River Teeth – Spring 2006

For those of us tired of most literary journals’ slim nonfiction pickin’s, River Teeth offers not only quantity, but variety. Taking its name from David James Duncan’s genre-bending book, this all-nonfiction journal prints narrative reportage, essays, memoirs and critical essays to, as they put it, “illuminate this emerging genre.” In his 40-page memoir “Starting at the Bottom Again,” Dustin Beall Smith, a 57-year-old, cosmically disoriented key grip, follows a Lakota camera assistant from his world of New York City studio suck-ups down the rabbit hole of adopted spirituality and cultural collaging.

For those of us tired of most literary journals’ slim nonfiction pickin’s, River Teeth offers not only quantity, but variety. Taking its name from David James Duncan’s genre-bending book, this all-nonfiction journal prints narrative reportage, essays, memoirs and critical essays to, as they put it, “illuminate this emerging genre.” In his 40-page memoir “Starting at the Bottom Again,” Dustin Beall Smith, a 57-year-old, cosmically disoriented key grip, follows a Lakota camera assistant from his world of New York City studio suck-ups down the rabbit hole of adopted spirituality and cultural collaging. Mixing humor with poignancy, this is a self-effacing existential romp where, with only a few forced revelations, we can laugh at ourselves as we Jim-Morrison-drunk-dance on Pine Ridge’s medicine-wheel world and stare our painfully modest humanity in its wrinkled face. In “The Center of Another Universe,” Lynda Rutledge reflects on the loss of her storm-chasing brother and the universe of things that might have been. Nature writer Jerry Dennis’ “Common Correspondents in Nature” starts with a list of human associations in nature and concludes with a heartbreaking anecdote of an outcast Indian child’s death. Rounding out the issue is “The Thirteenth Hour,” a newspaper-type piece recording the fatal boat wreck of a South Carolina country singer (lots of Indians and wrecks in this issue), “The Year You Learn About Happiness,” an overly self-conscious essay recounting the effects of a nervous system disease (written in the irritating “you will X” voice), and an interview with Pulitzer-winner Thomas French. Don’t be fooled: River Teeth may come from a university English department and carry the cheap, pixilated, glossy cover photo of a vanity press, but the caliber of the work belongs in prime bookstore shelf space alongside BOMB and Esquire, forcing myself to ask, once again, why we fans have to search so hard for a good nonfiction reader.
[www.riverteethjournal.com]