Here in our dusty corner of McMicken Hall, our ragtag group of editors, faculty, and graduate-student volunteers spend a lot of time passing around and discussing the work writers send us. Sometimes one of us stands on a rickety chair and effuses ebulliently about a manuscript he or she likes. Those are fun times, and it’s always helpful to hear what it is about a story or poem that butters someone’s biscuit. We wish everyone could hear these things. And now you can. We’re going to start putting them up here on our blog. Recently, fiction writer and UC PhD student Jason Nemec turned cartwheels down McMicken Hall in response to a story, and our managing editor ran alongside Jason and caught his comments on tape (or maybe just asked him to write them down).
Jason Nemec: If you care about literature—and I’m assuming you do—then you have a problem. There are thousands of poems, stories, and novels you simply must read, books people have been telling you about for years. Well, you’re already overwhelmed, so let’s add one more to the pile: Philip Moustakis’s “In-Between Places,” which appeared in the Summer 2010 issue of The Cincinnati Review as the author’s first published story.
The plot is simple enough: Simon, an aimless teenage boy, and Maeve, his lesbian best friend, cruise through Queens, looking to score some money for drugs. We’ve heard this story before, we think, or at least some version of it. And yet the way our first-person narrator views the world is at once fresh, disturbing, and breathtaking. Simon speaks of a friend whose fists and forearms were covered in blood, “like he beat a hole in the man and dipped his arms in.” Maeve’s neck becomes “the whitest thing in the dingy pizza parlor, white like a spot of bare canvas in a painting.” In Moustakis’s hands, Queens is transformed into a grimy Neverland, and we follow Simon and Maeve through the streets, so entranced by the brilliant imagery we almost miss the thing that’s been guiding them the whole way: their love for one another.
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