Tuesday Focus: Freele’s FEEDING STRAYS Delivers on Its Promise, Story after Wonderful Story

I've just finished reading Stefanie Freele's Feeding Strays for the second time, and I've got hundreds of things to talk about, but what's on my mind now is this: her beginnings astound me. Check some of these out:

 The seven year-old asks me, "Could you please lay down your baby, so I can dissect him? I say, No, he's been dissected twice today. He's tired of it..

— "the seven year-old"

"The priest can no longer look into his maid's eyes."

— "priests and balloons"

"She names her new dog Molecule after the neighbor, a biotech engineer, names his dog Molecule."

— "breathing oysters"

"Because her husband doesn't come home until 3 a.m., she shoots him with pepper spray."

— "double undie night"

"We tell her not to date a man in a banana suit."

— "every girl has an ex named steve"

The (amazing) Terri Brown-Davidson taught me so much about beginnings, especially in the poetry class I took from her. Beginnings, she said, have the following qualities:

• They begin, typically, in media res.





• A sense of mystery, but not of obscurity: enough “there” there to enable us to see what's happening, but we know more is to be divulged about character, circumstance, situation.





• A high level of conflict (as “close to the conclusion” as possible).





• They're dynamic, not static, with characters in motion, the situation in motion, the language of the circumstances charged.





• They're so vivid that they immerse us with almost a sense of shock in “the reality of the poetic dream.”

Of all the advice I've heard regarding beginnings, the above suggestions are the ones that have stuck, and of all the images I have encountered of beginnings, Athena is the one I remained enamored with, the goddess who "leaped from Zeus's head, fully grown and armed — with a shout, 'and pealed to the broad sky her clarion cry of war.'

So bursts Freele's stories into birth and our consciousness, out of the middle of things, with a shout, already in conflict, already in confrontation with our expectations and the ho-hum of the everyday. They arrive fully-formed, and what I mean by "fully-formed" is that sense that the story is already there, that there will not be the drawn-out wait for things to happen. Every single story works this way, and every single story delivers upon the promise of that beginning, not only to engage our interests and emotions, but to be something other than merely "odd." Again, I think that might need further explanation.

In some stories, surely not Stefanie's, the entire story revolves around the "oddness"—and the encounter with the unfamiliar (for writer, reader, & POV character) disappoints because it never leads to anything that matters to me. Stefanie's stories matter. I love that about them. And it is what I think you will love about them, too.