A Simplified Map of the Real World: The Renata Stories

by Stevan Allred Narrated by Stevan Allred

Overview

Fifteen linked stories chart a true course through the lives of families, farmers, loggers, former classmates, and the occasional stripper. In the richly imagined town of Renata, Oregon, a man watches his neighbor's big-screen TV through binoculars, an errant son paints himself silver, mysterious electrical humming emanates from an enormous barn. In A Simplified Map of the Real World, intimate boundaries are loosened by history-and high above the strife and the hope and the often hilarious, geese seek the perfect tailwind. Stevan Allred's stunning debut deftly navigates the stubborn geography of the human heart.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"The characters populating these stories have been enduring time and weather and hardship for a long time. People and forces they can’t control cut them down. Wives leave them. Friends betray them. Fathers refuse to understand them. But these people have a refreshing, ecological knowledge that there is always something to be done to make your own world complete again, at least for a minute. Even if it is eating a big bowl of your neighbor’s Rocky Road and finding a good but dumb-as-hell movie on the man’s TV to take your mind off the crap hand you’ve been dealt."
– Maria Anderson, Necessary Fiction

“In modest homes, over dinners, through divorces and the decades, we meet brothers, neighbors, daughters, soldiers, old friends and longtime rivals. From one story to another, through the years, these every day people may be villains and then victims, painted with the same brush but viewed from different angles, in different light.”
– Brian Juenemann, The Register-Guard

"... the most skillfully-woven collection of linked short stories I’ve read to date.”
– Stefanie Freele, Late Night Library

“Stevan Allred’s stories strike to the very heart—the pathos, the humor, the hope—of the American frontier. He is OUT there. Raymond Carver would love this book.”
– Robin Cody, author of Ricochet River

"Acts of neighborly kindness rub elbows with acts of raw prejudice. A rejected son learns complicated grief after the death of his father. The stunt of two brothers, an unexpected variation on boys will be boys, brings laughter in one story, then recurs in a tragic later story in a moment of magical realism. Allred offers a dazzling variation in storyteller voices, each revealing how often we hide our desires from ourselves and each other."
– Helen Sinoradzki, naming it a #1 book of 2013 in the Powell's Top 5s lists

"What a joy it is when an author's imagination is on par with his writing chops. The richly nuanced town of Renata, Oregon, becomes palpably real in A Simplified Map of the Real World, Stevan Allred's charming tapestry of life, death, love, heartache and every other human experience captured and fully realized in a series of interconnected short stories. Each snapshot of present and past life in the fictional northwestern logging town adds new layers to its cast and their complex histories with each other, quietly emphasizing the strange fact that no matter how well or how long we think know someone, we'll never truly know what inner mysteries (and occasional deluded justifications) propel them along the paths they choose."
– Madeleine Maccar, Chicago's Center for Literature & Photography

“Death and high jinks, love and rage—the ordinary doings of a small town are not so simple. Stevan Allred has clear vision and he’s a loving and joyful teller of tales. In his hands, these voices are angry, foolish, wise, heartbroken, and true.”
– Joanna Rose, author of Little Miss Strange

“Much like being ambushed by a sneaker wave, I simply surrendered to the futile and claustrophobic circumstances Allred forces the community of Renata to endure in this linked collection. As human beings we all know there are two sides—or multiple ones—to every story, and as readers, it’s pure indulgence to experience Allred’s deft ability to shift between various points of view to give us a 360-degree perspective of the intertwining lives of his characters as they meet head-on their spectrum of woes, each more heartbreaking than the last.”
– Polly Dugan, author of So Much a Part of You

"Allred writes wonderfully of loneliness, despair, and desire. The history and characters contained within the town of Renata, Oregon make this one of the most connected collection of short stories I've ever read."
– Sara Habein, Glorified Love Letters

“In A Simplified Map of the Real World, Stevan Allred creates one of the unforgettable locales of modern fiction—Renata, Oregon, a small town that takes us to the largest places in the heart. The people of Renata struggle with broken dams and families, with dangerous curves in roads and marriages, and with dreams that are both reckless and brave. These are stories as beautiful and honest as the landscape Allred loves. Gorgeously written, A Simplified Map of the Real World will make you wonder why you haven’t been reading Stevan Allred all your life.”
– Scott Sparling, author of Wire to Wire

“I don’t know how he works his magic–probably naked at the typewriter or some other trick to get so much humanity and humility on the page–but Stevan has built a world full of beautiful and messy people living beautiful and messy lives. These stories are great on their own, and even stronger together. You’ll feel like you know these people and this place better than you know your own people and place. You should be ashamed of yourself for not having read this book yet!”
– Yuvi Zalkow, author of A Brilliant Novel in the Works

“For years I’ve been teaching Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty in my Literature of the South class and didn’t think there was a short story writer who held up next to these two. Well, finishing A Simplified Map, I put Stevan Allred with them.”
– Michael Strelow, author of Henry: A Novel of Beer and Love in the West

“Beautifully crafted and marked by incisive wit, Allred’s fifteen interlinked short stories reveal the rich, dark tangle of events and emotions that lie beneath everyday happenings in small-town America, unearthing the sibling rivalries simmering beneath the surface of apparent conviviality, the devastation of divorce, the deadening sadness that follows, and the way innocent young people awaken into first love. At times humorous, at times deeply disturbing, these tales touch on the highlights of life in Renata—the stolen tractor raced through town and catapulted off a cliff into the river, and the return of a military son to great accolades while his ‘different,’ artistic brother sees beneath the sham to an underlying poverty of spirit. But Allred’s greater gift is his consummate skill at illuminating the necessary, mundane affairs of everyday life—the way all farmers talk eventually turns to the weather—and suffusing them with meaning.”
– Kristine Morris, ForeWord Reviews

“The Northwest town of Renata, the families, the connections between all these characters, their idiosyncrasies and quirks, their tribulations and moments of light, Stevan Allred makes it all very real. He intrigues from the first words and won’t let us put down each story until we know exactly how it’s to turn out.”
– Jon Bell, author of On Mount Hood

“Stevan Allred masterfully writes from 15 different points of view, giving each narrator a very distinct voice appropriate for the character. It’s hard to believe the author who wrote from the hilarious viewpoint of a crotchety old fart is the same person who wrote so poignantly from the perspective of a dying Native American woman. When he tells the stories of two neighbors or of a father and son or a nephew and an uncle, he doesn’t retell the same story twice, once for each view. Instead, Allred gives us new stories with some of the same people, told by unique voices. He does it brilliantly, proving that a writer need not be pigeonholed into a single writing style.”
– Edee Lemonier, The Reading and Writing Cafe Blog

"Divorce seems to be one of the major themes, as many of the characters are struggling through it or have some experience with it. It was nice to read about this from both male and female points of view, and I think Allred writes a woman’s voice and perspective authentically."
– Emily J, The Bookshelf of Emily J

"Anchored in the landscape of Renata, Allred’s characters seem straightforward in their “small-town” style. But as each story unfolds, more is revealed: in the nightstand of a pompous neighbor, in the complexity of Uncle Lenny, through conversations between fathers and sons and the resurgence of old high school relations."
– Christi Craig, Writing Under Pressure

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169694925
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	02/01/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Beginning of "His Ticky Little Mind"

This all begins when I come home from visiting Mother in the rest home last week and taking her down to the Norse Hall for the monthly dinner. Good eats at the Norse Hall, and Mother may not be able to remember what year it is, but she’ll sit there and tell you how that secret pinch of nutmeg made her creamed carrots the envy of all the ladies down at the grange, and that’s about all the female companionship I can handle these days.

It was Saturday evening and almost dark. That long busy drive from the city was behind me and I was eight miles past the last red light when I made the turn onto Gossard Road. I’ve lived on Gossard Road my whole life, and my whole life whenever I turn onto Gossard Road, the world has been made whole again, a place small enough that I can keep track of everything that matters and big enough to hold everything I need.

That first quarter mile the road rises and makes the tree line beyond sink, so you feel the heavens opening up big as God above you. The evening star was bright, and it had risen in its customary spot in the southern sky, which at this time of year puts it almost directly above the bungalow, which is the house I was born in, the house I now live across the road from. It was my parents who sold the bungalow and the farm that goes with it to Volpe.

Something wasn’t right. Underneath the evening star should have been the silhouette of an oak tree standing plumb and true, the only tree on that particular stretch of Gossard Road tall enough and near enough not to disappear below the top of the rise. I come up to the top of the rise and pull over in the wide spot where I like to sit for a minute and see the whole valley stretched out before me, with my little piece of paradise smack dab in the middle, the heart of the heartland, and the best forty acres in the whole damn section.

It must be in the nature of things that paradise wouldn’t be paradise without there was a snake running loose in the middle of it, because all that’s left of that oak tree is the butchery of a stump left to stand there tall, dark, and ugly.

The headlights of my truck picked up the big white ovals where Volpe cut off the lower branches. There was no lights on at Volpe’s house except for the TV, which he’s got the biggest damn TV in the whole damn county. The oak tree was laid out in rounds where he sliced it up after he dropped it. Volpe worked on a logging crew when he was fresh out of high school, so the man knows how to drop a tree. He had to take the fence down at the far end of his yard to keep it from getting smashed when he dropped it.

The sky was just this side of full dark, and those fresh cut rounds lay there white as a sliced cucumber, and sliced up the way it was, there was nothing left to do but split those rounds into firewood. Enough firewood to keep Volpe warm for five or six winters easy. When I was a boy I spent whole summers in that tree, me and my brothers and sisters and our cousins who lived on Gossard Road. We built a pirate ship high up in her branches and sailed off to the new world. We hung a swing from her thickest branch and we swung ourselves dizzy. We laid in the dirt beneath her and looked up at puzzle pieces of blue sky through her branches, and we made a game out of putting those pieces together.

Now everything that tree ever was would go up Volpe’s chimney and be gone forever. Everything except the stump. He left that stump standing twelve feet high to provoke me. I know how his ticky little mind works. We been neighbors for thirty-four years, and we went to all the same schools before that, and I got plenty of history with Volpe. That stump sat in the view from my front porch to his like the upraised middle finger of Volpe’s hand.

I know a dick when I see one.

* * *

I didn’t even go in my house after I parked my truck. Walked straight over to Volpe’s and knocked on his door.

“Evening, Arnie,” he said. On the TV was one of those fishing shows where some guy takes you out to a river and pretends he ain’t bragging about all the fish he’s caught. Volpe’s wife never would’ve let him buy a TV that big, but Volpe and me, neither one of us could keep a wife past the time our kids grew up and moved out of the house. I never thought my marriage to Viv would fail the test of time. They left us less than a year apart, and Volpe told me right after Viv left, he thought his wife caught the leaving disease from my wife. Like his wife didn’t leave first, and like that artificial inseminator fellow she ran off with had nothing to do with it.

There was a dish of ice cream half eaten on the coffee table in front of Volpe’s recliner, and the word “mute” in blue letters across the bottom of his big TV. I stepped back from his front door and pointed at his butchery.

I said, “What’d you do that for?”

“And what a fine evening it is,” Volpe said, “thanks for bringing it up.”

Volpe stepped past me and I got a whiff of whatever fancy cologne it is he puts on now that he’s divorced. He stood out in the yard, looking up at the evening sky.

“Have you seen the evening star?” he said. He was sideways to me. The man’s got no more chin than a hen does, and a long stick of a neck, and with his big beak of a nose cantilevered out over the bottom half of his face, he looks like he’s part weasel.

“Going to be hot in August without the shade of that tree,” I said.

“I got air conditioning,” Volpe said. “I’ll be all right.”

“That so?” I said.

A pair of bats was working the sky over our heads, all swoop and flutter, quiet as the grave, doing their level best to keep the flying insect population down to a dull roar. Volpe’s face was white and bloodless in the porch light. I stepped down and stood so I could talk straight into that chinless face of his. “Why on earth would you cut down your shade tree?” I said. I knew for a fact that my grandparents had situated their house to take full advantage of the shade of that oak.

Volpe’s mouth pulled up into that tight curve he’s been smirking with since he was five years old. “Have you seen my new satellite dish?” he said. “I been meaning to ask you over to watch one of my five hundred channels.”

He walked out into his yard further and pointed up at the roof. “You mount it so it faces the southern sky,” he said. The satellite dish was a round white circle against the darkening sky. It had that baked-on enamel look of a household appliance, but there was something sausage-like about the bulbous gray hunk of electronics that pointed at its center.

“Wasn’t getting the kind of reception I needed,” Volpe said. One of the bats flew low over his head and Volpe swatted at it. He pointed at the oak tree laid out like a dead relative down the length of his yard. “Did you see all that rot running through those rounds?”

“You couldn’t put that dish on the back corner of the house?” I said.

Volpe tightened up his smirk and put crinkles at the corners of his eyes, just in case I didn’t already know that he was laughing at me. He stuck his hands into the back pockets of his jeans. His arms are so long the man can practically tie his shoes without bending over, so his elbows stuck way out, and that left his gut wide open and just begging for me to sucker punch him.

“Well now, I suppose I might have,” he said, “but right here is where the signal is strongest.”

Course it ain’t me that’s got a history of throwing the sucker punch, it’s Volpe.

“You want a dish of ice cream, Arnie?” he said. “Rocky Road, it’s your favorite.”
I said no.

It was going to take a whole lot more than ice cream to patch this up.

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