H.E. Fisher re(view)s: The Mortality Shot
by Julia Lee Barclay-Morton

As a multi-genre, occasionally experimental, writer, it’s always a delight to come across hybrid literature, which can be a particularly effective genre when the subject matter wants to sprawl. The Mortality Shot by Julia Lee Barclay-Morton is a collection of stories, essays, and a play that looks at some big questions: death, abandonment, legacy, nature, among others — complex and nuanced topics that lend themselves well to the fluid nature of hybrid work.  The Mortality Shot’s table of contents indicates the genre of each piece; yet the voice here is so unified and elegant that without this information I, for one, would not have known fiction from non-fiction.

The Mortality Shot opens with the story “White Shoe Lady” and we are immediately introduced to the short distance between death and absence — and the long distance between loss, whether permanent or semi- — and the unfathomable unknown location of those who are missing. “White Shoe Lady” also sets up the tension throughout The Mortality Shot between children and adults and the profound need to be cared for or give care to.

In addition to multiple genres, The Mortality Shot treats us to different unexpected forms in the book (I don’t want to give anything away here and ruin the surprises). As a reader, I am kept on my toes, bent to attention, in the most delicious of ways.

There is a kind of unkemptness, chaos even, in the settings of these stories and essays (the play, has no setting; it is essentially dis-located). We feel wet rocks under our feet, can smell the cat litter than needs changing, and the exhaust emitted from cars… This works on two levels: as a kind of existential threat as well as evoking a sense of bereavement throughout. I found this particularly effective in the story about two outsider girls called “Red Hots.” The young narrator, describing her sleepover at her new friend Denise’s, tells the reader: “I am over her house and we are sitting on her bed, which has no sheets and an itchy blanket cover thing with faded flowers on it, that is kind of beaten up and stringy.” In a single stroke, we are given the discomfiting and scary world Denise inhabits, allowing the story to progress from there.

Solace in these pieces often comes from nature. The little girl in “White Shoe Lady” “…is afraid of almost everything else, but not the ocean.” The characters and speakers need solace — as might we all — especially as bodies in this book take a lot of hits. Struggling with health issues, the speaker in the essay “Epistedemiology: 99 Days” notes “The moment of calm in which I know I will be OK. Like touching the bottom of the ocean floor beneath all the ruckus on the surface.” Barclay-Morton’s approach to the body’s ailments and diseases is lyrical, never clinical. “Did I mention the burning of the esophagus?,” she writes in “Epistedemiology: 99 Days.” “That which mimics a sensation of heart attack, radiating out like a mushroom cloud in the chest. Making you sit upright to ask: is it gastritis, my lung’s pleura in embers, my heart on fire?” The effect of this lyricism evokes the organic beauty and connection we have to mortality.

Barclay-Morton does a graceful job reminding the reader that though mortality is inevitable for every living being, death itself is abstract because the living simply cannot experience it. The book builds toward that abstraction with the final piece, a play, called “Respairation.” This is a kind of two-person modern Godot, a dual voice in conversation about, among other things, the inevitable. The play, “Respairation,” at least in form, leans toward experimental, featuring two unidentified characters speaking in two distinguishable voices, something I don’t think is an easy thing to pull off, and yet, in Barclay-Morton’s skilled hands, the conversation is easy and fascinating to follow. The play does an interesting thing: it considers the role children can play in our lives, our legacies. This conversation that the characters have about legacy allows the book itself to come full circle: starting with a story about a child’s introduction to death and relationship to loss and ending with an adult contemplating what it means to not have a child to pass a legacy along to. This is exciting work, as is the entirety of The Mortality Shot, work that allows itself to look at some of the ugly stuff we experience and live in and live with, the stuff that makes up our lives and our inevitable full stop. To know the end is the end. From the play “Respairation”:  “But I keep being afraid that if I come to terms with death I will die instantly.”

Julia Lee Barclay-Morton, PhD is an award-winning writer/director, whose writing has been produced and published internationally; her first book, a hybrid collection, THE MORTALITY SHOT is out now with Liquid Cat Books; recent publications in Oldster, Prairie Schooner, [PANK], Heavy Feather Review, and, as winner of Nomadic Press Bindle Contest, chapbook of White Shoe Lady. She founded Apocryphal Theatre when in London (2003-11); all of her experimental stage texts were recently streamed in a 22-hour radio project created with Viv Corringham, commissioned by Radio Art Zone. She lives in NYC with her husband and cat, where she coaches writers, paints, makes theater, and teaches yoga, while working on a hybrid memoir about being diagnosed on the autism spectrum at 57. More at TheUnadaptedOnes.com

H.E. Fisher is the author of the hybrid collection STERILE FIELD (Free Lines Press, 2022) and poetry chapbook JANE ALMOST ALWAYS SMILES (Moonstone Arts Center Press, 2022). H.E.’s poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Ligeia Magazine, Broadsided Press, Tupelo Quarterly, Whale Road Review, Pithead Chapel, and The Rumpus, among other publications, and is a No, YOU Tell It! storytelling alum. H.E. was awarded City College of NY’s 2019 Stark Poetry Prize and has received nominations for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize. H.E. is an editor and writing coach, and currently lives in The Hudson River Valley. https://www.hefisher.com/; IG: h.e._fisher1