October 18, 2005: Diane Williams


Photo by Bill Hayward

EVENT INTRODUCTION

In Diane Williams’s fiction “All-American,” the narrator reflects on the power of desire, a certain fierceness, violence even, that accompanies arousal. It is “force” that attracts, force that repels, force that makes it possible to love even as it makes impossible those we love (or those we’d like to). The intensity of our interactions is never uni-dimensional even when it appears so, Williams suggests, and with remarkable facility, her incisive prose creates startling and discomfiting moments from seemingly familiar and comfortable scenes which, as we move through her books of "sudden" or "flash" fictions, never fail to take us by surprise. In “All-American,” for instance, a young girl tries to force herself on her sister in the back seat of a car. In “Here’s Another Ending,” a family covers up their dog’s poor behavior (they believe it killed the neighbor’s pet rabbit) only to discover—after they’ve laboriously washed and dried the dead rabbit and put it back in its cage—that it had died and been buried by its owners several days before. What do they feel? Shame? Embarrassment? Relief? Pride? It becomes apparent that it’s a chaotic mixture of all of these emotions in a work of fiction that’s no more than a single page long. Williams’ stories, like well honed blades, cut right through the meat of narrative to the bone within—to the essential perversity, the edginess, that underscores our day to day lives. With great deftness, she elegantly peels back the layers of common experience—reading a book, for instance, or having lunch with a friend, even watching a child play with dolls—to reveal our uncanny ability for concealing from ourselves those peculiar sensations that color, and give vibrancy, to the so-called normal. As she notes in an interview with John O’Brien, “I really have felt that sense of being close to soul-death that some people experience, and I think there’s just a great urgency to survive.” That urgency—that will, not just to live, but to account for the range of experience that living is—is the source of arousal in Williams’s work, the subtle and thorny stuff of her electric and versatile fictions. We’re delighted to hear more of her work tonight. Please welcome Diane Williams to Buffalo this evening.