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A Book Recommendation & Guest: Patricia Ann McNair

The Book

“Our actual Mission is to use stories to build community. It’s not just about creating good stories; it’s about employing those stories to connect people to one another.” ~ Amanda Delheimer Dimond, in Briefly Knocked Unconscious by a Low-Flying Duck

Briefly Knocked Unconscious by a Low-Flying Duck is a collection of stories originally told to a live audience on the 2nd story stage. While there is something quite powerful about listening to a story read out loud – about the effect of the words as they circle the air and settle into our ears, our mind, our hearts – the stories on the pages of this anthology carry as much weight as I imagine they did on stage.

As Dimond says in the quote above, stories serve to connect us. Pick up this book and find yourself in these pages: in a moment between father and daughters that doesn’t go according to plan but unfolds in perfect succession; or at a funeral when everyone knows the truth but no one speaks a word. One of my favorite stories, written by Patricia Ann McNair, speaks to the power of place, how, whether we leave a place whole or broken, memories settle deep within us and urge us to return.

The Guest

I’m honored to host Patricia here, where she writes about confined spaces and moments of reveal and the journey it takes to reach the crux of our story.

Driving the Story
by Patricia Ann McNair

On a long car trip to Montana from Chicago with a friend I barely knew, I told her about how, when I was seven or so, my mother made me return a shoplifted lipstick and a tiny plastic doll to Woolworths. The embarrassment was meant to steer me away from a life of crime, I think. I told my friend the details: my mouth so dry I squeaked I forgot to pay for these; the doll’s dress marked by my moist palms; my mother in front of the store in the car with her window down, the smoke from her cigarette lifting into the blue suburban sky.

On the same trip, my friend told me about what it was like living with her schizophrenic brother. About each of the once-loved family cats buried in the backyard by her father after their deaths of old age mostly, but sometimes of something else, some feline disease.

When I met my half-brother for the first time he was in his fifties, I was in my thirties. And we drove over the backroads of inland Maine, up and down the mountains, past freezing streams. It was autumn, 14 years after the autumn our father died. He told stories about growing up without his father; I told stories about growing up with mine. With ours.

On a car trip in Vermont in the late summer of 2000, a man from England told me about his life in London, his art, the coal miner grandfather who helped his mother raise him after his father died in a military accident when he was five. I told him about the trip I took to Cuba just months before, about my quiet life in the city with my cat, about my impending divorce. The man’s name is Philip Hartigan. We have since married.

So what is it about car trips that compel passengers to tell one another stories? Is it the closeness, perhaps? How being trapped in a small space for some time makes it near impossible not to want to fill the empty air between you? Radio stations come and go as you follow the curves of the highway; talk is better than static. There is only so much music you can agree on. With that audience so close by, how can we not want to share something, to reveal something? They have to listen. It is their only option.

It is this car-journey-story-impulse that led me to the telling of “Return Trip,” my essay in the anthology Briefly Knocked Unconscious by a Low-Flying Duck. Philip and I were on the road for hours, returning to a place that had become important to us. We’d made the trip other times, and each time we learned a bit more about one another.

I don’t want to tell too much about what is in this essay; I am hoping you will pick up the book and read it. In brief: September 11. Woods. A cabin. Students. A cat. My mother. Writing. Dunes. Fall leaves. Love. Death. Place. And the piece, finally finished to be read/told on stage before an audience, came to me like stories do when we are telling them: in bits and pieces, with tangents and sidebars and strange connections. As Philip and I drove to a cabin in the woods some years after the first time we made that drive, I couldn’t help but remember what happened here along the way. And here. And here. And when we reached our destination, I had to write it all down.

It might sound like this was an easy process, a quick one—just capture the moments on the page. Ha! Writing is rarely that easy for me, and I sometimes wonder if a piece is ever really finished. This one, “ReturnTrip,” took a few years. I wrote the first draft(s) in two weeks. That is, two weeks of daily writing, four hours at a time. I shopped it around. It got rejected. I put it away. I came back to it. Tweaked and tinkered. Put it away again. Then, when it came time for me to prepare a piece for 2nd Story, the wonderful Chicago-based live reading and storytelling series, this was the one I came back to. Why hadn’t it been successful before? What did it need? One of the really interesting things about 2nd Story stories is that nearly all of the stories told have a very visible point of discovery, some might even say an epiphany. A place in the story when the teller finally understands the purpose of what she is telling, and the audience can, too. I think, up until I was working on the essay for this particular reading, I did not really know what the story was about. I knew what I was telling, the events of the piece, the happenings. But I had yet to discover its “aboutness.”

I have a friend who tells stories that he thinks sometimes go on too long. (Hi, Ted!) I don’t agree with him; I enjoy his anecdotes greatly. But often at some time during his telling, he says: My point—and I do have one—is… Here’s the thing—“Return Trip” needed a point. My point is… After some years, I finally figured it out. My point.

I’m not gonna tell you what is here; you gotta read it. But below is a little taste of what fueled the piece.

Back in the car, with my mother. We are driving through woods turning colors, and she is asleep. It is the last driving trip we will take together and I want to tell her something. Stories. Something. I want her to tell me what I don’t yet know. My point, Mom, I would say if she were listening, and I do have one.

I do.

Patricia Ann McNair is the author of The Temple of Air, her own collection of short stories that has received much recognition, including the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Awardee in Prose, Finalist Awardee for Midland Society of Authors, and Finalist for Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award. She’s received four Illinois Arts Council Awards and was nominated for the Carnegie Foundation US Professor of the Year. McNair teaches in Columbia College Chicago’s Fiction Writing Department. For more about McNair and her writing, visit her blog.

Briefly Knocked Unconscious by a Low-Flying Duck releases from Elephant Rock Books on November 12th. Watch the book trailer here.

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Megan Stielstra Talks Writing & Life: The Interview, Part 1

“…I brought up…childhood and past relationships and too much time thinking too hard…and maybe that’s why I’m writing this. I want to know if I can get into it with you. That look we shared? Over the cracked eggs? Was that about something more? If so, you can leave me a message at this email. We can get some coffee, maybe. Or breakfast. I could scramble the eggs. Make something good out of the destruction.”
~ from “Missed Connection” in Everyone Remain Calm

In a post on INK TEARS about flash fiction, Tania Hershman says, “The kinds of short stories I love are those that are storms in miniature teacups….” Megan Stielstra’s book, Everyone Remain Calm, is a collection of such stories. I have my favorites (“Incredible”, “Missed Connection”, “Shot to the Lungs and No Breath Left”), but each story deserves the spotlight. Some stories surprised me, others left me holding my breath, several touched on themes that struck a familiar chord. Each one is written with a voice that tugs at the reader with a subtle but insistent pull.

I’m honored to host Megan for an interview, which I’ll post in two parts. Her answers to my questions are full of experience and writer’s wisdom that should be read and savored. Today, Megan talks about the book and the stories. Tomorrow, she discusses the delicate balance between life and writing and reading.

CC: What are some challenges, and payoffs, in pulling together a collection of stories for publication? And, do you find that the Kindle format serves a book of short stories well?

MS: I love short stories. I write them, teach them, perform them, and, most importantly, I read them. My life has been profoundly affected by stories I’ve read: Misery, Temporary Matter, Mkondo, Nilda, Video, Compassion, On Meeting the 100% Perfect Girl, Pet Milk, Like a Winding Sheet, A Hunger Artist, Kubuku Rides Again, Sonny’s Blues and a thousand others have taught me something I desperately needed to know; made me laugh when I really, really needed it; or reminded me of what’s really important in my crazy, messy life. And to think that, in some small way, one of the stories in Everyone Remain Calm might do the same? Help someone laugh? Think? Feel less alone or more hopeful?—that’s a hell of a payoff.

Putting the collection together happened quickly and organically. I’m a big fan of Joyland, an online literary journal out of Toronto, and saw they were having a contest for a new digital short story imprint. At the time, I was working on a novel because one too many agents had said, “I love your short stories! But no one reads short stories! You should write a novel!” Granted—this was an awful, awful reason to start a novel, but what magically happened was I got excited about it. I found the characters. I loved chasing them around. I was having fun, which felt really vital at the time because sometimes, putting all your effort into selling your writing can… let’s say kill the mood.

Anyhow—I sent my stories to Joyland and got right back to the novel, and was actually pretty shocked a few months later when Brian Joseph Davis and Emily Schultz wrote to tell me they’d like to publish them. Can I take a second to sing their praises? Everyone, please imagine a big ol’ orchestra in your living room, playing for these two. They are wonderful. They are both editors and writers, but, most importantly, they are readers. The care about audience. Their conversations are not fueled by What sells?, but rather We believe in this so now let’s make it the best it can possibly be. I’ll tell you what: Emily worked my ass off, and she’s fucking whip smart. I was a little intimidated by her, which was sort of great. I want my editor to be smarter than I am. Makes me work harder. Plus, both she and Brian were really supportive of taking some risks with form, specifically in putting personal essays and more fantastical fiction back-to-back, and—in some cases—intertwining them within the same story.

I think the fact that this was a digital publication allowed us to take some chances that we may not have been able to pull off otherwise. I’ve heard many people say “You can’t do that.” I’ve heard many say “That won’t sell.” Many, many, many have said “No one reads short stories,” which, honestly, makes me want to light shit on fire. Personally, I’m excited about the opportunities that digital publication brings to short story writers, and to writers in general. What can we do with it? What can we make?

Lots of people have asked what I think about digital publication, and, right before turning in the final version of Everyone Remain Calm, I added a few lines to my story Professional Development in the hopes of answering that question: “For the record: I love poetry. And novels. And short stories and essays, all of it! I don’t care what you call it or where you shelve it or what it gets printed on, I just want the words, the ideas and the stories handed to me like birthday presents. I want to find my own feelings in someone else’s experiences. I want to live lives I couldn’t possibly have lived, exist in a reality that can’t possibly be real—that’s what a story can do.”

CC: Margaret Atwood says, “You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.” I love that you aren’t afraid to twist reality or broach tough issues in stories like “Incredible” and “Shot to the Lungs and No Breath Left”. What requires more courage: to let yourself write whatever it takes during first drafts, or to sit with some of those raw ideas – and raw emotion revealed in those ideas – during rewrites and edits?

 

MS: Definitely the rewriting. For me, the courage comes not in the act of writing, but in the decision to share that writing. I’ll write anything—emotional stuff, personal stuff, political stuff, ridiculous stuff, ranty stuff—but I’m not going to share the half of it. It’s in my journal. It’s a mess. It’s me working out ideas. It’s not a story yet. It’s like EM Forrester said: I don’t know what I think until I see what I say.

From there, if something pulls me, I’ll copy it into the computer. It becomes more serious, in a way. I’m thinking about the craft. I’m thinking about what I’d like to say. I’d like an audience to care about it as much as I do.

For example: Incredible. What happened was: I got dumped, and it sucked, and I was trying to write my way out of it which, predictably, resulted in a big mess of Poor Me and Life’s Not Fair. That’s not something I wanted to share with others—it wasn’t a story. But later, when I had some distance, I looked back at that raw material with enough objectivity to ask myself a few things:

Q: What is this about?
A: How to get over it.
Q: How did you get over it?
A: I fantasized.

—about finding someone new. About getting a new job and losing twenty pounds and running into your ex when you look really hot. Those things we imagine in order to fall asleep at night when we’re hurting—how we use the made-up to get through the reality.

Q: That’s your fantasy. What’s this character’s fantasy?

—that’s where the Hulk came in. I got the idea from a journal entry I’d written as a kid about being scared of the Incredible Hulk, and as soon as I added him to the whole Life’s Not Fair mess, I got that wonderful writerly feeling of Yes, yes, I’m on to something! Eventually, through the writing, I realized that fantasies don’t just help us with reality; they can also hold us back from really experiencing it. That—that—is a story I wanted to share.

Much of the work I’ve done over the past decade, both as a writer and as a teacher, has been with a personal narrative storytelling series called 2nd Story (www.2ndStory.com). You want to talk about nerve? About courage? I see our tellers get up in front of fifty, a hundred, five hundred people and share stories about addiction, family, heartbreak, identity, obsession, survival, race, faith and a thousand other topics in profound, hilarious, tragic and beautiful ways. And—I see that audience laugh or cry or sigh or gasp but always, always, always connect. That’s what I want in a story, as a writer and a reader: To see that—even as we celebrate our inherent differences—there are still multiple connections in our lives. We share sorrow and confusion and hope. We want our lives to be better.

See? You want to read more, don’t you? Stop back tomorrow for PART 2 of this interview. Megan talks about good days and bad days and how to find the story.

~

Megan Stielstra is a writer, storyteller, and the Literary Director of Chicago’s 2nd Story storytelling series. She’s told stories for The Goodman, The Steppenwolf, The Museum of Contemporary Art, The Chicago Poetry Center, Story Week Festival of Writers, Wordstock Literary Festival, The Neo-Futurarium, and Chicago Public Radio, among others, and she’s a Literary Death Match champ. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Other Voices, Fresh Yarn, Pindeldyboz, Swink, Monkeybicycle, Cellstories, Perigee, Annalemma, Venus, and Punk Planet, among others, and her story collection, Everyone Remain Calm, was released in October 2011 from Joyland/ECW. She teaches creative writing at Columbia College and The University of Chicago.

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Suspended in Time

Have you ever carried around a passage of writing by an amazing author and hoped that – maybe, through osmosis – one writer’s craft will meld into yours?

I can dream, can’t I?

I read a passage recently, in James Salter’s Light Years, that made me immune to the sounds of life at my house — kids running around, washer spinning, grandfather clock ticking.

Immersed in the life of a character so unlike me, I hung on each word as the images unfolded on the page.

Her father in distant Pennsylvania towns already had within him the anarchy of cells that announced itself by a steady cough and a pain in his back. Three packs a day for thirty years; he coughed as he admitted it. He needed something, he decided.

‘We’ll take some x-rays,’ the doctor had said. ‘Just to see.’

Neither of them was there when the negatives were thrown up before the wall of light, dealt into place as rippling sheets, and in the ghostly darkness the fatal mass could be seen, as astronomers see a comet.

…

The usual prognosis was eighteen months, but with the new machines, three years, sometimes four. They did not tell him this, of course. His translucent destiny was clear on the wall as subsequent series were displayed, six radiographs in a group, the two specialists working on different cases, side by side, calm as pilots, dictating what they saw, stacks of battered envelopes near their elbows. Their language was handsome, exact. They recited, they discussed, they gave a continued verdict long after Lionel Carnes, sixty-four years old, had begun his visits to the treatment room.

…

The Beta machine made a terrifying whine. The patient lay alone, abandoned, the room sealed, air-conditioned because of the heat. The dose was determined by a distant computer taking into consideration height, weight and so forth. The Beta doesn’t burn the skin like the lower-energy machines, they told him.

…

It hung there, dumb, enormous, shooting beams that crushed the honeycomb of tissue like eggshells. the patient lay beneath it, inert, arranged. With the scream of the invisible, it began its work. It was either this or the most extreme surgery, radical and hopeless, blood running down from the black stitches, the doomed man swerved up like a pot roast (pgs. 126-127).

Just words.

Black print on off-white paper.

Yet, the way James Salter wove them together had me frozen in time.

My husband asked me what was for dinner, so I had to look up from the page. But, the moments with Lionel Carnes, the doctors, and the machine stayed with me.

That’s what I strive for in my writing: storytelling that suspends the reader, and then leaves them with a lasting image long after the book is closed.

Amazing.

***

Salter, James. Light Years. New York: Random House, 1975.

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