Curing the Mean Girls: A Review of Curing Season

| Michele Sharpe

Have there always been mean girls, or was that an invention of the 1990’s? Based on my reading habits, I’d say the mean girls have been with us for centuries, from Becky Sharp (no relation!) to the Heathers in Daniel Waters’ film of the same name to Regina George in Tina Fey’s film, Mean Girls.

Kristine Langley Mahler’s essay collection, Curing Season: Artifacts offers an exhumation, an exorcism, and a bit of anodyne in response to questions of whether people can recover from toxic, obsessive friendships, and whether those of us who’ve felt out of place can find ourselves at home.

Forced to move with her parents from an idealized Oregon to the foreign country of the Deep South, Kristine’s journey through adolescence is complicated by the difficulty of breaking into an established brood of upper middle class, middle school girls. Worse, on visits back to Oregon, her old friends have changed. Some people don’t remember her, but she remembers her life, past and present, in shining and precise detail.

This skill (or inborn talent) ends up giving her the tools she needs to write these essays: a deep understanding of how details fit together to form meaning, of how artifacts reinforce memory and reality, of how relationships, and the stories we tell ourselves about them, both leave marks.

Praised for its masterful inventions in essay form, Curing Season is often as intriguing in its formatting as it is in its narrative. It’s written in such a diversity of forms, the figuring out of each essay’s pattern is as pleasurable as solving a puzzle. The essay “Creepsake” employs my favorite form of the collection: making up a word, and then writing narrative definitions of the word. So cool and inventive! Here’s an excerpt:

Creepsake

  1. a memento growing along a wall, like a vine

I left things behind, fetishes tied around the fences I wanted to infiltrate. I pushed my copy of The Baby-Sitters Club Super Special #1 under the dust ruffle of Heather’s bed after a sleepover . . . I thought my “misplaced” belongings would be magnets, inexorably pulling relationships back to me . . .

Available from the publisher, WVU Press and the usual suspects.

Interviewing C.W. Cannon about I WANT MAGIC

| Michele Sharpe
Foreword’s image for this interview, a mash-up of the book’s cover, the author’s photo, and a glimpse of New Orleans

If you love New Orleans or want to visit there, check out C.W. Cannon’s I Want Magic for an insider’s take on what makes the city tick.

As a young woman who grew up under New England’s puritan Blue Laws, I found New Orleans’ legal public drinking exotic. I dreamed of partying there. By the time I had the freedom and money to attend Mardi Gras, though, it had lost its appeal for me, probably because I’d spent too many years bartending by then. For servers, holidays like New Year’s Eve can mean great tips, but they’re also amateur nights, where inexperienced drinkers overdo it and either act the donkey or puke or both.

A place where sensuality is celebrated year-round has a great appeal for me, though. As a mad hedonist who drenches food in butter or sugar or both, who chooses the 90-minute massage over the one-hour version whenever possible, I loved the lust for life (thank you, Iggy Pop) and nonjudgmental vibes New Orleans exuded once I finally visited the city in my fifties. I was delighted to review I Want Magic for Foreword, and to interview the author, C.W. Cannon.

My first interview question was about that lust for life:

Several essays in your book showcase New Orleans’ unapologetic sensuality. What sort of wisdom can the city offer to those who want to reclaim their exuberance after living through the COVID-19 pandemic?

Click here for the complete review

Can Objects have feelings?

| Michele Sharpe

Here’s my interview of British author David Musgrave, whose science fiction novel, Lambda, took me out of this world!

The book is an on-the-edge-of-your-seat story where even your toothbrush collects data on you. It also considers important questions about the meaning of being human and whether a near-future (a/k/a “now”) surveillance state impacts that meaning. By bringing programming languages and natural languages together, the book adds a meta layer to the question of whether objects can have sentience.

Click here, too, for my review of Lambda.

A womanist Take on the “Selfish Artist”

| Michele Sharpe

Reading Jami Attenberg’s memoir, I Came All This Way to Meet You, I kept thinking it was unlike any memoir I’d ever read. Above all, it’s a story of increasing dedication to the art of fiction, to an identity as a writer. Everything else is subordinate to her work, and everything else except family and friendships is transitory, even the idea of home.

Many male artists have told a story like this, but Attenberg brings a womanist take to the “selfish artist” trope without relying on some cathartic event to create her identity. Instead, she writes about the logistics of making time and space for her work, of dedication to selling her work, of understanding how she works.

The book hops around in time, but I found this pleasing along with the reflective bits toward the end where Attenberg tries to understand some of her less-than-happy behaviors.
Many thanks to NetGalley for an advance review copy. (less)

Sandra Gail Lambert

| Michele Sharpe

Jessica’s clone comes calling in this fast-paced story of nature, nurture, and survival.

Signal Mountain Review - Volume V, Issue I

Split Thread

White, neon light splatters over the windshield of the spacecraft. Although Jessica knows it can’t be called a windshield. There is no wind in space. Maybe there is. Earthbound, previously earthbound, Jessica is uncertain. Gayle43 reaches over and yanks on her harness until Jessica snaps tight against what should have been the co-pilot’s seat. But he is knocked out and stacked in a utility closet, along with the pilot, at the spaceport just outside Titusville which is forty miles down the Florida coast from Jessica’s home, which she will never be able to return to.

“Don’t touch anything.”

Gayle43 goes back to staring at the control panel in front of them. Lights blink, an alarm sounds, and Gayle43 punches buttons too fast for Jessica to follow. But not superpower fast. Does her clone have superpowers? The little craft twists sideways in quick loops. Streams of light crisscross in…

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Heathcliff’s Lost Years

| Michele Sharpe

Ill Will by Michael Stewart

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I sought out this book, which imagines the “lost years” spent by the Wuthering Heights character Heathcliff, after hearing Michael Stewart speak on the one of the “Sundays with Jane Eyre” broadcasts done by the Rosenbach Museum (excellent series, highly recommend for fans of JE). I was taken with Stewart’s ideas about how class issues function in JE and appreciated his perspective as a working class person, so I was interested to see how he would write about Heathcliff, who must be one of the most controversial characters in British fiction.
The book far exceeded my expectations. Stewart invests Heathcliff with complex motives that derive from a complex history, including an authentic (I’m an adoptee) representation of adoption as trauma in Heathcliff’s yearning and confusion towards the mother he cannot recall. The novel is also rich in period detail about class and race oppression. Stewart doesn’t turn away from ugly truths.
TBH, I wasn’t optimistic about the novel. I don’t read many books by male authors, as their assumptions about women often irritate me, I’m not into fan fiction, and I hold the work of the Brontes sacrosanct. Every year, since I was 8 years old, I’ve (re)read at least one Bronte novel, usually Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights. I’ll turn 65 this year, so that’s a lot of re-reads. Nevertheless, Stewart’s novel expanded my thinking about Wuthering Heights.



View all my reviews

Two new poems at mezzo cammin

| Michele Sharpe

Form is repetition

I think this is my seventh appearance in Mezzo Cammin: An Online Journal of Formalist Poetry by Women. The journal was founded in 2006 by Kim Bridgford, a brilliant poet, teacher, and critic who took every opportunity to support women poets. Tragically, she died in 2020 after struggling against cancer, but her colleagues keep her legacy alive by continuing to publish Mezzo Cammin.

Kim helped me and countless others to be a better poet by encouraging, critiquing, and publishing our work. Her own work, often written in traditional forms, is stunning for its mastery of tradition combined with incisive, contemporary political commentary, as in these lines from “Why Sisyphus Isn’t a Woman” :

Because it wouldn’t be mythological,
Just life. What woman hasn’t pushed a rock,
Or two or ten? It’s not an obstacle,
But a way of navigating. No shock.
Instead, it’s the efficient way to push
While also writing a book or raising a child.

The two poems I have in the current issue of Mezzo Cammin are both formal and experimental for me. The first, “Lost Ring,” is in the duplex form invented by Jericho Brown. Can we call something a traditional form if it was created in the 21st century?

The second poem, “How to Divorce” is intended as humorous, a departure for me and my usually grim outlook. Well, I guess divorce is kinda grim, right?

Check out both poems, and the fabulous poets who also appear in this issue, by clicking here.