The World Is on Fire

March 30, 2015
The author of The Wet Collection returns with a second collection of essays, this time with an apocalyptic bent. The book’s 21 selections—an odd commingling of dark tourism travelogues, voyeuristic impulses, and elegaic musings on the past, present, and future—take Tevis’s readers on a visceral journey from decaying railroad towns in North Dakota, where “the line between living and ghost wasn’t always obvious,” to the “Doom Town” at the Nevada atomic test site, a row of houses inhabited by mannequins “with eyes like apple seeds.” Tevis’s writing is utterly beautiful and authentically her own, driven by a deep-seated need to share the images that haunt her. Individual essays feel like the literary equivalent of long exhalations after holding one’s breath, a passionate outpouring of description and revelation (“This is no ordinary sea, no ordinary sunset, and despite its calm surface, the water reminds me somehow of solvent... This is water with an opinion”). Tevis does not provide the literary equivalent of any “duck and cover” directives for readers—her prose demands we must meet her in her burning world—but once we get there, the rewards are rich.

February 15, 2015
Evocative essays on faith, life and wonder.In these lyrical, finely crafted pieces, Tevis (English and Creative Writing/Furman Univ.; The Wet Collection: A Field Guide to Iridescence and Memory, 2012) reflects on haunted places: a house with 160 rooms stalked by its owner's ghost; a nuclear bomb testing ground in Nevada; the site of Buddy Holly's plane crash; auction rooms filled with abandoned furniture; and, not least, her own memories. Apocalypse, she writes, means "unveiling," and she searches for wisdom in devastation and despair. In the 1950s, the Nevada Test Site was a popular vacation destination where families gathered for the thrill of seeing a nuclear bomb explode, incinerating Doom Town: model houses staged with mannequins. From 1952 until 1992, 1,021 bombs exploded, the first hundred aboveground, contaminating the land forever. Tourists in Las Vegas could take a bus to the site; or they might have visited the Liberace Museum, where mannequins wore the performer's gaudy costumes, "dusted with silver, crusted with cabochons," as gorgeous and surreal as the bomb. Death haunts the Salton Sea, a vast inland body of water created by a mistake in irrigation in California's Imperial Valley. Now it is polluted, "stark and sad....Scalded, scabbed." Fish are gone, except for tilapia; birds, too. One year, park rangers cremated massive numbers of dead pelicans. The sea, Tevis writes, is "a practice apocalypse, terrible but local: if you're lucky, you can leave it behind." Like poets Gerard Manley Hopkins and Mary Oliver, Tevis sees the natural world imbued with spiritual power. "I don't want to be the same after this trip," she tells herself in the stark, forbidding landscape of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And she was not, discovering she was pregnant. During labor, "spells fill the space" and "a strange glow marks this seam between life and death." That seam glows fiercely, startlingly bright, in these rich, revelatory essays.

May 15, 2015

Tevis (literature & creative writing, Furman Univ.; The Wet Collection) grew up in South Carolina in a world of religious fire and brimstone and watching Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. This contrast of the apocalypse and glitz is what she delivers in these essays. In "Damn Cold in February: Buddy Holly, View-Master, and the A-Bomb," Tevis illustrates this point with her description of the atomic summer of 1957, when Holly was a rock-and-roll rising star, yet families were learning about bomb shelters and emergency food supplies. Similarly, Tevis compares her childhood fascination with Liberace with her admiration for the church pianist. The author has a keen eye, details from which flow through her pen into her writing. In "The Scissorman" she follows a South Carolina man who has converted his van into a workshop and travels to salons to sharpen hairstylists' scissors. In "Hammer Price (Song of the Auctioneer)" she explains her love of auctions and the ring of old room keys she purchased at a hotel sale. VERDICT Tevis's essays provide a travelog of her life. Her insights take readers from the steel of scissor blades and the cold waters of Alaska to the fire of atomic bomb testing grounds as seen through a View-Master.--Joyce Sparrow, Kenneth City, FL

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