Category Archives: The Story Behind the Story

The Story Behind the Story – It Was Only Clay by Elizabeth Kadetsky

17 Tuesday Feb 2015

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Being on this land, seeing its people, digging for artifacts, going off his meds—all of it was spitting Joseph out into a new sense of clarity. Following is Elizabeth Kadetsky’s story behind the story, “It Was Only Clay” from the Summer, 2014 issue of The Antioch Review.

He’d arrived on the isthmus after the earthquake struck—in Yucatán. Short wave radio reported a million homeless over the border in Guatemala, the crumbling of dozens of highland villages. For his own purposes, Yucatán was yielding nothing. He became anxious, impatient. The land was spitting him out of it like a language it didn’t like speaking.

 

On “It Was Only Clay”

by Elizabeth Kadetsky

Elizabeth Kadetsky

In 1994, The Village Voice sent me to cover a story set in a small highlands village in the Cuchumatantes mountains of Guatemala called San Cristóbal Verapaz. By the time I got to Guatemala City and checked into my hotel, however, a travel advisory had been issued. The advisory was intended for female travelers like myself—solo and American—so I dutifully avoided travel to the countryside and spent the next several days exploring and digging up facts for my story in the capital city.

There was a feeling of menace pervading everything. Once, as I was walking by myself at sunset near the grand municipal halls of the city center, a young soldier carrying a rifle and bayonet gave me an up and down. His eyes read fear, death, and other things it seemed I could not comprehend. Another time a man stared and heckled sexual harassments at me in a crowd that had gathered to watch some street performers. Another man—an American—came up to not so helpfully inform me I was in danger. The story I was covering related directly to the travel advisory: an American woman had been attacked by a mob in San Cristobal. The crowd, made up of young indigenous men, believed she had kidnapped a baby and was carrying it in her backpack to be absconded to the developed world and harvested for kidneys.  Continue reading →

The Story Behind the Story – Photographers’ Light – by Rosellen Brown

09 Friday Jan 2015

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Rosellen Brown

Photo credit, Sigrid Estrada

Rosellen Brown’s work has appeared in The Antioch Review numerous times. In “Photographers’ Light,” Winter, 2014, she tells her story through the eyes of a photographer, Toby, the wife of a vocal teacher who spends a month in Italy every summer teaching opera to young students from around the world. Toby is beginning to experience how aging is impacting their lives. Following is Brown’s story behind the story.

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I have always believed that a story is only ready to be written when not one but two stimuli – or call them provocations – are present. If you like to read the comments at the back of the O. Henry and Best American collections (which didn’t exist when my first AR story was published) you’ll see that a good many writers testify that they’d put a story away and only when they came back to it later did they see what it was “really” about. Newly energized, they reorganized, added new elements and so on – which tells me that their original impulse was incomplete because it lacked that second motivation, the spark that ignites the whole.

In this case, what I started with was a little unusual for me because it wasn’t a character or a situation:  I possessed (perhaps too grandiose a word) a little body of knowledge that I somehow wanted to incorporate in . . . something. For thirteen years I had taught in a summer writing workshop in Spoleto, Italy that ran concurrently with master classes in bel canto opera technique.  I loved the writers and, needless to say, the setting and all that went with it, but what I found most thrilling were the young singers (most, though not all, of college age), to whose classes we brought our students, not only to witness training that was and was not similar to their own but also to see how bloody hard the singers had to work, and how public were their successes and failures.

But I had no story until I realized – the second element – I could link the description of the sometimes astonishing physical and psychological means by which the opera coaches went about their business to a current that runs under much of my recent work.  I’m collecting a bookful of stories to be called Late Loves because what’s on my mind these days is aging and the sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant losses that accompany it. The youth of those marvelous children seemed the perfect contrast to a not-quite-over-the-hill star: a glory, a challenge, a threat.  Theo’s witness is his wife, an artist too but one whose art is not so harrowingly public, who also has her pride and her pain, for her husband and for herself.

I was very happy with the story but an ending eluded me until I thought of something else I had learned in Spoleto.  A wonderful photographer named JoAnn Verburg, who has a thirteenth-century house there, likes to shoot in the late afternoon in what she taught me is called “photographers’ light,” which just before dusk brings things into striking focus (and even tinges everything slightly – very slightly – purple!)  This seemed to me the perfect metaphor for the moment Theo and Toby have reached, which I will not elucidate further because a metaphor unpacked is worse than a joke explained.

In 1971, I had published a good bit of poetry but AR accepted one of my very earliest prose pieces. I had begun edging over toward prose so gradually that I hardly realized I was doing it; my first book of poems had ended with a long prose poem. What I sent to the Review was a series of vignettes, a portrait of my neighborhood on a gentrifying block in Brooklyn, described in rather heightened language that, without much concern for genre, I thought of as an essay. Certainly it wasn’t fiction.  But in the issue in which it appeared, apparently somebody forgot to include the headings that customarily appear in the Table of Contents separating poetry from fiction from essays, and to my great astonishment my “Mainlanders” was chosen for the 1971 O. Henry Prize Stories (my first appearance there), and at a time when the “best” three stories were ranked, it was pronounced the third best in the collection.  So I carry to this day huge gratitude to whoever was asleep at the switch. I hope he or she didn’t get into any trouble for such serendipitous inattention!

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Rosellen Brown has published widely in magazines and her stories have appeared frequently in O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prizes.  One is included in the best-sellerBest Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike.

She has been the recipient of an award in literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Bunting Institute, the Howard Foundation, and twice from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was selected one of Ms. Magazine’s 12 “Women of the Year” in 1984.  Some Deaths in the Delta was a National Council on the Arts prize selection and Civil Wars won the Janet Kafka Prize for the best novel by an American woman in 1984. Rosellen Brown teaches in the MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago http://rosellenbrown.com/#home

 

 

© The Antioch Review, 2015

 

 

The Story Behind the Story – Phase 3 of The Ruby Sands – by Laurie Ann Cedilnik

28 Tuesday Jan 2014

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Laurie Ann Cedilnik provides the story behind the story, “Phase 3 of The Ruby Sands,” published in The Antioch Review’s Summer, 2013 issue.

My glass sweats and leaves a wet ring in the carpet. I place my palm on the ring, push down. It is cold and squishy, a strange sucking wound. The wet glass slips from my hand and Jim Beam seeps into the ivory carpet, darkening the surrounding fibers and spreading like rot. I use the knee of my jeans to sop up some of the mess. The stain on my knee makes me self-conscious, like I’m some sloppy hobo, so I stand up and grope one of the shelves for towels. The biggest I find is a hand towel. I think I feel a hair dryer so I take that down too. Even when it’s in my hand and I’m looking at it, I still think it’s a hair dryer, one of those compact ones for travel. I’m trying to figure out where the cord went when I realize what I’m holding.

***

“Phase 3 of the Ruby Sands”

            The idea for this story arrived while I was snooping through a stranger’s closet. Check your judgment—you’ve done the same thing, admit it. Or you haven’t, and I’m a lawless monster. Moving on.

            My parents were visiting Florida and staying in the condo of a friend-of-a-friend from Puerto Rico who had recently purchased the unit, but preferred to spend time in San Juan and was looking to sell. My parents asked me to come down for the weekend and check out the place. We live now in a world of Couch Surfing and AirBnB, but back then it felt very odd for me to stay in a stranger’s home with the two people I’d lived with for most of my life: the family was the same, but the accouterments weren’t ours. I slept alone on a cot meant for visiting grandchildren, the cot’s twin unoccupied across the room.  Someone had left a Glamour magazine on it. Whose Glamour? I flipped through it with apprehension.

My parents went gaga over the size of the closets. As lifetime New Yorkers, they were accustomed to bitsy alcoves stuffed to the max with an avalanche of accumulated junk. I was living in Texas, so I’d grown quite used to large margaritas, large trucks, large hats and large closets. But seeing the closets in the condo made me understand that the person who’d purchased it had never really wanted it to be his home. The plentiful wire shelves were mostly vacant. When asked to fetch a towel from the closet, I chose a fluffy, nondescript beige one that looked brand new. The landscape in the closet magnified the landscape of the rest of the condo: blank, impersonal, entirely anonymous.

Perhaps this is why my brain needed to invent an extremely personal item for me to fear finding. I got up on tip-toe to grab the towel and thought, What if I stumbled upon some kind of sex toy? There was certainly nothing personal out in plain sight—surely, something ultra-personal must be hiding just beyond my reach. It was there, and I bet it was freaky.

While in town, my family looked at several other units in the area. If hunting for a pied-a-terre seems like fun, try doing it at a 55-and-over community where the units are priced to move because Grandma Rose passed recently and Aunt Kim and Uncle Charlie want the place off their hands. Many of the units still contained furniture of the deceased. Heavy in the air was a sense that these unit had not only been lived in, but that many had likely been died in. One home still had an elevated potty parked next to a wheelchair in the bathroom. I don’t think it required any kind of great empathy to picture myself in the place of these units’ sudden new owners, or to imagine strangers roaming my parents’ condo, assessing square footage amidst personal stuff.

There was no sex toy in the closet; what I found instead was plenty freaky.

Grief is king of loneliness. Nothing feels more isolating than thinking of something you want to share with a loved one, only to remember that you can’t, because they’re gone. You can spend lots of time with a lost loved one in your head, such vivid time that it might escape your attention that you’ve been alone for days. I wanted my story to take the form of grieving. I wanted Adrienne to spin herself into a cocoon of grief so tight that she barely realizes her solitude. Adrienne’s a voyeur with a lively imagination, and she has spirited interactions with objects, but it was important to me that she not exchange a word with anyone throughout the story’s present action.

What fun, yeah? Who could wait to dive into drafting such an uplifting tale?

During the last year of my MFA, lots of friends were doing these “poem-a-day” challenges where they’d write and send each other new work daily. Ever the only child, I challenged my own self to “story-a-week,” wherein I hoped to draft a new story each week for two months. The plan was: write fast, and before you know it, it’ll be over—the quick Band-Aid removal of story drafting. I managed to draft five; of the five, two didn’t make it. “Phase 3…,” after intensive therapy and rehabilitation, did survive.

 

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cedilniklaurieLaurie Ann Cedilnik has an MFA from the University of Houston. Her stories have appeared in Colorado Review, Epoch, The Masters Review, West Branch, and Cimarron Review. A native of Queens, NY, her honors include Gwen Frostic Prizes in Fiction and Nonfiction, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship, and an Individual Artist Grant from the Houston Arts Alliance. She lives in Kalamazoo, where she serves as Editor of Third Coast. Visit her online at laurieanncedilnik.com.

© 2014 The Antioch Review