In Sara Jaffe’s short story “Today’s Problems,” the narrator keeps a living document of national and international headlines—police violence, Israel’s potential annexation of Jerusalem—alongside intimate anxieties, like their own kid’s possible ringworm. The combined list functions as a reminder that “today’s problems” aren’t abstract forces. They express themselves in the strange frictions of everyday life.
The Portland writer’s new collection Hurricane Envy (Rescue Press) operates like a larger version of that document. Its stories braid world-scale urgency with the dilemmas of the individual—identity, parenting, artistic life. The catastrophic bumps up against the mundane. It’s a relatable push-pull, like texting your partner about dinner while systems of power scorch the world. Jaffe, formerly of the improvisational post-punk band Erase Errata and now a fixture in the local literary scene, navigates this terrain with gentleness. She seems suspicious of an easy resolution.
Hurricane Envy’s dominant concerns repeat across the collection. Her characters often exist in states of flux: queer people contemplating parenthood, youngsters with fake IDs wiggling around in their new independence at gigs. Their problems don’t resolve neatly. The stories pause inside tension. The mood is tender, sometimes bleak, and often weirdly funny.
Music provides much of Hurricane Envy’s imagery and its sensory core. A fruit shop fills with the repetitive whistle of a “shriller Steve Reich.” A guitarist stirs up a “massy rumbling” and kicks at sonic “confetti.” Jaffe describes sounds with visual texture—an E chord becomes “wheat with sugar, the long lawn, the field.”
Jaffe self-released an instrumental compilation titled Earth to You: Guitar Players Respond to a Short Story About a Guitar Player on her book’s publishing date. Partially funded by a Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC) grant and mastered by Fred Thomas, the recording includes tracks from eight of her favorite guitar players, each invited to respond to the story “Earth to You.”
Four of them—Ilyas Ahmed, Marisa Anderson, Jenny Hoyston, and Tara Jane O’Neil—will perform selections from comp at Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA) on January 31.
The stories in Hurricane Envy feel in tight conversation, almost as though they could all share a single narrator. Many characters occupy similar demographics and jobs. It’s a very Portland collection, and the city surfaces everywhere: in bridges and buggy kale, in “WASP Hollow,” in a coffee shop that plays the Slits and a preschool that’s “great on social justice.” If you live here, you’ll likely see yourself somewhere within it.
Jaffe’s characters are ultra-conscious of how they’re perceived, sometimes to the point of embarrassment or ego indulgence. A writer mourns the loss of a pebble-sized sculpture. A therapist’s patient feels too guilty to use a disposable cup. A parent worries that they’re “uncaring and monstrous” for texting their child’s preschool teacher back too quickly. In “Ether,” a part-time DJ discovers a song that becomes her carapace. “It wasn’t about whether anyone in the room was paying attention to the specific songs Ada played,” Jaffe writes, “but about the shell the songs built for her.”
Experiences of queer parenthood form another strong throughline. In “Today’s Problems,” the parent-narrator chooses the title “mom” for its “jaunty, soft-butch” quality, but finds it sounds strange in other people’s mouths. They see no trace of themselves in a famous novel’s heteronormative, “neatly binarized” rage; instead, they wonder whether their own ambivalence to parenthood would be as widely celebrated. Jaffe resists plotty payoff, allowing her characters to sit with these complexities.
“Someone Like You” offers the clearest distillation of Hurricane Envy’s themes. As the story’s musician narrator faces their partner’s “dealbreaker”—they want to become a parent—they also reconnect with an old friend, Carlo, who has traded touring for a career in music algorithm development. The start-up flattens sound into a range of preset descriptors, like “angry female vocals.” Carlos explains this, saying: “It’s not so much about what users want as what they don’t yet know they want.” The line reaches far beyond tech and into the narrator’s fears: betraying their musician identity, the quiet pain of selling out, their unknowable future as a parent.
In Hurricane Envy, Jaffe’s characters might envy a storm for its clarity—the chance to be immersed in something decisive, powerful, and real. Instead, as with the living document in “Today’s Problems,” they’re figuring themselves out in a time when self-scrutiny overlaps with wider crises and systems of power. But Jaffe’s consistently uncertain characters don’t represent a failure of narrative. These are honest materials.
Earth to You: Guitar Players Respond to a Story About a Guitar Player will be performed at Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, 15 NE Hancock, Sat Jan 31, 7 pm, $15-$50, pica.org, all ages.
Lindsay Costello
Source link