Link, Kelly. Magic for Beginners. Northampton: Small Beer P, 2005.

I first read Kelly Link in the summer of 2003 while lying on my belly half-out of some friends’ tent in the mountains of central Pennsylvania. Say a half-hour outside Carlisle. We were on a camping trip for the Fourth, and these friends were meeting older friends, all of whom were hiking while I decided to stay and read the McSweeney’s Thrilling Tales I’d brought with me. Her story “Catsuit” was in there, at the center of which is the idea that cats are just children in suits, and that if you split them open, people will fall out, naked and confused and angry.

Anyway, I’d never read anything like her before. I got her collection, Stranger Things Happen and devoured it the way devotees do, its stories about dead people and girl detectives and snow queens and dogs that are shadows and people. Libraries, dark and scary. I didn’t know that you could put things like that into a story and still expect a reader to follow you, and to discover things, and to thank you for it. At least that’s what I did. I’ve never been able to do with my writing what Kelly Link has done with hers. It’s so hard to make up something that feels “right” or “accurate” in regard to the world we live in. I can’t imagine how tough it is to make up something accurate to a world that itself doesn’t exist.

This collection is spotty, or maybe my memory of it is. I read these stories in bed before going to sleep. Many nights I’d pick up the book and not remember a single word of what I’d read the night previous, or, often, several nights previous. It’s never a good idea to read one short story in numerous sittings. Still, Link* is playing all sorts of games with form here. Lots of times she switches tenses in a story, and it’s rare that I can figure out why. “Catsuit” seems to do it every other section, but not always. It’s not a clear pattern. “Lull” alternates, too, but then again at the center of that story is a tape “where all the lyrics were palindromes” (239):

You couldn’t get this music on CD. That was part of the conceit. It came only on cassette. You played one side, and then on the other side the songs all played backwards and the lyrics went forwards and backwards all over again in one long endless loop. La allah ha llal. Do, oh, oh, do you, oh do, oh wanna? (240)

So this idea infiltrates the writing such that you get such sentences as “The music on the tape loops and looped” (246), and about which I just don’t know.

My favorite story is the title story, which is mostly about a TV show called The Library. (Except what’s weird is that the story starts with “In one episode of The Library, a boy named Jeremy Mars, fifteen years old, sits on the roof of his house in Plantagenet, Vermont” (189), and it turns out that Jeremy is this story’s hero, and that he loves to watch a TV show called The Library, so which is the show? The story itself or the show in the story? And then if you figure that question out, whence the title, “Magic for Beginners”? It all gets a little kooky.)

Anyway, so the show kind of rules, in that it takes place inside this many-floored library that has forests and oceans inside of it, mountains and shit, and the show itself never comes on the same channel and never airs at the same time. People scour UHF stations and keep themselves close to the Internet to report findings. And the way the show deals with the magical and the way it keeps a group of teens positively rapt, I think its best real-life analogue is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which was a pretty great show. This story made me think of the one episode that ended, just before the final credits, with Buffy coming home and finding her younger sister annoyed with her, and the both of them yelling for their mom. But up to this point in the entire history of the show, Buffy didn’t have a sister, and nobody ever mentioned it. And yet, this episode, a sister just appeared, and everyone acted as if she’d been there forever.

Could you imagine writing for such a show? What fun! When I love magic, which isn’t so often, this is what I love about it, or this is what I think of when I think of magic. Link’s stories show us that magic is possibility. It’s a kind of gift for fiction writers. It’s like the best kind of gift. It’s like, when you allow magic into a story, you bring in more danger, in that readers find themselves in a world they can’t logically predict. So when your characters work through the weird, unpredictable obstacles that magic might throw their way, and when they do it in ways that are human and honest, it’s like we love them more than we would otherwise.

Am I making sense? Maybe it’s this: my immediate intuition seems to think that writing a story with magic, where anything can happen, would be totally easy. Too easy. If someone’s in a jam, I could just use magic to solve the problem. But what Link’s stories show me is that writing stories with magic is so, so hard. Fiction is fake, as one of my students liked often to say, and with magic you have to work that much harder to make the fake stuff real.


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* I wonder if I can call her Kelly, having met her at the AWP Conference in Austin this year. She gave a talk on non-realist fiction, and then she signed my book, which I bought for a steal the day previous at Small Beer’s table. I’d tell you what she wrote on the title page, but then it would become less special.