Welcome to another installment of If My Book, the Monkeybicycle feature in which authors compare their recently released books to weird things. This week Valerie Vogrin writes about Expedition, her new story collection out from University of Tampa Press.
If Expedition were a human bone, it would be the horseshoe-shaped hyoid—small, solitary, floating, and sometimes quite pleased with itself.
As a type of wind, my book is visible only in the undulating flutter of striped bedsheets hung to dry on a backyard clothesline.
If Expedition were a tree, it would be dressed in shaggy bark like an Erman’s birch—Betula ermanii. On any given day you might glimpse a hooded eye in the fissures of its trunk.
If Expedition weren’t a plush red storage ottoman it would be studying watch repair.
If it were an object smaller than an ottoman, you might find it beneath a barstool at Samm’s Last Chance Saloon—a creamy blue four-hole button clinging to a bit of white thread. Or maybe I’m thinking of a sapphire, let loose by its former ring’s prongs, now waiting to be discovered in the gap between two flat stones. Although it might also be a Bigfoot finger puppet.
In its smallest, most clever form, my book is a Roly Poly wheeling across a slanted basement floor. Landing in a damp corner, it will harbor its juicy secrets until it feels safe again.
Valerie Vogrin is the author of the novel Shebang. Her collection Things We’ll Need for the Coming Difficulties (Willow Springs Press) was awarded the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in print in journals such as Ploughshares, AGNI, and The Los Angeles Review, online at Hobart and Bluestem, and in The Best Small Fictions 2015. She teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. She lives with her husband, dog, and cat on a tiny, unnamed lake in Moro, Illinois.