A little girl tries to lead a normal life – dance revues, school – while the shadow of her mother’s illness seems everywhere. If she focuses on dancing “The Blackbird,” she’ll be fine.
A couple try to make sense of their grown son’s suicide, even if you can never really make sense of that kind of tragedy. Or you’re traveling with your grandparents, trying to escape, or deal with, a family breakup. Or a spouse dies, that “little cough” having turned into something fatal. Or your youngest child is born with a skin condition that essentially makes him allergic to sunlight, and you have to re-orient everything you know and do. Or you take refuge from your spouse’s beach house, the one in your family for three generations, the one containing memories of every childhood vacation.
These are a few of the stories in The Blackbird & Other Stories, the new collection by Sally Thomas. Comprised of eight stories and one novella, Thomas explores life in contemporary America, where marriages flounder and fail, children die, someone you know and love is going to be on the autism spectrum, and dementia and its annihilation of memory always threatens. Underlying all the stories is the subject of faith, or lack of it, never overtly there but only a subtle presence, almost a reminder of something lost.
But being lost doesn’t mean unimportant. In one of the stories, “Not Less Than Everything,” faith has an important part to play.
Three of the stories and the novella (“The Happy Place”) are about members of the same family, especially the mother Caroline and the daughter Amelia. You read how their lives unfold, and you ache, all the while sensing that there is something here to hold on to while life throws everything at you. These are people you know; they may even be your own family.
Thomas is a poet and fiction writer. She serves as the thesis advisor for the M.F. A. program at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. She’s published two poetry chapbooks and collection Motherland, with a second collection being published this year. Thomas served as co-editor (with Micah Mattix) of the anthology Christian Poetry in America Since 1940. Her writing and poetry have appeared in numerous publications, including Plough Quarterly, North American Anglican, Dappled Things, First Things, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Public Discourse, Southern Poetry Review, and many others. With Joseph Bottum, Thomas is the co-editor of Poems Ancient and Modern, a poetry newsletter on Substack.
The Blackbird & Other Stories is a collection that asks, how do we make our way in a broken, fallen world? Or conversely, how can we make our way without faith?
Related:
Works of Mercy by Sally Thomas.
Top photograph by Nick Fewings via Unsplash. Used with permission.
