Gulf Coast tales

Abstract

Gulf Coast tales Jillian Brenner (bio) Moon Trees and Other Orphans Leigh Camacho Rourks Black Lawerence Press www.blacklawrence.com/moon-trees-and-other-orphans/ 175 Pages; Print, $15.95 Moon Trees and Other Orphans is the debut collection of Cuban American writer Leigh Camacho Rourks and a winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award. The collection is set along the Gulf Coast, where the natural beauty of the environment and the fragility of characters suffering with sickness, poverty, and mental illness combine with the harshness of their reality, resulting in unforgettable stories of impossible strength in impossible places. Camacho Rourks does not shy away from pushing her characters to their limits and examining the fallout as they break, with a style that invites both comedic commentary and sobering realizations about what it means to be disenfranchised in the South. Of the array of memorable and nuanced characters, the most remarkable of them all is perhaps the setting itself. With a characterization of place reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor’s writings of the South, Camacho Rourks brings the Gulf Coast of Louisiana to life. Though each story varies in plot and detail, the theme of hard-shelled characters nursing weaknesses — often hidden behind a veneer of wit and sarcasm — and pushing through brutal circumstances is consistent in the collection. These characters fall, they make bad decisions, and they seem very much alive. The titular story, “Moon Trees,” follows Essie and her brother, Stute, as Essie struggles to provide a stable home in the midst of their mother’s struggle with paranoid schizophrenia. Essie, a teenager, shows her mother a culmination of kindness, love, pity, and rage as Essie narrates the “myths” of their family’s history. The title comes from the family’s fascination with a 1970’s space mission, in which Stuart Roosa took an “unborn forest” into orbit before returning to plant the seeds on earth. Though the basic plot is not new, the narrative style brings a freshness and originality to the story. The commentary on the stigmas of mental illness, the difficulty of finding adequate treatment, and the failure of inequal access to education for children in low income homes is there, but they work as the subtext of the narrative. Instead, Comacho Rourks asks her readers to consider what it means to be special or how far the strands of family can be pulled before they break. Though setting is not as prevalent here as other stories, details of New Orleans and a secret “moon tree” along the River Walk are woven in. Comacho Rourks’s writing is well paced and concise, yet, despite the harshness of her subjects, inarguably beautiful. One such example is Essie’s description of her mother’s story of finding one of Roosa’s seeds and her mother’s belief that her subsequent pregnancy with Essie resulted in her illness: I can tell you how one day, when she was very lonely, she gobbled that seed up to make me. When I was a child, I did not fall asleep to Cinderella’s broom strokes and ballroom dancing. Instead, my mother told me of how her white fish-belly, iridescent with life, grew heavy and catered with my weight. I branched out inside of her, and my fetal limbs, long and searching, pierced her brain and left her addled. While “Moon Trees” is the collection’s ode to character, “Pinched Magnolias” is among the best at juxtaposing Louisiana swampland as both hero and villain. By the end of the second page, Dalia — a clear image of femininity at a height of five feet and wearing a floral sundress — has started her day by shooting her husband and then making a pot of coffee. Dalia and her sister, the sheriff, grew up on a large property alongside the bayou, where they learned to skin animals from their loving father whose murdered corpse was found in the swamp years before. The women speak to each other calmly as they dismantle the body of Dalia’s husband to be dumped for alligators. Dalia and Mary are both as much products of their environment as they are bound to it...