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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
between two sisters, one of whom is disabled, along with their family’s methods of explaining and affirming each daughter, but Bender’s description of these parents is almost too quick. In “The Sea Turtle Hospital,” a school shooting disrupts the lives of both the teachers and the students, yet we’re only allowed into the narrator’s perspective. Bender’s honest descriptions and realistic situations just left this reader, simply, wanting more of these characters. Bender completes her collection with three stories that illustrate the desire for love and connectivity that can be diminished but not expunged by the everyday struggles of finances or personal failures. In “Free Lunch,” Bender mingles uncertainty with hopefulness, as a family tries to make the best of their recent unemployment, while in “For What Purpose?” merely the threat of impending unemployment causes the narrator to search for a meaningful connection. Bender’s last story, “What the Cat Said,” signals the end to Refund by focusing on a private thoughtful yet tense moment between a husband and wife; Bender doesn’t give us hope for perfection in this encounter but instead demonstrates the couple’s ability to acknowledge their imperfect marriage. Bender’s stories are powerful because they portray life as it is, messy, complicated, confusing and often undervalued. Most importantly, Refund doesn’t pretend to have answers to life’s imperfection but instead focuses connectivity as the real beauty and worth of life. n
“TALKING IN CIRCLES,” “MOV[ING] THROUGH TIME” a review by Tim Buchanan Gregg Cusick. “My Father Moves Through Time like a Dirigible” and Other Stories. Livingston: University of West Alabama Livingston Press, 2014.
TIM BUCHANAN is from Kalamazoo, MI, where he attended Western Michigan University earning bachelor’s degrees in creative writing and Spanish and the university’s Creative Writing Award for Undergraduate Fiction. He received his MA in English with a concentration in creative writing from East Carolina University, where he worked as an editorial assistant for NCLR. His short stories have appeared in Monkeybicycle, Cheat River Review, LitroNY, Hypertrophic Literary, and Puerto Del Sol. He received an AWP Intro Journals Award in 2014. Currently, he studies fiction as an MFA student at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. GREGG CUSICK is a three-time finalist for the Doris Betts Fiction Prize, and these stories have been published in NCLR 2008 and 2009 and NCLR Online 2013. He is also a winner of the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition and the Florida Review Editor’s Prize. He earned a master’s degree in English and creative writing from NC State University and lives in Durham.
ABOVE RIGHT Gregg Cusick reading at Scuppernong Books, Greensboro, NC, 11 Dec. 2015
When I was first invited to write a review of this debut collection of short stories by Gregg Cusick, it was the title that initially attracted me. This might be an obvious thing to note as the title of any work is the first inkling any of us get about the quality of what we’re about to read. My Father Moves Through Time like a Dirigible is both intriguing and perplexing. It’s an oddball title for sure, the kind that demands you pick apart its meaning. What does it mean to move through time like an anachronistic inflatable aircraft? And more to the point, what does it mean to be the child of such a man? I don’t know that these stories actually answer those questions specifically, but Cusick does give the impression of a writer trying to puzzle out the significance of time to our human experience. In stories like “My Father Moves Through Time like a Dirigible,” “Looking for Things in the Courtyards of Oaxaca,” and “Gutted,” Cusick does painstaking work to pin down an exact chronology for the reader, fixing events to their specific date and time, so that even when those events appear out of order in the narrative, we know exactly where we are on the timeline. To that effect, one thing became increasingly clear as I read on: these stories are obsessed with time, whether with history and anachronism or the passage of time itself, even when we don’t have a specific timeframe for events. The title story revisits the historic crash of the rigid airship Shenandoah in 1925 near Dayton, OH. While recalled through supposed crew logs leading up to the disaster, the event is counterpointed against the recollection of an eighty-three-year-old man