My Life as a Mermaid, and Other Stories is Baltimore writer Jen Grow’s initial collection of short stories. It deals mostly with unheroic women in sad situations; 12 stories with a common theme of swimming and water.
TALES RANGING FROM
SADNESS & DANGER
TO DARK HUMOR
Patuxent Fiction Editor Jen Grow
explores loneliness & longing
via a cast of housewives,
dreamers & lost souls
UNHAPPY STORIES WITH
A COMMON THEME OF
SWIMMING & WATER
By Bill Hughes
When the fiction editor of the highly regarded “Little Patuxent Review” launched her debut book at Mount Washington’s popular Ivy Bookshop early last month, she was greeted by a standing room only audience.
The editor is Jen Grow, and the book is titled, My Life as a Mermaid. It’s a collection of 12 short stories with a common theme of swimming and water written by Ms. Grow that range from sadness and danger to dark humor, and explore loneliness and longing via a cast of housewives, dreamers and lost souls.
Jen is well-known in Baltimore literary circles, often participating at various readings around town, where I’ve frequently heard her read over the last few years in the course of my travels taking photographs at many of the literary events happening around Baltimore.
I vividly recall her sharing her stories at sites hosted by local authors such as Jen Michalski, Rafael Alvarez and Michael Kimball, among others.
The stories are excellent, though unhappy, and often resonate with vivid images of the human condition with all of its dreary, dark, boozy and gloomy circumstances. The author is sympathetic in her deft portrayals of the subjects — basically unhappy, unheroic women — but without going overboard.
One of her tales — a very moving one, indeed — is titled “Small Deaths” and is about death itself.
The narrator is the daughter. Her mother is “so frail,” that she can hardly stand-up. The author makes you feel that you are in the room with these two gallant souls as they bravely embrace “the clumsiness of death.”
Shifting gears, there’s Vivie stumbling through her life in an alcoholic daze as her neighbors are packing up and leaving town. Vivie desperately wants to do the same, in a story called “OK, Goodbye.”
FLOUNDERING THROUGH WHISKEY AND TEARS
She suspects her anger-filled husband, Don, is screwing around on her. Vivie is forever losing her keys, perhaps a metaphor for her perpetual floundering through her shots of whiskey and oceans of tears.
There is a water theme in many of these stories, none more so than in the title piece itself, “My Life as a Mermaid,” which contrasts two sisters.
Kay is off on a dangerous and adventure-filled excursion in Honduras as a “relief worker.” The narrator, the other sister, sits home with her three small children and recalls the fun times that they had growing up together and often going to the local swimming pool.
How to give her boring existence some meaning is her main quest. It’s not easy. She labels her predicament: “The land of marriage, motherhood [and] matching socks.”
“Joe Blow” is one of my fave stories in this collection. It’s populated by characters colorfully created, who remind me of my days growing up in Locust Point, in South Baltimore.
Back then, Locust Point was a bastion of the working class, many of whom belonged in a Hollywood movie.
Jen Grow explores loneliness and longing via a cast of unhappy, unheroic women in her debut short story collection, My Life as a Mermaid, and Other Stories. (VoB Photo/Bill Hughes).
Here’s one of Jen’s best lines from her book: “Winter is a bastard that beats his wife.”
It’s mouthed by a hapless street person named Larry, who lives in a truck parked on a street in a residential area with his drinking crony, Roger.
They are juxtaposed with Joe Blow, a “clean freak” who always has “a broom with him.” The narrator has an upstairs apartment with a wide view of the human carnival below.
A PAIN-FILLED CRY FOR HELP
“What Girls Left Behind” is a pain-filled cry for help.
A lonely housewife, the narrator, with kids long gone and an ex-husband out of the house, bemoans her dismal fate. Regularly saucing-up at the corner bar helps her through the day.
The next-door neighbor, Evelyn, another pitiful loser, is her companion. There is plenty of anger in the tortured soul of this housewife.
There is so much more in this gem of a new book, which is the 2012 winner of the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Competition.
Ms. Grow digs deep into the human psyche in her selected stories. So deep, at times, that the despair and hopelessness rise to the surface and spill over.
The author’s prose dances across the pages. My Life as a Mermaid is highly recommended.
It makes for a terrific summer read.
bhughes2@mac.com
EDITOR’S NOTE: Bill Hughes is an attorney, author, professional actor and photojournalist. He is the author of Andrew Jackson vs. New World Order, which can be found by clicking here. (For his complete thumbnail biography, click “Staff” under the Main Menu at left.)
My Life as a Mermaid, and Other Stories is available at The Ivy Bookshop, 6080 Falls Road in Mount Washington, and on Amazon.com.
Its publisher is Dzanc Books, a nonprofit small-press independent book publisher, operated from the owners’ homes in Detroit. Founded in 2006 and specializing in literary fiction and eBooks, it has been termed “the future of publishing” by Publishers Weekly.
