The penultimate member of this fall’s Visiting Writers Series is Karen Russell, author of two collections of short stories and the Pulitzer-nominated, Orange Prize-long-listed novel Swamplandia! On Monday, November 4, Russell will be reading in the Krannert room of Clowes Hall at 7:30 PM. Currently serving as Bard College’s writer-in-residence, Russell has been published in Best American Short Stories, Conjunctions, Granta, The New Yorker, and Zoetrope. Not to mention her debut short story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves won the Bard Fiction Prize in 2011. Not to mention that, just recently, Russell became one of the youngest recipients of a MacArthur grant.
Earlier this year, she published her second book of short fiction Vampires in the Lemon Grove. In much of her work Russell expertly straddles literary and speculative fiction, incorporating both the conventional and the fantastic. Each little world she builds is haunted with strangeness. My first exposure to Russell was actually a story from her most recent collection: “The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979.” I was so taken by the story that for hours after reading it I completely forgot to enter the tailspin of inadequacy and self-loathing I usually devolve into after reading something exceptional.
The story does concern the astonishing onset of an army of seagulls, yes, but the freakish flock comes to hold an entirely different significance. Maybe it involves parallel universes, maybe it involves time travel, or maybe it isn’t so tidy– maybe the gulls are drawing upon something forever unknowable. But in the hollow of a tree these seagulls tirelessly deposit objects that, in this world, at this moment, shouldn’t exist.
“There was a nest in the tree hollow, though, a dark wet cup of vegetation. The bottom of the nest was lined with paper scraps– a few were tickets, Nal saw, not stubs or fragments but whole squares, some legible: Mary Gloster’s train tickets to Florence, a hologram stamp for a Thai Lotus Blossom day cruise, a roll of carnival-red Admit Ones. Nal riffled through the top layer. Mary Gloster’s tickets, he noticed, were dated two years in the future. He saw a square edge with the letters WIL beneath a wreath of blackened moss and tugged at it. My ticket, Nal thought wonderingly. WILSON. How did the gulls get this? It was his pass for the rising sophomore class’s summer trip to Whitsunday Island, a glowing ember of volcanic rock that was just visible from the Athertown marina. He was shocked to find it here; his mother hadn’t been able to pay the fee back in April, and Nal’s name had been removed from the list of participants. The trip was tomorrow.”
These are the kinds of worlds Russell’s characters inhabit. What’s even better, however, is that Nal begins to steal these technically non-extant items from the seagulls and use them for his own gain. “If fate was just a tapestry with a shifting design–some fraying skein that the gulls were tearing right this second–” he reasons, “then Nal didn’t see why he couldn’t also find a loose thread, and pull.”
What I’m saying is that you’d be missing out even more than I usually insinuate you would were you to skip seeing Karen Russell read in the cozy confines of the Krannert room of Clowes Hall this Monday at 7:30 PM.
So don’t.