Carol Bly, 1930-2007     

In Memoriam: Carol Bly, 1930-2007

Carol Bly's Backbone was the first book of fiction—a collection of short stories—issued by Milkweed Editions, in 1984. Tess Gallagher, in the New York Times Book Review, said about the book and Bly,

"Each of the five long stories in this extraordinary collection has heft to it. With a novel's amplitude, her stories present self-reliant individuals held in a web of communal interdependence. Their very resourcefulness grants them a solitary dignity, even as it holds them captive to the general good. Mrs. Bly pays tribute to this self-sufficiency, then moves to disabuse her characters of it."

Three of the stories in Backbone were developed into a feature film, Rachel River, which debuted at the Toronto Film Festival in 1987 and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. The script of Rachel River was written by Judith Guest and the film was directed by Sandy Smolan. 

Bly went on to publish several more books with Milkweed, including the 1986 pamphlet, "Bad Government and Silly Literature;" a book about writing, The Passionate Accurate Story: Making Your Heart's Truth into Literature (1990); Changing the Bully Who Rules the World: Reading and Thinking about Ethics (1996); and, in 2000, a book of new and selected stories, My Lord Bag of Rice, that includes stories from Backbone. 

Selected quotes from Carol Bly:

"If an American were to turn out a novel or story in which men and women characters consorted together without mention of physical desire, we would wonder in reviews and at lunch why the author suppressed sexuality. Yet hundreds of novels and stories offer us American characters who live out their lives without any political and ethical anxiety. We ought to be calling it suppression, because we are as much political and moral creatures as we are sexual creatures."—from "Bad Government and Silly Literature"

 "Here is the crux of it: between the conscious and unconscious mind we are more complex and given to concept than we are just in the conscious mind This means we must somehow get more use out of the unconscious part. But the unconscious has no idea of being dutiful. To waken it, we try laying some sensual or aesthetic or moral excitement just under its nose: the fragrance will rouse it from its torpor, we hope. The unconscious mind had much rather remain sleeping, of course: it knows what it's doing. If it wanted to be awake all the time, it would be the conscious mind. It is powerful: it holds most of our memories. It has a penchant for terror and for self-defense. If not tempted by other nourishment, it will content itself with lurching to its feet just when we don't want it to, attacking someone senselessly. It is as much soup as animal. It  prefers steeping away to thinking. It is a mess, but in its mess lie impressions life once gave us. We want them to freight our hearts' truths in short stories."—from The Passionate, Accurate Story

"To be in love, blindly, with the whole of something or someone is less painful and certainly more ecstatic than to learn to partialize. And what is the return for the loss of joyful enthrallment? You would think that enthrallment is about as enjoyable a feeling as there is. The return is that in the process of grasping that one can love a flawed thing or person, one finds oneself loving more and more things, even oneself. That is, partializing can lead to increased self-esteem. Partializing about oneself gives one the gift of self-tolerance, even forgiveness, even liking. What an unfamiliar concept this is—that the ability to analyze (coolly to take things apart for a look, as if any one thing or person were made of several elements) should increase one's self-esteem!"—from Changing the Bully Who Rules the World

"When she turned north, on the right-hand shoulder of the highway, the wind struck her forehead. It wasn't bitter, but it was colder than she had hoped for. . . . Under her feet the dozens of pebbles on the road's shoulder underfoot looked shrunken and abandoned. She tried to set up her walking motion into a kind of automation, the way she and Einar and Larry had done for years and years when they were tired from the farmwork. At first you grew tired, then you grew so tired you felt you might cry, and then, by not feeling any pity for any part of your body, by not weakening those parts, that is, with pity, you actually exacted from them more character; once the ankles, back, shoulders, wrists, learnt to expect no mercy of you, they began to work as if automated. Then you weren't exhausted anymore, and you could sift fertilizers, or lift alfalfa, or shovel to an auger for hours and hours, until, with the headlights glowing like tiny search beams, coming out of the fields as if out of the sky itself, the tractors came home with the men who had been hired—and everyone could quit. Thus the tiredness could be held back until you all leaned over the salmon hot dish, and reached for the bread."—from "Gunnar's Sword," in My Lord Bag of Rice: New and Selected Stories