Exploded View: Observations on Reading, Writing and Life

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

This is a charmingly presented small book to hold in the hand, keep by
the bed, slip in one’s purse or pack. Roxanna Bikadoroff’s
black-and-white drawings are scattered here and there. The author’s
random thoughts appear in alphabetical order. One entry is a poem, one
is a three-line story: many run only one or two pages.

The “O” entry—“Out of nothing”—tells of the first night at
a writing class where the author is the teacher. A word game evokes a
“thin daisy chain” as each person speaks a single word. The second
time around, the words “take strength and begin to breathe ... Now we
can sit back and watch the images grow, clamber up the green walls,
float into the unused spaces of air ... coalescing like rain in the
splendid radiance of story.” McKay might be talking of her own book.

She certainly plays—with memories of childhood, sounds and silences
of music, made-up stories, riffs on a word or an image—and often
writes like a dream. She can also teeter on the edge of precious, but
then admits it with disarming candor. “Was that last piece too
much?” she asks. “Let me try to make you care.” And she turns on a
dime and does. Her humor constantly undercuts any whiff of cuteness and
a common sense runs along with the fun. As she says, “Sometimes
there’s only bread, with no butter.”

The “Z” entry uses the word “zymurgy,” which is about the
process of fermentation, and throws into the mix two 80-year-olds, a man
in a wheelchair, and a dictionary, and ends by musing, “What do we do
with it all?” What indeed? Is it snatches of this and that which
capture the fancy but yield nothing that really remains, or is it a
breezy exploration of human existence? Probably both. That puzzle is
part of what makes it intriguing.