Five Points – 2003

The quiet, simple beauty of Paula Eubanks’ black and white photographs featured in this issue tells you all you need to know about the fiction you’ll find here. These are high-quality stories, told in clear, confident, but unadorned prose. This issue opens with “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” by Alice Hoffman, with strongly depicted characters and a keen sense of place: “I could place a single blade of eelgrass between my fingers and whistle so loudly the oysters buried in the mud would spit at us.” In “An Only Child,” Julia Lamb Stemple gives us a heartbreaking look at a boy’s ambivalence towards growing up: “He wanted to hold himself close to [his babysitter] again but thought that she didn’t want him to, and something seemed to come loose inside him. He looked over at the triangle of shadow between the ficus and the entertainment center where he had been hiding and saw that she must have known he was there all the time.”

The quiet, simple beauty of Paula Eubanks’ black and white photographs featured in this issue tells you all you need to know about the fiction you’ll find here. These are high-quality stories, told in clear, confident, but unadorned prose. This issue opens with “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” by Alice Hoffman, with strongly depicted characters and a keen sense of place: “I could place a single blade of eelgrass between my fingers and whistle so loudly the oysters buried in the mud would spit at us.” In “An Only Child,” Julia Lamb Stemple gives us a heartbreaking look at a boy’s ambivalence towards growing up: “He wanted to hold himself close to [his babysitter] again but thought that she didn’t want him to, and something seemed to come loose inside him. He looked over at the triangle of shadow between the ficus and the entertainment center where he had been hiding and saw that she must have known he was there all the time.” Traditional stories like these anchor this journal, and truly they are masterful. Too much of a good thing can be cloying, however, and the editors wisely enliven this issue with a few offbeat selections. Michael Knight defies our expectations about believable characters and motivations in “Midnight at the Admiral Semmes,” where bizarre characters cavort joylessly on New Year’s Eve. And in “Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Curtain,” George Garrett bares the fiction writer’s art, and artifice, as he discusses his choices for characterization in the course of telling the story. Yet his characters, also writers, are themselves engaged in the American middle-class obsession with “defining and redefining themselves.” While Five Points remains traditional at heart, the edgier pieces provide a balance that keeps this well regarded journal feeling fresh.