John Dwaine McKenna: To Be Remembered

In the 22nd in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, John Dwaine McKenna, author of The Neversink Chronicles (Rhyolite Press), talks about coping with adversity.

If you’re fortunate and live a long enough life, at some point you’ll be faced with adversity because perfect lives only come in fairy tales. Real life is hard, unfair, tragic, heartbreaking, incomprehensible, competitive, joyous, unpredictable, finite . . . and somewhere along the line between birth and death, each and every one of us will deal with adversity. Then, after being annealed by it, we will be changed for the rest of our lives.

For our family adversity came with the millennium. On Friday,  February 18,  2000, at eight o'clock in the evening, our lives were changed forever when I fell about three feet and introduced my face to the hardwood floor. When I tried to move, my right side from shoulder to toe was paralyzed. I'd just become a quadriplegic.

I was fifty-three years old. June and I had been married almost twenty-four years and we were both devastated. It was inconceivable. I was athletic, 6 feet, 220, in robust health until then.

Saturday, February 19, I underwent five hours of surgery to repair my cervical spine. A plate was screwed into my third and fourth vertebrae after the cartilage had been removed, the spinal canal enlarged and bone from a tissue bank grafted in. My neck was fused. Held in a medically induced coma, I awoke Wednesday the twenty-third, in the critical care unit, a changed man, lucky to be alive.

Nine weeks later, after a ton of therapy and medical attention, I was discharged from the hospital into a whole new reality. I’d gone through a period of liminality and emerged from it . . . a disabled man, into an alternate universe . . . and it was forever: no oly oly oxen frees, hey waits!, or do-overs.

Over the next six or seven years, I grieved for my old self. It happened in stages: despondency, self-pity, grief, depression, and anger all took their turns. More than once, I thought about taking Highway .357 to heaven. But I just couldn’t; too many people loved and supported me. First and foremost was June, the woman I promised to love and honor for all of my days . . . who was suffering in silence, as much as me. Through it all, she stuck by me, and slowly, bit by bit, I recovered; some elements snapped into place somewhere in my brain and I got busy living again.

While auditing a class at the University of Colorado, I reengaged my writing talent. It wasn’t easy ‒ at first  I was so rusty I was embarrassed to share anything. I wrote a lot, revised it until I wanted to throw up, let it rest a while, reread it, then threw it all away and started over. And over. And over again. I tried entering contests. Never heard back. Wrote to agents. Same result. I got depressed again . . . but I never stopped.

Writing.

I volunteered to do a weekly book review column for a small newspaper in my hometown back in upstate New York and I reassessed my situation. But I kept writing.

Every day.

I decided that at my age, I couldn't afford ten years of submissions as James Lee Burke did, before finding a publisher, I'd not have much of a shelf life left. After a lot of talk and reflection, as well as a book called The Beethoven Factor, I put my years of business experience to work and started a publishing company called Rhyolite Press. I hired an editor, designer, formatter, photographer, webmaster and a web strategist who creates buzz, all on a contract basis. Last, I found the perfect assistant, who types four to six hours each week. She's indispensable.

We printed my first book, The Neversink Chronicles. It got favorable reviews and we sold some copies, gave away a bunch and then . . . lightning struck: it won first prize for fiction at the annual CIPA awards ceremony in Denver on May 17, 2012. Now, in mid-August, Rhyolite Press is about to publish my next book, a coming-of-age and murder mystery, which will be followed shortly after by an environmental thriller from a new author who has more than 500 magazine articles to his credit.

Am I excited? You bet!

Getting rich? Not hardly.

Will we publish more books? Absolutely.

Why . . . Because I want to leave a mark on the world ‒ proof that this life was lived, to leave a piece of myself behind and perhaps . . . be remembered for it.

Steve Mitchell Hangs Out

In the 21st in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Steve Mitchell, author of The Naming of Ghosts (Press 53), observes the world from a table outside a Winston-Salem bakery.

Camino Bakery in downtown Winston-Salem. Good coffee. Great pastries. Seating on the sidewalk. I can watch. Friday morning. Saturday morning. Late afternoons. A metal table in the angled shade of the building on the corner. 

The table is small. Everything is pushed together. The china cup, the keyboard, a fluttering page of scrawled notes. The shadow of a story. A place to begin.

There are other restaurants further down the block. Traffic grunts past. The stoplight blinks. Sometimes the sidewalks are crowded with dogs and their owners, families and couples or teenaged girls walking three abreast. I can watch. Sometimes an innocent crash or a surprised shout pulls me from the work; I blink for an instant, disoriented. Sometimes the street vanishes altogether.

A table's-eye view

The world around me opens up, or closes down; it's difficult to say which. One moment I'm relishing my condition as an unrepentant voyeur, watching everyone, everything. The next, I'm diving upward into a still pool where there is silence and coolness and only a whisper of self.

It has the aspect of a mountaintop, this inner location. It has the visceral trace of a clearer air and a breaking view, as well as the sense that time is falling behind me, its knotted path forgotten in the same way it's said we cannot truly remember pain.

A dog barks. One day I hear it as a distant voice. On another, it pulls me back into the street where I look up to find a woman frowning into her phone or three guys laughing, red-faced and sputtering, over their beers.

There's some kind of fertile space here. It shimmers between the inner silence and the jangle of the world like convection waves rising from a summer road. The passing music and the low rumble of trucks, chairs scraping the sidewalk and white china cups on black tables.

At the next restaurant, a man and a woman. There's the slight tilt of her head as she turns away from him to her menu. It's a gesture that might mean "I love you uncontrollably" or, just as easily, "I can't wait for this evening to end." His hand hangs open at his hip. In a moment he might take hers.

I fade. Words forming pictures, pictures becoming words, they take my place. They slide over each other, their light bodies rippling.

I vanish, into the space just before words. The opening into which something is said.

The sun passes behind a high cloud and a border of shadow eases up the block, leaving the air cool and damp in its wake.

Camino Bakery. I'm here on the sidewalk, I think. I can see my reflection in the window at my side. I'm holding my glasses in one extended hand. I'm staring forward, arrested by some thought I have no hold on.

A little boy wanders from his parents' table. He can't be more than three. Sandy hair. Red t-shirt. I can watch. His body shudders in a kind of loose joy, short fingers running over the table tops and the backs of chairs.

He stops to look at me. At the edge of the table he stares up to me. He stands completely still, his face innocent and fearless. I snap into my body with a sudden twitch of wonder. 

That's what I want a story to accomplish.

Michael Downs and the Fiction Writer's Reluctance

In the 20th in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Michael Downs, author of The Greatest Show (Louisiana State University Press), discusses his reluctance to meet the real life survivors of a catastrophe he was writing about.

“How many of you survived the fire?” I asked.

I didn’t have to say what fire. We were all–more than 125 of us–there to talk about the same disaster. Sixty-eight years ago to the day, a circus big top, engulfed in flame, had collapsed on a crowd in the city where we now gathered. The fire had brought us together, that and the burns and animal cries and the smoke–imagined, real, remembered.

July 6, 1944. Hartford, Connecticut. On a muggy, stifling day, some eight-thousand people filled the tent for a matinee performance of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. As the Wallendas began their aerial performance, people glimpsed a flash on one side of the tent. Within minutes, fire engulfed the entire canvas, which had been waterproofed with paraffin. Heavy flaming sections tumbled down. The injured numbered in the thousands; the dead were 168.

The July 6, 1944, Hartford circus fire

I’m a Hartford native, born two decades after the fire. Nobody I know went that day, and no one I grew up with was burned or trampled. But my dad, who was three years old, might have gone if not for a family argument. My grandparents were alive in Hartford then. The fire is in my history, its smoke an inheritance.

I wasn’t there, but I wrote about it in a book of fiction. I’ve only imagined the grease-painted faces smudged with ash, the elephants who lingered afterward on the grounds, the bodies placed on cots in the state armory for identification.

Yet people, mostly gray-haired, filled a theater to hear about the stories I’d created–and then to tell the stories they had lived.

One man spoke about his father, a police officer who had saved people by tossing them up and over cages filled with terrified animals. Another woman recalled her grandfather, a firefighter who had died in the blaze. Several talked about how, like my father, they’d nearly gone to the circus that day, but fate had intervened and spared them.

For many years, I was a newspaper reporter. For a reporter, true stories are the only ones that matter. We respect them and need them. The best leave us in awe. We revere them.

Now, I write fiction. Over the ten years I’d worked on the stories in The Greatest Show, friends and acquaintances offered to introduce me to people who had survived the fire or had been firefighters and fought it. Thank you, I’d say, and I might write down the information to be polite. But I never did talk to anyone. The journalist in me asked why not? Why not talk to people? The fiction writer shushed him.

The journalist said, “But I’ve done all this research!”

And the journalist had. He’d read oral histories and scribbled notes from Stewart O’Nan’s great nonfiction book about the circus fire. He’d searched archives and studied newspaper clippings. He’d even discovered a Red Cross brochure from the 1940s that used the circus fire as a case study for treating burn victims. The journalist-in-me was scrupulous about the truth of the event. With regard to the fire, he would allow me to neither invent nor change a fact.

The journalist held his pen and reporter’s notebook, waiting. The fiction writer shrugged: No interviews with survivors.

But now, here I was in a room full of people old enough to have known the horror inside that tent. And I asked: “How many of you…?”

Eight people raised a hand.

In that moment, I understood the fiction writer’s reluctance to meet people who had lived through the fire. If I’d met these people before I’d finished imagining my characters’ lives, I would have respected the true stories, honored them, been humbled and thus hampered by them. Imagination by necessity presumes. In its arrogance, it re-invents the world. It’s a paradox, but to respect the real pain of survivors and create something like it out of my imagination, I needed to not know them. Had I mixed reality with fiction to that extent, I would have diminished both.

Of the eight who raised a hand, none spoke. But afterward, I posed for photographs with a woman who had been at the fire, and a man named Larry showed me the burn scars laced across his left forearm. He’d spent half a year in a hospital undergoing skin grafts. Like Teddy Liszak, the boy my imagination sent to the circus, Larry had been three years old. I signed his copy of my book. He had such a wonderful laugh.

Margaret Hermes and the Wildly Various Triggers

In the 19th in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Margaret Hermes, author of Relative Strangers (Carolina Wren Press), reveals the sources of her ideas and her influences.

What made you want to become a writer? 
I had four brothers, no sisters, and shared a tiny bedroom with my maiden aunt for the first seventeen years of my life. I had no choice but to write.

But heritage played a part as well. My mother grew up with a passion for books in a small coal-mining town. Having no library in town and no means to purchase books, she began writing her own in grade school. Mostly tales of adventure in the American West, written on butcher paper and shared with friends and their families. Instead of becoming the next Zane Grey, she turned herself into a full-time housewife and mother, so somebody had to take up the pen.

Where do you find inspiration? 
 I’ve never been comfortable with the word “inspiration.” To me it suggests a reliance on some power outside the writer’s control. A Phrase Fairy or Santa Clause who leaves ideas under your pillow or beneath your tree if you’ve been good. And I suppose I’m reluctant to share credit for my labors.

What's the shortest time it has taken you to write a story? 
“Meet Me,” one of the stories in Relative Strangers, took less than two hours, plus subsequent airbrushing. I had asked my partner to pick a title for a story out of the air. I wasn’t feeling inventive and apparently neither was he. In a hurry, he declined and began to lay out plans for the afternoon. "Meet me--" he said and I said, "That's it!"

What's the longest time it has take you to write a story? 
“Growing Season,” another in the collection, took two years. That’s a story enriched by fragments from other people’s pasts. Various men among my acquaintance shared details from their youth that lodged in my memory and gave heft to the boy who matures over the course of the story. I worked on the structure to achieve a flow – an undercurrent really – between two forms of bigotry, religious and racial. So the innocence lost in this coming of age story is more than just sexual.

How often does an idea for a story occur to you, and what triggers those ideas?
Some days a dozen story ideas will occur to me, some weeks none. But I haven’t written all the stories that come to mind on those days teeming with ideas. Or even remembered the ideas. On the other hand, I usually manage to bleed out something during the parched periods.

The triggers are wildly various: snatches of overheard conversation; a visual image; a childhood memory; dreams. The opening story in Relative Strangers, “The Bee Queen,” was sparked by an incident that haunted me since childhood. “Parings” came directly from a dream. On two occasions that I recall, whole plots came to me while listening to classical music at performances by the St. Louis Symphony. And often the triggers remain a mystery to me. Sometimes the germ of an idea will lodge in my brain. I’ll be only sporadically conscious of it rubbing around in there but given enough time it might acquire sufficient nacre to become a story. 

If you've ever written a story based on something another person told you would make a good story, what were the circumstances?
I’m always culling story ideas from conversation, ones that I’m engaged in or ones overheard. Writers are magpies; scavenging is in the nature of the bird.

Mostly, though, the tales offered as outright gifts never become mine. However, an amazing Missouri woman was the model for the star character in “The River’s Daughter.” Cattle rancher, inheritor of her family’s Century Farm, operator of a celebrated bed-and-breakfast, proud horsewoman, environmental activist, Carol Springer is also a master storyteller. My challenge was to take the story of her fight against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and developers who wanted to dam the Meramec River and use it as material, not simply relay it. I was going for fiction, not nonfiction. To achieve that I had to keep Carol offstage, so I created a sister, a narrator with a distinctly different voice.

Where do you do most of your work?
I write my first drafts longhand, so my stories are typically begun anywhere but in my study where the long process of revising usually takes place. In that commodious room, I planted the dining table from my parents’ house at which I used to do my homework against one wall and its matching buffet that now supports two bookcases against the opposite. My desk is situated so that my back is to the larger window in the room, as I am too easily distracted.  

What writer or writers have you learned the most from?
How to choose among Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin, Barbara Kingsolver, Marilynne Robinson? Or the short story virtuosos William Faulkner, Alice Munro, Ray Bradbury, Flannery O’Connor, John Updike? (I’d like to leave Updike off, but I can’t.) Edgar Allen Poe taught me while I was still in grade school that every story is a mystery. And then there’s Antonya Nelson. And everybody else whose bibliography is passing before my eyes.

Since the list keeps expanding the more I try to shrink it, I’m going to focus on writers I devoured when I was very young.

I was enamored of the Oz books. L. Frank Baum reinforced for me that little girls are never safe but they can be resourceful, and he taught me to look for the man behind the curtain. Or to create him.

I was addicted to L. M. Montgomery’s zillion Anne of Green Gables books, even though Anne seemed to lose her fire (not before inspiring me to dye my hair red) during the course of the series. I learned from the volumes that disappointed me as well as those that delighted me that minor characters make a major difference.

P. L. Travers thrilled me with the unpredictable Mary Poppins. Though the situations in the novels are preposterous, the people are not. I was treated to characters whose complexity is revealed by a few precisely drawn strokes. And with each of Mary Poppins’ heartbreaking departures, came reinforcement of the invaluable lesson that literature and life do not provide happy endings.

And then there was Lewis Carroll and the Alice books. His love of word play and italics (and parentheses) gave me an early, exhilarating sense of the freedom to break rules. As well as an appreciation for the rules.

These writers provided me with youthful heroines. Two were men; the other two published behind the camouflage of initials. I’m certain I learned something from that as well.

"Meal Planner's Creed," a Story by Diane Williams

In the 18th in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Diane Williams, author of Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty (McSweeney's Books), raises questions about stories and replies with a story of her own.

What is a story?
They are are always asking. What is a story?
Is that a story? What is a story?
Can a story be a dream-come-true?

 

Meal Planner's Creed

     “Will your restaurant always be as bad as this?—or do you expect to make changes? It used to be such a good restaurant. We loved coming here. What happened?” I said.

     “What was wrong with the food,” the manager said,

     “Do you ever eat this food? You should eat this food,” I said.

     “I am not going to run around anymore I decided,” the manager said, “and serve people and see what people need. I am just going to enjoy myself!“

Josie Sigler and the Proverbial Needle

In the 17th in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Josie Sigler, author of The Galaxie and Other Rides (Livingston Press), explains how she keeps at it.

I don’t know that becoming a writer was a choice, initially. I just was a writer. I remember the first time I read a book by myself. The book was called Tommy’s Train. I read it aloud to my brother in my grandmother’s musty basement in Downriver Detroit. I couldn’t have been older than three or four, but I got the feeling I would later come to recognize as a story developing: What’s my train story? I was about to take my first train ride, from Detroit to Kansas City. I could imagine my family on the train although it hadn’t happened yet. That was probably  the first time I realized that you could have a story without having been there. Aha! Fiction. I also remember writing poems on a regular basis as early as nine years old, and I made a commitment to daily writing when I was eleven or twelve, in the seventh grade. So becoming a writer happened very early for me.

Staying a writer is something I do every day (or night) when I sit down to write. It’s not too hard for me to get myself to the table—even when it doesn’t go well, I like the mess and puzzle of writing. Developing my skills as a writer was and is largely a matter of reading books that amaze me, and figuring out how they amaze me. There’s an actual physical sensation I get when I read something that will change me forever; it’s like a shrinking feeling in my lungs that spreads to my upper back. It sounds corny, but it feels a little like wings sprouting. Later, when I am writing, and a good impulse comes to me, I get the same feeling. Then, if I’m lucky, my brain and fingers will remember that how I’ve learned from other writers and modify it to suit my purposes.

Now that's a big crazy haystack

I’m pretty fascinated by the creative impulse—that gorgeous nanosecond in which the part of inspiration that surfaces is still linked to the part that remains subterranean but you’re already typing or scrawling. In her foreword to Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison says she used to regard “the ‘mystery’ of creativity […] a shield erected by artists to avoid articulating, analyzing, or even knowing the details of their creative process—for fear it would fade away.” However, in writing that novel, she came to feel that her father, who had passed, was answering the book’s central questions. She began to trust the mystery. For me the space where intellect and experience meets up with mystery is an incredibly productive estuary. I have dedicated a lot of my life’s hours to building snappy sentences, but I have also tried to continually hone my instinct for recognizing the glint of the proverbial needle of a smashing idea in a big crazy haystack of a world.

Generally, this means my notebooks and task manager are jammed with hundreds of projects in various stages of development. It’s a rare day if I don’t have a “jottable” idea. (Then, maybe there are no bad story ideas and it’s all in the execution.) My main obstacle is the feeling of dejection I get when I realize I’m not going to live forever, and I can’t write all the time—I have to go to the dentist, do dishes, chop wood. I try to stick with a single project through the flow, to trust that I can always come back to a good idea later. I will sometimes write a note to myself: “If it’s a good idea now, it will probably be a good one six months from now, too.” Other times, I have to follow my impulse, and I just know it. Aimee Bender gave me some lovely advice once, which was to follow the pleasure in writing. That advice has served me very well because it goes perfectly with the only rule that always works for me, which is “just keep writing.”

Stephan Clark's Tricky Triangulation

In the 16th in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Stephan Clark, author of Vladimir's Mustache (Russian Information Services), reveals some of his sources of inspiration.

Where do you find inspiration? 
1.  Research
I started the title story of my collection almost ten years ago, after reading a book review for a biography of Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister. In it, I learned that the Nazi bunting used to decorate the Moscow Air Field on the day Ribbentrop arrived to sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had first been used in an anti-Nazi propaganda film. There was something wonderfully absurd about that, so I tried to think of who might have been exposed to both of the flag’s uses. 

I settled on an actor—not a star, but a bit player who’d have to work at the Air Field on those days he wasn’t working on a film. From there the story became like one of those Russian nesting dolls. Because the story took place before the Soviet Union’s entry into the Second World War (or the Great Patriotic War, if you’re looking at it from a Russian perspective), I had to research Stalinism and the Great Purge. Because my character was an actor, I had to research the early Soviet film industry, Socialist Realism, and finally the early days of Stanislavski, which ended up being the key to the story. My protagonist would be a Method actor, I realized. One who learns the danger of losing himself in a part after he’s cast as Hitler in the midst of a Stalinist purge.

2.  Headlines
The first story that I completed for my collection (the title story would take several years to get right) reimagines the failed KGB coup of 1991 in a way that’s meant to serve as a kind of mash-up of Russian and American culture. Like “Vladimir’s Mustache,” I started this story in the fall of 2003, not long after the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay had opened, when concerned citizens still found the Patriotic Act worthy of debate. It was at this moment in our cultural life that I read about the U.S. government’s plans—through DARPA, I believe—to data mine everything we do on the Internet in order to protect us from terrorism. I’m sure many people thought this was a great idea. If you don’t have anything to hide, what’s the harm, right? But it just struck me as neo-Stalinism, the type of governmental over-reach that conservatives are fine with at any cost so long as it’s done in the name of national defense and doesn’t include a tax (hidden costs are fine). 

Gorbachev makes an appearance

Still, however much I was opposed to this, I couldn’t imagine anything more painful than a faithful fictionalization of what was going on in our country. I didn’t want to add another voice to the echo chamber. We weren’t changing any minds, I thought. We were all of us just yelling. So I attempted a kind of triangulation between my subject and my target, which allowed for me to tell a lie about Russian history in order to maybe tell a truth about contemporary American life. For who? I don’t know. But the result was “The Secret Meeting of the Secret Police,” my first published story. In it, Gorbachev figures out a more cost-effective way to spy on all of his people, which in turns makes the operatives of the KGB, who initiated the coup against him, fearful for their jobs. The most cost-effective way, of course, is the Internet. With it, you didn’t have to knock on anyone’s door in the middle of the night. You don’t even have to leave the comfort of your own home.

3.  Personal Experience
Because I moved around a lot as a child, and have continued to move around as an adult, I’ll never have a Yoknapatawpha County that I’ll be able to describe better than anyone else. If I want to describe anything honestly and in great detail, I have to stick to those times I have lived through (or those times from which few people remain). That’s one reason I’m so drawn to Russia and the Soviet Union. It was still a world power when I was in high school, a permanent fixture on the news, and yet a decade later, after Gorbachev had given way to Yeltsin and Yeltsin had given way to too much drink, the country was all but an after-thought. 

That began to change for me in 2000, when I was living, as chance would have it, on the shores of the Russian River in rural northern California on the same piece of property as my landlord. This man was a California cowboy, a carpenter with eight fingers and one thumb. When I went to deliver my first rent check to him, his daughter-in-law answered the door and told me with a half-smile, “Johnny’s in The Ukraine getting himself a new wife.”

When he came back, he had more than just a wife: he had a daughter and a son, too, the former a girl of seventeen or eighteen who later had to return to Ukraine, because immigration officials here had considered her too old to be deserving of a Green card like her younger brother. It was thinking about what became of her, alone in Kiev, that started me thinking about the former Soviet Union and then had me applying for a Fulbright Fellowship to Ukraine, where I’d end up living for a year, researching the mail-order bride industry. The year I spent there—and one more in Russia—gave me the material I needed to write the handful of stories in my collection that are set against the backdrop of the mail-order bride industry or the post-soviet present.