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The Passionate, Accurate Storyteller

by

Paul Clark

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As I was re-reading this essay, I realized I had to rewrite my lead. The essay concerns a recently deceased female American author whose stories focused in large part on women of modest economic means, but who also incorporated great insight into the political and social forces that affected her characters. I realized that THREE writers who died in 2007 fit this description—Tillie Olson, Grace Paley, and the subject of my essay, Carol Bly.

The world of Carol Bly’s short stories is the small towns of Minnesota and the poorer parts of the Twin Cities. Her protagonists are usually women—middle-aged or older, sometimes married though usually not, living on fixed incomes, often in nursing homes, but fiercely independent, regardless. In “The Last of the Gold Star Mothers,”Mary Graving, a 40ish divorced mother of two children, works in her basement, building toy wooden houses and broadcasting a short daily radio show on community events. In describing Mary’s work space, Bly describes several generations of women:

“The old cellar shelves were soft and grainy with rot; the previous renter, an A.F.D.C. mother, had left loops of rusty Kerr-top canning rings there, but Mary had scrubbed off the space she needed, and spread out the tools of her trade there—a dish of chuck keys, a small sabre saw, two sizes of nail sets, all her lacquers, a mitre box, her power saws and sander. The place reminded one that generations of women had stored home canning there and had filled and emptied laundry tubs into the sump hole; there was an aura of domestic bravery and domestic squalor about the place still. But now the basement had some glint and bustle, too, which came from Mary’s shiny, imposingly modern radio equipment on the desk, her squared-off drawings on the steel table, and the bright orange electrical drop cords curling everywhere. In the middle of the room, and in the space where a washing machine had been before the men had recently come and repossessed it, there stood several half-finished castles and Norman keeps and three-storeyed doll houses, all smelling beautifully of AC ply.” [from Backbone (Milkweed Editions, 1984)
Bly had great affection for her characters and settings. Her world is one of church bazaars, nursing homes, social workers, Norwegian folk centers, and various religious folk—Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians, and the occasional charismatic. Her prose is simple and direct, imbued with gentle humor and even more so a “spiritual and moral intelligence” (in the words of writer Tess Gallagher).

In addition to her stories, Bly was also a writing teacher and published several books for writers. She provided the usual tips to help writers start and shape their stories, but more importantly she stressed the need for writers to bring their values into their storytelling, as well as an awareness of the world beyond the mere experience of the writer. In one essay she wrote:
“If an American were to turn out a novel or story in the 1980s in which men and women characters consorted together without one mention of physical desire, we would wonder in reviews and at lunch why the author suppressed sexuality. Yet hundreds of novels and stories offer us American characters who live out their lives without any political or ethical anxiety. We ought to be calling it suppression, because we are as much political and moral creatures as we are sexual creatures.” (“Bad Government and Silly Literature,” (Milkweed Editions, 1986)
In both her advice to writers and in her own stories, she stressed that writers have to be passionate—write what they know, with feeling, but they also have to be accurate—the world of their characters is inexorably shaped by social and political forces that are an essential part of the story.
“All beauty isn't in plot. There are two psychological disciplines authors exercise which make stories beautiful in tone and language: The first is the determination not to be embittered--at the same time as one avoids denial of the evil that people do. That is very difficult. It is hard to describe wretched behavior in even the tiniest corner of life without cynicism, perhaps because people will likely continue to behave in bad ways. The second is using language of consequence, because how the writer talks to the reader and how characters talk to each other depend on psychological circumstances.” The Passionate, Accurate Story (Milkweed Editions, 1990)

Bly may sometimes have been a polemicist in her essays (she does not curb her distaste for American foreign affairs and large corporations), but she never forgets the first task of a storyteller—telling the tale. As I read through the stories in her early collection Backbone (Milkweed Editions, 1985), however, I made notes at the beginning of each story about the social and political issues that lurked in the background of her stories. “The Last of the Gold Star Mothers” — land development and scorn of lower income people towards the wealthy; “The Mouse Roulette Wheel” — class envy, again, as well as concerns over water rights, mining development, and the banal evil of the CIA; “Talk of Heroes" — torture and war; “A Committee of the Whole” — class struggle and learning about people in the Third World.

She slips her awareness of a world beyond the small town world of her characters even in describing a landscape:

The club stood halfway between Pike Lake and Rachel River, on a bypassed highway that supported a sprinkling of businesses that had been thrown up in the last few years where there had once been endless jack-pine forest. There were still patches of forest here and there, but as one drove along one saw the high domes of oil storage tanks among the trees, and sometimes whole vistas, of new, barrack-like housing opened out. There was a turmoil about the landscape, as if it might all turn into a single giant shopping center by morning. (“The Last of the Gold Star Mothers”)

Similarly in “Gunnar's Sword,” a spry elderly woman who has walked two miles in a snow storm to visit the family farm that her son has just sold, is being driven back to the nursing home.

“They were driving rapidly down the Haglund Road—she felt the millions of pebbles of gravel that had always lain there, unwrapped, which no one pays any attention to, all the millions of things that lie about unbound to the millions of other things. With a tremendous burst of humility and joy Harriet thought: what a tremendous lot I have failed to think through! Yet I always thought I thought through things so well!”

Bly’s characters are not flashy or sexy; they are not world changers. In another era, they would have been part of the “silent majority.” In “The Mouse Roulette Wheel,” one character, an Episcopal priest, says from the pulpit on a Sunday morning, “What we have to consider on absolutely every occasion is, who’s invisible in the scene?” Bly in her stories breathed life into these invisible people and made them real. In her story “Amends,” she writes, “The unspoken secret of small-town life, of course, is that there isn’t much choice of people, so you have to be friends with whoever is there, and eventually you marry one of the people around who is single.”

In “Talk of Heroes,” a woman considering leaving her husband tells her mother, “I know too much about human relationships now to pretend to have feelings I haven’t got.”

The sadness one feels when a favorite writer dies is muted somewhat because, although the writer is dead, her voice is always there. All you have to do is pull a volume of her stories off the shelf. In her story “The Apprentice,” Bly herself wrote, “There are always a few artists ghosting around who invite us to do the work of beauty, and who give us back our humor when we are terrified.”


Paul Clark is a writer in suburban Chicago. By day he edits a variety of print and online business and legal publications. By night, he sometimes writes for pleasure, though he keeps these writings under a bushel, and the bushel he keeps in a dark shed outdoors. Paul co-wrote a humor column called “Loose Canons” for the late, lamented Readerville Journal. He recently purged the majority of his books from his shelves. Over a series of essays, he will write about the books that remain and why they are important to him. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

 
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