Last Wednesday, November 9, 2016, fiction writer and poet Stuart Dybek visited Virginia Tech for a mid-morning craft talk on campus followed by an evening reading of his short story “Córdoba” from the collection Ecstatic Cahoots (2014) in the Cube at the Moss Arts Center.
Here are some quick thoughts from the craft talk, Wednesday, November 9, 2016:
On quoting his good friend Ray Carver, “I couldn’t write fiction if I didn’t write poetry.”
On the idea of short-shorts and flash fiction: “Art is always looking for something new to do,” Dybek said. “For me, I never really set out to change anything intellectually. I would get to a point in a straight-ahead story where a digression would appear…Straight-ahead narratives give us a rational world…If I followed the digression, I would lose the straight-ahead story [. . .] It took me somewhere I didn’t know I was going to go. That was the start of the form [flash fiction].”
On following the digression, breaking the straight-ahead narrative for short pieces: “It was how we told stories in my neighborhood,” Dybek said. “I heard them [told] that way and that was something I was trying to repeat.”
Dybek’s work “move[s] easily between the gritty reality of urban decay,’ John Breslin wrote in the Washington Post (1990), “and a magical realm of lyricism and transcendence linked to music, art and religion.” Breslin says that Dybek’s work is linked by “a common desperation and a common hope.”
Stuart Dybek is a second generation Polish-American writer of fiction and poetry. He attended Loyola University in Chicago for his MA and received his MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His collections of poetry include Brass Knuckles (1979) and Streets in Their Own Ink (2004). His works of fiction include short story collections Childhood and Other Neighborhoods (1980), The Coast of Chicago (1990), Paper Lanterns and Ecstatic Cahoots (2014). He is the recipient of honors and awards such as the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the PEN/Malamud Prize, a Lannan Award, and several O. Henry Prizes.
His work has appeared in the journals Poetry, Tin House, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and of course, the minnesota review.
In celebration of Stuart Dybek, here are four poems from an archived excerpt of the minnesota review, Number 15, published in the fall of 1980 by Duke University Press.
- KID
Teena says
he’d be nice
if he cleaned up
his vocabulary.
Why girls like him
who knows,
not being one
& glad of it
if it means
some creep
calling you bitch
at the beach, as in
“Whataya want on your
hotdog, bitch?”
Ruthie says
at least he talks
like he thinks,
Kid’s philosophy being
It’s all bullshit.
Pam, the astrologer
always asking everyone
their exact moment of birth,
who Kid tagged
Miss Whore-O-Scope,
predicts: “In a few years
Aries like him
lose their build
to boozing.
Don’t think ladies
don’t check out
guy’s asses.”
- LOVER
Kid rides her home
holding hands
while the Clark St. bus
delivers Saturday Night —
punks in leather, drunken warriors,
queens, who got on glittering at Diversy,
slumping by Wrigley Field.
At every stop he jounces
against her
cushioned by her breasts,
inhaling her perfumed hair spray,
each block closer to the only destination
he’s dreamed about for days,
a sagging Hide-A-Bed
draped with a Navajo blanket
on a screened backporch
behind the room where her grandma snores the death rattle.
Two hours later he’s alone
riding back
the way he came,
a spade with a gold cross earring
passed out against him,
his razor scars like secret writing,
an empty wine bottle
rolling under the seats
slouched men groaning with each stop,
a midget crying in the long backseat.
Kid keeps sniffing
his hands
wondering if anyone
has noticed the delicate
bouquet of cunt
he’s carrying
religiously as a bride.
He peeks around.
They’re all too out of it.
- THREE WINDOWS
ONE
Painted stuck.
TWO
Ropes frayed, weights lost
in the sash.
It must have crashed like a guillotine.
They replaced the pane
with cardboard.
THREE
Opened opposite a wall.
Whoever lived here left
burnt matchsticks
in the shape of a man,
his erect penis as long
as his arms and legs,
beside a seashell ashtray
on the sill.
- REBELLION OF THE HANGED
Each day a bit more constriction
until it’s more comfortable
with the tongue protruding like this
and even possible
to propel oneself
backwards like a squid
by constantly giving
the raspberries
Kelsey Schurer is an MFA fiction candidate at Virginia Tech. She enjoys reading and writing fiction and poetry. She is from Jacksonville Beach, Fl. Pottermore has sorted her into the Gryffindor house and her patronus is a wild cat.
The Minnesota Review 