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Backstory – Small Talk for Monday Morning by Carrie Cooperider

31 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by Grace Curtis in Backstory, Fiction

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Carrie Cooperider, Fiction, Short Fiction, The Antioch Review

Carrie Cooperider’s story, Small Talk for Monday Morning was published in the Summer 2014 issue of The Antioch Review.

No one really wants to see anything new; we want others to see us; we hope to confirm the superiority of our superstitions; we visit backdrops, not places: yoo-hoo! here I am, warming your frigid monument—here I am, smiling against your sullen panorama—here I am, posed on the crumbling loge of your tender edifice, perched on the brow of your sad cascade, soiled and spent at the peak of your heathen mountain!

 

https://antiochreviewblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/zoom0004-1.mp3
I was inspired to write the first few sentences of Small Talk for Monday Morning after an exchange with a colleague about how much she hated the bob-and-weave of what seemed to her to be pointless and insincere inquiries after one’s well-being and weekend activities. I, too, have sometimes found it uncomfortable, and wanted to twist that discomfort into an unexpected shape.

The ritual—or, depending on one’s temperament, the ordeal—of exchanging small talk is meant to create a space of polite sociability in which nothing of substance is said, and where a dignified, impenetrable façade may be maintained by all. Dorothy Parker sent up this conventional mode of speech brilliantly in her short story The Waltz, in which the private thoughts of a woman being asked to dance are in satiric contrast to the demurely acquiescent words she utters aloud. It creates the appearance of accord among strangers, even in that exile called the workplace, where, possibly, the only thing its transitory occupants hold in common is a desire to be elsewhere. The acceptable range of stock phrases two office-mates have to broker across their Monday morning are perfectly calculated against the addition of insight into either’s true state of affairs. What would happen, though, if they were to cross the alien divide in a moment of truth?

In Small Talk for Monday Morning, a character’s response to the standard questions “How are you? How was your weekend?” is so preposterously inappropriate as to be comedic. Too much information escalates into more. The self-involved monologue ends with an abrupt realization that the speaker must acknowledge the other person in the room with a reciprocal inquiry.  The response this time is as understated as the previous one was overblown, yet in a few words manages to lay a life bare.

Although I knew that both characters would probably be pegged as female—in part because I am female—I wanted to avoid referring to gender in order to leave space for greater identification or empathy from the reader. I still cherish my childhood mislabeling of Joan Miro, the (male) Spanish painter, as female; it was quite a productive mistake since, as one of the only “girl” painters I’d ever heard of, little Joanie (I pictured her as a small woman) was an early inspiration.

The description of The Movie is an homage to Isabella Rossellini’s “Green Porno” film series, in which she dons costumes representing various creatures in order to illustrate how they enact their reproductive rites; her approach is both funny and educational. You can see a sampling from her videos here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WtftQ7AbEw. It is also based on a natural history tape of leopard slugs mating—but I’ll leave it to you look that one up.

 

***

Carrie CooperiderCarrie Cooperider is a visual artist and writer living in New York City. In addition to the Antioch Review, her work has appeared in Cabinet Magazine, New York Tyrant, Artishock, and The Southampton Review, among other publications.

© The Antioch Review 2016

Backstory – Miller Duskman’s Mistakes by Karin Lin-Greenberg

21 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by Grace Curtis in Backstory, Fiction, Uncategorized

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backstory, Fiction, Karin Lin-Greenberg, Short Fiction, Short Story, The Antioch Review

Karin Lin-Greenberg’s story, “Miller Duskman’s Mistakes,” is from the Summer 2014 issue of The Antioch Review. Here Lin-Greenberg shares the impulse behind her story of rejection.

Miller Duskman’s final mistake was not fighting for Avery. Afterward, after the Halloween dance had been cancelled and The Brilliance Café had crumbled and all the waiters had been sent home, Miller wept, told Avery, “This town has changed me. I’m not like this.

 

In the summer of 2008, I moved to a small town in Ohio to begin a three-year teaching position at a college. Two of us were hired to start at the same time in the English Department; I was in a visiting position, and my colleague was in a tenure-track position. We sat together at lunch during orientation and began to get to know each other. A tenure-track new hire from the math department slid into the empty seat at our table and spoke only to my colleague, engaging her in conversation about her move to Ohio, her summer, the classes she’d be teaching. He even said—right in front of me—“We’ve got to stick together since we’re both on the tenure track.” I know this sounds like a line of awkward dialogue from a poorly written story, but those words came out of his mouth. As he continued to speak only to my colleague, I realized that he (henceforth to be known as Dr. Math) didn’t allow himself to see me there, that I was—in my visiting position—someone who was essentially invisible to him. I wouldn’t be around for the long haul, and because of this, he didn’t want to invest any time or energy or kindness toward me. Fortunately, most people at the school did not share Dr. Math’s attitude, and I quickly felt that I was part of the community at the college. However, I wondered what it would be like for someone to move to a similar small town and be an outsider not tied to any institution, and that’s where the character of Miller Duskman came from. I had felt uncomfortable for a few minutes while Dr. Math snubbed me; what if I created a character who feels uncomfortable every moment of every day in a similar type of small town? What if the townsfolk are tacitly saying, “We’ve got to stick together” to each other while excluding Miller? And then what if this outsider somehow forces the people in the town to look at him? So I came up with the idea of Miller opening a restaurant right in the middle of downtown whose walls are made of glass. Even if the people of Morningstar don’t want to see Miller, they can’t help but see him through the glass walls as he goes about the daily business of running his restaurant.

The second incident that sparked “Miller Duskman’s Mistakes” involved a mom and pop hardware store that was downtown in the town I’d moved to. I’d bought a screwdriver there one day. A few weeks later, I returned to get a key copied and the store was gone. The place was completely empty when I returned. The signs were torn down and the shelves and counters had been dismantled. Where there’d been a store packed with merchandise a few weeks before, there was only a giant, empty room. I had no emotional attachment to the hardware store, but I wondered if others in town did, whether to them the closure symbolized a great loss, ushering in a new age of anonymous big box stores. And so I thought that in order to ramp up the conflict in the story I could have Miller, the outsider, come and build his restaurant in the space where an old hardware store, owned by a much-loved local, once stood.

A handful of years before I arrived in Ohio, the Rubbermaid factory in town closed down. 850 people lost jobs. I could still see the after-effects of this closure when I got to town. Although the blocks surrounding the college were filled with beautiful old houses (many owned by professors), just two or three blocks from school, the houses were in ill repair. I saw people sitting on their stoops all day, watching cars go by. I saw kids playing with rusted, broken bikes. It was a striking contrast to the well-manicured lawns of the college, the tidy houses with new cars in the driveways surrounding the school. During the time I lived in that town, a few new restaurants opened, and when I dined in those restaurants, I saw that most of the clientele were people who were affiliated with the college. In “Miller Duskman’s Mistakes,” a glass factory and a broom factory have closed down and people are out of work and the last thing the town needs is an expensive restaurant. I think there are lots of small towns in America where there are tense “town-gown” relationships, where the people who teach and attend school are better off financially than many of the other people who live in the towns that house the colleges. So in my story, Miller Duskman believes he’s bringing something positive and unique to Morningstar when he opens his glass restaurant, but he doesn’t understand that many people in the town are struggling. The fact that most of his customers come from the college only serves to make the inhabitants of Morningstar dislike Miller more.

It was those things—Dr. Math’s unpleasant welcome, the shuttered factory, the closed hardware store, those restaurants that seemed to exist only to serve clientele affiliated with the college—that came together to provide the sparks for “Miller Duskman’s Mistakes.” Living in that small town taught me that sometimes insiders don’t understand outsiders and outsiders don’t understand insiders. It taught me, too, that oftentimes we don’t do enough to understand the people who exist beyond our own circles. “Miller Duskman’s Mistakes” allowed me to slip into the voice of an insider, the owner of the town’s bed and breakfast, and play with how such a character would perceive a new person in town and what might have to change in order for her to feel regret for the way Miller had been treated.

***

Lin-Greenberg photo

Karin Lin-Greenberg’s story collection, Faulty Predictions, won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and ForeWord Reviews’ Book of the Year Award in the Short Story category. Her stories have appeared in journals including The Antioch Review, Bellingham Review, Epoch, and Green Mountains Review. She teaches creative writing at Siena College in upstate New York. You can find her online at http://www.karinlingreenberg.com.

 

 

© The Antioch Review 2016

The Story Behind the Story–Excellence at a Reasonable Price by Wilhemina Austin

21 Monday Sep 2015

Posted by Grace Curtis in Fiction, The Story Behind the Story, Uncategorized

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Antioch Review, Fiction, Short Fiction, Short Story, Wilhemina Austin

Excellence at a Reasonable Price

By Wilhemina Austin

Wilhemina Austin

“Excellence at a Reasonable Price” was published the Summer 2012 issue of The Antioch Review. It’s characters, members of an aging country club, consider the authenticity of a Maxfield Parrish painting that hangs above the fireplace in the library room where they meet to discuss wine.

We need an answer to what it is,” Franklin said. “The real thing, or not.

What an honor to be asked about a past story! I never want to re-read a past story. In this case, when I did, I writhed in my chair like a first-grader in school with his teacher’s eye upon him for need-of-bathroom-status. I still like the story’s setting – a country club, once a home, built in the early 1900s with a library, solid and gloomy with paneling. The club’s financial status: rickety. I still like the idea of a few people meeting in the library regularly to open and share a bottle of wine, with comments.

Meeting these folks again in the story, I find them surprisingly acidic, like my wine choices that have never met, will never meet, my goal of excellence at a reasonable price. In life I tried to accomplish this goal for two family events a few years apart: my son’s rehearsal dinner and my daughter’s wedding, with the advice of an acquaintance, a gentleman skilled in judging wine. This experience kicked the story into life for me, as did the idea of a dying country club, a place of supposed repose approaching the real thing. What would happen to the painting over the library fireplace – also the real thing, with its sky a Parrish-blue over a landscape rolling in Parrish trademarks? No one had ever paid much attention to it. A club member of book-keeping practicality might take another look.

To this end, the wine advisor in life became the unsentimental asset-gauger in the story with the painting being at stake. Was it an authentic Maxfield Parrish? The club was in northern Delaware set high in hills that are always said to roll, not unlike those in a mural Parrish had done for another family. There were his background mountains—their look between out-of-this-world and out-west. The blue-on-fire sky. The paper lanterns, lit, their unseen candles somehow not sending the lanterns and everything else up in flames. The curtains of roses. Domestic creatures that shouldn’t have been anywhere near the forest opening that hosted them.

There was more to be had from the hope that the painting was real, says the story, than finding out that it wasn’t – unlike, in life, the wines I chose and tried out by myself, a widow at my kitchen table, one glass doing the trick, two swallows often definitive, with the rest a hope against hope. The remainder of each bottle I let glug down the sink drain. You’re kidding, the wine advisor said, shocked. But what would come of polishing a bottle off? Was he kidding? I didn’t ask. My imaginary Parrish blue burned a little hotter in my mind through the few glasses that seemed to strike the right land-of-make-believe note all the way through.

***

Wilhemina Austin is from Delaware but has lived in southeastern Pennsylvania on a farm for years with her family and her goats. She has been published in Cimarron Review, Thema, and The Antioch Review.

© 2015 The Antioch Review

 

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