Lee Conell on Spotting the Extraordinary Among the Ordinary

In the 26th in a series of posts on 2017 books entered for The Story Prize, Lee Conell, author of Subcortical (Johns Hopkins University Press), describes some formative influences.

What influenced you to become a writer?
My father is a building superintendent and my room was right next to his answering machine—so I was often waking up to messages left by tenants. Sometimes, when I couldn’t get back to sleep, I began to tell little stories or to try to imagine myself into the scene behind the tenants’ calls. I am still trying to write about the scenes behind some of these calls, and about the class tensions I witnessed or was part of in that upbringing. A sense of going behind the scenes, not just in an apartment but in someone’s mind, had a definite influence on my interest in writing and storytelling.

City buses also played a role. On long bus rides, my mother would try to keep me entertained by asking me to look out the window and rank on a one-to-ten scale the weird things we would inevitably see on New York City’s streets. I have to believe that identifying the extraordinary in what seems ordinary has something to do with my becoming a writer. I also read a lot on mass transit, although most of the books I was reading (and, yes, rereading) were not short story collections but the YA science fiction series Animorphs. I was really into animals and aliens.

I didn’t really try to write short stories until a boyfriend’s aunt gifted me a brand new copy of Alice Munro’s Runaway. I hadn’t heard of Munro and I definitely hadn’t read many contemporary short stories—but I remember being blown away by all the scope a Munro story could cover, how it felt in some way like riding in an elevator that moved in all directions. Then I became more interested in the short story and discovered writers like Grace Paley, Lorrie Moore, Junot Díaz, George Saunders. I realized that inside a story you could be so funny and so moving and so weird (on a one-to-ten scale, a story could sometimes be a ten in weirdness). I wanted to try that.

Name something by another author that you wish you’d written.
Since it’s around Halloween, I’ve been thinking a lot about Mavis Gallant and her fantastic story “From the Fifteenth District,” where the dead complain about the ways the living keep haunting them. It’s among my favorite ghost stories and the concept is one of those deceptively simple why-didn’t-I-ever-think-of-that ideas (although I’d imagine it seems that way in part because of how well Gallant pulls it off).

How do you get yourself back on track when your writing isn’t going well?
Taking a walk is the best. There’s something about the rhythm of walking that connects to the rhythm of writing for me. But about fifty percent of the time I’m too lazy to put on shoes. I know this will sound made up, but I’ve actually found reading television recaps oddly helpful in terms of getting back on track. Sometimes I’ll even read recaps for shows I don’t watch. It almost feels like backing away from a pool before you take a running start and dive in. Backing away from the difficulty of a scene I’m writing by reading something fun and sharp and analytical and sometimes goofy, but that is also—at least on the surface—pretty detached from the fictional world of my story, has proven helpful. When I return to the story, I know the narrative cadences are probably coming from my characters themselves and not from whatever I read last because, well, what I read last was a recap of a television show. Of course, sometimes this backfires and I end up down a serious Internet rabbit hole, but usually if that occurs I feel guilty enough to return to the story. This is probably not the most efficient way to get back on track. I should really just try to go with the walk taking.

Luis Jaramillo and the Unintentional Curse

In the 62nd in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Luis Jaramillo, author of The Doctor's Wife (Dzanc Books), discusses the different ways writers write.

When I’m writing I usually think I’m doing it wrong, that the stuff I’m trying to serve is too thin a gruel. This feeling becomes worse when I think about Mavis Gallant’s stories like “The Moslem Wife,” or “The Remission,” long stories about money, war, and love, stories that have the weight of a novel. I’m well acquainted with jealousy and envy, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. I admire what Gallant does, and yet I also have a rock solid sense that I’m constitutionally unable to write the same sort of condensed epics.

There’s a danger in reading too much into a fiction writer’s biography, but Mavis Gallant’s story is too good to not tell. At the age of four, her parents sent her to board at a convent run by French-speaking nuns. When her father died she was told he’d taken a trip to England and would be back soon. At the age of 29, Gallant decided she wanted to be a fiction writer, full time. She quit her newspaper job and moved to Paris from Canada. She prepared three stories to send to The New Yorker, telling herself that if all three were rejected she’d give up. She received an encouraging note in response to the first one, and the second was published.

In the afterword to the story collection Paris Stories, Gallant describes a childhood marked by a split in languages—French was the language of order and English the language of her imagination. She points to this duality—of language, of sense of self—as key to the project of writing. “Some writers may just simply come into the world with overlapping vision of things seen and things as they might be seen. All have a gift for holding their breath while going on breathing: It is the basic requirement.”

I’m good at holding my breath, and though I didn’t have to go to boarding school as a toddler, I too have a claim on duality. When I was only a few days old a family friend took a look at me and declared, “Nacio para no ofender,” literally “he was born to not offend,” an unintentional curse of sorts, but meaning I looked like a 50-50 mix of my parents. My mother is of Nordic stock, and my dad’s side of the family is Mexican-American. My first word was agua, said while pointing at a fountain in Mexico City, but I consider English my mother tongue. I grew up in Salinas, California, a farming town, a deeply segregated place very attuned to the differences between white and Mexican, meaning that so was I.

In the same afterword to Paris Stories, Gallant writes that if childhood trauma and a sense of duality were the only determining factors in someone becoming a writer, there’d be a lot more of us—practically everyone would be scribbling away. That clearly isn’t the case, and to go back to my original point, those of us that do write, write in completely different ways. I sometimes think that my style comes from having a stingy, withholding kind of personality. But the truth is I admire other people who write even more concisely, like Lydia Davis in her lovely masterpiece The Cows. The short book is made up of short observations of cows in a pasture, and yet somehow Davis writes a deeply funny book about sex, friendship, and the nature of being. I don’t think I’d have the nerve to go that small. See also Flannery O’Connor, on the opposite end of the dramatic and syntactic spectrum. I tried to write a short story like her once, to disastrous results, ending the story with a wholly unbelievable scene in which junior high school kids bury a mouse, saying a prayer over the tiny gravesite.

I first read Mavis Gallant on an airplane, flying from Portland, Oregon, to New York. I finished each story feeling like I’d eaten a whole pie, but after I closed the book and rested it on my lap for a few minutes I’d find myself opening it again, drawing the fork to my mouth in bite after delicious bite. There’s a difference between writing a story and reading a story. Reading can be an act of gourmandism—I like all sorts of foods, all sorts of books. The writing is a bit more complicated.