Chella Courington is one of those writers and poets I wish were read more broadly. This is not to say that few people read her. She is well-known and well-loved by many, especially by those who are obsessed with flash fiction, as I am. However well-read she is, more people should read her. She writes with the elegance and ease of someone who loves poetry and of someone who loves words, their history, meanings, and sound. There is texture to what she writes.

Impspired Magazine February 2023 130 pages

Her new novella-in-flash Adele and Tom: The Portrait of a Marriage has her characteristic style, but what became clear to me as I read it is that she understands the purpose and strengths of both flash and the novella-in-flash in the way that few people do. This work explores the lives of a married couple who are both writers, are living the life of the mind, and are not perfect. It’s a work that’s profoundly moving, but would have left me flat in any other form. In Michael Loveday’s brilliant craft book, Unlocking the Novella-in-Flash (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2022), he explains that one of the strengths of the form is that writers can see their lives and their characters’ lives as a series of profound or at least interesting moments rather than as long narrative arcs. Most of us live life in this way, as a series of not-completely connected moments that have rich significance. This is the view that Courington gives us of a marriage; their marriage and their lives are multi-various without a single narrative arc, but with complex and overlapping events and motivations, and Courington presents this complexity in moments that are profound and echo with meaning.

Courington’s novella-in-flash develops the story of the life of the intellect. Adele, the point-of-view character, lives simultaneously in the present, past, and future; that is to say, she lives in her mind, and Courington is able to explore this life that so many of us who love to read and write lead.

Adele constantly played the twenty-year game. Twenty years ago I was thirty, twenty years from now, I’ll be seventy, counting years like a handful of coins, knowing they would be spent on trinkets. (55)

She is a person who spends nearly as much time thinking about her mother who passed away, and the daughter she never had, as the people currently in her life. She dwells on the significance of these relationships, and what she hopes for now as much as what she hoped for in the past. In this, she is not someone who is mired in the past, however. She is simply someone who thinks deeply.

The flash vignettes that Courington uses to construct her narrative are perfect for capturing the kind of person who sees life in this way. We drop into her mind for a moment, and then we move on to another concept, mirroring the way that people often think. We understand why the past matters to her, and her past matters to us as well. And then we move on. She loves and is devoted to her husband, but she loves her father as well. When she is eating Tom’s homemade ice cream, she appreciates the moment and then associates the present with the times her father made ice cream.

Last night Adele dreamed that she was sitting on the towel that covered the newspaper that covered the ice her dad’s ice-cream canister was packed in. As he turned the handle, her butt got colder and colder. (49)

This movement through time, back and forth through the past, present, and future, is at the heart of the work. It is in many ways a novella-in-flash of the daydream world of someone who is seriously dedicated to the profundity of daydreams. Courington’s training as a poet and her love of language and words also makes this a moving work for me, someone who has loved what language can do my entire life. The significance of language comes back again and again as she thinks about her life. She has a Ph.D. in literature, and her passion for study was created by a love of reading authors who understood the power of the word. “[S]he studied Woolf and Joyce, Johnson and Burney, holing up in the library cubicles at the University, closing out the world” (113).

But her love of language, like mine, like anyone I know who was drawn to seriously studying literature, began long before she arrived at the university. She thinks back to what motivated her in her high school math class. It wasn’t the math; it was the language:

Trapezoid. The sound, that’s what she remembered most about eleventh grade math, all those delicious words—perpendicular, quadrilateral, rhombus, isosceles, especially isosceles with all the s’s tickling her tongue. (65)

This love of language, from both Adele and Courington, comes through in the carefully constructed music of her prose. To read Courington’s words is to be immersed in a language that on its own helps to create meaning in the same ways that it does in poetry. This is a novella-in-flash about someone who meditates seriously inside her intellectual world. The language she uses reflects that beautiful meditation. Like Woolf or Joyce, whom Adele loves, Courington allows her prose style and voice to be as significant as any other part of her work.

I read Adele and Tom: The Portrait of a Marriage in a single sitting, and it’s one of those works that I know I’ll come back to. It’s not work that can be completely understood on a first or second reading. I doubt that it can be completely understood in that way. It seems to me that it is open enough that it will change with me, and add to my life as I age and gain new insights. It’s a work of great power I hope more people will read.

John Brantingham

was the first poet laureate of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (east of Fresno, CA), and now lives in Jamestown, New York. He is the founding editor of The Journal of Radical Wonder, and the author of 21 books of poetry, memoir, and fiction including his latest, Life: Orange to Pear (Bamboo Dart Press, 2020) and Kitkitdizzi (Bamboo Dart Press, 2022), the latter a collaboration which features artworks by his wife, Ann Brantingham.

John’s poems, stories, and essays are published in hundreds of magazines and journals. His work has appeared on Garrison Keillor’s daily show, The Writer’s Almanac; has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize; and was selected for publication in The Best Small Fictions anthology series for 2022 and 2016.

Author’s website: www.johnbrantingham.com/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ A Walk Among Giants by Kendall Johnson, a review of John and Ann Brantingham’s book Kitkitdizzi: A Non-Linear Memoir of the High Sierra, in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 16, January 2023)

⚡ Finnegan’s (Fiancée Goes McArthur Park on His Birthday) Cake, flash fiction by Brantingham in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 9, August 2021), which was subsequently selected for publication in The Best Small Fictions 2022 anthology

⚡ Objects of Curiosity, a collection of his ekphrastic poems (Sasse Museum of Art, 2020)

⚡ For the Deer, one of two haibun by Brantingham in KYSO Flash (Issue 8, August 2017)

⚡ Four prose poems in Serving House Journal (Issue 7, Spring 2013), including A Man Stepping Into a River and Poem to the Child Who I Almost Adopted