Joanna Luloff: How A Lost Toe Provided a Creative Toehold

In the 56th in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Joanna Luloff, author of The Beach at Galle Road (Algonquin Books), discusses why she decided to write a book of connected stories rather than a novel.

When I first began writing the stories in The Beach at Galle Road, I had recently returned from Sri Lanka, where I had worked as a Peace Corps volunteer. I began writing with a very tiny idea for a story—an old woman and her missing toe. The old woman was based on my Sri Lankan host grandmother. A few days after my arrival in the village of Baddegama, my host family took an emergency trip to the local hospital. There, my host grandmother had her toe amputated. She suffered from diabetes and poor circulation and her toe had “died.” Over the next weeks, she hobbled around the house with a bandaged foot, looking at times confused, at other times tremendously angry. We couldn’t understand one another; I hadn’t learned her language yet. So we sat in silence, keeping each other company in our shared befuddlement.

A few months later, she died, and I felt stunned by her sudden absence. She had been kind and patient with me, and I had hoped that my Sinhala skills would eventually get to the place where we might share our stories. After her death, I was surprised to learn that my host mother Dhamika (who had become my best friend) had hated her mother-in-law for a number of small meannesses. In my story “Counting Hours,” I eventually wrote about my host grandmother and her missing toe. I tried to explore the silence that had accompanied her return from the hospital, what it might be filled with—anger, regret, confusion. I also wanted to look at the ways in which a once large and fulfilling life could shrink to the small space of a couch. Dhamika’s character hovered in the shadows of that first story, a somewhat bullied young wife and daughter-in-law. After a few months’ time, I started a new story that would allow a fictionalized Dhamika to play a central role.

Sri Lanka

Luckily, at the time I was writing these stories, I took a class on the linked short story with the wise and generous Margot Livesey. In that workshop, we read Alice Munro’s The Beggar Maid, Harriet Doerr’s Stones for Ibarra, and Russell Banks’s Trailerpark along with a few other linked collections. Munro’s stories offered glimpses of a single life refracted across time. Doerr’s stories conjured a richly drawn place through multiple vantage points, and Banks’s stories used a rather enclosed space to explore the very different people who live there. Each of these books, through their very different approaches and styles, helped me see the potential expansiveness of a linked collection.

There are many other books and writers that I like to imagine my collection talking with. While I was living in Baddegama, I read several books by Sri Lankan-born writers. I admired Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion and Coming Through Slaughter; his books felt like wonderfully complex puzzles where characters’ lives bump up against one another, forming an almost, but never complete, whole. Romesh Gunesekera’s Monkfish Moon is a subtle and kaleidoscopic view of Sri Lanka that shows how the notion of home shifts and realigns after both small and large journeys. And other writers have demonstrated the linked collection’s ability to capture long and complicated political conflicts within the particular lives of families and individuals—Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak! and The Dew Breaker, for example. All of these writers helped me see the ways in which stories could communicate across a single text, how story collections could be these wonderfully malleable things that could move fluidly through time and place and character perspectives while still maintaining an almost novelistic narrative arc.

There are more than twelve different perspectives that make up my story collection. I knew a novel couldn’t handle so many points of view. The stories gave me the flexibility to travel from the south of Sri Lanka to the north and east, from older narrators to younger ones, Sri Lankans to foreign aid workers, from girls to boys, from those directly affected by the Sri Lankan civil war to those only tangentially touched by it. My hope was that each story could stand on its own while complementing and complicating other narratives linked to it. The book had begun with a very small idea—the absence of a toe—but it had become a collection that (hopefully) grappled with much larger contemplation of absences, hauntings, escapes, and disappearances.

Emma Donoghue on the Books Inside of Every Book

In the 50th in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Emma Donoghue, author of Astray (Little Brown), explores intertextuality.

“No man is an island,” said John Donne, and no book is an island either. Your book may seem quite distinct from every other book, especially when it arrives so smartly dressed before publication day, with its hard covers and glossy jacket. But whether you know it or not—and whether you care to acknowledge it or not—your book is made up of other books, just as you’re made up of every meal you’ve had, every lover you’ve touched, every cut you’ve had and healed. We shouldn’t let our modern obsession with originality obscure the truth that our literary forebears always remembered: Books are born of books.

Sometimes that fact is flaunted right on the surface, when you quote another author in an epigraph or let one of your characters do it. I find that my characters, even if they’re not churchgoers, regularly cite or echo The Bible: It’s one of my cultural touchstones. For epigraphs, I often use texts from the oral tradition, such as ballads: There’s something lastingly powerful about words that have stood the test of centuries of time, even without the benefit of being set down in print, impressing themselves on so many people who bothered to pass them on.

Sometimes the intertextuality is found at the deeper level of structure and theme. In my novel Room, for instance, the imprisoned boy and his mother only own ten books (and not a great ten!), which she does her best to supplement with the para-literary tradition of fairytales, nursery rhymes, and pop lyrics. But many other books were crucial to my writing of Room, so every time I see my novel praised as, say, “unique,” I remember that it’s just one in a long tradition of child’s-eye fiction that includes, for instance, passages in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (a book not only explicitly referenced in Room but helping to shape its world-turned-inside-out structure) as well as many novels (from L P Hartley’s The Go-Between to Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha) in which a child fails to understand the complex sexual politics of adult life. Room also owes a huge debt to the years of reading eighteenth-century fiction that I did for my PhD: Jack is a wide-eyed, deadpan guide to a Fallen world, much like Voltaire’s Candide or Swift’s Gulliver.

There are books with which Room shares subject matter (John Fowles’s The Collector, which is such a definitive postmortem of the mindset of the kidnapper that I went to great lengths to stay out of the mind of the captor in mine) and others with which it shares a method (Lionel Shriver’s We Need toTalk About Kevin, for instance, inspired me as a freakish case that illuminates the everyday experience of parenthood).  Reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road left me with a question—if that’s a father-and-son myth, what would a mother-and-son myth look like?)—to which Room was my best answer.  Books emerge from each other, and turn back to each other, talk to each other, and sing each other’s praises, much like human beings do.

And like us, they don’t always get along. A story can be written in response to another, as a thoughtful corrective or a furious rebuttal. Many a weak novel has inspired a better one, in a spirit of I’m-going-to-tell-it-like-it-really-is. Whenever I write a same-sex love story, for instance, I’m trying to sing louder and sweeter than the centuries-long chorus of clichés about bitter and suicidal gay or lesbian characters. “Genre” fiction writers tend to be very aware of the reader’s expectations; in romance or crime fiction, there’s a sort of unwritten contract between reader and writer, and if the writer chooses to ignore one of its clauses, she had better make sure to pay attention to the others. But genre rules are just another form of intertextuality: Your reader’s sense of what makes a good crime story has probably been shaped by a lifetime of Agatha Christie, Patricia Cornwell, and Stieg Larsson.

Maybe it’s because of my academic-gone-wrong background that I tend to be extremely conscious of these intertextual relationships: Whether I’m writing (as I often do) fiction based on real events, such as the fourteen stories in my new collection Astray, or a plot I’ve invented, I tend to be hyper-aware of my sources and influences. But a writer isn’t obliged to be: Some prefer to compose their fictions in a sort of dream state, and leave it to critics to worry about the why. Either way, no book is pristine, no matter how white the pages may look when they hit the bookshops: They’ve all got each other’s grasping fingerprints all over them.

Mark Brazaitis on Influences, Conscious and Not

In the 46th in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Mark Brazaitis, author of The Incurables (University of Notre Dame Press), discusses the influences he—and others—have seen in his work.

I have never been good at detecting the influences on my writing. It’s not that I don’t accept that I have been influenced by other writers; it’s that I can’t recognize where and how I’ve been influenced.

Sometimes I feel like my older daughter did when she was three years old and went Trick-or-Treating as an apple. Upon opening their doors, people cooed, “What a cute tomato!”

“I am not a tomato!” she insisted.

I would like to think my writing is always dressed up to look like Mark Brazaitis (earthy if elegant, accessible if subtle). But sometimes I notice when I’ve put on another author’s gloves or scarf or basketball shoes. Or I think I do.

After reading my short story “Gemelas,” about Guatemalan twin girls and the parallel lives they live even after one of them dies, the poet Gillian Conoley said to me, “I detect a Kafka influence.” This stunned me. (I am not a tomato!) If anything, I was sure that in “Gemelas” I was guilty of swiping Gabriel García Márquez’s guayabera and Panama hat.

But without knowing my reading history, Gillian had discerned one of my favorite writers, someone I read obsessively when I was younger and still read (and teach) today. If I had been asked to list the authors who influenced “Gemelas,” however, Franz Kafka wouldn’t have appeared in my top 100. In retrospect, however, he should have been in my top five. (The story is dark, labyrinthine, fatalistic—Pandora would have nailed the influence instantly.) As for García Márquez, as much as I love him, the most “Gemelas” has in common with his great work is a Latin American setting.

A decade ago at the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop, I read the opening of my novella “Bathwater.” A member of the audience approached me afterwards to say, “I heard an Edgar Allan Poe riff, a ‘Tell-Tale Heart’ vibe, in your story.” Like Poe’s narrator, I thought, you’re out of your mind. But when I reread “The Tell-Tale Heart” the next day, I nodded at its rhythmic similarities to passages in my novella. Prior to this, it had been years since I’d read Poe’s story, but his mad narrator evidently had been camping in my brain, waiting his chance to whisper into my words.

Reviewers of my books have been remarkably accurate in pinpointing my literary lineage. I was sure one reviewer missed the mark, however, when he detected a Raymond Chandler sway over my prose. Then I remembered the hard-boiled summer between my junior and senior years in college when I said hello to Farewell, My Lovely and every other Chandler novel I could find.

I could guess the literary influences behind the ten stories in The Incurables. Kafka might be on the scene of “The Bridge,” observing its mysterious, unnerving suicide epidemic. Jane Austen might have touched “This Man, This Woman, This Child, This Town” with her sense of courtship’s comic awkwardness, although by its end, she surely has given way to Richard Wright or Toni Morrison or William Faulkner. There’s a little of John Updike’s frankness about sex in the title story, but its ending jumps off the page and onto the screen. It’s Vertigo’s finale rewritten! Maybe!

I can state this with certainty: The biggest influence on my fiction is my life. In the case of The Incurables, I wish it were otherwise. The protagonists in my collection contend with mental illness—its humiliations, its paralyzing power, its rare moments of levity—as I have. In this, I—we—are not alone. In any given year, 14.8 million adults, or 6.7 percent of the U.S. population 18 and over, suffer from major depressive disorder. Other millions endure a range of mental illnesses, from bipolar disorder to schizophrenia. Ninety percent of people who commit suicide suffer from a mental illness.

If I didn’t know mental illness up close and personal, I never would have written The Incurables; I certainly wouldn’t have felt free to write the stories the way I did, in equal portions of black humor and sympathy. If William Styron and Kay Redfield Jamison, the authors of extraordinary memoirs about their experiences with, respectively, clinical depression and bipolar disorder, provided me in their work the courage to write honestly and unsentimentally about mental illness, Nikolai Gogol and Samuel Beckett and Lorrie Moore gave me permission to use comedy to explore dark subjects.

Did the above authors actually influence the stories in The Incurables?

Your guess is as good as—no, it’s better than—mine.