Visit Me In California: Stories by Cooley Windsor

Reviewed by Scott Bowen

ISBN-10: 0810124963
ISBN-13: 978-0810124967
Triquarterly Books, August 2008

With a beguiling and amenable voice, Cooley Windsor gives “everyman” his fifteen minutes of fame in Visit Me in California. As one traverses this compilation of flash fiction, there is something innovative and yet warmly familiar in his rendition of tales of old. Be it a man declaring, “I wore the wrong shoes for this,” before crossing a recently-parted Red Sea, or Lot in the aftermath of God’s siege on Sodom and Gomorrah (“I lie each night dying in my bed—how I pine for cliffs of pure white salt and wish I had looked back too”), Windsor’s attention to the supporting characters and stage hands of literature’s lions is as fresh and cool as the beaches of his home of San Francisco.

Yet Windsor doesn’t limit himself to a parlay with the old. In swift, affecting prose, he exhibits the heartache of a love that could have been:

Canuto mourned Wojnarowicz. He sat staring at the raw power of the paintings and collages with remorse. He could have known him. Here was the person he could have loved—He did love, right now…

Even Biblical prophecy is tapped for comic relief in the first lines of “Omega Notebook,” as Windsor offers a glimpse of heaven’s dress rehearsal for Rapture: “The trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. That’s the cue. And remember to smile.”

In Visit Me in California, Windsor helps us step outside the box of stereotypes and offers a generous helping of what it truly means to be human. From a prostitute’s view of Achille’s death to a man who summons imaginary companions and watches them make love, the world of Cooley Windsor is a candid expression of humanity’s grandeur brought down to eye level where pain, love, and everything in between can be met with a cathartic grin.

Visit Triquarterly Books on the web at http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/.

Mr. Bowen currently resides in eastern North Carolina. He occupies his time writing both novel length and short fiction concerning a prophet of his own design, playing house husband, and taking a stab at Native American crafts. He is currently working on his B.A. degree in English at East Carolina University.

© 2009 prickofthespindle.com