Finding places and spaces in Ivy Grimes's Glass Stories
The first time I read Ivy Grimes's Glass Stories (2024), I didn't find much in the way of geographic themes in the pieces. In fact, in one of the first notes I took I wrote that these stories seem to "float" in space and time, not fully located anywhere or anytime we might recognize as our own. But this is only on the surface, and upon revisiting the pieces I found that Grimes is doing much more with the places and spaces her characters inhabit than I initially realized. So, the purpose of this essay is to examine the ways these geographic themes manifest in Grimes’s work.
The stories in this collection are often a mosaic of modern and folklore settings, where Grimes uses the ambiguousness of setting to evoke a sense of strangeness and uncertainty, along with characters who are often struggling to define themselves or escaping real or metaphorical confinement. Stuart Docherty wrote a good review of this collection for Ancillary Review of Books, wherein he highlights the often-flawed nature of Grimes's characters and likens her "mystery of fable" with the "ambiguity of modern internet life".
While I find this reading of the collection insightful, what I found in my second reading was a use of what literary geographer, Sheila Hones, refers to as "micro-geographies", or the use of place and space in short stories that seem otherwise generic in their geographic contexts.[1] In geography, place and space are related, but distinct, theoretical concepts. A common (albeit oversimplistic) way of understanding them is to say that space is an empty dimension or volume of a location, whereas place is that volume filled with the meaning a location takes on through our experiences there. A college dorm room is a common example, where when a student first enters it is an empty room with no connection to the student who will live there, but after a semester, that room suddenly is filled with memories of experiences and interactions. It thus becomes a place with specific meaning. I should note, though, that thinking space as empty in this way is something that many geographers have moved away from, toward recognizing the ways that space and place are co-dependent concepts, both with political and social implications.
Because short stories must accomplish narrative closure in shorter lengths, they often lack detailed descriptions of specific places. In addition, short stories often compress time and space, or expand them, in experimental ways. Hones argues that the brevity, intensity, and experimentation in short stories provides a more interactive and collaborative engagement than novel-length work. These micro-geographies open up the possibility for greater text-reader interaction and invite a spatial interpretation that shifts reader perspective. As such, generic places acquire a flexible interpretation that is dependent on reader subjectivity, while generic space can be open, closed, liminal, or merely ambiguous. Combined, the narrative style and generic settings of short stories create unique geographic interactions within the text via reader interpretations.
In the context of Grimes’s work, the stories with a more explicitly folkloric (but decidedly surreal) setting use space as a medium in which to explore themes of nature, patriarchy, agency, and identity. For example, in Glass Pet, a girl visits her grandmother in the woods, who has a glass dog that protects the two of them by keeping a cello-playing wolf at bay. Here, we see a familiar nature-home duality, where the wolf is representative of a dangerous nature that's "out there", somewhere else, which is in contrast to the glass dog that can be seen as a more domesticated version of nature. One that's allowed into the safety of the home. These distinctions are inverted when the wolf enters the home, bringing the outside to the inside, and inverted again when the dog (and characters) enter the wolf. The outside is brought inside and the inside outside, mirroring the way Grimes is playing dialectically with the simultaneously modern but folkloric conceit.
Staying within the folklore setting, in Glass Mountain femininity is put on a pedestal when a girl is forced by her father (the king) to live atop a glass mountain, which her suitors must climb to earn her hand in marriage. This is a familiar version of femininity, at once both cherished via control and oppressed in faux protection. Grimes subverts this familiarity when the narrator escapes her marriage and re-claims the space (i.e. mountain top) upon which she was previously confined. In exerting her own agency in space, the narrator claims femininity on her own terms. The mountain thus becomes a contested place, a site of struggle for its meaning and what the place represents: oppressed or liberated femininity.
Within the stories that have a more recognizably contemporary setting, Grimes again uses space to explore notions of femininity, along with the relationships between mothers and daughters, and the role of place in the transition from childhood to adulthood. Glass Mother takes place entirely within two rooms of a hospital, but Grimes uses these two places to contrast different versions of femininity. Ellen, the narrator, is at the hospital as part of a group who gather to support their friend as she gives birth. Ellen feels out of place in the birthing room, which throughout the narrative takes on a spiritual femininity that the characters associate with motherhood and giving birth. There’s a connection between the women who are mothers, or want to be mothers, that renders the room a place with spiritual significance that alienates Ellen, who is neither. She feels much more comfortable answering calls and updating her friend’s social media in the hospital lobby, where she can perform a different type of femininity that is more mechanical and structured, but no less supportive. In a bit of fairytale twist, Grimes uses a (seemingly) evil stepmother to represent the different ways feminine support and solidarity can be performed in different spaces. The twist of this introduced character disrupts the duality of feminine vs. masculine expectations, where the feminine is expected in the space of the birthing room and the masculine is expected in the space outside of it. The disruption directly challenges the reader to consider if feminine support behaved in the traditionally more masculine space is still feminine, or masculine, or something else.
In Glass Turtle, Grimes stays with the theme of motherhood, but from the perspective of a daughter (Alice) who has left home for college. Here, home represents a place Alice wants to leave behind in order to define herself, but also a place that should be familiar, a constant during a time of change. But when Alice returns to visit her mother at home, and brings her boyfriend, she finds that like her, the place has changed. Later, when college reveals itself as a place not necessarily safe either, Alice finds her safety in a small glass turtle, a constant that she can carry with her so that her safety becomes mobile. This mobility implies Alice’s newfound ability to navigate new spaces, and in doing so she is able to build the confidence needed to find her own way.
Some of Grimes's stories don't fit neatly into either a folkloric or contemporary setting but instead slide back and forth somewhere between. Glass Pills is one such piece, following a woman who brings a sick wolf to her house and is eaten, but is then saved by an axe-wielding man of the woods. A strange romance ensues, where after being saved, the woman asks the man to get inside the dead wolf so that she can save him. It's easy to read this as a sexual metaphor. In my notes I wrote "characters have weird wolf sex", and the characters themselves even quip about whether or not this is a "feminist thing". But I think the use of space here reveals something more complex. If, like previous appearances, we take the wolf as a version of nature, something "out there" and unfamiliar, then the characters take turns entering the unfamiliar, and are each then pulled back to safety by the other. In a way this story can be read as two people helping each other grow and mutually exploring their externalized traumas. Seen in this context, metaphorical space becomes a metaphor in itself, representing each character’s trauma, and mirroring the ways that trauma can manifest spatially.[2]
I noticed a similar theme in Glass Museum, which tells a story of two aging brothers reconciling with their pasts as they visit a museum of glass sculptures. Each room of the museum represents different memories for each man, from their experiences at war to the traumas of their childhood, and thus the experience of the men’s trauma is both mapped spatially and mobilized as they move through the museum. Thus, the museum functions as a stand in for the ways that trauma, guilt, grief, and other emotions have geographies and histories to them. Our responses to traumatic events are not limited to the time and place in which the events occur, but rather manifest periodically at different times and locations.
Finally, in Glass Coffin, a young girl goes looking for a new subculture, one that’s different from her ex-boyfriend's. She visits a local mall, at which she enters a virtual reality experience. She’s sent to an ominous “Floor 5”, where she finds a blood-filled room of gore, and eventually, different versions of herself. Here, the relationships between place and identity are challenged. Do we have to go to specific places to solidify our identities, or are our performed identities representations of places we form attachments to? The question is turned inside out when the virtual reality bleeds into actual reality, inviting us to question which is which, or if there’s any distinction.
The late geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan, said that “Place is security, space is freedom; we are attached to the one and long for the other”.[3] For Tuan, home was a safe and secure place, while the world offered freedom but requires leaving the familiarity of home. In this sense, space offers a freedom that place lacks, but is the realm of the unknown, which is latent with the possibility of displacement, or a feeling of being “out of place”. This is a common thread throughout Grimes’s collection. In Spaces of the Fantastic, David Ian Paddy’s essay presents a literary analysis of Daphne du Maurier’s work that I think in many ways is similar to what I find in Grimes’s.[4,5] Paddy highlights the various tropes in du Maurier’s work, including things like animated objects, doubles, breakdowns between the real and the imagined, and the blurring of human and non-human. As highlighted above, these are often used to challenge the safety/freedom and security/unfamiliarity distinctions. And like du Maurier, Grimes deploys these same tropes in ways that resist easy classification, but these aspects aren’t necessarily what interested me most. Although Grimes is writing decades later than du Maurier, and with a unique approach that is wholly her own, the speculative aspects of her stories consistently produce the feeling of displacementthat Paddy locates in du Maurier’s. Du Maurier’s writing often focuses on displacement around the place of the home, where characters frequently struggle to find a home, or return to a changed one. Her characters also often wrestle with identities that blend into places, and vice versa.
Like du Maurier, Grimes challenges the comfort of places like the home, often bringing the unknown into the known, and space into place. When Grimes’s objects animate, they disorient her characters in ways that center the representations of place and space. Doubles complicate the relationships between place and identity. When reality blurs into the imagined, and vice versa, spatial proximities twist and entrap characters both literally and metaphorically. And when the human/non-human boundaries are blurred, so too are those between place and space. The unknown, and unfamiliar, enters the home. Safety moves into the unsafe. All of these examples contain elements of displacement, and the theme of being “out of place” is perhaps the most consistent one used throughout Grimes’s stories.
While Grimes uses this approach highly effectively, the place/space duality is not without its critiques. Another late geographer, Doreen Massey, argued that place and space are not so inseparable nor distinct.[6] For Massey, places are both dynamic in time and connected through space in an ever-unfolding becoming. If I were to make a similar (and minor) critique of Grimes’s work it would be along these lines, that place and space are often represented as a duality with locatable boundaries. Not entirely though, as some pieces in the collection do dissolve the boundaries in interesting ways. Nevertheless, using a unique narrative style, Grimes’s generic settings manage to twist the perception when viewed through her glass geographies.
Furthermore, there are many other interesting uses of space and place in Grimes's stories: a cemetery as a place not just for holding on to the dead, but where the dead maintain some hold over us; an artist creates glass objects which may or may not contain souls and other worlds; and a bookstore where the liminal spaces between the floors are where the most interesting interactions occur. Like the titular glass objects in her stories, Grimes's geography occupies ambiguous spaces, shifts our perspectives, and invites us to contemplate what, if anything, they mean.
Ben Lockwood is a writer in central Pennsylvania. He's also a geographer and ecologist at Penn State University. Ben’s work has been featured in Clarkesworld Magazine, Seize the Press, Vast Chasm, ergot., and others. You can find more of Ben's writings at benlockwood.substack.com
Notes
[1] Hones, S., 2010. Literary geography and the short story: setting and narrative style. Cultural geographies, 17(4), pp.473-48
[2] Coddington, K. and Micieli-Voutsinas, J., 2017. On trauma, geography, and mobility: Towards geographies of trauma. Emotion, space and society, 24.
[3] Tuan, Y.F., 1977. Space and place: The perspective of experience. U of Minnesota Press.
[4] Punter, D. and Mancini, C.B. eds., 2020. Space (s) of the Fantastic: A 21st Century Manifesto. Routledge.
[5] Paddy, D.I., 2020. Home is Where the Dark is: A Literary Geography of Daphne du Maurier’s Disturbing Genres. In Space (s) of the Fantastic (pp. 96-114). Routledge.
[6] Massey, D.B., 2005. For space. London: Sage.