Author Susan Buttenwieser believes, “that everyone has something important to say and that we, as a society would greatly benefit by the ability to hear from everyone.” She has taught creative writing in high-poverty neighborhood public schools and facilitated writing and poetry workshops for homeless LGBTQ youth, young people in pretrial detention at Rikers Island, and incarcerated women at a maximum-security prison. She has drawn on these experiences in We Were Lucky with the Rain, her debut collection of twelve short stories published last month (September 2020) by Four Way Books.
Her writing style is deceptively straight-forward with sentences that aren’t adorned by superfluous adjectives or encumbered by excessive clauses. As such, her writing is accessible to a large, diverse audience. She is adept at aligning the narrative with the main character while deflecting the plot, which is often not about the main character.
In a trio of stories involving a thirty-something, intermittently employed writer, Buttenwieser uses the second-person narrative to suggest the character’s inability to own his marginal successes and growing alcohol problem.
Several of the stories are told from a child’s point of view. In the titular story, Lacey, a pre-adolescent with an interest in cartooning, “can’t resist spying” on her parents, whose fights seem to combine thrills with slapstick. Her mother throws glasses, shoes, a bottle of wine, “and once a dining room chair.” Although Lacey’s father cleans up these messes, he can’t resist stopping at garden stores and garage sales where he buys things his wife ends up throwing out. These acts of clearing debris and purging junk might symbolize the only remaining attempts Lacey’s parents make in repairing their marriage, thrown off track after the loss of a child who died in its infancy. Lacey has a younger sister, suggesting the parents have tried to move on, but both remain in denial: Lacey’s mother denies her afternoon of binge drinking; her father denies how the dismal road trip he has foisted on his daughters, has ended in rained-out failure. By the end, Lacey’s voyeurism dissolves as she realizes she and her sister are integral to the family drama.
April, the introverted teen protagonist of "Distant Edge of the Horizon," agrees to accompany her equally taciturn, widower father on a morning fishing trip with his boss, Mr. Dunn. April’s father, fearing he will be fired, hopes the presence of his daughter, whom Mr. Dunn likes, will make him reconsider. The expedition occurs in a small boat that navigates through fog until it reaches a cove where April recognizes a clique from which she’s decidedly excluded. They are “the kids on the varsity sports teams, the first to start dating and smoking and shoplifting,” but among them is Kyra Brody, who excites April whenever “she sneaks looks at her.”
One of April’s alienating talents lies in the science-activity of dissecting. She loves “[t]he feel of the scalpel as it cuts through layers of flesh. The orderliness of the tiny body parts.” Ironically, she becomes nauseous when Mr. Dunn catches a fish and rips the hook from its mouth, but this leads to an opportunity to go ashore and connect fleetingly with Kyra. Later, in bed, she savors a cigarette butt Kyra leaves behind “like it’s an expensive chocolate that she is finally getting to eat.” Distant Edge of the Horizon stands out for its use of metaphors and similes—all appropriate for April’s character.
My personal favorite in the collection is "Nights at the Marco Polo," which actually takes place during the morning routine of a housekeeper at a low-budget motel that accommodates obnoxious one-night guests, provides temporary shelter for homeless families, and was once the site of a meth lab. Once again, the main character functions as a narrator for another story. Walter is the housekeeper, but the story’s focus is on his younger sister Mallory. They are two of four children in a family led by a single mom. Two older sisters were high school dropouts even though one of them started on the honor roll, and eleven-year-old Mallory puts questions to her older brother, such as, “Why does an eclipse happen anyway? Is it so everyone will stop to look up at the sky, all together, at the same time?” The story begins with Mallory’s middle-school contacting Walter, because they can’t reach their mother, to inform him that Mallory has been suspended for fighting.
The exposition meanders gracefully, never losing its footing. Walter acquired his job at the beginning of the summer break following his first and only year in college. His experience with college is summed up in one sentence (“The classes were only slightly more interesting than his high school ones”), yet the procedures of his job are detailed almost lovingly over several paragraphs. Walter changes pillow slips and dirty sheets and folds blankets with hospital corners. He knows that running the shower will dispense with pubic hair and that folding bathroom towels like napkins might bring him a nice tip.
Walter and Mallory’s mother ruefully describes her family as underachievers, but Walter prefers his younger sister’s assertion that “even the smaller stars still make up the galaxy, are part of a luminous body, an essential contribution to the nighttime sky.” This sums up Susan Buttenwieser’s compassion for her characters and her purpose in telling their stories.
Susan Buttenwieser will be teaching a free writing workshop on October 17 from 1 to 2:30 PM CST and reading from this collection via Livestream at the Arts + Literature Laboratory October 2020 Watershed reading on Saturday, October 17 at 7 PM, along with poets Lauren Camp and Sasha Debevec-McKenney. The reading is open to the public and free (donations accepted). Attend on-line through ALL’s Facebook page.
We Were Lucky with the Rain is available through our smALL Press Library.
