(Well it's a holiday weekend around here, in case you hadn't noticed, so we're closing up shop and stepping out for a weekend devoted to cycling, Banville transcribing, and novel writing. We'll be back in these parts Tuesday morning, but we leave you with this fine guest review, courtesy Dan Olivas - whose participation in La Bloga, a new blog about Chicano literature and writers merits your notice. Onward!)
AutoBioDiversity: True Stories from ZYZZYVA
Edited by Howard Junker
Heyday Books (Berkeley, CA)
ISBN 1-59714-007-4
Paperback, 272 pp.,
$14.95
REVIEWED BY DANIEL OLIVAS
In 1999, six years before Clint Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby” garnered numerous awards including four Oscars, there was a creative non-fiction piece—thinly disguised as a short story—written by F. X. Toole and published by Howard Junker in his iconoclastic literary journal, ZYZZYVA (“the last word: west coast writers & artists”). Toole (whose real name was Jerry Boyd) had been many things: a matador, boxer, cut man and trainer. These last three professions he turned into short stories which he could not sell until Junker found “The Monkey Look” in his slush pile. Toole received $50 for his efforts; he was elated finally to be published at the age of 70. But his luck did not run out: a New York literary agent read the story and one thing led to another. Eventually, Toole’s collection of short stories, Rope Burns, was published by HarperCollins’ Ecco Press to critical praise. Toole died in September 2002 from complications following heart surgery. “Million Dollar Baby” is based on two of Toole’s stories. His discovery still gives me chills…and hope for all struggling writers.
“The Monkey Look” is but one of twenty-seven true stories included in this entertaining and feisty anthology culled from the pages of ZYZZYVA in honor of the journal’s twentieth anniversary. In his introduction (introductions are his forte), Junker notes that he purposely avoided including “the usual suspects” (other than the celebrated Phil Levine) in “keeping with my essential commitment: to mine the slush pile in order to give new voices a chance.” Publishing Toole is the perfect example of Junker’s philosophy. But let us look at the words used by these writers. “The Monkey Look” begins: “I stop blood. I stop it between rounds for fighters so they can stay in the fight. Blood ruins some boys. It was that way with Sonny Liston, God rest his soul. Bad as he was, he’d see his own blood and fall apart.” Toole’s remarkable life as a cut man brings us into his world with clean, honest prose that is poetic in its clarity.
Actor Peter Coyote tells of his crazy, commune-living, pot smoking, free-loving hippie days in “Carla’s Story.” His saga commences: “I met Carla in 1968 when she was 17, a big, voluptuous teenager with a throaty laugh and a baby.” Reading Coyote’s piece will make those of a certain age both smile and squirm at the same time. Indeed, there was something rather pure about the make-peace-not-war hippie philosophy. But Coyote doesn’t spare us the darker side of the summer of love: drug addiction, prostitution, too-young mothers, violence. “Carla’s Story” won a Pushcart Prize and was eventually incorporated into Coyote’s memoir, Sleeping Where I Fall (Counterpoint Press).
Other selections focus on the writing life but are no less compelling. For example, Susan Parker in “Tumbling into Words” explains that she did not become a writer until her husband, Ralph, “had a bicycling accident that left him a C-4 quadriplegic, paralyzed below the shoulders.” Writing about her life after the accident helped keep Parker sane but also led to the publication of her memoir, Tumbling After (Crown). Her journey is a must-read for anyone who complains about writer’s block. And Philip Levine’s elegiac “The Shadow of the Big Madrone” lets us peer into the rarified world of a young writer’s apprenticeship with the great Yvor Winters circa 1957. Novelist Tad Wojnicki discusses ethnic and religious identity in “Under the Steinbeck Oak” as his piece bounces between sunny days in the Salinas Valley of the 1980s to 1944 Poland and Nazi occupation. Wojnicki deserves a prize for finding humor (though at times dark) in the face of Hitler’s evil.
Those who do not write for a living are well-represented here. One example is Yvonne Martínez who tells us in “Primero de Mayo” how she began her work with unions. She could speak English while her mother, Margaret, spoke Spanish. At age six, Martínez decides to tell off her mother’s abusive boss because her mother cannot do it herself. His response to this scolding: “You better smack that girl, Margaret.” Martínez unblinkingly remembers workers’ struggles from Utah to California. Not surprisingly, she now represents the Communications Workers of America at UC-Santa Cruz.
And true surprises lurk behind every corner: Craig Diaz grades mental hospitals (based on his much-needed stays) on their food, available sex and meds in “Guide to Mental Hospitals, Facilities, Halfway Houses & Board-and-Care Homes of the Bay Area.” There but for the grace of God….
In “The Geography of Reading,” books become Bill Mohr’s landmarks with specific titles tied to his memories of first sex, boring jobs, breakups, lingering colds. Just when you feel Mohr has done nothing more string together a series of witty diary entries, he ends his piece with this: “No matter what I’m reading, or where, I keep hoping to find a perfect sentence, something brief, entire, and completely spinning within the stalk of itself, with no reference to any character, so it doesn’t need a context, but rolls like a marble in a vacuum tube, a marble beautiful as those clear ones with green and blue ribbons inside I used to knuckle at the edge of a circle in dirt.” Perfect.
Junker should be proud of this anthology. He put these writers into print, some for the first time. These diverse voices tell us in their own words what it is to be them. And because of their eloquence, we do walk in their shoes for a short but exhilarating while. What a magnificent way to celebrate a twentieth anniversary.
Daniel Olivas is a writer living in Los Angeles. His most recent book for adults is Devil Talk: Stories (Bilingual Press). Visit him online at www.danielolivas.com.
