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Tuesday, July 31, 1984

MIAMI SOUTH FLORIDA MAGAZINE Reviews Books by Richard Grayson

MIAMI SOUTH FLORIDA MAGAZINE is featuring an article on Richard Grayson on page 32 of its current (August 1984) issue:

CUTTING EDGE

Richard Grayson is a young writer who experiments with the short story form. His stories don't necessarily have the traditional beginning, middle and end. Some are extremely brief but intense sketches. Some jump radically in time or place. Others are stories in the form of notes, questionnaires and interviews. They are all stories which uncover a person who must deal with the shallowness, anonymity and pain Grayson finds in today's life. Grayson deals with that subject with poignancy and humor.



A four-year resident of South Florida, Grayson lives in North Miami Beach, teaches English at Broward Community College in Davie, and has had more than 125 stories published, most in exceedingly outre magazines. Some of these stories have been compiled in three hardcover books. Others are gathered in two chapbooks, which are thin, softcover collections. His latest publication, I Brake for Delmore Schwartz (Somerville, Mass., Zephyr Press, 1983) contains, paradoxically, much of his earliest work. In many of these stories, he deals with his personal vision of his Jewishness. His characters face loneliness and alienation with little loving absurd gestures. "Reluctance," the opening story, is about the love he felt for, and the pain he caused, his great-grandmother. "She told me," he writes, "she would make cookies when my own son was born, and when I said that would never happen, she just grabbed me up to her mammoth breasts and shook me until I laughed and said okay, I will have a son."

"By now," claims Grayson, "I've forgotten which work is autobiographical. Some of it is."

He also plays with perception, challenging the way we take the appearance of things for reality. "One of my feelings is that we live in a time when the perception or the so-called appearance of things is more important than what is real. Good writers always challenge our society. I hope to get people stirred up and even angry and outraged," he says. "I don't like telling people what they want to hear because they get enough of that on television."

And he does outrage, especially in his "press releases," a black comic part of his fictional work. As part of his experiments iwth perception and the way the media shapes ours, Grayson sends out press releases for his make-believe organizations like Future Fetuses of America and The Devil Broadcasting Company, which has "non-programs" like Satan Place, Route 666, and I Love Lucifer. He and his mother ran as delegates to the Democratic Convention on the platform of the Committee for Immediate Nuclear War. The publicity they received via the press releases garnered the pair more than 10,000 votes.


The surrealist Latin American writers Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges are his literary models, so it is not surprising that Grayson produces such stories as With Hitler in New York (New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1979). He portrays Hitler as nothing more than an ordinary, likeable person with ominous undertones to his personality, thus asking and telling the reader how Hitler was able to reach his stats in the first place.

What makes Grayson's work outstanding, though, is that he mixes conventional narrative styles and subject matter with experimental games and unconventional material.

True, some of his experiments don't work, such as the tiresome and cliched Eating at Arby's (Brooklyn, NY: Grinning Idiot Press, 1982) but when I read the opening lines to the title story of his latest book, I know I am communicating with a person who is not afraid of looking down toward reality:

"Sometimes when I wake up in my loft bed in the mornings and I see the bars on the windows, I remember I am in prison. I try to feel repentant for the awful crimes I have committed, but then I remember that this memory is a false one and that the bars on my windows are only to protect me from other people . . . . Other times I decide that I really am in prison."

---Ann Reaben Prospero

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Richard Grayson at Waldenbooks, Books & Books, 296 Aragon Avenue, Coral Gables, and Bookworks, 6933 Red Road, South Miami.

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