It occurred to me, while reading L. Annette Binder’s collection Rise, that perhaps the most magical skill a true storyteller possesses is the ability to restore to the reader the sense of what a strange voyage we’re on, this life. It seems that this strangeness of life would be evident at all times, but the fact is that, except during moments of heightened awareness, the edges get dull, the awe boils down. Things are what they are, and they fail to astonish.
But, while reading Rise, each time I put it down, I found the colors brighter, the objects around me more intriguing, the dialogue overheard more full of portent, and the whole idea of story—how it can be both a craft and just the weirdness of what happens—more alive.
What a heroic feat!
L. Annette Binder has gone so deeply, and with such mystical brilliance and loyalty, into her own world that she has brought mine to me in high relief. Or, she has climbed a rickety ladder to get the view from up there in order to share it with me. Or, she has spent the night out in the orchard, listening in on what the worms in the apples have to say. Or, she has risked a fortune on a number, and, lucky for me, has won.
This feeling that she was helping me, via her stories, to see differently caused me to recall an anecdote told by the anthropologist Richard Grossinger in his book The Night Sky. He writes of an experience he had while doing research on people who believed they had been abducted by aliens:
At a UFO meeeting that I attended in the basement of a bank in Hamtramck, Michigan, the gathering was told that it was honored by visitors from Venus and Saturn. I looked around the room, and suddenly everyone appeared strange and extraterrestrial. Everyone was a candidate.
There are moments like this in life—bright flashes of intensity. Some kind of defamiliarization has taken place. We see it all differently, however briefly. But there aren’t very many of them. Rise reminds us that real storytellers exist to bring these experiences to us.
To everything she sets her fabulist eye on, L. Annette Binder brings this intensity. Like all of our best storytellers, she reacquaints us with our world. Borges would have recognized this genius, as would have Poe, O’Connor, and Mann. Like these writers (and others whose writing she recalls—Cormac McCarthy, Joan Didion, Steven Millhauser, the Brothers Grimm), L. Annette Binder brings word to us from beyond the quotidian of what is always there. She both casts a spell and breaks it. To experience Rise is as much to experience wonder (again, and as if for the first time) as it is to read a collection of wonderful stories.