Deadheading, the practice of pruning dead flower heads in order to preserve the plant, provides Beth Gilstrap with a rich metaphor around which to organize her new story collection. The twenty-two stories in Deadheading & Other Stories, which won the 2019 Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize, range widely in content, tone, and voice. But as Gilstrap digs into her theme, it’s clear that what unifies them is their relation to the powerful metaphor evoked by the title.

The first story, “Earth Eating As Suppression,” concerns a girl who prepares mud to eat. The initial sentences suggest the story is told in the third person, but tucked into the opening is the collective voice of residents of the Carolina Piedmont region:

Winters in the Carolina Piedmont were like what folks up north call mud season, though we’re almost never thawing out frozen. We stay misted and sinking in the ground from November to March. Nobody ever dreamed of a dirty little Christmas, which was almost always what we had. Our trees were trimmed a little more around the bottom after having sat on lots for any amount of time, dirt huddled in the needles, sometimes knee-high.

The collective voice then drops away, which is curious. Does this chorus relate only to this particular story or is it a voice of the whole collection, of the men and women populating this book? Either way, the opening story establishes the collection’s primary setting. Most of the other stories, while atmospheric, aren’t as rooted in place or even time. Although they’re undoubtedly Southern and contemporary, they don’t feel firmly anchored — which provides a slightly magical quality.

“Earth Eating as Suppression” also hints at the collection’s theme. While the girl’s grandfather believes “only ignorant people” would eat mud, her grandmother disagrees: “Some folks won’t never understand the desire to let the earth melt under the tongue, to let the thousands of microbes disseminate into the body, to suppress the unnameable pain growing in the belly.” That’s what the collection’s girls and women are all aching with: unnameable pain. They’re heartbroken, traumatized by witnessing or experiencing horrors. As in deadheading, removal becomes an essential safeguard of life. These characters cannot suppress their pain, but they must fight for survival. Typically this struggle is for emotional well-being — on which, arguably, one’s existence does indeed depend.

Another story, “The Denial Weeks,” about a couple facing financial hardship, provides great example of what Gilstrap does so well: she unfolds an initially unassuming story to reveal rich underlayers. This story, like most others in the collection, delights while building to its surprising yet inevitable ending. Part of the charm comes from humor, as when oof the characters wryly notes: “[O]ur twentieth anniversary was coming up a week from Tuesday, and there we were, still together, still broke as shit, and losing the jobs we’d never been brave or financially secure enough to walk away from. Still though, I was 80 percent thankful.”

Most of the collection’s characters we meet only once, but a few reappear, lending cohesion to the whole. We first meet Janine and her friend Maddie in “No Matter How Fine,” for instance; our acquaintance deepens when we meet them again, a few years later, in “Sale Day” — only his time, they’re living together. Similarly Layla, the narrator of “Still Soft, Still Whole,” returns, transformed by a point-of-view shift, in the collection’s closing story. Some characters are vivid, three-dimensional, and unforgettable. Others are rather unmemorable, perhaps by design. The wide range of characters makes the book feel something like a town and recalls the subtle collective voice that begins the collection. Like Gilstrap’s characters, there’s a range in her stories, too. Some are quiet and tiny. Others are unforgettable. The affecting “Five-Pointed, Failed Paper Love Weapon,” about a girl whose boyfriend staples himself in the chest, is a story to hold close. It’s the only story Gilstrap tells in the second person, and her choice is hard to argue with.

In this wide-ranging collection, some stories are more lyrical than others, some are classically Southern Gothic, and most vary in tone and style. This breadth proves Gilstrap’s skills and dexterity as a writer working out the implications of a fascinating metaphor. Again and again, Gilstrap’s characters respond to pain and affliction with acts akin to deadheading. Something in these women and girls has indeed died, but through acts like deadheading, their lives are preserved. Just as deadheading involves cutting — a kind of violence — to preserve a plant’s integrity and beauty, so, too, do Gilstrap’s women engage in acts of self-preservative violence. What a breathtaking metaphor for an equally breathtaking story collection.

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