Tag Archives: Short Story

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

21 Monday Sep 2015

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

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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

 

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