"Learning to Fly" by Jamy Bond

Jamy Bond is a nonfiction and fiction writer originally from Dallas, Texas. Her stories and essays have appeared in a variety of publications, including Pithead Chapel, JMWW, Barren Magazine, Wigleaf, The Rumpus, and The Sun Magazine. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. She earned her BA in philosophy and MFA in writing from George Mason University where she co-founded So to Speak Journal. Her work in humanitarian aid and as a Fulbright student scholar sent her traveling throughout Europe, the Middle East, and East Africa before she finally settled down in the DMV area with her family to focus on her writing. She is currently working on a novel and a collection of hybrid flash stories.

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Lindsay Forbes Brown is currently enrolled in American University's MFA program and serves as associate editor at the literary magazine, FOLIO. She has a background in publishing at Macmillan in New York City, but is glad to be working on her own pieces now. She is interested in making the grotesque beautiful in her writing.

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Introduction to "Learning to Fly"
by Lindsay FORBES Brown

When I first read Jamy Bond’s Pushcart-nominated short story, “Learning to Fly,” I was reminded instantly of the Joyce Carol Oates story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been.” Like that story, Bond reveals the prickly intersection of desire and devastation, of youth and beauty curdled sour. “Learning to Fly” is a reflection on a defining moment in a young woman’s life when she stumbles across the purpling, turquoise-ringed hand of cheerleader, Jesse McDaniel in the woods. We eventually discover our narrator has been sexually assaulted by the neighborhood boy she loves. 

Bond’s nonfiction work deals with her travel abroad, her family, and the things we think about as our loved ones lay dying. Both her nonfiction and fiction writing have a proclivity toward the dark and cruel corners of life and center on man’s inhumanity against man. As in “Learning to Fly,” the subject matter in much of her work deals with human bodies defiled by substance, illness, or violence. “Kaysera Stops Pretty Places” depicts death through the invisibility of a young American Indian woman who goes missing. “Morphine” reveals two sisters who fight over the administering of “liquid gold” to their dying father. “Therapy” details unimaginable parental abuse. “American Girl Doll” tells the story of a brutal sexual assault on Halloween. 

In “Learning to Fly,” our narrator always knows how fast she’s running by how long it takes her to slow down. Unfortunately, a young woman’s muscular body and powerful lungs are no match for the “hissing,” “cooing,” “slurping,” and “grunting” boys on the sidelines. While our narrator can nearly fly down the track, she freezes at the hands of Charlie Dean. She can’t break free from his overpowering mouth and grip when he rapes her one afternoon in his garage. 

The boys in this story are always in control. They construct model airplanes for fun (a clever nod to their control of flight) and prey on young women by pinning them down, clipping their wings, and turning them flightless. Bond suggests that girls can only be free under these circumstances if they disassociate, waiting to see whether the boy will be kind enough to leave a body or discolored shell to crawl back into whenever the assault is over. 

“Learning to Fly” is a story of movement and lack thereof. It is also a story of reduction: Jesse’s identity reduced to turquoise and silver rings, the track team reduced to the “sheer beauty” of their calf muscles, cheerleaders reduced to the horrible term, “stretched.” There is reduction of a young woman’s life smote to wrapped white plastic, of teenage sex reduced to the stuff of nightmares on cold concrete. 

Bond is a master of nuance, and she uses smart linguistic devices to lead us where we need to go. There is a visual return of rib bones and black marble eyes. Jolting adjectives and verbs such as “shoot myself forward” and “dead tree” set an ominous tone from the beginning. The frank and succinct use of colors makes the work all the more gutted. The ending is surprisingly ambiguous, yet in its understatement, there is still the feel of a loosely wrapped bow. 

As a young woman who once read “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” in her high school classroom to now reading “Learning to Fly,” I can’t help but feel that we, and perhaps writers specifically, have work ahead of us regarding how American culture views women. Today, nearly sixty years after Oats’ story was published, the conversation of young women as surface-level beings and serviceable objects begetting jealousy and disgust doesn’t seem to have changed. Stories like Connie’s in “Where Are You Going” and our narrator’s story in “Fly” need to be read and talked about and learned from. We must teach young men like Charlie Dean how desire and violence can be shaded gray, and the tragedy of miscommunication and getting it wrong. We women also mustn’t accept the history before us as our chosen path. We mustn’t continue to travel toward men who aim to stifle our voices and violate our bodies. We must loudly celebrate youth, desire, and beauty, and get out from under the grip of the hands and mouths that force us into frozen, dissociative silence. Ultimately, we must embolden ourselves and others so we can survive. 

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Interview with Jamy bond
by Lindsay Brown

LB:    Your work I would say is not for the faint-hearted, yet it still maintains a lyrical and literary appeal. What draws you to such vulnerable places and how do you handle them with grace and expert touch?

JB:    I’m drawn to vulnerable subjects, I suspect, because I grew up in an abusive home. There was violence, alcoholism, and neglect. The mistreatment of others, especially children, is a subject that causes me a great deal of turmoil, anger, and sadness, so I use writing as a way to channel those emotions. Living in and traveling through third world countries and war zones gave me a wide lens through which to observe the cruelty human beings are capable of and this experience, coupled with my childhood experience, make my subjects feel almost inevitable. Writing is a way of containing experience and there’s a lot of comfort in that for me.  

I absolutely love lyrical writing, so I tend to use lyricism as an entry into difficult subjects. I once took a photography class, and our assignment was to photograph ugly things in a beautiful way. I photographed a rusty drain, someone else photographed dried up and spoiled condiments, and one girl photographed a land fill. Her photograph was really gorgeous, like looking at a Rothko or a Diebenkorn. No one even knew what it was until she told us. Then, I could see little pieces of trash in it. Overall, it was a beautiful panoply of color and texture. Her photograph made a deep and lastly impression on me that has carried over into my writing. I like to give voice to things we’d rather look away from, but to hold the reader’s attention with beautiful language and imagery.

LB:    “Learning to Fly,” involves a coming-of-age experience which intertwines tragedy with desire. The subject matter and reference to calf muscles and “stretched girls” was reminiscent of Connie and her long blonde hair in Joyce Carol Oats’ story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been.” To me, there is the constant question girls and women face which is whether youthful beauty and bodies should be celebrated or demonized. What do you believe is your story’s take? What is your own take if it is different from that of your story?

JB:    I love “Where are you Going, Where Have You Been.” It haunted me when I read it years ago. My story is purposely ambiguous, because there is nothing straightforward about how the female form is “seen” in our society. Girls face a barrage of conflicting messages from a very young age as to how they should feel about their own bodies. I tried to capture the manifestation of that dichotomy in the story. The narrator and her two friends find Jesse’s mutilated body and can reasonably deduce what happened to her. They are both mesmerized and disgusted, curious and repelled by what they see. This is juxtaposed with the narrator’s budding, pubescent sexuality, her own desire for Charlie and her desire to be desired by other boys. She begins to interpret her experiences in light of this new discovery, which looms, sadly, as a kind of warning.  

LB:    In “Learning to Fly,” we find that our narrator thinks very highly of a boy named Charlie Dean even though we find out he raped her. Her whole world it seems, revolves around him and he is referenced twelve times in the seven-page story. Charlie teaches our narrator (quite ironically, I might add) how to breathe and “hold her body” during runs. The narrator even wishes he had been there with her to watch men take Jesse’s body away on the gurney. I wondered if this refers to how women and girls can struggle to compartmentalize tragedy and abuse and can naively paint a varnish on those we love. I believe this is a universal human trait where we can be blinded by (call it) hormones, love, desire, etc. Is there anything you might want to add here in this interpretation or takeaway of the story? 
JB:  Yes, the situation with Charlie absolutely refers to how women and girls struggle to compartmentalize tragedy, abuse and vulnerability. Compartmentalization is a survival skill and it is what the narrator imagines Jesse doing in her last moments. 

I see Charlie as a victim too, and perhaps that is a part of the story that doesn’t come through as strongly. He, too, has been flooded with the same conflicting messages about what it means to desire another person, and what it means to express that desire sexually. He and the narrator share the fact that they are standing at the precipice of awareness. This is why she wants to show him what’s happened, she wants to bring him in on this slow-evolving epiphany about how violence and desire are inextricably linked. 

LB:   You talk briefly about angelhood and lonely birds in flight, of transformation and metamorphosed bodies: Jesse’s discolored body and her metamorphosis into death and our narrator’s loss of innocence and reckoning with disassociation during her rape. Did you anticipate that this piece might come away with a tinge of religion or faith? Of life after death?

JB:      When I sat down to write this story, I wanted to write about a young girl’s sexual coming of age. I knew the story was going to be about a group of friends finding the dead and mutilated body of a girl they know. I knew that the narrator would be forced to process seeing this dead girl in light of her own developing desires. That’s all I had in mind when I started writing. Once I had a strong voice, the rest just came. For me, writing is about making connections and the best connections are made in the act of the writing itself. It doesn’t matter how much or how little I have in mind when I begin, the real story takes shape on the page during the process of writing it.  I had no idea how it would end until I was writing those final paragraphs, reading them out loud, hearing their rhythm, seeing their imagery, making the relevant connections and then refining it.

LB:    One scene that haunts me is when our narrator takes a stick and pokes at the leaves that are covering Jesse’s body. I felt in those initial moments of first seeing the body, our narrator grapples with her own mortality through the lens of her rape, yet she is also somehow removed from the death to do something like this. What are we to make of this action? Is it the exhibition of morbid curiosity? Is it naivete or perhaps sheer disbelief she is feeling? How do you think she feels now, looking back on this pivotal moment in her life?

JB:     Yes, in those moments the narrator is grappling with her own mortality and her own vulnerability at the hands of male desire. She is quite literally coming of age in the space of this narrative and it’s a slow transition; the curiosity and invincibility of youth still control her impulses, including how she interprets her experiences. There is naivete at work and perhaps a bit of shock (most of us go a lifetime without ever seeing what she’s seeing at such a young age). One of her impulses is to blame the victim, though not explicitly, by suggesting that Jesse was essentially a slut. It’s a human impulse in the face of tragedy to convince ourselves that the suffering before us could never happen to us, for whatever reason. It’s yet another form of compartmentalization and survival. But as the story moves on and she considers other factors in the situation (Jesse’s bruises, for example), and how she felt in that garage with Charlie, she is beginning to come to terms with the fact that she could easily become Jesse herself. This vulnerability is a reality all girls absorb at some point. 

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To learn more about Jamy Bond's work, visit her website.