The Knitting Story, by Tara Ison

Tara Ison,  The Knitting Story, from Tin House, Issue #64, Summer 2015

Ison is a short story writer, novelist, screenwriter and essayist. She has a short story collection, Ball, coming out this fall from Soft Skull Press. She teaches fiction at the Arizona State University.

First, let’s look at craft. Note that every paragraph begins, “She knits.” Think about using two or three words like this repeatedly in your writing. It creates a subtle thread (forgive the pun) in your work.

On the face of it, this initially appears to be a lovely story that has three themes: The lifelong process of looking for love, our heroine's love and knowledge of knitting, and the way in which knitting both saves and possibly ruins this unnamed protagonist’s life. But like all great stories, this story becomes darker and more complicated as we read on, and the ending has a surprising, sharp sting to it.

The story opens semi-sweetly, with a girl learning to knit to please her mother and to keep herself occupied as a child. (Though even in the first paragraph, we see that the mother’s carefully knitted socks have been destroyed by a  careless boyfriend.) But the glory of this story ultimately lies in the process of knitting, which is revealed to be a precise, soothing, satisfying ritual that gives the child comfort and an increasing sense of satisfaction, and ultimately becomes a way for her to create gifts for people she loves, or, and this is the interesting part, possibly hates. 

As the story progresses, and the protagonist’s skill as a knitter increases, the rhythm of the knitting accelerates and we learn that knitting is also used as a cover to reveal the protagonist’s failed efforts to become close to people, and also to hide her rage and sadness over her frustrations with her mother, her friends, her lovers, her father and ultimately herself, as she finds herself knitting herself into a shroud.

Let’s look at the first three paragraphs. (I suggest you type out the first three paragraphs yourself to see how the author established rhythm, tone and point of view.) In every short story,  essay or book, the first two or three paragraphs are crucial because as we know from our own experiences as readers, if the first few paragraphs don’t grab you, you probably won’t read on. In these three paragraphs, love, betrayal and rejection are subtly revealed through the gorgeous, detailed descriptions of how and why a girl learns to knit:

“She knits as a clumsy, pudge-fingered child, because her mother loves to tell her once-upon-a-time story of knitting socks for her college boyfriend, painstaking argyle wool socks for the princely young man who carelessly thrust his foot through the sock toe after all that labor the mother did to show and prove her love, because that was how. She knits because her mother is at a luncheon or antiques show or mahjongg and Can’t the child occupy and entertain herself, and so after school the child trudges to the craft shop and spends her allowance coins on a Let’s Get Knitting! booklet  and a fuzzy pink yarn like a long bubble gum worm, and a pair of pointy twig-thick needles she is a little frightened of, because if you walk around with them and trip you could poke out an eye , and on the floor of her canopy-bed bedroom she teaches herself how to cast on, how to loop little nooses of yarn through other loops, scoop the alive loop through, and let the old loop fall away and die, loop loop loop, your rows like little crooked cornfields growing, and then you cast off and are done and look what you have made and can do, ta-da!”

"She knits gifts for her mother---a pot holder, a hot pad, a long tubular scarf, everything a wormy fuzzy pink---because that is how, and her mother exclaims with joy at her own sweet misshapeness, and spills bloody meat juice on the hot pad and scorches the pot holder and cannot wear the scarf because of its so-beautiful but impractical color, but is so very proud and What else can the child make, What else can she do?”

“She knits because she grows absorbed by the taming of chaotic string into structure the geometry of a messy line turned to a tidy grid, and her fingers slim to deft and she buys slenderer needles and more levant yarn and her after-schools and weekends are now so very busy herself, in her room, with all those squares. Square, square, square, a big gift pile of them, this is what she can make and do.”

The beauty of this short story is that the more we read, the more we learn about the intricacies of knitting, as well as the intricacies of human relationships.

This is a fast, intense, short story. What Ison did so well here is to weave (forgive the pun) her knowledge of knitting with the details of her unnamed protagonist’s life. In five pages, the author rushes through the highlights and lowlights of the protagonist’s life: The pleasures and perils of childhood, high school and college, followed by the limitations of and envious feelings inherent to friendship, the mysteries of failed romances, the grief of tending to friends with cancer, the grief over a father’s aging body and ultimate death, and ultimate the anxiety and realization that she has been knitting herself into  her own imminent death. 

But Ison does it brilliantly and she does so by embracing the practice of what Frank Conroy used to tell his writing workshop students: Process. Process is always interesting. Here the process of knitting is fascinating. It saves the protagonist, it allows her to make gifts of love and healing for friends, and it also allows her to see how she really feels about her lovers and her mother. But does it also keep her sequestered away from other people, and give her something to do that makes her feel productive, when in fact, it simply ensures that she stay busy alone? The fact that this story generates multiple questions means the author is doing her work and has created a layered, complex story that is really a journey to discover what the protagonist’s struggle really is.

One question we always ask in class is: What is this story really about? I think this story, ultimately, is about being flawed and utterly human, and trying to create something positive, but perhaps also destructive, in the process.

The last few lines of this story upend much of what has come beforehand. The protagonist has knit babies’ caps, caps for friends with cancer, blankets for abandoned infants. She seems charitable. And yet. How do you feel about the ending? Is this a tragedy, ultimately, with the protagonist comparing herself to the villainous, vengeful Madame Defarge from A Tale of Two Cities, who knit the names of people she intended to kill or have killed? Look at the last paragraph.

“She knits and knits like Madame Defarge in her chair, content in the breeze of the blade, knits until she feels the blood has risen warm to her ankles and it is suddenly, surprisingly, her turn now, sees she has blindly knitted herself into the wooly smothering thing that will bag her own cold twiggy bones, and that is all she has ever made, or done.” 

This ending stops you in your tracks and makes you think, What was this story really about? I think it commands a second read, a sign of excellent writing.