MANYWHERE, nine short but powerful fictions in debut collection

MANYWHERE: Stories
MORGAN THOMAS
MCDxFSG
$26.00 hardcover, available now

Author Thomas wins a 2022 Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Morgan Thomas's Manywhere features lush and uncompromising stories about characters crossing geographical borders and gender binaries.

The nine stories in Morgan Thomas's shimmering debut collection witness Southern queer and genderqueer characters determined to find themselves reflected in the annals of history, whatever the cost. As Thomas's subjects trace deceit and violence through Southern tall tales and their own pasts, their journeys reveal the porous boundaries of body, land, and history, and the sometimes ruthless awakenings of self-discovery.

A trans woman finds her independence with the purchase of a pregnancy bump; a young Virginian flees their relationship, choosing instead to immerse themself in the life of an intersex person from Colonial-era Jamestown. A writer tries to evade the murky and violent legacy of an ancestor who supposedly disappeared into a midwifery bag, and in the uncanny title story, a young trans person brings home a replacement daughter for their elderly father.

Winding between reinvention and remembrance, transition and transcendence, these origin stories resound across centuries. With warm, meticulous emotional intelligence, Morgan Thomas uncovers how the stories we borrow to understand ourselves in turn shape the people we become. Ushering in a new form of queer mythmaking, Manywhere introduces a storyteller of uncommon range and talent.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Whenever I read new story collections, I try to think of the reason(s) the writer had for writing that story, for including those words in a selection of them intended to make a reader form an idea of their creator. When that test gets me into a swivet, a frustrated screaming match with that absent author, I know I'm onto something worth following to the end of the trail. I had that sensation reading Morgan Thomas's words from the beginning.

As an example, there's "Taylor Johnson's Lightning Man." This was one of those fantastical reads that grows as you recede from the words but get the feelings so much more powerfully as memories. Those high places got scaled again in the strange, futuristic "Transit," in which the story's liminal between-space left me slightly sadder that I'd been born. There's no way that much longing and unrequited need can not teach you the truth of samsara. And the less-than-desired results of reading other stories, eg "Alta's Place," bring that into ever-sharper focus. The balance of going with Author Thomas's peripatetic imagination to its manywheres comes down on the positive, occasionally excellent, end of the literary map's scale.

In the time-honored tradition of this blog, I shall use the Bryce Method to elucidate my opinion of each piece within the whole.

Taylor Johnson’s Lightning Man poignantly discovers a trans ancestor in a folk-tale told by a non-conforming cisgender parent. The ways we all need to feel Seen and accepted are many, innumerable perhaps, but real drivers of identity and success. It's a charming story, all centered around photography as it reveals and conceals:

But they're waiting for you upstairs, the Board of Special Inquiry. Of course, you'll have to bring them a photo. You choose one of the good, familiar photos. In it, you sit in your hat and spectacles, facing the camera, your head tilted just a little to the right, your mouth a firm, flat line.
"At the risk of saying too much," I say, I'm a fan of that photo. Everything I am is because of that photo."

It says just enough. Magical realism does Ellis Island. 4.5 stars

That Drowning Place is a polyphony in one voice, "we", for people with Hansen's disease who lived in Katrina's path, who lived as long as they could in a place that no one else wanted, and who eventually got themselves neighbors in the relocated Cajuns, not entirely voluntarily. But the price of joining the rest of the world? Not small. "They" are everywhere. And we'd best get ourselves ready for it. There will be a LOT more of "them" soon.

You can't hide from the water forever.

The end of all things: The water. 3.5 stars, a story that repays close attention and makes demands.

Transit posits a weirdly different climate-changed Louisiana, one with the most delightful little town of freakishly supernatural beings...shades of Sookie!...only it's on a major train corridor, and it's got a faux (?) vampire visiting as the world around drowns and leaves them stranded on their way back from an institution for the anorexic desiring not to be Women.

"If I wasn't a girl would you date me?"

Happy grinned and I knew I'd lost her. "If you're not a girl, then what are you?" Happy pulled her bottom lip in against her teeth, her incisors poking out long and sharp. "Someving supernatural?"

"I'm whatever. I could be whatever."

If that doesn't break your heart. Broke mine. 4 stars

The Daring Life of Philippa Cook the Rogue has the best line I've read yet:

It's astounding that {she} has any memory of that day at all, though I suppose it's true that as the lanterns darken yesterday, they brighten yesteryear.

Excellent! And perfect for this oddball tale of a transwoman/hermaphrodite (it's not totally clear which) in Colonial Jamestown. Epistolary delight, a truly moving account of the terrible price being forced to choose a binary identity exacts on those not inclined to the absolutist demands of The World. Moving, terribly sad, ultimately a joyful reading of Reality trumping the fantasy of the past we're sold as the one immutable truth. 4 stars

Bump tells us of Louie, their lover Len, and Len's wife Melinda, as they navigate the shoals of Figuring Family Out. It isn't, I know you'll be shocked to learn, a smooth process.

We. A word I hated. A word that declared to the listener, You Are Not One of Us.

Louie's "country Cajun" Nana, who lives with them and is supported by them, is also the sanest person in this piece. She just gets on with her life, making her needs known and dispensing The American Way advice to her increasingly reality-challenged grandchild: taken to wearing a pregnancy bump, in competition with Melinda's actual baby ("the aphid"), Louie gets trapped in the implicit lie at work by failing to correct a co-worker's presumption that it's a real pregnancy.

More hijinks ensue and, in the end, Len's unusual family comes apart. You know already who's "we" and who isn't. 4 stars

Alta's Place makes me so sad...what is persecution if not denying a person a living, a house, a way not to starve and/or freeze? Why is this so hard to comprehend?

Because this is the land of the free to discriminate, and the brave if you don't put it to the test, Othered people will tell you. Being from here, or elsewhere, Othered people will tell you what refuge means: Not Wanted, go away. (Cory, the party of the second part in the dialogue, is a drip.) Not the best of these stories. 3.5 stars

The Expectation of Cooper Hill shed a little light on the war of the medical profession against all those who didn't want to medicalize everything a human body does. It's been a long, expensive peace; maybe we should get back to warring. A woman being a midwife seems like a pretty good alternative to going into a hospital.

But I don't love the idea of the world as it was, either, though maybe that's how things are headed. 3 stars

Surrogate meditates on the gigantic cost of environmental degradation, the cruelty of expectations loaded onto a relationship, and the tyrannical hold of Hope on our spirits. Brighten, in need of a purpose, tells her husband Orson that she's decided to become a surrogate for $50,000. He does his best to dissuade her. He says really clearly that he'd rather she didn't. She does anyway.

As the rural poverty of Arkansas makes Orson's job at the fracking facility a good one, and as she's sure their well isn't polluted, Brighten makes a mistake by drinking tap water while carrying her surrogate child. The problem of being alive in this ugly, dirty world has never been more stark than Brighten's corner of it. 4 stars

Manywhere finishes the journey with a Vegas trip. A transmasc narrator, Charlie, is sure that caring for the father that walked out of her mother's life the same way he walked into it...unexpectedly...and now that Charlie's caught up with him, he's filled their life too. And now, a peripatetic life led the two of them back to each other only this time with one major difference: Obligation.

Who's obliged to whom? There's never only one answer to that question and this exploration of it doesn't offer anything pretending to be it to the reader. But the scourges of mental illness, loneliness, unhappiness follow people no matter where they walk to or from or around. There is, at last, no longer any way to be out of reach of the sorrow we inherit from all the ancestors we never met. 4 stars