“I now pronounce you man and wife.”
You know the deal — white dresses, flowers, kissing, an exchange of rings, a promise of this thing called forever — before a priest, a rabbi, a judge, a confession in front of loved ones and that distant aunt you had to invite despite your distaste for her political views and loud chewing.
Fiction writer Katie Chase, who is reading at Literati tonight at 7 p.m., has crafted her debut collection of short stories upon this phrase. Her stories explore the strange world of marriage tradition in terms of gender, family dynamics and the public and private ways we grow up in a bizarre and arbitrarily gendered world.
“The expectations that our society, and others, have not just for women but for men, seem endlessly strange and fascinating to me,” Chase wrote in an email interview. “Fiction, as an endeavor that is equal parts intellectual and emotional, seems the proper place to probe those thoughts and feelings.”
Chase grew up in a suburb outside of Detroit and graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.A. in English in 2002, where she studied with English professors Eileen Pollack and Peter Ho Davies and lecturer Tish O’Dowd. She then went on to get her MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Her title story, “Man and Wife,” draws on heavy influence from women writers such as Edith Wharton, Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood. It’s also inspired by writing that has revolved around women, the institution of marriage and how it marks a female life.
“I knew I wanted to make work that reacted in some way to what has been considered ‘female,’ and I was excited by the possibilities of working in more imaginative territory, with creative worlds and premises,” Chase said.
“Man and Wife” focuses on nine-and-a-half-year-old Mary Ellen, betrothed to a much older man whom she has never met. “The Hut” tells the story of the narrator’s visceral loneliness upon getting her period for the first time. Chase wrote that in stories like these, she unpacks “a little more forthrightly what it feels like to be initiated into womanhood.”
The work of fiction has the Midwestern touch of Chase’s suburban Detroit upbringing. In one story, “Creation Story,” the female pre-teen narrator observes her adolescent brother in rituals different than her own. The story is tinged with distinct tones of industrial development and automobile culture.
In playing with rites of passage in imaginative space, Chase wrote that the story “Every Good Marriage Begins in Tears” “came more out of research and a desire to put myself, insofar as that is impossible, within the bounds of another culture.” The story is a vodka-soaked narrative that takes place in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan.
“I do see so many of the premises and worlds in the book to be exaggerations of reality, not merely their own fictions,” Chase wrote. “I do hope it can make readers see our world anew.”
Although the collection enters realms of the uncanny or surreal, the stories hold a kernel of honest fact, humor and strangeness about the grit of what it is to be a woman, bound within the structure of historical rite and tradition. With her fiction, she bestows upon her audience an opportunity for rich imagination — a chance to lift the veil, stories that question the vows, an invitation to enter the history and secrets of not-quite-girls but not-quite-women beyond their place as figures atop a cake.