Evelyn Hampton, Discomfort. Ellipsis Press, 2015.
Read a story from the collection online:
In startling, often breathtaking ways, Evelyn Hampton examines self and object and word and world in these pages, moving with wonder and hopefulness through all the bewilderment and beauty that is the human predicament. A moving and impressive debut. —Carole Maso
Evelyn Hampton’s Discomfort is a stunning first collection of stories that take place in the gap that exists between the world and our perception of the world. And, when it has to make a choice, it comes down not on the side of reality but on that of embodied, eccentric perception. Hampton cannily reveals the uncanniness of all we think we know, and shows that that uncanniness belongs as much to our own minds as to things themselves. —Brian Evenson
Hampton’s stunned sentences will remind you, because you have forgotten, how piercingly disregulating life is. Discomfort is an amazing experience. —Stacey Levine
While the stories in Discomfort are far from realist, they are not surreal in the expected ways either. Nothing seems quite as it should be, or as you would expect it to be, but it is hard to pin down exactly what is so very (and yes, the title is apt) discomforting in these pieces. The overall feeling is one of microscopy—as if Hampton has us looking so close, has us rooted so deeply into the grit of her characters’ experiences, that the edges and the context get lost. We sense that if we pulled back far enough everything would fall into a more conventional view; all the stories of disembodied lovers and mysterious contraptions would settle into recognizable metaphors for loss or loneliness and alienation. Luckily, Hampton makes us want to stay right up close, nose to the glass of her words. These close-up worlds are beguiling and relatable, though they move by a logic more bodily than narrative. The stories end not when the plots (such as they are) end, but when the object has been looked at long enough, or when the sudden thought is spoken fully. In “Blue” a character watching a television news show calls out in despair to the universe and notes that “Immediately nothing happened.” There is perhaps no better description of the way Discomfort unfolds itself: nothing happens, but the way it happens, or fails to, is surprising—sudden and fresh—and worth watching.
The prose is elegant and tight. Hampton’s descriptions, even at their most poetic, are controlled and precise: there is no looseness here, no messy, headlong glory. The power of this writing is in slow accumulation—one right word after another after another. This is load-bearing prose, prose strong enough to anchor us into the strange intensity of these stories, approachable enough that when it says keep looking, keep looking, look close, we do.These stories are intensely embodied, taking as both subject and form the basic awkwardness of existence, of moving among others. The stories—more perhaps, than the characters themselves—are neurotic, circling back on a thought again and again, never quite resolving it into a meaning. These are stories of an elaborate overthinking, a close examination by which the normal, natural, and physical all turn grotesque. In “Nowhere Hill” a young child becomes convinced that their Mickey Mouse watch is producing a foul, damp odor that others must soon notice. In ”Julian” the objects and moods of the world are gathered together in a wild solipsism until they become some version of a man. In the titular story, a bag of food gets damp in the rain and begins to weaken, and a man talks and talks. and a woman remembers people who have made her uncomfortable before him. In this sense, the stories are highly naturalistic—or at least highly relatable, despite their occasionally impossible plot points. The stories feel real, feel like they get at some essential, mundane ill-ease, even if we could not say precisely how their odd, looping logic reflects our experience, except in so far as we all live within the closed loops of our bodies and minds.
There are multiple returns to the idea of naming in Discomfort, or of trying to make something shifting and unreal whole by knowing what to call it, or of trying to constitute something solid out of only the loose material of language. The characters of Discomfort are at home in the body and its oddness and its sufferings, but the words to trace the outlines of these things often prove ineffective, tangential, in need of frequent revision. The things of these stories certainly are but tend not to remain. In the final story of the collection, “Blondlot’s Transformation” the narrator is assisting police in searching for Blondlot, who is missing. Blondlot is described at various points as a certain configuration is sparrows, a scientist and discoverer of the N-ray, a man with Christmas lists in his pockets, a mist rising between trees, and a person in a dress of unremembered color. In this last guise, Blondlot sits and talks with the narrator for some time. Afterwards the narrator says “I know that back in my hotel room I’ll see, in the white wrinkles and folds of my sheets, the way Blondlot’s dress gathered and carried him from one gesture to the next, so that Blondlot’s thoughts seemed to belong to the dress which nodded no and yes and fidgeted Blondlot’s hands” the physical is strong and clear in the impression it leaves, Blondlot’s body and clothes projecting their memory forward into the sight of the hotel sheets. But soon, the narrator is scribbling a question into a notebook, “When there is real distance between us, what will Blondlot be?” because in the world of Hampton’s Discomfort, description, memories, or even the reality of being cannot be expected to stay put, to stay named or understood for very long. Everything is subject to a strange tide.
In most of the stories, this constant slippage of identity and reality, this too-easy path between presence and nothingness, is a source of some anxiety, or at least of a pervasive sense of dislocation. There are moments, however, when we see the sweetness of this universality, of how our own bodies and minds—confused and strained and circling—are constituent of something bigger or beyond or, at least, held in common. In “Mole” we see this most clearly, as the narrator, weighing an escape from relationship and home and life-as-she’s-known-it tells us, “Walking above the cape this morning, I wasn’t worried about myself because I didn’t feel that I had a self apart from the cape to worry about. To worry about myself living alone on the cape would be to worry about the cape living alone on the cape, and where else would a cape live if not on an oceanic coast, where rocks are constantly being pummeled and tossed by waves that are sometimes the size of houses, sometimes even larger?” Where else, indeed? The stories in this collection are not as strange as they are first appear. They are, in fact, quite clear, as soon as one gets the sense of this self-destroying, drifting logic. These are not stories, after all, of pain, of abjection, of the extraordinary or incomprehensible, but of discomfort—something that cannot be named except by saying what it is not, not a feeling so much as a state—inhabitable, large, shared. - Emily Kiernan
WE WERE ETERNAL AND GIGANTIC, a chapbook of prose and poetry published by Magic Helicopter Press.
Reviews:
An incredibly kind review by Molly Gaudry in Big Other.
More reviews Here, here, here, and here.
And as a “small-press holiday recommendation”.
Lost Body Projected: a use for an abandoned building, from Mud Luscious Press chapbook series (and a Pushcart nominee).
ANTHOLOGIES
My Chute in &NOW Awards vol. 3 (forthcoming)
Mr. Gray in 30 Under 30 edited by Blake Butler & Lily Hoang
Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature
Discomfort in Harp & Altar’s first anthology.
WRITING ONLINE AND IN PRINT
Fishmaker in Conjunctions, spring 2015
Fictional review of The Fixed Stars in Heavy Feather Review
BB & Calla Lily in BOMB Magazine, June 2014
excerpts from M forthcoming in online and print editions of Black Sun Lit
The Slow Man has been included among The Wigleaf top 50 very short fictions 2014
The Art Teacher in Birkensnake 6 (fall 2013)
3 stories (Julian, Rico, and The Slow Man) at Web Conjunctions
Mole in BOMB Magazine
The End of History in The Collagist
2 things in H_NGM_N
My Chute in LIT
Blondlot’s Transformation, winner of Black Warrior Review’s 8th fiction contest
Cassidy online at Hobart
Everyday, an Epic in Conjunctions 59
3 poems online in Dinosaur Bees
Choo and Cream online in The Collagist
2 poems in Reality Hands
Dear Gravity in NNATAN 0
The Monk and the Nun in the April Mother’s News
Office in Flyway (runner-up in essay contest, published in Fall 2011 issue)
Revision in Everyday Genius
Love Dolls in Anomalous Press
Boy in New York Tyrant
I Carried My Coma in Sidebrow
Girl in Brooklyn Rail
The Largest Unobstructed Area Given to Ham in Everyday Genius
Gaps (a response to Feminaissance)
Being Nobody (an essay) in MAKE (issue 10)
What People Want From Waves in Unsaid (issue 5)
2 poems in H_NGM_N
Henry Ford Made Time American in Absent Magazine
Nowhere Hill, winner of The Collagist’s non-fiction contest and a Pushcart nominee.
The Van Gogh Diary in Action, Yes
About the Inside in Sleeping Fish (Issue Eight), guest ed. Gary Lutz with Derek White
Interruptions in The Denver Quarterly and translated into Polish and published by Minimal Books
Sag: A Saga in Birkensnake
Cell Fish in The New Yinzer, guest edited by Claire Donato
excerpts of Not That Far in elimae
4 Tales in Spork
Stories Of the Things That Had No Power Of Their Own (Pushcart nominee) in Unsaid (issue 4) and translated into Polish and published by Minimal Books
EEG in Sidebrow
Discomfort (Pushcart nominee) in Harp & Altar and in the forthcoming Harp & Altar anthology
Poem in Corduroy Mountain
Parting in SmokeLong Quarterly
I am a lion birthing a kitten in Noo Journal
Adored, Or Red in Pindeldyboz
Escape from the Bursa of Fabricious (kind of strange ebook) at endtable
Slippery Handles in Juked
Decoy in The Portland Review
Evelyn Hampton is the author of the chapbook We Were Eternal and Gigantic (Magic Helicopter Press). Her writing can be found in The Brooklyn Rail, The Denver Quarterly, New York Tyrant, Birkensnake, Conjunctions, and other venues. She graduated with an MFA from the Literary Arts program at Brown University. She’s @lispservice
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