Rob Davidson Finds Inspiration in Images

In the 18th in a series of posts on 2017 books entered for The Story Prize, Rob Davidson, author of Spectators (Five Oaks Press), discusses writing stories in response to the work of visual artists.

What inspires a new story? It can be anything—a fleeting glimpse, an overheard bit of gossip, a memory. Sometimes it’s another work of art.

The stories in Spectators began as ekphrastic exercises. Ekphrasis, a Greek word meaning “description,” is a literary response to an artistic production, typically a piece of visual or conceptual art. The resulting story, while inspired by the work of art, is not mere summary or objective description. The best ekphrastic works are richly subjective, presenting idiosyncratic responses that could only have been penned by a particular writer. There are countless examples, from Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” to Anne Sexton’s “The Starry Night” (inspired by Van Gogh), to Juan Felipe Herrera’s “Exiles” (inspired by Edvard Munch’s "The Scream").

Floating in Time © Sara G. Umemoto

Many of the flash fictions in Spectators were inspired by the photography and visual art of Stephani Schaefer, Sara G. Umemoto, and Tom Patton. The process is simple. In each case, I sit with the chosen image, studying it intensely before beginning composition. This might involve minutes or hours. Only when I feel I have fully entered into the world of that image do I begin to write. It begins as a kind of dialogue, with me going back to the image frequently. Eventually, I quit looking at the image and focus solely on my text, which develops its own dreams and aspirations.

Naturally, some readers want to see text and image side-by-side. When it happens, the experience is powerful. Tom Patton and I mounted a joint gallery show at the Morris Graves Museum of Art in Eureka, California, in early 2017. Seeing Tom’s excellent photos paired with my flash fictions, printed as broadsides, was grand; we both saw our own work in a new light.

So why not do a book together? A couple of reasons. First, not every fiction in the book is in response to visual art; some are homages to other writers, like Borges, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James. Second, I always intended the fictions to stand on their own merits. Seeing the image alongside the text I wrote might be interesting, but I don’t consider it essential.

I wrote these flash fictions to challenge myself to do something new. After three published books, I am a mid-career author who has learned he’s good at some things. There is a certain temptation to keep doing those things because you think you know what you’re doing. And there is another temptation to challenge yourself to cross lines, to cultivate what the Zen Buddhists call shoshin, which means “beginner’s mind”: an openness to new things; a willingness to try those things; an eagerness to learn; and the absence of preconceptions. Let go of the presumption that your wisdom counts for something. Look anew, as if for the first time.

While drafting Spectators, I had a few rules in mind, rules I made for myself solely for the reason of cultivating a beginner’s mind: to dispense with plot (go ahead, try it); to be more lyric and less narrative; to experiment with genres other than realism; to make each piece a response to another work of art; and to write nothing longer than a page.

It all started with those wonderful images by Stephani, Sara, and Tom.

Rob Davidson on Overcoming Every Day Obstacles

In the fourth in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Rob Davidson, author of The Farther Shore (Bear Star Press), discusses obstacles he's encountered, writing quickly, writing slowly, and what triggers his ideas.

What obstacles have you encountered in your work, and what have you done to overcome them?

"Obstacles include..."

Frequent obstacles include fatigue, anxiety, self-doubt, pride verging on hubris, teaching, debt, exhaustion, my ongoing attempt to be a good husband and father, my 1939 Gibson L-00, ambition, lust, anger, occasional insobriety, a great new book by someone else, my obsession with rock music, and a general sense that life is filled with many wonderful things that don’t involve me isolating myself in my studio with the door shut. What have I done to overcome them? I’ll paraphrase Isak Dineson: A writer should work a little bit every day, without hope or despair.

What's the shortest time it has taken you to write a story?
I wrote “The Student,” which is in my new book, The Farther Shore, very rapidly. The germ of it was told to me by a good friend, to whom something very similar happened (as a graduate student, he slept with an undergraduate who feared she’d become pregnant). Immediately after my friend told me his tale, I knew it would work as a short story. It seemed like a gift dropped in my lap. I asked him if I could use it, and he wished me the best. I wrote the core of the story very quickly, in just a week or so—light speed, for me. I tinkered with it for a while after that, but the final version stayed pretty true to that initial draft.

What's the longest time it has taken you to write a story?
I wrote several failed versions of “Criminals,” the long story that concludes The Farther Shore, before writing the version that is in the book. I began drafting the story in 2004 and worked fairly steadily on it for the next two years. Howard Junker accepted it at ZYZZYVA, then proceeded to give it a good, old-fashioned hard edit, cutting it by almost a third. After that first publication, I revised it, restoring much that Junker had cut, and sent it out to the Camber Press fiction award. To my delight, Ron Carlson selected it for the prize. I revised it a third (and final!) time for The Farther Shore—so there are essentially three different “finished” versions of this long story. Faulkner had something like four published versions of “Barn Burning,” and of course Raymond Carver was known to fiddle with his work after it had seen print, so I guess I’m not alone.

How often does an idea for a story occur to you, and what triggers those ideas?
A story can be triggered by almost anything: an overheard bit of conversation, an image or detail from life around me, a line in a book I’m reading. Once, I was distracted from reading a book in my back yard by the low, steady drone of a single-engine airplane moving slowly across a brilliant, blue sky. I wondered, Who is on that airplane? Where are they coming from? Before I knew it I was at my desk, writing the first draft of “Barnstorming,” a story in my first collection, Field Observations. Years later, I was reading The Routes of Man, by Ted Conover, and a line leapt up off the page: “It’s much easier to make a roadway dangerous than to make it safe.” I copied it into my notebook, carried it around in my head for a little while, found I couldn’t stop thinking about all the things that single sentence might mean or suggest, and now I’m hip-deep in drafting a novel, The Road Builder. Triggers for stories are everywhere; it’s just a question of paying attention. Henry James said it best: “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.”