 Earlier this month, the good folks at Bending Genres emailed and said they'd like to publish my flash fiction story "My Exploding Uterus" in their latest issue. I was immediately excited. This is one of the first pieces from my new, in-progress flash collection to get published in a lit mag, and this is a great journal to appear in. Bending Genres is an online literary magazine that touts itself as publishing "thrilling, fanciful, oddball, unusual, stunning fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction pieces."
A few notes on the flash fiction story: I came up with the idea after a funny, late-night conversation with my wife. I wanted to write something that explored the fractured, crazy politics around reproductive rights in the world we live in, and I wanted to write it from the perspective of a funny, sassy, smart teenage girl. It was really the voice in the piece - innocent and knowing, sensitive and darkly ironic - that kept me engaged in writing it. I finished it quickly, submitted it, and now it's been published (this rarely happens so quickly). You can check out my flash fiction story here: My Exploding Uterus. View the entire issue 33 here at www.bendinggenres.com. Bending Genres also offers writing groups and workshops. Learn more at https://bendinggenres.com/writing-groups/.
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 When I teach personal essay writing, I often focus on things like helping writers establish themselves as characters, discover the heart of their story (“the conflict” or “what’s at stake”), and drive the narrative forward with a mixture of scenes and reflection. I use examples like “Three Spheres” by Lauren Slater and The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls that are big, sweeping, and dramatic – in “Three Spheres,” the narrator treats a patient in the hospital where she once stayed and must reckon with her own past and keeping it from colleagues, while The Glass Castle tells the story of the author's childhood of itinerant poverty through an adult’s eyes.
Justin Torres’ “It Had to Be Gold,” originally published in The Los Angeles Times Image and included in Best American Essays 2022, focuses on a seemingly smaller moment in the author’s life to render a fine-grained version of the narrator’s emotional drama. Torres starts the essay standing at a window reaching absently for a cross he lost a year ago. He uses this seemingly small thing as a jumping off point to explore being a “chronic loser” – someone who “constantly misplaces everything,” but also perhaps a reference to his status as an outsider in mainstream America. He has discovered this idea from listening to a writer talk about Anna Freud’s ideas. “We wish to possess, to be possessed, and to be relieved of our possessions all at once,” Torres writes. “The hoarder solves the problem of value and attachment by holding on. The chronic loser lets it all go.” Let’s pause here for a moment – I’m still not sure I understand Torres’/Freud’s idea of the “chronic loser,” but I’m interested in reading “It Had to Be Gold” because Torres’ mind and musings are interesting to me. That’s the essence of the contemplative essay, and it’s where the roots of the modern essay lie, at least according to Dinty Moore’s book Crafting the Personal Essay, which explores essays by Virginia Woolf and others to make this point. In contrast to Slater’s and Walls’ writing cited above, Torress’ essay is almost anti-plot, driven only superficially by external events, but more fundamentally powered by the engine of the author’s thoughts, his worrying, looping wondering over what the cross means to him and why he lost it. In the interstitial webbing between his thoughts, we learn that the finding and losing of the cross is a kind of allegory for the narrator’s struggle with his gay identity, As Torres stands by the window reaching for the missing jewelry, we spin backwards into his thoughts and memories. He says the cross “helped me to think, and daydream. I realized, too, how ridiculous this was. I’d never considered myself a fetishist, but as it turns out, I’ve got a thing for chains.” He goes on to talk about how his father wore chains and other gold jewelry for a job and how he was obsessed with this “gangster father” or “shadow father.” Then a few years later, “something happened both mundane and terrible, which altered my relationship to this form of ostentatious, hardened masculinity.” He goes to a party in New York with all kinds of relatives and friends, and “in walks a young man I’ve never seen before. He’s beautiful.” Even as the narrator recounts him in luxurious detail (“the soft luster of his skin,” “everything is crisp: his fade, the lines shaved into his eyebrows,” “jewelry glints all around him”), the man uncovers a homophobic shirt that reads, “Silly faggot. Dix are for chix” (a pun off the old Trix cereal commercials, “Silly rabbit. Trix are for kids.”) This triggers a lot for the narrator, who is realizing his own identity, and the man also has a crucifix that’s “an exact replica of the one my father keeps hidden away somewhere in the house.” The cross represents the kind of beautiful masculinity he covets, but also the kind that’s forbidden to him. In his memory, he is overwhelmed by “the sudden double awareness of something burning in me, and a new depth to the ugliness burning out there, in the world.” The double awareness is his own self-perception as a gay man, his internalized oppression. Simply put, he's aware of how he sees, and how others see people like him. It’s also his awareness that the way he views masculinity and male beauty is different from how his straight, male family members view it. To him, the gold cross is sexy and attractive. To others, it’s a symbol of hard, heterosexual masculinity. “How do we survive our own ambivalence?” Torres writes, attempting to resolve this. “One way is to fetishize.” We are taught in essay writing that part of our job as writers is to go deep, to reveal, to tell our stories in rich, cinematic detail, but there’s a flip side to this. In Torres’ piece and other contemplative essays, telling the writer's story in minute, intimate detail is actually less important than exploring the nuances of the writer’s mind, which again provides the internal engine for the narrative. What fascinates me about Torres’ essay is that he deliberately elides, obscures details others might highlight, perhaps to protect people in his life, perhaps simply because he deems them not to be central. For example, he describes, in an almost cursory way, how his parents’ marriage fell apart and he “lost” his father (note the language here returning to the core issues of loss/losing). Without too much transition, the essay then jumps ahead to the present day and concludes with two more memories about finding and losing the cross. These stories are mundane and deep at once, involving drunken outings with friends in two different cities. The first tells the story of how he finds the cross, the second the story of how he loses it. Again, I’m not sure I understand the reason why Torres is a “chronic loser,” but I love the way his meandering, probing thoughts are presented on the page, and how he hints at the fact that the gold cross is a symbol of the father he lost and represents his attempt to reclaim this childhood symbol of masculinity. |
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