Excessive Candour
Captain Buzz

In case it's not made clear enough over the course of the next few paragraphs, it should be said right away that praise is due Theodora Goss, praise be. In the Forest of Forgetting ranks with Joe Hill's 20th Century Ghosts, Glen Hirshberg's The Two Sams (2003) and Kelly Link's Stranger Things Happen (2001) and Magic for Beginners (*2005*) as one the finest collections of short fiction from a member of that class of authors of the 21st century who are comfortable here.

Like Hill and Hirshberg and Link, in other words, Goss has mutant virtues; like her cohort, she is some kind of new mammal unafraid of the sun we get now. Look how their eyes adjust to the light! But two problems need to be addressed before we can return to praise.

The first problem is not Goss' alone. It is something that may derive from the tendency of mutants to emit blog gas, for the net culture they live in has no internal or external censors, no captaining of the unsorted untested wikipedian utterances of the gawping soul, no place for the buck to stop. So mutants tend to publish too much.

I believe I mentioned in my comments on Joe Hill a sense that he had included too many stories in his collection; a similar sense governed my response to Holly Phillips' In the Palace of Repose (2005), which seemed to include everything she'd published to date, as well as (it might be) everything else in her manuscript cache. The same here. I think a couple of student efforts have been excluded, but it looks as though Goss has reissued in In the Forest of Forgetting everything else she's laid a hand to in her three years of writing. Some of these stories should not have been assembled here, partly because some of them are quite seriously less good than her best work, but more specifically because Goss is a tightrope walker. When her stories work it is because she finishes them without falling off until she reaches the world. More about this below.

The second problem is the Interstitial Art Foundation, a modestly casual ginger group convened a few years ago by Delia Sherman and an entirely agreeable cluster of sympathizers, and conducted mostly online through its site at www.interstitialarts.org. What it none too clearly advocates, promulgates, articulates, celebrates, provides is something its conveners hope will henceforth be called interstitiality: that category of art that rides between categories; gap-rider art that finds a home in the Interstitiality Arena.

An interstitial story is one that (or so I figure) tends to extract shape from various genres, more or less simultaneously, and without any strong predisposition to decide upon any single or captain reading: Smorgasbord in the Ruins. Interstitial art is as free as birds (as buzzards, some might say). A story IAF members would call interstitial I'd have been just as likely—for the past half decade or so—to call equipoisal, a term I've been using to describe, and generally to praise, work that exactly uses more than one genre pattern to convey a story without allowing any one pattern to take command, but with an implied and sometimes explicit emphasis on what one might call a terminal captain buzz. So it sounds almost exactly the same thing, but is not quite.

If I've continued to use my own term, it is partly because it more clearly invokes for me the almost predatory alertness required of 21st-century writers when they juggle modes of telling the new sun of the world, when they use the fissures between tellings as a map to navigate the world by. The problem with interstitiliaity is that it tries to say where we are but not how we go.

A necessary grasp of the world

Balance can only be maintained if you continue to move, which is to say a story is a dance, a captained choreography. The problem with some of Theodora Goss' less-good stories is that they offer complex deposits of loot from the Cauldron of Story that sit on the page touchy-feely and unjelled, mildly pleased with themselves; that they are interstitial and no more; that they do not dance. The best stories in In the Forest of Forgetting are nothing like that.

"The Rose in Twelve Petals" (2002)—the title story of a chapbook collection from 2003 that is mostly incorporated into this full volume; it is the story that most surprised and thrilled her first readers; and it is the first story here assembled—is a superb example of that most traditional of equipoisal narratives, the Twice-Told. In 12 marvelously balanced short segments, the tale of the Sleeping Beauty is imagined, re-imagined, cast into clashingly diverse contexts, told from different angles of voice that argue and converse and marry, and ends in a slingshot. It does everything a great Twice-Told must do, or any great story of our time: it takes every mode of telling it feeds from as a literal description of the case: for the only way to narrate the fissures is to believe what you say. The only way to surf Twice-Told worlds is to take each world as the case, for only then will the tightrope hold, the captain cross, the slingshot hurl.

"The Rapid Advance of Sorrow" (2002) is also word-perfectly literal about its jagged world (note how this story would collapse if "Sorrow" were understood as a metaphor). And the hilarious "Sleeping With Bears" (2003) is pure equipoise that does not stop for breath. It is the same with "The Belt" (2005), whose first sentence commandingly states that a fairy tale is to be told ("My story has the contours of a fairy tale"), which a fairy tale cannot; and is a fairy tale, and other things as well. And it is the same with "In the Forest of Forgetting" (2003), where the thin partitions between fairy tale and exemplary life-in-a-single-day fabulation and the mimetic description of a slow death are perfectly ridden along the tightrope ("She would find her name in the mountains. ... In the mountains she would learn about berries. Her winter coat would come in.") until we are thrust through terminus.

Even with the best stories there are a few moments of dis-ease, over and above Goss' habit of talking about food an awful lot. More seriously, she does have a tendency on occasion to muck the weak—the eponymous life-refuser in "Professor Berkowitz Stands on the Threshold" (2003), for example, is just slightly too easy a target, though the corner-of-the-eye pointillist sign-language essence of the world he has entered is rendered with seeming calmness of diction, like ice on the cusp of metamorphosis, and Berkowitz's final refusal of grace and passage is shattering.

Another relative failure—"Lessons with Miss Grey" (new here), which cannot hold all its plunder in the air at once—only points to the arduousness of the task Goss has set herself, because this tale would be perfectly fine from another hand. Despite the slightly passive muse-voice she's prone to—one can almost imagine the Max Beerbohm caricature, "Dora Goss Among the Interstitials"—she is the kind of writer who succeeds when she addresses herself to this own loud world of ours that must be told. It is because she seems undeafened by the task that she seems so deeply a writer of the moment. It is why (I think) we need her. We need her grasp of the world. We need her to keep falling forward into it.