Dancing in Their Dead Mother's Dresses

"This is the universe of everything," says the narrator of "Balloons," the first story in this lyrical and luminous collection. The protagonist is nine-year-old Sophia, who also answers to "Come here" and "Quiet," and whose mother has died, leaving her with a distant father and a dog named Ketchup. Sophia is grieving, growing up, and listening to the secrets of the whispering creek. Her world is small, but her imagination is vast: together they form her universe of everything. Doug Ramspeck's story collection, Dancing in Their Dead Mother's Dresses, is its own universe of everything. The stories feel set as much in the characters' imaginations as they are set in the Midwest. But the external surroundings of muddy Midwestern rivers, train bridges, and winter lakes are not just backdrops; they are sources of metaphors that help the characters make meaning of their often unsettling realities: dead mothers, absent fathers, sick siblings, inscrutable friends, intriguing neighbors, and unhappy wives. Dancing in Their Dead Mother's Dresses calls to mind other language-rich contemporary story collections about the harsh realities of both the urban and rural Midwest: The Luck of the Fall and Eight Mile High by fellow poet Jim Ray Daniels; Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock; and American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell. Ramspeck shares an interest in exploring the effects of traumatic events that destabilize the natural and man-made worlds. His stories are narrated in the closest third person possible, transporting readers to characters' inner worlds through free indirect discourse. In our circumscribed realities, where mothers die but children live on, or brothers die and siblings must live on, sometimes all we have are the worlds of our imaginations. At the end of "Old Snow" it is summertime, but Olivia holds a snow globe in her hand, and it becomes a metaphor for her own world, her universe of everything. She shakes it: "It is snowing in the world inside her hand. The world there is snowing."