Claudia Smith, Put Your Head In My Lap (Future Tense Book, 2009)"It is like Claudia Smith is trying to bury me in words, one on another, and they are little words and very unassuming so that even as they steep and mount and touch my chin, I am still only smiling at the way they are used.
Put Your Head In My Lap by Claudia Smith is the latest release from the ever-present Future Tense Books and is basically a whirlwind of subtle wit, clever linguistic arrangements, and complex emotional states pulled together under the guise of simple story-telling.
from Marks:
“When he falls asleep, she leaves and looks in on their child. Transparent hair and blue eyes; perhaps his eyes, his hair. She would like to touch the whorl on the back of his head, but it would wake him.”
An especially unique feature of Claudia Smith’s work is how she maneuvers within and around dialogue without losing the intensity of phrasing or the aggressive hold on each scene. Too often dialogue becomes either a stopgap for exposition or a stumbling, bumbling kind of imaginary world, leaning on what we think is spoken dialogue rather than what is actually our phrasing, but Smith instead holds her poetic fists and makes the conversations tackle the natural mode of our speaking while still fitting the rhythmic pull of each narrative.
from Leak:
“Mom, you know what you do when you stir like that?” “I’m simmering the vegetables.” “You shimmer it. It’s called you shimmer it, Mom.”
The moon was pressing against the back door, leaking slivers of light in through the cracks. The house wasn’t well insulated. Her son asked if it was a monster.
“It won’t get in, don’t worry,” she told her son. “How do you know?” “I won’t let it.”
Put Your Head In My Lap accomplishes what so many young flash/vignette writers are attempting at every online and print journal with a pension for the shortest of stories: a crisp, clean, complex narrative woven with invisible plot and seamed by tangible characters who do not require thousands of words in order to exist. Claudia Smith makes them real, shapes their faces, and does so in a quiet avalanche of small words, one at a time, until we are unknowingly bricked into her humanity.
from Pillow:
“The sky was an over-bleached sheet, stretched to the point of ripping. Everything worn but clean. He was saying he’d be happier if we lived in Canada. The sun seemed very close, like a star at the top of a Christmas tree. Maybe I could pull it down. Our baby had died, but he didn’t call it a baby. This was the year we lived on 32nd Street.”
Go get Put Your Head In My Lap. It will pile words on your chest, and you will smile as you suffocate." - J. A. Tyler
"For years I've been finding these little Claudia Smith stories. They draw me in so easily, with something familiar if slightly odd, and before I know it I'm consumed by a world far deeper than so few lines have any right to contain. In Put Your Head In My Lap, each of the stories is anxious, intimate, and powerful. Yet together they form a narrative of love and separation--like a flash novel. She's a terrific writer." - Robert Shapard
"Swiss artist Urs Fischer says “art works best in people’s memories” by which he means “it’s not just the act of going to see it on the wall.” Fischer is talking about visual art, but, in the case of Claudia Smith’s Put Your Head in My Lap, at least, the same could apply to literature. The 16 short short stories in this 41-page chapbook are compelling and immersive when you’re in the act of reading them, but they get even better when you’ve finished and moved onto recalling them.
This may be because the stories operate like memories, sharp and edgy on some points, like when the narrator of one recalls, “The air smelled of clean laundry and coffee. It smelled so good,” but also blurred and dreamy at other points and seeming altered by the process of recollection as when another protagonist says, “Four years ago, my son wore mittens with elastic at the wrists, so he wouldn’t scratch his face. He looked like a little lobster […] His eyes were a still sky on a rainy day.”
Small details make the stories feel lifelike, inhabited, and even well-documented as if they could almost be nonfiction, like when a protagonist says of a rough time in her life, “I shopped from a list. I made pretzel Jell-O. My grandmother had made it; I Googled the recipe.”
The final paragraph of the book depicts the speaker of the last story this way: “She is remembering, holding her face up to the flakes the way she’d read about and seen in Christmas movies. It happened, it happened, she’ll say and you can’t take it back.” These stories feel, in the best sense, like they are true things, like they are things that happened." -Kathleen Rooney
"The sixteen short-short stories in Claudia Smith’s Put Your Head in My Lap convey such tenderness it’s difficult not to develop a big-ass lump in my throat, the kind that causes tears to well and fall. This is a collection to read alone, wrapped in a blanket beside a crackling fire, a steaming cup of tea nearby. But beware: anyone who’s experienced heartbreak will relive that sorrow, those losses. Proceed, however, and be brave. Your reward is to discover prose that resonates with simplicity, prose that prompts aching and, subsequently, hope. You will want to reach for someone dear; you will want to dial up an old friend and catch up, someone whose voice once soothed. This is the complication in Smith’s writing: her words remind us of our pain, but the pain reminds us, inspires us, to reconcile with that, or those, we have lost.
In Submarine Dreams, a mother says, simply, “We came here a year ago. I was hopeful.” An obvious, but unstated, divorce later, she closes this story with the lines: “My son sleeps with me now. I sing to him, Mariposa, sweet dreams, butterfly, close your eyes.” And when she asks, “It’s a bad pattern to set, isn’t it?” I’m not sure whether she’s addressing us or her departed husband. “Good luck,” she sings, because her son “gets scared, dreaming, at night.” In the next story, “Valentine,” the narrator recalls how she and an unnamed “you” first fell in love; after falling “asleep together on the floor,” she kisses her lover’s forehead. She says, “I did it suddenly and softly, startling myself,” and I, too, am startled by her admission. It seems so natural, that kiss. And yet, it “was like touching the wings of a creature you couldn’t see but knew to be beautiful simply from the feel.” What she does next is just as startling: “I stood up and walked out of the apartment, down the stairs, into the street. It was cold and I wasn’t wearing a coat, but I kept walking anyway, thinking I couldn’t go back there because you’d be gone.”
A fiction professor once told me—and this is some of the best advice I’ve ever received—that physical objects in a story are best utilized when they pull double, or even triple, duty. What he meant was that though a coat can just be a coat, when it actually means something more than that, magic is born. The triple duty, or the magic, of the coat in Valentine is that while it is dormant back at the apartment, beyond reach, its presence tells us something about this narrator—that she’s willing to go without it, despite the chill, because the physical consequences are nothing compared to the emotional; to return to her apartment, to find the object of her affection gone, will leave her more bare than she already is, and the idea and fear of such exposure is something she’s unwilling, just yet, to face. It’s interesting, then, that this particular story opens with the line, “You once gave me an apple off a tree, and I thought about its significance, and wondered if you meant something by that, or if you were just handing me an apple.” An apple, a coat, a sleeping son: in Smith’s careful hands, they are more than anything we’ve ever encountered; they are precious cargo, worthy of quiet meditation and further exploration.
In the next story, Half, the unnamed narrator wears a locket her mother-in-law gave her; inside the locket, her husband’s black hair. She says, “I wore the locket at all times, even when I took a shower. I thought about the thin layer of gold between his lock and the flesh on my collarbone.” A locket, hair, a collarbone: again, the familiarity of such physical objects is recast in such a way that readers can’t help but ponder their symbolic meanings; again, Smith’s words—their simplicity, their frankness, the magic of their admissions, their very utterances—become more than words; they become experiences, revealed to us. And are we worthy? When else have we been entrusted with so much? I can’t say I’ve ever felt such a connection to a writer’s (dare I say?) soul.
In Marks, a woman learns the meaning of what it is to be touched, to be the one who does the touching. The father of her child has “a strawberry mark behind his left shoulder. When she traces it, he stands up and goes to lie down on the stone floor in the bathroom. She watches him through the opened door.” The door here—a physical object that can be opened or closed—is, while open, closed. The threshold is impassable. Her touch has gone, worse than unnoticed, unwanted, and, from worse to worst, even after they have had sex; and all she can do is continue to watch him until, when “he falls asleep, she leaves and looks in on their child.” It is up to us to learn the meaning of a touch, and when we read that she “would like to touch the whorl on the back of his head, but it would wake him,” there is only a deep sense of loss, something unexplainably clear: this is what it is to want to reach out, this is what it is to stop yourself.
I can feel my throat tightening now. Who wouldn’t? Fitting, then, that the collection’s final story, Ice, opens with this: “They will break one another’s hearts—well, at least, he will break hers, she’s not sure now about his.” And having read the other stories in the meantime, we, too, can’t help but be unsure about his, though we do know the fate of hers. Which is why, I’m sure, I opened this review with the word “tenderness.” If these aren’t prime examples, I don’t know what else I can offer in my desperate urging that will compel you to buy this chapbook. It is required reading for any human being; perhaps, more specifically, any woman whose life hasn’t quite turned out the way she hoped it would at some youthful age when she was freshly scrubbed and innocent. We may still be freshly scrubbed, but the scrubbing, over the years, will have certainly taken on a different purpose: no longer to cleanse but to cast away the sorrows of our past and present lives. Claudia Smith understands this; and I can’t help but think it’s because she’s been there. So tonight, wrapped in a blanket, I will raise my cup of tea to her and hope that as I blow away steam, so too will I blow away her hurt, if only for even a moment. - Molly Gaudry
"HAPPILY-EVER-AFTER fell short. It’s not raining, but the sky is full of “bruised clouds.” That gift from your husband makes you feel worthless, and the only person capable of articulating hopelessness seems to be your three-year-old. So why are you still piecing together what happened a year ago? Claudia Smith offers us a kind of answer with Put Your Head in My Lap. This collection of shorts explores how we fail at love, and how we split our fingernails trying to cling to it.
Smith’s characters represent many of the roles women play in a spoiled relationship—the abandoned, the unrelenting, the witness—but they also share a stillness-in-motion, characters stuck inside the memories of what they no longer have. In many shorts we travel from memory to present only to end in memory again, placing us in an elliptical world where the present is less important than the events that made it this way.
The world becomes even more elliptical when we draw connections between stories. These connections—from a dark-haired husband’s refrain of “stop talking” to a son’s love of Spiderman to the aftershocks of a miscarriage—build on each other so that we too feel lost in the memories, that each short is another scene in the story of where happily-ever-after went. A story like “Two and Two,” though a sweet moment between a couple, is turned sour by what we already know. That dark hair and that conversation about future children let us know exactly how this ends. I find connections between every story, even when I have to make a stretch. The compelling “Hook”—maybe the largest departure from the stories in this collection—can even be related back with one moment of dialogue in “Ice.” But whether these characters are intended to be related or not, Smith gives us just enough, and leaves out just enough, for us to fill in the rest. And we don’t fill it in so hopefully.
So what about redemption? Maybe it’s in a mother and child pretending the moon is a monster, or how a dog’s nose feels like velvet, in the beautiful details found even in a hopeless situation, or that failed love was at least proven love once. Maybe we find ourselves like Smith’s characters when asked, with our knowledge of how it all turns out, if we’d burn the memories. We’d rather relive them. These stories are what we have left so we’ll hold them in our laps. Not let go." - Christine Crutchfield
