Accepted

In our “Accepted” column, Mid-American Review editors discuss why they selected stories, poems, or essays for publication. In this post, Managing Editor Sasha Khalifeh discusses a story that appears in our Spring 2014 issue.

Genre: Fiction
Title: “Tracking the “Choose Life” Balloons: Our Findings Thus Far”
Author: Brian Costello
MAR Issue: Vol. XXXIV, Number 2 (Spring 2014)
First line: “On the afternoon of March 14th, 1983, 322 students of St. Sebastian Catholic School in Peoria, Illinois gathered in the parking lot between their school and their church and released 314 primary-colored balloons into the gray late-winter sky.”

An unexpected ode to music and Midwestern life, “Tracking the “Choose Life” Balloons: Our Findings Thus Far” begins with a quirky and attention-grabbing premise, a Catholic school balloon release, and transitions into an enchanting portrait of the Midwest. As the piece progresses, the reader is thrown into the lives of well over a dozen characters, from Catholic schoolchildren to heartbroken adolescents to the front-men of rock bands. The result is a richly-imagined and captivating piece that balances humor, history, and music, all against the backdrop of 1980s Illinois.

The story was a hit with our fiction staff, resulting in a rare unanimous vote for acceptance. The MAR editors were immediately drawn in by the story’s unique premise, but that engagement quickly progressed to an appreciation for author Brian Costello’s neat prose and an investment in his succinctly-developed characters. Like the lines of the songs that permeate the story, each section of the story is sharp and strong, but woven together the overall effect is greater than the sum of its parts—a piece both memorable and compelling.

One of the greatest strengths of the story is its language: Costello’s prose deftly navigates a range of emotions—joy, heartbreak, nostalgia, loss, passion—without ever becoming weighed down by sentimentality or losing sight of its distinct voice. A balloon drifting past a high school senior fantasizing about spending the night with his girlfriend becomes a simple but profound moment of reflection: “As Porterfield watched the balloon land and the song moved into the chorus, there was something about the scene that made him swell with, maybe not pride, but the feeling that you’re exactly where you want to be—Peoria, the Midwest, the ‘80s—and it doesn’t get much better, does it?”

At the same time, a teenage girl giving her first haircut to her punk-rock boyfriend begins her career as a hairstylist even as she ends her relationship: “As the song “Party with Me Punker” played, Oberkfell felt a confidence and self-assurance in her work that she had never felt before.…at that moment [she] correctly surmised that her relationship with Richie Asshole would be short-lived, but to the present day, Oberkfell is an in-demand stylist throughout the Detroit suburbs.”

Costello’s piece, though only a few pages long, is brimming with stories spanning age, place, and gender, all of them framed by an unforgettable premise. Through his prose, readers are immersed in a different world, one permeated by music and memory—a world that one is happy to inhabit, if only for a little while.

What MAR editors said about “Tracking the ‘Choose Life’ Balloons: Our Findings Thus Far”:

“…a combination of deadpan humor and clean prose…a sense of a clear narrative that follows inevitably from the release of the balloons.”

“The tone and concept are engaging…and then it turns out that the whole story is about something completely different than what you thought it would be.”

Sasha Khalifeh, Managing Editor

Photo: Chi-Chi Chuang

In our “Accepted” column, Mid-American Review editors discuss why they selected stories, poems, or essays for publication. In this post, Assistant Poetry Editor Jenelle Clausen discusses a poem that appears in our Spring 2014 issue.

Genre: Poetry
Title: “At the End of the Street”
Author: Jeff Oaks
MAR issue: Vol. XXXIV, Number 2 (Spring 2014)
First lines: “In the old parking lot. Where there’s enough / darkness and distance to be struck by / the night sky…”

This poem, which is both short and poignant, deals with love and loss, and its central images are celestial bodies. Each line resonates with a compelling image, and the line breaks are skillful and meaningful. Just to read the final word in each line gives one a sense of the poem and its emotional content. This memorable poem is an example of word economy at its most impactful.

Oaks uses his poem’s title, “At the End of the Street,” to lead into the first line: “In the old parking lot….” We immediately have a sense of place. Oaks then goes on to mention the “night sky”—now we know the time of day. Thus grounding the “we” in place and time within the poem, Oaks shows us Venus, the Moon (capitalized to suggest its importance and that it’s specifically Earth’s moon), and Jupiter, describing them succinctly in terms of shape and colored light. These celestial bodies are “…Millions of miles away / and in opposite directions from us.” We’re not just in a parking lot anymore; we’re in the midst of a vast, unreachable (and thus unknowable) universe. Oaks has already said a lot in a small space.

It’s then that the poem takes a turn, and we move into the first complete sentence of the poem. It’s a casual question that segues into a serious declarative sentence that gets at the heart of the poem and features the two biggest and two of the most emotionally resonant words in the poem: “annihilates” and “responsibility.” What is this grief and its aftermath? In the final two lines of the poem, the author connects the inconceivably distant planets and Moon to a confession of human grief and aloneness: “We were talking about our parents dying then, / the grief of orphans hanging over us.”

Though this sonnet—which almost slips by unnoticed as such—is written in unrhymed free verse, the final two lines echo the Shakespearean tradition of the ending couplet. The speaker actually says very little about his or her shared grief; the visual description of the planets and Moon situated in the universe builds to inform those final two lines, and we feel their emotional impact.

What MAR editors said about “At the End of the Street”:

“The word choice was great. I can tell that the author chose every word carefully, like there couldn’t have been an alternative. And those final two lines really sneak up on you, but they’re not just thrown in—the whole poem builds up to them.”

“A lot of sonnets fall short, but not this one. The form—which is not strictly formal in the traditional sense—and the content are both really working, and they work together. Basically, the form seems inevitable. I can’t imagine this poem as not a sonnet.”

Jenelle Clausen, Assistant Poetry Editor

Photo: Sparky

In our “Accepted” column, Mid-American Review editors discuss why they selected stories, poems, or essays for publication. In this post, past Fiction Editor Jason Marc Harris discusses a short story that appears in our Spring 2014 issue.

Genre: Short fiction
Title: “Close Enough to See”
Author: Roger Sollenberger
MAR issue: Vol. XXXIV, Number 2 (Spring 2014)
First line: “We know how it goes: no one sits next to the fat kid; the fat kid sits next to you.”

From the first line of Roger Sollenberger’s “Close Enough to See,” the narrator, Sol, manifests a continuum of interesting qualities: intelligent, self-deprecating, sarcastic, comedic, defensive, honest, even-tempered, and needy. Sol is thoroughly ambivalent about himself and the people around him. These characteristics are developed further when Sol encounters Nikki, who gravitates towards him because of his academic prowess in their community college statistics class. She wants to cheat off him, and he’s a virgin who has never had a girlfriend, but their rapport crosses into many dimensions beyond mutual opportunism. The progress of their relationship explores ethnic identity, sexuality, and class tensions. Besides Nikki, the story offers a range of other characters, such as Sol’s father, a retired geologist obsessed with catching a bear in their backyard. The light ironic tone of the narrative often belies the profundity of the topics the story delves into.

Many of our editors remarked on the use of the setting in this story. In particular, we see the Blue Ridge Mountains of West Virginia, which delineate the physical space these characters inhabit, but also imply how the lives of Nikki and Sol are bounded and dwarfed by rhythms and measures of the natural world that are nearly infinite. Sol and Nikki are part of a larger landscape and trajectory of change: “Nikki said her house smelled like a hell of a lot of cigarettes. She sat me instead on the couch on the porch, which sagged, then ran a hand under my chin and went inside for beers. I drummed my heels on the wood, looked out across the yard, settling into the light evening chill. Above the trees on the other side of the road I could make out the blue Appalachian mountains, half a billion years old and once higher than the Himalayas today, now worn down to these hills, these arcs, featureless and smooth and perfect.”

The sense of that sublime attrition over the immense scale of geologic time extends into the narrowness of Nikki’s house, and those looming ridges help define the interior worlds of Nikki and Sol as well: “The Appalachians rose way off to my right, which was west, land so dark it seemed part of the night itself, and it would have been impossible to tell where the mountains ended and the night began if it weren’t for the radio towers on the ridge, a line of red lights that marked the limit of the land, and I shivered once and lowered myself to my knees.” In this scene, Sol has accepted Nikki’s dare to attempt to meet the Devil at the crossroads. The revelation he experiences is not supernatural but deeply personal, and he learns more about himself and Nikki, a private world within the unknown darkness of the collective human psyche that their relationship explores.

Highlighted by the title, the story is also about blindness, physical and spiritual. Nikki, we learn, has trouble with her eyes, and both she and Sol have much to learn about each other and themselves. “Close Enough to See” is a deeply humane story, always engaging with its substantial characters and entertaining because of the comedic and insightful narrative voice.

What MAR editors said about “Close Enough to See”:

“The characters are interesting and well-drawn. Setting is beautifully rendered.”
“Story really drew me in.”
“Gritty.”
“There is a pathos here that I liked.”

Jason Marc Harris, Fiction Editor (2013-2014)