Joanna Howard, On the Winding Stair (BOA Editions, 2009)"In her debut short story collection, Joanna Howard bends the expectations and cliches of mainstream mystery and paranormal writing to bring new surprises and intelligence to the genre. Rebecca Brown says, “These words are dreams or visions, fantasies, letters of things that are not quite love, buffooneries and comedies, scenarios from horror films you are afraid you'll one day see.” Howard joins Kelly Link and Shelley Jackson in redefining genre writing for a new audience."
"It is impossible to settle easily into the fictions of Joanna Howard, whose work has quietly generated buzz positioning her as one of the most promising in the avant-garde reconsideration of the relationship between story and language. Readers weary of the too-easy manipulations and the claustrophobic feel of conventional (and dreary) stories about love and death, family and work, here feel the magnetic sway of Howard’s audacious narrative interrogations, their deliberately constructed ambiguities, their delicate intricacies, their supple, subtle sonic effects. It is not that they dispense with character and symbol and plot, it is not that they mock the implausibility and heavy-handedness of such tricks—Howard is too savvy for such twee trickery. There are characters with names and psychologies, there is action—most often, those tectonic moments when passion and inhumanity collide, those blunt-force intrusions of mayhem that are here reported with a chiseled grace. Like the subtle, elegant terrorism of Edward Hopper canvases, however, the stories both invite and disturb, their world at once recognizable and entirely symbolic, characters shaped into forms but denied reassuring clarity, their stories driven by inexplicable forces, symbols casually blurring with quiet irony into archetypal suggestiveness as the aesthetic landscape itself edges uneasily toward the dreamlike. Howard understands that a post-everything generation of readers, so willingly, so gratefully oppressed by visual media, cannot—and indeed need not—tolerate backyard domesticity. Such stories now have that hokey feel of reality show dramatics. Her stories manipulate drama, certainly, but the drama of adjectives against nouns, the dynamic of vowels against consonants, and ultimately the suspense between words and silences. They beg to be read, to engage the ear, to cast a kind of enchantment that reminds us, in this uneasy quietus of the age of reading, that language—not stories—was ultimately what that age was all about." - Joseph Dewey
"Howard upends some traditional literary conventions in these 14 tales of startling description and beauty. Her settings are bucolic, such as an abandoned farm house, a hilltop mansion and the ruins of a cider mill, each depicted in romantic language (“in a lavender twilight”). In the first story, “Light Carried on Air Moves Less,” a waiflike beauty stumbles upon an erotic book and apes the illustrations, all the while being watched by a curious “specter.” In “Captive Girl for Cobbled Horsemen,” the author plays on the 19th-century captive narrative, while “Seascape” tinkers with the maritime ghost story by featuring a widow who gradually comes to love the captain depicted in a painting. Many of the stories simply showcase lush, serene description, such as “The Scent of Apples,” in which a recluse tends to his apple orchard, spied on adoringly by his orphan ward. The last story, “The Tartan Detective,” features all the necessary accoutrements of detective fiction (even “the listening mechanism concealed in a potted fern!”). Howard's sensuous prose is to be savored for its own sake." - Publishers Weekly
"Joanna Howard’s lapidary debut On the Winding Stair is an escalier spiraling with brocaded lyricism, alternately swathed in darkness and bathed in phosphorescence. Metaphysical spaces coexist with vivid corporeality in a place where words aren’t so much modified as they are baroquely embellished, cast in irreality; we have, as in “Ghosts and Lovers,” “[t]he fantastic, the unthinkably thick swirl of sudden change.”
Howard’s book opens with “Light Carried on Air Moves Less,” a story about a “perpetually insomniac specter” enamored of an eccentric beauty whiling away her hours reading from “a swollen, yellowed tome, Pauline’s Life of a Madam,” and sewing her approximations of the frilly outfits found illustrated within it. Consumed with desire as he watches her act out lascivious poses from the book, the specter pumps his handcar crank, the motion of which creates “a cyclonic whirl” that picked up the hair of the pale beauty, tore away the garish and delicate chemise and in a last, fitful tug, scooped up the long white body whose momentary rapture was focused on the vibrant earthly manifestation of a wind so powerful it could move rust-bound handcars on weed-lashed tracks, so powerful it could make a storm of scarves obscuring the moon, powerful enough to grant the wishes of pale, hungry girls.
Like a fever dream, every sense is heightened in these stories. Every smell is fermented, every sight is lush, every taste is pungent, every sound reverberates. The stories are sodden with detail, saturated with color and have a lacquered brilliance mirroring the luxuriant abundance of 17th century Dutch Golden Age painting. And they’re simply choked with vegetation: the “melon-blossomed trumpet vines”; “long spindly shoots of Rose of Sharon”; “unvascilate” pasture grass; juniper shrubs; corn and sorghum fields; crops “yellowing and weeping downward, like, like suicides”; “trackside ditches of sumac”; the “weeping overhang of mistletoe clotted in the joints of spare-leaved elms”; catnip and crabgrass; mulberry trees; pyracantha; “lavender sprig nosegay” blooming from a dandy’s buttonhole; the dandy’s beloved apple blossoms; the “succulent leaves of purslane.”
“Captive Girl for Cobbled Horseman” is about a waif of a girl who, “[s]evered and refitted… begins the flight to [a] strange future from [an] imagined past.” “Exchange” is a tiny, mysterious gem almost bursting with intimations of seduction, intrigue, betrayal. “The Black Cat” is a dark set of nested boxes complete with car accident, hilltop mansion, creepy underground lair, and séance. Another apparition appears, this time from a “portrait in brooding oils” in “Seascape.” Here, the narrator’s unworldly infatuation with a dead sea captain gives way to love, and, in a bizarre twist, when the captain finally leaves, she remains to haunt the cottage. Another ghost appears in “What Was There Was Gone, Burning” and ends with another ghost’s appearance. While the presence of ghosts is obvious in “Ghosts and Lovers”—a novel in the Diane Williams sense of the word—the atmosphere is no less mysterious.
On the Winding Stair’s body count is considerable. Besides the implied, but long since decomposed corpses of “Light Carried on Air Moves Less” and “Seascape,” there are the four great-uncles dead from gunshot wounds in “Captive Girl for Cobbled Horsemen,” the car accident crumpled chauffer in “The Black Cat,” and the drowned man in “Russian Doll” who bobs “like an undulating mound, a waterlogged paunch arcing out of the water.” And there is the mother in “Ghosts and Lovers” who “had fallen from a train crossing the border.”
While certainly sharing similar themes with Angela Carter, Shelley Jackson, Rikki Ducornet, and Kelly Link, Howard’s style suggests Mervyn Peake, Jorge Luis Borges, and Michal Ajvaz, and Nabokov at his extreme descriptive best, as well a shared affinity for disjunction and refraction reminiscent of John Ashbery, all while gazing perspicaciously at language through the same loupe that master jeweler Wallace Stevens used. Howard’s stories are, as one of her characters says, like “going through a maze, you can make so many turns. You may get to the center, but it would take awhile. At some point along the way, maybe you forget the center.” In short, Howard’s stories are, modifying a phrase from her book, “lovely views from harrowing ruins.” - John Madera
"Joanna Howard’s dizzying tales of drowned sailors, glowing specters, reclusive dandies, and roguish pursuers start like the strike of a match: they ignite in an instant to a dazzling flame and then just as suddenly die out. Howard’s linguistic prowess sets the conflagration by bombarding the reader with irresistible images, such as “a mendicant: a scarved pale beauty with silver bell earrings, curled to sleep on kinked metal filings on the floor of a windowless farm shed gone to rot.” Howard’s oft idyllic scenes depict romantic pastures, crumbling farmhouses, and other filigree among the ruins, that evoke a heightened past. And the present is always overripe. To these scenes she adds adventure, tales of restless, wandering souls, often beauties, who are chased and who pursue and who are seeking. Tie in touches of the fantastical, the macabre, and the romantic, and the intrigue that inevitably laces Howard’s stories begins to take form.
What you will not find in Howard’s first book of short stories, On the Winding Stair, are elements of the mundane, the transparent, or the slipshod. Much of what Howard accomplishes on the page owes to the sensuality of her words. Of Fennis, the reclusive dandy who the gourd farmer’s wife watches from a distance in “The Scent of Apples,” Howard writes, “From here she can see into Fennis’s home from her spyglass. She watches him creep about in Nile green crêpe de Chine robes. He spoons hollandaise from a pewter porringer and scans the spring catalogs, circling items with a charcoal marking pen.” No syllable is squandered in the lush descriptions; each word builds upon the previous to fashion an existence both delicate and decrepit. Howard’s sentences read as if she’d spun them in a linguistic centrifuge to rid them of excess. What remains is condensed, colorful, necessary.
The wonderfully strange worlds we fall into in these first sentences are complex and often unsettling. In “Black Cat,” a car crash crushes a chauffeurs’ head and leaves a honeymooning (and gauche) American couple and a Hungarian aristocrat at the driveway to a mansion that would rival Marienbad. “What Was There Was Gone, Burning” opens to bullets shattering the dining room window, piercing brocade curtains, and killing the narrator’s two great uncles. Or consider “Captive Girl for Cobbled Horseman,” where a girl taken from a ditch below her “family graves” wanders with a nomadic pack of girls across rivers and fields to faraway lands. She is not dead, but it’s also unclear in what form she survives.
The girl in “Captive Girl for Cobbled Horseman” lives, though if not as a human, then somewhere between this world and death. We know she and the other girls are endangered, that baying dogs search ceaselessly, that distant pursuers are always trailing, and that in an abandoned farmhouse an empty bed waits. Time moves in both directions, flying forward within a sentence, and distant memories hold sway. When the girl finds a torn shirt sleeve “blood-soaked and homespun,” she takes it “to be fit later quite naturally into an emerging puzzle.” Much of what is revealed is enigmatic, and the reader, like the captive girl, must piece together what has happened from the morsels that are given. In this sense, the story is formed like patchwork, much like the captive girl at the end who, “Severed and refitted, she now begins the flight to this strange future from this imagined past.”
These transient, cryptic middles lead to provocative ends that accentuate the fragility of the characters and their precarious worlds. Like the almost absent narrator of “The Black Cat” waiting in a crystal box for her husband’s return from the war, there is often anticipation of violent release: “In the end, these walls might be razed in strips, like peeling fruit, or they might come down in shards.” The narrators are frequently fractured and refitted: the captive girl (literally), but also metaphorically. The absconding femme fatale in “She Came from the East” glances at herself in a shattered funhouse mirror: “she was still working out the minor points, a story which began in windows and ended in mirrors, and nothing cleanly cut.” Nothing is cleanly cut in Howard’s stories; her characters are more beautiful in their brokenness. Nothing is definite and nothing is safe, and yet there is beauty and artifice and everything is at stake." - Anne Yoder
"Joanna Howard’s short stories flit about like phantoms - just as her characters are ethereal and haunting, her stories are framed by an aura of mystery and romance, with fleeting peaks of action. The 14 stories in On the Winding Stair range from a vignette of an encounter to a “novel in shorts” that encompasses several generations. Howard imbues all her tales with dream-like action and sidelong description, which creates a haze around the narrative that, rather than disorient, lulls the reader into her sometimes euphoric, sometimes tragic world. Her careful and practiced dismissal of the concrete allows the reader release from conventional concerns of plot and conflict, and ultimately celebrates the unknowable. Few of her stories have happy endings and none need them; they offer glimpses into reveries, into intrigue, into rediscovered pasts and unreadable futures that dispel our world and offer another. Unwinding it all is futile, and Howard poses the question in one of her stories: “Is there still the pale hope to unknot the bind? Again, I count out the factors, moving across the horizon, now, with bright allure. Forever vulnerable to the seduction of cool fingers and warning hands which announce, as though inked: Fictitious! This way does not go through to action.”
The fictions Howard inks often focus on the silvery shadows of the world rather than on the searing realities of existence. The collection opens with “Light Carried on Air Moves Less,” a tale of an unnamed pale beauty, alone in the cross section of a ramshackle farmhouse in the middle of a deserted plain, and her desperate affair with the powerful prairie wind. Watching her is a specter, who pumps a handcart along a dead-end strip of train track and wonders if it is possible “for a ghost to combust to light and ash from sheer will, just for the sake of finally being seen.” There is a scarcity of wind and, desperate to regain her lover, she strips to a chemise made of rainbow scarves and strikes seductive poses in the farmhouse turned stage. Tortured and desirous, the specter pumps his handcart ever harder until he is finally able to create an “elaborate fantastical cyclonic whirl” for the pale beauty.
The romantic, idyllic past in which many of the stories are situated is saved from garishness by a thread of the macabre that winds through the collection. Nieces dig graves for their recently murdered uncles; the body of a man swells in a canal; a Hungarian sailor poisons a gentleman and steals his daughter; the dead are ever abandoning the living, and yet their specters abound. In “Seascape,” a woman settles into the home of a dead sea captain and, even after the love between the woman and the ghost fades, still has the home: “I married the place. This was the more lasting of the two liaisons. Loving so solitary a horizon, when one has been abandoned, proves some compensation for absence.” The relations between the departed and the remaining, the sought and the searching, and the past and the present spur the charm and mystery behind these stories, which explore the intertwining of our world and a parallel mystical world.
Yet not all the stories are overtly cryptic. “In Guffy’s Plum Cricket” reveals the spiraling delirium of the narrator through a stream of consciousness, as he attacks his fellow diner, Marty, for not truly understanding the difference between the movies Guns of Navarone and Spellbound. It becomes an inner battle between Spellbound, “which marks well-reasoned, even-keeledness, understated good taste,” and Guns of Navarone, which is “hysteria and backwardness.” The narrator unwinds into insanity, ending his rant, “I know now I must be quiet if I want to move into Spellbound, a space where the bar is quite white and the floor below me is pitched and I am either scaling or slipping.” Iterations of a clash between normalcy and absurdity overflow in Howard’s prose, as it veers first to realism and simplism, then to florid fantasy.
Howard’s linguistic maneuvers are what primarily account for the vertiginous, sensory deluge of her prose. The words tumble forth, trumpeting their full sound and heralding attention: “Even Loba came down from the porch in sisal-soled slippers each spring to shake the tall branches of the mulberry tree so the dark berries would collect in the yard, so we could scoop them up in handfuls into stone bowls, our bare feet spotted bruise black with ripe mulberries.” Then each successive sentence adds to the onslaught, creating a surge of meaning, with few pauses: “Eyes like a name, her eyelids flicker. The iris capsizes. A murderer is rarely moved. Behind him, the trail of his reflection in shards. The pursuing inventors. Forward, the ruined beach.” Howard’s prose alternately whirls and unwinds, contributing to the overall aura of emotional catharsis and unrestraint.
While her words and sentences thatch together perfectly, her characters often fall to pieces, uncertain and broken. The femme fatale of “She Came From the East” views her own death in mirror shards, as a bullet rips through her body and into a funhouse mirror; the young girl of “Captive Girl for Cobbled Horsemen” wanders endlessly through a threatening wartime landscape, and the gourd farmer’s orphan ward in “The Scent of Apples” is just barely resuscitated by the neighborhood dandy. The girls, women, and phantom women of Howard’s work perpetually mourn a loss, whether it is of a lover, a family, a past, or a future. They are haunted and they haunt, flitting through the sometimes ethereal and sometimes all too real worlds of Howard’s creation. There is no end and no beginning for Howard’s stories, only a perpetual suspension in a gloaming." - Maria Ribas
"Michael Kimball: I like the way that you often build long, complex sentences out of a string of clauses, especially, say, in a story like “Light Carried on Air Moves Less.” Could you talk a little about your thinking behind that?
- For each of the stories in On the Winding Stair, I began with a particular sense of a rhythmic pattern: at times fractured and truncated, as with “The Tartan Detective,” at other times undulating, and almost breathless as with “Light Carried on Air.” The initial rhythmic instinct drives the sentence length, so that I have a sense of having completed a thought based on the need for a rhythmic pause. Beyond this initial rhythmic constraint, which is perhaps arbitrary or perhaps organic, I like the cause-and-effect relationships built up out of strings of clauses, so that a detail is presented, commented on, resolved to some degree, until it triggers the next detail. I have always liked the way the word “sentence” refers to a grammatical grouping, but also has a definition related to judgment and punishment of criminals: something which indicates verdict, as well as duration. This is how I think about sentences.
So let’s take the opening of “The Tartan Detective” and talk about that rhythmic pattern: “Inside this house, a precipice. The vacation repeats itself: the flight arrives late. Stationed in the inn, light breaks through the pale slatted blinds of the bedroom, carefully tucked into eyelet and down.” I like the way the colon from the second sentence picks up the comma from the first sentence—a little bit of punctuation that balances the rhythm of the first two sentences. And I like the way the rhythm of the third sentence picks up the rhythm of the first two, but also seems to be spinning wider and wider outward, longer phrasings with a similar rhythm. And I love some of the acoustic things that are happening, the way “vacation” in the second sentence becomes “stationed” in the third sentence and then leads to a few other long-a words. Could you talk a little more about these three sentences, what is going on within them and from one to the next?
- It worked just as you suggest, although the sound patterns come subconsciously, and then I move back from each analytically before going on to the next sentence. The method is one I’ve heard described as “consecution,” which I believe simply refers to sentences that build consecutively, but are driven as much by their grammatical markers as by their narrative content. It is not uncommon for me to begin with a sentence that disrupts standard grammatical expectations. The truncation, which removes the subject and verb, gives me increased flexibility with the surreal image. The second sentence takes the initial two-part structure of the fragments and builds a mirror structure, this time with two independent clauses, reliant now on concrete action rather than ambiguous or surreal imagery. Then, I like to break the pattern, the instinct being entirely sound based. I liked that what I was hearing was a kind of drone effect, with slight blips. These three sentences gave me the structure and the narrative of the story. I knew that from the elision of the two fragments of the first sentence, and the omission of a controlling verb tense, I was going to have a narrator who worked in notation (hence a detective or spy), and who had difficulty sorting out time. The second sentence suggested two narratives, running side by side, at times canceling each other out, at times building on images one from the other. Because my tendency is to hover in a space of indeterminate or partially obscured images, discipline dictated alternating these with concrete elements, so the third sentence locates the narrator, gives her a ruling tense, and the slatted blinds of film noir, but reversed, to focus on the light. I knew I was working with repetition and inversion. Funny result, given that when I sat down to think about why there would be a precipice inside this house, my narrative mind automatically assumed I would be writing a story about a couple having marital problems, maybe an affair taking place. This precipice turned out to be quite different.
I love how much you pulled from those first few sentences, what that gave you in terms of structure and narrative and voice. That second sentence and the idea of two narratives, is that how you found your way to the parenthetical text that runs through the story or did that happen another way?
- The parenthetical text was one I had brewing in the back of my mind for a while. It is a version of Michael Powell’s film I Know Where I’m Going about a girl who thinks she is going to marry a rich man, then gets sidetracked by a poor soldier on leave. Before I figured out what the second narrative would be, however, I had several sections of the main narrative (the girl detective/spy) and I left gaps, knowing that something would go there, even if I didn’t yet know what it was. Because I was still working on the theory that the main narrative was about a relationship gone wrong, I wanted the second narrative to be a sort of wild romantic fantasy, which I guess is why this film popped into my mind for the second narrative line: it’s a story in which the Scottish landscape seems to be conspiring to bring the lovers together. As I started to run the piece parallel, I began to see openings for connection between the two narratives. There was a way in which both pieces took up notions of fidelity, loyalty, and allegiance. There was also this notion of knowing where one is going, desiring to control the path our lives take, however inevitable it might be. As I worked to draw out imagistic and language chimes between the two narratives, the plot trajectory of each narrative adjusted. The game for me was to discover, within these two seemingly disparate stories, some common ground.
I love the way those two stories come together. And I keep thinking about the other story you mentioned, the one with the couple having marital problems that didn’t get written, did that become another piece?
- I think many of my stories are about couples having marital problems or relationship problems; it is just often the case that one of the partners is a ghost.
Ghosts, I have to ask about “Ghosts and Lovers: a novel in shorts.” I love things that play with form, so tell me: What was the thinking behind the subtitle?
- “Ghosts and Lovers” came out of a failed project to make a million dollars with what was, at the time, the hot ticket: a globe-trotting female first-person romance with epistolary chapters and recipes. However, when I began to write the chapters, they were coming out very short. Despite their conventional intention, they were still possessed of certain weirdnesses I can’t get beyond: fractured, gapped narrative, tentative, at best, cohesion through repetition and variation, emphasis on image, and character types rather than full-blown characters. Because I had sketched out a plot summary of the trajectory of the novel (something I had never done before, and have never done since), I was able to work them as a cycle of pieces, and because I had been spending a lot of time thinking about what constitutes a “short-short” versus what constitutes a “prose poem,” I wanted to put some of my thinking into play with the form. The subtitle was something I couldn’t resist because it does give me the image of a novel wearing shorts, as if it were in a Nair commercial. It is perhaps the most whimsical thing I’ve ever written, and because the narrative arc was already in place, I felt like I could let the individual pieces operate organically, so that some stand alone, and others are there as supporting columns. It gave me more freedom, and allowed the piece to come much more quickly than anything else I did in the book." - Interview with Michael Kimball
