Drift and Swerve Does Raymond Carver One Better
Samuel Ligon will be reading from his latest fictional short-story collection, Drift and Swerve, at Elliott Bay Book Company, along with A.J. Rathbun and Amy Schrader on Thursday, July 16, at 7:30 p.m.
Having gotten to know Samuel Ligon from working at the Port Townsend Writers' Conference in past years, we were very excited to get a hold of his latest story collection, which took home the 2008 Autumn House Fiction Prize. At the conference, Ligon is known for being one of the most popular writing teachers, and his workshops are usually the most sought-after, quickly filling up. Not having been able to attend one yet ourselves, we were quite curious to find out more about all the fuss. And it's safe to say that after reading Drift and Swerve--we get it, loud and clear.
Drift and Swerve is a collection of fourteen kinetic stories, set in three parts. All of the main characters are known by a first name basis, some only revealed through the dialogue with one another. The only recurring character, a troubled teen named Nikki, begins the collection with the story, "Providence," and then reappears in stories at the beginning of each part, only to end the collection fittingly in "Orlando," where we see the teen--whom we've come to love and hate and hope to save, or see her save herself--turn eighteen aboard a Greyhound bus heading south, with a young child that is not her own, trying to find a single road that does not swerve and that may lead her away from the abuse that she doesn't know life without.
Ligon's writing is reminiscent of Raymond Carver and Flannery O'Connor's--two of our long-time personal favorites. He takes the good, the bad, and the ugly of primitive and primal human nature in its rawest form, while giving an accurate portrayal of just exactly how fucked up and desperate people can be when it comes down to survival and personal desire.
We would even venture to say that Carver and O'Connor are "tame" when in comparison to Drift and Swerve, due to Ligon's feverish, vigorous plot lines, that even those two would most likely say are taken to the extreme. Instead of, say, sitting around the table drinking gin and tonics with the tension mounting while "talking about love," these characters don't go down without a fight--in some cases literally. In "Vandals," we see a man who decides to spend his summer vacation time hiding out in a tree outfitted with railroad ties and cinder blocks, ready to drop them on the unsuspecting teens who have been terrorizing his mailbox, his yard, and his home. The consequences are horrifying.
In another story, "Dirty Boots," Nikki fights to have forbidden sex in a dorm room, barricading herself against the door to not be caught. She knows that it will come down to being sent home, but is willing to give it her all in hopes of prolonging her fate, even if only by the minute. Like Carver and O'Connor, Ligon has that impeccable way of leading his characters into moments of grace and personal solitude amongst the most disastrous of situations.
Interestingly enough, one story in particular, "Something Awful," reminds us very much of "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"--only much more gritty and coarsely abrupt. Three neighborhood couples sitting around having drinks and smoking joints turns into a game of heart-wrenching confessions, which quickly spins out of control. One man hopes to play Pictionary, another suggests a game called Something Awful. From the first moderately-bad confession of shoplifting, they begin to escalate--ending with an accusation of adultery and betrayal. From there, the tension only mounts, much like Carver's well-known story, turning itself into a self-proclaimed monster, where nothing can be taken back. As the end of the story notes, "The worst things, it seems, are all in front of us."
Ligon's stories are filled with dark humor, heartache, abuse, and irony. All of the characters are both hopeful and hopeless, trying to drift and swerve among their messy lives, hoping for salvation, and instead finding more problems created by their poor decisions and precarious lifestyles, brimming with missed opportunities.
