THE LITBLOG CO-OP: Taking Chances

Jul 31, 2006

Taking Chances

In Skin, Kellie Wells follows up with an aspect of writing that she had shown earlier with her short story collection, Compression Scars - she is a writer willing to take chances. The stories of the people living in What Cheer, Kansas are not what you might typically find in novels. As Meg Sefton so elequently put in an earlier comments section: (Skin) " ... is about spiritual exploration, a dream world, the possibilities inherent in imagination and what is not on the surface of our lives, but what we share in our humanity and our commonality with the planet."

It is perhaps the combination of this spiritual exploration and the fact that the world has a dreamlike feeling about it, or almost a magical aspect to it, that was most surprising to me. Wells doesn't come out and blast away with religious dogma at all. She instead allows her various characters to explore their own individual faith and spirituality based upon their own situations. There are teenagers, Duncan and Ivy, exploring their burgeoning relationship, while dealing with the fact that Duncan is a living time bomb based on the compression scars his body has as a result of an earlier accident. There is also Charlotte McCorkle, slowly losing it and believing that she is responsible for the death of her husband, even though he's not dead, but instead in a nursing home across town. Wells also has a Deacon hitting the wall in terms of accepting his life and faith, a highly imaginative little girl and her mother and grandmother and their interactions, and others - and each brings something to the table in terms of exploring faith and spirituality.

Wells brings all of these together and does so with language and a vocabulary that challenges the reader. She infuses her writing with many biological terms and phrases that sent me wandering to dictionary.com more than a few times. She also has a great hand at metaphors and similes, which I tend to enjoy. An example: "The sparse and occasional vegatation that poked through the otherwise bald ground looked like two days of beard growrth sprouting on a lumpy, featureless face."

The combination of the writing, the unique topics Wells points her readers towards, and the risks she takes in her fiction are what kept my attention once I began reading Skin, and kept it there through the end of the book and further.

Posted by Emerging Writers Network in SUMMER 2006 - SKIN | Permalink

Comments

Wells has a background in poetry. To read her material is to sense a mastery not only of words and their meanings, but their sounds, their rhythms, their texture. In reading back over a section in Chapter Five entitled "Mrs. McCorkle's Ascent," I found a paragraph I particularly enjoy both because of the profundity of the ideas expressed and also because of the poetry embedded in its prose. By the end it becomes both love poem and prayer and the whole of the paragraph has an incantatory feel (Mrs. McCorkle is the narrator):

"So I will clear this life of its hard evidence, the everyday indictments that give it heft, must clean house, perform an ablution on the outward edifice, this exoskeleton that has held most of my days in its dark jaws, will flush out the accumulation of the mundane, the day-after-day objects that bear testimony to gravity, the breakable matter of living, will empty this life for where I am headed there will be no appetite to feed or thirst to slake, no reflection to see, no call for the dinner service, the looking glass. The things this house has seen. Make my life light and earn the air so to find my love Harlan dispersed in atmospheric thinness, cells gathering and grouping long enough for me to fix him in my flickering eyes, and we'll erupt and fill the air with the mist of who we are next."

(p. 53)

This is one of many such examples of stunning writing, both by its effects and also by what it expresses.

Posted by: Meg Sefton | Jul 31, 2006 at 11:45 AM

O, that is such a beautiful passage. Kellie Wells is such an amazing writer: The compression and precision and wildness of her prose is to die for-- I so loved Compression Scars and Skin and can't wait to see what she will do next.

Posted by: Mary O'Connell | Aug 01, 2006 at 04:52 PM