'The Land of Infinite Variety: Stories and Other Prose' Now Indexed on ProQuest

July 19, 2020 -- The arrival of a first-class envelope at my doorstep here in Portland over the weekend took me back about 10 years. It bore the seal of the university I've attended as a doctoral student for much of that time, and in the corner, the words DIPLOMA—DO NOT BEND. Amid the uncertainties of the global pandemic, like so many other newly-minted scholars and professionals exiting graduate programs in 2020, I'd been waiting for this materialization, some real-world sign of the terminus of my studies. This was it, complete with tissue paper, faux leather, and the digitally-rendered signatures of various officials.

Forget about commencement. The impersonality of the white envelope and its carefully-wrapped contents carried me back, instead, to memories of the Peace Corps and my smoke-filled exit from southern Kyrgyzstan via the Manas Air Base outside Bishkek, which I've narrated in previous posts. (The writer Jia Tolentino, also from K-18, our doomed volunteer class of 2010, has chronicled parallel experiences and argued for agency reforms meant to prevent other kinds of violence.)

Months after the evacuations of many in K-18, an unmarked truck with a U.S. government plate deposited a similarly-shrouded parcel at my doorstep in Fort Collins, Colorado, where I had returned to complete a master's degree in English at Colorado State. Inside the package I found assorted dictionaries, notebooks, travel guides, novels, and dusty personal effects that had survived the looting of the Melon Revolution. In other words, the rhetorical artifacts of my tenure abroad as a university educator—some 100 days of living with host families, preparing to co-teach English with local instructors, and beginning the journey toward fluency in one of Central Asia's dozens of Turkic languages. It had all ended in waves of violence that swept through the Kyrgyz provinces in mid-June 2010, for reasons still not well understood, resulting in hundreds of thousands of families displaced. And some 2,000 deaths—including the reported killing of two fixers hired to ferry my own team of American volunteers out of the chaos of an ancient city in flames.

Writing and reflecting on the broader systems of violence and colonization in which I found myself implicated that summer—and on what it means to arrive "home" in the American West—has taken the better part of a decade. And that work of self-examination (personal, fictive, familial, rhetorical) is far from finished. But this summer, along with my doctoral diploma, I can point to another kind of materiality: the assemblage, in manuscript form, of a book of stories and other prose now available on ProQuest (metadata only, for the near future). Below I'm sharing the abstract and table of contents for The Land of Infinite Variety, and offering thanks to the many generous souls who have guided this work and its author thus far.

For another window into its composition, here is a brief excerpt from my dissertation's artist's statement, which draws in part on a critical review by Patrick Madden, "W. G. Sebald: Where Essay Meets Fiction":

For Madden, then, the essay as a form is not limited to conventional genres of fact. His thought experiment maintains that Sebald’s first three translated “novels” can actually be read as nonfiction, while the fourth, Austerlitz (The Modern Library, 2001) “performs the actions of an essay” (174). In response, I might propose that we place Sebald’s works along a spectrum of essaying as a mode of discourse, rather than unnecessarily divorcing The Emigrants, for example, from the canon of literary fiction by applying the “non” prefix. More generally, however, my work asserts support for Madden’s thesis. Sebald’s and similar volumes of under-recognized “essays”—ranging from Brian Kiteley’s “novel” Still Life with Insects (Graywolf, 1989) to emerging works perhaps best captured in the title essay of Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (Houghton, 2018)—have been remarkably influential in composing certain stories at the heart of Infinite Variety. “The events of your life like an empty field . . . Invent something,” Chee muses, “that fits the shape of what you know,” then tell the story of this thing through “a character like you, but not you” (246). As of late, we find works fitting this mold in almost every kind of experimental fiction. From the lyrical fixations of Lydia Davis and Rita Bullwinkel to wartime cycles such as Phil Klay’s Redeployment (Penguin, 2014). From the New American anthologies of Ben Marcus to Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School (Farrar, 2019), with its chapters culled from essays, autoethnographic stories of therapy, fictionalized memories of high school forensics, and appearances of Duccio’s Madonna and Child, “a real painting,” in places that do not correspond with real time. Such anachronisms, explains Lerner in the back matter, work to signal his social novel’s “unstable mixture of fact and fiction” (285).

Turning to my own work, “A Fictional Essay On or About the 100th Meridian, Alphabetically Arranged,” for example, borrows its title and underlying structure from Dinty W. Moore’s enduring “Son of Mr. Green Jeans: An Essay on Fatherhood, Alphabetically Arranged,” which found its way from Crazyhorse to Harper’s. Moore, also a former journalist, catalogues some two dozen images of fathers (from classic television, the natural world, academia, genetics, and so on), beginning with “Allen, Tim,” then gradually intersecting with more personal entries such as “Vasectomies” (49-52). In my fictional essay’s examination of 26 scenes from a line of demarcation with “great significance” in the American West, an opening section titled “Adventure” introduces the cultural memory of “three fair-skinned, French tourists” paddling southward into the bowels of the high country. Their journey is followed by more personal “Echoes”:

It’s the same storied meridian many American families deserted—propelled less by adventure than desperation—in the year before the voyagers arrived to the land they called the Far-West. Might Antoine’s journal somehow call into question the writer’s own nostalgia for the late frontier—built on his grandfather’s late memories (1928-2013) of the Dakotas? . . . How many echoes, and how much dissonance? What of the parallels in these perpendicular lines of flight? (123)

. . . In this wayward manner, [my] work unfolds with parallels to what Sebald once described to a New Yorker interviewer: “Not even my Ph.D. research was done systematically. It was done in a random, haphazard fashion. The more I got on, the more I felt that, really, one can find something only in that way—in the same way in which, say, a dog runs through a field” (qtd. in Madden 170).

Flash Prose Nominated for Pushcart

Along with other compositions, "Blowfish," a work of flash prose by RBM published earlier this year by Salmon Creek Journal, has been nominated by the journal for a Pushcart Prize. More on the nomination process can be found here. Please enjoy an excerpt:

The Dakotas have probably crossed the county line. The Dakotas are not the kind of boys you’ll find in a Walmart parking lot. So why this careful study of Entrance and Exit? Of tired woman and wailing would-be piano man? Inside there is Grocery and there is Pharmacy. Centers Garden, Vision, and Photo, and 1-Hour Photo. Where would the Dakotas hide? Sporting Goods? The walk-in cooler?

For the rest of this and more works by writers and artists from Washington State University Vancouver and other corners of the Northwest, please visit the journal's archives. (Submissions are currently open to the public and close Jan. 11.) Thanks to the hardworking SCJ staff for this kind recognition.

Fall Readings at #PAMLA2015 and #WesternLit2015

A father-son portrait from "Thanksgiving for Aurelia"

November 8, 2015 -- This fall, RBM brought new chapters of a prose manuscript-in-progress, The Land of Infinite Variety, to the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association's 113th annual conference in Portland, and to the Western Literature Association's 50th annual conference in Reno (PDF).

At Friday's PAMLA session on "brief prose forms," organized and moderated by Megan Spiegel of Western Washington University, RBM read from a lyric essay on motherhood, "Thanksgiving for Aurelia," modeled after Dinty W. Moore's "Son of Mr. Green Jeans: An Essay on Fatherhood, Alphabetically Arranged." Glimmer Train recently shortlisted (PDF) a related work of fiction as a finalist for the magazine's Short Story Award for New Writers.

Slides from "The Archivist and The Voyager"

At October's WLA session on "intergenerational memoir," moderated by Megan Riley McGilchrist of the American School in London, RBM read from "The Archivist and The Voyager," another alphabetically-arranged essay. This chapter from RBM's forthcoming collection juxtaposes accounts of the American West from two journals of the late 1930s: that of his grandfather, and that of French tourist Antoine de Seynes. The story of the latter "voyager" and two companions was recently documented in a feature-length film, Voyagers Without Trace (2015), which debuted in Portland. (RBM served as a post-production associate producer; there's more on this acclaimed project at OPB.org.) Below is a brief excerpt from RBM's reading in Reno:

One fragment, from that first westerly passage, stands out from the rest. Some measure of redemption, let’s say, for our collective memory. It’s an image of descent, under the noonday sun of 1930-something, from the high plateau of the Old West into the fruit valleys of the Northwest: peaches, pears, apples, toilets, electricity. Men crawling like so many insects over something called the Grand Coulee. Such wonders, says my great uncle, in his eulogy. The three boys gazing the whole time, I’m told, from the rear window of a 1929 Chevrolet. 

The car rolls to a stop at a big painted lodge in the basin. The youngest boy, the one usually last in line, steps out first, now suddenly a tourist. Just then, something peculiar catches the boy’s eye—a glinting transom at the peak, the very zenith of the roofline. And so the young archivist scurries up the railing to have a look. 

Staring back, through the beveled glass, is the boy’s own reflection—the sight of which sends us both tumbling back to earth.

500 Words on Arbor Day

January 29, 2013 -- RBM has new flash nonfiction, "500 Words on Arbor Day," featured online this week over at Hobart. So as not to give too much away, here's a (five-word) excerpt:

... There is talk of lightening ...

For more from Hobart, consider subscribing, buying a good book by a friend of this blog, or reading some of the journal's fine fiction in The Best American Short Stories 2012.

Speaking of the Bigger Stuff

via "Remembering Osh"

RBM's essay "I'd Like to Talk About the Bigger Stuff," which won Phoebe's inaugural nonfiction contest and appeared in print earlier this year, is now available online. Another excerpt:

To the west, through the helicopter’s tea-colored portals, I can see Uzbekistan; the cotton fields and cherry trees of the Fergana Valley; and a long, maniacal border severing one village from the next. I imagine, for a moment, an engorged Stalin, dragging a fountain pen down a wide gray map. Skirting his line, as though his hand ignored the topography, march row after row of mountaintops. They look cold and lifeless from on high. They divide Bishkek from the farmlands and become impassable in winter. Reminding the Russified Kyrgyz, who prefer white rice, of those hotheaded Uzbeks, who prefer red. But that’s enough imperial history.

To read this and more from Phoebe 40.2, as well as other debut nonfiction, visit PhoebeJournal.com.

The View from Grapevine

By R.B. Moreno

Above: Thursday's sunset over Dallas, Texas, where temperatures are climbing into triple digits this week. The 2011 Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference heats up in nearby Grapevine on Saturday and Sunday with lectures from long-form journalist Ted Conover and The Washington Post's Gene Weingarten.

Tonight's opening remarks at the DFW Hilton, below, came from essayist Diane Ackerman who contends that she would rewrite every book she's authored, given the chance. "It's hard to stop working," Ackerman explained.

I asked her about the recent wave of memoir criticism in editorial circles, which she rejected. (See this dispatch for more background.) Ackerman said she happily borrows techniques from fiction and enjoys testing boundaries, but can't consider one genre exclusive of another.

Then how, someone else followed up, do we avoid tiresome memoirs?

"I'm a firm believer in being as specific and detailed as possible," was Ackerman's reply. "Just that alone will create something universal. Having it be interesting enough? There's the rub."

Remarks from Paul Theroux at the same venue a couple of years ago finished with this advice, which has been hard to ignore: "Leave home, tell the truth, you'll be all right."

Ready for the rest of the Mayborn lineup, over the years? It's become something of a nonfiction grocery list: Mary Karr, Mark Bowden, and Gary Smith; Ira Glass and Alma Guillermoprieto; N. Scott Momaday, Bob Shacochis, and Candice Millard; Mary Roach, Allison Hedge Coke, and Joyce Carol Oates; Hampton Sides, Melissa Fay Greene, and Gay Talese; and Susan Orlean and Norman Pearlstine, among others.

I'd Like to Talk About the Bigger Stuff

via Phoebe

An essay by RBM that questions relationships among Coloradoans, the Kyrgyz, and our animals has won Phoebe's inaugural nonfiction contest, judged by author (and screenwriter) Shauna Cross. The essay will appear in the George Mason University journal's fall issue (volume 40). An excerpt:

Dinner and a bowl of kumis, or fermented mare’s milk, prompts another tale, this one about the melting of the snows. “I was born in the mountains,” says Salmorbek, his whiskers flaring around the words. From here in Kant, the Tian Shan range looms impossibly high, stretching all the way to China and 10,000 feet above the Rockies. Somewhere up there, in celebration of the equinox, points Salmorbek, through the kitchen window, men mount horses and compete in a sort of airborne wrestling match. Instead of a ball, they fight for a dead sheep. “I too rode a horse,” he adds with pride. “But I was better at riding a tank.”

That night, locked among the carpets, I find “Reviving the Kyrgyz Horse” in the guidebook Kyrgyz Republic. “For centuries, the horse was vital to nomadic life,” reads the entry. I swallow hard at what comes next. The author quotes a French historian dismayed by a Soviet plan to civilize the Kyrgyz: “‘The shepherds were in tears,’ says Jacqueline Ripart. Some of the horses went into giant Soviet stud farms but most were killed for their meat.’”

For Phoebe's current nonfiction and other genres, visit the journal's blog, which for a limited time is offering an entire issue as a free download. You can also follow Phoebe on Twitter and Facebook.

via Phoebe

Update -- "I'd Like to Talk" is now available at PhoebeJournal.com along with contest results and artwork for Phoebe volume 40.2. Congratulations to fellow winners and HMs Aja Gabel and Dwight Holing (fiction), Mark Wagenaar and Grace Curtis (poetry), and Jessica McCaughey (nonfiction).

Exposure Time

An essay by RBM involving travels along Colorado's Horsetooth (pictured above), through Cartagena de Indias, and above Osh, Kyrygzstan (below), appears on Matter Daily newsstands this month.

Matter Daily/Matterhorn is a publication of Wolverine Farm and Matter Bookstore. An excerpt from "Exposure Time":

Sulayman rises from an old city on the Silk Road and an arid expanse of farmland, and looks something like Horsetooth. Still, its five hills are made of quartz and lime, not sandstone, and I feel conspicuous in my shorts and trainers. This a place of pilgrimage, where colored prayers dangle from bushes and women in veils slide down a certain rock said to impart fertility.

Get on with it. What’s a foreigner doing in a cemetery?

The sun has nearly set but I want to find a running trail I can trust -- and get a look at the summit. I don’t know how to get there, but the path that snakes around some military barracks, on the west side, seems less taken. I work myself higher and higher along switchbacks, feeling my heartbeat climb into familiar territory. Burs rake at my legs as I lose the path, but the exertion is exquisite (and hard to find on the campus where I teach). I pass boulders covered in Kyrgyz and Russian graffiti, some with blue numerals that signal older markings -- hunters and the hunted, most predating the Qur'an. Finally, the path enters a draw and shoots straight up, toward a plateau where the sky seems brightest.

RBM's last dispatch from Osh can be found elsewhere on this blog and over at NPR.org.

In an Age of Great Nonfiction Writing, Too Much Nonfiction Writing?

via Colorado State University

Over the next two weeks RBM will be blogging for Colorado State University's Center for Literary Publishing, where he serves as a Colorado Review editorial assistant. His first post considers a debate about memoirs that's been brewing this month. An excerpt:

to read the New York Times Book Review as of late is to get the impression that the age of nonfiction, like that of Rome or America, has overstepped its bounds. The literary world, according to Times editor Neil Genzlinger, has been inundated by “a sea of people you’ve never heard of, writing uninterestingly about the unexceptional, apparently not realizing how commonplace their little wrinkle is or how many other people have already written about it.” Genzlinger’s guide for “would-be memoirists,” which conveys the kind of hollow feeling I get from reading sex advice columns, comes in four parts

To read this post and an upcoming interview with one of the Review's nonfiction contributors, visit the CLP Editor's Blog.

Update: Creative Nonfiction has flagged RBM's "Too Much Nonfiction Writing?" in its March newsletter along with a similar post worth reading, Brevity's "Listening to One Another: A Defense of the Memoir Genre."

What Endured

Below you can view cover artwork designed by RBM for Writings from the 2009 Summer Institute, an anthology of The Denver Writing Project. The shoes depicted belong to RBM's extended family in Guatemala, circa 1960.

Check back here for the text of RBM's contribution to the anthology, "What Endured: Looking for Boyhood Lost at Sea."

The Stories the Writer Knows to Be True in His Life

A slideshow and an essay RBM presented to the 2009 Federation Rhetoric Symposium in Commerce, Texas, is now available via Google Docs. Above: midnight on presentation day.

Mountain Climbers

Update: An essay by RBM about a father and son's attempt to climb Mount Rainier, the most heavily glaciated peak in the continental United States, was published this year in LandEscapes, a literary journal of the Washington State University English Department.

Meningococcal Meningitis: A Mother's Memoir

An essay by RBM that profiles a childhood bout of meningitis -- and his mother's role in his recovery -- has been published online by Creative Nonfiction. An excerpt:

They say I can finally go home now. A wheelchair! How embarrassing. I get a purple metallic heart with a diaper pin: "For Bravery." On the day we leave I'm standing on the steps leading to the emergency room holding my suitcase and smiling. Mom snaps a photo, and now I'm unsure whether I remember that moment or the picture that captured it.