Deborah Max Reisman
Margaret Benbow.
Margaret Benbow wanted to be a writer since she was three years old — when her mother began reading aloud to her from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. “I thought the characters in the book were real people, and I desperately wanted to join their adventures,” she remembers. “My mother explained that the author had made them up, and I knew immediately that I wanted to do that too. I wanted to write stories about other people and their lives.”
Fittingly, the Madison-based author’s first collection of short stories, Boy Into Panther (New Rivers Press), is as chock-full of colorful characters as L. Frank Baum’s bestselling children’s book. Dorothy and Toto aren’t around, but there’s an irascible suit maker, a spirited outsider artist and a pugnacious schoolboy. “His shoulders filled doorways and burst through the tragic steerage pullovers his mother bought for him,” she writes of that boy, Carlo Puovi. “He wore shoes that a good horse would have disdained, but he won every race.”
Some of the characters, like a meddlesome old priest named Father Karl Dubroski, wander in and out of multiple stories, interacting with many of the characters. The end result is a work of fiction that packs the potent, one-two punch typical of a short story collection and as much character development as a novel. And Benbow’s prose style is decidedly lyrical. Her poems have been featured in The Kenyon Review, The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner and many other journals. And she published a collection of poetry, Stalking Joy, in 1997 that went on to win a Walt McDonald First-Book Prize.
Boy Into Panther has also been well received in literary circles. The novelist Lin Engler describes it as “the liveliest collection of tales you’re likely to read this year, or in any year.” And Ronnie Hess, a critic writing for the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters, calls it an “almost seamless work that is a representation of nothing less than a community.” Benbow won the New Rivers Many Voices prize for fiction for the collection.
Benbow, a former Isthmus contributor, is thrilled by the positive reviews, but she’s quick to point out that the book was a labor of love for her, something she spent years and years working on. And if the stories that made it into the collection are uniformly excellent, it’s at least in part because she tirelessly revised her work, and made cuts whenever necessary. “These are my favorite stories,” she says. “I’ve probably written three times as many.
Benbow isn’t one of those authors who waits for inspiration to strike, or claims that her stories spring fully formed from her head like a Greek god. She sits down every weekday morning — she’s been a full-time writer for years now — to write, whether or not she feels like it. And she admits that her work often feels like exactly that. Work. “I’m always amazed by people who say how happy they are while writing,” she says. “I hate the first draft process. It’s truly like trying to chisel an elephant out of a block of marble.”
But chisel she does. Story by story. Year by year. She’s eventually able to transform a hunk of raw stone into a finely polished work of art.
And though her writing process can be long and, at times, frustrating, her friends and family — her husband, John, and her three adult children, Dan, Ross and Eden — have always supported her. She says she finds joy in the unexpected discoveries she makes along the way. “I often have a general sense of where the story is going to go, but I’m sometimes surprised by what they end up doing,” she says. “I’m not their puppet master. I can’t make them fall in love with the people I’ve chosen for them.”
Benbow is now hard at work on her first novel. The book will be loosely based on the exploits of Simeon Prophet, the outsider artist character who appears in Boy Into Panther.
