Tim Bryant’s new novel, The Stained Glass Mustang, is a captivating tale of wrong actions leading to unimaginable loss and the bumpy road to redemption. The accident happens, irreversibly, in an alcohol-blurred moment. From there we’re with the guilty driver John, a once successful PR and marketing specialist, as he struggles to reconcile his old life with the new, disgraced version of himself. The contest unfolds against vivid imagery of Charleston and surrounding areas, a place Bryant knows well, using threads of various colors to weave a tapestry of light and shadow, good and evil, and multifaceted love when viewed from a distance.
At the heart of the Charleston descriptions are the rivers, Ashley and Cooper, whose confluence form Charleston Harbor. John’s world, before the tragedy, was on the swanky, upmarket Ashley side. Now that he’s “bankrupt in all ways: money . . . love . . . soul,” he has been reassigned by fate to the Cooper marina, “where there would be no more full-service amenities.” John once owned a sleek yacht that he docked at the Ashley Marina. Now he lives aboard his ketch, docked in murky water where at low tide there’s a stench in the air along with the constant din of nearby workers welding and banging to repair old cargo ships. He once drove a freshly waxed company-leased Range Rover. Now his battered old pickup sits in the gravel parking lot of the low-rent Marina.
His wife Cathy has divorced him, and his daughter Janelle will have nothing to do with her dishonored dad, unwilling to reach through the dark cloud that surrounds him. In order to feed himself and pay for his slip at the marina, he is forced to write press releases and internet promotions for a lecherous shyster named Big Al, the only client he can secure at this low point. Big Al is demanding, and John finds himself increasingly at his beck and call. This unsavory relationship adds to John’s burden of guilt and depression.
This story rides along dark currents, but comic relief abounds. Big Al and his “team” are the source of many chuckles. His business is discount auto parts and accessories, most of them cheap Chinese knockoffs. John’s role as Al’s marketing specialist, becomes complicated when John inherits an elaborately painted Mustang from his father, from whom he has been estranged for years. The car’s paint job, inexplicably layered in vibrant colors in the style of the Mexican muralist movement, is “now covered in Chicano street art, scenes from church windows, a graffiti-like rendition of the life of Jesus: Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, Michaelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, Raphael’s The Transfiguration, and Jacapo Pontormo’s The Deposition from the Cross. These and more as if in a Mexican barrio—bright, ostentatious, mystical.” When Big Al sees the car, he is awestruck, and the wheels of his diabolical mind begin to spin.
He offers to pay John handsomely for the use of the grandiose vehicle as an attraction at Race-O-Rama, a local track that serves as a poor man’s training ground for NASCAR wannabes whose race cars are held together with baling wire and Big Al’s cheap parts. The spectators include unsavory characters from the bottom rungs of the socio-economic ladder, along with many folk of Hispanic origins, the perfect audience for the resplendent and spiritually imbued Mustang.
Despondent John reluctantly does Big Al’s bidding, hawking his inferior merchandise to the crowds that are drawn to the enigmatic allure of the Mustang with all its religious symbolism. As a profitable pattern begins to develop, John meets Maria, a beautiful Hispanic woman who seems out of place at Race-O-Rama. Weeks roll by and the car becomes a legend. Money rolls in, but slowly, through his association with Maria, John’s perspective begins a radical realignment.
The heart of this book is, indeed, Bryant’s captivatingly nuanced portrayal of Maria, and the obstacle-filled unfolding of John’s relationship with her.
Maria despises Big Al and his duplicitous marketing ploys. She is an artistic, spiritual woman dedicated to good deeds, and wise beyond her years. What begins as an unlikely friendship blossoms into a love story wherein John realizes he must change his ways in order to be worthy of Maria’s affection. She encourages him, pointing out the obvious in a way that allows him to see the fault lines of his crumbling life, and she also sees the spiritual significance of the Mustang and the immoral way in which Big Al and John are profiting from its misuse. The heart of this book is, indeed, Bryant’s captivatingly nuanced portrayal of Maria, and the obstacle-filled unfolding of John’s relationship with her.
With its passionate heart, the story’s propulsion—the wind in its sails—comes via wind in the sails. John loves sailing, and Tim Bryant displays both his writing chops and knowledge when he writes about the subject. This passage describes the experience of John’s friend Richard the first time John takes him out for a lesson:
“He [cut the engine] and then the magic happened as it always does for newbies, the obnoxious motor racket suddenly replaced by a bewitching rush of sensations: sounds of water rushing along the hull, water gurgling off the rudder, lines straining, basket of fruit hanging in the galley creak-creak-creaking back and forth, back and forth, full sails filling the sky, breezes brushing his face silk-like, sea and sky combined into an enormous tranquility mesmerizing Richard, changing his life forever.”
As Richard’s perspective changes through sailing, John’s spirit becomes reinvigorated as he realizes anew life’s beauty, endless potential, and his sense of purpose. His friendships deepen as does his relationship with Maria and her young son. When he meets his ex-wife Cathy for dinner to discuss, among other things, their daughter, who is now estranged from both of them, she offers a pearl of encouragement to the man she once loved, before the unspeakable tragedy that broke their lives apart: “I think there’s a lot still out there waiting for you to find it.”
John has sailed across dark currents that nearly capsized him, but he is still upright, heading into a new life with his compass pointed toward love and forgiveness. In this complex novel Bryant has employed a range of outcomes, symbols, and correlatives, along with a rich cast of characters, to show how bleak circumstances and myriad setbacks can work together for good. The reader, having embarked on this journey with John, will be uplifted and satisfied when it comes to an end, but nevertheless wanting more—not because anything is lacking but because it is that good.
Tim Bryant’s recently released novel, The Bird in Your Heart, is a beautifully conceived and tightly woven chronicle of the geography, traditions, and superstitions of the South Carolina Lowcountry; generational expectations; family; friendship; racial barriers and bridges; good whiskey; the persistent lure of sailing across the open sea; and the therapeutic value of bird watching. If you’re thinking that’s a lot, you’re right, but that ain’t all. Included also are a mysteriously missing father, divorce, wedding, Gullah mysticisms, a sweet-running Jaguar automobile, a battered Land Rover, spoiled rich people, a beautiful sailboat, an epic storm, an explosion and fire, and a just-right dose of romantic love. One may ask how Bryant pulls it all off. I’m not sure, but I suspect Lowcountry magic . . . or there’s the more likely explanation that his success is due to masterful craftsmanship.
The art of weaving together various plot points, scenes, and characters requires talent and an overriding desire to get things right. Because Tim Bryant possesses these traits in abundance, the reader glides easily through the chapters, eager to see what happens next, even though the novel doesn’t rely on cheap suspense and cliffhangers. It’s all in the balance: Bryant in this regard matches the best of the plate-spinning, sword juggling, unicycle riders of the literary world. Jane Smiley, Jodi Picoult, and Richard Russo come to mind. I’m sure you can think of your own favorite authors who can explore several narrative arcs in the same novel without the book becoming too plot heavy.
Plate spinning and juggling require a solid foundation on which to distribute the weight. This is where careful scene construction comes into play. Consider this description of an Edisto Island landmark, Rupert Wright’s bait shop:
. . . I could see him as he always was: on the porch of his bait shop . . . rocking in his chair, looking to be asleep, but not. He was as black and hard as coal and his hair was like the white ash that appears when coal begins to heat up. I always thought of him as the oldest person alive because his appearance made it seem so. Yet . . . he never seemed to age further. . . . Visiting Rupert’s store was a fork in the road decision, with consequences large and small. . . . You had to willingly surrender the reassurances of good, county-ordained pavement to accept the consequences of loose gravel over oyster shells and sand. A right-hand turn then another then another, then a left and another right. Woods . . . mudflats . . . scrublands . . . not much else. At about the time you’re uneasy enough to consider turning back, Rupert’s hand-painted signs appear at intervals along the way, announcing “ICE COLD GRAPE SODA!” “POTTED MEAT!” and “Worms and Crickets Just Ahead!” as if tidings of great joy. Then it hits you that you’re in deep, deeper than you’ll ever know.
Rupert and his disheveled store—replete with fishing gear, canned potted meat, soft drinks, boiled peanuts, yams from the garden, comic books, toilet paper, and most anything else a person in that neck of the woods might need—figures heavily in the novel as a place of insight, point of reference, an avenue for comfort, and sanctuary for clear thinking.
Jack Hamilton, the novel’s protagonist and narrator, has been away from Edisto for a long time. Upon his first trip back to Rupert’s store, he’s filled with waves of nostalgia. He has escaped a bad marriage to a spoiled rich girl and an unsatisfying seven years of serving as a senior executive in her father’s ad agency. Now he’s leaving Atlanta behind, the posh Buckhead apartment and his precarious perch among Atlanta’s elite society. He is ready for a fresh start and finally to embark on his lifelong dream of sailing the open seas.
He arrives back in Edisto, where he grew up, to find that some things have changed while others have not. The birds are still there. In fact the novel opens with a Boat-Tailed Grackle flying high over the island, “above marshlands and swamps, across small struggling farms, and narrow, rough-edged roads disappearing between old oaks. It swooped in low for a closer look at tidy white cottages where clothes hung on lines like dots and dashes . . . and then soared farther out to where the few old plantation homes remained, some freshly painted, others desecrated by the seasons: from airless summer heat to shivery winter drafts and, in between, salty storms blowing in from the sea.”
The grounds and old plantation house where he’d grown up were largely the same, at least to the casual observer, but Jack soon discovered, after an uncharacteristic plea for help from his mother, that the old place was “falling down” around her. The mother’s health, particularly her vision, was also in decline. Jack wasn’t prepared for this. He needed a place for rest and quiet reflection as he envisioned the sailboat he’d buy with the settlement money from the divorce and severance from his father-in-law’s firm. He’d been paid a considerable sum to basically go away, and that’s what he’d planned to do, still planned to do until he received another round of bad news from his mother’s banker: her money was all gone. Now Jack’s dreams were in jeopardy. Would he “man up” and do the right thing, or would his selfish desires get the better of him.
In making choices for his mother and himself, Jack becomes torn and entangled. The realization that the path to freedom will not be found entirely through his own efforts but through the surprising behavior of those he loves—along with some unexpected twists of fate—comes hard. Will the nagging questions of his childhood be resolved? Will his hopes and dreams—at least some of them—be realized? In reading The Bird in Your Heart, you’ll accompany Jack on this rewarding ride through misadventures, false starts, and revelations. Bonuses include learning about Lowcountry life, bird watching, and perhaps a thing or two about yourself.
Dan Mueller’s new story collection, Anything You Recognize, works as a precision machine, similar to the core drills geologists use to bore deep into the earth’s crust in order to bring up samples from the various layers and strata. The result is a remarkable cross-section of humanity’s collective psyche. Mueller’s process also involves chopping the samples into distinctive bits and asking the reader, “Anything you recognize?” Or perhaps the book says, “Pick up and take with you anything you recognize. Surely some of these pieces belong to you.”
The collection as a whole feels autobiographical, especially in the authenticity that’s conveyed through the manifold scenes, situations, and conflicts. While the reader may envision Mueller as a boy, young man, and mature adult through the stories, only the author knows where the boundaries lie between autobiography and fiction; in fact, the worlds created here are so precise and familiar that Mueller himself may not know where the murky lines lie between actual and imagined experience. In his mind the scenes conveyed—through the toil of writing them—may have displaced what existed before in his memory, creating masterful fiction in the process.
Many period-correct details contribute: Thingmaker oven with bottles of glow-in-the-dark Plastigoop for making Creepy Crawlers, Country Squire station wagons, the Apollo 11 moon landing, Vietnam War, stereo record players built into heavy wooden consoles, black-and white TVs, Hot Wheels raceways, Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots, and G.I. Joes. These brush strokes are placed within the seven stories that feature a young boy protagonist who, as an adult, recounts events from his fifth through tenth year, a period fraught with challenges largely brought on by his father’s being drafted into the Army to serve as a medical officer.
The family’s subsequent move from Greely, Colorado to Fort Hood, Texas presents the boy with painful realities, confusion, and opportunities for growth. He suffers a feeling of helplessness over the dissolution of a close relationship with a neighborhood boy, resulting in the evaporation of a vow they’d made to be “first, best, and last” friends for life. This story and the others that center around the youngster resonate with the poignancy of his grappling with sexual mysteries, hard-candy lozenges that stick in the throat, the confusing behavior of grown-ups, pangs of childhood love, racism, and the disappointment that comes with discovering how imperfect people are—friends, family, and himself.
He feels guilt over killing a robin with a slingshot, stealing a snapping turtle from a new boy in the neighborhood in order to elevate his own status, and relishing the suffering of others. Growth occurs, though, in these episodes, along with knowledge that life will continue to confound while providing opportunities. The realization, instilled early in the boy, that fulfillment—or happiness—will always be elusive is further explored in the eight offerings in the collection that involve adults in adult situations.
The adult stories—indeed the collection as a whole—utilize the time-honored journey motif. Two of the tales involve a free-spirited couple who travel down the west coast from Alaska to Tulum, Mexico, financing the trip with money saved from a summer spent working in a salmon processing plant in Alaska. Cleverly, they sew their cash savings inside secret pockets within their backpacks. Their “tentative, one-sided love,” as well as their plans to winter in tropical Tulum, are upended by what happens after they rent a “cabana,” really little more than a thatched-roof bamboo hut, the security of which proves to be woefully inadequate. Their journey interrupted, alternate routes will be necessary.
“Nothing Has to Happen,” features a middle-aged would-be writer seeking inspiration along with relief from a troubled marriage and the detritus of his mind. On his trip from New Mexico to Virginia for a writers’ workshop, he envisions peaceful evenings spent at campsites along the interstate, sipping beer by the fire and relaxing under the stars. He hopes that tranquility and introspection will provide the clarity and perspective needed in order to produce some writing worth sharing. The events that transpire, while not providing tranquility, do show him how quickly lives and plans can be altered through one simple act or slip of the tongue. Now, at least, he has something to write about.
“The Embers” presents not a physical journey but one through time in the form of a monologue from an OB-GYN doctor addressing his former pastor, who “had the air of a counselor to whom much had been entrusted.” The monologue chronicles deep connections over many years between the doctor’s family and the pastor’s. The doctor’s violation of his own moral code not once but three times through his admiration for the pastor becomes the connecting thread through this painful trip. In the story’s present, years after the recounted pertinent events, the pastor’s health and memory are in decline. The time for reparation or apology has passed, but the doctor, by revisiting painful memories, has released some of his burden and gained understanding of how their shared journey brought him to where he is now.
The adults in this collection are travel weary, whether their journeys have been physical, emotional, or both, scarred by their struggles along the road of life. While these tales encompass disappointment with spouses, romantic partners, friends, family members, respected counselors, and life in general, they are permeated with the fragrance of love, perseverance, and faith. The stories about the boy mirror these same qualities as the youngster tries to reconcile what he can’t understand or fix in the present with what he hopes for in the future. Like all trips worth taking, Anything You Recognize presents challenges, but spending time in the worlds Mueller creates is ultimately heartening, providing joy gained from an appreciation of characters we recognize as being very much like ourselves and those we encounter during our individual life journeys. The collection will be officially released on September 19, 2023 through Outpost19 Books and is available now for pre-order on the publisher’s website and on Amazon.
Author Daniel Mueller with his daughter Lili, hiking in New Mexico’s Sandia Mountains
An Interview with Daniel Mueller
RY: Many of the stories in your latest collection, Anything You Recognize, feel autobiographical. Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you what is or isn’t, but rather if you could offer advice to writers who would like to incorporate actual events and characters into their stories but struggle with how to do so. For example, how do we include characters based on family members or close friends, especially if we’re using their foibles or flaws as part of the narrative, without jeopardizing friendships and causing rifts within the family? Also, how much of our own flaws and embarrassments should we be willing to expose in order to bring authenticity and emotional resonance to the tale? In your own writing where do you draw the line?
DM: That’s a great question. Nearly every story I’ve ever written stemmed from something that happened to me in real life, but, you’re right, this collection is more overtly autobiographical than my previous two. Indeed, all but one of the early childhood stories, of which there are seven in the book, were published first in literary magazines as creative nonfiction. For me, the experience of writing fiction and creative nonfiction aren’t all that different from each other; like most writers, I’m always only ever trying to wring the best story I can from material that has in some way captivated me. In fiction, the question for me is, what’s the most interesting thing that could’ve happened but didn’t. In creative nonfiction, the question is, what’s the most interesting way of presenting the thing that did. In truth, whether I’m calling what I’m writing fiction or creative nonfiction, I don’t worry about whether actual people who see likenesses of themselves in the work will be happy or not. I know this probably sounds awful of me, but for as long as I’ve been writing I’ve privileged the story itself above all other factors, believing that if it succeeds, those who in some way figured in it won’t mind how they’re portrayed. And, I also believe, for a story to succeed at all, love must serve as a binding agent, and maybe even more so in dark stories. This said, my sister didn’t talk to me for a year after she read a short story in which her wedding figured as the central action. She’d asked me not to use her wedding, during which the best man died in a drowning accident under suspicious circumstances, but I was there, too, and so the experience was also mine, and the protagonist of that story, loosely based on me and what I was going through at that time, supplied the story’s meaning, at least for me. It’s difficult, I think, to see ourselves clearly in the here and now, and when we put ourselves in stories, hopefully warts and all, it’s almost always a past self that finds representation. In the stories from early childhood mentioned earlier, the fifty + years of temporal distance made it easier to be honest about my own flaws and the cringy things I thought and did, but I also think that readers, whether they know it or not, turn to literature for a degree of honesty and intimacy that’s hard to come by in our day-to-day interactions, and that’s what I try to give readers.
RY: As I was reading these stories, a notion—somewhat foggy as it originated from my sophomore survey courses—took root: that the classic journey motif presents itself throughout this astonishing collection. Most of the stories involve a physical journey. The few that are confined to a single place still imply a journey, albeit emotional or spiritual in nature. This concept seems especially applicable to the ones that feature the young boy, Travis, as the protagonist. Without stretching it too far, these tales combined could qualify as a classic hero’s journey as the youngster struggles against a variety of obstacles, most of which are peculiar to the individual locales he moves through with his family. In Greeley there’s an older boy whose physical development far exceeds Travis’s and his best friend’s, resulting in “smarting palms left by his fastballs, the stinging nipples left by his spirals, the grass-stained abrasions left by his guillotine chokes and Indian deathlocks.” There is also the internal struggle caused by being uprooted and having to move away from his friend David, whom he ultimately betrays by leaving him alone in a compromising situation and at the mercy of Jerry, the sadistic stronger boy. In San Antonio he grapples with trashy, borderline abusive grandparents along with confusing adult language and why his parents don’t seem happy. In the last of the Travis stories, we find our hero in yet another new community, approaching adolescence, grappling with self-image problems and his need for love. Throughout his years-long journey the boy is growing and changing, discovering truths about himself, society, and human nature. Could you shed light on the journey motif concept, whether or not it applies here, and how it did or didn’t figure in the construction of the stories and the collection as a whole?
DM: A point of pride for me is the interconnectedness of the Travis stories that lends an arc to the new collection that my previous collections lacked. I didn’t set out, however, to render a hero’s journey. After my father passed away in 2012, I went through a hard patch emotionally, psychologically, and a year later I started seeing a therapist to address the question of why I felt such paralyzing guilt. She asked me to share a few memories from my early childhood to try to identify the origin of a debilitating self-image I had carried within me for as long as I could remember, and she was surprised when I couldn’t remember much before sixth grade. For eight weekly sessions, she asked me to try to remember specifics from my life when I was much younger, five, six, seven, and eight, but I couldn’t, try as I might. But about a year later, I had a memory from the years when my mother, father, and baby sister lived in Greeley, Colorado, my father fresh out of medical school. You might remember it from “An Incision in the Reeds.” The kid tries to sic the family’s boxer Duchess on a grieving mother walking past his house on her way back from a funeral for a son killed in the Vietnam War. I wrote that vignette, and then the strangest thing happened. Another memory came to me, the one in “Cache la Poudre” about incinerating the paper trash and the slingshot Travis and his friend David pool their allowances together to buy at the Rexall Drug. Long story short, I spent the better part of two years giving narrative form to these little memories that seemed to pop into my head one after another, like saplings connected at the roots. In 2016, University of New Mexico awarded me a sabbatical, and I spent the year organizing the fifty or so vignettes I’d written into stories I then submitted to literary journals as creative nonfiction essays. The other stories in the book were written before or after the Travis stories, and as I was organizing the pieces into the manuscript you read, I was pleased by the coherence achieved inadvertently by alternating between the Travis stories and the other ones. Ultimately, I hope that discerning readers will see the book as a portrait of the artist as a very young boy and a nod to one of the writers I admire more than any other, James Joyce, which is probably wishful thinking on my part.
RY: The prose in this collection is rich with artfully constructed sentences brimming with details presented through, at times, complex grammatical constructions. Writing of this caliber stands in striking contrast to the minimalist styles of contemporary authors such as Raymond Carver, Chuck Palahniuk, Amy Hempel, Brett Easton Ellis, Cormac McCarthy, and many others. Are you intentionally bucking a trend with your long, luxurious sentences that adhere to the standards of formal usage? My suspicion is you grew up in a household where your parents were sticklers for correct grammar. Are you disappointed by current language trends that depart from traditional conventions regarding who/whom, lie/lay, split infinitives, and ending sentences with prepositions? Do you have other grammar-related pet peeves? In drafting your stories how much consideration do you typically give to sentence structure and why does it matter?
DM: Thank you, Ron, for complimenting my style, which has been hard-won. If I could be a minimalist like Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, and Denis Johnson, I would. By the same token, if I could be a maximalist like William Faulkner, John Cheever, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Stanley Elkin, I would. At points in my life, I have tried to be both. My writing style, however, lies somewhere between these two extremes, and I spend hours drafting and redrafting stories on the sentence level to get them to sound like me and, I hope, no one else. There’s also narrative strategy involved in complex sentence structures. A complex sentence demands focus, and if you can elicit a high level of attentiveness from readers, they’ve likely suspended their disbelief in the effort, and the language alone can carry them to strange, often surprising, more nuanced states of consciousness. Ultimately, I want my sentences to sharpen vision, to improve the reader’s capacity to see.
RY: There’s a beautiful paragraph early in “Antivenom” that describes Travis’s maternal grandmother Izzy and her second husband Leo. A textured portrait is presented, in a little over one hundred words, that highlights the couple’s overall tackiness as well as their lifestyle and how others might view them. This is accomplished not just through physical details but also by incorporating phrases such as “in cahoots” and Travis’s dad’s snide summation of them as “a real pair.” Colors also are deftly used with descriptions of photos of the couple in their natural surroundings: “. . . on the front steps between blazing pink azalea bushes in concrete urns . . . she pumpkin-shaped and ethereal, he leather-skinned, silver-buckled, and gritty.” This passage is but one of many throughout the book that do the heavy work of placing three-dimensional people into authentic worlds. Developing characters this way with nuanced bits of information coming from different angles must require, along with imagination, a keen eye for details, robust memory, and cleverly pointed research. Please share something of the process(es) you use to create these memorable portraits.
DM: Every writer comes to their subject matter with certain strengths and weaknesses. I’ve always loved describing things that I can see in my mind’s eye and giving them substance, and when I’m writing and revising (which for me are synonymous), I’m striving for greater and greater exactitude. It’s fun because I’m good at it, or I’ve gotten good at it. I struggle with dialogue, however, with capturing how characters express themselves in speech, and while rendering talk isn’t as fun for me as description, I’m dogged in my commitment to getting it as right, or close to right, as I can. If I’ve improved as a writer of dialogue, it’s from studying writers who excel at it. Antoine Wilson is a writer whose dialogue I loved when we were classmates at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1998. Now when I read his work—his latest novel, Mouth to Mouth, is superb—I pay special attention to how his characters speak, how they differentiate themselves by how they speak, and pray his ear for dialogue will rub off on me. Because I want my stories to be driven by the characters in them, I utilize as many modes of narration as I can, those I’m adept at as well as those I’m clumsier with, to give them the dimensionality of actual people. Great writers are masters of multiple modes of narration, and characterization occurs not only by how the characters interact with one another dramatically, but by how they’re apprehended and remembered by other characters. Izzy and Leo were real characters in real life, and I wanted readers to remember them as I still do, as larger than life when seen through the eyes of a six-year-old boy who has somehow become the sixty-two-year-old narrator.
RY: The natural world figures prominently in several of the stories. In “Nothing Has To Happen” the narrator sets up his tent “in a site shaded by caddo maples and the narrow canyon walls, [where] in the receding daylight the yellow green leaves popped against the orange cliffs.” In “Ground School” a father and daughter negotiate a hiking trail that comprises “a 30-foot sheer rock wall; a grade punishing to the ankles, knees, and hips; a meadow of corn lilies . . . in which for a quarter mile the trail vanished and on each toxic, greenish blossom a hornet rested like the black iridescent knob of a scepter. . . .” These and other passages that also present the outside world as vibrating with life and portent must have been influenced by your own experiences. What role does spending time with nature play in your creative life? I’m sure you are often able to utilize details directly from memory of places you’ve visited, but how does research, when memory isn’t enough, also play a role in constructing these scenes?
DM: I rely predominately on memory for the imagery meant to evoke the natural world, which existed before any of us were born and will exist after all of us are dead. The natural world is always a force in stories, even those set indoors, because its emblematic of vertical time against which the horizontal time of a story generates tension and elicits sympathy. As powerful as what happens in a story, the natural world reminds us that the story we are reading is transitory and impermanent, however strong the impression left by the story in memory. For this reason, I’m always looking for ways to bring the natural world into stories, even when I can’t entirely justify it artistically. I just have a feeling that the natural world, i.e., the moon as seen through a neighbor’s telescope in “The Way They Do in Movies” or the jungle surrounding the German nudist camp in “Anything You Recognize,” will provide the contrast necessary for emotional resonance and meaning. I rarely research places where stories are set because I tend to use places that have left strong impressions on me. Indeed, one of the things I love about writing stories lies in resurrecting places and reimbuing them with the life I remember them having and, in the process, feeling young again, as if no time has passed since then at all.
RY: Thanks Dan for sharing insight into your new book and a bit of yourself! Anything You Recognize will be officially released on September 19. Pre-order now on the publisher’s website: https://outpost19.com/AnythingYouRecognize
I’ve worried over Brussels sprouts for quite some time. I’ve wanted to like them, but the best attitude I could muster until recently was not hating them. They have a strong flavor that’s bitter while imparting a sewer-gas taste that lodges in your nasal passages causing you to dread the next bite. I was almost to the point of giving up on this nourishing but odd cruciferous veggie until I started noticing on the menus of trendy restaurants the various braised, baked, sautéed, roasted, and blackened versions of the formerly underappreciated sprout from Brussels. This gastro-pub approach, often featuring bacon, cheeses, a variety of herbs, and creamy sauces—along with pictures showing the outer leaves all black and crispy—piqued my interest and revived hope that I could learn to love this vegetable as a satisfying side dish.
So I ordered Brussels Sprouts again and again at different restaurants, and I was disappointed every time. Once past the blackened outer leaves (which were sometimes flavorful but often burnt) the result was always the same: a hard, bitter interior. In my experience these “chef-inspired” dishes all suffered from the misconception that being brown or black on the outside means the sprouts are done on the inside too. The pretentious chefs probably all subscribe to the “we don’t need to cook them to death” school of vegetable preparation. I get that. The typical Southern fare I grew up with featured beans, peas, squash and greens that were cooked in grease until mushy and slimy. Thankfully we’ve moved beyond that, but most vegetables taste better when cooked enough to at least soften up a bit. I formed the opinion that Brussels sprouts would provide better mouthfeel if they were tender, and that some of the bitter sewer-gas taste would be removed if the sprouts were cooked through to the center. So, I renewed my experimentation, searching for a way to retain some of the flavorful browning and caramelization while cooking the center to a mellow and smooth level of softness.
Luckily this process was not laborious as I achieved success after only a couple of tries. The desired result requires very little preparation or skill and only a few basic ingredients. Read on if you’d like to learn how to prepare delicious Brussels sprouts that will have your guests going for seconds and asking for the recipe.
Here’s what you’ll need:
• Brussels sprouts. Try to get the freshest ones you can find by looking for a “best by” date, examining the stem and outer leaves, and feeling for firmness. Also use your sniffer. If they smell gassy in the bag, they’ll more than likely retain some of that quality even after cooking.
• Baking dish suitable for the amount of sprouts you intend to serve when they are cut in half and placed side-by-side in the dish. The size of the dish shown is 2.75 quarts. That many Brussels sprouts will make two big servings, three of ample size, or four dainty ones.
• Garlic. You can use either fresh, the minced, refrigerated variety, or plain garlic powder. For a serving this size I suggest about a teaspoon of the prepared varieties or one to two finely chopped cloves. Salt and pepper are the only other seasonings I use.
• Parmesan cheese. Grated cheese from a hard chunk will work much better than the kind you shake from a can. The cheese will aid in browning and provide a delightfully crispy and flavorful coating to the finished product.
• Butter
• Press ’N Seal multi-purpose sealing wrap. This stuff is heavier than that aggravating cling wrap, which you should not use for this project.
Here’s how to make the dish:
Go ahead and set your oven to 350 and start it preheating.
After finding a suitable dish, grab a good slicing knife and a cutting board. After rinsing the sprouts, cut off the stems and slice each one in half, long ways. Place the halves in the baking dish, cut side up.
Thanks to Carol O’Gorman Yates for her excellent work as hand model.
Spread the garlic as evenly as possible over and around the sliced sprouts. Add salt and pepper. Spread some thin pats of butter around in there. You can see in the picture how much we used for this dish. A little more or a little less won’t make much difference.
Carol and I find this minced, refrigerated garlic convenient, but you can use whichever type you choose. Butter pats with liberal amounts of salt, pepper, and garlic.
Sprinkle a little water over and around the sprouts. I simply wet my hand under the faucet and fling water with my fingers into the dish, repeating the process three or four times. I’m guessing this would amount to a couple of tablespoons. You won’t need much.
Now it’s time to cover and seal the dish with the sealing wrap. After getting it firmly in place, punch six or eight small holes through the wrap with a sharp knife. Don’t forget to do this!
This stuff is durable enough to withstand the heat it will soon be subjected to. Don’t use flimsy cling wrap!Punch some holes to allow a slow release of steam and to avoid a small explosion.
This next part may seem complicated but it’s really very forgiving, so don’t stress over it. You’re basically going to cook the sprouts in a series of short microwave bursts. This will get the centers hot and release some of the bad flavors as steam. The steam is partially trapped inside the dish, thanks to the Press ’N Seal. Each little timed burst makes more steam, which is then allowed to slowly escape, tenderizing the sprouts while you work on something else. Every minute or so return to the microwave and push the button again. Here’s the suggested sequence: Give it one minute at full power. Let the dish rest for maybe a minute. Hit the “add 30 seconds” button. Let the dish rest for half a minute or so. Hit the one minute button again. Work on something else for a minute or so before hitting the add 30 button again . . . and so on. Try to keep up with how many times you hit the buttons. Three one-minute bursts alternating with three 30 second bursts will be enough. Remember to allow time between so that the steam can do its work. Easy, right?
After that last 30 second zap, allow the sprouts to rest in their steam bath while you grate the parmesan, if you haven’t already done so. Three-fourths cup to a full cup is about right for a dish of this size. After the steam and heat have dissipated a bit, peel off the sealing wrap. Smells good in there, doesn’t it! After bathing your face in the aromas for a few moments, try piercing one of the sprouts with a toothpick to gauge its softness. This info will be valuable later. Next, sprinkle the grated cheese over the fragrant sprouts. You’ll want to pretty much cover the tops (cut sides) of the sprouts with the parmesan. Now place your dish into the hot oven.
Cover the fragrant steamed sprouts with grated parmesan.
Let them bake for about five minutes (before turning on the broiler) if you’d like them thoroughly cooked, depending on how soft they felt when you stuck the toothpick in. If they came out of the microwave fairly soft, go ahead and start the broiler on the high setting. Once it comes on, you’ll have only a few minutes to piddle around, cleaning up your mess or whatever. Keep your sniffer on high alert for the first signs (or smells) of burning. And look inside frequently. Pull them out when they look like the ones in the picture, golden brown!
Soft but not mushy, flavorful and crispy!
That’s it. Plate your meal and enjoy. Your perfect Brussels sprouts will make a fine complementary dish for almost any entrée, be it steak, pork, chicken, tacos, pot pies, pasta, or pizza! Let me know how it turns out.
Ron Yates, Author 