Reviews of A Fiction Reading With Other Reviews of LaVerne Harrell Clark's THE DEADLY SWARM

By LaVerne Harrell Clark

Posted on 06.03.05

PHOENIX (AZ)GAZETTE (4/O9/1986)
Headline:Author taps roots reaching
deep into the region
By Dave Eskes.

SCOTTSDALE,AZ--- LaVerne Harrell CIark paced back and forth at the Undinotti Gallery reading “Once Again on All Souls" with undisguished enthusiasm. Clark alternately giggled and gestured as she spun the tale of Buck and Lillie, an over-the hill couple who drink Gallo, make love and live inside a camper on the parking lot of a Tucson Safeway store.

"Ahh know," she said, laughing helplessly, before adding in her Texas accent, "it's terrible to laugh at your own stuff."

Occasionally, she look time out for a genteel slug of red wine, usually at those times in the story when wine would be prominently mentioned, which was often.

The audience--a handful of literary types in rumpled dresses, cowboy boots and jeans--laughed with her. They sat in chairs, a beat--up sofa and on the
cool cement floor drinking red wine in plastlc glasses.

Clark, a native of Smithville, Texas, is the author of the recently published collection of stories,“The Deadly Swarm and Other Stories,” from which the selection she read was taken.

She once directed the U. of AZ Poetry Center and is a good example of a contemporary Western writer, whose roots
are deep in the West, its people and the issues that weigh heavily on the region.

"Smithville is about 42 miles southeast of Austin," she said. "When I was born during the Depression, it was very rural. It was a Roy Rogen-picture-show-Saturday-afternoon sort of town.

“It’s more urbanized now. When I go back, I see pine trees cut down, sewage plants, even more oil wells.

"Austin is a beautiful city, but the high tech there is getting dangerous."

“There never was a time when I wasn’t a storyteller,” she said.“When I used to play paper dolls with the other little girls, I would direct the story. Sometimes, it went on as long as three days.”

Indeed, when she talks, Clark often strays from the subject to embellish little subplots and thread them into the main narrative. Occasionally, she
pauses to search for just the right word. Recent reviewers have compared her with Flannery O’Connor, whose incisive short stories about the South strongly influenced postwar writers.

Clark believes Western literature is being taken more seriously these days. "Geographically, Western literature begins outside Austin, Texas, and extends to Yuma and swings up to parts of Utah and southern Colorado. It's marked by sagebrush, creosote bushes, asphalt, desert and mountains.

"It's a distinctive literature, but I don't think we set out to make it that way. There's always been a drive for good Western literature. Now people are looking at the stories as universal."

Clark thought for a moment before adding, "Which they should have been doing before."

.......

Some Reviews of Clark's story collection
from TX BOOK LIST (v.8, #2,1986)

"THE DEADLY SWARM AND OTHER STORIES"...is an exquisite collection of short fiction. The four stories in this grouping, set against rural backgrounds, constitute a remarkable achievement in writing, and a valuable contribution to Texas letters. The stories are regional in nature, but universal in scope.

"Goyenesque" is the term that
comes to mind when attempting to describe this very human style and the magical outlook on life that gives the tone for the collection."

FROM THE BACK COVER of the second printing of "THE DEADLY SWARM AND OTHER STORIES" (Hermes House Press, Northampton, MA.):

This Collection Won:

*1st Place, 1986, Biennial Letters Award, National League of American Pen Women

*Best Short Fiction Award, Finalist, 1986, Western Writers of America

THE BLURBS ON ITS BACK COVER FROM SEVERAL FICTION WRITERS FOLLOW:

"All [of the stories in The Deadly Swarm and Other Stories] seem written from the inside-out. They reveal the author's masterly use of vernacular, her intimate knowledge of the people, and her craftmanship as a storyteller. They are indeed examples of the best grass roots writing, regional literature that reflects also the universal wishes and strivings for fulfillment and the misfortunes that often overtake us all."-Frank Waters

"LaVerne Harrell Clark shows herself as a very worthy claimant to the line of transcendental regionalist writers from George Branch Cable and Mark Twain to Eudora Welty and William Goyen. Her use of monologue is beautifully musical."
-Marguerite Young

"LaVerne Harrell Clark's stories are composed of a strongly individual vision and voice,...inteweaving the commonplace with the magical."-Vance Bourjaily

For more on this title beyond the sources cited here, see Clark's biography in CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS (2004), as well as this selected review listing: BLOOMSBURY REVIEW (3/'96),
ARIZONA QUARTERLY (Fall,'87), WESTERN AMERICAN LITERATURE (XXI, 2), PEMBROKE (21, '89), ROUNDUP (July/Aug.'86), CACHE REVIEW, (Winter, '85), FENNEL STALK (Summer,'86), STONE DRUM (Sprg., '86), ARIZONA DAILY STAR (10/27/'85), TUCSON CITIZEN (11/20/'85), SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS, McALLEN (TX) MONITOR (5/4/'86),GOLDSBORO (N.C.) DAILY ARGUS (11/24/'85), HOBBS (N.M.) DAILY NEWS(4/13/'86) & THE PILOT, Southern Pines, N.C.(2/24/'86).

In 2003, Grider and Rodenberger, editors of the anthology of 22 TX women writers, LET'S HEAR IT, present the detailed examination of Clark's stories, pp.248 -251, from which this assessment is excerpted:

"Attention to the visual aspects of events is reflected in Clark's graphic descriptions of people and places in her short stories as well as her publishers' use of her photographs to illustrate her fiction. She has said that the most demanding literary form is the short story and admits that she revises many times before she submits a story for publication....Clark had published four books and numerous scholarly articles by 1977, when her first short story, "Big Damon's Quilt," was anthologized in the Texas Section of the Red Earth Press collection, SOUTHWEST: A CONTEMPORARY ANTHOLOGY. In the years since..., more than a dozen of Clark's stories have appeared in literary magazines such as VANDERBILT REVIEW, PEMBROKE, ST. ANDREWS REVIEW, and PAWN REVIEW. Her most recent publication of short fiction is a chapbook [from the Writers in the Plains poetry & prose series, published in 1996 at New Mexico College, Hobbs, and ed. by poets Jim Harris & Peter Mladinic] featuring only one story, "A New Dimension of An Old Affinity." It is the sensitive chronicling of an adolescent boy's gradual and painful realization that family members are not who he has always believed them to be."
[Re: "Big Damon's Quilt,"] "With uncommon skill, Clark assumes the small girl's point of view, and the tragic nature and cause of her grandparents' animosity unfolds gradually for the child as it does the reader....[Clark's] plots are always explorations into the tragedy inherent in the human struggle to cope with mistakes and fate's uncertainties. This characteristic of her themes is most poignantly captured in "The Sign from Luke XVIII." With reference to the Biblical Luke's record of Christ's admonition, "Suffer, little children to come unto me: as lieitmotif, this story explores conflicted family relationships as a brother, his wife, and the protagonist Roddy's mother drive her to college in San Marcos during the depression years. All are dealing emotionally with interpersonal turmoil and with Roddy's leaving home for college. But Roddy, who has always wanted to be a teacher, is pregnant and after the family drives away, goes to a parked car driven by Mrs. Moore, who will take her to a San Antonio shelter to have her baby. Mrs. Moore comforts Roddy by reminding her she may be able to keep her baby, and that the role of a mother requires teaching skills."

24,077

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This still life from THE DEADLY SWARM offers Clark's view through an old window frame of a rural landscape and is typical of those found in the story collection. As CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS' (2004)biography of Clark notes: "Clark published her first collection of short stories to an enthusiastic response in the American Southwest," noting that among the reviewers, writer Byrd Baylor particularly noted that "an unusual aspect of the collection" was "the [author's] photographs that illustrate and enhance it." As an illustration, they cite Baylor's words in CONCHO RIVER REVIEW (Fall, 1981): "The group of moody black and white photos by the author reinforce the stark and mysterious essense of a landscape already painted by her words." Not only did a reviewer (whose initials only are provided) in BOOKS OF THE SOUTHWEST (#321, 1/'86) all but echo Baylor's words regarding the use made of Clark's "stark black & white photographs," the same writer also noted that the stories themselves placed "gifted Tucsonan Clark squarely in the tradition of earlier regionalists such as Eudora Welty,"and then before concluding, even touched on the kind of enthusiasm that CA had noted by expressing an eagerness besides to "see more of Clark's fiction."

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L.D.& LaVerne Clark are in front of their N.Y.C. brownstone, en route to his MA graduation at Columbia, with him holding his cap and gown in his right arm. After their marriage, LaVerne had continued working for NYC publishers (mainly Columbia U. Press) and taking night courses at Columbia in the short story from John R. Humphreys, along with some gradauate comparative literature courses. But with their move to AZ, she was to pursue there instead both her MA in English and later on, her MFA in Creative Writing, too. During the interval, the Clarks did return to Columbia for L.D.'s Ph.D., with LaVerne again pursuing editorial work in NYC. This time, though, it was for THE BULLETIN, the magazine of the Episcopal Diocese of New York City. Once more her office was back in the Columbia neighborhood, located as it was in the close of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine near the campus on Amsterdam Ave.

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Clark's scene of the Colorado River running near her Smithville home appears in THE DEADLY SWARM with the title story. About the title, editors Grider and Rodenberger noted in their LET'S HEAR IT(2003) examination of Clark's fiction (pp.248-52) that the book takes its title from John Milton's "Samson Agonistes," through an association of the 1st person narrator's "restless thoughts" with that of "a deadly swarm of hornets." The narrator's voice in the text of THE DEADLY SWARM accompanying the photo reads (p.17): Soon I was at the river and the moss and pine shadows and me were all one in the Colorado. Being at the Crag Rock in the late afternoon was like being at church to me."

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Publisher Bobby Byrd of Cinco Puntos Press introduces LaVerne Harrell Clark at her reading from her short story collection for the Bridge Gallery series, El Paso. The photo dates to a period between 1986--1990 when Clark stayed busy giving cross-country fiction readings. In one of those years, she attended Breadloaf and afterwards traveled west from the NE and a reading for a U. of Mass. Coffee House series in Amherst to be on another one in Oakland,CA. There was also a time when she traveled from the NW and the Visiting Writers' series at WA St. U. in Pullman down to the SE to read on another campus in N.C., this time at St. Andrews College. Still, she has appeared with the most frequency in the Southwest, and following her move to TX, began focusing more and more on that state. By 1998, she was among the Texas writers selected to be on the TEXAS BOOKS FESTIVAL, which, as is the organization's custom, also included a like variety of well-known names with books from NYC publishers along with others from many other parts of the country. Earlier, in the Spring, 1987 issue of SOUTHWESTERN AMERICAN LITERATURE, critic and story editor, Sylvia A. Grider, had observed in reviewing Clark's collection for SOUTHWESTERN AMERICAN LITERATURE: "The discovery of LaVerne Clark and her short stories is a distinct pleasure." Nevertheless, by 1997 and the time of her novel, writer Dale Walker in his Nov. 30 review of it for ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS (Denver}, took note of the fact that Clark had still not received the recognition he felt due her. After citing the novel as "a fine,involving story," he observed that it was likewise written "by an important, if unswung Southwestern writer." By 2004, however, Clark's sketch in CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS implied things might be changing: "In recent years her work has begun to receive the recognition many feel it deserves." A 2005 review of LET'S HEAR IT in PEMBROKE #37, a literary magazine on a Univ. of N.C. campus, would seem to lend support to CA's observation, not only by way of the reviewer's enthusiasm, but also through the detailed examination and observations he offers Clark's story after choosing it in particular to be among those he focuses on. THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS's review of the anthology (8/8/'04), lends further support to such a possibility also in listing Clark as among the select few in the anthology the reviewer identifies as "fine contemporary writers." In any case, these examples of current responses does indicate that these days attention is being paid to Clark's fiction.