Olive Ghiselin is a quiet person.
For more than 60 years she's quietly lived in Salt Lake City as the wife of poet Brewster Ghiselin; quietly published her short stories in Utah magazines to avoid the hubbub of the East Coast "slicks."Last year, however, a small New Mexico publisher - the Teal Press - got in touch with Ghiselin about collecting some of her short fiction.
She agreed.
The result is "The Testimony of Mr. Bones" (Teal; 151 pages; $10). And now, after a rave review in the New York Times and high praise from Pulitzer Prize-winners Wallace Stegner and Peter Taylor, Olive Ghiselin - at 82 - is one of the freshest faces in American literature.
"I suppose I don't have much biography," she says. "One husband, two sons. Brewster and I came to Utah in 1929 and have been here ever since. I did a little teaching at the university, but I have always written. Some stories in the book go back 30 years."
It was Flaubert who said, "Be regular and orderly in your life like a Bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work."
Olive Ghiselin didn't write the words, but she's lived them.
Says Joseph Bauman of the Deseret News, a long-time friend, "Olive's very understated, but very droll. Sometimes you'll be talking in a group and she'll say something that stops the conversation it's so surprising and wry."
There is a "wry" quality to her writing as well, though a word that often pops up there is "risk." Dorothy Solomon, fiction editor at Utah Holiday, sees it this way: "Olive Ghiselin seems more willing to walk the edge and look into the dark issues than many women writers are."
A review of her book could easily begin by noting that "The Testimony of Mr. Bones" does indeed read like a testimony. Ghiselin writes in the tone and voice people adopt when speaking the truth.
And these are "user friendly" stories. Each has a beginning, middle and end. Transitions between time periods and on-going scenes are clearly marked with road signs to help the reader along.
This opening paragraph from "Ah Love, Remember Felis" displays her style:
Ghiselin's temperament as an observer, as one of Stegner's "Spectator Birds," sets her fiction apart from many modern, self-absorbed meditations. She's not afraid of allegory, for instance. And - hush this up - she doesn't name Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie or even Chekhov as influences.
"I've never been crazy about autobiographical fiction," she explains. "It seems so limited to me. On the other hand I don't think I'm a theme writer either. I never set out to prove a point. But I am well aware I'm writing about life and death, good and evil. I'd like to think the characters transcend such abstractions, however."
John Gardner once accused Saul Bellow of "writing essays and calling them short stories." And some of the pieces in Ghiselin's book - "Signora Grigia," "The Testimony of Mr. Bones," to name two - do have all the makings of non-fiction pieces. But Ghiselin can't help herself. By her personality and training she gives the stories a spin that lifts them from the realm of the enhanced or embellished essay and into the realm of the imagination.
"For one thing," she says, "I'm interested in people. And to really write about people you need to have characters in action, you need have conflict. Expository writing is easier, I think, because you can just swing along. Fiction demands more shape. Besides, the rough stuff of life is not under copyright. Writers can use what they like the way they like."
Right now Olive Ghiselin is using the rough stuff of life to write about the meaning of happiness. She's struggling, she says, but that's a good sign. Such struggles usually pay off in her best stories.
Peter Taylor, one of America's top short story writers, says of Ghiselin's writing: "I like the Western flavor, but the truth is these stories makes all life seem exotic. Harriet Doerr and Isak Dinesen come to mind, but there is the brimming life of D.H. Lawrence's stories and Rudyard Kipling's India stories."
She takes such praise with a typically quiet understatement. "Oh I do like to write," she says, "I just hate the publishing, you know."
If her book keeps receiving positive notices, Olive Ghiselin could be in for more publishing than she ever bargained for.