selected short works ~ Kim Adrian

05
Selected Short Works

My Thoughts on Paté
Agni, short story

What is consciousness? Is it in your head or is it something your head encounters? Is it in the world itself, can you touch it? Or does it touch you? Our brains are matter, of course, like rocks, or stars, or like that stick of butter melting in the sun on my kitchen counter. Our brains are things. Soft and greyish. Bumpy. They say electrical impulses carry our thoughts and these impulses jump from synapse to synapse. Sometimes deep paths are worn over long trails of synapses, and these constitute habitual thought, like rote memories or those odd connections that haunt you on a regular basis. For example, say there’s a certain stop sign at a certain street corner with a certain sticker on it with the name of a certain band that, for no reason you can think of, reminds you each and every time of your mother’s garden.

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Ten Conversations about 'My Struggle'
The Gettysburg Review, essay
Notable Essay, Best American Essays 2020

At the little sushi restaurant near my husband’s new office, I fish a flat sliver of ice out of my water glass and rub it against the inside of my wrist. David asks how a person can get carpel tunnel from reading a book, and I take the final installment of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s novel My Struggle out of my backpack to show him, again, how thick it is.

"Mostly it happened at the beginning. When all the weight was in my right hand."

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Red Currants and 'Gooseberries'
Tin House, essay

Once, about eight or nine years ago, I caught a glimpse of some wild red currants growing by the side of the road. The road traced the spine of a rolling, lightly wooded hill in West Virginia; my husband and I were on our way home from a wedding, and he was driving—forty, maybe fifty miles an hour—while I half dozed in the passenger seat. But my eyes must have been at least partially open, because I saw the berries dangling behind a thin screen of leaves and branches, glowing in a reaching bit of sunshine. And when I saw them, I felt some enormous thing—a feeling, you could call it for the sake of convenience, though it seemed much more than that—quickly rise in me and then, just as quickly, evaporate.

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Knitting 101
New World Writing, lyric essay

To the novice, the craft of knitting can seem a fussy and bewildering thing, but really, even fairly complex patterns are doable with nothing more than patience, diligence, and a modicum of skill. Still, one must always approach the activity of knitting with a keen sense of adventure. As one of the nicotine-infused salesladies who work at my local yarn shop once told me (disgusted by another customer’s fear of improvisation), “Knitting is all about taking chances!”

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Last Cookies
New World Writing, lyric essay

To make last cookies, you first must make not-last cookies—Chocolate-Almond Biscotti, packed in a large tea tin. These you must give to your father to give to his sister at Christmastime, his sister having stayed home in New York City, as she was too ill to visit Boston for the holiday. Of course, you can’t go so far as to call this a batch of “everyday” cookies, because your aunt is so sick, but they are at least vaguely feel-good cookies because while she’s lost her appetite for almost everything else, your aunt (whom you have always resembled) eats them one right after the other while lying on the couch in the apartment she shares with your father, attached to an oxygen tank and watching Dr. Phil with her nurse’s aide.

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poe

Poe's Death-Watches and the Architecture of Doubt
New England Review, essay

I've been trying, for the past few weeks, to memorize Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven." Decadent in its rhythms, deep purple in its emotion, crowded with Gothic details (velvet curtains, tufted cushions, tinkling sounds of seraphim), the poem is so sunk in Romanticism that the modern reader, with a generally much sparer sensibility, might find something closer to silliness than revelation in its famous lines. "I can't believe you're so into that," my husband said the other night as I sat on the stairs near our kitchen, reading and rereading the poem out loud while he made dinner. "Just stay away from the fake English accent," he warned me. "That's the worst."

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Why Dim Sum Makes Me Feel Tender
Seneca Review, lyric essay
Chinese translation in 作家 (Writer Magazine)

In college I knew a boy who walked funny, and a wrestler with golden ringlets, and a Greek boy who danced like an angel, and I knew a boy whose mother killed herself with a heavy-duty electrical extension cord. I knew other boys in college, too, but for some reason these are the four I still occasionally remember with affection despite the fact that, in reality, I never actually got to know any of them all that well. To tell the truth, I don’t even remember most of their names.

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I Wish I Could Write Like Russell Edson
Brevity, lyric essay

I wish I could write like Russell Edson because then I could show my husband standing in the kitchen like a tree that lost its leaves all at once. Or like a rock in the living room that doesn’t notice the lichen. And my daughter would be a bird in the tree, and my son would spend hours climbing on the rock, inspecting the lichen and watching the bird. In this scenario, I might bake some cookies and spread a picnic blanket in the living room and lean against the rock, which might or might not moan, and when the children weren’t looking, I’d tell the rock how much I missed him.

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Toast
Michegan Quarterly Review, short story
Distinguished Story, Best American Short Stories 2014

One of the strangest memories I own is of wandering around an old-fashioned carnival, complete with the smells of popcorn, cotton candy, and oily, meat-scented smoke; there were games of chance, amusement rides, and dozens of bicolor tents housing such spectacles as the Strong Man, the Fat Lady, and the Bearded Girl. I must have been ten or eleven years old at the time, and on one side of me was my sister, holding my right hand, on the other was Darin, holding my left. Darin was the little boy who belonged to the woman who was supposed to be babysitting us—my sister and me—but who really, more often than not, left all three of us in front of the TV while she took naps and ran errands.

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The Strange Child
libretto

The Strange Child is a full-length chamber opera based on a fairy tale by E.T.A. Hoffmann (Das Fremde Kind), with music composed by Julia Werntz. The libretto explores the theme of childhood imagination and its often painful conflicts with the adult world. It takes place in a bucolic village, where the lives of siblings Christlieb and Felix are upended by the arrival of two strangers: a cruel tutor named Master Inkblot, and a mysterious sprite who lives in the woods. Weird and magical happenings culminate in a violent struggle in which imagination itself is at stake.

The Strange Child premiered at The Alloy Studios, Pittsburgh, PA, June 17 and 18, 2022. It was produced with the generous support of the Pittsburgh Foundation, the Opportunity Fund, and the Heinz Endowments. The opera was commissioned by Kamratōn, a music group that "exists to challenge the boundaries of music performance, expand the contemporary chamber music repertoire, and celebrate the role of women as leaders in the arts." Its premiere was directed by Shana Simmons, with musical direction by Daniel Curtis, and singers and musicians from Kamratōn and Quince ensembles.

Act One, Scene 1 ▼

ACT ONE
SCENE 1 — THE HAMLET OF BRAKELHEIM

A small village lane. Beyond the village, a stand of birch trees. High on a hill, a tidy cottage, its roof topped by a great stork roosting in a gigantic nest. Beyond the cottage—a dense, mysterious wood. Beyond the wood, blue mountains.

COUNT CYPRIANUS
(accompanied by LADY VON BRAKEL, ADULGUNDE, and HERMANN)

Tell me, man, where can I find the castle of Sir Thaddeus von Brakel?

VILLAGER 1

Our lordship lives up on that hill, just beyond the birch trees, shimmering in the breeze.

BIRCH TREES

Aflutter, ashivver, aglitter in the sun.
It’s a kind of oscillation.

VILLAGER 2

Up the hill, past where the birch trees quiver. There he lives with his wife and two mischief-makers—wild things they are, full of capers.

BIRCH TREES

Jubilation.

COUNT CYPRIANUS

(to his family)

What a talkative bunch!

VILLAGER 3
(to audience)

Though just between us, it isn’t much of castle, more like a cottage. But its windows are bright, and its vines are thick and thickly sown with swallows’ nests.

BIRCH TREES

And the swallows’ sing so sweetly.
They love their lives completely.

VILLAGER 1
(to COUNT)

Nowhere on this good green earth is there a more contented place than Brakelheim. Though it be modest, though it be small.

COUNT CYPRIANUS
(annoyed)

Oh, for God’s sake!

BIRCH TREES

Agrarian, agreeable. Amenable, amiable.

VILLAGER 2
(to audience)

Yet again, truth be told, Sir Thaddeus hardly looks the part of a lord. He’s more like one of us.

BIRCH TREES

Humanitarian, egalitarian. Charitable, practical.

(COUNT CYPRIANUS waves off the VILLAGERS in annoyance as he and his family exit to make their way to the Von Brakels’ house)

KIM ADRIAN

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