Erin Brenneman
LAUREN CARTER, PLACES LIKE THESE.
TORONTO: BOOK*HUG PRESS, 2023. $23.00.
In her short story collection Places Like These, Lauren Carter displays her uncanny ability to craft vibrant yet fleeting moments in the lives of her characters which are, at once, mundane, momentous, and undeniably human. Throughout the seventeen stories contained within this collection, Carter illustrates how the choices we make in search of human connection—or in our efforts to break free of it—impact the trajectory of our lives and those of others. Readers are introduced to a woman seeking to flee the confines of her marriage in “That Lift of Flight,” while in “Bones,” another puts down even deeper roots within her relationship while pulling against the family ties that threaten to return her from the small Northern Manitoba town where she has settled. In “Tenderloin,” a mother seeks out her daughter in the slums of San Francisco, and “Dear Leila, Dear Timothy” tells the story of a woman grieving the family life she and her partner had long been imagining together.
In only a few pages, Carter is able to slip into the lives of her characters and paint them in startling colour, and she does so while assuming that those lives both began before they were put on the page, and extend far beyond it. “Grass Fire,” in particular, left me contemplating what exactly I had witnessed long after I moved on to the next story, as the grim suspicions the protagonist has of her partner are slowly realized. Still, I find myself questioning the implications of the final lines—what do they mean?—as the story closes: “There I stood, half naked, captive in the shadow of the large sign that explained how prairies are made. How they need to be burned to the ground, blackened by fire, for any new shoots to grow.”
These stories and characters feel familiar in the way that they remind us of our own, imperfect humanity. The choices Carter’s characters make are not necessarily right, nor perhaps the ones we ourselves would make, but we sympathize with them in their grief, their desires, and their longing. Written in raw, realistic, and frank prose, the stories contain an undercurrent of lyricism, as evident in this passage from the closing piece, “Story”:
The first night we met, Jonathan and I fucked. That’s what he calls it, the sharp consonants percussing on his lips. Josie left early… even though in the bathroom, I told her I’d do whatever she wanted. Go home or stay. The glare of the fluorescents revealed the splotchy weakness of grief in her face, the first lines around her eyes like pins hemming a skirt, and I thought, We’re too young for this.
Carter’s avid readers may recognize a number of these stories, like this one, as they’ve appeared in several literary journals such as Prairie Fire, The Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly, and many more, but collected here they showcase the vast range of the human experience, strung together by the thread of our connections to one another.
As someone who often struggles to find the time to settle into a novel, I find myself turning to short stories to better fit the constraints that school and work place on my reading habits; this collection allowed me to immerse myself fully in another place, even for the sparse moments I could give it. But more than that, it served as a reminder that places like these—the honest and at times ugly moments—exist everywhere, in all our lives, for us to weather and share.
Erin Brenneman
is a writer and editor based in Mississauga, though she was born and raised just outside of Stratford, Ontario. She is in her fourth year of Sheridan College’s Honours Bachelor of Creative Writing & Publishing program and most recently had two of her poems published in B222’s inaugural issue. Although she primarily writes poetry and short fiction, Brenneman is constantly looking to sharpen her skills as a reader, writer, and editor by exposing herself to a wide variety of writing and stories. She currently works as the editorial intern for The Ampersand Review.