Freele's Feeding Strays a blueprint portfolio

I met Stefanie Freele at a reading hosted by my new friend Lauren Becker quite recently and it was the first time I've ever been to a reading and recognized one of the stories. I'm not particularly well-read and certainly not in this region. Not yet. According to some feeling in my gut there are a trillion stories being written in the bay area this very evening. Imagine my feeling of surprise.

I don't want to do this review for two reasons

1. There's no way I can possibly fit in this space what Freele finds in each of hers: justice; I could speak about each story individually but I would then be doing the opposite. As Bruce Holland Rogers writes in his well-written introduction: "every time you think you've got her pegged, the next story will surprise you." I'm halfway through the book and this is still true.

2. The other reason is I don't want the book to be done. But I've got to move on, write other reviews, document other events. The world doesn't stop every time an author writes a good book. Which is why I'm thankful for books like Feeding Strays that I can keep coming back to.

The volume brims with what the back cover calls "50 stories," though it is more like 50 vignettes. What the difference is I'm not sure I could say (but I think Freele could). In an age when the short story is becoming the new poetry, when online magazines are popping up like weeds and publishing 200 - 1000 word "pieces" only - although the real short story was never exhausted, was it? - the definition of what makes something a story is more elusive than ever. The importance of plot has long been debated. Beckett got rid of it and others followed. Modernism was born, characters became central, recounting the same event from different perspective. But we doubt character now. We cannot say. If I can't peg myself into a concrete image, story, persona, how dare I speak about anyone else? Of course there are ways: authors spend lengthy passages, even whole texts devoted to the analysis of a single "person." Do we even see a host of characters as representative of different facets of the single author anymore? When's the last time we read Dostoevsky?

The point is, Freele is not making any arguments. In most cases she seems to be an arbiter, guiding the text and making the final decision, but with little (if any) premeditation. She gives us revelations, little ones usually, but constantly, and genuinely because they are her revelations. She seems to write a sentence or a paragraph as though a painter, step back from the canvas, and weigh the options of that sentence. Where does it want to go? What does it unveil? How optimize its power? This, to me, is an essential way to read Feeding Strays. Freele paints the most interesting, compelling thing she can put together in a given amount of space. She gives us snapshots not necessarily of humanity, but of what it is to be alive. Little moments, stray moments. Rogers explains the title by addressing Freele's compassion. Truly there is a lot of heartfelt emotion in this collection and a lot of it is familial or neighborly. But I see the title more as an explanation of Freele's creative process. She is feeding the stray moments of her life with whatever she has to give them, personal gifts of the self, circumstantial blessings. These come from an inner conviction similar to that expressed by one of her characters:

The woman is nine months and a week pregnant when she notices "a red line traveling up her ankle toward her knee." Something bit her. "Annletta presses on it, to see if the line will change direction, head on back to its origin. But instead, the line proceeds slowly and silently around her finger and toward the top of her leg." The woman "believes in meant-to-be's" - she does not have insurance. But what will she do when the line gets to her twins? She resolves "she should not stop the poison because obviously it was sent to her for some reason. She watches the fire and the scarlet line which reaches the crease of her thigh. She covers herself with a blanket." Freele examines the moments when we truly find ourselves - the moments, usually, when we are separate from history, plans, context, self-perception - and re-forms a vision of the world around them. The woman "thinks she could be sad" if they die — but the change we see in her is not a rush to the hospital. She falls asleep watching the fire and approaching red line, and when she wakes in time to see the sun rising, embers glowing in the hearth, "she skips her tea for the first time ever ... and pulls the blanket up tight over her heart." She lets go of her self and at the same time finds it.

If stray thoughts find expression through Freele and she lets them take their course, when do the stories stop? When does Freele decide to stamp them? Even in the cases where the ending is not a surprise we are still given a gift. In "The Flood of 09" a pair of brothers liberate a corpse from its stranded burial in a trapped hearse - refrigerators have tipped over, a piano has rushed under a nearby bridge - and these are the only characters in the story. This is the last graph:

Even though John doesn't want to swim back home by himself, he lets go so Gary [the corpse] can proudly join a log covered in salamanders, a rectangle of Styrofoam and a grubby beach ball, bouncing and bubbling all on their way toward the mouth where they'll roar into the ocean, smashing with the waves against the rocks" [There is no period]

This story is just over two pages long. In it we find a sick boy staring out a doomed window at a trapped corpse. He films the piano float under the bridge and the other character imagines watching the video later by himself and remembering the moment (presumably after his sick friend or brother has passed away). It is he decides to liberate the corpse. The corpse's "body swings sideways joining the flow, like he wants to get on with it." The two tease each other as this happens, making light of both the body's situation and their own. The story is left floating; we know all rivers lead to the ocean, we know all oceans lead to rocks, yet we see this, we feel the waves, the unending undulations of inevitability, and we watch the way one boy imagines watching the other's video, alone, with interest, yet with a certain tint of memory. There is no "period" - this is happening right now. The story is crashing and we are the rocks.

I want to talk about all of these stories - I too want to feed these strays. They have grown from the splash of an impulse to a whisper of tale. Just as most of our moments would if we treated them kindly.

To compare the last ending, let's take a look at the most similar. In "Sweet Venus" Rueben is tripping on LSD. We see him run toward a cold winter lake for liberation. He has imagined that the Venus in the bathroom painting is alive and shares his longing and has rescued her - ripping her out of the frame, rolling her up and running, shedding articles of clothing and wrapping her in his shirt, bare-chested now, "feeling the delightful chill in his skin as the snow reunites with his cells. 'We are all one,' the flakes say in unison, in unspoken words, but Rueben hears them and agrees with great joy that he is finally aware of the fusion of all cellular matter." The suspense keeps building as he (and the painting) become "eager to lie atop the water." He dies, right? How does this end? "They float, Venus and Rueben, past trembling, past jaw-chattering, past immobility. The contentment of their unification spreads throughout the waves until the lake buoys them with congratulations."

I feel chills in my body thanks to the imagination. I'm so happy with this ending I am done writing, will dance!

• Public service announcements (of course)
•  A review of ZZZombiezzz by Reynard Seifert, including a short (but illuminating) interview
• The many goings-on of Peg Alford Purcell
• Review of the new Kerouac documentary, One Fast Move or I'm Gone
• The Business at The Dark Room - full video!