What a pleasure to review Aimee Bender in this weekend's Chicago Tribune. The review begins like this, below, and can be read in its entirety
here.
We gathered in a circle in the side room and talked about
mirrors, and still water, and wells, and feeling understood, and opals,
and then we did a creative-writing exercise about our first memory of
the moon, and how it affected us, and the moment when we realized it
followed us … and then we wrote haiku.
I borrow this gorgeous scene from the midst of the title story in
Aimee Bender's new collection, "The Color Master." I place it here, as a
header and a prompt, as a way of saying that this, perhaps, is where
Bender's wild and fantastical stories begin — with a first memory of the
moon. Perhaps Bender, as a little girl, was already paying attention to
the way light dives through and past forest leaves. Perhaps she was
stacking unlike things beside unlike things and forging intricate
bridges. Perhaps, after her mother read her fairy tales, she hid beneath
her covers with a flashlight, a pair of scissors, some crayons and
glue, and rearranged the elements to make the stories more bewildering
and aberrant and lovely.
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