Collected Voices in the Expanded Field: A Book Review

You see a watering hole. Reprieve from the old dusty path.

 

So begins each of the 34 chapters in Collected Voices in the Expanded Field (11:11 Press). Each chapter was written by a different author… “and, branching outwards, works in unison with the chapters around them to generate something wholly unique”… “[a] novel”… publisher Andrew J. Wilt would have you believe according to the book’s foreword.

 

Having just finished reading it, I feel in a unique place to say what it is and what it isn’t… at least according to my perspective, which is the only perspective I feel confident to represent.

 

Something that it is? It is a super handsome book. If this speaks to the overall quality of 11:11 books simply with how they exist physically, I’m impressed. I’ve been lugging it from room to room in our house over the last couple weeks, and it’s a tactile pleasure each time I pick it up.

 

Something that it isn’t (and I’m not sure this is important)… it’s not a novel. At least it’s not a novel in the sense that I was thinking when I first purchased the book. I thought it would be a unified story told in chapters by 34 different authors… with each subsequent author having read the preceding chapters and trying to add to an overall story. 

    [I mistakenly thought I was going to a traditional museum with some unconventional docents]

 

Even so, as it turns out, the definition of novel in my head varies a bit from the actual definition:

 

: an invented prose narrative that is usually long and complex and deals especially with human experience through a usually connected sequence of events

 

I mean, Collected Voices in the Expanded Field is “long and complex” and mostly deals with “human experience” but it certainly doesn’t represent a “connected sequence of events” (not by a long shot)

 

[But then notice that the word “usually” lets them off the hook, too]

 

But I don’t want this to be a diatribe on the definition of the word novel (although that could be a super cool conversation to have). I’m just saying, it threw me for a while because I was expecting one thing and then read to realize I was getting something else. Even if the nod is made to the word “novel” in the introduction/foreword, the title of the book is the saving grace because it lets on that this is more of an anthology of sorts… a collection of voices.

 

I know I’m supposed to be letting the whole definition thing go, but there is another definition of novel that fits this book well (and may be what they maybe meant):

 

: new and not resembling something formerly known or used

 

Yeah, that describes this book. [It’s like nothing else I’ve read… and that’s good]

 

So what is it? It’s a sampler of some of the more experimental writers I’ve come across in my reading history. And by experimentation, I would ask that you look at some of these sample pages from the book... the most experimental to be sure. (Some of these authors are as much visual artists as they are wordsmiths)

 

 

 

After my initial reaction to finding out that this was not going to be the experimental novel I thought but instead was the experimental novel I had not thought to anticipate but needed, I dove into the experience, like finding a watering hole after too many weeks on a dusty path.

 

And I think that “dusty path” might be all of the conventional conceptions of what stories, words, narrative, etc need to be when really they can be anything.

    [Bear in mind, those pages above are the most experimental. Much of the narrative is more straightforward in its use of words]

 

{With my experience with film festivals, I believe I’m well-suited to review Collected Voices in the Expanded Field. I learned fairly quickly that indie films are not lower-budget versions of Hollywood films. They are their own thing… taking risks, expanding perspectives, and saying, “This too is film.”

 

I’ve taken friends to film festivals, and I always have to coach them ahead of time. They can’t expect a slick, but cookie-cutter movie like they saw the week before in the multiplex. They have to be open to the idea that the curation of a film festival results in something that has not been seen before under the sun.}

 

(Same goes for this book)

 

Even if they really don’t build off of each other, each chapter of this book is a trip. There is a surreal quality to many of the pieces, though some are more conventional in their storytelling.

 

It’s challenging for me to review this book (at least in a conventional way) other than to say I find it an important book because it carries out its mission to bring together many of the more cutting-edge voices in experimental writing. I really enjoyed that each chapter ended with the author’s bio. Each bio contains a book or books that the author has published, so if you enjoyed your introduction to a particular voice, you have easy access to more.

 

            [In the foreword, Wilt likens the book to MySpace, which early on was a platform for more experimental, indie musicians to get their music out to people who might not otherwise hear it or be aware of it]

 

                                                                                                (I approve of the analogy)

 

Some of the stuff I’m doing here with brackets and parenthesis… well, I feel I have to. I’m 50 years old, and I’m just trying to fit into this experimental world!

 

*8*8*8*8*8*8*7

 

Even though I wasn’t necessarily pulled into the story of each piece, I was always intrigued by the imagination and vision of each artist… in some cases asking the air in the room around me, “How the hell did they come up with this? What guts it took to say, ‘Yes, this is what I’m going to write.’”

 

I appreciate, value, and celebrate the risk-taking in many of these pieces.

 

I also truly appreciate the celebration of sentences in this collection. Let me share a few.

 

            [Would you let me do that?]

 

{ok, thank you}

 

 

“Drink your magnesium infusion and let yourselves be lost in the repetitive flashcrash while all your experiences since the last uploading session are being sucked out by the dancers of the purple flame, statistically managed and returned to you tagged with their proper significance by the everpresent Mygdala queen.” – from chapter 7, by Germán Sierra.

 

 

“According to Dad, ‘You’re a soldier and it’s time to go to war with your own physical limitations and it’s gonna be really barbaric and really insane.’” – from chapter 14, by Benjamin DeVos.

 

 

“A playground.           I’m a first kiss turned blackbelt fight.            I’m a

 

gnashing poodle.         An apple.                     A wooden block. Each of these as an elegy.

 

 

I’m not an engine, but an oil.              We’re all pins and needles in the monolith’s soft

 

meat.                            Every job is a gig. I gag.                                 A sore on the lips of many

 

shores.” – from chapter 24, by Evan Isoline.

"A castle on fire is on fire and the fields between us and the castle and the castle and the horizon are on fire and a fire is on fire with a new kind of fire a sentient fire of bodies licking like flame or everything we picture here is from another story like every other description of an inferno is from another inferno and every book is of another book and every day is the day of another fire and we meet each other in this place where something is out to get while the getting is good." -- from chapter 30, by Adam Tedesco

 

 

“This began when you bought the ouroboros in that pet shop that you mistook for the progressive sex shop: The Smitten Kitten.” – from chapter 33, by Candice Wuehle

 

 

“He thinks: why are the people you share the most of yourself with the ones who you risk never talking to again?

 

He thinks: How much of myself has come from people I will never see again?

 

He thinks: What are we but slices of everyone we meet?

He thinks about all the pieces of himself and all of himself that is composed of pieces he has taken from others.” – from chapter 34, by Andrew J. Wilt

 

 

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Whenever I go to Chicago, I usually skip the Art Institute of Chicago (the traditional museum containing that which you must see as Art because others have determined that it's Art) 

Most of the artists are dead. Most of the work is vetted, and much of it I’ve seen before in pictures, etc.

                [it's kinda boring]

 

Instead, I often go to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

 

            It’s here that I experience the weird, the out there, the risky, the ridiculous…

    It challenges. It asks me to ask the question, "Is this important? Is this Art?"

 

                                                Something nascent and unknown being given its due space.

 

Collected Voices in the Expanded Field is just such a museum for these 34 pieces/authors.

 

Go on. Get a ticket. Check this stuff out.

 

            Exit through the gift shop… just past that watering hole.

While in the gift shop, purchase the book: here

Jeff Vande Zande is an English professor at Delta College in Michigan. His latest collection, The Neighborhood Division: Stories, is now out through Whistling Shade Press and available: here

Book Trailer: here