According to the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Anne Germanacos’s In the Time of the Girls
showcases a series of short stories in which the sharp glimmer of each tale’s tiny world suggests an entire universe of meaning… These brilliant sparks of insight arrive in lieu of an all-too-easy “enlightenment” … Germanocos’s evocative prose delivers precise and lasting images in a series of vignettes, each carefully crafted with a minimalist’s patience and a maximalist’s ambition. For all their aesthetic refinement, however, Germanocos’s stories contain compelling human dramas, exploring such themes as the fluidity of bodies, identities, gender, and sexuality, as well as joy, loneliness, and love. Thus, even when Germanocos is at her most surreal and elusive—as she radicalizes notions of identity and human relationships—the stories retain a clarity and a core that grounds them in the world of human emotions. [review by Ralph Clare]
In the Time of the Girls is Germanacos’s first collection, released last year by BOA Editions. In the months since I finished reading her stories, I continue to be haunted by them, their fierce sense of form and the rigorous intelligence and breadth of their investigations. “It’s astonishing how nimbly Anne Germanacos glides across presupposed boundaries—between dream and myth, between poetry and prose, between her own dueling provenances of ancient Aegean islands and the modern San Francisco peninsula,” Johnathan Kiefer writes in SF Weekly. Germanacos’s stories leap from myth to domestic scene to essayistic meditation, all the while expertly mapping their own movement; she is a bold and exacting chronicler of the love affair between form and content. In the Time of the Girls offers both the great seductions of the short story and—at the same time, with a mischievous facility—an exhilarating study of the act of fiction-making.
I wanted to discuss Anne’s work with her, but instead of a traditional interview, I thought we might offer another “writer’s dictionary”: I sent her a list of terms, and she offers here her definitions.
A writer’s dictionary by Anne Germanacos
Arrival: The sense of a new, seemingly more immediate relation to time.
May happen again and again in the space of a story—writing or reading one—as well as a life.
Bandage: You tell stories to ease the bleeding, but I wouldn’t call that a bandage.
Blind: Stay blind to what you may be doing until you can no longer keep your eyes closed. Opening them upon your own designs is another kind of arrival.
Breath: (You breathe a sigh of relief.)
Center: Always looking around for the center. It’s right here!
Charm: A discrete physical symbol of the action: knocking on wood. Also, a way to lure.
Citation: Identified echoes. In stories, best left uncited. (To be recognized—or not—by a reader.)
Constraint: To produce tension, a little like clothing. Protection and barrier. You play your piece between the two. (related to: tightrope walking)
Departure: You leave one story for another, though it may pop up again. (see arrival)
Dog: Down on all fours, you let yourself be abandoned by words. Muzzle to muzzle—a dog’s nose is cold!
Echo: Incessant, infinite. (Sometimes best ignored.)
Epiphany: A calculated (literary) form of arrival.
The fictional essay: No lines between genres!
Form (desire): Like a body, desire’s inspiration and its home.
Haunt (v.): A form of blindness. (Definitely has its uses.)
Heritage: Put it aside, but feel free to plunder!
Icon: Saint in a frame. (framed saint)
Labor: Mostly internal, often invisible.
Lure: A more potent form of charm. A finger, motioning, “Come here.”
Mask: Somewhere between stark naked and overdressed lies nudity. The perfect mask?
Murmur: One’s heart in the night. Urge the heart’s murmur toward syllables, and words.
Obeisance: My sister once said: I bow to no one.
I bow to my sister!
Omen: Tend to take a bird’s flight as omen. (Too much Iliad.)
Precipitate: Life becoming something else: a written vapor. A form of translation.
Practice: Daily, hourly. Best: minute by minute! Also, see bandage, lure, mask, labor.
Signal: Faint, or clear.
Static: Change the station!
Stitch by stitch, you make a written dress.
The emotion of the paragraph: In the reader’s hands. The arrival you labor for!
The pastoral: Among sheep and goats. We graze together, though our constraints are different.
Our dresses, too.
Territory: Just land, beneath the imposed markings. The body from which the heart’s moisture is made vapor. (see form, desire)
Turn: Always looking for a turn, possibly another way of speaking about arrival.
(may be a function of the light)
Wind: Through the tinkling turbines fueling this screen, this machine, and all the unseen apparatus carrying my words to you. (Signal, or omen?)