American Short Fiction blog

1.     Tell us a little bit about the genesis of “Heliotrope.” Where did the idea come from? How did the talking placenta first arrive in the story? What kind of revision did “Heliotrope” go through?

I once nannied for a family of vegans.  They were really strict about diet, so the meaty-looking lump Ziplocked in the freezer had me curious.  I finally found out it was the youngest kid’s placenta. How crazy that something so intimate and raw and meaningful and sort-of-maybe-disgusting would be chilling next to the peas!  I came home and wrote a few sentences in which a teenage babysitter steals a placenta, with the idea that it would talk to her after the theft. I knew the placenta needed to talk; I didn’t know what it wanted to say. Maybe by giving it a voice  I was trying to give it back some of the power I felt it had lost in the freezer.  But I couldn’t do anything with the idea, writing-wise. A talking placenta without a story is just a gimmick. I didn’t find the story until five years later, when I used the word “stereoscope” in conversation with a writer friend, John Evans, who proposed we each write a page, including the word “stereoscope,” and submit it to five journals by the end of the week.  This time–maybe it was the luxury of a deadline, maybe it was the challenge of incorporating the stereoscope–the story came. I read a bunch of blogs about the things people do with placentas–everything from eating them for strength to making placental quilts.  Planting seemed to fit the story, and maybe I was interested in sunflowers and heliotropism at that point because I’d just planted a garden. Anyway, I made relatively few revisions once I wrote a draft.  (By the way, the exercise worked for John, too. His stereoscope poem, “Elegy with Boardwalk,” is coming out soon in the The Missouri Review.)

2.     At 240 words, “Heliotrope” is a miracle of compression. There’s a tension between the vision researcher and the placenta, the narrator and her sister, fatalism and free will. There’s a lot going on here! Nick’s position as a vision researcher seems like a particularly salient detail. Could you talk about the position of science in the story?

Thank you for saying so! I like to pack stuff into stories, though sometimes it’s a struggle not to overdo it. I’ve always thought one of the coolest things about being a writer is that any information or experience you come across is potential material. (And when experience fails, there’s Wikipedia.)

Well, first of all, science got my mind to a place where I could finish it.  Until the Stereoscope Challenge, the talking placenta idea was just a kernel. Science made it pop.

Science is full of poetic truth.  Certain concepts resonate with human intuition, our experience of the world. The mechanisms underlying heliotropism and holograms are complex, but they’re also ideas you can distill and explain to a child. In this story, invoking science allowed me to pack a lot of ideas, and symbolic possibilities for the reader, into a short piece.  I got a similar bargain out of philosophy and linguistics.

3.     “In the end, we compromised. I buried it in the garden with a sunflower seed and later that year, after Nick had left us all, we sat and watched the flower’s face track the sun.” The last paragraph suggests that perhaps the narrator and her sister now stand on equal footing—at the very least, relationships have fundamentally shifted. What kind of shifts were you looking to accomplish in “Heliotrope”?

I wouldn’t say I was looking to accomplish anything more specific than a shift that would provide an honest ending.  Starting a story involves posing myself a riddle. When I typed that Nick left them all behind–the sisters, the placenta, and the baby in all its innocence–my gut breathed a sigh of relief and said, ‘Finally! Took you long enough!’ and I knew I was onto something. But until then, figuring out that key shift was the riddle keeping the story kernel in my head.

4.     What are you working on now?

I’m finishing a novel. It’s the story of a Japanese-American woman who, as a child in Kyoto, murders her bully.  She goes on to start a new life in America–becomes a nurse, marries, has a daughter–but tells no one of her past.  A death in the family brings her back to Japan for the first time since the murder, and, well, she finds out she’s not the only one with a secret.  I’m also working on a second story collection about where I grew up, outside Chicago. (The stories in my first collection, Ms. Yamada’s Toaster, are all set in Japan.)

B. J. Hollars gave us the great short “Missing Mary.” You can read it online here. In this short interview, we ask him about his inspiration, his methods, and his new work.

1. Tell us a little bit about the genesis of “Missing Mary.” Where did the idea come from and what kind of revision did the story go through to get to us?

I think I started this piece as a result of my desire to try to subvert a somewhat clichéd story trope. The opening line points to that—”You’ve heard this one before.”

This isn’t a new story: a girl goes missing, she’s never found, the end. While I was interested in Mary herself, I was far more interested in the lives she touched after she vanished. I was also interested in the mystery of the thing. I sort of viewed this as an erasure story. I started with a much, much longer piece with far more answers and then I just started whittling away until I broke it down into its simplest elements. I’m a bit obsessed with coming-of-age stories, but I want to write them in a unique way. I think this genre of story is often exploited and the end result is rarely original. And so, this was my attempt at an old story in a new packaging—something stripped of its essentials.

2. The narration of this story is one of the things that makes it unique. You address the reader directly, including asides like “but that won’t prove to be a critical detail.” Can you tell us a little about this style of narration?

Sure. I think this goes back to my idea of “new packaging.” I felt like that omniscient voice seeping through was quite ominous. Because the question becomes: “Wait a minute, if there’s an omniscient narrator involved, than why doesn’t he tell us what happened to Mary?”  The narrator himself is implicated in this way. If the narrator knows which clues are important and which aren’t, then surely he knows far more than he’s letting on. And so, the reader is forced to choose: Do I trust this withholding omniscient narrator or not? And I guess if you read the story, you really don’t have much of a choice.

3. Your piece is not the typical “missing child” story. In some ways, it’s about a whittling away—or collecting the lack of evidence, assessing material that does not relate to Mary. And then the ending has a surprise turn. How did this progression, this arrangement of details, come about?

Yes, I really like that interpretation. I think that’s dead on. This story is about whittling away. I want the reader to be the detective, but I want the detective to have bare bones resources. And so, a reader is given facts, but a few of them are red herrings. Some facts seem to push the reader on a particular path, but since we never know what actually happened to Mary, we aren’t sure which suspect (if any) is the guilty party. I wanted to create a world overflowing with suspects: a classmate, a police officer, a fisherman, even Mary’s family. But I think the lack of closure is important. As I was writing this, a friend of mine lost her dog, and I just kept thinking: How much more terrible to never know what became of her. That lack of closure, I think, puts a major hole in the center of the story. I couldn’t imagine any other possible ending.

4. What are you working on now?

Oh, all kinds of things. I’m quite excited about my nonfiction book forthcoming from the University of Alabama Press titled Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence and the Last Lynching in America. I’m also in the early stages of a second anthology. And there are always short stories to be written, and an essay in need of revision, and that bear of a novel that never quite steps into the light.

Reading Lisa Locascio’s “What Is Disneyland?” is like taking part in a fevered, wondrous dream. Be sure to check the story out and then return here to read more about Locascio’s inspiration and editing techniques.

1. Tell us a little bit about the genesis of the story. Where did the idea for “What Is Disneyland?” come from and what kind of evolution did the story go through to get to us?

I have often found that my best work comes from refracting my experiences into my fiction. Certain elements of the story are “true”—I did go to Disneyland, I am engaged to a man from another country. The character “Stella” is a sort of self-proxy I’ve experimented with over the last few years. She has appeared in a few stories, including this one published by Candor Magazine. When I wrote “What Is Disneyland?” I had just moved to Los Angeles, which I immediately loved, and I had just met my fiancé, whom I immediately loved, but both the city and the man were a bit mysterious and unknown to me.

I’m fairly obsessed with the allure of mystery—the moment of not knowing before we discover whether someone or something is dangerous or benign. I wanted to write about all of this in some way, and I started thinking about Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9,  an art film I watched at midnight a few years ago in New York, where he and Björk meet on a whaling ship and get married. So I started out with Stella’s travel narrative, and then the way she can’t escape her thoughts, even in a distant place like Disneyland. The implications of migration and movement in a story about being in love with a foreigner really weren’t planned, and were only pointed out to me after the fact by my advisor, Aimee Bender.

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Can we share some really terrific news?

Last night our parent nonprofit, Badgerdog Literary Publishing, won a $105,000 grant from Impact Austin.

Impact Austin is a local organization of philanthropic women who give annual grants for projects in five different categories. Badgerdog won the Culture grant for “It’s Elementary,” a project that will put professional writers in classrooms in eight elementary schools on Austin’s East Side. Over the course of a year, 600 students will engage in creative writing workshops where they will read, write, and share their original work; they’ll also become published authors—submitting their work, revising proofs, and participating in reading events for Badgerdog’s awesome anthology, Youth Voices In Ink.

This is an exciting step for Badgerdog and we’re thrilled to have Impact Austin’s generous support.

Check out the announcement.

by Madeleine Crum, ASF intern

Daniel Orozco’s “Orientation,” selected for Best American Short Stories 1995, wryly takes you through the ins and outs of day one at a 9-to-5 job. (It’s a timely selection for me because this is my first week at ASF. On the whole, though, the story is not parallel to my experience here, where the only gossip seems to concern the office pet, a dachshund named Ethel.)

“Orientation” begins rather straightforwardly (“Those are the offices and these are the cubicles,” “If you make an emergency phone call without asking, you may be let go”), but the narrator soon begins listing what are probably elaborated accounts of his coworkers’ personal lives in a similar manner, implying that this information is just as important as knowing where the supplies cabinet is located.

Shifting seamlessly from duties to gossip and back again without losing his informative tone, Orozco humorously undermines the characters’ hardships, reducing them to individuals who either enhance or worsen one’s social status:

Anika Bloom sits in that cubicle. Last year, while reviewing quarterly reports in a meeting with Barry Hacker, Anika Bloom’s left palm began to bleed. She fell into a trance, stared into her hand, and told Barry Hacker when and how his wife would die. We laughed it off. She was, after all, a new employee. But Barry Hacker’s wife is dead. So unless you want to know exactly when and how you’ll die, never talk to Anika Bloom.

“Orientation” has been translated into several foreign languages, indicating the universality of corporate discontent. Orozco’s mastery of second-person narration is also refreshing, and this story is sure to make you laugh, regardless of whether or not you’ve been subjected to Forms Processing Procedures Manuals and Escape Route Quizzes.

You don’t know it, but Haruki Murakami is the master of repetition. He writes mostly long novels, chock-full of surreal happenings, strange characters, sheep-men, wars, bizarre disappearances. But, naturally, it’s a short story that best exposes Murakami’s mastery of reiteration. Repeating things, I mean. But also, describing a life.

You don’t know it, but Haruki Murakami is the master of repetition. I knew I loved Murakami’s work after reading a mere twenty pages of his work. Why? He describes his characters eating—long scenes detailing boiling noodles, chopping vegetables, obsessing over cubed tofu—and going to the bathroom. He talks about what happens when his characters go to sleep. Anybody knows that these things add up. We spend at least a third of our lives sleeping, for instance. A writer damn well needs to talk about it.

You don’t know it, but Haruki Murakami is the master of repetition. I’m talking about a story, “Sleep,” from the collection The Elephant Vanishes. It’s about a woman and her life. And it’s about what happens to this woman when, suddenly, after a terrible, “slimy,” trancelike dream, she is unable to sleep at all. For weeks. And it’s about what happens when she discovers long-dormant passion for Anna Karenina and for milk chocolate and brandy, and what happens when she begins to read Tolstoy’s masterpiece over and over again—over and over again—without sleeping.

You don’t know it, but Haruki Murakami is the master of repetition. In “Sleep” and, I’d venture to say, in all of Murakami’s fiction, the repetition of a life seems positioned contrary to the extraordinary. Look harder and read more deeply. Count how many times he uses the words “routine,” “ritual,” “same,” “always,” and count how many times he uses the normal, simple present tense to describe things that have been recurring for days, months, years, lifetimes. Sometimes he’s sneaky about it. It seems as though the woman’s life of “tendencies,” of rote motions, disappears when she stops sleeping and encounters the surreal. But it doesn’t. Repetition isn’t anti-surreal—it stands right there alongside it. Stepping out of one set of motions means stepping into another. The woman in the story changes, but she changes within a framework. Repetition and the fantastic work together. Both are needed to construct reality.

You don’t know it, but Haruki Murakami is the master of repetition. The heroine of “Sleep” muses,

So that’s my life—or my life before I stopped sleeping—each day pretty much a repetition of the one before. I used to keep a diary, but if I forgot for two or three days, I’d lose track of what had happened on which day. Yesterday could have been the day before yesterday, or vice versa. I’d sometimes wonder what kind of life this was. Which is not to say that I found it empty. I was—very simply—amazed. At the lack of demarcation between the days. At the fact that I was part of such a life, a life that had swallowed me up so completely. At the fact that my footprints were being blown away before I even had a chance to turn and look at them.

She says, (he says), pages later, “After I gave up sleeping, it occurred to me what a simple thing reality is, how easy it is to make it work. It’s just reality. Just housework. Just a home. Like running a simple machine. Once you learn to run it, it’s just a matter of repetition.”

Albert Camus isn’t known for his mastery of the short form. He could write a damn good novel, sure. Don’t even get me started on his essays. And yes, Camus only published one collection of stories, Exile and the Kingdom, in 1957, three years before his untimely death. But these six stories shouldn’t be overlooked.

“Jonas, Or the Artist at Work” is the longest story in Exile and the Kingdom and the collection’s blockbuster. It’s the story of Gilbert Jonas, a painter, who, when faced with deserved fame, omnipresent admiration, and new societal demands on his art and on his life, moves his studio further and further into the depths of his apartment. At last, he finds a safe haven to express his anxiety. Sort of.

My experience with “Jonas” is unusual—I spent four harrowing months translating the story into English from the original French a few years ago. So, clearly, I’m here to talk about the story’s language. The thing about the tone of “Jonas” is that it’s truly, deceptively simple. Camus employs such a precise structure and impeccable word choice.

This story was published the same year Camus won the Nobel Prize and it is near impossible not to equate Jonas’s angst with Camus’s own crippling anxiety. To read “Jonas” carefully is to discover a consistent, humming, almost conspiratorial voice. There’s an irony in the story that’s written so subtly you could miss it, but you won’t miss it. The narrative never digresses but builds, builds, builds. And the last three words of the story are perhaps the most honest articulation of Camus’s troubled humanism in his entire œuvre.

You have to read this story. At its best, “Jonas or the Artist at Work” is an entry point into one of the most brilliant philosophies and one of the most fascinating bodies of work composed over the last few centuries. At its worst, the story is a necessary meditation on the role of the artist and the power of creation over its creator. In any case, “Jonas” will renew your faith in the craft of language. And hey, the rest of the collection’s not bad either.

Hi, y’all.

It’s that time again. American Short Fiction is looking for passionate readers and writers who are in Austin (or willing to brave the scorching Austin heat for a few months) and interested in interning at the magazine this summer. Our editorial interns do things like evaluate submissions, correspond with authors, copyedit and proofread stories, help plan events, and research for future issues and various ASF projects. Interns usually work 10 to 15 hours a week for a period of 3 months. Our internships are unpaid. We recommend that applicants have a strong background in English or American literature, or a related field.

If you’d like to apply, send a résumé and cover letter to me, callie.collins [at] americanshortfiction.org. In your cover letter, let us know why we’d love to have you around the office and let us know about your experience with contemporary short fiction. We’d love to know about a story, an author, or a journal you adore and why.

We can’t wait to hear from you!

We are delighted to share this month’s web exclusive, “Driving,” by Katherin Nolte. Read it here and return to check out our two questions for Katherin below.

ASF: Tell us about the genesis of “Driving.” Where did the idea for the story originate and what kind of development did the piece go through?

KN: After a couple of loved ones died, I dreamt that I scattered their ashes in bed and in the morning woke to find them both alive. I was absolutely overjoyed in the dream, that these two people who I’d thought were gone forever had miraculously returned. That was the genesis of the story. I worked on the piece for almost a year. I knew much of what would happen and when—and a portion of the story is simply my dream transcribed—but it was a difficult story to write. And finish.

ASF: This story has such a wonderful arc for a short piece. What’s your philosophy on writing short shorts? Is there a particular short short writer or collection you admire?

KN: I’m not sure that I have a philosophy per se. I just try to get rid of anything that isn’t necessary, which often ends up being a lot. Another short short I wrote, “Before the Train and After,” which appears in New Sudden Fiction, was originally 400 words longer. It wasn’t until I cut those 400 unnecessary words that the story was published. I love Nadine Gordimer’s “Homage” [in her collection Loot and Other Stories]. I was blown away the first time I read it. Jenny Hollowell’s “A History of Everything, Including You” is equally beautiful.

Katherin Nolte’s fiction has appeared in a number of places, including Glimmer Train Stories, the Beloit Fiction Journal, Blue Mesa Review, and the anthologies A Best of Fence and New Sudden Fiction. She received an MFA from The University of Iowa, where she was awarded a Truman Capote Fellowship.

We’re celebrating the life and work of J.D. Salinger tonight at the Ransom Center.

Local writers Elizabeth Crane, Amelia Gray, Nick Flynn, ZZ Packer, John Pipkin, and Amanda Eyre Ward will read excerpts from Salinger’s books and unpublished correspondence from the Ransom Center archives.

There will be so much life and love in the room. You’ll really want to be there, trust us.

The tribute also marks the opening of a small display of Salinger manuscripts, letters, and inscribed books that’ll stay open until March 12 at the HRC. ASF will have a table at the event where you can pick up information about our March reading or a copy of the magazine.

The reading starts at 7 pm at the Charles Nelson Prothro Theater at the Harry Ransom Center. Doors open at 6:30. The theater has limited seating, so get there early. There will be overflow in the lobby with audio and video, just in case.

See you there.