Picture Show Press (October 2023) 226 pages

Happily, Picture Show Press recently released Journey to Merveilleux City, Stephanie Barbé Hammer’s new book. Journey is playful, fast-moving, and penetrating; you’ll want to get this one. Spoiler alert: when Stephanie Barbé Hammer writes, be prepared for serious magic!

It adds immensely to bring with you a modicum of historical smarts to the reading—in popular music, psychology, classic literature, and contemporary culture. I kept my browser open to Google and Word Hippo, and the occasional background check added immeasurably to the experience. It reads well without the deeper scene sets, but like emerging from the optometrist office with new glasses, the subtle details can blow you away. The book, as fun as it is, has depth. No surprise here—after all, Barbé Hammer is a Schiller scholar though she embeds that background carefully in a camouflage of hip.

So, the point of another train trip story? Think Orient Express. Girl on the Train. Hitchcock. Lots can happen when strangers are forced together for an extended period. Think Ship of Fools. People get together and stories will happen. A character recalls how his father watched classic movies, particularly train mysteries. He remembers his father saying:

Movies about trains make me feel safe. Every train movie is an emotional journey. The journey always completes and a better world is discovered at the end. (p. 29)

This story follows a trainload of apparent misfits traveling from the East coast of the U.S. northward to Canada to attend several events. A singing evangelical cowboy, a Russian spy, a slippery politician, a tall bagpiper in a kilt, the bagpiper’s best self, a short but vocal Goth-girl, a Chinese travel-video blogger, Homeland Security, an MFA student and her professor/lover, and a bevy of others, all of whom turn out to be more than they seem. One, the short/rebellious/loud Goth-girl, keeps revealing an interesting aspect: tentacles, shape-shifting, and an inky demeanor. Another, a quiet playwright, turns out to be writing on her laptop the very story we are reading, as we read it. Truly a Pirandello moment! Along the way a mysterious passenger disappears, prompting an all-hands search.

Agatha Christie simply hadn’t lived long enough, and she may have been preoccupied with skewing the upper class, when she populated her luxury trains and cruise boats with quirky characters. Our times seem more a welter. And I loved how Barbé Hammer dances through dimensions. Disclaimer: I’m a sucker for a story with substantive import. Enamored with speculative questions, first through literature, then comparative religion, I finally launched into university philosophy per se. I drank deeply from the cup of questions about being, knowledge, right action. That romance with academia ran out in my philosophy graduate program during a time steeped in British and American analysis and its obsession with the limits of language. Divine spirit was reduced to human words, and then told to remain silent. Analysis managed to do to philosophical wonder—human wonder—what biologists do to cephalopods by taking them onto dry land and dissecting them into small slices. They end up little more than raw Calamari. The octopus is long gone.

Not a problem for Journey. On page 27 the Bagpiper, struggling with his own shallowness, asks Quirk the Goth-girl octopus, “Wait a minute, you’re not a Film Studies major, are you?” Quirk answers:

Is that like fucking auteur theory and having to watch endless Truffaut?

Bagpiper decides not, and their relationship begins to build up steam.

For Barbé Hammer, spirit is essential. I found reading Journey to Merveilleux City a bit like I imagine attending a box social would be at Princeton: the more you bring, the broader your appetite, and the more you can talk of big things playfully, the more you get. In one scene alone, Barbé Hammer manages to deliciously complicate things by involving murder, law enforcement jurisdictional disputes, multiple players with competing motives, passengers revealing hidden identities, and the major political issues of the time. And then, of course, the lights go out.

Things, as they do in the best tradition of travel mysteries, finally work out. At one point bagpiper Mack, seeker after love, hugs Goth/Octopus Girl, and discovers to his surprise he means it:

It’s a warm hug. It has a kinetic kindness to it. And as I rest for a moment inside this embrace, it feels like more than two arms encircle my waist and back. I am being held by a woman who is so complete and so multifaceted that her arms are everywhere holding me completely, lifting me up. Suctioning up my self-doubt and even my need to criticize things. Imbuing me with ... grace. (p. 67)

Merveilleux City is, indeed, marvelous. It is a dizzying read choc-a-block with a delightful and mind-blowing mix of references to old movies, train movies, spy movies, literary personages and sources, contemporary political hysterias, and hopes for the future. Even, wait for it, the American Writers and Publishers Association conference. Stephanie Barbé Hammer is a writer’s writer. She even ends with an admonition for all of us literary aspirants:

Don’t Give Up. Keep on performing. Change the play any way you want. It doesn’t even have to have puppets. Tell the stories that matter to you and your community.

Kendall Johnson

grew up in the lemon groves in Southern California, raised by assorted coyotes and bobcats. A former firefighter with military experience, he served as traumatic stress therapist and crisis consultant—often in the field. A nationally certified teacher, he taught art and writing, served as a gallery director, and still serves on the board of the Sasse Museum of Art, for whom he authored the museum books Fragments: An Archeology of Memory (2017), an attempt to use art and writing to retrieve lost memories of combat, and Dear Vincent: A Psychologist Turned Artist Writes Back to Van Gogh (2020). He holds national board certification as an art teacher for adolescents to young adults.

A year ago, Dr. Johnson retired from teaching and clinical work to pursue painting, photography, and writing full time. In that capacity he has written five literary books of artwork and poetry, and one in art history. His memoir collection, Chaos & Ash, was released from Pelekinesis in 2020, his Black Box Poetics from Bamboo Dart Press in 2021, and his The Stardust Mirage from Cholla Needles Press in 2022. His Fireflies series is published by Arroyo Seco Press: Fireflies Against Darkness (2021), More Fireflies (2022), and The Fireflies Around Us (2023).

His shorter work has appeared in Chiron Review, Cultural Weekly, Literary Hub, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Quarks Ediciones Digitales, and Shark Reef; and was translated into Chinese by Poetry Hall: A Chinese and English Bi-Lingual Journal. He serves as contributing editor for the Journal of Radical Wonder.

Author’s website: www.layeredmeaning.com

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Kendall Johnson’s Black Box Poetics is out today on Bamboo Dart Press, an interview by Dennis Callaci in Shrimper Records blog (10 June 2021)

⚡ Self Portraits: A Review of Kendall Johnson’s Dear Vincent, by Trevor Losh-Johnson in The Ekphrastic Review (6 March 2020)

⚡ On the Ground Fighting a New American Wildfire by Kendall Johnson at Literary Hub (12 August 2020), a selection from his memoir collection Chaos & Ash (Pelekinesis, 2020)

⚡ A review of Chaos & Ash by John Brantingham in Tears in the Fence (2 January 2021)