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

21 Thursday Jan 2016

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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

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Backstory – France: The Cake Frosting Country by Joan Frank

23 Friday Oct 2015

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In the “The Astonishment Index,” contributor Joan Frank provides what she calls a piece that functions more as a “coda” to her original essay, “France: The Cake Frosting Country,” that ran in the Winter, 2010 issue of The Antioch Review. She says her essay describes realizations gained from a (very!) recent trip to France, and concludes that while the beautiful Cake Frosting Country is still a wonder, one can’t not see it differently with age and experience: certain scales have tumbled from one’s eyes.

The Astonishment Index
by Joan Frank

Someone close to me recently suggested, about the work of a famous living poet, that everything she writes is an expression of shock—arising from the thunderbolt comprehension of the fact that we will die.

That shock evokes—rather, tugs like an attached cart after itself—the ancillary question of how then to live, how to be, during our brief tenure of time on earth.

It strikes me increasingly that we never really recover from this first astonishment: that it extends vastly from and through our lives, like spokes of a wheel.

It strikes me too that everything we say and do, once that double-whammy realization cracks open, is driven by it. Perhaps more strangely, the fact of Place feels intimately bound up with the whole business—this acute, spreading recognition of a finite self, operating so briefly in time and space.

We wonder not just how to be, but why—and inevitably, where.

It’s arguable that my American generation, post-World War II, was saddled with a sanitized moral vision—a series of givens about fairness, or at least of eventual tit-for-tat. We were taught to do good, and expected that good would be offered back to us in return. We were encouraged to reason, never questioning the (hard-won) modicum of food and shelter enabling this luxury: food, shelter, and a resuming moral order, furnished by a shaken adult population doing its best to rebuild in the wake of unspeakable horror.

So when we grew up and began to travel to the classic world capitals, we viewed them through a rosier lens—possibly a Disney-fied lens, of princesses and castles and kindly old shoemakers. (Later we applied the Jamesian/Kerouacian lenses: “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.”) A piquant paradox: how my own great-grandparents, and those of countless others, likely fled Europe for Ellis Island, and how their progeny’s progeny eventually returned to Europe as self-styled rogues and daring artist-adventurers (never mind the exciting new venue’s dark history). This imposed romance, in effect appropriating a backdrop, persists to some degree in our own kids—though I think that it probably peaked in my own generation; that young adults now, chafed by the bizarre trials of making their own lives (paying off loans), look coolly at any notion of Dharma bumming (unless someone else is funding it).

I recently revisited France, starting in a small, sleepy southern town and moving north to Paris, the journey viewed this time through a pair of eyes seasoned by inevitabilities of age—windfalls and personal loss: books published, babies born, the death of an only, beloved sibling. And while L’Hexagone delivered everything described in my essay of 2010, those real joys felt limned this time by deepened tensions and frailties. All the jewels remain intact in the crown, but they seem to have shrunk a little. Life feels tougher there, more fraught. North African storekeepers look grimmer, more vigilant; teenagers act out more recklessly; clerks, streetpeople, business types, even nannies all seem tightened, more pinched by want and need as they move through the day’s obligations. A certain playfulness seems to have vanished. Everything’s bewilderingly expensive. True, restaurants and cafes still bustle with people who appear poised, accomplished, at ease with the world and with their meal’s bill. But waitstaff, as they hustle about, damp and breathless, exude a telling, desperate fatigue. The divide between haves and have-nots grows starker.

This, too, counts as astonishment. If we are honest with ourselves about it, we’re never ready for the next revelation, whether for good or (too often) for ill. It falls to an individual’s mettle—an inborn or willed resolve—to be able to witness the rise and fall of of empires and ideals, live with surging change and uncertainty, and knit meaning from them; carry on with what remains. Part of what is gained, with age, is a richer sense of how little these parsings (and the parser him- or herself) finally matter. France does not care who loves or hates it, just as a piece of timeless music or art does not care. Do I still champion the Cake-Frosting Country? Yes, but with an asterisk—an existential qualifier, an expressive shrug in the best Gallic tradition: “as it stands, as best one can.”

***

Joan Frank (http://www.joanfrank.org) is the author of five books of fiction and a book of Joan Frankcollected essays. Her last novel, MAKE IT STAY, won the Dana Portfolio Award; her last story collection, IN ENVY COUNTRY, won the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award, and was named a finalist for the California Book Award. Joan’s book of essays, BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO: A WRITING LIFE, won the Silver ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award. A MacDowell Colony Fellow and recipient of many grants and awards, Joan is also a book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in Northern California.

 

© The Antioch Review 2015

Backstory – “The Man Next Door” by Paul Christensen

13 Monday Jul 2015

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“The Man Next Door” by Paul Christensen was published in the Summer 2014 issue of  the Antioch Review. Below, Christensen reads the first few pages of his story.


The Backstory of “The Man Next Door”
by Paul Christensen

Paul Christensen“The Man Next Door” has its origins in the row-house culture I grew up in in Philadelphia in the 1950s, post-war neighborhoods that threw together British war widows, Polish immigrants, orthodox Jews, and returning soldiers starting families in these affordable brick houses. To fit in, everyone observed strict rules of conformity–same lawn furniture on the tiny patio, same Ford or Chevy, same clothes, radio programs. But every neighborhood had its eccentric, a recluse living behind drawn curtains, who couldn’t hide from the prying eyes of neighbors. He seldom went outside, but if he did, he was the news of the day–pulling a wagon to the market, washing his windows, standing in the sun in worn-out pants and shirt, a pair of bedroom slippers, shielding his eyes from the glare. Who knew what he did inside, or how he managed to provide for himself.

I knew of several of these strange figures in my early childhood, and when I read To Kill a Mockingbird a few years later, Boo Radley leapt out as the representative of all of them. Kinder, with a bigger heart than the loonies I knew, Boo turns out to be the moral hero of Maycomb, Alabama. Harry Crome is my version of the eccentric, mysterious loner, cast among strictly conforming busy-bodies and gossips in a suburban neighborhood. I gave him all the characteristics I wish those other loners had possessed – I might have learned from them. Crome does not give in to three-inch blades of grass; he’s not afraid of a black snake in his yard. He doesn’t paint and fix things up.

He is the bane of Bill Hughes, my protagonist in the story, who lives next door to Crome. Bill has never had an original thought in his life; he is the epitome of the shallow, conforming Everyman, who has never written a word he wasn’t ordered to. He lives an ordinary, muddled life with his sensitive wife Margo, who defends the man next door as part of some higher awareness that neither of them understands. It offends poor Bill, whose resentment verges on outright jealousy. But Margo happily befriends the neighbors and bakes a pie for their anniversary, an event that Bill ruefully observes from his kitchen window. It slowly dawns on him that Margo may be right about Crome, that he might indeed represent some utterly foreign thing in his life, a cultivated, successful man, an intellectual.

Bill and Margo represent the common clay from Willy Loman to Archie Bunker; their world is narrow, their lives modest and conventional. Only Margo realizes it and can put into words how they are “as common as pancakes and instant coffee.” Bill reminds me of an older friend I knew some years ago who told me he had never been surprised by anything in his life. He said it with some measure of pride. He had avoided all the slings and arrows of misfortune, apparently, by living within his budget, balancing his checkbook, wearing drip-dry suits in the summer. He was pretty much the opposite of me, and he knew it. He found me reckless, a man eager to plunge off a cliff without checking his parachute first.

By the time the story got to the midpoint, I realized, of course, I was describing the two sides of my own personality. I was obsessive like Crome, neglectful of duties and obligations, eager to submerge into another reality to know more, to live more widely. But I was also Bill Hughes at times, cautious not to plunge too far that I couldn’t find my way back. But I also think everyone has these two contradictory impulses in them.

When my two main characters are reconciled, and Bill is willing to serve Harry Crome in a humble way, you might say I put the two sides of my nature together and found a measure of harmony between them. Perhaps the two men are soul and body, like the lofty, overbearing officer and his humble orderly in D.H. Lawrence’s “The Prussian Officer,” one of the most insightful short stories I have ever read.

***

Paul Christensen‘s story, “How Frank Died,” published in The Antioch Review in the Winter, 2013 issue, was listed as a distinguished mystery story in Best American Mystery Stories of 2013. He shovels snow in central Vermont much of the winter, and relaxes in southern France each summer. paul-christensen.com

© The Antioch Review 2015