by Jessi Kalvitis

“Who the f**k keeps birds? It’s like having loud fish!” So said Wells Tower during a reading in the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning last fall. I laughed a little too loud, but then so did everybody else. I met and spoke with him after, gushing like a hopeless fan-girl and making an ass of myself. Then, again, so did everybody else. That night, Tower read a dazzling excerpt from his novel-in-progress. He also tormented his audience with the suggestion that he may go back and re-do the entire thing, shifting it from third person to first. If he does that, I may cry. I don’t want to wait.

In the interim, I am left to mournfully wear out the pages of the relatively few short stories he put out into the world before getting sucked into the novel-writing void. Though “Raw Water,” anthologized in the Year’s Best last year, blew my mind, the classic (and my personal favorite) collection is still Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.

I read the title story, a gory but melancholy romp through the imagined lives of Vikings, quite a few years ago, for Gail Adams’s creative writing workshop. I didn’t particularly like it.

How, then, did I end up a gushing fan-girl? Well, I didn’t like it, but it sure did stick in my brain. Long after I’d forgotten many of the other readings for class, or remembered them only in fragments, the story would swim up from the deep and wallop my cerebellum all over again. And again. And again. Finally, I walked past a library end-cap display in Berryville, Virginia one day and there it was, the collection with that story’s title. Figuring that the same logic works with stories as with songs (i.e., if it’s stuck in your head, go through it one more time and it’ll go away), I checked it out.

Turns out that a) the song trick doesn’t work with stories, and b) it’s okay that I didn’t particularly like the Viking story; his others are so much better. Tower’s characters are complicated and flawed, but not so much so that you want to hit them. His worlds matter-of-factly tiptoe along the line between the darkest bits of reality and the oddest areas of fantasy. There’s humor. There’s tragedy. There’s hope for the human race. And all, every line of it (even, yes, the Viking story), so very beautifully written.

Since I first picked it off the library shelf (and, of course, later bought my own copy), I have badgered my English 101 students, my capstone class mentee, my future father-in-law, and anyone else within shouting range into reading this collection. And now all of you. You’re welcome!