The Epiphany reading at Victoria Lesser's wonderful North Branch Inn was a perfect evening save for the fact that I did not take any pictures. North Branch is a tiny hamlet in Western Sullivan County with two auto repair shops, a handful of residential houses, a firehouse, and the beautifully restored inn. It was Epiphany's first foray into Catskills and the evening was how I define success. It provided a tension between feeling socially comfortable, and yet, at the same time feeling the need to participate in the chatter. This social hour was genuine and buttressed by good wine and delicious canapes made by chef, Caties Schwalb, of pitchfork, knife & spoon.
Readings are a tricky business as there is nothing worse than a bad reading. Prententious poets carefully enunciating breathy words that no gives a damn about. Zzzzzzzzzzzz! Holding the audience is as much about a performance by the reader as the quality of the work itself. It can't simply be a well read sacchrin fairytale spooned out like timed lines in a sitcom. A good reading must have a quality of wonder. The listener must wonder about who the characters really are, and just what they are up to in their imaginary world. A good reading has magic in it -- it is the sound of words that casts the spell over the listener and opens the imagination to something very real. The first reader, Samantha Gillison, read about a philandering Brooklyn sophisticate and has-been novelist, Jim Bevelacqua, who is always popping unpronounceable drugs and envying the richer classes. Humor and pathos were abound. The second reader, Rick Fellinger, read a tale of an alcoholic Vietnam Vet, Cuppy Forester, and his wife who were evacuating a flooding Pennsylvania rust belt town. Both characters in both stories were as real as Hamlet or Holden Caulfield. While there was plenty of drama in both stories but I think both stories tipped toward the epiphany. The name of this literary journal comes from James Joyce’s notion that stories should reveal those moments of insight or epiphanies, rather than that kind of bristling drama --the formulaic rising action, climax and denouement--that was ever present in the Greeks and perhaps even more so in the modern Hollywood film. The epiphany in short fiction is something different. It is the subtle and the evanescent that is often found in a lonely and struggling character of no particular economic class, but nevertheless it is a character who can't seem to put the pieces of the puzzle together. For one reason or another he/she makes bad decisions, take wrong turns, and can’t seem to get things right no matter what they do. Some have moral failings, some do not. Generally they live on the fringes, they are outsiders struggling to fit in. Flannery O'Connor's misfit in A Good Man is Hard to Find, Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis, Neddy Merrill in John Cheever's The Swimmer or even Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's Araby. They are vulnerable and a little melancholy, but all the same, determined to find meaning in their respective universes. Short stories capture this kind of human essence at a particular moment in time the way nothing else can – not a poem, novel or memoir.
In Gillison's story, The Fall of the Bevelacquas of Boerum Hill that moment is when Jim realizes the woman he envies, Suzanna Gryce, is "losing her tits" to cancer. It is a moment where Jim can no longer return to that self that envies her money and status. After that knowledge he sees the world a little differently.
In Fellinger's The Stuff Left Behind it is not Cuppy but his wife who has the epiphany when she takes the bottle of vodka and throws it on the pavement where it explodes. Cuppy's wife can no longer believe his pronoucements about his sobriety. Like Jim Bevelacqua her world is changed forever.
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