Emily Ruskovich, Owl

Owl, by Emily Ruskovich, was published in One Story in March 2014. Ruskovich grew up in the Idaho Panhandle and has an untitled novel and a book of short stories called Idaho coming out from Random House. She has an MFA from Iowa and teaches creative writing at the University of Colorado in Denver. To read a Q&Q with Ruskovich in One Story, click here.

In this story, we again have a first person, male protagonist.  Again, I imagined a man, sitting on a stool on a stage, telling us his story through a series of flashback scenes and dialogue. The story begins with an accident: His wife has been hurt, “bullets taken from her body.” This is a great premise for a short story. The narrator is reeling, his wife’s life may be in jeopardy, his whole life has been turned upside down.

The story takes place in the early 1890’s/early 1900’s. We are on a farm, in Idaho. Life is difficult, the characters dependent upon each other for survival. Jane, the wife, has been shot by one or perhaps four teenage boys.

SPOILER ALERT: This story is a mystery. Why was Jane outside that night? Was she flirting with those boys? Is Jane innocent or guilty of betraying her husband? Her husband does not judge her, or even ask that question. He shows great restraint. It is very clever to have your protagonist show restraint and not pass judgment on the character who has hurt or betrayed him/her. This empowers the reader and allows the reader to do the judging for the protagonist. Jane was outside late one night, when the young boys saw her, shot her and said they thought she was an owl. Is this really what happened? We don’t know. The narrator is both a naive observer and unwilling participant in the intrigue that is woven into this story.

On the surface, the plot is simple: When the narrator marries Jane, they are both young. He works for her father, and she is a teenage girl, pregnant by another boy, who is ultimately given to, or sold to, the narrator by her father. Jane loves another man and this marriage to the narrator is not a love match, though we get the impression that the narrator comes to love and appreciate Jane. Lopsided love makes for a great plot point. Use it if you can in your own fiction.

Whether Jane loves and appreciates the narrator is in question; By the end, we suspect she may have been biding her time until her true love was released from prison and came to find her.

Elevation of objects/inanimate objects and animals as characters in the story: Feral cats are characters in this story, as is the cornmeal that the narrator feeds them, he is careful to make sure the cornmeal cools before he leaves it out for them. The cats and the cornmeal are elevated objects---by the end of the story, we can see and almost touch the cats, and can almost feel the hot cornmeal burning their tongues.

There is a lot of food in this story, and its presence in the story works on many levels. One, though the story took place more than a century ago, the food they eat is very much the same as the food we eat. The food makes the story feel current and relevant. Two, the description of the food is luscious, vivid and makes you want to eat. Three, the use and eating of the food helps makes the fictional characters seem real. Notice the cornmeal, the cherries, the pie, the pie pan and Jane’s last buttered piece of toast, in particular. They move through the story. We come to expect them and recognize them.

Also notice the use of insects---the flies that land on top of the cornmeal. This is disgusting but real and memorable.

If you are trying to make your scenes and/or your characters sound authentic, go to a diner and watch people order and eat.  Write down what they eat and how they eat it, how they fold or scrunch up their napkins, how they wipe their mouths and spear their asparagus: Gestures relating to the preparation and eating of food will contribute to the “reality” of your writing.

Examples of great food writing in Owl:

1)   On page 3, Jane brought the young boy Peter “eggs and hot venison sausage at sunrise.”

2)   The cherries, which first appear in page 6, are elevated and referred to frequently over the course of two pages: “He held, awkwardly, a bowl of cherries, at such a precarious slant that with one small movement of his wrist, the cherries would come pouring out.”

3)   The pie on p. 6: “Against his body, he held a pie covered in cloth. His neck was very white like it was recently scrubbed. By contrast, his freckle splattered face looked filthy, as if underneath a film of orange dust.”

4)   The cat food, the flies and the pie on page 8: “They had a smell to them, a mix of soap and filth. They laid their dishes on the table where the boiled cat food was cooling in the pan. A few flies had landed and gotten stuck on the grainy skin forming on top of the oatmeal. The red-haired boy was watching them. He had a bright red mark on the skin of his ribs from having held the pies so tightly against himself.

5)   On page 25, as we near the beginning of the end of the story, we see how time passes through the pie pan:

“At some point, she washed the pie pan and the other dishes that held the food the boys had brought, and she set them out on the porch in case they ever returned. The dishes remained on the porch the rest of the summer. I got so used to seeing them there that I stopped seeing them at all. Soon they held no associations; they collected the same dust as everything else...Then one evening, early in the fall, I came home from a hunt just after sunset and saw that the dishes were gone.” (Also, notice the use of the sunset.)

6)   Also on page 25, we see the end of Jane, as seen through the food and dish she left behind: “On the night table, I saw one of her novels, opened facedown, beside a plate with a half eaten piece of toast shining with butter.” That piece of buttered toast is memorable.

7)   And on p. 27, we have light, food and dirt, all in the same paragraph (see my note about light below): “Soon I saw the light in the window of the trapper’s house. Out of breath, I paused and looked inside, where husband, wife, son and baby ate a late dinner of potatoes and broth. Their dirt floor was nearly black with what looked to be coffee grounds.”

    The dirt floor says so much about this family, as does the meager meal they are eating.

Now, take a look at some other wonderful details in this story, details that make the characters feel yanked from real life:

1)  Great gesture on p. 7: “I saw in the boy’s eyes a yearning to touch it (the cat) and I myself was touched by that. It was respectful the way he stood so still knowing this was not the time to pet a cat, even such a friendly, stupid one, and that show of self restraint softened me a little…” This is a great gesture, the boy’s restraint completely makes the boy feel real.

2)   Sunlight and hair on p. 7 “The sunlight he’d stepped into revealed a single, white, glossy hair on his Adam’s apple.” 

    We often talk about using sunlight and moonlight in our stories; see how well this works here. Don’t forget to use light in your stories.

I also want to point out the dirt floor (and the smell of coffee) on pages 13-14, which become characters in this story as much as the cats and the corn meal. The dirt floor first appears on page 13 and by describing it, the author tells us a lot about the narrator’s sad history (as it turns out, this detail comes from the author’s family’s history):

“The floors of my mother’s house were made of dirt. My father had built the pitiful place on a piece of oven-farmed soil. The more we beat it down with our feet, the finer the dirt became. The dust rose with every step, with every gust, with every turn in the night of our bodies in our beds. It settled in our sheets, on our clothes, in our hair, and finally in my mother’s lungs, where it lingered for years before it turned into the infection that turned her, with a bit of time, into dust itself…Around the time the infection set in, my mother discovered coffee grounds. She spread them wet across the dirt. It was the only the thing that ever worked to keep the dust down, her one triumph in all those years as a housewife in a house without floors, and she began to drink so much coffee as a side effect of using it on the floor, that deep down I wonder if it wasn’t’ her lungs that let her down but her heart. Just before I closed the lid of her coffin, which I did alone, my father having long since left, I smelled the coffee that had replaced the dust on her body and her clothes, and I thought what a shame it was to bury someone whose essence was still so much alive.”

Two pages later, on page 16, we read that the narrator “built a good, sturdy house, with boards across the floor.”

You can see the dirt and smell the coffee grinds and the boards across the floor by the time you finish reading these pages. Essentially, floors define characters in this short story, a fascinating and original concept.

Weather is also a great character in this story. Notice this great sentence on p. 24: “The river ran low; the sun baked the hides of the cattle.” Don’t forget to weave the weather into your fiction: Is it windy out? Hot? Freezing? Using all of these outdoor elements will make your story feel real.

The narrator tells this story in retrospect; by the end of the story, the narrator is alone with his dog. Jane has left him, the cats have disappeared. How do you feel about him by the end? Do you wonder what happened to him? Do you wonder what happened to Jane? Do you think he’ll ever see her again? Are you satisfied with the ending of the story? I was. I felt I had come to know, understand and feel sorry for him.  I admired his restraint and his doomed love for his wife. Doomed love can make for a great plot. But my real question to you is: Did this story make you want to write one of your own?

Exercise: Write a story that takes place in the past or the future. Use details from your own family’s history.

Phil Klay’s Desployment:

Redployment by Phil Klay

Redeployment, by Phil Klay, is Klay’s first published collection of stories. Klay is a  former Marine, who served in Iraq as a pubic affairs officer. He did not see combat, though his protagonist in this story did. Klay’s two brothers were also in the military at the same time. Klay graduated from Dartmouth and has an MFA from Hunter College.

What struck me about this story is that it is written so vividly in the first person, and though there are plenty of scenes and dialogue, it is mostly a monologue. I imagined the narrator, sitting on a stool on a stage, telling us the story of how he returned from war, with flashbacks to what happened while he was over there, and how he felt upon his return.

Like all great stories, this one is about a hero going on a journey---a journey into war, and then the journey home to rejoin his wife. There is a whiff of the Odyssey here. He survived death; now, how will he experience life? 

SPOILER ALERT: He does it by shopping with his wife and killing his dog. In some ways, writing a story about war is tough---the reader expects to be moved, shocked and possibly devastated by the end of the story. If the writer does not deliver these feelings, the reader is disappointed. Most of us have never been to war: We want the writer to tell us what it is like, gives us some insight into its atrocities. The bar is high for war writers. But writing about war can also be a clever, easy and efficient way to tackle those most profound of subjects: Life and death. If you or anyone you know has experience with war, I suggest you write about the experience and/or interview the person with the experience and write about it.

Klay assumes that you know the vocabulary of war, and that if you don’t, that you will either look up the definitions you don’t know, or you will glide through the story, ignorant of what some of the writer is referring to. You don’t necessarily need to know what a DI (defense intelligence), IED (improvised explosive device) or XO (executive officer) are in order to enjoy the story, though you will get more out of it if you do know what these terms mean. This raises a question I’m frequently asked in class: Is it okay to use vocabulary that will be unfamiliar to your readers? And if you’re going to do that, should you include a glossary? My preference is to include a glossary at the end of the story or to at least define the word or the acronym the first time you use it so that your lazier writer isn’t struggling to understand what you’re writing about and possibly abandoning the story in frustration and ignorance.

How the story does its work of moving the reader: The author deftly weaves fear into this story, so that you, the reader, are constantly on edge, wondering if the narrator and/or his friends are going to get killed. This is a clever writing device: Make the reader worry for your protagonist. Put the reader in your protagonist’s shoes. And use the second person. For instance, on pages 2, Klay writes, “You try to think about home, then you’re in the torture house. You see the body parts in the locker and the retarded guy in the cage. He squawked like a chicken. His head was shrunk down to a coconut. It takes you a while to remember Doc saying they’d shot mercury into his skull…You see the little girl, the photographs Curtis found in a desk….”  By the bottom of page 2, we are filled with dread at what the protagonist is going to find and describe next. Dread is a powerful feeling. In fact, your readers want to feel dread, just as theater and movie-goers want to feel fear when they go to the theater. Later, they want to feel the release of it, but first, they want to feel it in full. Don’t be afraid to scare your reader.

Dog as a character (SPOILER ALERT): Notice how much the narrator loves his dog (p.3) and how that dog becomes a character. The story opens and ends with the killing of the dog (pp. 1 and 16). There’s a neat and gruesome symmetry here. The narrator’s dog is a vulnerable, old creature. The narrator is attached to him, as we become attached to him, and when the narrator shoots him at the end, we feel his loss. Don’t be afraid of killing off characters in your fiction. Your reader wants to feel this loss and grieve this character’s absence.

Gun and hands as characters: The narrator is attached to his gun (p.6.) Can a gun be a character? Sure. Klay writes: “When I got to the window and handed in my rifle, though, it brought me up short. That was the first time I’d been separated from it in months. I didn’t know where to rest my hands. First I put them in my pockets, then I took them out and crossed my arms, and then I just let them hang, useless, at my sides.” Elevates objects---hands, guns—so that your reader sees and feels them and imagines using them in his/her mind.

The use of vice: The story starts off with the introduction of vices: The murder of a dog, jerking off in a shower, card-playing and smoking cigarettes. Readers love to read about vices---smoking, drinking, gambling,s ex play, etc. This immediately raises the stakes for the characters, takes the reader to a place s/he doesn’t normally go to but wants to experience. When characters are put at risk, the readers ask: Will the protagonist be okay? We want that uncertainty, we want to wonder what is going to happen to the characters, we want to be caught up in the question: Will s/he die?

Some of the characters get drunk on page 4. Same idea here: Readers love to read about characters getting drunk, high, stealing, lying, pretending, falling in love with inappropriate people, cheating on people they love, and doing all sorts of deviant activities. We love to be experience high’s and low’s in fiction, high’s and low’s we probably avoid or repress in real life. But fiction is not real life. Fiction is where your reader goes to feel and experience the things s/he avoids in real life. Don’t be afraid to have your characters do crazy, dark, risky, destructive and self-destructive things in your stories.

Did Klay’s title story move you? Did it make you want to read more of the collection? What about it, if anything, made it memorable? Did it make you want to write?

Exercise: Write a scene for one of your characters in which s/he does exactly the opposite thing sh/e should do.

Katherine Heiny, Leviathan, Glimmer Train, Spring/Summer 2014

(Spoiler alert: If you haven’t read the story yet, please wait to read this. If you can’t wait to read it, please know that the ending, such as it is, is discussed.)

I love Katherine Heiny’s fiction. I first discovered her last year when she published the short story, “Andorra,” in Ploughshares spring 2013 issue under the pseudonym Szidonia Molnar. When I came upon her short story, Leviathan, in Glimmer Train’s spring/summer 2014 issue, I was thrilled. Heiny writes about marriage and modern life with a light touch, but there is always a dark undercurrent to her work---she writes about the unrest and infidelity that can sabotage a relationship, though in her work it generally doesn’t. Her couples tend to soldier on despite the earthquake happening beneath their marriages. It is very common in modern fiction to read about couples breaking up, but it is far more interesting and original to read and write about couples who stay together. Heiny is funny and her dialogue will make you laugh, and possibly shudder too. This combination of dark and light, humor and grief, loyalty and betrayal, gives her work a nice friction and tension. She has a book of short stories coming out in 2014 called, “Single Carefree Mellow: Stories.”

Leviathan is an excerpt from a novel Heiny is working on but it reads like a short story so we will treat it as such here. In this story, we have three main characters Audra, Graham and the doorman, Julio, who lives with the couple and acts as a sort of Greek chorus to their marriage. Right away, Heiny raises the stakes for Graham. Something has happened, something “unimaginable.” We read on to find out what. “The post-apocalyptic world was inside him but no one seemed to notice.” As readers, our curiosity is piqued so we read on to find out what apocalypse has taken place.

On page 247, we learn what it is that Graham is so upset about: Audra might be having an affair. You can get a lot of mileage out of an affair---real or imaginary----in fiction, and though it turns out that Audra isn’t having an affair, she did think about it and whatever went on between her and the photographer now threatens to undermine her marriage. What will happen? Will Graham stand by her? There is a wonderful sentence on page 248, that effectively sums up the essence of the story: “And then she let herself out of his study, very quietly, closing the door gently behind her, like a nurse leaving a patient alone to deal with a difficult diagnosis.” We, the reader, are the patient, and we are grappling with the difficulties this marriage presents.

Graham and Audra also have a child, Matthew, who has Asperger’s (p.251) and a passion for origami. The scene (on page 255) in which Audra takes Graham to an origami workshop in a diner is terrific---funny, frightening, completely believable.

There is some funny, light banter between Audra and Graham, concerning United Nations Day at their child’s school. There is great detail: an anecdote about Audra having an assistant to the Italian ambassador stuff a rolled-up dollar bill between her breasts, the details of decorating the rooms so that they kind of, sort of represent various countries in the UN. Why is Audra so busy with this? The question isn’t answered, but God is in the details, and the details of how she spends her days makes us believe that this is an authentic character, and we start to believe we are reading about a real person, or else we believe that the writer is writing with confidence and authority. Heiny makes Audra seem even more believable when she sums up on page 251 some memorably awful experiences from her “life”: food poisoning, the gas (literally) running out during another affair, an unexpected French kiss from Grandpa, etc. All these strange, unsettling experiences give Audra the air of authenticity. She is complicated and problematic, as all interesting protagonists are, busy making decisions that the average reader would not necessarily do in real life, but is very happy to read about in fiction.

There is more authentic detail when Graham and Julio drive around picking up food, and “one woman handed Graham a bag full of cylindrical objects wrapped in plastic and then leaned in the window and gave them a long blast of information about rolling out the dough and brushing it with butter, then each individual roll with egg wash, and afterward sprinkling a little pearl sugar or possibly almonds unless that was a danger due to nut allergies, which schools were way too paranoid about inher opinion.” You read this and feel as if you are in the car with them, listening to this woman drone on.

There is also what I like to call a lovely resting moment, when Audra is described in all her glory and we can see why Graham loves her. On page 252, Heiny writes: “She was wearing her short swingy green coat and a little green beret and just the ends of her hair curled from beneath it. Julio and Graham were stuck at a light so they watched as Audra finally decided on both bunches of flowers. She tucked them under one arm and took Matthew’s hand and began walking. Their clasped hands swung easily between them.” Both Julio and Graham are a bit love-struck at the sight of her, and so are we, despite her arguably bad behavior.

So where is the turning point of the story, the moment where the story opens up and turns around, where we suddenly feel invested in the fates of the characters, where the plot heats up and the tension mounts and the author manages to rivet us to the story’s resolution? I think it is on page 257. This is a sad, tender moment, where Graham is left to decide his own fate. He envies Julio: “Julio could drift in and out, partaking of family life, and yet leading his own romantic life (he was frequently out all night). Julio could stay on the surface, where everything was fine, where the happy family watched movies and ate dinner and sat around in cozy clusters. Julio never had to look deeper and examine the foundation, never had to realize that the foundation was damaged and unsafe.” Graham has a quiet epiphany here. He is vulnerable as he realizes his life has changed, irrevocably and not for the better, and he is worse off than he realized. Whether he decides to stay in the marriage remains to be seen, though we are led to believe that he does. Graham has another unpleasant epiphany on page 261, when Heiny writes: “Suddenly he realize why life went on: because, unfortunately, that was the only direction it moved. You could keep running afer former happiness like a boulder rolling away from you, but it was pointless because that existence, the one you want, is gone forever.”

Adding to the complications of this plot is the doorman, Julio, who notices the dynamics between Audra and Graham, and has a few choice, funny observations about their marriage: Essentially, he tells Graham to “man up,” and not make such a big deal about Audra’s dalliance. This is tough advice to take, but Graham does, at least for the duration of this story.

Finally, there is some fabulous writing here, specifically when Heiny gives Graham gestures and writes about him watching Audra: “He kept cutting the skin off the sides of the pineapple, concentrating on making the knife follow the curve. He could tell she was still standing in the doorway. But when he finished with the pineapple and looked up at her, she had already turned to go, her shirt leaving an after image of red that hurt his eyes.” Notice the use of food, color, and gesture here---we see the pineapple being cut and the color red stays with us.

I’m curious what you think the outcome of this story is. Is this a couple you want to continue to read about? What about Graham’s dilemma interests you? What makes Audra such an intriguing character? Would you have liked to read more about Matthew? (I would have.) Is Julio a convincing character? What do you think happens next?

Ann Hood, Tomato Pie, Tin House, Spring 2014 (elevation of object, our hero goes on a journey, looks back at her past)

I have to admit that what initially attracted me to this story was the idea of reading about and possibly making potato pie. But I also like Ann Hood, especially her essays, and when I read the first paragraph in which Hood writes about the great, late food writer and novelist, Laurie Colwin, I knew I would want to read this piece through.

This essay is a bit long but there is some wonderful, vivid writing here. “The recipe got splattered with tomato guys and mayonnaise..” is an excellent example---we have the funny, violent and refreshingly original phrase, “tomato guts.” 

Hood writes about the mechanics of making the pie: “You place a layer of biscuit crust in a pie pan, cover it with sliced fresh tomatoes, sprinkle with chopped basil and top with cheddar cheese…” As Frank Conroy once said, process is always interesting and that includes the process of cooking. The mechanics of doing anything that requires concentration---planting flowers, climbing a mountain, sewing on a button, decorating a cake---can be made to symbolize an entire life’s effort and the object itself can go on the journey that the protagonist is also making. In fact, sometimes the object’s journey is more magnificent and vivid than the character’s and we end up loving and longing for that object as if it were a character. 

Hood made that tomato pie over and over until she got it just right. Hood ends that paragraph (on page 210) by writing, “The smells of that pie on a hot summer day make you feel dizzy, so intoxicating are they.” You’ve probably heard me say this before in class, and I know it sounds cynical, but your reader wants the experience of being drunk/intoxicated/high and you will give him/her a vicarious thrill by describing the effect of being intoxicated by food/drink/smokes/drugs/love in your work.

But of course, this piece is not just about getting tomato pie just right or the joys of making it and eating it. If that’s all it were, it would appear in Bon Appetit or Cook’s Illustrated.  This piece is about Hood’s evolution as a writer, her family’s vacations at the shore, her desire to emulate Laurie Colwin and become a published author, and most of it all, it is about Hood’s past, how she got through it and what she made of it. But one writer’s desire to emulate another writer is an old story. Hood cleverly gives the story a twist by inserting the making of tomato pie into it. She elevates the pie as an object and uses the pie to expand and narrate her story. 

And though her infatuation with Colwin is interesting, it is her description of her own family, specifically on page 212, that brings this piece to life. Notice the details of food, weather, books, the specifics of what her mother did at work. This is rich, thick writing: “Growing up, I spent most of my summers sweating in our backyard or watching game shows on TV, sitting in front of a fan and eating root beer popsicles. My mother worked at a candy factory, stuffing plastic Christmas stockings with cheap toys and candy all summer. But she got Fridays off, and she and my aunt would load us kids into one of their station wagons and drive down to Scarborough Beach, where my cousin Gloria Jean and I sat on a separate blanket and pretended not to know the rest of the family. We had plans, big plans. To leave Rhode Island and our blue collar, immigrant Italian roots behind. Even at the beach, we toted Dickens or Austen, big fat books that helped the hot humid summer pass.”

Hood also deftly uses smells in this piece. Notice on page 213: “I also remember the smells of steam heat and wet wool, the way the audience listened, rapt.” Don’t forget to use smell in your own work.

Finally, Hood beautifully writes about her family in this piece, and this is ultimately what gives the piece some heft: She is writing about loss here, the loss of family, the fading feeling of safety and happiness that children feel when their parents are nearby, and she writes about it beautifully even as she casually writes about food. On page 213, she writes: “We ate tomato pies with grilled cheeseburgers and hot dogs, and Italian sausages, my father manning the grill with a cold beer in his hand..” She mentions her mother’s poker club, Auntie Dora’s Italian meatloaf, etc. By page 214, she has killed all these characters off, and though that sounds callous and blunt, please notice that this loss of the people/characters she loves (and we have come to love) moves us as readers. We have come to know these characters and feel attached to them because Hood wrote about them with fondness and in detail, and she makes us feel sad about the characters she’s lost and prompts us to think about our own families and friends, perhaps prompting us to revisit the art of spending time with and remembering the people (and characters if we are writing and reading about them) we love(d). 

Hood writes these beautiful lines on page 214: “There are have been so many things I didn’t take good enough care of, or hold on to tight enough, because we don’t really believe we will lose them, do we? Somehow, we are always stunned that things go away, disappear, die. People too. They leave us and despite knowing better, their leaving is always a surprise.” 

Don’t be afraid to write movingly and slowly about people/place/things and pets that you have lost. Your reader wants to share that loss with you. Killing off a vital, vibrant character is an effective way to move your reader.