I Have the Answer: (Made in Michigan Writers)

Short stories that manage to feel both fantastical and disturbingly familiar. If you thought the suburbs were boring, think again. Kelly Fordon's I Have the Answer artfully mixes the fabulist with the workaday and illuminates relationships and characters with crisp, elegant prose and dark wit. The stories in Fordon's latest collection are disquieting, humorous, and thought-provoking. They might catch you off guard, but are always infused with deep humanity and tenderness. In these thirteen short stories, Fordon presents people dealing with the grayness of reality and longing for transcendence. Characters within these stories are often as surprised by their own behavior as that of their neighbor's. In "Jungle Life," the narrator attempts to clarify and document the stories of his father, a war veteran, before he descends into dementia. In "Where's the Baby?" a woman reflects on her difficult childhood as she grudgingly cares for her more successful, yet exasperating sister. In "In the Dog House," a woman visits an estate sale and sifts through the layers of lifetimes past while grappling with her long-standing jealousy of a mysterious neighbor. In "The Shorebirds and The Shaman," a woman who has just lost her husband winds up at a kooky weekend retreat role-playing her way out of debilitating grief. Award-winning author Desiree Cooper has called the stories in I Have the Answer "pitch perfect . . . Fordon takes us to the precipice where trauma and triumph are equal possibilities. The people in these stories are so hauntingly real that long after I put the book down, I found myself wondering what had become of them." Readers of contemporary fiction and short stories will enjoy mulling over the complicated feelings this collection evokes.

About the Author :
Kelly Fordon is the author of an award-winning short story collection, Garden for the Blind (Wayne State University Press, 2015); a poetry chapbook, The Witness, which won the Eric Hoffer Award for the Chapbook; and a poetry collection, Goodbye Toothless House.

Review :
A shrewd and probing volume of literary tales. -- "Kirkus Reviews" Fordon's stories are a wonderfully complex look at life and how our expectations can bump up against our realities. The stories are sobering and yet, I found myself comforted by them. --Jeff Vande Zande "Jeff Vande Zande Blog" Fordon's stories hold up a mirror to our shared humanity, breathing three-dimensional life into her characters through a rotating prism of joy, tragedy, triumph, and heartbreak. This collection joins the ranks of such illustrious contemporary short story writers as Alice Munro, Jeffrey Eugenides, James Salter, and Aimee Bender. --R. J. Fox "author Love & Vodka, Awaiting Identification, and Tales from the Dork Side" Kelly Fordon is so good at telling real stories about real people, regulars folks who face irregular situations. Because she's so skilled at characterizing her protagonists, it's easy to empathize with their trauma, to see myself in their shoes. I Have the Answer isn't always a true statement here--in fact, it almost never is--but it does make for a good book, one I'm glad I spent time with today. --Michael Czyzniejewski "Story366" Reading I Have the Answer by Kelly Fordon made me more keen to get to know my neighbor. Because just like me, she is living a life to the best of her ability and her story matters. [. . .] This short story collection is a simmering display of adulthood and the challenges people face around us in silence and in shame. It is incredibly human and eloquently full of emotional truth. Some of the stories force you to stop dead in your tracks and bear witness with your whole, entire body. --Maggie Briana Chidester "The Bookslut" The author has a fine touch for breathing life into her characters and making their lives meaningful and real. --Tom Powers "Michigan in Books" This collection is perfectly timed--all of our shared experience in the pandemic makes us crave normalcy, but also validation that we're not the only ones feeling the way we do. I Have the Answer is a perfect fill for that feeling. The stories go through a huge range of experiences, showing that there is a way to get through the every-day difficulties as well as the monumental events. There's so much to be found in the pages of this collection, and thoroughly I enjoyed every page. --Bayleigh Kasper "The Sundress Blog" What a beautiful book! As I finished the last of these astute, moving, and often funny stories, I was reminded of something a fellow writer once said to an audience of fans: 'What I want is not so much that you'll get into my book but that my book will get into you.' --Julia Glass "National Book Award winner" With this surprising collection of stories set mostly in Michigan, Kelly Fordon takes her place among our most compassionate, insightful, and wry observers of contemporary American life. These are stories of mothers and daughters, wives and widows, rendered in prose that is at once poetic and plainspoken, with genuine heart and a connoisseur's eye for the absurd. --Will Allison "contributing editor at One Story Magazine"