Friday, October 17, 2014

Island Fog Spotlight/promo Post


 

ISLAND FOG
 
 

by John Vanderslice

STORIES OF NANTUCKET THEN AND NOW

Lavender Ink Press (October 2014)

 

There is an uncommon power to this collection, which feels a good deal more potent than the sum of its parts. Vanderslice's Nantucket is -- like Spoon River or Winesburg or Yoknapatawpha -- a remarkable place.” —Philip Martin, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

 

Nantucket then and now is the theme of John Vanderslice’s novel-length collection of stories, called “a chilling tour-de force worthy of a Chesterton or a Borges.” The stories all take place on that iconic Massachusetts island, which began as an English settlement early in the colonial period of the United States. In the heyday of its nineteenth century success as a whaling center, the island was quite the cosmopolitan center.  Sailors from across the globe mingled with the mixed local population of descendants of the original English settlers, black Americans, and native Americans.  Today Nantucket is known as being especially open to visitors from around the world. When one travels there, one feels that one is no longer in the United States but in a culturally indistinct, in-between land, somehow equidistant from North America, the Caribbean, and Northern Europe.

Vanderslice’s collection spans a period of Nantucket history from 1795 to 2005, with four different centuries represented. Two of the stories--the first and last in the book--are novellas. Along the way, readers meet: an 18th century wigmaker accused of a notorious bank robbery, a 19th century "whaling widow" who has newly awakened to some important aspects of her sexual nature, a former whale ship captain who once had to resort to cannibalism to survive an extended period at sea after being shipwrecked, a 20th century plumber whose wife jumped off the Hyannis to Nantucket ferry with her infant child in her arms, and a 21st century ghost tour leader who is being metaphorically haunted by a former lover.

 

 

 PEOPLE ARE TALKING ABOUT ISLAND FOG

 

John Vanderslice teaches writing in the master of fine arts program at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, where he's also one of the editors of Toad Suck Review. His new book Island Fog (Lavender Ink, $17.95), a collection of thematically connected short stories set on Nantucket Island, deserves more space and consideration than I can provide here, but the alternative would be to ignore a worthy, haunting book.

The first half ("King Philip's War") is composed of stories that take place from 1795 to 1920, while the second ("Island Fog") is made of more contemporary pieces, set mostly in the 2000s.

It's the historical-feeling fiction of the first half that affected me deepest. The first story, "Guilty Look," considers an actual bank robbery that took place on the island in 1795 and establishes a tone of apartness from the rest of America that carries through to the final pages. I haven't been to Nantucket as an adult, so I can't vouch for the accuracy of this vision of the island as a kind of gray-market American frontier, but Vanderslice's characters are credibly human and humane. The opening story that unfolds of the unjustly accused William Pease -- a Congregationalist suspected of abetting the robbery by an opportunistic Quaker oligarch -- might resonate with those who worry about the slide toward theocracy.

In "On Cherry Street," set in 1837, a woman whose seafaring husband hasn't been heard from in three years declares herself a widow and finds controversy and recompense in the decision. A little later on, we meet a retired sea captain who has, of necessity, acquired a shamefully exotic taste. (A rare but not exactly unknown preference, if we're to believe Edgar Allan Poe's 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket or Benjamin Morrell's possibly dubious 1832 memoir Narrative of Four Voyages.)

In the second half, Nantucket has been reduced from a nation-state to a tourist trap and playground for the rich, a place where ghosts are still palpable and certain American resentments have taken root. The titular final story, of novella length, flirts with magical realism as its protagonist Doug, having flunked out of the University of Massachusetts, repairs to the island for a summer job, his "future draped before him like an island fog: dank, listless and inscrutable."

You might come to this collection thinking it a specialty work made up of little stories that appeared in little magazines. But there is an uncommon power to this collection, which feels a good deal more potent than the sum of its parts. Vanderslice's Nantucket is -- like Spoon River or Winesburg or Yoknapatawpha -- a remarkable place.

—Philip Martin, Arkansas Democrat Gazette

This island feels like some mad doctor’s lab experiment”—so says one of the fictional residents of Nantucket Island, the setting of John Vanderslice’s extraordinary story collection Island Fog.  But Vanderslice is by no means a mad doctor, though he is definitely one insanely talented writer.  In the eleven literary experiments that comprise his book, he brilliantly parses the soul of America from 1795 to 2005 through the microcosm of Nantucket Island.  To borrow the words of yet another of his characters, he conveys “the awful weight of history pressing down upon the island” and conveys it so viscerally that we feel that “time has stopped or has circled around on itself” and we are “back inside that living spiraling body, that awful protean force” that was, and is, not just the island but America.  This is a book that anyone interested in the grand, failed experiment that is America should read.  It will open your eyes, and your heart.

—David Jauss, author of Glossolalia and Black Maps   

 

 

 

John Vanderslice’s debut collection is a whopping cycle of beautifully crafted stories spanning over two hundred years of Nantucket history, each emerging from the fog of the past crystal clear, complete, and poignant. Reading Vanderslice’s stories, it’s as if Ishmael has never boarded the whaleship Pequod in Nantucket, as if he’s remained island-bound to tell these far-reaching, masterful tales. In a gripping, surreal novella reminiscent of Kafka’s The Trial, Vanderslice opens the collection in 1795, during which a consortium of religious oligarchs use a bank robbery as a kind of witch hunt to consolidate power. In “King Philip’s War,” the narrator challenges a Native American boy in a footrace whose outcome is more onerous than he can imagine. From the travails of whaling widows, to a ship’s Captain who must resort to cannibalism to survive on the high seas, to an African-American school teacher stalked by her students, we see Nantucket’s earliest European and native inhabitants struggling to find a place in this island community. In part two of the collection, beginning in 1999, Nantucket transforms from a site of colonization and industrial whaling to a tourist town, dead and haunted in its off-seasons, a crossroads for people running from others, and from themselves. A carpenter struggles with a “fog of soporific recollections” at the death of his wife and child.  A man flees a love affair in Boston to establish a company giving ghost tours, only to be haunted himself. Jamaican immigrants find veiled resentment. The titular novella bookends this richly realized collection. In it, a young man flunking out of U Mass finds himself on a purgatorial visit to Nantucket, where he is hired to participate as an actor in “Hopes and Promises” tableaus that reenact customers’ past moments of deepest desires and regrets. Read this book! Rarely have I enjoyed a story collection with such artistic and historical sweep, one so quintessentially and vibrantly American.

—Wendell Mayo, author of The Cucumber King of Kedainiai: Fictions

 

 

 

John Vanderslice's Island Fog is far more than just a collection of stories. Tied together by a place and its history, the collection tells the story of Nantucket Island through the desperate lives and conflicts, hopes and sorrows of its inhabitants. I began reading the collection assuming it was for folks who have known or loved Nantucket and by the third story I was convinced that Island Fog is for anyone who loves good stories, beautifully told, with a good slice of the twisted history of humanity thrown in.

—Robert Hicks, author of The Widow of the South and A Separate Country

 

 

 

In this quirky yet captivating collection of nine stories and two novellas, all set on Nantucket, the island is both microcosm and prism, through which the reader catches illuminated glimpses of American life, from the hard, dangerous times of the whaling community to the present-day tony resort of the super-wealthy—and yet the same problems beset the inhabitants through the centuries: racism, class exploitation, sexual identity, envy and fidelity. The essence of all the fictions is “the awful weight of history pressing down upon the island”, and in a twenty-first century America struggling to reconstruct its identity, the reader cannot but hope that the idyllic and mythic island might give us a clue about who we are. And yet in the final novella, “Island Fog”, a chilling tour-de-force worthy of Chesterton or Borges, we find ourselves in a place so far from reality that, like its hapless and trapped protagonist, we wonder if we are doomed to play parts in someone else’s fantasies forever. John Vanderslice is a writer of vision and this is a haunting, essential collection.

 

—Garry Craig Powell, author of Stoning the Devil

 

 

 

ABOUT JOHN VANDERSLICE

 

John Vanderslice hails from southern Maryland, specifically the eccentric community of Moyaone. After twelve years of Catholic schooling, and too many summers working as a lifeguard, he left the southern Maryland woods to attend the University of Virginia. In 1991, he received his MFA in the Poetry Writing program at George Mason University, where he studied under Peter Klappert, William Matthews, and Susan Tichy and started teaching writing to college freshmen at GMU and Northern Virginia Community College-Annandale.  In 1993, he entered the Ph.D program in the English Department at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He is now an Associate Professor in the Department of Writing at UCA, teaching fiction writing, poetry writing, and nonfiction writing both to undergraduates and to graduate students in the new Arkansas Writers MFA Workshop.   He also serves as associate editor of Toad Suck Review magazine.  More than eighty of his stories, poems, essays, and one-act plays have appeared in literary journals and anthologies, including Seattle Review, Versal, Sou’wester, Laurel Review, Crazyhorse, The Pinch, Southern Humanities Review, 1966, Squalorly, Foliate Oak, Red Wheelbarrow, and Exquisite Corpse. Some of the anthologies are Redacted Story, Chick for a Day, The Best of the First Line: Editors’ Picks 2002-2006, and Tartts: Incisive Fiction from Emerging Writers.


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