The Stories of Devil-Girl

By Anya Achtenberg

"Poignant and fierce, this book is moving, beautifully written, and urgently relevant."
"Devil-Girl's stories are all of our stories, all of the 'discarded and demonized', all of us who have had to fight to survive, to fight to tell our truths. Achtenberg's wise survivor, Devil-Girl, is witness and seer, and her words are sustenance. There is much pain in this book, much wisdom, and a kind of beauty that sears itself into memory, a fierce beauty that is as necessary as air. Read this book."
--Lisa D. Chave, Author of Destruction Bay; In An Angry Season
"Achtenberg is a cutting-edge voice in the literature of the postglobalization age, an era in which we are uprooted geographically and spiritually, and redefining what it means to be home. What a superbly written book! Read it and be changed."
--Demetria Martinez, Author of Mother Tongue
"Stunning and original! Powerful 'make it new' language that creates-through the runaway energy and precise detail of the storytelling voice--a disturbing world in all its particularities, only to transcend it by grappling with what's at stake in the larger world."
--Stratis Haviaras, Founder and former editor of Harvard Review
"An amazing piece of bravura writing! Devil-Girl takes us from destitution to seedy glamour as a homeless vulnerable young woman tries to survive the savagery of the streets. Poignant and fierce, this book is moving, beautifully written, and urgently relevant."
--Kathleen Spivack, Author, Director: Advanced Writing Workshop
Book #1 in the Reflections of America Series
an imprint of Loving Healing Press

• Language: English
• Publisher: Modern History Press
• Release date: Jul 8, 2008
• ISBN: 9781615999927

Anya Achtenberg

Anya Achtenberg is an award-winning fiction writer and poet. Her publications include the novel "Blue Earth", and autobiographical novella "The Stories of Devil-Girl", both with Modern History Press; and poetry books, "The Stone of Language", published by West End Press after being finalist in five poetry competitions; and "I Know What the Small Girl Knew" (Holy Cow! Press). Her short fiction has received awards from Coppola's Zoetrope: All-Story, New Letters, the Raymond Carver Story Contest, and others. She is at work on History Artist, a novel centering in a Cambodian woman born of an African American father and Cambodian mother at the moment the U.S. bombing of Cambodia began. This work received a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. She is also writing a book of poetry and short prose, The Matadors at the Crossing. Anya teaches creative writing workshops and classes around the country and online with growing international participation, and offers manuscript consultations and coaching for fiction writers, memoirists, and poets. She also organizes groups of writers, artists, filmmakers and educators to travel to Cuba. Along with her numerous fiction and memoir workshops, she developed and teaches a series of multi-genre workshops on Writing for Social Change (Re-Dream a Just World; Place and Exile/ Borders and Crossings; and Yearning and Justice: Writing the Unlived Life), which she has started writing into a movable workshop. Visit Anya at www.AnyaAchtenberg.com

Book preview

Introduction

Devil-Girl has been through many incarnations. She has been a double-CD set and is still an MP3 audio file. A nickname for a dear friend's daughter; a candy bar discovered long after Devil-Girl had named herself in my head; and, after going a million miles away to the other side of the mirror, she is perhaps being reborn in Devi Mau, the central character of History Artist, a novel-still-in-progress as of the date of this publication of The Stories of Devil-Girl.

As various people would question my racial/ethnic identity, even to the point of the bluntest question presented in the sweetest tones, What are you, dear?, so may readers question this small volume, looking for its identity in its genre. Looks like prose, sounds like poetry, at least, some of the time. Reads like a fable, but smacks of the truth. Just as I would respond to the question about my identity with a simple, It's all true, so would I admit the mixed identity of The Stories of Devil-Girl with a nod to the way that history must not be buried or allowed to remain the food of amnesiacs. While it can be a challenge to keep track of the truth, I must offer this so-called novella as a true hybrid that aims with its lies and its music only for the edge of truth, and its ability to cut. Cut through, cut away, cut into.

The writing of this novella was much longer than the volume is, and moved with me from my main writerly occupation as a poet into my obsession with storytelling in prose. It took along my own story on the journey of the writing and dropped it down an airshaft or into the sea to explode, or to splatter, into fiction. Once mostly poetry, it left the stutter of line breaks that would not tell what I needed to tell.

The Stories of Devil-Girl is prose fiction, with much that is autobiographical, and, as our lives always are, pushed by poetry.

It is, more for me than for the reader, a document and a time capsule, an air bubble, the black box from the crash, the beginning of breath. Lifesaver. It was the release for me into becoming a fiction writer and novelist. It marks for me the letting go of autobiography, until perhaps some distant moment, and the freeing of my voice into the multiplication of characters who somehow hold the forces that move us. My first memory is that of someone trying to strangle me in my crib, a memory I seem to always have had, reasonable in context. I read, after this novella was mostly complete, of the first woman, Lilith. It is, then, no surprise, but an act of balance to find a voice in Devil-Girl—the demonized speaker who roams the globe not to strangle babes in the crib, but to protect children.

What this novella is for the reader will, of course, vary, but I can only hope that it is a container holding something of use, something to connect to, something that opens up a bit more space for memory and story, for passion for the world. It is in this spirit that I now offer in print The Stories of Devil-Girl.

—Anya Achtenberg

May 2008

Storytelling

I was born September the first, my entry into the visible world precisely following the month of August, Devil's Month in Bolivia, far away and not so far from New York, an expensive city because there is always the Devil to pay. I was born here as the one I had violated during another lifetime, I'm sure of it. I was born here to walk the avenue between life and death. To fill out the forms of denial. To rave in the road and stop traffic with my stillness, as some do with their anger. To prowl the bootless alleyways, to drink the spoiled fluids of men. To flail beneath the Devil. To sprout breasts in the lunar lots of Bushwick, where the maws of an old Frigidaire caught my friend Penelope and she froze to a fetus, knees to lips, gray fists clenched.

Devil's month, exhausted and febrile, lay down in me, and I wailed a love song to the Devil, that dapper demon, as I fell from the clutch of my mother's thighs and she waved me away, and something invisible scooped me up and kissed me on one baby nipple, then bit it hard, as I bleated and bucked and shivered in the whiteness of the hospital corridor, fleeing dark as a stain on the Maimonides sheet.

Actually, as I recall, we never made it to the hospital. I couldn't wait, and had for some time been having nightmares of forceps sliding around my tufted skull and squeezing me past thought, or, if not that far, just into the land of deformity. I lived with that nightmare for the last month of my float, and came up pigeon-toed and anxious.

Because of the circumstances and moment of my birth in a speeding taxicab on the evening of the Devil's retreat to gather up force for his next spree, and because of my furious race to be severed from my mother after the nightmare of strangulation I slept with all those months, because of my flight, then, from my origins, my howl moved through all parts of the city, and returned to each neighborhood as I searched for the word my mother said to my first ear at the moment I slipped into hearing the solid world. Repelled so far from the welcoming word and the breast of life, my body was able to measure distance in units of hunger and fear.

Now, understand this, it was because of the silence that spoke in me, because of the daily stories that fed me through the window and the mountainous decay of events in each room that waited for a teller loud enough to be heard, that I have the ability to tell a story. It was because of playing at life in my mind, because of how things shattered, and because of hands. It was because my screams always gave me something to cry about, something to hide and seek. And it was because words also fly away from their origins, and in their dream lives continue to search for them in unbearable whisperings, that I possess the ability to read a man according to his reactions to my storytelling.

Soon, I could measure the distance between a man and his soul, as well as the speed of his flight away from it, by the strength of his punch and the angle at which his knee jabbed into the softest part of my thigh. If he could finish a rape, the taking or the buying peppered with

Reviews for The Stories of Devil-Girl

[reader247_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Reading Anya Achtenberg is like a sculptor creating something beautiful out of a lump of hard, cold stone. The chips of pain fall away as the narrator slowly escapes the confines of her childhood. Piece by piece fall away revealing more and more truths about life. Not since reading The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls have I felt the pain and torment of this kind of childhood. Eventually as the real person evolves we see the freedom that is in the heart really revealed. Lovely!

[lisalynne_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Anya Achtenberg calls [The Stories of Devil-Girl] a novella, but it reads more like a poem - a wild, surreal poem that occasionally bursts out in pain, in suffering so clearly described that it's painful to read. The stories are not straightforward, but it is easy to pick out the threads - abuse, both physical and sexual, poverty, rape, prostitution and the struggle to make something of her life. They are told bluntly, with language that is sometimes fanciful, sometimes blunt. It is beautiful in the way that sad, haunting music can be beautiful.

[menagerie_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Achtenberg's primary calling is poetry and that is obvious in every page of her debut novella. Her prose is lyrical, ebbing and flowing like an epic poem. Sometimes the lyricism distracts from the story, but given how brutal the story is, it may be a necessary distraction. Devil-Girl is about a young woman who goes from a grim, abusive childhood to to an even bleaker adulthood. Homelessness, rape, and pornography are all part and parcel of Devil-Girl's life as she tries to find a home or at least a place to be safe. Achtenberg is short on the details of how her protagonist pulls herself out of the muck, but somehow she does and moves to the relatively safe environs of academia in Minnesotta before returning to face her demons in NYC. Achtenberg makes no promises of happily ever after but she does assure her readers that at least the worst is behind Devil Girl.This work is steeped with suppressed emotion and offers a very bleak view of the world. Achtenberg seemed to be intentionally vague on the basics of the story (who, what, where, when and why) but highlighted snatches of the horrible experiences that her protagonist endured. I frequently felt like I was supposed to guess what the character was doing or thinking. The whole book seems to be enveloped in fog and I was constantly casting about trying to figure out what was going on. Overall, Achetenberg seems to have taken the idea of "less is more" a little too far. She needs to flesh out her writing to make it true prose. Devil-Girl is somewhere between poetry and prose and that is a tough place for both reader and writer.

[bookcrushblog · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Don't let the slimness of the book fool you. The Stories of Devil-Girl, by Anya Achtenberg, is a densely constructed set of very wordy stories. Each vignette is short but far from easily digestible.When I learned that the writer's previous works are mostly poetry, this book made much more sense to me, as it reads like wandering prose poetry. I often found myself continuing to read only because I was hoping to find another pretty phrase or metaphor -- not because I was invested in the story.I like to consider myself a fan of "experimental" fiction or "literary" fiction -- whatever you'd like to call it. But I do think there is a fine line between breaking the rules of the novel for story sake and breaking the rules of the novel for writer sake. I'm not convinced that Achtenburg landed on the right side here.That said, her writing is beautiful, and I look forward to checking out some of her poetry -- based upon The Stories of Devil-Girl, I'm pretty certain I'd be a fan.

[novelnympho · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I was certain I'd written a reviewed this book after receiving it, but maybe my negative review was deleted? The strange lyrical poetic prose was difficult to follow and impossible to connect with. I was completely turned off by the style of writing, grammar, prose and story. Unfortunately, not a book I'd even pass along...it was just not there for me. It looks like it was a better fit for some other reviewers. That's great! I'm glad it has received some positive accolades.

[bplma_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

There is so much to say about this slim novella, but i have trouble finding the words. Devil -Girl grows up in a cold, disfunctional home, neglected by a physically and emotionally abusive mother. Brief descriptions of her father drift in and out of the work, and i get the impression that he abandons devil girl and the rest of the family. A loveless, unhappy home---devil girl is repeatedly told --and comes to believe--she is worthless of any thing good and worthy of all the abuse she gets--almost seeking it as a young adult. She moves or is thrown out of hte house, then becomes homeless, a drunk, drug addict, petty criminal, prostitute whore, eventually marrying an abusive man. Similar in many ways to Sapphire's PUSH, Devil-Girl eventually finds community, friendship, purpose and self worth in education, at a school in Boston and later in Minnesota. She is saved, redeemed, renewed. In fact, my only complaint about the work is that Achtenberg does not tell us more about the road to recovery...does not go into more detail and carry us along on the recovery route...That will be the next Devil-Girl novella, perhaps?? Beautifully written --lyrical, musical language that moves --rich in imagery ..."Fatherless, I roam. Dead-tongued kisses lodged in my throat." Achtenberg correctly states that this work sounds like poetry and reads like prose--part diary, part memoir, part storytelling, The Stories of Devi-Girl is beautifully written but difficult to read. It is not for everyone-to be sure, but i really liked it and enjoyed reading some parts aloud-- Anya Achtenberg is a very strong writer.

[littlebear514_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

While I can't say I appreciated the writing style (very, very poetic and artsy), if you can get past that, the story is a very good one; though it is hard to extract most of the time. I think if it was written differently I would have a much greater opinion of it.

[djupstrom · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I think this book suffered from trying to be too many things, and not accomplishing any of them. It would have been better as a book of collected poems or short stories, or a memoir, but it is none of these. It is marketed as a novel or novella. I didn't get it at all.

[afyfe_5 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I wasn't a huge fan of this book, and I feel that with this book it is a little hit or miss, either you would like it or you wouldn't. I can apprectiate the writting style and I thought the author did a fantastic job with this. However it was a very depressing book and I didn't like some of the chapter/stories topics, although I realize they all need to be in there to make it complete but there were definately some that I liked more than others. Some of it got a little too weird for me but there were also some parts I really connected with, unfortunately, there were more parts I didn't like then ones I did. I would recommend this book to someone who enjoys this sort of poetic writting and wants to read something dark and depressing. I think it was a good book, just not enjoyable for me.

[wolson_16 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book was a huge struggle to get through page by page. Not saying though that is was horrible just very hard to understand defiantly not a light read.The Stories of Devil Girl is about a child that is raised in an abusive home that leads to more terrible things in her life from very young she is forced to think that she is a terrible child and in turn feels that she does terrible things. This leads her down a life of homelessness, prostitution, and poverty. It is only many years later that she is able to drag herself out of this repetitive cycle that she lives and move to a more respectable lifestyle.This is one novel that I would have a hard time recommending. I think it takes a certain type of reader to read this type of novel and I don't believe that I am one of them.