Stevan Allred Populates a Town

In the 33rd in a series of posts on 2013 books entered for The Story Prize, Stevan Allred, author of A Simplified Map of the World (Forest Avenue Press), explores point of view.

The stories in A Simplified Map of the Real World gave me the opportunity to explore one of my central obsessions as a writer: point of view. I had abandoned a novel that I'd worked on for five years, a novel that had four first person narrators, and when I turned my attention to short stories, I was eager to try something different. I'd been away from third person for so long that writing in third person felt exotic, as if I had slipped my body inside a new skin.

POV is of course a great deal more complicated than deciding with which pronoun a narrator will refer to him- or herself. I live in a very rural setting, but I had not written from that place, and now this unexplored territory beckoned. The familiar world right outside my door became a second exotic element I could build into the POV of a character. So as I began “Conflations of a Hard-headed Yankee,” the story that would become the first one I wrote for this collection, I was thinking only that I would write in third person about a man who lived in the country. I wanted the story to have a ghost in it, because I'd never written a ghost before—at the time the idea seemed completely foreign to me—and I was interested in both how to describe something so ephemeral, and in what the deeper metaphor meant. Ghosts, I came to understand as I wrote, are a metaphor for the persistence of memory.

I began with a man watching his cat hunt. He follows her into his barn, and there he encounters the ghost of his dead wife. He believes he is hallucinating, and I leave it to my readers to decide for themselves how real this ghost is. I have never seen one, but I have a friend, a man of great sobriety and intelligence, a man not given to flights of fancy, who saw one and told me about it. This man, a New Englander, became the "hard-headed yankee" in my story, a man who sees something he does not believe in, and who must decide how he will live with the inexplicable.

Faulknerville

I felt a door swinging open inside of me as I wrote this story, and this door opened on to the terrain that I would spend the next several years exploring. I had always loved the conceit of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, that Faulkner invented a county in which to set all of his work. I would do the same. I would write about the countryside that I loved, and the small town near where I lived. I would call my fictional town Renata, Oregon, and like Faulkner, I would draw my own map, and populate it with my stories, and I would include that map in the collection.

The question of setting now settled, I was free to obsess about POV. Each story in the collection would have a different narrator, but characters would recur, giving me the opportunity to present them again as they are seen by their neighbors, their friends, their family. The stories would always be about whatever was going on inside me at the time—I know no other place from which to write—but there would always be a POV issue to wrestle down to the mat. I wrote in first, second, and third person, and in third person I explored close-in and more distanced narrators, and I took on omniscience. I alternated more than one third person narrator within a story.

Craft, character, and setting coalesced for me into a kind of writing joy juice that I sipped on as I wrote these stories over the next several years. I gave each story its own voice, with its own idiosyncratic language and sound, whether I was writing in the persona of an eight-year-old boy, a ninety-one-year-old woman, or an omniscient narrator. Voice, I came to understand, was a metaphor for the particular consciousness of each narrator, and as such, was central to how I wrote the many different point of view characters in A Simplified Map of the Real World.

Writing these stories engaged me on so many different levels that I never grew weary, and when I sat down to write, I could enter my imaginative world through any of several portals—setting, character, story, language, or POV. Each presented its own challenges, and together they served to keep me writing about Renata, Oregon, for years.

Jennifer Spiegel's Three Worst Stories—So Far

In the eleventh in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Jennifer Spiegel, author of The Freak Chronicles (Dzanc Books) confesses to some failed efforts.

Oh, I’ve written a lot of bad stuff. Some was bad because I was too close to the material, failing to let the “trigger” or subject matter marinate or ferment: not enough psychic distance. Some was lousy because it was inauthentic: I didn’t know what I was talking about. Some sucked because I didn’t care. Playful prose, no passion. 

Here are my Top Three Narrative Calamities:

Curiosity...

1.  We don’t like to talk about this in my family. We’re pretty embarrassed. Surely, it says something about us as people. Surely, there must be criminality in our genes. Surely, we must beat the children or embezzle funds or, minimally, drink. I’m talking about the time our beloved yellow Lab bit the head off a Siamese-mix kitten, her body left limp—cast off to the side, if you must know. Even as I wrote those words, I moaned aloud—the memory too gruesome and too heartbreaking to type my way through.

I was still living at home. We had just gotten a kitten: a fluffy little kitten we promptly named Sophie. For one day, Sophie was a star. She was adorable, clamoring around the velvet recliner, purring and frolicking like a bunny, an angel. Even Hemingway, our gentle giant pup, thought her special.

But then the dawn: Sophie innocently, dumbly, pitter-pattered over to Hemingway’s dog chow on the kitchen floor and sniffed it out. Hemingway, animal that he was (may he rest in peace), didn’t hesitate. With unanticipated fury, he growled, he snapped his jaw, and he bit her head off.

It wasn’t quite this way. The head was still attached. Pandemonium truly did ensue. My mother shrieked. My father picked up the broken body and Sophie, dying, defecated. I was the one appointed to drive to the animal hospital with my mom holding the ruined kitten in a towel. My mom wept the whole way. The beautiful, beautiful kitten would be put out of her misery when we arrived. The spasms would cease.

And Hemingway remained. For maybe nine more years. There were other cats. They all lived. He liked them, actually. At first, we struggled. Especially my dad. What were we to think of this dog, this monster, this cat killer? How were we to make sense of his snap dog-decision, that resort to sudden bloody violence? How could he still be our sweet pup? Should we get rid of him?

We kept Hemmy Bemmy Man, and—later that day—I knew I had to use this violence of Flannery O’Connor proportion and turn it into a stunning metaphor for beauty, innocence, and pain.  I wrote and wrote, incorporating it into a story about a woman with inoperable cancer.

All you need to know is this: It sucked.

Why? Psychic distance. Not only do I need a measure of objectivity, I also need that lapse in time in order to be free from what actually happened. I’m only able to manipulate and shape details—for a better aesthetic purpose—when time has passed.

Something missing

2.  “Following the Dead” was going to be about the Grateful Dead because my mom’s cousin, who I knew remotely but fondly, was a Dead Head at one time—and I had this strange, lurid obsession with groupies, which might be similar to my contemporary strange, lurid obsession with Renaissance Festivals. The whole thing sounded utterly fascinating. I started smoking a pipe, I put on my thinking cap, and I came up with a Grateful Dead scenario. That band name! Following around the Grateful Dead! Talk about another metaphor!

One problem: I never listened to them. I didn’t even really like them. They seemed a little smelly. I kinda liked my boys pretty. But then the coup d’état: someone let on that Jerry was missing a finger. I never knew! I had no freakin’ clue!

I abandoned ship. Obviously, my story would lack authenticity.

What writerly virtue do I prize most? Authenticity. It isn’t that I have to live it physically, but I need to grasp that world spiritually and mentally. If I don’t know about Jerry Garcia’s missing finger, I’m not fit for this story.

3.  “Scallop.” I called my fictional town Scallop. I think it was in Upstate New York. This was an assignment by a licensed counselor. Because I was in therapy. Yeah, I’m admitting that. I had been in this near-fatal car accident, which I never like to talk about, and I hated it. I said a lot of B.S. stuff. When she asked me to write her a story since I liked to write stories, I assumed she was patronizing me—but, hey, I thought, I’ll blow her @#%*ing mind with my literary awesomeness!

Friday night in Scallop

I don’t need therapy! I’m a badass writer!

What happened in the story? I don’t even remember. Something—no doubt—about a vivacious, badass woman ending up in a small town called Scallop, where they square-danced on Friday nights and preserved fruit and sh#t. I remember how the poor therapist said, “I don’t know what it means, but I know I like it.” Patronizing! I flew out of there, and burned “Scallop.”

The problem: the machinations of craft are necessary but not sufficient for literary awesomeness. The spark, the passion, the talent, the divine grace: If it’s not there, the story is D.O.A.

I have plenty more narrative disasters, but I’ll hold back.