Story: “Lake of fire” (<-Click there to read the story!)
Genre: Short Fiction
Keywords: Ménage à trois in 1960s Canada; Polygamy; "Militant" Feminists Who Don't Shave
Soundtrack: "May This Be Love" by Jimi Hendrix
Tell us how you got the idea for this story.
In the “Adults” interview on this site, I mentioned this guy who’s basically the model for every “older guy” character of mine – a professor with whom I was once involved. (He was 51 and I was 27 at the time; he’s the father of my first-ever boyfriend whom I dated when we were 13 and 14. The dad was my first-ever lover, so hey, a lot of “firsts” in that family.)
At some point my older dude told me just a tiny bit about his ex-wife (that’d be the mom of my first-ever boyfriend). What’s truly weird is that his ex-wife drove her son and me in her minivan to the movies for dates when we were in junior high. OK, that’s too weird to dwell on. Let’s move on.
The dad mentioned that his ex-wife had been a “militant, bra-burning feminist” who didn’t shave and seemed uncomfortable with the idea of sex. Somehow this notion bloomed in my mind into the idea of this trio – a guy who loves his wife but doesn’t get what he needs from her, and this young girl who’s willing to give him exactly what he needs (although the emotional truth of this part of the equation is more complicated than that, as the girl realizes many years later).
I have no idea why it’s set in Canada, or why it's set in the 1960s other than the fact that I think the ex-wife was at her most “militantly feminist” and bra-burning-est in that era. I wrote the first scene first – I typically write stories in chronological order, almost exactly as you read them – and went from there. I thought of two characters making love in “a bungalow,” or some kind of rustic joint in the woods, raindrops on the window screen, and someone listening to that Jimi Hendrix song about the waterfall off in another room.
I should point out that the older guy in my life bears very little resemblance, physically or personality-wise, to Luke in this story. My older guy was a balding English professor and haiku scholar, and Luke is this virile thirtysomething dude who sometimes gets carpenter gigs. I picture Luke as looking kind of like a poor man’s Brad Pitt. But Beatrice (his wife) – I made her look like the real-life guy’s ex-wife as much as possible, as much as I could remember from her driving me to the movies in her minivan. I’m sure I’m picturing her all wrong, though.
The story is structured, in some places, almost more like notes for a story – for example, “How it began,” and the “questions people would likely ask at this point.”
That’s true. Honestly, I think that was mostly just me being lazy – although at some point it occurred to me that the technique that arose out of that laziness kind of worked. It was unconventional, and therefore original. But at first, I had written what I worried was an improbable or sensationalistic story – and the “questions” parts were my dealing with what I imagined were these critical readers with their eyebrows raised skeptically.
My friend Zack, who provided invaluable feedback that changed my story “Adults” for the better, read this one and thought the "questions" section was a cop-out device, but I left it like that. I think it works, of course, or I would have changed it.
Did you do any research to write about the things in the story that fall outside your personal experience – life in 1960s Canada, for example?
Only the merest sliver. I felt surprisingly vindicated when my brilliant Canadian writer friend, Dave, said he’s actually been to or near Algonquin Park – a place whose name I grabbed at random from an online map of Canada – and could imagine the story having taken place around there. I think the only concession I made to the story’s being set in Canada was to change one reference of “miles” to “kilometers”!
There’s some obvious symbolism here – the house with only two rooms, saying good-bye to the bungalow in autumn when the characters are much older.
Yeah. I like to really hit you over the head with my symbolism. Subtle I ain’t! I think this is partly because I don’t know many writers, so I’m writing for an audience (my friends, my Facebook "friends") who don’t necessarily go looking for symbolism in every little thing. I almost want to put symbols and things in bold, like a vocabulary word in a textbook.
It’s a little bit corny to be that blatant about it – but you know what? Sometimes stuff in real life is corny and almost embarrassingly obvious like that, too. When I broke up with my first fiancé, in college, I gathered up his things he had left in my dorm room and brought them over to him in the only container-type thing I had: a trash bag. He even joked about how it was an apt metaphor. Patterns and themes are there, and it’s human nature to see that stuff everywhere. So I don’t mind the lack of subtlety. I don’t beat myself up over it.
Tell us about the title of this story – why did you choose it, and what does it mean?
This is one of my less obvious titles. And I could see it being misleading – “lake of fire” is usually a poetic synonym for hell, I think, and there’s that Nirvana song with that title.
Genre: Short Fiction
Keywords: Ménage à trois in 1960s Canada; Polygamy; "Militant" Feminists Who Don't Shave
Soundtrack: "May This Be Love" by Jimi Hendrix
Tell us how you got the idea for this story.
In the “Adults” interview on this site, I mentioned this guy who’s basically the model for every “older guy” character of mine – a professor with whom I was once involved. (He was 51 and I was 27 at the time; he’s the father of my first-ever boyfriend whom I dated when we were 13 and 14. The dad was my first-ever lover, so hey, a lot of “firsts” in that family.)
At some point my older dude told me just a tiny bit about his ex-wife (that’d be the mom of my first-ever boyfriend). What’s truly weird is that his ex-wife drove her son and me in her minivan to the movies for dates when we were in junior high. OK, that’s too weird to dwell on. Let’s move on.
The dad mentioned that his ex-wife had been a “militant, bra-burning feminist” who didn’t shave and seemed uncomfortable with the idea of sex. Somehow this notion bloomed in my mind into the idea of this trio – a guy who loves his wife but doesn’t get what he needs from her, and this young girl who’s willing to give him exactly what he needs (although the emotional truth of this part of the equation is more complicated than that, as the girl realizes many years later).
I have no idea why it’s set in Canada, or why it's set in the 1960s other than the fact that I think the ex-wife was at her most “militantly feminist” and bra-burning-est in that era. I wrote the first scene first – I typically write stories in chronological order, almost exactly as you read them – and went from there. I thought of two characters making love in “a bungalow,” or some kind of rustic joint in the woods, raindrops on the window screen, and someone listening to that Jimi Hendrix song about the waterfall off in another room.
I should point out that the older guy in my life bears very little resemblance, physically or personality-wise, to Luke in this story. My older guy was a balding English professor and haiku scholar, and Luke is this virile thirtysomething dude who sometimes gets carpenter gigs. I picture Luke as looking kind of like a poor man’s Brad Pitt. But Beatrice (his wife) – I made her look like the real-life guy’s ex-wife as much as possible, as much as I could remember from her driving me to the movies in her minivan. I’m sure I’m picturing her all wrong, though.
The story is structured, in some places, almost more like notes for a story – for example, “How it began,” and the “questions people would likely ask at this point.”
That’s true. Honestly, I think that was mostly just me being lazy – although at some point it occurred to me that the technique that arose out of that laziness kind of worked. It was unconventional, and therefore original. But at first, I had written what I worried was an improbable or sensationalistic story – and the “questions” parts were my dealing with what I imagined were these critical readers with their eyebrows raised skeptically.
My friend Zack, who provided invaluable feedback that changed my story “Adults” for the better, read this one and thought the "questions" section was a cop-out device, but I left it like that. I think it works, of course, or I would have changed it.
Did you do any research to write about the things in the story that fall outside your personal experience – life in 1960s Canada, for example?
Only the merest sliver. I felt surprisingly vindicated when my brilliant Canadian writer friend, Dave, said he’s actually been to or near Algonquin Park – a place whose name I grabbed at random from an online map of Canada – and could imagine the story having taken place around there. I think the only concession I made to the story’s being set in Canada was to change one reference of “miles” to “kilometers”!
There’s some obvious symbolism here – the house with only two rooms, saying good-bye to the bungalow in autumn when the characters are much older.
Yeah. I like to really hit you over the head with my symbolism. Subtle I ain’t! I think this is partly because I don’t know many writers, so I’m writing for an audience (my friends, my Facebook "friends") who don’t necessarily go looking for symbolism in every little thing. I almost want to put symbols and things in bold, like a vocabulary word in a textbook.
It’s a little bit corny to be that blatant about it – but you know what? Sometimes stuff in real life is corny and almost embarrassingly obvious like that, too. When I broke up with my first fiancé, in college, I gathered up his things he had left in my dorm room and brought them over to him in the only container-type thing I had: a trash bag. He even joked about how it was an apt metaphor. Patterns and themes are there, and it’s human nature to see that stuff everywhere. So I don’t mind the lack of subtlety. I don’t beat myself up over it.
Tell us about the title of this story – why did you choose it, and what does it mean?
This is one of my less obvious titles. And I could see it being misleading – “lake of fire” is usually a poetic synonym for hell, I think, and there’s that Nirvana song with that title.
To me, the lake of fire describes the little house in which these three people lived with all their desires and frustrations and storminess. I guess it was a kind of hell, for Beatrice, and for the narrator sometimes, too, although she doesn’t realize how damaging it was to her until she’s much older. It wasn’t hell for Luke, but he was tormented by his desires – for sex, for sex with the narrator – so maybe it’s apt for him, too.
Any Puritanical implications – for example, that the characters are going to hell because they’re living in a sort of threesome arrangement – are unintentional. The title, to me, is more about a private kind of anguish that people go through alone, not some divinely inflicted punishment in the afterlife.
What’s the main thing you want readers to take away from this story?
That you can write about sex – or, about a living arrangement based on a sexual situation – without its being porn. At its heart, the story is really about people with needs that aren’t getting met. Everyone is disgruntled; it’s sort of the opposite of my story “Adults,” in which I truly believe Richard and Bess love each other and are, for the most part, happy together. Maybe not for the long haul, but for the duration of the story and the foreseeable future they are.
In this story, everyone’s just sad and alone. They’re those flowers that were once a bouquet, that Luke tosses into the water at the end, floating away from one another on separate paths.
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