Arrangement

"For weeks she looked in that eyepiece, always seeing something new. On her way home the world would seem utterly different to her, every surface quivering with a thin secret film. There was life on the leaves and in the rivers, on the food she ate, and on her clothes; it was wonderful, it was horrifying, some days she couldn't eat and she wanted to boil her hands. The world was a alive in a way beyond the way she knew. What did that mean?" --Andrea Barrett, "The Cure"

Yesterday I finished Andrea Barrett's 2002 collection of short stories, Servants of the Map. Loved it, despite wondering if I'd ever plow through the first, title story. The collection was a 2003 Pulitzer Prize finalist (Middlesex won that year). Barrett's prose is precise and measured. Each sentence suggests gradual development and depth. On a holistic scale, she arranged the book in paired stories, or stories with overlapping characters and time. In arrangement, the first and the last are paired, the second and second to last are paired, and then the two center stories (right next to each other) are paired. If you read the collection chronologically (which, in this case, I think you're meant to do) you don't realize the pairs until the middle of the book! A pleasant surprise, since before that point I enjoyed connecting the unpaired stories to each other...the pairs added another level of understanding to the whole. Although the stories occur in different time periods, thematically they all deal with how people map themselves and their world through science (primarily botany--Barrett has a Ph.D in zoology), relationships, and writing--such as letters, diaries, notes to themselves. Even before the shared characters, each stories converses with those around it; I craved the connections even as each piece held its own very well.

How do you achieve that? I'm reading single-author collections of essays, poetry, and stories in an attempt to figure out my own thesis. "What's the arc?" "What's the argument?" I hear. My goal focuses around "What are the connections? How can meaning be layered and enhanced?" Perhaps that will not be possible for a collection emphasizing form and family, but I believe it is.

Barrett's 267 page collection only had six stories; this shouldn't have impacted me as much as it did. I write short pieces overall--but I like the weighty possibility of both.

Daily I discover that the world is "alive in a way beyond the way [I know]" whcih leaves me wondering--"What does that mean?" Usually answers evade me, but the freshness does not.