There's a lot to say about Hempel's work but I'd like to start with her titles. Her titles are breathtaking. Some of my favorites: "Nashville gone to Ashes", "Tonight is a Favor to Holly", "Breathing Jesus", "Rapture of the Deep", "Beg, Sl Tog, Inc, Cont, Rep", "The Most Girl Part of You." Titles are something I sometimes stumble over in my own work, or overlook as particularly meaningful (from my own perspective as I write them). Titles have felt to me in the past, often, just like a label to remember them by. Of course my relationship to titles as a reader has always been something very different. Hempel's titles--and the particular way they tether her stories to themselves and also to their own exquisite unraveling--are lessons in how to take the breath away before a story begins, and then also once it has ended.
Because often, Hempel's titles emerge from only a small reference in the story, rather than the story's obvious center, and thus the titles do not take their full weight or clarity until the end. The title "Beg, Sl Tog, Inc, Cont, Rep," seems like nonsense (though we trust the author that it will materialize into meaning). On the third page of the story, we learn that the title is most likely an abbreviated instructions code from the knitting books at Ingrid's knitting store. Not until the ninth page do we find out the translation for this code: "Begin, slip together, increase, continue, repeat." Finally, on the last page, we are given the closing instructions for the piece that the character--that Hempel, that the readers--have been creating throughout the story: "K tog rem st", or "knit together remaining stitches." Topically speaking, this story is about a woman who has had a difficult abortion with lasting physical and emotional effects, who is taking care of another woman who is pregnant. While she watches over her friend, she knits (there is little else to do). Once the baby is born, the woman knits feverishly without stop, and gives the new mother an embarrassing number of sweaters for the baby. "That was the great thing about knitting, I thought--everything was fiber, the world a world of natural resources." She knits her pain and her loss into sweaters for another woman's baby; she conceives of new beings from the fibers of yarn, rather than the fibers of her own body. The title is a code that the woman must figure out--a code of healing and of creation--but also a code that she wants to live safely within because codes are in a way safe in their secrecy. And the code's translation--"Begin, Slip together, increase, continue, repeat"--is both a metaphor for conception (the source of this woman's pain and loss), and one for the process of healing. The final piece of the code: "Knit together remaining stitches." Heal the pieces of yourself that are broken. The title unfolds its own code, its own meaning throughout the story such that it is not just a stagnant label but rather a pulsing part of the story and its arc of meaning.
"Nashville Gone to Ashes" refers to the narrator/protagonist's dead dog, Nashville, whose ashes sit "on top of the dresser, next to the phone." Initially most readers recognize Nashville as a Tennessee city but the expectations are changed when this name is given to a dead dog. There is something lovely about this, about this subversion of expectations and naming. Names, (another word for "Titles")in this story, are critical--and Nashville is in fact mis-named because of her husband's misunderstanding. The narrator's husband was a Vet, nicknamed "Flea", and is now dead. Flea, of course, is a funny name (and an unexpected one) for a Vet who collects animals at home. Their home, even after flea dies, is awash with adopted animals and all their names. These animals both keep the narrator company, and remind her terribly of her dead husband, or rather, the fact that her husband is dead. "Here's a trick I found for how to finally get some sleep. I sleep in my husband's bed. That way the empty bed I look at is my own," she says. "Nashville Gone to Ashes," initially evocative of a place but then clarified to refer to the dead dog, ultimately reverts to including it's initial meaning of "A Place Gone to Ashes" because, we learn, it is not just the dog that's dead, or the husband, but the entire wild world the husband built at to which the woman, without Flea the husband, is only allergic and in which she is terribly lonely. With Nashville gone to ashes, she tries to give away the other dogs.
As I said, I'm toppled by some of Hempel's titles. In thinking about why, with these two stories as case studies, it seems to me that the mark of these strong titles is that the title unfolds its meaning, its beauty, all the way through the story. The title is, at the beginning, a small peephole into the revelation that will come with the story (and for its characters), and it is also ultimately the foundation of that revelation. Hempel's titles, in this way, are stories unto themselves. Her titles matter--all titles should matter. From this I have a lot to learn.
