Review of This Mobius Strip of Ifs in the Autumn 2012 issue of “The Centrifugal Eye” online literary magazine, pages 81-83 reprinted below:
Reflections on Rummaging
by D. J. Bryant
Mathias B. Freese first appeared in The Centrifugal Eye’s web pages in the form of an anomalous review of short stories from his collection, Down to a Sunless Sea (2007), by TCE staff writer Ocalive Olaopa Mwenda. (Visit TCE’s archives to read Mwenda’s Absence of Light: Quirks of Dark.*) While Matt Freese is not a poet, his stories and essays are often poetic in tone, and this now-retired teacher and psychotherapist has written often on the subject of writing — a theme always welcome in our journal.
The essays in This Möbius Strip of Ifs were written over four decades, according to Freese, and many were previously published. The first in this collection, “To Ms. Foley, with Gratitude,” even won the Society of Southwestern Authors Award for personal essay/memoir. To whet your appetites, I’ll reveal that “Ms. Foley” was none other than Martha Foley, editor of The Best American Short Stories series (1941-1977).
Recently, This Möbius Strip of Ifs won 2012’s National Indie Excellence Award in the category of non-fiction, and was a finalist for Dan Poynter’s 2012 Global eBooks Awards (Autobiography/Memoirs) .
Award-winning or not, what I enjoyed most about Freese’s essay collection, without question, was his storytelling. Even though the essays within are non-fiction, many are descriptive, concrete narratives. They read, sound, feel like stories. From the classroom to the therapist’s couch to the family-shadowed corners of childhood. Freese accredits this “richness” to having “lain down ‘pilings,’ details on which the story’s scaffolding rests.”
At almost 200 pages of prose, I’m not about to give you a rundown on all the pieces in Möbius Strip, but if I rummage around a bit and pull out some choice scraps from Freese’s memory bag, you’ll get the drift. Right away, I come up with “Teachers Have No Chance to Give Their Best” (pg. 14). While the essay is meant to be a rant, it’s also an honest telling (and yes, a story) about the state of urban high-school ignorance — concerning English, reading, writing, and especially culture, where many students “are sorely confused about their own ethnicity so as to be misinformed of the heritage of others.” Especially sorry case in point: “No one in the advanced tenth grade English class has the
foggiest notion who King Kong is.”
Matt Freese admits a leaning towards Freud (like so many of us), and he’s well-enough read on him to engage us with witty, analytical anecdotes (unlike so many of us who misunderstand or misquote because we haven’t read enough). Freese explores this idea in “Freud’s Cheerful Pessimism”(pg. 27). Other psychologists and psychotherapists will likely agree with Freese when he says “there is much to be said for the analytic approach. All of life is an expression, our expression, to put things into words or to act upon the world. Choose your flavor; I became a writer, others harpoon whales. We all need to make the unconscious conscious, a working definition of psychotherapy that has Freudian salt in it, like a good lox.”
And how about Gulliver’s Travels? Think it’s a kid’s story? Freese will have you grinning like a reaper’s scythe as he links Yahoos to bloggers in another rant he refers to as a “howl.” (Personal Posturings: Yahoos as Bloggers, pg. 42.) It is particularly enlightening to discover how literary reviewers, such as myself, are compared to review bloggers — are we so different? Freese thinks we are, if we’re honest and don’t go about “shoving chicken fat” up authors’ asses.
Speaking of authors, many of you can relate to the careful crafting decisions we must often make, whether these include selecting a point-of-view, or carving unrelated details or sloppy repetitions from an overripe manuscript. Freese’s essay, “In First-Person” (pg. 51), takes a self-critical and accepting look at his own emblematic choices when it comes to writing and editing his stories. A
self-proclaimed tinkerer, he’s learned to wait for his stories’ ends to come to him. Or not.
The essays I liked most in Möbius Strip have something in common; they include nostalgic and multicolored portraits of family members: Matt Freese’s parents, uncle, grandmother. These remembrances also conjure scenes thick with longing, frustration, and oppressed anger. Freese refers to his upbringing as one of “benign neglect,” not from a lack of wants or needs, but “a lack of mothering and fathering.” Still, his parents influence heavily the texture of his writing here.
“Trains = Holocaust and Other Observations, Railfans” (pg. 63) explains Freese’s obsession today with trains and scale models — and how this interconnects with a decision his father made over 50 years ago.
In “Grandma Fanny” (pg. 150), we get to meet his maternal grandmother who was a wayfarer and hoarder, never content to stay for long in any one place, but full of unexpected charms when it suited her. And there are other characters among these essays. Wives, daughters, a son. Freese opens up, maybe sometimes telling more than you want to hear, other times just enough to flood you with empathy.
What was least appealing to me in Möbius Strip was a consistent, mud-dark bitterness that flowed unceasingly from Freese after some of his “howls” hit their crescendos. I can understand degrees of animosity and frustration, especially in light of negative life experiences, but sometimes it overwhelmed my appreciation for the “stories.” I’m not a shallow reader, by any means, and I don’t shy from confessional writing. Yet, I wasn’t a fan of what sounded like potential grudges and unresolved anger that might be skewing Freese’s point of view.
Isn’t this a matter of personal tastes, though? Rightly so. Matt Freese echoes what many of us writers and poets think, feel, and hope to express in our writing as we continue to head, irreversibly, into our twilight years. Sure, yeah, some of us are frustrated, angry, even disgusted with the state of the world. And it’s going to show some of the time.
If you enjoy essays on cultural icons, books, and movies, you’ll like the section called “Metaphorical Noodles,” which noodles about a number of theater and screen actors; and “Babbling Brooks and Motion Pictures” (pg. 112) is essentially a biographical essay of books and stories that impacted Freese’s thinking. He’s got some informative things to say that might lead you to your next good read. Or write.
Freese ends this collection with an essay on something I’m prone to do every time I move house or clean out my files: “rummaging.” You know, it’s where you start sorting papers from folders or boxes that are at least 4-25 years old with the intent to “clean out.” You get through a few pages of a typed document, and then you come across a couple of torn, handwritten notesheets of quotes or quickly-jotted lines of poetry, an old letter you saved for some sentimental reason— and you go sit down and start to read them all instead of tossing them. For you writers, it is often more important to find and re-examine those keepsake scraps than it is to actually “clean out” your office or desk. Freese’s “Reflections on Rummaging” surely bears this out, although my wife would probably be more impressed by a neater office.
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