KL Pereira on Lost and Missing Mothers

In the 38th in a series of posts on 2017 books entered for The Story Prize, KL Pereira, author of A Dream Between Two Rivers (Cutlass Press), relates a history of absence.

Missing mothers haunt my work. It’s partially because of my obsession with fairy tales, to be sure. Mothers are often an absence, a shadow, a lurking thing that can neither be written out of the text, nor forgotten. In fairy tales, the mother has often died, a reality of times when coming through childbirth was far from sure, and stepmothers were a fact of life. Then, as now, mothers seem to be stolen away, and our narratives are full of looking.

There are so many mother-shaped holes in my life, my story. I’m always, it seems, trying to find them. But, try as I might, mothers always seem to elude me. They turn out as absences or shades, violent shadows. I can’t quite seem to fill their shapes. There’s something that rises up and blocks me.

And this is what I really want to write about, but can’t: We have a terrible tradition of losing mothers in my family. My mother lost her mother when she was 17. My grandmother had had ten children by the time she was 36 and by 39 her body had given up. I never knew her, none of her grandchildren did. Some of her children do not remember her. She became an absence that everyone felt and a fairy tale that everyone was too sad to tell.

My grandmother lost her mother when she was four years old. But her mother did not die. She was taken. Her children were taken. My grandmother and her siblings were seized by the state and their mother (my great-grandmother) was committed. Yes, that kind of committed. The one census record I’ve discovered cites schizophrenia as her illness. It’s a box on the side of a card that is ticked off by a neat “x.” There’s no explanation. She was an immigrant, spoke little to no English, it was the Depression and she’d left her young children at home while searching for her husband, her husband who, it was said, was running around on her, and what rights did she have, what rights do women and immigrants have now over their own bodies and lives?

I’m usually not a fan of the happy ending, where everything works out, even in fairy tales, but when it comes to this story, I want that ending. I yearn for it. Perhaps precisely because I know that it can never happen. I can’t save my great-grandmother, break her out of the asylum, rescue her children from the orphanage, reunite them. Because that is not how it ended for either of them.

Every time I find a new census record, it breaks me. There’s no other way to say this. Because of the way state and federal census records are released, I have to wait years between updates and each time it shows that my grandmother was still in the orphanage and then with foster homes that never adopted her. That my great-grandmother was still in the asylum and then, after being deinstitutionalized sometime in the 1970s, died in a nursing home, long after my grandmother’s death, and long after my birth. So many details are still missing, but I know that neither of these women got the ending I wish for them. And if I know the truth and it’s heartbreaking and there is no redemption for anyone, how do I write this story, how did I write so that it’s not like losing them, again and again and again?

Bill Roorbach's Freaky Fridays

In the 37th in a series of posts on 2017 books entered for The Story Prize, Bill Roorbach, author of The Girl of the Lake (Algonquin Books), describes his writing habits, his reading habits, and how he gets back on track.

What influenced you to become a writer?

When I was five—an earliest memory—my mom took me to Shopper’s World, one of the first malls. It was still new then, late fifties, and we were going to see Santa. The wonderful thing was that it was just me and Mom, very rare, and about to get rarer: Eventually she’d have five kids. I sat on Santa’s lap and he asked me what I wanted and I said I wanted a desk. He seemed fine with that—very jolly in fact. On the way home Mom asked me why I wanted a desk. I said, “Because I want to be a writer.” She read to us, my mom, maybe that’s where my conception of a writer came from, the idea that it was something I wanted to do.

Describe your writing habits.

It used to be so clear. Get up, eat breakfast, write till lunch. Then a walk and a nap and write again, till dinner. After dinner, correspondence with editors, agents, and so forth. If teaching, writing in the mornings, class in the afternoon, grading in the evening. But then we had a kid. Now it’s ten minutes typing before the shower comes available, forty-five minutes on laptop in parking lot while the girl is at ballet, a couple hours after midnight (assuming no one’s throwing up), nineteen minutes while dinner’s in the oven.

Where do you do your best work?

Skunk family: Sub-tenants

I have a studio in a little outbuilding here at our place in Maine, but a family of skunks lives under it. Mostly they are good neighbors, but they do fight with the woodchucks who also want to move in, so there are stretches when it’s too smelly to work out there. These days I’m on the porch with the rest of the family, each doing our projects. Trouble is, the visual artists can chat and listen to music, so I’m often chased back out with the skunks. 

Name something by another author that you wish you’d written. 

Game of Thrones. But just for the money.

Where does a story begin for you? 

Usually with something interrupting life as usual. A character is grocery shopping before a snowstorm. He sees a homeless woman struggling with her bags. He decides to help her.

How do you know when a story is finished?

I always seem to finish writing stories on Fridays. So much of my life was set up like that, from grade school forward: There’s a work week, and there’s a weekend. I don’t do it on purpose—some inner clock times everything out for me. To write a given story might take a few days, might take a year—doesn’t matter, I finish on a Friday. So that’s how I know I’m done. It’s Friday, and I can’t think of anything more to do: Stick a fork in it.

Describe a physical, mental, or spiritual practice that helps put you in a suitable state of mind to write.

Walking, usually in the woods or on the beach or otherwise in nature, though cities work well, too. Also gardening. So much so that I count both walking and gardening as writing.

How do you get yourself back on track when your writing isn’t going well?

Reading, walking, gardening, heavy drinking.

Describe an idea that you want to write or return to that you haven’t quite figured out yet.

I used to play keyboards in bands, though I’ve lost my chops over the intervening decades. I would like to learn or relearn one song really, really well and get say, the Rolling Stones to let me play it with them at one show, somewhere big, with jumbotrons and screaming fans. And then write about the experience. 

Describe your reading habits.

I used to read relentlessly, always five or ten books going at once, a pile by the bed open to various depths, one main project always forefront, ready to be opened in all the interstices of a busy life. I’ve had periods of reading a book a day—until recently a book a week was just average. Now I’m lucky if I can read a book or two a month. The problem is getting older. The problem, frankly, is staying awake. Also not enough hours in the day. Success has brought a lot of duties. And a lot of those duties involve reading. When night falls, I’m more about watching a movie these days. Which I count as reading, if it’s a good enough movie.

Douglas Trevor on Toni Morrison and Subjective Histories

In the 36th in a series of posts on 2017 books entered for The Story Prize, Douglas Trevor, author of The Book of Wonders (SixOneSeven Books), discusses how Toni Morrison influenced his writing when he took an undergraduate writing class with her.

When I was a junior at Princeton in the spring of 1991, I had the opportunity to take a small craft class on fiction writing with Toni Morrison. There were six of us in the class—all students in the creative writing program. We met once a week in Professor Morrison's spacious office in a building known to us simply by its street address: 185 Nassau. In addition, Professor Morrison scheduled individual appointments with us. This was two years before she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In one of my private meetings with Professor Morrison, I remember her asking if I had first drafted the story we were discussing by hand or if I had typed it directly into my computer. At the time, I was using a Macintosh SE that had dual floppy drives. I recall writing my stories on this computer, saving them on a floppy disk, and then printing them out in the computer lab in Fine Library. I told her all this, adding that my own handwriting was so bad, sometimes I had difficulty deciphering my lecture notes.

She responded by shaking her head and laughing very softly. She said I had to be able to read my own handwriting if I wanted to be a serious writer; otherwise, I would never learn how to control and create the music of my sentences. She told me to rewrite the story by hand and then revise it and rewrite it again. Typing, she observed, is not the same as writing.

Perhaps none of Morrison's novels are more overtly attentive to the question of rhythm and variation than Jazz, which would come out in 1992—a year after my class with Professor Morrison ended. In Jazz, the distinct narrative perspective on each character is akin to a different solo. Taken together, these solos form a larger, composite piece, all knitted together—orchestrated, as it were—by the narrator.

I find the theory of character development embodied by Jazz to be an incredibly generative model for thinking about fiction writing, not just because it emphasizes how characters need to sound different from one another, and how this acoustic distance is part of what establishes character in the first place, but also because Morrison thinks about the historical dimensions that inform how and why characters express themselves in unique ways. By historical dimensions, I don't mean that older characters will use different forms of speech and diction than their younger counterparts, although of course that's true, but that each character should have a different relationship to history. This history can be personal or political or—as is really always the case in Morrison—both.

The title story of my recent collection, The Book of Wonders, is just one example of how Toni Morrison's lessons about character development, and her emphasis on subjective histories, continue to shape my writing more than twenty years later. In this story, a middle-aged woman named Simone is convinced that her mother, Annabel, has long scribbled secrets about her past in a leather ledger book she keeps under lock and key. For Simone, to access this book is to access a secret history that will help her explain the distance that has always existed between her and her mother. Annabel, on the other hand, regards the past in very different terms. Never really satisfied in marriage, she has instead dwelt upon the memories she has of those female friendships she cultivated while a student at Radcliffe in the sixties. Annabel has chosen to live in these memories—to clutter her home with pictures of these women, and to judge her daughter in relation to these figures.

While Simone assumes that excavating her mother's real past will prove something incontrovertible about it, and therefore explain their own relationship in some fundamental way, what she discovers instead is not so much what her mother thought about the past but how she thought about her own life. This discovery has a much different impact on Simone than she would have ever imagined.

"The Book of Wonders," both the story and the collection, is about this kind of impact—about what happens when one character is made to understand how another character sees the past. By virtue of her sustained meditation on how history works in the minds of different people, I group Toni Morrison with other writers whose work has meant the word to me—other writers for whom the flickering and repressing of the past constitutes one of their central concerns: Proust, Woolf, Marquez, Sebald, Bolaño, and—more recently—Egan. That I had the opportunity to engage directly with Professor Morrison's mind, to watch her pen mark my pages, is something—to this day—I still cannot quite believe.

Michelle Ross Asks: Is a Story Ever Finished?

In the 35th in a series of posts on 2017 books entered for The Story Prize, Michelle Ross, author of There's So Much They Haven't Told You (Moon City Press), contemplates the array of choices writing a story presents.

By nature, I’m an indecisive person. If I don’t bring leftovers to work with me in the morning, then I will deliberate for so long about what to get for lunch, that in the time I wasted trying to decide where to go, I could have been out and back and eating already.

Writing, of course, is an exercise in making choices. Every word is a choice. Every detail. Every action. In the process of writing any story, I make thousands of choices along the way.

I’m also a perfectionist, and I suspect this largely explains the indecisiveness. Maybe perfection exists on a small scale. There are perfect sentences, I think. But on a larger scale, perfection either doesn’t exist or, at the very least, I don’t think it’s a reasonable goal. That’s in part because while some writing choices feel easy and natural, as though I couldn’t have chosen any other way, many other choices involve more chance than that. I could have chosen differently and still ended up with a great story. Maybe it would have been a slightly different version of the story I wrote. Maybe it would have been a drastically different version of the story I wrote. Maybe so different, anyone else wouldn’t know the two stories had started with the same seed.

Decision tree: Chose your own story

So I remind myself that there isn’t one correct path I must stumble my way onto or else the story is doomed. There are many fine paths I could take, so I just need to relax, make a choice and another and another and keep going.

And then there’s the revision, of course, and so reconsidering choices, and choosing differently, which creates more and more choices to make.

Until, finally, the story is finished.

On one hand, I want to say that knowing when a story is finished is rather simple. It’s a gut feeling. I’ve put in the work, given myself time and distance from the story, reread the story again and again and found that nothing nags at me anymore. That’s when I know a story is finished.

But many times an editor who has accepted one of my stories for publication has requested edits. Was the story not finished when I sent it out?

When I put stories together to make this collection, I revisited work I’d published in journals a decade earlier in some cases. I found more edits to make—most of them copyedits, but also more significant edits. I cut whole paragraphs. I rearranged scenes. Were the stories not finished when they were published in journals?

My book has been a finished thing since February of this year. If ever my stories are truly finished, surely it is when they appear collected in a book that has my name on the spine, right?

Recently, an editor expressed interest in republishing a story from my book, only she wanted to know if I’d be willing to consider making some edits. In addition to being in my book, this story won a contest years earlier. A prize of $1,000, the most I’ve ever been paid for a story. I’ll admit I felt a little uncomfortable at first about editing this story now. Because to make changes seemed to be an admission that the version of the story in the book is less than perfect. But didn’t I know that already?

There’s that famous sentiment I’m not sure whom to credit: Art is never finished, only abandoned. The word “abandoned” feels a little harsh, but if by “finished,” we mean “perfect,” I’m inclined to agree that no story—or few stories anyway—are ever truly finished.

There’s something liberating and beautiful about that.

And so, yeah, I listened to this editor’s insightful suggestions, and I edited the story. And it’s a better story.

But it’s still not perfect.

Michael Knight on a Literary Touchstone

In the 34th in a series of posts on 2017 books entered for The Story Prize, Michael Knight, author of Eveningland (Atlantic Monthly Press), discusses his sentence-level admiration for The Great Gatsby.

Name Something by Another Author that You Wish You’d Written / Talk about a Literary Touchstone / What Influenced You to Become a Writer?
Given the nature of this prize and this blog, I should probably select a short story to answer this question, and if I’m not going to select a short story, I should probably take advantage of this opportunity to shine a light on some under-read masterpiece rather than on what is surely one of the most read novels of all time, and if I really do intend to select an already well-known novel, it would make perfect sense for me to pick the one referenced by the title of my new collection (Walker’s Percy’s The Moviegoer is now and ever shall be one of my favorite works of fiction), but the book that keeps insisting on itself in my mind is The Great Gatsby. I know, I know. I already feel like a heel and I’m barely a hundred words into this post.

But, still, there are those sentences:

An oldie but a goodie

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

And there is the point of view, Fitzgerald’s observer narrator, Nick Carraway, his first person voice inviting us in, courting our sympathy—he’s a charming storyteller, after all, and he’s just as amazed as we are by the near surreality of the wealth and decadence on display—allowing for bias in Gatsby’s favor while also keeping us at a slight but vital remove. This is a narrative stance I have employed (imitated? stolen?) on several occasions in my own fiction, including in the story “Water and Oil” in Eveningland. Even when I’m writing in third person, I often imagine my narrators this way, as actual humans with flaws and opinions and recognizable uncertainties bearing witness just on the fringes of the action and moved by what they see, as I hope the reader will be moved. There is a scene in my story “Jubilee” that makes direct reference to (rips off?) The Great Gatsby, a party scene featuring a guest list that bears an undeniable resemblance to Nick Carraway’s list, famously scribbled in the margins of railroad timetable.

And there’s the way Fitzgerald uses imagery to mirror Nick’s interior life, a craft lesson for any writer. 

Two o’clock and the whole corner of the peninsula was blazing with light, which fell unreal on the shrubbery and ran in thin elongating glints upon the roadside wires . . . But there wasn’t a sound. Only wind in the trees, which blew the wires and made lights go off and on again as if the house had winked into the darkness.

Those lines span two beautiful paragraphs and appear in the novel immediately after Nick has learned the truth about Gatsby’s history with Daisy. For me, as a reader and a writer, no sentences in literature better reflect the way the world might look to just that human and just that moment in his life. 

Like most everybody else, I first came across The Great Gatsby in a high school, Nancy Strachan’s American lit class my junior year. I was the perfect age and exactly the right sort of kid to romanticize vague notions about the glamorous 1920s and a boozy literary life, false notions, to be sure, but no doubt the beginning of my dream to become a writer. And I can still remember the way my pulse thumped as Fitzgerald lead me inexorably toward what I surely must have known was coming, that image of Gatsby floating dead on a raft in his own pool, the water littered with fallen leaves, and from there to those last lines, which I most likely didn’t understand completely but which I somehow felt completely and have kept on feeling across all these years and dozens of re-readings and which, even now, I can feel creeping up on me as I type these words. Honestly, writing this post has made me want to go read The Great Gatsby all over again.

Timothy O'Leary Weaves Fact Into Fiction

In the 33rd in a series of posts on 2017 books entered for The Story Prize, Timothy O'Leary, author of Dick Cheney Shot Me in the Face (Unsolicited Press), discusses his ideas for stories and how he gets himself back on track.

How does a story begin for you?
Voyeuristically. I’ve always been fascinated by the often overlooked occurring around me. It might be the tension of a couple arguing three tables away in a restaurant, or the particular arrangement of bumper stickers on a car. It makes me wonder “why,” and “what if.” Right now I’m working on a story inspired by a particularly engaging sommelier I encountered—whose life I intend to make much more interesting than the one he probably lives. I feel compelled to take a little piece of fact and weave it into fiction I find entertaining.

All my stories begin with a real event. I began to formulate the title story of my collection, Dick Cheney Shot Me in the Face, when I ran into Dick Cheney at a fly fishing tournament in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He was in his home state, comfortable with the crowd, and it was interesting to watch him interact. I knew I wanted to write about that aspect of Cheney. I did a lot of research on the man, talked to a lot of people that had interfaced with him, and formed the story around the following premise: We all know Dick Cheney shot one man in the face, but what if there were more?

My story "One Star" began after I gave a restaurant in Aspen a poor review. The owner of the establishment literally tracked me down at my hotel, came to see me, and begged me to take down the entry. It got me thinking about the enormous online power each of us now has, and the much bigger “what if.”

My story "First Kill" began with a gun. When I was a kid I went hunting with relatives, who insisted I shoot my first deer with an old buffalo gun. It was a frightening and exhilarating experience for a twelve-year-old that I never forgot, and I knew I had to write a story based on that rifle, which eventually took me to a much darker place.

Sometimes it’s an old emotion I can’t get out of my head. The opening scene of my story "Impala" takes place in a bowling alley where I grew up. I always found the establishment delightfully sinister and frightening. It borders a graveyard and was a scary place to leave after dark.

The more I write, the more I search for snippets of real stories that I can make my own. I type cryptic notes into my phone when I notice something unusual in public, or hear an interesting story from a friend. Often someone begins to tell me a story, and I find myself rudely allowing my mind to wander, envisioning a much more dramatic end to the tale they are relating.

The physical practices that help me write.

Going Gaga: Set the mood

I begin every day with a long walk and a soundtrack for the day. With dog on leash, I walk for at least an hour as I try to work out an idea. Sometimes I am concentrating on language—trying to work out a passage. Sometimes I am contemplating a story arc. In any case, I find the perfect playlist to facilitate the work, that could range from 1970’s rock to Lady Gaga, to Willie Nelson. If the walk has gone well, I will have undergone some kind of emotional transition. Music often becomes the mood board for a story; a way to insert me back into the mindset I was in when I first decided an idea was worth writing about.

I started my career writing advertising and for television, and that certainly influences my work. I tend to “cast” my stories—choosing one or two actors that I am writing for—and I find that sometimes helps—especially when writing dialogue.

What to do when the writing isn’t going well.
First, I try to wean myself away from the distractions. Fast access to the Internet is incredible when I am researching or exploring, but it is deadly when I need to concentrate. When I am really writing I don’t open my email account or anything else that could pull me from the page.

When the inevitable writer’s block visits, I go to the movies or read less challenging books that I can move through quickly. I want to experience a velocity of ideas for a kick-start.

When my writing is in a difficult place it is often a function of boredom or laziness. Perhaps I have written myself into a bit of a corner that I need to escape, and there is no replacement for enduring the pain of that place until you have written yourself into a more pleasant setting. It is easy to put that off. Perhaps I am writing necessary scenes that are much less interesting to me than the core of the story, but I need to move through them.

Becky Mandelbaum's Four Simple Pieces of Advice

In the 32nd in a series of posts on 2017 books entered for The Story Prize, Becky Mandelbaum, author of Bad Kansas (University of Georgia Press), talks about reading and writing.

Like many writers, I’ve received a great deal of advice over the course of my writing education, and yet these are the four pieces that have stuck with me. Like most good advice, each is more maddeningly simple than the last.

1.  Read more books, watch less TV 
Be prepared to lose a few friends with this one. While I, too, appreciate the appeal of burning through a season of Stranger Things in one sitting, I always remember what my first college writing professor told our workshop. “If you want to write good fiction, especially good dialogue,” she said, “stop watching television altogether. What you must do is read books. You must devour books.”

Stranger Things: Don't look now

She was not wrong. Over the years, the act of reading—such an obvious answer to the predicament of writing—has come to my aid over and over again. Whenever I’m at an impasse with my work, reading is always the solution. If it’s good writing, I think, “I’d like to write something that good.” If it’s bad writing, I think, “I can do better than that.” Either way, it leads me back to the page.

2.  Write
As an undergrad at The University of Kansas, I had the privilege of taking a workshop with Laura Moriarty, a killer novelist and teacher. When I asked her for writing advice, she told me simply, annoyingly, to write. “There are people out there who will call themselves writers,” she said, “but they don’t actually write. At the end of the day, the work is all that matters.”

So my advice is: Get your pages in. It doesn’t matter where or when or how. It also doesn’t matter if these pages are any good. I repeat: It does not matter if they’re any good. For every viable sentence I write, I probably write ten that end up in the trash. Those are frustrating numbers, but what is writing if not gratifying frustration?

3.  Revise, revise, revise
I once heard the writer Pam Houston tell a group of her students, “The very minimum number of times you should read through a manuscript is twenty-five.” Not surprisingly, a series of gasps and groans circled the room. Who wants to read her own book twenty-five times? Later, when I asked Pam about the advice, she told me, “The truth is, I usually read through a book fifty, sixty times before I’m done with it. But nobody wants to hear that. Twenty-five sounds more reasonable.”

4.  If you can do anything else and be happy, do it
In college, I had the opportunity to interview National Book Award winning poet Nikky Finney. Like most great poets, Finney emits a force field of wisdom you can feel on a cellular level when she enters the room. “If you can do anything else besides writing and be happy,” she told me, “then do that instead. This is not an easy life.”

These words have followed me ever since, appearing most often in times of self-doubt. Over the past few years, as my friends have begun to settle down in their careers, writing has sometimes felt like a dubious and even reckless life path, one that not everyone understands. Sometimes, when I’m home for the holidays, my brother will encourage me apply to law school. “I’ll pay for you to take the LSAT,” he’ll offer. “I’ll pay your application fees.” His concern is not unfounded. If there is money at all in writing, it comes in random, fitful bursts, like a row of cherries on a slot machine. I try to remember that the life of a writer is not a normal one and, as Finney promised, will by no means be easy. If I could clean teeth or crunch numbers or organize fundraisers and feel even a fraction of the satisfaction I feel after falling into the heart-swallowing extraterrestrial wormhole of a short story, I would certainly do that instead. But I can’t, and so I don’t. In exchange for all the fear and doubt and neurosis, I get to be in love with what I do.