when I was offered this book and read its synopsis- a collaboration of art and prose between two people- I immediately thought of the Rooneys and accepted the offer. I'm glad I did- this was fun!
I do not have much experience with either poetry or art, so I can't really rate those aspects- hence, I will not rate the book here. But in terms of creativity and interest, it ranks pretty highly. This book gives readers the ability to get inside someone else's head. It's like going to an art museum and having access to the internal reactions of the (very articulate and erudite) guy next to you, at each and every exhibit.
That was the most fascinating part to me. My approach to this book was as follows:
1. Look closely at the photos of Margo Klass's art, trying hard not to peek at Frank Soos' words. This, I admit, was sometimes a lesson in futility. Klass really, really likes egg-shaped stones. That's all I can really say for sure. All her works are interesting and fun to examine, though. Really fun uses of common objects.
2. Form my own, however hazy, thoughts and reactions to the piece.
3. Read Frank Soos' short paragraph/poem relating to the piece.
4. Be stumped.
5. Look back at Klass's art after reading the paragraph and attempt to find what led Frank down his path, so vastly different than mine. Sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
I don't know if that makes sense at all, but it is pretty fun to do! Really, it opens up a huge realm of possibilities. Often, with modern art, you don't really know what you're going to get. But I never considered the huge realm of possibilities that exist for interpretation. Two people can look at the exact same thing and have completely different reactions to it. And this book highlights that- you bring your own life experiences and memories and passions to art, and those are reflected in your experience of it. It's very interactive, and Double Moon gives you the ability to do it with someone else. Read it with your friends and family, and see how you all react to the art. If you're a museum nerd like I am, I think you'll really enjoy it.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Story last updated at 5/13/2009 - 11:29 am
'Double Moon' gives readers visual and verbal creations worth lingering over
The Alaskan Shelf
By Katie Spielberger | CCW Editor
"Double Moon: Constructions & Conversations," by Margo Klass and Frank Soos. 2009: Boreal Books. $19.95, 68 pp.
"Double Moon: Constructions & Conversations" is one of the best books I've come across recently, and that it can be placed on the "Alaskan Shelf" makes it all the more valuable. I have lingered over this review because I have been lingering over the book, but the list of people I wanted to pass the book on to is growing too long.
"Double Moon" is a conversation between the constructions of visual artist Margo Klass and those of writer Frank Soos. This is the first collaboration between the Fairbanks couple, and the book's jacket notes indicate that Soos's "short essays in response to Margo Klass's work represent a new and unexpected direction in his work."
This book will take readers into new and unexpected directions as well. Klass's constructions, which have been exhibited in museums and galleries across the country, consist of found objects carefully placed inside boxes or small altarpieces in the Medieval style. Egg-shaped stones make frequent appearances. The book is broken into five sections: Narratives, Maine, Japan, Altarpieces, Alaska. Are the works in response to these themes, or were they grouped after their creation?
Reading "Double Moon" is like having a private gallery between two covers, and it makes me think of experiences I've had at art museums, in which people seem to spend more time reading the placards next to the artworks than looking at the art itself. The more meaningful the work is or is perceived to be, the more this seems to hold true. For us language-bound creatures, it's sometimes hard to accept non-verbal meaning. It's meaningful, we know, but how can we talk about it? So we look to the placards for clues.
And like so many museum-goers, I find it hard to resist looking first at Soos's words before studying Klass's creations. The boxes are mysterious, so it is tempting to look to Soos's essays to help us make sense of the boxes. But his words often only deepen the mystery.
As Soos explains in his preface, "Margo's earliest constructions were conscious of their own narrative possibilities. I could respond directly to her intent. Or I could not. As time went on, abstractions set in, wanderings in both word and image went farther afield...."
"Double Moon" was a hard book for me to finish because my mind started to wander. I imagined things to create and things to respond to in words. I tried my hand at prose poetry.
It's easy to be lulled into Frank Soos' short prose poems and be tempted to adopt the style yourself. It's equally tempting to reflect on different permutations of Klass's objects in her boxes. What would you put in your box, your altarpiece?
The people I want to share "Double Moon" with are both artists and wordsmiths - although in light of the book, I find it hard to believe that someone can be one and not the other. But as much as I feel like lending the book out, it's not a book to be borrowed and passed around. It's one to keep, to pull off the shelf in quiet moments.
I can equally imagine picking this book up for a moment in the morning for a quick jolt of inspiration, and lingering over it during a quiet day of retreat.
THURSDAY, AUGUST 6, 2009
Thursday Review: Bamboo Fly Rod Suite by Frank Soos
Thursday Review: Bamboo Fly Rod Suite by Frank Soos
I usually don't review books that are a decade old (although in this case the softcover came out in 2006), but I will make a few exceptions for books I discover ex post facto. This is one of those circumstances; until Bill Jordan sent me a copy of this book in the mail, I was blissfully ignorant of its existence.
This could be because I have not seen any discussion of Frank Soos' Bamboo Fly Rod Suite: Reflections on Fishing and the Geography of Grace, (University of Georgia Press, 2006) in any of the places I frequent, and I think that's a shame. It is one of the more beautiful little books on fishing and bamboo rods I've read in recent memory.
Soos is an English professor from Alaska who won the prestigious Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. The book is short (72 pages), concise, and an absolute model for anyone seeking to command the English language. The story revolves around a 1930s Shakespeare Bamboo fly rod that Soos painstakingly restores and then takes fishing. It turns into a voyage of discovery. What place in the fast-paced modern world is there for a bamboo rod constructed over half a century before? This is the questions he seeks to answer. Along the way, he learns not just about bamboo rods and the culture of fly fishing, but what meaning there is in his act of resurrecting a relic.
For what rationale is there in restoring a rod that has no real value? Soos considers buying a new custom built bamboo rod instead. He rejects the idea, however, and writes at one point, after tossing a catalogue containing $2000 bamboo fly rods into the trash:
What am I saying when I laugh and flip the catalogue in the trash and I just say, "No"? It's a harder question than it looks to be. It is the question of my life. How to have the beauty of the man in the boat--the long graceful cast, the rod catching the sunlight as the bamboo flexes, the absolute stillness of the lake--and have it honestly come by?
After refinishing the Shakespeare, he is told the action of the rod is "too slow" for modern fishing, but discovers it fits his personality quite well. The rod serves to open a new world to him, a slower, thoughtful purpose, a life of reflection instead of hurrying from place to place. And although it brings him a measure of peace, it cannot bring him solace. "No fishing rod can solve my problem," he laments at one point. "My problem is that the world itself has so little understanding of and places so little value on slowness."
Bamboo Fly Rod Suite itself is a panacea for troubled times, a small book to be read slowly, every word pondered until the last sentence--which rivals Norman MacLean--is done.
The book is widely available from most book stores, including from Amazon.com.
-- Dr. Todd