short stories – Memphis Flyer

Libraries are something of an endangered species these days. Public spaces without an admission fee rarely fit into the makeup of the modern city. Maybe that’s why Susan Cushman, the Memphis-based author of Cherry Bomb, chose them as the setting for her new collection of short stories, Friends of the Library.

Friends of the Library is Cushman’s first short story collection, and she’s celebrating the release with booksignings at Novel bookstore this Sunday, August 25th, and at Cordova Library, Wednesday, August 28th. Those readings kick off an autumn and winter book tour that will take the author to 10 independent bookstores and 24 libraries.

Susan Cushman

Cushman, a native of Jackson, Mississippi, who moved to Memphis in 1988 with her husband and three children, didn’t discover her love for libraries until recently. “I was more so always a writer,” she says. “I really got into writing in junior high and high school for literary journals and our newspaper. I thought, ‘I’m going to be a journalist.’ I was a feature editor on our newsletter, and then I did some freelance writing as an adult.”

Her journalistic leanings were put to the test, though, when she came up against a work of fiction that, for her, reframed what a writer could do. “I knew I wanted to write fiction when I read Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides,” Cushman says, explaining that she relished the idea of using her own trauma to inform her expression — all without being too “confessional.”

“I didn’t start seriously writing books until about 2006 or ’07 [when] I started working on a novel and a memoir,” Cushman says. Of the memoir, she adds, “I didn’t know it was going to be a book. I did 60 blog posts over an eight-year period about caregiving for my mother with Alzheimer’s, and then I turned it into a book in 2017. That was a different kind of book project because I didn’t know I was writing a book all those years.”

Cushman spoke at the Memphis Alzheimer’s Conference in 2018, which, along with other speaking engagements, gave her direct access to others who were struggling with similar challenges. “I spoke at a lot of book clubs and bookstores and conferences, and people would always say, ‘I didn’t know anybody else felt that way,'” Cushman says. Processing the experience in such a way gave her a different perspective on her relationship with her mother, which had been strained even before the struggle with Alzheimer’s. “I was able to forgive her before she died in 2016. That was a real blessing.

“At the same time, I started my novel Cherry Bomb, and that was a long project that took about six or seven years. It came out in 2017 as well,” Cushman says, which brings the story back to libraries. “I was visiting libraries in 10 small towns in Mississippi in 2017 on a little book tour for my novel, and as I visited each town, I did a little research about it. Even though I grew up in Mississippi, I’ve never been to most of those places.”

Cushman grew fascinated with libraries, especially those in small, rural towns, where libraries can function as a cultural crossroads. The people Cushman met on her book tour were dealing with the same issues as she had, but they had fewer places to go to gain perspective, to share their troubles, and to take comfort from their fellows. And the pages of Friends of the Library are populated by troubled people in need of comfort.

A few issues dealt with in the collection include cancer, Alzheimer’s, domestic abuse, homelessness, and racism. To help her navigate the maze of heartaches she had created, Cushman invented a fictional author to take the trip through Mississippi. “She gets involved in the lives of the people that come to the Friends of the Library meetings where she speaks.” Even as she’s helping to fix the fictional dilemma, “she’s helping the real person Susan.” Because, when you get right down to it, everyone could use a friend. Susan Cushman discusses and signs her new collection Friends of the Library at Novel bookstore Sunday, August 25th, at 2 p.m., and at the Cordova Library, Wednesday, August 28th, at 2 p.m.

Short Stories, presented by Voices of the South, is exactly what it says. It’s a collection of brief, meditative narratives about loss: loss of parents, loss of youth, loss of freedom, loss of identity, loss of love, loss of lifestyle, loss of control, loss of innocence, and loss of Jesus. Many hushed tones and reverent, sweetly held silences too. Also adjectives. There are lots of glittering, garish, alluring, stinky, and provocative adjectives, languidly and liberally scattered near adverbs and such. That Dye kid can write, but somebody needs to intervene regarding the ornamentals. It doesn’t make his prose richer or more musical, it only makes it more. And by more, in this case, I mean less than it might be. Less confident. Less clear. Less to the heart of the matter.

“Uber” is a story performed by Todd Berry, about two men telling stories. One is an oversharing driver with roots in the Far East. The other is a distant passenger who doesn’t know he’s in powerful need of blessing. “Uber” is best when it’s in the moment, letting the audience decide what these internal and external dialogues mean as guarded and gregarious strangers clash, connect, and talk about death in their families. The piece ruminates too much on itself. Most all of these stories do. But “Uber” is effective in contextualizing both the evening and the mission of a theater company deeply committed to the singularity-like power of stories to connect across cultures, generations, dimensions, time, space, and maybe even the void of death.

“Jesus and Mrs. Stone” is where Dye really unpacks his adjectives. But let’s face it, if you’re not hooked by the faintly New Age-ish inner-child dance that opens this story, you’re probably dead inside. The opening is all about that thing kids once called “the feels” (til their parents co-opted it, they outgrew it, and life went on). In a sequence worthy of a Super Bowl commercial, a grown man, played by David Couter, connects with his old Sony Walkman cassette player and a song that unlocks his younger self (Reece Berry) and everything that mattered to him in the 1980s. The song is the Go-Go’s first hit “Our Lips Are Sealed.” What mattered was a fading free spirit named Ms. Stone, perfectly played by Anne Marie Caskey. Like “Uber,” it turns in on itself instead of resolving. It is, in some regards, one of Dye’s richest portraits wrapped in some of his thinnest writing. A little less wonderous wonderousness and a little more wonder would tighten things right up.

“Two or More” is the treat of the evening. I’d be happy to spend an entire night in the theater watching Steve Swift and Cecelia Wingate sitting on their imaginary porch going back and forth. It starts slow and stays that way, an excellent lesson for all those directors out there suffering under the illusion that broad farce is fitful and frenetic and works best when executed at breakneck speeds.

“Two or More” is a direct ancestor of a classic comedy routine most closely associated with hayseed comedian Archie Campbell of Hee Haw fame. Though it was usually scripted, “That’s Good/That’s Bad” functions like a theater game where a story is told in which all the things that sound good turn out bad and vice versa. In this case Swift and Wingate talk about the fate of a young hell-raiser who grew into an adult hell-raiser who found a good woman who led him to Jesus so he could become a hell-raiser for Jesus, before he fell off the wagon and lost Jesus but not the woman or the hell-raising. And so on. It’s classic front porch comedy with more substance than it lets on. Pitch perfect front to back.

Short Stories closes with a piece called “Do You Love Me,” a boy’s memory of his mother. Like most of the pieces up for consideration in this collection, it loses its way a bit while working through circumstances most viewers will respond to emotionally. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. And Couter and Alice Berry are so good together you’ll want to call your mama after curtain call.

This is a pretty show in sentiment and style. It’s also some of the greenest writing we’ve seen from TheatreSouth’s most celebrated voice. Well, at least since the last time the company staged a collection of Dye’s shorter works. That collection eventually spawned the excellent new play Distance. I’m really looking forward to seeing what mature things may grow from this latest seed batch.