Morgan Thomas explores identity across several Southern landscapes—including Virginia.
Manywhere By Morgan Thomas. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. pp. 224. $26.00
In Morgan Thomas’s debut short story collection, Manywhere, the titular story opens with the line: “My father walks circles around my kitchen.” We learn of a man on a journey. Yes, it’s literally around a kitchen table, and he is wearing the tiles floors down with the scuffling of his feet, but he walks with purpose; he has a desire to reach a higher understanding of himself and the world around him. In Morgan’s glittering nine short stories, readers witness various characters embarking on the same journey as this loitering man. Characters of queer, genderqueer, and trans identities grapple with their places in this world, and Morgan highlights these adventures through the exploration of the link between human bodies, landscapes, and history.
Manywhere
While the characters of Manywhere confront similar issues, the paths which they take to enlightenment are far beyond a kitchen island. In the opening story “Taylor Johnson’s Lightning Man,” readers witness a young person on Ellis Island struggling with their identity and seeks solace in the history of the inspirational Frank Woodhull—a woman who adventured from London in men’s clothes and feared the very thing she was known to stop, lightning. While Woodhull is nothing more than a memory in history, the youngster explores a day with the lightning man and comes to the realization that it is okay not to conform in society.
In the stories “That Drowning Place” and “Transit,” water floods the scenes. Here there’re characters running from their homes drowned in water, and floods of water prevent characters from going back to their original homes. “That Drowning Place” focuses on the relocation of a small group of Cajun refugees after water consumes their houses. They share promised land in Louisiana with sixteen individuals whose lungs are currently flooding with dark fluid due to Hansen’s disease. These two groups cannot grasp an understanding of one another and the new world they are living in. But as the waters rise once more, the groups gain a better awareness of one another, their places in the world, and the impact they all have on each other. The story ends with the line, “You can’t hide from water forever.”
This attempt to escape from water can be seen in “Transit,” where the nonbinary Pet—who is on the run from the Naked House where eating disorders are “treated”—finds themselves in Jubilee Louisiana. During her time at a flooded train station, Pet is mistaken for a vampire and soon tries to convince the itinerant strangers they are also part of Jubilee’s history of vampires. A history explored through the stories of the townsfolk, and a history that, ultimately, has Pet finding where they belong—among a rather masculine Virgin Mary in the grimy grotto—dreaming of bringing the totem lilies.
Manywhere is filled with more characters who dive deep into their own struggles, through the histories built by others and themselves, to find their places in a complex world. This can be seen again in “The Daring Life of Philippa Cook the Rogue” where Shoo seeks comfort in the identity of the Colonial Philippa Cook, an individual who identified as both male and female. Shoo sells their belongings, ends their relationship, and travels across by ship to the Netherlands all in search of Cook’s letters from a potential descendant. This is another instance where readers witness Thomas’s rich storytelling that lies less in the specificity of gender identities, but more in how they journey towards their own self-understanding.
Returning to the titular story—because the father walks around his daughter’s kitchen to the point where she needs her own escape—one journey has pushed another into being. Escaping after tricking a young woman to stay in her stead, the daughter leaves in the night, “navigating by the sound of the incoming tide,” and walks with purpose into the unknown. The beautiful ending symbolizes the journey of all Thomas’s characters, turbulent but meaningful. Like the theme of water, identity is fluid and moves as we move through the world.
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