Where Belle Boggs's Characters Come From

In the 21st in a series of posts on 2010 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Belle Boggs, author of Mattaponi Queen (Graywolf Press), talks about her characters' roots.

The stories in Mattaponi Queen take place almost entirely in two rural Virginia counties, and people from my hometown (of fewer than 100 people) have started wondering and guessing who is who, and asking my mother about it. “It’s fiction!” she says. “It’s made up!”

Away from home, too, I’ve been asked about my characters and where they come from, especially because so many of them seem so different from me. It’s hard to explain to a bookstore audience how I am in fact very much like the dutiful, practical Lila, or like George, the dreams-deferred carpenter-turned-custodian, or like Jeremy, a teenage boy in survival mode at a concert, but I’m sure that other short story writers can relate. I also think this feeling of connectedness comes from being a teacher (of everything from first grade to GED classes); teachers, like writers, are often empathetic outsiders who experience people’s quirks and character traits on an almost molecular level, while also imprinting their own.

But try telling that to people at a certain Middle Peninsula farmer’s market, where my mom sometimes sets up shop with copies of my book and the favors she’s made to go with it: jars of Mattaponi Queen preserves, bouquets of flowers in tin cans. In particular, people have wondered about Cutie Young, an old white woman who is cared for in her home by an African-American nurse, Loretta Johnson, who has come out of retirement in order to save up for a boat. Cutie’s home-care situation bears some resemblance to a local neighbor’s, but as a character she is more of an amalgamation of family members, particularly my grandmother and my great-aunt, who in fact went by the nickname Cutie. My great-aunt lived with her adult son (a Southern tradition), and would not let anyone in the house at the end of her life (another Southern tradition). And my grandmother, who is a New Yorker by birth but has lived in Tidewater for more than 60 years, is stubborn-minded and particular and, like Cutie, experienced the theft of some irreplaceable family silver a few years ago.

What I was not expecting, writing Cutie’s stories, was that my grandmother, Jeannie, would develop dementia and need the care of a nurse, or that my family would be drawn into the complex and very personal relationship that happens when you hire someone to take care of a family member in her home. We have just celebrated the first anniversary of Jeannie’s nurse, Ms. Joy Brinson, coming to work with her, but the celebration was of course bittersweet. Jeannie used to play the piano and correct your grammar and take you to the opera; now she sits in a chair with copies of The New Yorker in her lap and wonders where everybody is. She can no longer read The New Yorker, not even the cartoons, though she’s subscribed through 2013.

Ms. Joy (which is what my generation calls her) is just like her name sounds—bright and lovely and nurturing—and her relationship to Jeannie bears none of the prickliness of Loretta’s and Cutie’s. In fact, she knows a version of Jeannie that we never knew—she tells her freely, “I love you,” and Jeannie coos back something similar. But there is an invisibility at work there, too—the last time I visited, Ms. Joy told me that she worked for an entire day, trying to get Jeannie to remember her name. “What’s my name?” she kept saying. “You don’t know it? It’s Joy, remember. Say it, please. Say Joy.” Loretta would have never done that—she wouldn’t have cared—but she knew what it was like to be at once necessary and peripheral.

I signed Ms. Joy’s copy of my book last weekend, with great gratitude that she is part of our family and that Jeannie is a part of hers, but we didn’t talk about Loretta and Cutie, their story’s particular details. I don’t know how to tell her that Loretta is me, an outsider and a caretaker, just as Lila with her loneliness and George with his pride and Ronnie with her ambivalence are me, too.

Dawn Raffel's Ticket to Someplace New

In the 20th in a series of posts on 2010 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Dawn Raffel, author of Further Adventures in the Restless Universe (Dzanc Books), discusses, among other things, the influence of fairy tales on her work.

What book made you want to become a writer?
Can we start with the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson? I cannot remember a time when I didn’t want to read and write stories, and fairy tales still fascinate me. A few years ago, I had the good fortune to land a brief teaching gig in Russia. My students were amused to see me lugging around volumes of Russian fairy tales. I swiped a few ideas from them for Further Adventures. “Mighty Breakers of the Sea” is the collection’s curve ball story; while everything else is set in the Midwest or Manhattan, this one is sort of a warped Russian fairy tale that is also informed by the lives of the tsars’ wives. The latter tended not to end so well.

Describe one of the stories in your collection.
“The Air and Its Relatives” is seven pages but it took me years to find a way to get it on paper. I wanted to write about my father, who died suddenly without my having had a chance to say goodbye. I guess I was looking for a way to spend more time with him. In the story, I am a teenage bad driver taking us home from a visit to the planetarium in Chicago.

Most of what’s in the story didn’t happen—at least not in that order. Okay, I did flunk my driver’s test twice, but I never took out anyone’s taillights on the throughway. Still, the story is the closest I’ve come to capturing my father and my relationship with him, given that our view of our parents is always our own fiction. I pulled the story together with another device I lifted from Russian fairy tales: the repeated phrase “after a very long while, or maybe a short while.” That feels so true to me in terms of how memory works and how we experience the passage of time.

What do you think a good short story collection should deliver?
A good short story collection should deliver the same thing a good novel or play or painting does: a ticket to someplace new. It should ask you to view some quarter of the world, of yourself, in a new way. It should challenge assumptions. It should linger.

Anthony Doerr: "The World Is So Fundamentally Interesting..."

In the 19th in a series of posts on 2010 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Anthony Doerr, author of Memory Wall (Scribner), discusses his propensity for revision and his enthusiasm for research. 

Have you ever written a short story in one sitting and not revised it later?
A better way to ask that is to ask if I've ever written a sentence in one sitting and not revised it later! Indeed, stories routinely take me five or six months to write, working every day, weekends, too, and I'd be surprised if a single sentence has ever once survived wholly intact from the moment I've typed it out all the way to the finished story.

For me one of the chief pleasures of working on short stories is their manageable size compared with longer forms. Each time I return in the morning to the work—unless the story I'm writing is over, say, 10,000 words—I can read through everything I’ve written so far. And so, in that way, I can reenter the rhythm of the prose I’ve already laid out; I can reenter the feel and mood of the story. And as I read through, I’ll make changes the whole way. In that sense I’m in total agreement with Poe that a story offers a force of totality that cannot be approached by anything (novels, epic poems) that cannot be read in a single sitting.

What kind of research, if any, do you do?
I am researching all the time. For me research is traveling, or studying snowflakes with a magnifying glass, or excavating my memories, or reading about violin makers on the Internet. Research is going to the World Center for Birds of Prey, as I did a couple of months ago, where a friend opened a steel cabinet, slid out the top drawer, and showed me a passenger pigeon with a paper tag tied around its left ankle: “Chicago Market, 1886.”

The world is so fundamentally interesting and it makes me fall in love with it a dozen times a day. Part of my goal as a writer is to say to a reader: Look at this life we’re living, look how enormous the scales of time are, look how incredibly old and marvelous this situation is we’ve lucked into. As I write, I tend to use imagination and research in tandem to buttress the lives of my characters. I look back through my journals, I look at photos in archives or on the Web, I read naturalists’ accounts, I talk to fishermen: anything that can help me evoke the places and lives I'm writing about.

Author Posts on TSP: So Far, So Very Good

We're at the halfway point of our entry period, having received 49 story collections as entries for The Story Prize as of the July 15 deadline for books published in the first half of 2010. The deadline for books published July through December is November 15.

Just some of the collections so far entered for The Story Prize

We're not nearly halfway through our ambitious plan to dedicate a post to each book, having run 18 posts so far. But we have several more lined up and promised. The form the posts have generally taken has either been a short essay by or a Q&A with the author. And we'll write our own posts about the books for which we don't get author contributions.

The aim of The Story Prize, of course, is to promote the short story form. Our efforts in past years have focused on the three books we choose as finalists each year and the six books our judges have chosen as winners. But we've always wanted to do more to promote our objective. We added a long list of other notable books the second year because more good collections come out each year than we can honor. But even our long list isn't long enough. So we decided to use this modest platform to shine the spotlight on every book we read and consider. Many of these books (I'd hazard to say most of them) get far less attention than they deserve.

I was, admittedly, reluctant to do this at first. I'm always concerned about remaining neutral, not wanting to reveal what we think of individual collections until we announce our finalists and long list in January. But neutrality hasn't turned out to be a problem with the posts. The introduction for each is short and straightforward; we're letting the authors' words speak for themselves rather than hype the books. And because we're posting about each one, we can remain evenhanded.

What has been surprising to me has been how consistently interesting these posts have been. Our contributors' insights into their own process, what interests them, and how their collections took shape reveal just how different and personal each writer's approach is. What they have in common is a sense of being attuned to the world and a desire to make something that reflects and amplifies their unique sensibilities.

Thanks to the thoughtful essays and answers the authors have provided, we're beginning to amass a good resource for readers, students, and writers interested in the short story form. We're only going to build on that in the months ahead. So stay tuned.

Justin Taylor: "It's the Little Details That Make Fiction Seem Real."

In the 18th in a series of posts on 2010 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Justin Taylor, author of Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever (Harper Perennial), talks process. 

Have you ever written a short story in one sitting and not revised it later?
I don’t think so—or, if I did, it was something that I basically considered a failure, i.e. not worth revisiting. But I am a fairly quick writer—typer, anyway—and so it’s not uncommon for me to produce a whole first draft in one sitting, then come back the next day or whenever and start sifting through it, fix the truly boneheaded errors, and start to figure out which parts of the draft actually interest me, and which need to be jettisoned ASAP. Some of the shorter stories in my collection, “Tetris” for example, came out more or less "right" the first time. Even in that case, I spent a lot of time worrying the prose up, but in terms of what actually happens, it was basically written as it now appears. That's a rare exception.

What kind of research, if any, do you do?
I research on an as-needed basis, and usually in medias res. For example, in the story “Weekend Away,” Rose drives from her home in Portland, Ore., to Cannon Beach, which is on the coast. Along the way, she picks up a hitchhiker. Now, I’ve spent a good deal of time in Portland, and actually visited Cannon Beach, but I didn’t know much about the area in between. So first I mapped out Rose’s route on Google Maps as though I were driving there myself. Then I read some things about the Sunset Highway, which is the road I learned she’d be driving on. I figured out where she’d have to pick her hitcher up (outside Staleys Junction) based on the length of time that I wanted them to spend together in the car.

A lot of what I learned about the Northwest coast never made it in, and I’m sure the good people of Oregon would have forgiven me if I’d just fudged, but I believe that it’s the little details that make fiction feel real—to the author as much as to the reader. Like the hitchhiker telling Rose that his mom has an antique store in Cannon Beach but that she actually lives in Tolovana Park. He doesn’t say that she lives there because it’s cheaper, but then, he wouldn’t have to—she'd figure as much. By the end of the story it’s not clear whether anything that the hitchhiker said was true, but if he did lie to Rose, they were convincing lies precisely because they realistically exploited her presumptions about him, which he would have been aware of when he told them. This is how effective fiction works—it makes you eager to be complicit in your own hoodwinking. Of course, this assumes that the hitchhiker really was lying; he could just as easily have been telling the truth.

What's the longest narrative time period you've ever contained in a short story?
There’s one story in my collection—“Somewhere I Have Heard This Before”—that jumps about six years. You’re told in the first line that Stan, the main character, is eleven years old. A few pages later, Stan is seventeen, and this naturally means that a lot has changed for him (and the other characters) during the missing time. I was thinking of To the Lighthouse, and how Woolf sets aside a special chapter to cover two decades in the life of the Ramsay family and their summer house, and kills off a major character in a parenthetical aside. In a short story, of course, the main constraint is always space—all short stories fly economy class. My whole story runs less than 2,000 words, with the jump taking place about midway through. There's no section break; just a new paragraph which begins “When Stan was seventeen...”, as if the jump were as normal a detail as the color of a shirt or a door opening.

You know when you’re having a very normal conversation with someone, and then they slip in something outrageous? And you’re going “uh huh, yeah, uh huh,” and then a beat or two later, after you’ve already said “yeah, uh huh” to the crazy thing, your brain actually registers what your ears heard and you say, “Whoa, hold on. What was that last thing you said?” I wanted this moment in the story to read like that feeling.

Craig Morgan Teicher's Short Attention Span

In the 17th in a series of posts on 2010 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Craig Morgan Teicher, author of Cradle Book (BOA Editions), discusses his writing process.

What is your writing process like?
I write often. If I didn't, I think I'd be pretty hard to deal with. Most of the "creative" writing I do (I work as a kind of journalist) is poetry; Cradle Book was a project I got obsessed with for about a year. I love fiction, but started writing poems as a teenager because I realized quickly that I didn't have the attention span or patience to write fiction. The fables in Cradle Book are the closest I think I can get to fiction--they've got characters and little plots, but they also work a lot like poems, turning on phrases. Plus, they're short--the longest one is about 7 pages, which took a lot out of me! So, to write the pieces in Cradle Book, I sat down with a sketchbook--my favorite thing to start writing in--and tried to get from beginning to end of the fable in one sitting. Then there was lots of revising...

At what stage do you start seeking feedback on your work and from whom?
I ask my wife to read most things I write, and I almost always ask her too soon--before I'm ready to hear that I haven't written a masterpiece.

What book made you want to become a writer?
Catcher in the Rye. Or maybe I just wanted to be Holden Caulfield and confused being him with being a writer.

What kind of research, if any, do you do?
For Cradle Book, I read a lot of fables and folk tales, starting with the two books of fables W.S. Merwin published in the 1970s, then I went backward to Aesop and worked my way forward through all kinds of crazy stuff--it's amazing how wonderfully grim these kinds of stories are: bad for bedtime.

What's the longest narrative time period you've ever contained in a short story?
Well, a couple of stories in Cradle Book kinda roll together all of time--there's lots of stuff about Gods and sentient rocks and things like that, so those stories start before time began and end after it ends. That's a pretty long time.

How The Lindy Hop Set the Pulse for Megan Staffel's Lessons in Another Language

In the 16th in a series of posts on 2010 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Megan Staffel, author of Lessons in Another Language (Four Way Books), discusses the influence of dancing on her writing.

If you dabble in any other non-literary forms of expression, what do you do and how does it inform your work?
I’ve been learning the Lindy Hop, a partner dance from the years before World War Two, when couples danced to big bands in local dance halls in towns and cities across America. Even in my little town in western New York, there is a long, low wooden building next to a main road that was the dance hall. Every weekend it was filled with live music. The big bands that were traveling between Manhattan and Chicago would stop there on the weekends. Now it’s an auto junkyard.

The lindy hop originated in the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem where the best dancers turned it into a visually stunning acrobatic form. Over the years, as it was adapted and translated by the general culture, the aerials were dropped and the dance was simplified into what we call swing. Both swing and Lindy Hop disappeared after the war, but now both have resurfaced, and once again, couples doing the Lindy fill the bars and dance spaces of American cities. Unlike swing, where the lead (typically the male) and the follow (typically the female) dance close and in unison, the lead and follow in the Lindy dance more independently. They come together and then move away, and that rubber band compression and expansion is the signature move. It’s a fluid move, but it’s not relaxed; there is a taut energy between the partners that’s further pressured by the eight count musical phrase. Really great Lindy dancers can accentuate this structure, the eight count measure, and dissolve it, so that it goes from being a pattern that limits expression to a pattern that creates expression. It makes me understand, on a physical level, that when opposites are brought together in a small, tightly controlled space in narrative, and a pattern is established that gets repeated, the result is a raw, explosive energy.

In the Lindy, the dancers have a relationship with the floor. That is, they’re not upright, they’re slightly bent. All of the movement happens in the lower body, in the hips, legs, and feet. The eight beat phrase imposes the boundaries. It creates the underlying pulse that everyone feels. That pulse has been the most challenging thing for me to learn, but as I try to bring it into my feet, I feel as though I am tapping into the very world I imagine in my fiction, one where there’s a thread of lightness and humor winding through the starker realities of life.

Different dances express different emotions. For instance, if the tango is about seduction, the fox trot about calm and order, then the Lindy Hop is about laughter. In my most recent collection, Lessons in Another Language, humor is present in even the darkest stories. That’s been the unexpected and welcome carryover from my dancing. It’s created a ripple or pulse of humor and lightness in my work. And it’s opened my eyes to that same quality in other writers.

What do you think a good short story collection should deliver?
There has been a lot of focus lately on the linked story collection where characters and settings reappear and a narrative thread is established. But lately, I have been more interested in stories where the linkage comes about in a different, less obvious way, where the stories express a linkage in theme. In two really fine story collections, Michael Parker’s Don't Make Me Stop Now and Deborah Eisenberg’s Twilight of the Superheroes, humor is what articulates the level of desperation the characters feel. It is another example of the way opposites create energy. Compressed into the small space of a story, the character who is compelled to make light of an uncomfortable situation by turning it into a joke, makes the reader feel two things simultaneously, the sadness that pushes these particular lives out of kilter and the possibility for laughter. Here’s what I mean: In Parker’s “What Happens Next,” sixteen year old Charlie Yancey is compressed into the small space of the car with his dead grandmother, but really it’s a moment when he’s alone with his father and as he hears the familiar litany of disappointment, he knows what he will do next. With devastating calm, he turns the situation into the very thing that will inspire the most parental disapproval.

Like Yancey, the narrator in Eisenberg’s “The Flaw in the Design,” calmly steps into a role that is so reckless it’s breathtaking. Afterwards, when she returns to her very proper life, the reader tries to fit the two halves of her existence together, but they won’t mesh and that disparity informs everything. The stories in these collections are threaded with the absurd; this is the humor that links them.