This Is Only a Test exposes our fearsreal and fake, invented and embeddedof disasters. Through Hollarss own experiences, research, and rememberings, he examines how our fears are often unfounded or inflated, even created. B. J. Hollars is in a field all of his own.
Jill Talbot, author of The Way We Werent: A Memoir
Through spare, haunting, and heart-wrenching prose, Hollars deftly guides the reader from the tornado-torn streets of Tuscaloosa to the lakes and rivers of Wisconsin, from his backyard to nuclear Japan, and ultimately into those tiny intimate moments of fear that shape a new fathers consciousness. Combining a novelists ear for dialogue and drama with a poets eye for detail, Hollarss essays delve into the hard spaces, mapping out a place for hope, or at least some small moments of happiness.
Steven Church, author of Ultrasonic: Essays
In these quirky, inventive stories, B. J. Hollars depicts a world both dangerous and unreasonable, a place where the local TV meteorologist assumes the quality of a god. Character may not be fate in This Is Only A Test but the reverse is always truewe reveal ourselves by our response to the random cruelties of the universe, from errant meteor strikes to a small childs fever rising in the night.
John Hildebrand, author of
The Heart of Things: A Midwestern Almanac
This Is Only a Test is an immediate read. I dont only mean you should read it immediately, though I do mean that deeply. I mean the act of reading this wonderful new collection is close, personal, and compelling. The book is nearly alive in your hands as each story, and then each implication, each idea unfolds. In one section, a tornado falls from the sky and the familyhusband, wife, dog, and unborn childseek shelter in a bathroom tub. But what do you say, think, wonder about, and do when the event is over? What do you tell your future child? How do you talk to anyone else? Whether its storms, or drowning, lake monsters, incendiary bombs, or a childs fever, these events, present and historical and intimate, seep into every later moment. This is an elegantly written book about how we love each other in a terrifying world.
W. Scott Olsen, Editor, ASCENT magazine
Theres plenty of room aboard the Hollars bandwagon, and heres your chance to experience what his growing audience already knows and loveshis warm intelligence, his companionable voice, and the how-does-he-do-it trick of spinning terror into tenderness.
Bryan Furuness, author of Winesburg, Indiana
In the face of disaster, of childbirth, of fatherhood, Hollars finds the perfect middle-ground in the strange void between loss and gain: that the center, despite what the numbers tell you, isnt zero, but something greater than thata souvenir to say that we are here and we are answering impossible questions the best and only way that we know how.
Brian Oliu, author of Leave Luck to Heaven
THIS IS ONLY A TEST
Michael Martone
THIS
IS
ONLY
A
TEST
B. J. Hollars
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2016 by B. J. Hollars
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.481992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hollars, B. J.
[Short stories. Selections]
This is only a test / B. J. Hollars.
pages ; cm. (Break Away Books)
ISBN 978-0-253-01817-5
(softcover : acid-free paper)ISBN 978-0-253-01821-2 (ebook)
I. Title.
PS3608.O48456A6 2016
813'.6dc23
2015013860
1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16
To Meredith, Henry, and Eleanor,
who always allow me to retake the test.
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
ADRIENNE RICH, Diving into the Wreck
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing a book, like enduring a disaster, requires all hands on deck.
And so a warm thank-you goes out to my family, friends, and supporters who have often manned the buckets to keep this ship afloat.
Additional thanks go to the editors who have previously published these works, including Nik De Dominic, Marcel Savino, W. Scott Olsen, Steven Church, Karen Craigo, Cory Aarland, Adam Kullberg, Roxane Gay, S. L. Weisenberg, Dan Wickett, Matthew Gavin Frank, Dinty W. Moore, Shena McAuliffe, Adam Weinstein, Kim Groninga, Anjali Sachdeva, Sam Martone, Jeff Albers, and Allegra Hyde.
Thanks to Walter Font of the Allen CountyFort Wayne Historical Society for his additional fact-checking as well.
Thank you to my colleagues at the University of WisconsinEau Claire, and in particular, Chancellor James Schmidt, Provost Patricia Kleine, President Kimera Way, Dean David Leaman, Dr. Carmen Manning, Dr. Erica Benson, Dr. Audrey Fessler, Dr. Jenny Shaddock, Dr. Justin Patchin, Dr. Jason Spraitz, Professors Max Garland, Jon Loomis, Allyson Loomis, Molly Patterson, John Hildebrand, and Karen Loeb, as well as Joanne Erickson and Vickie Schafer. I could go on.
Thanks also to my gifted graduate assistants, Alex Long, Laura Becherer, and Josh Bauerall of whom dug deep to make this a better bookand to my undergraduate students, who make me a better writer through their own work.
In addition, thank you to Dr. Karen Havholm and the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs at the University of WisconsinEau Claire, whose University Research and Creative Activity grant proved vital to this project.
And, lest I forget, the Bama gang, especially those I met on the UAEDFL gridiron.
Thanks, too, to Brendan Todt, for the edits and the correspondence, and to Jill Talbot, for the feedback that eased the doubt.
To Mom, Dad, and brothercan we consider this your Christmas present?
And to my own family, who served as witnesses to my head-pounding, hand-wringing, and tiger-pacing as I tried to tease these essays out.
Finally, thanks to all the nameless folks who didnt just write their way out of disasters, but clawed their way out; the people who did what had to be done when it had to be done because they knew no one else was doing it.
THIS IS ONLY A TEST
We cant stop tornadoes. But we can live
through them when we know how.
Tornado Warning: A Booklet for Boys and Girls
