Michael Jeffrey Lee

by Cate Czarnecki

Tonight, the Uptown location of Maple Street Book Shop will host a reading by local author Michael Jeffrey Lee in honor of his recently published collection of short fiction Something In My Eye. Winner of the 2010 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, the collection is a darkly imaginative compilation that expands on classic Southern Gothic themes by superimposing them over significant issues in modern American life including economic recession, homelessness and war.

The event, which begins at 6 p.m. with a complimentary wine and cheese reception, will include a reading from the collection followed by a Q&A session and author signing. Copies of the book will be also available for purchase for the price of $13.

Published in 2012 by Sarabande Books, the stories in Something In My Eyedepict a strange, bleak landscape inhabited by some of the most squalid and lamentable characters exhibited in recent American literature. The apocalyptic imagery and surprising, often violent plot twists lend to the collection a sense of the desperation and loneliness that is symptomatic of both classic Southern Gothic writers such as Flannery O'Connor as well as modern authors like Cormac McCarthy.

As Francine Prose, judge of the 2010 Mary McCarthy Prize, said of the work, "I was drawn to Michael Jeffrey Lee's lineup of losers and drifters, imperiled children, and haunted psychos neither because I wanted to hang out with these bad boys, nor because I plan to cross the street when I see them coming, but because the invitation to inhabit their minds, to see the world through their eyes, and to watch their often unsettling stories play out in space and time enables Lee to do all sorts of extremely interesting things with consciousness and language."

While Lee is a comparatively recent contributor to the literary world, the New Orleans resident's stories are current and worldly in a way that subverts any newcomer status. In describing his personal history as a writer, he comments that "For the last few years, I had a lot of voices in my head that I wanted to try out on the page: some agitated, some angry, some ghoulish, and the short form seemed conducive to my own restlessness as a person." 

Something In My Eye is the product of these voices, which manifest themselves in each of the 12 stories in the collection.

Lee. who is also an editor of the New Orleans Review, first came to New Orleans in 2004, living here for a year until Hurricane Katrina forced him to relocate to Alabama. He spent the next three years there, cultivating his particular style of writing until returning in 2009. In describing what he gains from his artistic relationship with the city, Lee writes that "it keeps throwing exciting, horrifying, and sometimes beautiful scenes my way, and I'm sure that these are finding their way into my work."

Despite the severity of the characters and their situations, Lee's writing contains a wry humor that has the power to endear us to them, and enhances the overall complexity of the anthology as a whole. In the self-titled piece, the narrative structure is a series of disjointed, seemingly unrelated observations that ultimately come together to create the coherent story of a man speaking to a former lover who is about to be taken off of life support. Regardless of the grim subject, there is a macabre humor here, as when the speaker informs the lover, "The title of the children's book I am writing is "Where the Flames Reign".

In his relationship with New Orleans, the final story, "I Shall Not Be Moved" concludes on a note that is particularly relevant to the city which  he currently calls home. Depicting a midget awaiting the approach of a major hurricane at a bar in the French Quarter, it opens with the lines: "I will not be separated from the city I love. Here I have found, if not complete acceptance of who I am, an environment in which I am able to exploit the odd dimensions of my body to achieve something resembling a normal life." 

This piece exemplifies the best of what the collection accomplishes as a whole - a calculated articulation of people in their more desperate and yet most gloriously stubborn moments. It's a mentality many New Orleanians can readily identify with.