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Aimee Bender roundup I recently finished Aimee Bender's short-story collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, and I was quite taken with it. Reminded me of all the fun elements of Donald Barthelme, only channeled through the relationship dystopias of A.M. Holmes. But Bender's definitely doing her own thing. Here's how the publisher describes her stories: A grief-stricken librarian decides to have sex with every man who enters her library. A half-mad, unbearably beautiful heiress follows a strange man home, seeking total sexual abandon: He only wants to watch game shows. A woman falls in love with a hunchback; when his deformity turns out to be a prosthesis, she leaves him. A wife whose husband has just returned from the war struggles with the heartrending question: Can she still love a man who has no lips? Some of the stories in The Girl in the Flammable Skirt are online, as are a few other pieces and many interviews, so I threw together this collection of links. Enjoy. Also keep an eye out for Bender's appearance in The Secret Society of Demolition Writers, where she'll contribute one of a number of "anonymous" stories.
Short stories "The Bull" The robber I married was bothering me; we kept having fights about the fact that he wouldn't fight with me. He wasn't touching me as much either. He was all too distracted by his current robbing scheme which involved anklets and starlets. I'd pick fights and initiate sex and he'd nod during the fights and pat my back in bed. I suggested we get away and go on a trip. My robber had one brother, who happened to be a matador, so, in July, we took a plane to Spain (we paid for the tickets) and went to the bullfight. I was fine with it but the robber was very protective of the bull. "Call My Name" I'm spending the afternoon auditioning men. They don't know it. It's a secret audition, come as you are. "The Rememberer" My lover is experiencing reverse evolution. I tell no one. I don't know how it happened, only that one day he was my lover and the next he was some kind of ape. It's been a month and now he's a sea turtle. "The Neighborhood" The barking does not stop even though neighbors have been throwing dog bones out their upstairs windows for awhile now. Everyone is afraid to leave their house and go see. It is a ragged bark and the word rabies has come up in over ten kitchens in the last hour, people looking it up in their never-before-used encyclopedias, searching down the page, index finger skating over the gloss, finding the words froth and lather, shivering with fear, closing the book on the finger, looking out the window. Aimee Bender's shorts about fonts A brief visit to mon amour, Helvetica. She is lounging on her chair of vinyl listing her whip against her thigh which is long. She is such a beauty and my heart stirs into a meringue looking at her. Audio version of "Drunken Mimi" (Realplayer) Interviews Bold Type Bold Type: Your short stories remind me of modern fairy tales. Did you read fairy tales as a child? Aimee Bender: Yes, especially Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. I liked Hans Christian Anderson because the tales were so dark and tragic. My favorites were "The Tinderbox" and "The Steadfast Tin Soldier." Pif Ryan Boudinot: Why did you divide your book into three different sections? Do you feel a sort of thematic unity to these stories? Aimee Bender: The three parts — I must admit it was the editor's original idea but I liked it because three is such a good mythic number. I had them loosely titled Loss, Rage and Magic but it didn't totally work because the mermaid story isn't rageful at all and a lot of the stories have some of all three of those things in them, so making up the mini titles felt false. Hopefully, within the structure of three parts, there is a certain kind of flow to the order, in that some of the more intense stories peak in the middle, and there's a lifting up with some of the later ones. Margin TKS: First of all, I'm curious whether you consider yourself a magical realist. Certainly your cult of followers consider you a magical realist. AB: Sure, why not. I definitely like the term, and I'm proud to be included in that category. Bending Perceptions New U.: Youíre working on your first novel, is that more of an endeavor than you thought it would be? Bender: Yeah, it's a huge endeavor. I didn't know what it would be. It's just much longer than a short story. It's so obvious, but I feel like it's really true. The whole stamina of it is different. It's really like preparing for a marathon instead of running a sprint. I'm more adjusted to sprints. So, I have to train. You deal with characters differently and plot differently, because it just can't unravel the same way, but it's also exciting. I'm feeling good about it this week. Then I'll have a freak-out week where I'll just be like "Oh my God, what is it? What's happening?" It goes back and forth. Tastes Like Chicken Vinnie: Do you remember the first story you ever heard? Aimee: Good question. Let's see, my mom used to read to me from A.A. Milne's book Now We Are Six, and there was a great poem about two raindrops in a race down the windowpane. Supposedly, the first book I really read was The Wizard of Oz. There's a whole series of Oz books that are lesser known than the first one, But they are equally wonderful. In one of them, Glinda of Oz, the people are flat-headed and carry their brains around in jars, and people in power steal brains and get smarter. Finally, Glinda empties the brains into the flat-heads and sews them up around the brain so that everyone has equal brainage. Great stuff. Strange Horizons BR: One of the wonderful things about reading your collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, is the way it mixes the fantastic with the superficially mundane. To what extent do you feel like you're creating a world when you write something like "Drunken Mimi," where the imp and the mermaid are in high school, or "The Healer," where you have the two mutant girls with the hands of fire and ice? AB: The world sort of creates itself, but I have found it's really satisfying to make everything happen inside the world, vs. inside the character. That way you can allow the landscape to speak for you! And when I'm making up the world, then I get a kick out of the tiny details, because that's fun for me as both reader and writer. If a girl has a hand of fire, then how does she brush her teeth? That didn't come up in the story, but it is something fun to consider. I suppose she'd use some kind of iron. Or use her flesh hand. Beatrice RH: Aimee, I was rereading some of the stories in your short story collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, recently and I noticed that you'd maintained the sensibility of those stories in the novel. How were you able to maintain your voice for several times longer than you've done before? AB: With the short story, you're not dwelling too long on what it's going to be, shapewise. You get a sense of the story's shape fairly soon. But I had no idea what the shape of the novel would be for the majority of the time I was writing it. One of the things I wanted to maintain from the short stories was that the scenes have a certain tautness. I tried to maintain the story's push, but that push often comes through individual scenes, andthe novel ends up feeling like a rainbow collection of scenes. Want to comment on this roundup? (discuss) (Posted by Peter)

Essay Links: Aimee Bender 's website The Girl in the Flammable Skirt on Amazon.ca The Girl in the Flammable Skirt on Amazon.com The Girl in the Flammable Skirt on Powells The Girl in the Flammable Skirt on ChaptersIndigo.ca

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