Stephanie Powell Watts' Unrequited Couch Love

In the 56th in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Stephanie Watts Powell, author of We Are Taking Only What We Need (BkMk Press), discusses a story she wrote in one six hour sitting that took ten years to revise.

Which story in your collection required the most drafts or posed the most technical problems?
I wrote a draft of “Unassigned Territory” about fourteen years ago in one wonderful evening on one of the couch loves of my life. That couch was a beauty: deep red cotton, flecked with almost imperceptible surprises of blue and yellow, traditional strong rolled arms, firm padded body (not vulgar and overstuffed), real wood skeleton. A couch’s couch. I loved that couch from the day I saw him, needing new upholstery, shoved in the back of a dark Salvation Army like the runt of the litter, whimpering at a frequency only fellow couch people can hear, “love me, I am good.”

I snuggled into my couch and couldn’t stop writing this story. Before I realized it, time had ticked away and flown by and flashed and disappeared in all the ways time does when you are miserable and watching mindless television because no one you love will call and you can’t fake the enthusiasm to call them or when you are deliriously happy because the baby you weren’t supposed to be able to have won’t stop belly laughing at his bunny’s flopping ears. Or you are quiet, the world is quiet and there are no emergencies anywhere, just quiet, harmless people breathing the same cool air. OR when you have written something you suspect may be fantastic, so good, when you re-read it you cry your own fool self. In that one sitting on my beautiful couch, I had a seventeen page draft that I believed was a masterpiece. If you write, you know exactly the feeling I mean. That wonderful, full sensation that you, glorious you, did it and it is very right and every word clicks into place like a combination lock. Tick, tick, all done. Perfect. That happy-making draft took me about six hours. But the revision for “Unassigned Territory” took the next ten years—not every day or even every month, but a tickle on my back on a place I found impossible to reach for TEN YEARS.

It is an understatement to say that my first draft was not perfect. Let’s just say it wasn’t very good. In fact, if there are three words strung together that remain from that original draft, I would be shocked. Though I was wrong about the quality of that first draft, I knew there was something important I was trying hard to say. For me it is significant that the title has not changed in all the revisions. I suspect what I wanted to get across all those years ago had something to do with the desperation of the striving outsider. What is claimed? what is taken in a person? in a life? and what can you, if you have the courage or stupidity, claim for yourself? The girl I wanted to be, still want to be: included, safe and uncompromised, belonged if that is even the right use of the word, was always trying to have a say in that story. Can you live in this world without compromise? And, more to the point of my story, is faith in anything always a compromise?

Oh compromise. Though my red couch was a deep love and a long-lasting one, I had a first and unforgettable. And in the way of these stories, this original couch-love was unrequited. I fell hard for an asymmetrical curving back, orange fur-covered beauty in the Goodwill in Raleigh, North Carolina. Fifty dollars, a lot of money for me in those days (in these days too, who am I kidding?) and I visited that Goodwill just to get a look at his sprawled, angled lusciousness. At the end of the week, when one of my jobs paid me the mere pittance that amounted to a week’s just-over-minimum wages, that couch would be in my own tiny, one bedroom apartment, with the occasional (thank God) cockroach so large the sight of it would take my breath. It has been twenty years since I went to that thrift store, consumed with the worry of how I would get that seven-footer in my Hyundai only to find an open spot where the body had been. The couch, MY COUCH had sold just the day before. I was crushed. Do you understand being crushed? When the body of you, a person, straight and complete becomes compacted into a mass, no blood flow, no errant thoughts, the opposite of hollow, a thick dead cube with useless systems, dead functions. Too much sentiment for a couch, I know, but I fell hard for this one. But what I am hoping to tell you is sometimes THE ONE isn’t really THE ONE. Though I imagined our glorious life together, that couch and I were not meant to be. This is not sour grapes talking. Sometimes you have to search like hell for the real true thing. Loving is so good, and like the soul song says, ain’t nothing like the real thing, but trying again, loving again, revising again and again and a-freaking-gain can sustain you too.

Cathy Stonehouse on Density, Space, and Silence

In the 55th in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Cathy Stonehouse, author of Something About the Animal (Biblioasis), talks about how she put together her collection.

What do you think a good short story collection should deliver? 

For me, a good short story has density, which means that a lot happens between the lines. Space and silence in short fiction do a lot of work. In a collection, therefore, there needs to be sufficient space to absorb and appreciate the implications of each piece. I have tired of collections which pack too many stories in, or hit the same note too many times. Some stories that work powerfully alone lose impact when placed beside eight others that do pretty much the same thing. Equally, collections that read like literary portfolios, filled with as wide a range as possible of settings, voices, and forms—as if to demonstrate technical prowess—can feel manipulative and irritating. Personally I admire writers who offer up what they know and push it as far as they can even to the point of failure. Reportage from a front line I will never visit, which can take multiple forms.

How did you decide to arrange the stories in your collection? 

When assembling the stories for Something About the Animal I wanted the reader to experience them as a journey into a particular darkness and then out again. I knew I was expecting a lot of the reader, perhaps too much, but nevertheless this was where my narrative path led. I began to see the book as a linked whole, a series of suspension bridges from which the reader could survey an entire landscape and goggle at the canyons beneath. There was something magical about the way the stories linked territories and when placed one after the other made a bigger journey possible.

I am interested in how “the collection” is quite often an artificial or temporary structure. In this sense short fiction resembles poetry, a form that operates on both micro (individual poem) and macro (collection of poems) levels.

Finishing a book, knowing when it is done, is hard for me. Two of the shortest stories, “Ravenous Hours” and “Freak Waves,” were written at the very end of the editing process to fill what I perceived as gaps, stretches of terrain that required integration into the circuit. I was, however, aware my style was changing and began to feel one book blur into another: This was the time to stop or else the whole rest of the book would become obsolete!

Will Boast on Beautiful Musicians and Unlikely Dreams

In the 54th in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Will Boast, author of Power Ballads (University of Iowa Press), explains why he thinks struggling musicians make good protagonists for short stories.

Since high school, an obsession with music—performing, recording, listening, talking about it endlessly with friends—has run right along in parallel to my more private obsession with reading and writing. The two pursuits intersected in the stories I wrote for my collection, Power Ballads. The accumulated force of all the rehearsals I’ve sat through, all the (largely unglamorous) gigs I’ve played, all the beautiful and frustrated musicians I’ve met, and all the unlikely dreams I’ve seen those musicians try to live out needed to find some kind of literary outlet. It wasn’t that I set out to write about music and musicians necessarily, more that the lives of the musicians I’ve known put them in interesting, precarious positions—artistically, financially, and emotionally—that began to suggest to me individual stories.

One of my favorite books of criticism on the short story is Frank O’Connor’s The Lonely Voice. It’s not a scholarly work, nor does it make any claims to objectivity, but for me it compellingly describes what the short story is good at doing. In his introduction, O’Connor outlines his famous concept, the “submerged population group,” using it to describe the sorts of characters he finds in the early masters of the short tale: Gogol’s petty officials, Turgenev’s peasants, Maupassant’s prostitutes, Sherwood Anderson’s lonely, small-town dreamers. (More contemporary examples might be Denis Johnson’s junkies, Tim O’Brien’s soldiers, or Jhumpa Lahiri’s Indian immigrants.)

The novel, that most middle-class of art forms, has long been obsessed with social climbers and world-beaters, their triumphs, their downfalls, their second and third acts. O’Connor says that the short story concerns itself with a different sort of character: those who get swept to the side of society, who the larger world deems unworthy of having their lives told. Put another way, the main character in a novel stands out from the crowd. The characters in short stories are those most people walk by without even seeing. I very much like what O’Connor says about what the novel is good at:

The novel is bound to be a process of identification between the reader and the character…. One character at least in any novel must represent the reader in some aspect of his own conception of 
himself…. and this process of identification invariably leads to some concept of normality and to some relationship—hostile or friendly—with society as a whole.

He is, of course, saying that the novel needs a hero. Half-hero or quarter-hero or anti-hero, it doesn’t matter—the novel needs a central character the reader can see standing in for him- or herself. The reader of the short story, however, is asked to enter into a very different relationship with its characters. As O’Connor puts it, “The short story has never had a hero.”

With my decidedly marginal experiences in the music “industry” and under the influence of O’Connor and some of the story collections mentioned above, I knew what I did not want to write about: rock stars. In the last couple years, there have been some pretty successful novels on this subject. But, for whatever reason, the rock star—both the actual people and the cultural myth—has always bored and dismayed me. Perhaps because of the mediocrity of mainstream music. Perhaps because I hate being asked to follow fashions and pay homage to those who ride them. Perhaps because the narrative of the heroic individual who risks it all, gets everything they have ever desired, only to lose it all again, etc., etc.—that favorite narrative of the movies and VH1—seems so patently false to me. Perhaps because the stories of those who simply have to learn to live with their own lives seem so noble and true.

Alexander MacLeod: Let's Get Physical

In the 53rd in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Alexander MacLeod, author of Light Lifting (Biblioasis), discusses his efforts to "get into the zone," as athletes do, and write without over thinking.

A lot of the stories I wrote for Light Lifting centre on a single action or, sometimes, just one physical movement that holds the plot together and also threatens to tear it apart. I have a girl who dives off the roof of a Holiday Inn into the dark Detroit River at two in the morning, for example, and I have a pair of world class distance runners blasting down the backstretch of the most important 1500 they will ever race. There are some exhausted parents trying to stay up all night with a sick child, and there’s a work crew of guys who have to deal with that unique up and down grind that comes only from working with paving stone. I have a boy who decides he’s going to have to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a man who may or may not be some kind of sexual predator. In all these cases, I wanted the key movement of the story to be held in one ambiguous image or scene that could be felt as directly as it was imagined. I wanted the reader to experience the panic of the girl who is afraid of deep water or the surge of the runner who is about ready to get up on his toes and unleash his kick. I tried to describe what it’s like to have a blistering sunburn or to live through a car accident or to stand in line in the cold for hours. I wanted the reader to feel what the kid feels as he presses his lips against that man’s mouth.

Newton-John: Body Talk

In order to get close to the sensory core of those scenes, I knew that the writing would need to get out of the way as much as possible and almost disappear so that the intensity of the experience could carry the whole thing. I tried to do this lots of different ways, but I often found myself hemmed in by language and it was difficult to find the words to match up with the actions I wanted to capture. I did not want to internalize any of it, and I definitely wanted to avoid intellectualizing what was happening, but it was difficult, as Olivia Newton-John would say, to “hear the body talk.” How do you write sensation or transmit raw feeling when those things are precisely outside the normal range of the sign and signifier?

I used to be a pretty serious middle-distance runner and whenever my races went wrong—I mean really, really wrong—my coaches used to say: “You’re thinking too much. You need to let it go and just trust the rhythm. You know your body knows how to do this.” Sport and literature usually don’t seem to share much common ground, but I come back to that coaching advice all the time when I’m putting together my stories. If I feel like I’m pushing it too hard and thinking and worrying too much, I try to let go and feel my way through the scene.

Murakami: "Suffering is optional."

As Haruki Murakami teaches, writing and running are actually quite similar: Both require a weird individual discipline that can’t be faked and a person has to put in countless hours alone before there is any public significance to what they do. HM’s best line about running and writing—“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional”—feels just about perfect to me and I think it captures the idea that all aesthetic challenges must eventually come back to real-world practical concerns. Those athletes who hit the effortless three pointers, or fire one-timers into the top corner, or throw a baseball one hundred miles an hour may seem amazing to us, but for them, it’s all part of their routine and they are really just auto-piloting their bodies down roads they’ve travelled thousands of times before in isolation. If everything’s working right and the rhythm is on, I want my stories to feel like that. I want them to go into ‘the zone,’ into that strange place every athlete knows but doesn’t quite understand. I want the story to seem inevitable, as if every action is unfolding exactly the way it should.

Michael Martone on Form, Function, and Fourness

In the 52nd in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Michael Martone, author of Four for a Quarter (FC2), lays out the structure of his collection.

How did you decide to arrange the stories in your collection? 
Arrangement is the story of this story collection. Some might label Four for a Quarter “experimental” fiction, but I never liked that designation. I think Chekhov’s coupling realistic techniques with Freudian ideas of depth of character was a very fruitful experiment. I wouldn’t call my fiction experiments, or I would, I guess, call it experimental in the way I would call every attempt to write fiction an experiment. Writing prose is always an experiment in arranging and/or rearranging the forms and content, words and sentences, styles and idioms of earlier fictions and nonfictions. I think of myself as a very old-fashioned formalist, writing fictions that foreground form. So, in this case, I didn’t write a set of stories and then arrange them afterward as much as I thought of the form of the book before I wrote it and then, wrote the individual pieces to complete the predestined formal structure. Form follows function? Function follows form? Hard for me to say at this point. 

There are 44 fictions here. The fictions are arranged in four sections. The first two sections each have 11 fictions. The third has 10 and the fourth 12. The idea for the book started with the old photo-booth photo-strips. I collect them. I have my students as a final project tell stories by means of a photo-booth photo-strip narrative. What I noticed is a pattern in the four shots. The first and second pictures are polite, staged, planned, arranged, but the third seems to be the anomaly. Mugged. Goofy. The crazy shot where self-consciousness (that one is having one’s picture taken) takes over, revealing the artifice of candid portraiture. It is an attack on the invisible fourth wall of transparent presentation. In the third shot, we break character. The fourth shot then is a kind of recovery. A desire to make sure there is “one good one” in the bunch. An attempt to recompose oneself. I wanted then for the overarching structure of the book to represent this syncopation. The book is a waltz as well as a march. The little skip also allows the author’s bio-note at the very end to be incorporated as the last fiction, another story, and not something that falls outside the “body” of the book.

Fantatsic fourmalism?

Each of those 44 fictions is divided into four parts. Many of the third parts of those four part fictions are also anomalous asides in the flow of the individual stories. But not all. And of course I should say that all of the fictions are also already about a four: the four winds, directions, humours, blood types, horsemen, gospels, questions, corners, Beatles, etc., etc., etc., etc. I do regard the four blurbs on the book’s back cover as a 45th fiction, and perhaps a ligature to the next book I am going to write. I asked my blurbers not to do a blurb but write a very brief story based on the number 4. I encouraged them not to read the book, all the better to help them write a story in the form of a blurb of an imaginary book. And the final story in the collection, “Contributor’s Note” is written not by me but by four other writers I asked to sit in.

Let me say this about all that. I know you are shaking your head. You asked a simple question about arrangement and you get this complex obsession about “arrangement.” Some of those who like to use the appellation “experimental” do use it as a kind of code. We are meant to understand that here in these “fictions” the reader will find cleverness, tricks, games, and riddles but no real emotional content that the “traditional” epiphanic dramatic story is designed and constructed to animate and release. That is to say that this kind of over-realized fiction, fiction that wears its form on its sleeve, has no heart. Oh, that may be true! It quite possibly is true. This book, then, is constructed as just another kind of elaborate amusement, some sort of mechanical booth, say, that takes a series of snapshots of its subjects wearing many highly exaggerated and artificial masks. But I hope that in the book’s architecture and in that dilapidated analog arcade booth there is, yes, a beating heart, a heart of four (four!) chambers, that circulates an empathetic vitality within its conscious anatomical arrangements—a systolic/diastolic stutter, a dub DUB squared, a surprising fibrillation, and, at last, the dénouementic code blue, bluer than the bluest blue.

Diane Goodman: Food for Thought

In the 51st in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Diane Goodman, author of Party Girls (Autumn House Press), discusses how her work has evolved along with her personal and professional involvement with food.

When people ask me what my first book of short stories, The Genius of Hunger, is about, I say it’s about lonely women in grocery stores. I moved down to Miami 12 years ago, I didn’t know a soul, and I spent a lot of time by myself in the markets. I started writing about it, about this peculiar kind of loneliness taking place while I shopped for food, for something familiar and comforting. This book is, I think, also about the universal need for community and for communicating, and then the actual genius of these hungers—how they propel and compel us to fill them.

Once I got myself settled here, I opened a catering/personal chef business, and then something else remarkable occurred to me that created the foundation for my second story collection, The Plated Heart. Cooking, feeding people, is such an intimate, nurturing gesture, but I was doing it for strangers in their homes; I was a stranger in their homes. The dynamics that emerged from that conflict were endlessly interesting to me in terms of writing stories that examined what it was like to prepare and serve food in strangers’ homes—how much you saw of their lives, how little you actually wanted to know, how it seemed as though you were supposed to provide comfort and yet you were not because you were an employee. I was a hero if the meals/parties were a success, a villain if they were not, and much of the time a person whom they talked to and ordered around all day but never really saw.

A hero

But then I became a more accomplished caterer with a thicker skin and my focus shifted from the service perspective to the surprising fragility of my clients. In the world, they were rich and powerful; in their homes, they were insecure and frightened. The pressure they put on themselves to throw the perfect event, the personal issues that arose from merely wanting to throw a party, made me sympathetic to them and made me feel more powerful. My new book, Party Girls, still focuses on food, on cooking and serving and trying to please. But in this one, the focus is on the hostesses—their odd, kind of secret world—and on when a party is not just a party but a pressure cooker (pun intended) constantly threatening to explode.

Peter Markus: Kafka’s Axe for the Frozen Sea (or How I Came to Be the Writer I Have Come to Be)

In the 50th in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Peter Markus, author of We Make Mud (Dzanc Books), compares reading a short story collection to listening to a record.

In college, I was drawn to two books of stories written by writers, both dead, whose origins, like mine, were decidedly of the Midwest: Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and The Nick Adams Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Both writers, both under the influence of another now-favorite of mine, Gertrude Stein, wrote about the particulars of small-town middle American landscapes in such a way that they seemed to give me permission to turn my own fictional attentions on my own small town backdrop that has, for anyone familiar with my work, a muddy river always running through it: a town and a river where boys—no, brothers—and sometimes men—most of them called Bob— spend the bulk of their time fishing for the river’s fish. 

But it was two other books at that time, too, by writers who at the time were both still alive and living, that really ran their nail of influence through me, their own river of words, mentor-works of fiction that made me want to write and to try to find a way to write the stories that would become my own, my own voice, my own particular landscape in the bigger landscape of American short fiction. The first of these two books was Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, a book whose title alone, not so much its suggested subject matter—love and its failings—but the patterns of its lingual phrasing, its sense of stripped-down musicality and repetition, that made its way to my ears and eventually drove a nail right through to my writer’s heart. I remember opening up the Carver collection at random to find the story “Viewfinder,” a story that I teach at the beginning of every fiction workshop I now teach, a story about a man who has steel hooks for hands, a man who is in a way hand-less, and I remember the feeling that I was holding in my own hands stories whose sentences, like the characters themselves, had been stripped down to the rawest of bones.

Borders Book Shop, Ann Arbor, Mich.

A couple of years later, as I was about to graduate and leave Ann Arbor with the self-knowing that I was going to become, one way or another, a writer, I discovered that second of books that would change the way I not only wrote, but it changed the way that I experienced language both as a reader and a writer. That book, The Ice at the Bottom of the World by Mark Richard, did violence to the way that I saw what a story was or what a story could be and the way that the sentence itself is the foundation and the source of fiction’s ultimate power. It’s a book that, as Kafka makes the bold point, was the axe that cut in half, that freed, the frozen sea inside of me.

I remember how The Ice at the Bottom of the World found its way to me, much like a fish that leapt up out of the river and slapped me in the face as if to say, Hey, look over here! I’d read a review of it in The New York Times Book Review, a review that talked about Richard’s hard-scrabble characters, fathers and sons, sailors newly home from sea, drunken uncles—get the picture?— stories, too, that, like both Hemingway and Anderson, had driving behind them and anchoring them to the page a strong sense of place (Mark Richard’s place being the American south). I surrendered from my tight fist a twenty dollar bill to the bald but bearded bookseller at the Ann Arbor Borders Books—the headquarter store of the now sunken chain—the sort of frivolous purchase that I rarely ever participated in back then when I was a lowly English major whose first job out of college would be working for five bucks under the table at a used bookstore in Detroit. I took The Ice at the Bottom of the World back home with me to my one-room efficiency on North Ingalls Street with the hope of spending the day with a book that I believed would speak and sing to me.

A day later I was back at Borders to ask for my money back. As I told the bookseller who asked why I was returning the book: “This book,” I sneered, “is unreadable!” The problem, needless to say, wasn’t the book, wasn’t the author, wasn’t the stories themselves. The problem was that I, as its reader, didn’t know how to read a writer whose stories demanded that they be read on their own terms: under their own lingual conditions. I wasn’t ready to read a book that was written not so much in English or the English that I was comfortably familiar with. No, this was a book written in one writer’s singular vision and reinvention of what language can become when we speak it and shape the particulars of our speech onto the page.

A few years later I picked up the book again, this time from a used bookstore for two bucks, but this time I was ready for, I was open to, its rhythms and recursive ways of sentencing a work of fiction. Richard forced me, in the words of the great poet Jack Gilbert, to “unlearn the constellations to see the stars.” I learned, in short, to read Mark Richard the way that Mark Richard demanded to be read: one word, one sound, at a time, taking it slow, savoring every beat, every syllabic bite. It changed the way I read and the way that I wrote and the way that I now write: one word, one sound, at a time. It’s my hope that the mud that I’m now making, with my own words, might also be read, and eaten, in much the same way. I hope you enjoy the taste.