104
2021
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
SHORT STORY SEQUENCING a review by Sharon E. Colley Leah Hampton. F*ckface and Other Stories. Henry Holt and Company, 2020. Rhonda Browning White. The Lightness of Water & Other Stories. Press 53, 2019.
SHARON E. COLLEY is a Professor of English at Middle Georgia State University. Her scholarship includes a forthcoming article on Elizabeth Spenser’s Starting Over as short story sequence, as well as an essay on Lee Smith in NCLR. She is a regular reviewer for NCLR. LEAH HAMPTON lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains. A graduate of the Michener Center for Writers, she has received North Carolina’s James Hurst and Doris Betts Prizes for fiction. Her work has been featured in Ecotone, Electric Literature, and many more. Read stories by her in NCLR 2013 and NCLR Online 2018. R H O N DA B RO W N I N G W H I T E lived in the Piedmont region of NC from 1985 to 2001, and currently resides near Daytona Beach, FL. She completed an MFA in Creative Writing from Converse College in Spartanburg, SC. She was awarded the 2019 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction for The Lightness of Water. Four of her stories have been nominated for 2021 Pushcart Prizes, and she has been awarded a fellowship from Eckerd College’s Writers in Paradise.
Two debut short story volumes, The Lightness of Water & Other Stories by Rhonda Browning White and the startlingly titled F*ckface and Other Stories by Leah Hampton, use different styles but similar literary forms to tackle contemporary life in Appalachia. White’s clean but lyrical prose delves into the crises of present-day characters struggling with values, relationships, and connections to mountain land. Hampton’s volume features characters more connected to grocery stores and Dollywood than insulated mountain communities. The stories are more vulgar (as the title suggests), yet often comedic and touching. Both texts arguably utilize the short story sequence to deliver evolving volumes rather than loosely connected collections. The more unified The Lightness of Water deals with the common struggles and uncertain future of its communities. F*ckface, though it features characters from similar locales and cultural backgrounds, focuses on individuals isolated in the separate stories. The short story sequence or cycle has become a commonly recognized literary form, thanks to critics like Susan Garland Mann, J. Gerald Kennedy, and James Nagel. The short story sequence combines independent short texts into a larger volume that takes on more thematic depth with the juxtaposition of the stories. Often, sequences feature recurring characters or character types, settings, or situations that are approached from different angles. In The Contemporary
American Short Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of the Genre, Nagel observes, “writers from a wide variety of ethnic groups have used the form for the depiction of the central conflicts of characters from their own race or nationality.”1 The form can communicate the experiences of community members without identifying one as the ethnic experience. The characters in White’s and Hampton’s books are easily recognizable as ethnically Appalachian, living in the mountainous areas of North Carolina, West Virginia, Virginia, and Tennessee. Even when they venture to Florida or other regions, their love of mountain land, independence, and endurance suggests connections to traditional Appalachian culture. Many characters have a conscious connection to the Southern Mountain Region, which may be positive, negative, or, often, complicated. Both volumes, however, are firmly set in the recent present, exploring how the characters cope with changes in economics, culture, and environment. The Lightness of Water & Other Stories by Rhonda Browning White is more clearly a short story sequence. The first and last stories in the volume feature the same characters; the final story is a continuation of the initial one, albeit from a different character’s point of view. The volume begins, “These mountains are killing me – killing all of us – though I know it’s in self-defense” (1). Many stories explore different aspects of this
1
James Nagel, The Contemporary American Short Story Cycle: Ethnic Resonances of Genre (Louisiana State UP, 2001) 15.