I'm excited to announce that Scattered Lights, my new collection of short stories, was named a finalist for the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award in Fiction. Here's what writer/critic Charles Finch said in his award commendation at the award ceremony.
"In the last five years, it has seemed at times as if we are a nation of two permanently estranged tribes, doing little more than sending up angry flares at each other. But in Scattered Lights, a quiet, probing, masterful collection of stories set in his native Ozarks, Steve Wiegenstein tacitly rejects that binary and, in doing so, returns to a fundamental promise of fiction, that politics dissolves in the particular.
"Wiegenstein's signal strength as a writer is in his characters – a girl reflecting with awe at herself on a kiss, a widow who refuses to take her predetermined place in a town's society, a middle-aged man whose dispiriting new job suddenly and unexpectedly decides him in favor of courage and happiness. In all of these instances, the characters’ inner lives precede whatever lesson they may represent. Wiegenstein steadfastly and honorably refuses to invite catastrophe or revelation on his characters for the sake of a reader's cheap excitement.
"Instead, he presents us with dozens of distinctive and real people doing their best, or not so best, but intermittently asking the same questions all of us do – why are we here, who loves us, what do we owe each other, what does it mean to be good? In the process, the pared, beautiful prose of Scattered Lights comes to seem less a style than an ethic – not to intrude, but to observe not to judge, but to comprehend. The project founded on a final faith, present in great writers of short fiction, from Chekov to Grace Paley, to another of this year’s finalists Deesha Philyaw, that art is where our higher selves can meet, free from the transient furies of the news. The sooner we begin paying attention to each other as people, Wiegenstein argues, the more people we suddenly begin to see, no matter where we're from."
The book is published by Cornerpost Press. Some of these stories have been published before, and others are brand new. All are set in the Ozarks, but unlike my novels, they are set in contemporary times.
Here's what some early reviewers had to say. Ann Weisgarber, author of The Glovemaker, The Promise, and The Personal History of Rachel DuPree: "Wiegenstein again brilliantly plumbs the depths of human emotions. With his pitch-perfect sentences and compassionate insight, Wiegenstein’s memorable characters are achingly real as they grapple with their ordinary lives and peer into the uncertain future. Scattered Lights is one of the best collections of stories I’ve read in years."
Aarik Danielsen, Columbia Daily Tribune: "In a book made of beautiful, complicated moving parts, Wiegenstein finds a greater sum. Considering these characters, he gives lie to the ways we think and talk about small towns and their people. . . . Each story in Scattered Lights starts with uncommon understanding and ends exactly where it should, even if the reader leaves that corner of the world wanting more. In this, Wiegenstein's curiosity becomes our own — and that's the best gift a writer can give readers or the very characters he coaxes kicking, screaming, sighing and praying into the world."
John Mort, author of the Sullivan Prize-winning Down Along the Piney: "Steve Wiegenstein, known to many Midwestern readers for the rigor and thoughtfulness of his historical novels, returns to his Ozarks roots in the twelve stories of Scattered Lights. He portrays ordinary, impoverished, small-town and country people in his polished, often elegant collection. Some are crazy some are violent some are no good. Mainly, these people are alive, and you’ll recognize them. They live in those little towns, those scattered lights you see looking down from an airplane, and they’re much like your grandmother, or your restless uncle who went off to see the world, or you."
Steve Yates, author of The Legend of the Albino Farm, Morkan's Quarry, and many others: "In language both beautiful and crystal clear, Steve Wiegenstein opens the heart of the Ozarks in these stories. There are no stereotypes here, and he brings a multitude—young, aged, curious, jaded, desirous, bashful, stranded, and striving. Reading these tales feels like the moment when you top that final ridge before the outskirts and see the porch lights of home."
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Here's a sample:
Weeds and Wildness
Everybody knew Charley Blankenship to be something of a loose cannon, a man you didn’t want to get into an argument with at a ball game or a bar, because you truly never knew what Charley might do: swing a log chain, poison your dog, or drunkenly hug you and declare that you were right, after all. Mark was in the same class as one of the Blankenship boys, John Wayne, and they shared a spot at the end of the bench during basketball games. So he knew Charley a little from his occasional visits to games, where he would lean over the bench behind them and say, “You got this, boys. That bunch ain’t worth shit except that one dude. Put a couple of you defensive specialists on him and they wouldn’t score thirty.”
“Defensive specialist” was a charitable phrase for someone who never made the linescore except during blowouts, and Mark had always figured that Charley’s appearances were his way of letting his son know he was there, supporting him, since he wouldn’t have much opportunity to cheer if he waited until they were in a game. Coach always called them “Salt ’n’ Pepa” in a lame attempt at coachly humor, since although the two were both average height and average build, Mark was pale and freckled while John Wayne, like his father, had a thick wave of black hair, like a Fifties rock ’n’ roll star, and a steady growth of facial hair that seemed entirely inappropriate for a high school student. They knew that their real resemblance was in the fact that they would never get in a game that mattered. Still, a dad hovering behind the bench was an embarrassment. John Wayne remained studiously neutral until his dad returned to the bleachers, and then the two of them would exchange a glance of hard-boiled, high-school-boy sympathy.
So Charley was a character. Everybody knew him around town. But no one expected it when the ATF people swooped in and arrested him, with a helicopter and a line of cars that sped through town at four in the morning going fifty miles an hour. On the courthouse lawn they spread out the haul for the cameras: belts of ammunition, grenades and grenade launchers, and the centerpiece of the raid, a .50-caliber machine gun that had somehow walked away from Fort Leonard Wood about a year ago.
