Judy Budnitz: Flying Leaps
Fiction that makes real situations suddenly strange

by Eliza Wilmerding

In Nice Big American Baby, the newest collection of short stories by Judy Budnitz ’95, the author considers mothers and babies—and the uncertain boundary between them. “Flush” tells of a mother (with a mysterious ability to disappear) and her daughters, who work so hard to protect and care for each other that they begin having mammograms in each other’s stead. “Where We Come From” describes a pregnant illegal would-be immigrant (ostensibly from Mexico) determined to sneak across the border and have her baby on American soil. She tries again and again, telling herself, “American baby. Nice big American baby.” Repeatedly caught and deported to her own country, she delays giving birth for four years until “her son is so big, she imagines he fills her completely. His arms fill her arms, his legs fill her legs. She is a mere skin covering him like an insect’s carapace, soon to be flaked off and shucked away.”

Budnitz puts believable characters into unrealistic situations; she may give them unusual powers or exaggerate one or two aspects of reality. “Magical or horrific or impossible things might happen in my stories,” she’s said, “but the characters are always guided by the same human emotions that we all share.” She explains that “There have been times when I’ve said to myself, ‘OK, I want to try to write something with no tricks, where nothing crazy happens. Just have it be about character.’ It’s hard for me! I’m just not interested in writing vaguely autobiographical stories about typical twenty-, thirty-something people in their lives and their relationships.”

Photograph by Jeff Linnell

Author Judy Budnitz writes “contemporary fairy tales,” novels and short stories that twist reality in surprising ways.

Budnitz embeds social commentary in her tales—she parodies colonialist attitudes, or uses postnuclear or futuristic landscapes void of water and trees. “Nadia” is as much about xenophobia as it is about a man and his mail-order bride and the provincial, gossipy group of interfering females who serve as a mob-like, collective narrator. The women poke and prod and eventually learn that Nadia left her 12-year-old daughter in a war-torn country with a name they can’t pronounce or remember (“I looked it up—one of those places with the devious names that sound nothing like they’re spelled”) and know little about, save the seemingly unreal images they glimpse on TV. “[W]e asked if she was different from the women here, if she had a way of walking, an extra flap of skin, a special smell. Did she smell of cigarettes, patchouli, foreign sewers, unbathedness? ‘I think she has some extra bones in her spine,’ he said. She seemed to have a lot of them. Like a string of beads. A rosary.”

Read an excerpt from "Nadia."

In the futuristic story “Sales,” a young girl watches her brother catch and corral salesmen, like dumb animals lured from a desert landscape. “My brother puts the new one in the pen out back with the other salesmen. ‘They just don’t ever learn, do they,’ he says mournfully as he yanks home the latch and notches up one more on the gate post....I like to walk past and hear their voices hooting out at me. I like to pretend they’re calling out for my hot body. ‘Set of seventeen knives for the price of twelve! And I’ll throw in a free melon-baller!’….My sister-in-law likes to stand in windows naked….That is why so many salesmen stop by. ”

Readers have characterized Budnitz’s stories as “contemporary fairy tales,” “riffs on the gothic,” and “surrealist political allegories”; their characters are pushed to explore unconventional, often grotesque means (cannibalism, for instance) to survive. “The further Budnitz gets from reality, the more beautifully she writes about humanity,” said the Portland Oregonian in 2005. “The new collection [Nice Big American Baby] is ripe, humorous and full of life—to put it aside is to wake from a strange, deliciously inventive dream.”

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Judy Budnitz: Flying LeapsFiction that makes real situations suddenly strange

Judy Budnitz: Flying Leaps
Fiction that makes real situations suddenly strange