Introducing Gladys Swan, multi-artist

Literary Review, Fall, 2004 by Thomas E. Kennedy

I began reading the stories of Gladys Swan just over twenty, years ago, in the literary journals I studied as a fledgling writer, including the grand old Sewanee Review whose editor, George Core, has likened her voice to that of Sherwood Anderson.

Eager for more, I learned that she had only published a single collection, On the Edge of the Desert. A strong collection it was, though, whose stories, in her own words, employed the imagination as "a way of knowing quite as valid as anything the rational mind can yield. " In the 25 years since that first collection, the body of Ms. Swan's work has grown, slowly at first, with the novel Carnival for the Gods--later with another novel, Ghost Dance: A Play of Voices, nominated by Louisiana State University for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and five collections of short fiction, the most recent of which, News from the Volcano was also nominated for that Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award. (For a review of that collection see The Literary Review, Fall 2002.)

Her visions of the desert of the American southwest create a landscape not merely of the earth but of existence itself, body and spirit, conscious and unconscious, so that the external world of her characters becomes a reflection of their inner life--and of ours. Hers is a voice to sing the tales of the great southwest--the circuses and rodeos, miners, ranchers, cowboys, merchants, migrants and Indians who have made their homes in that mysterious expanse of earth. Sharing mystical qualities with Hawthorne and Poe, her stories at the same time seem to predate the colonization of the Americas, rising from the ancient land itself, the vastness against which scattered human beings act out their lives. Her continuing fascination with carnivals and circuses has produced fiction that conveys not only the particular, earthy experience of American carny life, but a vision of the American soul from which it springs.

The 1990s saw Gladys Swan take another turn as an artist. Already established as a distinguished American fiction writer, she began to paint and to write poetry. Or perhaps she had begun to do so much earlier for it is startling that anyone could get that good that fast at these two demanding arts. Her poetry and paintings are as striking and memorable as her fiction. Many of the poems have appeared in prominent literary journals and several of her paintings have graced the covers of others--perhaps most notably The Literary Review special issue on Stories and Sources (Vol. 42, No. 1, 1998) which also included a Swan story and an essay on how it came to be written.

That story, in fact, had been the core piece around which Carnival for the Gods crystallized. Those who have a copy of that issue are advised to save it, along with a copy of the novel itself if they have one--for the novel is no longer in print. An American classic, it certainly should be. In Swan's Carnival we experience a prestidigitation in which a cloak of verisimilitude is neatly laid out for us, then whipped away again to reveal a glimpse of the cosmic infrastructure so that, ultimately, the visionary, aspects of the novel become more real than the earth beneath the feet of the characters who inhabit it--and a boy's search for a legendary city proceeds to an imagined land where, if that city does not exist, it can be created. Carnival for the Gods, in fact, was conceived as a trilogy; the second volume, Small Wonder, is complete, and this reader eagerly awaits its appearance in print.

Regardless of which style or which art form Gladys Swan is working in, I think the value of her art is aptly summed up in her own words about what the best kind of fiction does for the writer and for the reader: "I think that fiction enlarges one's sense of potentiality, of different ways one can be. By exposing (writer and reader) to the experiences of many kinds of people, it can, I think, increase the imaginative response to those around us, enlarge the powers of empathy. It offers an insight into the human condition and suggests the values by which we can better realize our humanity. 'It makes one see'--as Conrad said. For writer and reader both, fiction can develop the loving sense of particularity; the way a gesture, an expression, a tone of voice can create meaning; an appreciating of the way a cat moves across an alley or the way light hits a pot of geraniums, all those innumerable small things that make up the texture of daily life. Fiction can reveal now this, now that about the physical world and about the inner geography. And besides that, at its best, it's damned entertaining."

The description fits her own work nicely, and the novella presented here, "Exiles," is no exception. Those who are familiar with her work have no doubt already eagerly skipped forward to the story itself.