The Antioch Review Blog

~ Words Behind the Words

The Antioch Review Blog

Category Archives: The Story Behind the Story

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

 

The Story Behind the Story – He Remembered His Life by Zane Kotker

29 Friday May 2015

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Antioch Review, Fiction, Short Fiction, Short Story, The Antioch Review, Zane Kotker

In Zane Kotker’s “He Remembered His Life,” in the Spring 2011 issue of The Antioch Review, an old man in a foreign country remembers his life.

https://antiochreviewblog.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/zane-recording.mp3

 

 

Zane Kotker

“He Remembered His Life” belongs with those stories that cut close to the life of the writer. In 2005 I attended a residency at Fundación Valparaíso, an artists’ colony on the Mediterranean in the dry hills of southeastern Spain. My husband had died a few years before—after twenty-one years of Multiple Sclerosis. During his illness our world narrowed and darkened, as can happen with long-term degenerative conditions. When he died, I remained wrapped in the habits and emotions of care giving.

When you get to an artists’ colony every need is provided for and a congenial group of fellows gathers for conversation at dinner time. Heaven is the word. Unless you have nothing to work on. Though I had begun a novel, The Inner Sea, I’d deliberately set it aside so I could return to it with fresh eyes at the end of the month. But I had to produce something at Valparaíso, didn’t I? Nothing came to mind. I panicked. I started writing paragraphs describing my daily walks around what to me was an exotic landscape: the strange hill behind the colony, the walk through orchards to the white town on the next hill. Eventually I took a few notes on my fellow colonists.

Gradually the grace of Valparaíso fell upon me and I began to let go of my husband’s long illness and to shed the habits it had bred in me. The air became sweeter, the walk to and within the village revealed unexpected new corners, and I was living like people who had not known long illness. Then one night at dinner came the serving of squid and the report of a ghost. In the narrow bed of my handsome tiled suite, the sorrows of the life I had left came back to me. Fear and dread returned, and I heard (an imagined) voice say: She remembered her life. Then came the sense of some other sound, some ghostly sound, out on the roof beyond my window. It was only rain.

The next day I turned myself into a man and morphed the spoken phrase into the opening line of the story: “It was four days before he remembered his life.” My husband’s long illness became the short illness of the imagined man’s wife and I transferred the chronic element into that of his son. I added in what I remembered about group dynamics from my life as a ghost writer for psychiatrists some years ago, disguised my fellow artists, and there you have it.

 

***

After fourteen years of rejection slips, Zane Kotker was lucky enough to be taken on by the legendary Bob Gottlieb at Knopf. Her novels Bodies in Motion, A Certain Man, and White Rising were published by them. Life intervened and Gottlieb went to The New Yorker, while Zane turned to nonfiction under the name of her grandmother, Maggie Strong. Her fourth novel, Try To Remember, came out through Random House and her fifth, The Inner Sea, A Novel of the Year 100, through Levellers Press. Her short stories have appeared in The Antioch Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Sun, and other journals. She won a fiction grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Must Read 2012 Award from the Massachusetts Center for the Book.

 

© 2015 The Antioch Review

The Story Behind the Story – Joe Szabo and the Gypsy Bride by Margaret Benbow

13 Monday Apr 2015

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

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Council for Wisconsin Writers, Fiction, Margaret Benbow, Short Story, The Antioch Review, Zona Gale Award

Margaret BenbowMargaret Benbow’s story, “Joe Szabo and the Gypsy Bride” was published in the Winter, 2014 issue of The Antioch Review and is the winner of the Zona Gale Award for Short Fiction given by the Council for Wisconsin Writers. The story chronicles the day tailors Joe Szabo and his son Abel are asked by the aunt of a beautiful young lady, to make her a wedding gown. The day unfolds as only it can for this family of strong-willed men.

Abel …reflected that his father, his grandfather, and every single one of the Szabo forebears he’d ever heard about were the same:  swarthy, barrel-chested, raving men charging their demented projects with their tusks, focusing on the desire like blind wild pigs.

 

DEVELOPMENT OF “JOE SZABO AND THE GYPSY BRIDE”

by Margaret Benbow

Perhaps the first seed of this story was planted when I was ten years old, and went to the Sauk County Fair with a friend. She pointed out the one family at the fair who stood out from all the others.

“That’s the gypsy family,” she whispered.

They had wild, dark, beautiful faces and bright clothes. They looked so different in kind that they seemed almost different in species from the placid German farmers and their blond offspring. Everybody knew there was only one farmer who would allow them to camp on his land. They returned for a few weeks each year. He said they always left the campsite cleaner than they found it.

During the year, at irregular intervals, he and his family would receive odd, lovely presents, sent without a note from different places. His wife said that the gypsies remembered their friends. They remembered their enemies, too. Continue reading →

← Older posts
Follow The Antioch Review Blog on WordPress.com

RSS

RSS Feed

Categories

  • Backstory
  • Editorial Staff
  • Editorials
  • Essay
  • Fiction
  • From Our Archives
  • Interview
  • Literary Event
  • Look Back – Interns
  • On Poetry
  • On Writing Fiction
  • POEM WEDNESDAY
  • Poetry
  • Reviews
  • The Story Behind the Story
  • Translations
  • Uncategorized

Tags

Alex M. Frankel Alice Fulton Alpay Ulku Anniversary Issue Ann Pierson Wiese Antioch Review Arthur Vogelsang Asako Serizawa Audio Poem backstory Bill Christophersen Blog Bruce Fleming Cathryn Essinger Courtney Queeney Debora Greger eclipse Edd Jennings Edith Pearlman editorial Emily Rosko Eminent Domain Eminent Domain Abuse epublication Essay European Poetry Evan Morgan Williams Fiction First Readers Frannie L. Lindsay Generations Interns Interview Italian Poetry Jacqueline Osherow Jane Satterfield John Taylor Kathleen Ford Katy Bowman Ken Bode Kent Nelson Klaus Merz Kurt Olsson Laurie Ann Cedilnik Lia Purpura Lorenzo Calogero lunar eclipse Marilyn Moriarty Mark Wagenaar Michael Carlson Michael Shirzadian Nathan Oates non-fiction O. Henry on writing fiction Peter Kline poem Poem Daily Poem Wednesday poetry Poetry Daily Raiziss/de Palchi Fellowship Ralph Keyes Rebecca Cook Rex Wilder Robert Fogarty Scott Whithiam Shane Seely Short Fiction Short Story The Antioch Review Theodore Levitt Translations Travis Mossotti Valerie Wohlfeld

Yes! There are so many ways to subscribe.

AR on FaceBook

AR on FaceBook

Follow us on Twitter

My Tweets

The Antioch Review

P.O. Box 148
Yellow Springs, Ohio 45387
http://review.antiochcollege.org/antioch_review/

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • The Antioch Review Blog
    • Join 106 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • The Antioch Review Blog
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...