Something 'Weird' This Way Comes

Photo by John Anderson

Amelia Gray is the first one to admit her stories are weird. It's right there in the title of her latest collection, Museum of the Weird, which was inspired in part by the Austin landmark of the same name, although Gray admits she's never been there, just sort of window-shopped. "Oh God," she says. "Hopefully they won't sue me." She laughs that they wouldn't get much out of her – experimental writing is not a lucrative game – and all she has of any value are her stories. Not a bad trade, if you ask me.

Winner of the small press Fiction Collective Two's Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize, Museum of the Weird is Gray's second collection of pieces that fall somewhere between flash fiction and short stories. Gray calls the book "a menagerie of oddness," a perfect approximation of its, yes, weirdness, but not of the pleasures of its many tonal variations, from impishness to subdued melancholy. Consider the hare, on his deathbed, reluctantly accepting a sympathy call from the tortoise. Or the small-town columnist whose slight-seeming observations about the weather and road conditions couch agitation and doom. Or the woman with first-date jitters who is served a plate of hair. And don't forget the next-door neighbor who makes a chunky stew of her toes.

I'm almost afraid to ask if the stories are autobiographical.

"There's always a little part that's real. Except for stuff about eating hair. I don't like that at all. I don't have the – what do you call it, trichotillomania? That I just looked up on the Internet." 

I mention that another Austin writer, Doug Dorst, has a hair-chewing story in his recent book, The Surf Guru.

"You know, I'm seeing a lot of hair-chewing stories lately," she says. "You could think about it, like, the world is spinning out of control and the only thing that makes sense is this internalization of the self, and that's the easiest way to do it. I guess my other story about the girl eating her toes is the same kind of [thing], like, taking your body and kind of keeping it inside of you for safekeeping or something.

"That's odd," she laughs. "Now that I think about it, that's really strange. ... I think I should just send my books to a therapist and skip the getting-to-know-you portion of our sessions. I think that would really work." 

If there's a connective thread between the stories, it's the normalization of the abnormal – how characters adapt to, say, a dinner plate of pastalike hair or a strange blockage in a throat that takes on a sort of spiritual connotation for the afflicted.

Gray nods. "I'm really obsessed with how to make an ordinary thing really weird and how to make a weird thing really ordinary." 

In addition to her fiction and a day job as a technical writer, Gray is something of an emissary for experimental writing.

"I was in Victoria, Texas, last week talking to some high school kids and at the University of Houston at Victoria, too, and the general tone of the questions was something like: 'Well, I've been trying to write a novel, but it feels like really, really short stories. Is that okay?' And it's like, 'Yes.' And the next question is like: 'Well, I want to write a story that's really strange, but I'm afraid it's too strange. Is it too strange?' And I'm like, 'No.'

"If you're going to call yourself an experimental writer, you should be really comfortable with talking about when the experiment fails and why it fails. And so I am." 

Amelia Gray will read at We Roll Big: An Evening of Women, Wine, and Song, Nov. 6, 7pm at BookWoman (5501 N. Lamar Ste. A-105). The lineup also includes Meredith Hall, Barb Johnson, Wendy Wheeler, Lila Guzman, Debbie Winegarten, Liz Belile, Ir'ene Lara Silva, and Terri Lord.

Gray will also take part in the upcoming Writers in a Room event, along with Doug Dorst (author of The Surf Guru) and James Hynes (author of Next), Nov. 10, 6-7:30pm at the O. Henry Museum (409 E. Fifth).