By Sadie Shorr-Parks

On my walk to Gary Fincke’s reading, I ate a large order of french fries from a particularly problematic fast-food chain. I didn’t want to listen to a reading about the tragic; I was already embodying it. I knew Fincke’s writing lingered on despair, but I didn’t know much else. In his newest book The Proper Words for Sin there are stories about a young girl drinking Drano, Three Mile Island, and the Kennedy assassination. I settled into an uncomfortable chair and prepared myself for sadness.

But as second-year fiction student John Bryant pointed out during his introduction, Fincke’s stories highlight how close despair and grace are. Despite the sad subjects, the writing I was about to encounter was funny and moving. After the reading was finished, I felt inspired and centered.

That night, Gary Fincke read the story “Someone Else, Someplace Else” from his newest collection, The Proper Words for Sin, published by West Virginia University Press. The story was instantly engaging. His voice was even and clean. The story takes place in Centralia, PA, a place where devastating underground fire has turned a small town into a tourist attraction. The story is about a man wondering if he witnessed child abduction. We wandered with Fincke past the gaudy underground fires to the much quieter and interesting business of the lives that surround it. As Fincke pointed out in the Q & A that followed: “I’m not interested in the disaster; I’m interested in the hanging on.”

When I talked with Fincke after the reading, I wanted to tell him about my grotesque experience of eating 750 fried calories during a five minute walk. I was hoping he could help me to find grace and humanity in it. But instead, we discussed endings. A feature I admire in Fincke’s writing is the way his stories make it feel okay to end on a question. “Black and White is entertainment,” Fincke said. “I like ambiguity.”

At the end of the Q & A, Fincke spoke compassionately about the mayor of Centralia and how he had been embarrassed on The Daily Show. It seemed fitting for him to touch on the softer side of an issue, to worry about the human on the sideline of the spectacle.

Gary Fincke is the Charles B. Degenstein Professor of English and Creative Writing and director of the Writers Institute at Susquehanna University. Fincke has published 25 books of poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction. He’s won numerous awards, including the Flannery O’Conner Prize for Short Fiction in 2003, the Stephen F. Austin Poetry Prize for his collection The History of Permanence, the Bess Hokins Prize from Poetry magazine, and more. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in Harper’s, Newsday, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, and others.