SYCAMORE REVIEW » FICTION

I Am Not What I Once Was: J. A. Tyler’s A Man of Glass and All the Ways We Have Failed

Sycamore — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:08:43 +0000

By David Blomenberg, Sycamore Review Contributor

J. A. Tyler has quite an astonishing number of works out recently, including INCONCEIVABLE WILSON, which was recently excerpted in PANK magazine, In Love with a Ghost, and, among other works, two chapbooks, and has no fewer than three books due out this year. What I’ve read of Wilson’s work focuses on the fragility of self, its parts, its dismantling. His most recent book A Man of Glass & The Ways We Have Failed shares this theme. “I remain, remainders,” the speaker in INCONCEIVABLE WILSON says, “the parts, pieces. I am dismantled. Tools and instruments and me taken apart.”

Even the genre Tyler writes in—he terms his longer works novel(la)s—dovetails with that sense of fractured identity. A Man of Glass… centers on one character’s point of view like a novella. It has stanzas instead of paragraphs, and is it lineated like poetry or not? A Man of Glass… can be seen as a novel planted in the unsteady ground between novella and poetry. It’s an interesting form that we’ve been seeing more of lately: in addition to Tyler’s works, other works in this form include We Take Me Apart by Molly Gaudry and Culture of One, from the ever-prolific Alice Notley. In all of these, identity never strays from the center of the frame.

In A Man of Glass…, something is wrong; the love’s gone sour between the unnamed man and woman. The man still loves but now, it seems, she does not. She washes her hair with cherry shampoo up above him in her apartment while he stands there, dejected, in the street. The stage, surprisingly, is then set for scenarios that remind me of the sonnet cycles of the 1600s. In fact, this book follows the same fever-chart course some of those poem sequences do, with rising and falling levels of desperation. There is denial: “You see now what you have done to me…how you have made me so different that I can’t even exist anymore.” But has she done this? The same accusation is leveled in Michael Drayton’s Idea, a sonnet cycle from 1593: “My heart was slain…who should I think the murder should commit? …It slew itself…”

The tension ratchets higher. The man alters himself to bring her back. She doesn’t speak. He changes, again and again and again, to get her attention, to perhaps rekindle her attraction to him. He becomes a string of beads, a spotted egg, a wineglass, a rainbow. Through a bewildering series of changes, the main character tries to metamorphose to win her, and each metamorphosis is inadequate: “Mourning is a river that never changes, but always changes and never cries itself out.” In many ways, the situation is more heartbreaking than that of the sonneteers who tried but never won. The speaker in Drayton’s sonnet cycle realizes his folly early: “Upon your lips the scarlet drops are found/ And in your eye the boy who did the murder.” In J. A. Tyler’s latest book, the main character teeters closer to the edge. In off-kilter and lacerating language, Tyler’s A Man of Glass… follows the track of a man who had won but now has lost.

A Man of Glass & All the Ways We Have Failed

Fugue State Press

ISBN 978-1-879193-24-6

112 pp.

$12 paperback

BINOCULAR VISION a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle fiction award!!!

Sycamore — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:02:49 +0000

by Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor

It’s been exhausting trying to keep up with Edith Pearlman lately. She contributed a wonderful story, “Last Words,” in issue 23.1 before publishing her collection of new and selected stories Binocular Vision. After receiving the Pen/Malamud Prize for short fiction, she was nominated as a National Book Award finalist. The finalists for the National Book Critics Circle awards were announced this weekend and guess who is a finalist: Edith Pearlman. Pick up your copy of issue 23.1 today and read “Last Words” to see what all the fuss is about.

If you live within shouting distance of West Lafayette, be sure to join us on Tuesday, March 27th when we’ll be honored to have Edith Pearlman on campus for a reading and Q&A session. I have a feeling we’ll have a lot to talk about! Find a preview of the conversation with our review of Binocular Vision and interview with Edith Pearlman from last year.

At Home in America: A Review of Shannon Cain’s THE NECESSITY OF CERTAIN BEHAVIORS

Sycamore — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 13:09:07 +0000

by Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor

Thursday, December 1st, Shannon Cain will be taking part in the Purdue Visiting Writers Series on the Purdue campus in West Lafayette, Indiana. Please join us at the Krannert Auditorium, Room 140 at 7:30. Shannon Cain will be reading from her debut collection The Necessity of Certain Behaviors. The event is free and open to the public.

Jane, the protagonist of “This is How it Starts,” the first story in Shannon Cain’s debut collection The Necessity of Certain Behaviors and winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize from University of Pittsburgh Press, is a girlfriend to both a married lawyer, who happens to be man, and a doctor, who happens to be a woman. She is also an artist living in her family’s rent-stabilized apartment in Manhattan who paints on panes of translucent glass. In order to create a textured still-life or landscape or a portrait, Jane must paint backwards: “she must paint her foregrounds first, top layers before bottom.” Like Jane, Shannon Cain has put considerable effort into “planning her layers” and in each of the nine stories in her debut he has created textured moments of beauty, stark landscapes and a stunning collection of uniquely American lives.

The textures in Cain’s stories are built upon familiar themes that are juxtaposed to one another in idiosyncratic ways. Sexual identities are challenged, hearts are broken, parents struggle to care for their children without letting go of themselves, and children are left to confront a world changed after the death of their parents. These textures can take a tragic or humorous turn depending on the story, but Cain’s tone is always sincere, honest and generous to her characters that seem to make and get into more trouble in this collection than most writers could manage in a full career of books.

A young woman moves to L.A. to connect with her father, who happens to be Bob Barker from The Price is Right, and finds unexpected love and the truth about her childhood. The wife of a mid-size city’s mayor is caught masturbating in the steam room of a local gym and she must confront not only her vulnerabilities, but those of her husband and their daughter, who has been damaged in ways the mother had never taken the time to notice. “The Queer Zoo” is the story of a heterosexual man working at The Queer Zoo, “home to the world’s largest collection of homosexual, bisexual, and transgender animals.” The Queer Zoo is not only the second busiest attraction in Arizona, behind only the Grand Canyon, but it is also forces the protagonist, Sam, to ask if he has ever really been free.

In the O. Henry Prize final story, “The Necessity of Certain Behaviors,” Lisa escapes from the city on an eco-tourism trip and finds herself in a mountaintop village where she no longer has to “identify” as straight, gay or bisexual as she did in the city and is “thrilled by the jolt of it and by her own desire.” Lisa stays in the village indefinitely and “she no longer knows the difference between lost and found.” She finds contentment, not confusion, in the village that has “made itself available to her.”

All of the stories in the collection call into question the necessity of certain behaviors that the characters act upon in order to find freedom, love, or redemption. More often than not, the behaviors the characters believe are necessary are misleading, if not self-destructive. In the end, Cain forgives the bad behavior of her characters, but she never lets them off the hook. Charlie, the protagonist of the standout story “Juniper Beach,” abandons her longtime girlfriend after her parents die in a tragically silly car accident. With her inheritance, Charlie buys an old RV and searches for a sense of purpose and herself on American highways, documenting sites of other horrific automobile accidents. In the middle of a strip mall parking lot at sunrise, Charlie admits to herself that “she expected to feel different. She expected to know more about where she was going.” In that way, she is not different from the rest of the characters in the book or from those of us lucky enough to read this collection who are trying to “feel at home in America, rootless yet ensconced, held in place by her movement across strips of landscape.”

The Necessity of Certain Behaviors
Shannon Cain
University of Pittsburgh Press – September 2011
144 pages / $24.95

Total Absorption and Abandon in LAMB: An interview with debut novelist Bonnie Nadzam

Sycamore — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 00:08:33 +0000

by Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor

Bonnie Nadzam was born in Cleveland, went to high school in suburban Chicago, and has moved continually westward since then. She studied English literature and environmental studies at Carleton College, and earned an MA and PhD from the University of Southern California. Her fiction and poetry have been published in The Kenyon Review, The Mississippi Review, Story Quarterly, Callaloo, The Alaska Quarterly Review, and others. She taught at Colorado College, where she served for two years as the Daehler Fellowin Creative Writing. She is married to her childhood love and lives with him in the Rocky Mountains.

Be sure to read our review of Bonnie Nadzam’s debut novel Lamb here.

Sycamore Review: One of the most striking aspects of Lamb is the narrator who occasionally steps in to introduce Lamb as “our man” and Tommie as “our girl.” At one point, the narrator even invites the reader to pause to contemplate how Tommie’s parents and friends are reacting to her sudden disappearance. In a separate interview, I saw that you refer to this point of view as not strictly third person, but closer to a distant first person. Did you find that you had to utilize the distant first (or extremely close third) in order to inhabit the character because a straight first person point of view would be too daunting for a character as deluded, manipulative and confused as David Lamb is in the book?

Bonnie Nadzam: When I wrote Lamb I was reading a lot of older literature, including many texts we now not only anachronistically call novels, but even novels with experimental narrators. At the time some of these books were written, however—like Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones—the aim was not to write a realistic novel (whatever that means) or one that experimented with an as-yet unrealized “realism”; rather, the literary aims varied with the philosophical, political and spiritual backgrounds of each author. Fielding was a skeptic, and I found myself greatly intrigued by the way he deliberately inserted narrators/essayists/playwrights into his histories, essays and plays. He did so, I believe, not in any bizarrely early post-modern game, but because he was trying to instruct his readers and viewers how to read and weigh information, especially when mediated by some authority we perhaps ought not trust. Without the context of the time in which he was writing, it’s easy to criticize him for his “garrulous narrators,” for “shabby writing.” He is even still disliked because that quality of total absorption while reading (more possible with those who came later, like Austen) is not so possible—and I find that dislike so interesting.

Such absorption was then and has sometimes now been criticized too, for being dangerous (how those shameless women of the late Eighteenth Century neglected their duties of housewifery to read their novels!). I was equally intrigued—for personal reasons as much as scholarly reasons—by the very real danger of this total absorption and abandon that can happen when a story is really good/seductive. Or, since as a country we don’t read very much, insert “TV” or “video games” or their equivalent for what long ago were corrupting gothic novels…

While it may seem like a distastefully clever game to have taken Fielding’s lead on some of this in my own manuscript, it was in fact because I did not have the heart to present a novel or story to the reader “as if it were true” in the same manner that Lamb usually presents stories to Tommie. Of course we’re much more sophisticated/practiced readers of fiction than were readers two hundred years ago; still, I wanted there to be that gap, that toe-hold for the reader, should he or she want to stop (in a way Tommie does less and less as the story progresses) and say: hey, wait a minute. This story, however lovely and/or seductive, is being mediated by a person with motives, with limitations. Who is telling this story and why? What am I to take for truth (within the fictional story), and what am I to consider simply rhetorical manipulation designed to “suck me in” to the story? What are the essential differences among lying, truth-telling, lying in a work of fiction, truth-telling in a work of fiction, and self-deception across the board? If Lamb were a less pathetic/criminal character, I may have bypassed all these questions, formally. As it was I felt compelled to give Fielding a nod, and the reader some respect and wiggle space for his/her own judgment.

Sycamore Review: Early in the book, Lamb describes his cabin in the mountains to Tommie and I made a mental note of how deluded the pastoral scene he described to her was, but was taken aback when they finally made it to the cabin and it was just as he described it to her. The moment forced me to take stock of just how honest Lamb had been with Tommie throughout the book. Deluded and manipulative for sure, but their relationship is also honest in a way most relationship couldn’t be, and probably shouldn’t be. At any point in the drafting process did you worry if the reader might sympathize with Lamb more than he deserves? What is the responsibility, if any, of the writer to judge a character like Lamb, or is that the reader’s judgment alone?

Bonnie Nadzam: I don’t feel qualified to speak clearly or fairly about writers’ responsibilities other than mentioning the importance of bearing witness without flinching. I think if one examined the rhetoric of Lamb carefully, he or she would find a lot of authorial judgment. An embarrassing amount of it, really, tucked formally into the book no less humanly than in Lamb’s own manipulative games. I tried to minimize it not because I thought or think an artist has some big bad set of responsibilities, but because I wanted to try to erase my own personal motives from the storytelling as much as possible. The more I revised, the less I judged Lamb as all-bad and Tommie as all-good. I don’t think I have the authority to make these judgments let alone impose them on others.

Sycamore Review: After Lamb and Tommie arrive at the cabin they go for a hike and we learn that Lamb “smelled the sun block and his own sweat and knew that the end of the story had already begun.” There is also a recurring theme of a young girl saving an old red horse that begins with a story Lamb tells about the two taking the elevator down from the top of a city office building where “outside on the street was even worse. Steel cars and concrete and noise and girl leaned over the horse and she promised to get him home.” Lamb is obviously at the end of his rope when the story begins and is resigned that his story will end, but he also believes that if he can save Tommie from herself, then maybe she can save him as well, but only if they leave the city. In your mind, is there a correlation between the corruptions inherent to life in and around a city with the corruption of children, specifically young girls in this country? There is a certain tension in the novel based on the fact that I didn’t want Lamb and Tommie to travel any further west because of the frightening potential of their fledgling relationship, but I couldn’t help but sympathize with the Lamb’s need to return to nature and desire to introduce nature to Tommie. How cognizant were you of these two opposing forces as Lamb and Tommie ventured west?

Bonnie Nadzam: Unfortunately I don’t think the corruption of children is particular to any region of the country, or, indeed, to any country. My older sister works with abused children, and I was with her once in a very nice shoe store in the rural western town where she lives. She was taking shoe donations for these children, and the owner of this particular store was very receptive and looking forward to helping out/ collecting shoes. A woman who happened to be shopping in the store at the time was sincerely surprised, then shocked, then visibly upset. “What?” she said. “That sort of thing happens to children in this town?”

I think in terms of Lamb, the West is a place where he believes he might yet be able to salvage something of his masculinity and see himself as a hero in a story about good and evil. He’s pretty bereft when we meet him, and has this great opportunity, really, to own up and take responsibility. Instead, he starts weaving a new narrative that is utterly like the old one that has just unraveled. In this new narrative-about-David-Lamb, being a good force in Tommie’s life relies on being out West, for he convinces himself he can show her a “better” America she wouldn’t necessarily get to experience without the help of his own time and resources.

Like you, I sympathize with Lamb on some of these counts. It’s as much a heartbreak that the West and the wildness he is seeking are already gone as it is that he’s hurting Tommie so irreparably. I think at his best he really believes there’ll be some healing power of “returning to nature,” but it’s not something one can easily do in the U.S. , and certainly not something Lamb and Tommie do. I don’t think they are any better or worse off out there than they are in her impoverished Chicago suburb. There’s no new horizon except an internal one, and it’s precisely this that Lamb is running from.

Sycamore Review: Many readers of Sycamore Review are also writers and I wondered if you could share a little on your process of writing your debut novel. How many drafts did you write of Lamb? Was a huge rewrite ever necessary (POV, cut characters, setting changes)? What advice did you receive during the drafting process that proved the most helpful?

Bonnie Nadzam: There was a lot of re-vision in the process—tons. And I mean re-visioning, not editing or proofreading. Whenever I got stuck, I printed out the manuscript, deleted it from the computer, and started re-typing in a new blank document. Something about that wide-open blank page—it’s so unconcerned. Such a good listener. It sits there with its eyebrows raised, its face open, ready for anything. The all-accepting blank. I did get awfully sore hands and arms though. Too much typing.

I think the best advice I had when writing this manuscript had little to do with writing, per se. I remember the time as one thick with reading, and self-doubt, and self-incrimination, and shame, and a lot of worry that I was wasting my time and fooling myself. Not about being a writer, which I still don’t really consider myself, what’s one book, but about writing this novel as a way of getting closer to whatever it is we seek when we open a book of poetry. The advice was twofold, and I must precede it by saying while it sounds a little hippie-dippie, the advice was serious, and I pass it on seriously: Love yourself. Trust yourself. The writing, publication—that’s all secondary stuff. I think.

Grotesque and Lovely: A review of Bonnie Nadzam’s LAMB

Sycamore — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:04:05 +0000

by Conor Broughan

When your kitchen is a mess—a plates-piled-high-in-the-sink, socks-getting-stuck-on-sticky-spots mess—how do you react? If you’re anything like me, a messy kitchen means that you clean up the coffee table in the living room or pick up clothes that have collected at the foot the bed. Rather than tackling dirty dishes, the grime on the sink, or whatever it is that has been growing behind the stove, I project the mess onto other portions of the apartment, allowing me to clean a minimal amount while still feeling accomplished for tackling a chore.

When we first meet David Lamb, the fifty-four year-old protagonist of Bonnie Nadzam’s beautiful, unsettling, and stunning debut novel Lamb, he has just buried his father, has recently divorced his wife, and has been forced to take a leave of absence from his job because of an affair he can’t seem to end with a younger colleague. In a word, David Lamb is a mess—a plates-piled-so-precariously-high-you’d-be-better-off-buying-a-new-set-of-dishes-at-K-Mart mess.

Early in the novel, when David Lamb’s work partner, Wilson, tells Lamb that he’s “kind of made a mess of things here,” Lamb acknowledges as much by saying “it’s been one thing after another.” To say that’s an understatement is an understatement. With a seemingly endless stream of manipulations and self-delusions, David Lamb has created an epic and unfathomable mess of his life. Rather than try to clean it up, he projects that mess onto someone else, so he can clean up her mess and accomplish a chore, a good deed. Enter Tommie.

Tommie is also a mess, but she hasn’t made one of herself. She is an unattractive and unpopular eleven-year-old. Her mother works all day and she doesn’t get along with her stepfather in their small suburban Chicago apartment. When her friends dare her to ask a stranger for a cigarette in a liquor store parking lot, and that stranger happens to be David Lamb, a strange, manipulative, unnerving and oddly genuine relationship is born: “Scrawny white arms and legs stuck out of her clothes. The shorts hung around her pelvic bones and her stomach stuck out like a dirty spotted white sheet. It was grotesque. It was lovely.” Nadzam not only has an eye for perfect though unflattering descriptions of her characters, she also possesses a keen eye for beautiful, lush descriptions of the natural world, especially after Lamb convinces the impressionable Tommie to join him on a week-long trip to his dilapidated cabin in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Just as Lamb convinces Tommie that the trip will let her into “this country’s secret heart,” Nadzam invites the reader to look into the country’s secret heart with lines that describe an America that is disappearing: “Outside the truck, before and beside and behind her, an endless span of blond grass and silver bitterbrush and greasewood and sage.”

Lamb abducts the willing Tommie and they strike out west. Outside of her dysfunctional home, Lamb believes he’ll show the self-conscious Tommie her own worth: “It was like he found a loose bolt out there in the world and had carefully turned it back into place.” The tension inherent in a story about a fifty-four year-old manipulating an impressionable eleven-year-old on a road trip builds as they drive further and further west of the Chicago suburbs: Will Lamb take the relationship too far? Will they be caught? Will Tommie realize the trouble she is in and find help? But Nadzam doesn’t rely on external tensions or melodrama to drive the momentum of the novel; rather, she lets the conflict between Lamb and Tommie, and Lamb and himself create tense scenes where by and large nothing really happens.

One of the most memorable aspects of Lamb is the sometimes obtrusive, always observant, and downright beguiling narration. In an interview, Nadzam herself has described the one-of-a-kind third-person narrator as more of a distant first-person point of view. The narrator introduces Tommie as “our girl,” David as “our man” and invites the reader to “pause” in order to contemplate how Tommie’s parents and friends are reacting to her disappearance. This manipulative narration—not so unlike the hyper-observant narrators in Terrence Malick’s films—may open up too many distracting questions for some readers who will wonder just who the narrator is: is it Tommie years later? Lamb himself? But for me, the narrator does not to distract; it adds a new layer of tension that implicates the reader in the action of the novel, becoming less a voyeur than an accomplice in the backseat of David Lamb’s truck.

With more questions than answers, Lamb demands a second or third reading to take in the lush descriptions, striking dialogue, and multiple layers of tension. As unsettling, terrifying and uncomfortable it is to be a willing participant in the backseat of Lamb’s truck while reading the novel, the view is undoubtedly amazing and worth revisiting, “all of it vast and unchanging, as though Lamb and the girl were at rest and not rushing west, a diffuse and unmappable destination.”

Lamb
Bonnie Nadzam
Other Press – September 2011
275 pages / $15.95 Trade Paperback

Edith Pearlman’s BINOCULAR VISION a National Book Award Finalist

Sycamore — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 20:16:05 +0000

by Conor Broughan

It’s been a big year for Issue 23.1 contributor Edith Pearlman. In January, Lookout Books published Binocular Vision, a career spanning collection of new and selected stories. In June, she received the prestigious Pen/Malamud Award by the Pen/Faulkner Foundation. Today, the National Book Foundation announced that Binocular Vision is finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. Congratulations!

Oh yeah…she also contributed her wild and wonderful “Last Words” in Sycamore Review’s Winter/Spring 2011 issue. Be sure to check out our review of Binocular Vision and interview with Edith Pearlman before you pick up your own copy of Issue 23.1 here.

Joe B. Sills: A Minefield of Concussive but Potentially Enlightening Moments

Sycamore — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 12:00:21 +0000

Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor

The editors at Sycamore Review were thrilled when judge Antonya Nelson chose Joe B. Sills story “The Duck” as the 2011 Wabash Fiction prize winner. Nelson said of the story, “This story stands out for being both entirely original, and entirely paying homage to the father of short story writers, Anton Chekhov. It looks backward, it looks forward. It is spare, clever, elusive, and utterly satisfying.” We couldn’t agree more. We wanted to catch up with Joe and ask him a few questions about his story, Chekhov, and the relationship between medicine and writing. Read an excerpt of the Wabash prize winning story here.

Sycamore Review: One thing that became quite clear after reading your Wabash Fiction Contest-winning story “The Duck” and taking a look at Contributor’s Note is that you have a clear and frustrating lack of ambition. Not only are you currently in medical school, but I understand that you took a break to attend the MFA program at UVa, correct? Can you discuss how writing and medicine connect for you personally? Do they take up the same mental space, or do you think about your stories when you are making your rounds and think about patients when you sit down to write a story? And, oh yeah, how the hell do you find time to write?

Joe B. Sills: I did take a leave from my medical school at Tufts to go to UVa, and now I’m back in medical school again. Medicine and literature usually hang out in different parts of my brain. I used to think of them as roommates who get along fine but don’t have much to say to each other. That’s begun to change now that I’m spending more time in the hospital, and the occasional thought will pass between medicine and writing if it has certain properties that I can describe only through example.

One of my patients was this elderly woman, about whom I will be slightly untruthful to protect her identity. She was hospitalized for pneumonia, and my resident needed to draw a blood gas which can be painful. The nurse was holding down this poor woman while the resident hunted for her radial artery with a syringe, and I was trying to distract her with inane questions about her life, thinking that would helpful somehow. She’s this tiny, frail lady who’s writhing and moaning and I’m standing at the foot of her bed and asking about her cats. At some point she must’ve recognized how weak I appeared, and that her pain had given her a power over me, and she began telling me this Flannery O’Connor-ish story about her next-door neighbors who got into an argument in her driveway, and one beat the other unconscious with a shovel. She watched this happen through her living room window, and she shared this experience with me in an effort to captivate and calm me, and in doing so she was calmed, and the resident found her artery and drew the blood gas.

By the time I needed to leave her room, she hadn’t finished the story – she’d only gotten as far has the neighbor with the shovel noticing her at the window. For mostly selfish reasons, I told her that I’d check in on her tomorrow to see how she was doing and to hear the rest. But the following morning I learned that she decompensated overnight and died. Since then, I’ve had this story fragment embedded in my head, and I can still see that woman and her neighbor locking eyes through the window and wondering what will happen next. I was already somewhat aware of how a story retains its velocity even after its point of origin is gone, but I’d never witnessed that concept at close range.

Anyhow, that’s a raw, unprocessed experience, and I don’t know if I can write it into something good enough to be of emotional value. I don’t even know if the act of writing it will refine my understanding of how stories are created and shared and survive, or if I’ll just spin my wheels for a few thousand words before moving onto something else. Either way, the point I’m trying to make is that medicine is a minefield of concussive but potentially enlightening moments, and writing has always been my best shot at clarity.

I have no writing habit, no daily system. I make time at the expense of whatever errands I’ve decided to ignore. My mom made the mistake of gifting me an orchid that I’ve starved to death. There’s a petrified brick of clothes in my hamper. A horde of spiders nests in the space between my storm windows. But I can live with a dead plant, and I can wear the same pants tomorrow, and those spiders can stay as long as they want if that’s what it takes for me to squeeze in another hour.

Sycamore Review: An abridged list of the company you will soon be keeping as a doctor/writer (no pressure): Anton Chekhov, W. Somerset Maugham William Carlos Williams, Walker Percy, Chris Adrian, Louis Ferdinand Celine, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to name a few. Not to put you on the spot (but, in this case, you kind you put yourself on the spot), but I wonder if you can make a few grand, sweeping claims on why doctors seem to write such great fiction and poetry—just a few.

Joe B. Sills: That is very, very generous of you to think of those authors as my company. Chris Adrian is a living hero. I came upon his fiction around the time I realized I wanted to be a writer and a doctor but would be unable to abandon one for the other. It was a small relief to know that at least it was possible for someone to do both.

It’s also very, very generous to say that doctors write great fiction and poetry. I’ve read brilliant work by physicians, but I don’t believe that being a physician makes for great writing. Most of the best writers I know are shoe saleswomen, part-time waiters, or working for peanuts at lit mags. I know a wonderful poet who castrates wild horses in Wyoming, but I can’t claim to know if or why horse castrators write such great poetry. I think of Chekhov as a gifted writer who happened to be a doctor, and had he not been a doctor I’m sure we’d still be reading him over a hundred years after he died.

Sycamore Review: Speaking of Chekhov: Not only is “The Duck” inspired by the stories of Anton Chekhov, but the protagonist is young Anton himself. Antonya Nelson, the 2011 Wabash Fiction judge, said of “The Duck:” “This story stands out for being both entirely original, and entirely paying homage to the father of short story writers, Anton Chekhov. It looks backward, it looks forward. It is spare, clever, elusive, and utterly satisfying.”

Did this story begin as you trying to pay homage to Chekhov or was it simply a story about a young, sensitive boy who eventually announced himself to you as a young Chekhov? Did you do any research beyond reading Chekhov’s stories and possibly a biography to make the time and place feel so authentic? Did Chekhov, as far as you know, ever have a pet duck? Raymond Carver’s last published story, “Errand,” details the illness and death of Chekhov. Have you read that story and, if so, did it offer any permission for you to write a story about the young, anxious, but very much alive and awe-struck Anton Chekhov?

Joe B. Sills: About a year ago I read a collection of Chekhov’s letters, in which I discovered my favorite Chekhov quote:

“Could you write a story about a young man, the son of a serf, a one time shop assistant, choir boy, schoolboy and university student, brought up to fawn on rank, kiss the hands of priests, accept without questioning other people’s ideas, express his gratitude for every morsel of bread he eats, a young man who has been frequently whipped, who goes to give lessons without galoshes, engages in street fights, tortures animals, loves to go to his rich relations for dinner, behaves hypocritically towards God and man without the slightest excuse but only because he is conscious of his own worthlessness – could you write a story of how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself drop by drop, and how, on waking up one morning, he feels that the blood coursing through his veins is real blood and not the blood of a slave?”

I read that line, took the rest of the day off to recover, and thought, No, I couldn’t. But I also knew that I’d try anyway, and so I hammered out a series of clunkers, most of them having to do with his early successes and women troubles. Those stories didn’t turn out well, and eventually I gave up and recycled them for scrap. I don’t believe in permission when it comes to fiction, but I lacked the audacity to write about Chekhov after he had become Chekhov. Carver had earned his audacity by the time he wrote “Errand.”

I tried to put the story behind me but I’d accumulated a pile of Chekhov biographies that I was too disheartened to return to the library. Months passed, and I kept rereading the chapters about Chekhov’s childhood. That was a part of his life I felt more able to envision and imagine and manipulate. I’m not a Chekhov scholar, but I do consider myself an expert of miserable, miserable adolescence. At last I’d found a Chekhov in whom I could believe.

No, Chekhov did not have a pet duck, at least none that I know of. But when he was sent to bring a duck home for dinner, he’d torment it into quacking on the walk home, probably to let his neighbors know his family wasn’t broke yet. So a pet duck was within the realm of possibility, though I never expected it to become the story’s fulcrum. Other Chekhov lore smuggled their way into the story as well. The Taganrog official with the broom, the pair of wretched shop boys, the rat that drowned in the cask of oil; all true.

Sycamore Review: I also wondered about the point of view in this story, which is mostly limited to a close third on Anton with only a brief moment from his father, Pavel’s, perspective. However, much of the story is so deep in Anton’s consciousness that we get wonderful insights into his young and vulnerable mind, such as: “He imagines her skin on his lips and the flavor it might make on his tongue, but these thoughts catalyze a hot alchemy in his belly. It is humiliating to be taunted by this braver version of himself, and Anton replaces this feeling by counting the houses, old and welcoming like benevolent grannies.” Did you ever considered writing this in first person or perhaps at least experimenting with it to find his voice? Would it have been too daunting to write this story in first person?

Joe B. Sills: I take a crack at both the first and third person in all of my stories. In this case the first person couldn’t sustain the Chekhovian voice that I wanted to contaminate with my own. That line with the ‘houses like benevolent grannies’ is cribbed from letter that Chekhov wrote to his family while traveling outside of Taganrog when he was twenty-seven. The story is heavily ornamented with phrases in which the narrative voice is literally Chekhov’s. The first person brought me too close to the consciousness of thirteen year-old Chekhov, who would not have been as capable of such gorgeous observations as was his future self.

And you’re right; the first person was too daunting. I felt like an imposter inside Chekhov’s skin. The third person was a trick I played on myself so I’d feel as if there were a more comfortable distance between myself and Chekhov.

Sycamore Review: Between your time spent with the outstanding writers at UVa and mentors at your medical school you have been absorbing much wisdom over the past few years. Can you share with our readers a piece advice that you received that has stuck with you and that comes to mind whenever there is a blank screen in front of you?

Joe B. Sills: I am the grateful but not absorbent recipient of plenty of advice and wisdom. Maybe I will recall some of it by the time anyone reads this. So the honest answer is sorry, but no.One thing I will say is that I have nothing against blank screens. The moment before I’ve begun to write is a gift, because that means I haven’t made any mistakes yet. It’s much worse to slog through the millionth draft of a story and then realize that all you’ve done is polish a turd. And most days it’s enough of a challenge to arrive at the blank screen. If you’ve made it that far, you have my sincere congratulations.

Sycamore Review: Quick thought experiment: Your brother (or hypothetical brother) is going to be spending the next year at the international space station, alone. He only has room in his shiny space bag to bring one Chekhov story with him to keep to him company. Which story would you pack in his bag and why?

Joe B. Sills: I have a sister and we don’t even give each other anything for our birthdays. We have a tacit understanding that by not receiving a gift we are relieved of the burden of finding some doodad that the other will just throw away. So gifts meant to last a year are a little out of my league.

At UVa I taught an undergraduate fiction workshop. In each class my students discussed some canonical story, and they’d make these brilliant insights while I did my best impression of a competent instructor. But I secretly hated assigning stories because so much literature, including Chekhov, has been wasted on me in the same way. When I was in high school I was supposed to read “The Lady with the Little Dog” but I don’t think I even finished it. I hadn’t yet become the person who could recognize its peculiar magic. At UVa I pled with my students that if they hated a story, to wait a decade and try it again. I hope I didn’t cause any lasting damage.

My favorite Chekhov story is “Heartache,” but I didn’t assign it to my students. They were much brighter than I was at their age but I didn’t want to chance their apathy, which would have been like witnessing my previous apathy, and I have enough embarrassing memories.

“Heartache” – I’m reading it again now. It builds a world with perfect economy. Its comedy is one with its sorrow. Iona Potapov and his loneliness, his horse, his imbecilic fares who biff him in the neck, a beating that he hears rather than feels. The final sentences are too beautiful for me to quote without first reciting the story entire. It’s almost too good for anyone.

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Joe B. Sills is a medical student at Tufts University. He holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia, where he was a Poe/Faulkner Fellow. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, and Zoetrope, in which he was the winner of the 2010 Short Fiction Contest. His story “The Duck” was the winner of Sycamore Review’s 2011 Wabash Prize for Fiction and appeared in Issue 23.2 Summer/Fall 2011.

THE DUCK: an excerpt of the 2011 Wabash Fiction Prize story

Sycamore — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 12:00:32 +0000

by Joe B. Sills

Little by little I am entering into a fantastic world.

-Chekhov

The first snow of winter falls on The Taganrog Gymnasium for Boys. Students exit from a wide doorway, each of them uniformed in a dark blue tunic with a long row of copper buttons. A first-grader removes his cloak and sits on it, then demands that someone pull him. An icicle is plucked from the corner of a windowsill, is sucked on, stolen, and hurled at a sparrow. The Greek instructor removes half a sausage from his pocket and inspects it. He gives it a nibble and walks homeward, weaving through a row of skeletal elms.

Anton waits until there is no one left to follow him. He shapes snow into five tiny spheres and assembles them along a low railing. Once he has eaten them, he makes five more. Under white skies, the plastered walls of the Gymnasium are nearly invisible but for the black voids of its windows. In the wake of Anton’s classmates, gashes of mud seep through the thin dermis of snow.

Anton fastens his cap. His hair is recently shorn and betrays a disproportionate head. His mother has reassured him that a big brain requires a big skull. There is a boy in his class who calls him The Tadpole.

He is thirteen years old.

He is wondering if Karina will allow him to kiss her. Perhaps on the back of her hand. He might be more successful if he does not ask for her permission. Maybe she would prefer that – not to be asked. He imagines her skin on his lips and the flavor it might make on his tongue, but these thoughts catalyze a hot alchemy in his belly. It is humiliating to be taunted by this braver version of himself, and Anton replaces this feeling by counting the houses, old and welcoming like benevolent grannies. The snow has melted on the roofs of those who can afford coal.

In Karina’s yard, he finds a town official armed with a bucket and a large twig broom. The official curses and sweeps up a pile of human dung. He knocks on Karina’s door and an old grandmother answers, holding a steaming bowl.

Anton watches them from behind an unevenly clipped hedge. Karina waves to him from the window on the second floor. She mouths, “What are you doing?” The glass near her mouth blossoms in fog.

“I told the child to go to the docks, to empty it in the sea,” croons the grandmother to the official, and she hands him a piece of food that might be a fig. The official hesitates, then places it into his mouth. His face darkens. Neither he nor the grandmother acknowledges Anton as he slips between them.

The house is hot and pungent like a stranger’s breath. Karina stands at the top of the stairs in a wilted dress dotted in pills of green cotton. Her hand waits, palm-up. Anton places three kopecks upon it, then follows her into her bedroom.

“Granny is in love with him,” Karina sighs. She is two years older and half a foot taller and when she sits on her bed, Anton is witness to a naked crease of scalp. “He only humors her because she is old and will die soon. Her heart is weak and nervous, like yours.”

Anton sits beside her and sets his hand on hers. “I’m not nervous.”

“Then stop sweating on me.”

Anton wills his hand to become dry. He clears his throat, logged in mucus. Each morning, when he wakes, tears leak from his eyes. His soul was assigned a hand-me-down vessel. At night, he argues with his body, then apologizes and caresses it, trying to cheer it up. Downstairs, the official asks the grandmother for a tip.

A slender insect glides across the floor. Karina taps it dead with the toe of an exquisite slipper. She asks, “What do you do all day in school?”

“There are different classes. Mathematics, for example.”

“Is that all?”

Nothing else comes to Anton’s mind – it seems that his life has begun just now, at the moment he sat on Karina’s bed. “There is history also,” he guesses.

With a fingernail, Karina scrapes the bug from her sole. “Eight hours a day for that? Do you think that makes you smart?”

“I’m not smart,” says Anton. His stomach gurgles. Idiot, he tells it. “I don’t go everyday. I share a spot with my brother. We share the same uniform.” He picks at one of his buttons.

Privately, he has made her fall in love with him by all sorts of tactics – riches that he hasn’t earned, sonnets he hasn’t written, adventures that could never occur. He once dreamed up a series of tragic events that would deliver them into a warm carriage as an angry mob receded into the horizon. All day he has imagined Karina’s room and how she lives within it – what she does with all that time between his visits. Inking a new face on her wooden doll, drawing animals into the condensation of her window. She owns two dresses and each morning she must lay them on her bed and decide between them. She exists as a series of perfect moments until Anton arrives to contaminate them. He wishes it were possible to let others act out his desires while he watches his own life from a safe distance offstage. At school, he writes instructions for pranks on paper scraps and leaves them on the floor for his classmates to discover and perform.

He looks at Karina’s hair, fallen jagged across her back from her attempts to cut it. Maybe she will not charge him for a lock.

When he leans in to smell her, she looks at him as if he has wandered away from his caretakers. “Three more kopecks, if you want to stay.”

The butcher’s apprentice drives his hand deep into a goose. Its organs are collected in a neat pile on the table. When the apprentice has Anton’s eye, he pinches an intestine and uncoils it as if it were a skein of yarn.

Anton stands at the counter. It is smooth and smells pleasantly of brine.

“Eh?” says the butcher from a stool.

“I need a duck, but…” Anton looks upward. Three smoked ducks hang from hooks in a low ceiling and sway gently in a draft. A sign says they are thirty kopecks apiece. “I need a smaller duck.”

The butcher rises. His size is mythic. “How much do you have?”

Anton empties his pockets onto the countertop. Twenty-four kopecks. The creases of the butcher’s palms are like valleys. As the butcher sweeps the money into his hand, it assumes the value of crumbs.

“A moment,” says the butcher, and walks to the back of his store. He lowers his arms into a basket woven from strips of bark.

If Anton returns home without a smoked duck, his father will beat him. A small voice screams from the deep compartment of his heart, but Anton has disciplined himself to react to this with curiosity rather than alarm. He wonders if his father will send him to the backyard to retrieve a length of birch. Or maybe his father will use an umbrella. Maybe he will use nothing. When his father slaps him, Anton is commanded to stand to attention and look him in the face.

“Twenty-four kopecks,” says the butcher. He places a live duck on the counter. It is not fully grown, and tufts of down sprout from immaculate green feathers. Below it appears a coin-sized puddle of urine.

On the walk home, the duck is silent and purposeful, hopping over ox cart ruts. Anton guides it with a leash he has improvised from the lace of his boot.

I was robbed, thinks Anton, trying on excuses in the way ladies try hats. A tramp took everything. He hit me with a rock. Anton passes a wall of stones and considers running into it, face first. He drops the makeshift leash and prods the duck away with his toe.

Suddenly, he realizes there is nothing to worry about, that he will be beaten regardless of what he tells his father. He decides that he might as well feel relieved. He continues down the street, the duck at his heels. When it develops a limp, Anton swaddles it in his grey cloak and finds a sliver of ice embedded in the soft pad of its foot. When he touches the sliver with his finger, it melts.

“You are cured,” says Anton.

To read the rest of the story, order your copy of Issue 23.2-Summer/Fall 2011 today.

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His story “The Duck” was the winner of Sycamore Review’s 2011 Wabash Prize for Fiction and appeared in Issue 23.2 Summer/Fall 2011.

ITEMS FOR EXCHANGE: Excerpt and Author Response

Sycamore — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 10:18:32 +0000

Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor

Many readers of Sycamore Review are also writers. So we wanted to pose a few craft questions to contributor Naomi Williams that might illuminate her process and techniques when writing “Items for Exchange” which can be read in its entirety in Issue 23.2-Summer/Fall 2011.

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by Naomi J. Williams

PLAUSIBILITY

He always forgets how unpleasant the crossing from Calais is. He has never once made the trip that there wasn’t inclement weather, contrary winds and tides, unexplained delays, seasick fellow-travelers, surly packet captains, or dishonest boatmen waiting to extort the passengers ashore. This time it is all of the above, and by the time he reaches Dover, he has, of course, missed the stagecoach to London. He spends the night at the Ship Hotel, where he endures a hard, flea-ridden bed and a neighbor with a wracking cough.

It is not an auspicious start to the journey. But Paul Monneron is not given to superstition. The trials of the crossing and the Ship Hotel do not discourage him; they were what they were and are now past. The next day brings spring-like weather, a passable meal from the hotel kitchen, the stagecoach ready to leave on time, and an unsmiling but efficient coachmen who gives the correct change. The only other passenger inside the coach is a man Monneron recognizes from the packet; the poor man had been gray-skinned with nausea most of the way from France. “Well, I daresay we are being compensated for yesterday’s horrors,” the man says. Monneron nods politely although he doesn’t agree. For him, the universe is not given to compensating one for past miseries any more than it exacts payment for one’s successes. But he’s not immune to the pleasures of a smooth ride on a lovely day. The Kentish countryside, or such of it as he can see through the coach window, is charming. Once he points out the window at a large bird, white-breasted with black and white wings, perched atop a post. “Please—what do you call that?” he asks. “I do not know the word in English.”

The man leans over. “That would be an osprey, I think,” he says.

“Osprey.” It’s rare that he encounters a word in English he finds nicer than its counterpart in French. But osprey is undoubtedly lovelier than balbuzard.

The brief exchange leads inevitably to an inquiry about Monneron’s trip to London. Almost everything he says by way of reply is true: That he’s a naval engineer, that he’s leaving soon for the South Seas, that he’s going to London to make some purchases for the voyage, that he was tasked with the errand because he speaks English—“Not that my English is so good,” he adds, to which the man says, “Nonsense! You’ve hardly any accent at all.” But part of Monneron’s account is not true: That he’s in England at the behest of a Spanish merchant, Don Inigo Alvarez, with whom he’ll be sailing to the South Seas . Monneron will be sailing with neither Spaniards nor merchants. There is, in fact, no Don Inigo.

It’s a French naval expedition he represents, a voyage of exploration meant to compete with the accomplishments of the late Captain Cook, a voyage that is supposed to be secret until it departs. This excursion to London is not just a shopping trip for books and instruments. He’s supposed to find out the latest on antiscorbutics—scurvy-prevention measures—and on what items work best for trading with natives in the South Seas. For this he needs to find someone who sailed with Cook—someone both knowledgeable and willing to talk.

This is the first time he’s tried the Don Inigo story on anyone. He’s surprised by the fluency and ease with which he spouts the commingled lies and truths. He hadn’t liked the idea of traveling under false pretenses—had, in fact, challenged the need for secrecy at all, and when the Minister of the Navy dismissed his query with an impatient wave of his beruffled hand, had considered turning the mission down. Considered it, but not seriously or for very long. There was no question of jeopardizing his place on the expedition. He would have stood on his head before the court of Versailles if required. Still, when the Spanish merchant ruse was first concocted, he’d burst out laughing. “Don Inigo Alvarez?” he’d cried. “It’s like something out of a play.” But the Minister held firm: “People are inclined to believe what they hear,” he said. “Speak with assurance, and no one will question you.” So far, at least, he has proved right: Monneron’s companion nods, interested, impressed, and apparently convinced.

FIVE NIGHTS’ ADVANCE

The stagecoach arrives in London the following evening, and Monneron secures lodgings with a Mrs. Towe, recommended to him by his brother Louis, who often travels to London on business. The house smells unaccountably of stale cider, but it meets Monneron’s most basic requirements—clean bed, convenient location, quiet landlady—and a couple of unusual ones—first, the absence of other lodgers, and second, a windowless storage room to which only he and Mrs. Towe will have a key.

Before going to sleep, he calculates his expenses since landing in Dover: a night’s stay and meals at the Ship Hotel, then 16s 8d for the stagecoach, plus the fee for his baggage and a tip for the driver, not to mention a half-crown for every meal and one night’s lodging en route, and now, five nights’ paid in advance to Mrs. Towe. He’s spent almost all of the English currency the Minister gave him before he left. His first task the next day will be to go to the bank. So far he’s had few choices about his expenditures, but now that he’s in London, he’ll be faced with myriad decisions, most of which will involve money. He can’t spend too much. But it might be worse to spend too little. He doesn’t wish to squander the Ministry’s faith in him, of course. Above all, he doesn’t wish to disappoint M. de la Pérouse, the real Don Inigo.

Jean-François de Galaup de la Pérouse is the naval captain who will command the French expedition when it leaves this summer. Monneron served under him during the American War, and now La Pérouse has appointed Monneron chief engineer on this voyage. He also recommended him for this mission to London. It wouldn’t do for M. de la Pérouse to regret these choices. Staring up at Mrs. Towe’s water-stained ceiling, Monneron reflects that there’s still time to appoint another engineer—and plenty of ambitious young men of good family eager to take his place.

To read the rest of the story, order your copy of Issue 23.2-Summer/Fall 2011 today.

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Sycamore Review: “Items for Exchange” is part of a linked collection of stories based on the La Perouse expedition. I read one of the other stories in the collection, the amazing “Snow Men” (Issue #131 One Story), and was surprised by how different both the content and style were between these two stories that will eventually share space in the same book. Can you speak a little bit about the larger project of the collection and what you hope to accomplish by presenting this expedition from varied perspectives? Did you ever consider writing a novel from multiple perspectives or did you always know they’d be linked stories?

Naomi Williams: The basic idea for the book – a bunch of stories about the voyage, each told from a unique perspective –popped into my head almost as soon as I first learned about the expedition nearly ten years ago. I think the episodic nature of an ocean voyage, where you go from point A to B to C and so on, lends itself to this treatment. And from a craft perspective, the format’s allowed me to play with different tenses, structures, points of view, voices, ways of rendering dialogue, etc., without worrying too much about maintaining a consistent tone or air-tight throughline across the manuscript. But more than anything, I wanted complete freedom to reimagine the voyage, not as one story that a group of people might help tell, but as a series of individual stories that can stand alone even as they might overlap, illuminate, or contradict each other.

Some people have suggested I call this “a novel in stories.” That’s fine with me, but in my head it’s a series of stories—it’s more an apartment building full of different-sized units occupied by different people with different tastes than it is a big house with lots of rooms for one big family.

Early on I submitted a synopsis and a story from the collection for one of those one-on-one manuscript reviews at a writer’s conference, and the guy who read it said, “You know, you should just be a good host, pick a narrator, and write the story.” Maybe it was arrogance, but I just shrugged off his advice and kept on doing what I was doing. I have no objection to reading such books – or even to writing one in the future – but it’s never interested me to take that approach with this project. That sort of seafaring story has been done many times over.

Sycamore Review: I am having a difficult time thinking of a precedent for a collection depicting a historical event like the expedition through a variety of narrators and perspectives. Andrea Barrett and Jim Shepard come to mind as masters of retelling/revising historical events and who often write against the grain of our “official” histories. Do you have any models for your collection or books that have inspired this project?

Naomi Williams: I’m really flattered to have both Andrea Barrett and Jim Shepard mentioned in a discussion of my work! They have both inspired me tremendously, especially Jim Shepard, with whom I’ve done a writing workshop. But I didn’t know their work till after I’d begun this project. When I started, I hadn’t read much literary historical fiction, nor was I all that familiar with the concept of linked short stories. I think Dubliners was the only such collection I’d read before.

When I try to think of what might have influenced the genesis of this project, I end up with a motley list that betrays my weird, anachronistic upbringing as a bookish, classical-music-loving, half-Japanese movie buff in an evangelical Christian household. I’ve always loved travel stories—from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to Robinson Crusoe to the seafaring novels of Patrick O’Brian. I’m also interested in texts that offer multiple takes on a set of events, like the four gospels in the New Testament or Kurosawa’s Rashomon. Then there are revisions of historical events or existing texts—Tale of Two Cities, West Side Story, Anita Diamant’s Red Tent. And art that strings together related but independent pieces, like Canterbury Tales, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, or Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth. I think my project must somehow have emerged out of that odd stew.

Sycamore Review: Quick follow up: “Items for Exchange” is at heart a bildungsroman about the young, naïve protagonist, Moneron, desperate to accomplish his mission and be in good standing with company before the expedition begins. But the details and the world built around them was what really hooked me as a reader from the first paragraph. Historical fiction can be difficult in short stories because the writer must build the world of the story while also telling a story. How much primary and secondary research did you do to get all the details of 18^th Century London right? The townhouses, streets, carriages, and nautical materials were pitch perfect—not to mention that Alaskan myths and geographical details of Lituya Bay in “Snow Men.” How do you know when enough is enough and you need to stop researching and start to write?

Naomi Williams: It took me two years to write this story, and much of that time was spent researching: reading everything I could find about the artist John Webber; staring at his paintings online; reading about Joseph Banks; skimming through some of the thousands of letters he wrote; and poring over books and websites about 18^th-century English fashion and currency and transportation. One of the most helpful texts I read was the journal of German writer Sophie von La Roche, who visited London in 1786, the year after Monneron did. I got some wonderful details from her about when and what people ate, what the weather was like, how people traveled, etc.

As for knowing when enough is enough: I don’t. I love doing research and sometimes joke that the collection is just an excuse to keep going to the library. I actually asked Jim Shepard this exact question five years ago at the Tin House Writers Workshop, and he said that at some point you just need to put on your floatie and jump in the deep end. I loved that answer, and I’ve always remembered it. Sometimes when I know I’m just avoiding the hard work of writing by doing yet another Google search on South Seas canoes or 18^th-century coinage, I remember that and think, “Okay, Naomi, it’s time to jump in the pool.”

Sycamore Review: The subject headings that begin each scene are unique formatting and style decision for this story. What do you hope the illuminate for the reader, or are they a formal decision that recreates serialized stories of this era? Were they a part of the first draft of the story or were they added later?

Naomi Williams: I had to go back through my files to answer this question. There are more than 20 versions of this story, in various stages of completion, dating back to February 2009. The story began as a first-person account with no section breaks, then morphed into a series of diary entries, then into the current third-person, present-tense story with the subject headings. The headings appear in the original third-person version, so there was something about switching the point of view that seems to have inspired this format.

I do know that at this point in the drafting of the story, I’d come to understand that “items for exchange” didn’t refer just to the objects Monneron was collecting to trade with South Seas islanders, but to a series of exchanges that he himself was involved with – some monetary, some intellectual, some more psychological or moral. Each header represents something that can be, or is, exchanged in that scene.

Sycamore Review: If a young writer were to tell you they had a great idea for a linked collection of short stories and she was about to draft out the first paragraph, what advice would you give her? And no,“Don’t bother” is not an acceptable answer!

Naomi Williams: Yeah, don’t you hate those author interviews where someone’s asked for advice about writing, and the answer is something like “Take up welding” or some other form of “Don’t do it”? I’ve always thought there was something disingenuous and weirdly elitist about such responses. Anyway, I don’t know that I’m in any position to be giving other writers advice – I’m still very much in advice-receiving mode. But I’d always encourage a writer with an idea to pursue it. If an idea for linked short stories is really more conducive to treatment as a straight-up novel, I think the process of writing reveals that. I will say, however, that if I’d known at the outset how long it would take to complete a series of stories in which every piece takes place in a different part of the world and requires entirely new research, I might have tackled something else for my first book. But it’s been seven years, and I’m still fascinated by the La Pérouse story. My husband has occasionally said, “Can’t you just write one of those autobiographical novels like everyone else?” Maybe for the second book.

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Naomi J. Williams’s story “Items for Exchange” is part of a collection of linked stories about the La Pérouse expedition. Other stories from the collection have appeared in Ninth Letter, One Story, A Public Space, and American Short Fiction. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize and an MA in Creative Writing from UC Davis, she lives and works in northern California.

Her story “Items for Exchange” was the second runner up in Sycamore Review’s 2011 Wabash Prize for Fiction and was featured in Issue 23.2 Summer/Fall 2011.

Edith Pearlman receives 2011 Pen/Malamud Award

Sycamore — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 19:30:52 +0000

by Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor

Congratulations to Issue 23.1 contributor Edith Pearlman who has been selected to receive the 2011 Pen/Malamud Award! The award recognizes a body of work that demonstrates excellence in the art of short fiction and we here at Sycamore Review know that no one deserves the award more after publishing Pearlman’s thought-provoking, speculative short story “Last Words” in our last issue.

The award follows a busy year for Edith Pearlman who also published Binocular Vision, a collection of new and selected stories with Lookout Books. Be sure to read our review of Binocular Vision and our recent interview with Edith Pearlman before you order your copy of Issue 23.1. This award was a long time coming and is well deserved. We can’t wait to read more Edith Pearlman stories ...MORE