Matter Out of Place: Stories
by AnnElise Hatjakes
A grieving mother ghost-hunts in Virginia City. A college student’s field trip to the Moonlite Bunny Ranch brothel spurs a sexual awakening. A boy starts a wildfire on Peavine while trying to impress his crush. A schoolteacher is dismissed, and the aftermath unfolds in a schoolwide email chain. A woman tries on new identities at Burning Man. All must contend with their complicated histories and answer the question: is being from a place the same as being of it?
Experimental in its approach and unflinching in its execution, Matter Out of Place is an exploration of bright spots of humanity in dark underbellies, a feminist reckoning with “sin,” and a love letter to the strange mirage that is northern Nevada. It inhabits physical and digital spaces with equal wariness, and its characters—filled with grit—navigate the fraught divide between appearances and reality, approval and judgment, gambling everything despite knowing that the house always wins.
5 out of 5
An excellent collection of short stories that will have you seeing life through many eyes before the end. I love that there are different elements woven into some of the stories, such as emails, essays, etc. Although the characters are unique, it’s interesting to see how in some ways, they all don’t quite fit in. Like a puzzle piece that wasn’t properly cut, and should fit in, there’s just something slightly off that stops them from fitting perfectly. It’s always something different, and you get to see the way they view things, and experience the world. Although the stories are short, and you could easily read through the whole book in one sitting, I highly suggest taking your time with this collection. You might even find some of the thoughts/experiences in here that you can relate to, if not directly than from similar moments in your own life.
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AnnElise Hatjakes holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of Missouri and an MFA in fiction from the University of Nevada, Reno, where she works as a teaching assistant professor. Her stories have appeared in Juked, Bull, Tahoma Literary Review, and Typehouse, among other journals, and have been shortlisted for the Neil Shepard Prize in Fiction and the Curt Johnson Prose Award.
