Okie Review: Revisiting Dinah Cox’s Award-Wining Short Story Collection a Decade Later
Review written by Jules Packett
The Okie Review Series seeks to promote Oklahoma writing by reviewing books by Oklahoma writers.
Dinah Cox’s short story collection Remarkable contains stories set in Oklahoma communities, where working class characters navigate money, family, and maybe most notably, belonging: That rare sort of belonging that one can only achieve in a place so small that people can’t really get away from each other. Cox’s collection was published in 2016, and reading it from the vantage point of 2026 underscores how consequential the last ten years have been for the country and for our state. Donald Trump makes an appearance in these pages, but he is still merely a pageant lecher, not yet Mein Führer. Hillary Clinton is there, too, teaching one character how to make her famous margarita recipe. Both cameos arrive from a political reality that now feels almost quaint: history has not yet hardened around either of them.
It is another time in Remarkable, and also it isn’t. I recognize the Oklahoma Cox’s characters inhabit: a place where nostalgia is reified in a Museum of Telephones and where people cobble together a living through strange, almost obsolete occupations. They hire themselves out as birthday-party characters, operate hayless hayrides, play heroes in low-budget Westerns. The communities are unusually close-knit. Most of Remarkable’s characters are working class and many of them are gay. Affordability has long kept queer folks in red states like Oklahoma, and now economic conditions even lure us here from blue states. Class inequality often means working class queer folks do not have the luxury of retreating into accepting enclaves. Instead we live alongside and depend upon the same people who might regard us with suspicion or even hate.
The queer characters in Remarkable bear little resemblance to their metropolitan counterparts who live out and proud, surrounded by other queer people, insulated in a cozy gay world. Cox’s characters inhabit a more ambiguous territory somewhere between the closet and outness. They accept neighborly kindness from people whose kindness can coexist, without obvious contradiction, alongside homophobia and moral judgment. As one character observes, “we weren’t really friends…we were consumers who shared the same demographics.”
That line could serve as Remarkable’s thesis. Cox’s characters are commingled by shared geography, class, and the peculiar institutions of small-city life. Her Oklahoma is full of people connected less by mutual understanding than by the simple fact that they have all ended up in the same place. And it’s a place where the daily compromises, the dependencies, the violence, and the acts of care bind people together who share a place without sharing a world.
Dinah Cox’s debut short fiction collection, Remarkable (BOA Editions, 2016), won the BOA Short Fiction Prize. Her stories appear widely and have won prizes from The Atlantic Monthly, The Texas Observer, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. She teaches in the English Department at Oklahoma State University
Remarkable (Winner of the 2016 Boa Short Fiction Prize)
by Dinah Cox
Boa Editions, ISBN: 978-1-942683-10-0, $16.00.
