Story: “Then you rise, and you’re pure”(<-Click there to read the story!)
Genre: Short Fiction
Keywords: Appalachian Escapism; Country-Creek Baptism; “In the movie version I’d have some kind of catharsis.”
Trivia: The town in which this story takes place is Saltville, Virginia. It is a real place.
What was your impetus for writing this story?
The original impulse is obscure, even to me. I had gotten an e-mail from this older guy I was involved with, and it made me sad. He’d just made some offhand comment about some of his conquests in Japan, but – like the chick in the story – it set me off. I guess it triggered my jealousy, but beyond what would have been a normal, rational reaction even for me. That’s the problem when you’re an incredibly introspective person – some tiny little thing happens, and it sends you spinning off into the wild yonder.
Anyway, somehow that feeling led to my fantasizing about dropping out of my life in “the city” – really just a suburb of Washington, DC – and going off to crash with my grandparents in the country. I saw the country as somehow purifying. It was linked to this nice image I kept having of getting baptized – hard-core baptized, in a little country creek like in the olden times. As I acknowledge in the story, it’s a bit absurd for an atheist – like me, like the me in the story – to daydream about getting baptized, but the power of that ritual and symbol goes beyond just the religious significance of it, I think.
Speaking of “yonder,” your family is from the town that the story is set in.
They are – Saltville, Virginia, holla! Both of my parents were born there, although my mom will point out that her family moved one town over, to Glade Spring, when she was a baby, so my parents’ high-school football teams were actually rivals. Weirdly, my folks didn’t meet until they got set up as a blind date in college.
Unlike my depiction of Mexico – I should really put quotation marks around that; “Mexico” – in my story “Adults,” I didn’t make up much of anything here. For example, there really is a small-town paper whose editor – I think her name is Loretta, not “Lottie” – wrote all the articles and took all the photos and did pretty much everything else. And my dad’s best friend from childhood, Rocky (“Ricky” in the story; I’m barely obfuscating these people at all), was both the newspaper’s editor and the town mayor (though not at the same time). It’s a small town, so people have to take on more roles.
I should point out that I never once got a creepy vibe from the real-life Ricky – that part was something I added because it felt right in the story, and I would be mortified if my dad or the real-life guy ever found out I wrote that. For some reason there had to be a potential suitor for the protagonist there in town, and the girl had to say: “I hope I leave before I have to break his heart.” But you have to really believe she wouldn’t want to be with the guy – otherwise the story turns into some godawful rom-com and the girl falls for him and stays in town and they have a bunch of kids and a tractor.
You’ve mentioned that Amy Hempel’s writing style was an influence on you around the time you wrote this story.
It was, and it still is – she broke my brain, man. I read her “Collected Stories” and liked it so much that I started copying her style, even when I wasn’t explicitly trying to. She’s probably more known among short-fiction enthusiasts for her spare, minimal (she calls it “miniaturist”) style – but what I picked up from her and put into this story was more this sad tone, almost like a trance that a survivor goes into just to get from one day to the next.
The older man/professor character makes an appearance in this story, too.
Yeah, that’s the same guy as “Richard” in my story “Adults,” and he’s in a bunch of other stories I wrote around that time, too. I hate to be unimaginative and always cast him in these professor/teacher roles – but that really was our dynamic, which was sometimes frustrating to me. He taught me a lot – mostly about sex; he was the first person I ever had sex with – but sometimes I deeply disagreed with stuff he said about writing, and with certain life decisions he made, or that I made and he critiqued.
Yeah, that’s the guy. I’m sure he read this story, too. I think he sometimes held back from defending himself – after I’d make him look like a jerk in one of my stories – out of a belief in artistic freedom or something. Or maybe he just didn’t care all that much. The last few times we spoke were times that he drunk-dialed me from some bar in the French Quarter near where he lives. Maybe he drank too much beer and pickled his brain; what do I know.
What’s the main thing you want readers to take away from this story?
That sometimes stories – just like real life – don’t have any kind of obvious resolution. This story doesn’t end with one, and yet I feel it has a proper story arc. Or at least, it seems to me that it ends on a kind of resolution-y tone without really resolving anything. … I get the feeling most writing teachers would cringe at that last sentence.
The resolution, to me, seems to hinge on this sentence near the end: “I’m lying to myself if I say it’s getting better.” Hey, an acknowledgment of stasis is something. An acknowledgment of stasis can lead to action.
Genre: Short Fiction
Keywords: Appalachian Escapism; Country-Creek Baptism; “In the movie version I’d have some kind of catharsis.”
Trivia: The town in which this story takes place is Saltville, Virginia. It is a real place.
What was your impetus for writing this story?
The original impulse is obscure, even to me. I had gotten an e-mail from this older guy I was involved with, and it made me sad. He’d just made some offhand comment about some of his conquests in Japan, but – like the chick in the story – it set me off. I guess it triggered my jealousy, but beyond what would have been a normal, rational reaction even for me. That’s the problem when you’re an incredibly introspective person – some tiny little thing happens, and it sends you spinning off into the wild yonder.
Anyway, somehow that feeling led to my fantasizing about dropping out of my life in “the city” – really just a suburb of Washington, DC – and going off to crash with my grandparents in the country. I saw the country as somehow purifying. It was linked to this nice image I kept having of getting baptized – hard-core baptized, in a little country creek like in the olden times. As I acknowledge in the story, it’s a bit absurd for an atheist – like me, like the me in the story – to daydream about getting baptized, but the power of that ritual and symbol goes beyond just the religious significance of it, I think.
Speaking of “yonder,” your family is from the town that the story is set in.
They are – Saltville, Virginia, holla! Both of my parents were born there, although my mom will point out that her family moved one town over, to Glade Spring, when she was a baby, so my parents’ high-school football teams were actually rivals. Weirdly, my folks didn’t meet until they got set up as a blind date in college.
Unlike my depiction of Mexico – I should really put quotation marks around that; “Mexico” – in my story “Adults,” I didn’t make up much of anything here. For example, there really is a small-town paper whose editor – I think her name is Loretta, not “Lottie” – wrote all the articles and took all the photos and did pretty much everything else. And my dad’s best friend from childhood, Rocky (“Ricky” in the story; I’m barely obfuscating these people at all), was both the newspaper’s editor and the town mayor (though not at the same time). It’s a small town, so people have to take on more roles.
I should point out that I never once got a creepy vibe from the real-life Ricky – that part was something I added because it felt right in the story, and I would be mortified if my dad or the real-life guy ever found out I wrote that. For some reason there had to be a potential suitor for the protagonist there in town, and the girl had to say: “I hope I leave before I have to break his heart.” But you have to really believe she wouldn’t want to be with the guy – otherwise the story turns into some godawful rom-com and the girl falls for him and stays in town and they have a bunch of kids and a tractor.
You’ve mentioned that Amy Hempel’s writing style was an influence on you around the time you wrote this story.
It was, and it still is – she broke my brain, man. I read her “Collected Stories” and liked it so much that I started copying her style, even when I wasn’t explicitly trying to. She’s probably more known among short-fiction enthusiasts for her spare, minimal (she calls it “miniaturist”) style – but what I picked up from her and put into this story was more this sad tone, almost like a trance that a survivor goes into just to get from one day to the next.
The older man/professor character makes an appearance in this story, too.
Yeah, that’s the same guy as “Richard” in my story “Adults,” and he’s in a bunch of other stories I wrote around that time, too. I hate to be unimaginative and always cast him in these professor/teacher roles – but that really was our dynamic, which was sometimes frustrating to me. He taught me a lot – mostly about sex; he was the first person I ever had sex with – but sometimes I deeply disagreed with stuff he said about writing, and with certain life decisions he made, or that I made and he critiqued.
Yeah, that’s the guy. I’m sure he read this story, too. I think he sometimes held back from defending himself – after I’d make him look like a jerk in one of my stories – out of a belief in artistic freedom or something. Or maybe he just didn’t care all that much. The last few times we spoke were times that he drunk-dialed me from some bar in the French Quarter near where he lives. Maybe he drank too much beer and pickled his brain; what do I know.
What’s the main thing you want readers to take away from this story?
That sometimes stories – just like real life – don’t have any kind of obvious resolution. This story doesn’t end with one, and yet I feel it has a proper story arc. Or at least, it seems to me that it ends on a kind of resolution-y tone without really resolving anything. … I get the feeling most writing teachers would cringe at that last sentence.
The resolution, to me, seems to hinge on this sentence near the end: “I’m lying to myself if I say it’s getting better.” Hey, an acknowledgment of stasis is something. An acknowledgment of stasis can lead to action.
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