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“After a Series of Misadventures…” How The Opposite of Chance was Born by Margaret Hermes

February 17, 2021

The Opposite of ChanceThe Opposite of Chance may have had the longest gestation period in literary history. I started writing what came to be this novel about a young woman backpacking her way across Europe in 1981 when I was a young woman backpacking my way across Europe in 1982. And I returned to it decades later.

I always envisioned a series of encounters between an assorted cast of characters and my protagonist as she launches her first solo expedition, a journey into the unfamiliar. Three of the chapters were published as short stories in literary magazines, but I didn’t get back to finishing the novel I’d projected. While I wasn’t content to let go of those chapters and regard them as loosely connected finished stories, I wasn’t sure where to take my protagonist, and I didn’t want her itinerary to be the sole determinant of her journey. The project’s long hibernation provided me with a new, invigorating vision, spurred by an encounter.

After a series of misadventures involving a lost passport and missed flights, I found myself sitting glumly at the airport in Montreal. My mood lifted as I watched – stared at – a piercingly handsome middle-aged Muslim kneeling nearby, directing his prayers toward Mecca. His noticeably dyed hair was growing out and the fact of this transfixed me. I knew nothing of his character except that he was devout enough to adhere to the rituals his religion required of him and I couldn’t reconcile that with him dyeing his gray roots. The mystery of that Muslim traveled with me for months to come and became the first person Betsy meets on her travels.

But he became much more than that. Having made almost a hobby of wondering about this stranger, of imagining him, I found in him more than another character to be met and left behind. He delivered the unusual structure of the novel to me. Perhaps there are several novels that feature a protagonist who crosses paths with other characters and then, while she goes on her way, the other characters’ stories unfold in the interleaving chapters without her, but I have not come across them. I began to reflect on how the layered stories of a person are not easily revealed, and how first impressions belie imperceptible nuances that sketch a fuller person. I devised this novel format for a novel because I wanted to tell not just Betsy’s story but his story too. More than that, I wanted to learn his story.

 

And that required months of research. About the Muslim religion, about the difficulties of travel to Mecca and the rituals of the Hajj, about the war in Lebanon during that time period, about the National Museum of Beirut, about Lebanese Arabic names, and more. But Kassim, whose name means “dispenser of food and goods,” became not just a fully realized character – he showed me how to proceed with the novel as a whole.

I did the same for the other characters Betsy met. I had the joy – and the challenge – of exploring a multitude of disparate lives to a depth that few novelists get to revel in. In the labor of writing this novel, I learned about subjects ranging from blackjack to rabbit farming. Like Betsy, I was having an adventure. The Opposite of Chance, a glimmer of an idea born in a particular moment and decade, has me looking back in time, with the tools that I have sharpened across years, words once scrawled with a pen now recorded and formatted with the technology of this time. I hope to bring something of the 1980s, and that pen, to the page.

Filed Under: General

I Want to Write About How They Make Me Feel by Laura Newman

January 30, 2021

 

The Franklin Avenue Rookery for Wayward Babies collection took about three years to write. After I lived through decades of suitcase rambles and backpacking tramps.  My stories came from these travels – some exotic – Varanasi, Rome, Kathmandu, Japan, Isle of Skye; some closer to home – New Orleans, Tijuana, Valdez. I don’t travel so I can write.  I travel so I can expand. In fact, I didn’t know I would have such a far-flung collection when I started.

The ‘beach resort cum prickly-pear-margarita’ vacation is nice.  But that’s an afternoon nap; it is not travel. Travel is a wide-awake experience.  Authentically first person. Travel is seldom easy – many times sleep deprived, food and language challenged. It’s not for the weak at heart.  But heart is exactly what it delivers.  I am a seeker of beauty – in nature, architecture, cuisine, culture. Words. If I have to walk there to find it, so much the better. I don’t think about writing as I travel, and I don’t take notes, although that’s exactly what the photographs turn out to be.  I am open to experience.  And often it’s magnificent.  So later, when I’m at my kitchen table or by my gas fireplace with the faux logs, my mind travels back to the higher-than-the-clouds Himalayas or to the gold-haloed icons in an onion-domed church.  Some of these places I find so exquisite, I want to write – not about them – but about how they make me feel.

The first story I wrote for Franklin Avenue, The House of Naan and Saffron, came out of a trip to Varanasi, the most holy city in India on the banks of the holy Ganges River. It was a colorful, hectic, hazy, completely non-Western experience; they burn bodies in the open and sweep them into the river. I could not expect to fully interpret or understand the culture.  But I could experience it.  Take photos like breadcrumbs and follow them back later in memory.  This turned into a story about a Norwegian preacher trying to convert Hindus to Christianity, and win back his wife.

At one of the “three most beautiful” gardens in Japan, there are two shallow streams and when the iris bloom, growing right out of the water, the banks are fringed in violet. Later, I found myself wanting to write about these flowers, what it would be like to sink into that color.  Just a story about those flowers, that color. This grew into a rather magical tale of reincarnation, which is the last story in the collection, The Color of Fisticuffs and Bloodlines.

There are authors who do not need to travel to write about a location.  My favorite example is John Irving’s Son of the Circus, a wonderful romp through India.  Mr. Irving never went to India. I bow to him.  For me, it is quite often the location that creates the space for the story, and then the characters fall, literally, into place.

Travel will always be my muse, both for settings and experiences.  The year before Covid 19 my husband and I were in Paris.  I ordered too much for breakfast and I took a leftover hardboiled egg with me, put it in my pocket.  We went to climb the 222 steps up to the basilica of Sacre-Coeur.  There was a raggedy man sleeping on the steps, vertically, his body splayed across four rows, face up, arms out, palms up.  My God, he looked like Jesus, and terribly uncomfortable. How could he sleep like that? I put the boiled egg into the curve of his up-turned palm.  He would find it when he woke up. Oh, the magic of it!  Or maybe he would hit himself in the face with it. I’m not sure yet. I haven’t written the story.

Irises that inspired a story.

Encounters with local residents.

 

Laura Newman on a trek in the Himalayas.

 

 

Filed Under: General

In Defense…and Celebration of the Short Story

December 15, 2020

I had the good fortune to read Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge before most people, having been assigned it for review by The Boston Globe. I remember sitting with the galley on vacation in Florida over my winter break, often placing my finger on a page to mark my place before closing the galley to look up and ponder some poignant line or observation, or just to marvel at Strout’s brilliance. I’d read and admired her work before, but OK is, to me, her best.

But I took issue with the way her publisher had marketed the book as “a novel in stories.” No, I wrote in my review—it is, like Sherwood Anderson’s classic Winesburg, Ohio, a unified cycle of finely observed tales focusing on characters inhabiting a single town.  A collection of tales, no matter how closely the characters overlap or intrude on each other’s stories,

Jessica Treadway

are not chapters contributing to a single narrative arc. A collection of tales does not a novel make.

“Linked stories,” to use the vernacular more in vogue now, is a better description. I’ve just finished writing a collection of these myself: independent, standalone stories with occasionally recurring events and characters, including a Russian fabulist writer most famous for her own story about a housewife who converses regularly with her sugar bowl. None of these stories depends on another for its meaning, although I do hope that my loose “links” do provide some Aha! moments of resonance for the reader encountering, as Love False or True goes on, a familiar name or setting.

 

Elizabeth McCracken, a fine writer of both, says that a short story is a blow to the solar plexus, whereas a novel is a lingering illness you might never recover from. These are two very different conditions, and they do not usually mimic one another. The first wants you to have to catch your breath a little, upon reading the final sentence. The second moves in a slow build toward an ending that makes you sigh. I’ve sighed at the ends of a few stories and gasped upon finishing a novel or two, but those are the exceptions. To invoke an alternate metaphor to McCracken’s, the two forms are disparate species within the same literary genus.

It’s an important distinction because as the marketing of Olive Kitteridge demonstrates, novels sell better than stories, but I’m not convinced that collections can’t make a comeback. To do so, stories need to be understood and celebrated for what they, uniquely, do: distill the experiences of their characters into an essence that will come sudden and sharp upon the reader, a fresh and welcome—if fleeting—scent in the otherwise ordinary air.

 

Filed Under: General

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