"Women I've Known" | What would Willa have done?

Atlanta-based writer Greg Johnson has breathed a swirling unreality into the stories in his collection "Women I've Known" (Ontario Review Press, $23.95), giving them a dreamy atmosphere full of longing, insecurity, rage, curiosity, inhibition and, in true Southern Gothic style, warped humor.

It's as if to say women aren't from Venus, but from someplace altogether more distant and interesting.

In 17 previously published works and five new ones, we are invited to sit back and watch as dames, damsels, eccentrics and tough broads demonstrate their various forms of womanhood through encounters with the men, children and other women in their lives.

The boy narrator of "Crazy Ladies," for example, relates the day a woman visits his grandma's house, gulps red Kool-Aid and throws everyone off-kilter with her strange remarks. "... Her glance seemed full of mischief, as though she were exercising her right to a second childhood," he tells us.

In the slow-burning "Wildfires," we have the case of Janet, "once a woman of considerable fire and passion" who has suppressed her artistic ambitions to tend to a husband suffering from the trauma of fighting in Vietnam. The decision has left her "dissatisfied, a little bitter," but she's also clear about her duties as a wife. That is until her husband's alluring younger brother reignites the flames of her youth.

This story is juxtaposed against somewhat overheated "The Metamorphosis," about a beloved but tormented female impersonator who is figuratively and almost literally consumed by an audience. That's not the only time "Women I've Known" presents readers with acts of grotesque passion and violence.

But these scenarios aren't always grim. The hilarious "Last Encounter with the Enemy" pits writer Flannery O'Connor against a precocious boy who arrives at her peacock-filled farm one day to pepper her with disarmingly incisive questions about her work, then claims he's a prophet and suggests she's a lesbian. O'Connor, who in real life died of lupus at age 39, uses the crutches she's walking on to teach the little twerp what happens when you try to get cute with ailing authors.

In the title story, "Women I've Known," Willa Cather keeps a cooler head as she tries to deflect similarly nosy, overly long questions from a lonely admirer who keeps dating her letters 2037, even though it's 1937.

In one postscript, the admirer asks if the 'th' in Cather's name is pronounced as in "rather" or "wrath." The author writes back sourly: "It rhymes with 'blather.' "

Johnson, an English professor in Atlanta and a Joyce Carol Oates biographer, presents us with women who have developed their own techniques — some serious, some puzzling, some funny — for remaining centered and connected in a world that is itself hard to fathom.

For them, selfhood is a constant struggle, and despite the expectations of the men, children and admirers in their lives, it won't always be pretty or pleasing.

Tyrone Beason is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff writer.