Name of fiction work? And were there other names you considered that you would like to share with us? The name of my novel is NOUS NOUS (French for “we ourselves”). Honestly, I can’t remember any other title I considered. I worked for a bit without a title, but when I wrote a scene with a French teacher explaining reflexive phrases and using the example of “nous nous,” I realized that the phrase captured the sense of collective longing that I seemed to be developing. It was an early choice that stayed.
What is the date you began writing this piece of fiction and the date when you finished the piece of fiction? Hah! Now that is a question. I first drafted this book all the way back in 2013 (Bottom Left). I couldn’t attract a publisher right away, so over the years, while working on other projects, I would occasionally get back to the novel and tinker with it, because I liked it so much and was sure it eventually deserved a publication home. To be honest, I would say that the book was finished only in the summer of 2021 (Bottom Right) I submitted my final edits to my publisher.
Where did you do most of your writing for this fiction work? And please describe in detail. And can you please include a photo? Most of the writing was done in my study at home, on my beloved—and since upgraded—iMac. (I also wrote a chunk of it in the classroom of a Novel Writing course I was teaching that spring.) My study is a wonderful room; it sold me on the house, actually. It came to us with towering eight feet tall, built-in bookshelves, cream white, with crown molding lining the tops and bottoms. Those shelves were, and still are, jammed to the gills with books of all sorts, paperbacks and hard-covers, thick and thin: novels and story collections, poetry collections, plays, anthologies, books of philosophy and religion, psychology books, travel books, arts and crafts books, books on writing, cookbooks, foreign language textbooks, history books, home design books, books on French flea markets, huge tabletop art books, collector children’s books, etc., as well as an assortment of miscellaneous items, like (many) thick photo albums from when people still assembled, books on astrology, guides to trees, our dissertations, and more.
Unfortunately, over the years, the study has become a kind of storage room too. On the floor, in front of several of the bookshelves are fat cardboard boxes filled with items we either still need or don’t want to get rid of, like cards of all kinds, and old notebooks filled with penned scribblings. And on top of those cardboard boxes are often more books!
My desk is a broad, heavy Brobdingnagian thing; its dark brown wood all chipped and scratched. The previous owner left it behind. It was too much trouble to move, so I just took it over. It’s plenty big enough to hold my computer, plus whatever notebooks or reference books I’m using, plus books I haven’t shelved yet, the occasional stray CD, and boxes full of office supplies. The place, yes, is as messy as it sounds. But it’s a center for fictional creation!
What were your writing habits while writing this work-did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? This novel represented a break for me in my writing habits. Heretofore I had always insisted on writing stories by hand first and then transferring them to computer. I still do this sometimes, and I still do it for certain sections of novels that I know need to move more slowly. But with NOUS NOUS the unique fact of its drafting was that I started it, and worked through the first draft of it, in a novel writing class. For that class, I assigned weekly word count goals to my students. And I gave myself the same assignment, kind of as a way to show them that these goals weren’t impossible. With the weekly need for word output I took to typing my story directly into the computer. Surprisingly, it did not feel all that different for me. And now I feel much more comfortable forgoing the initial step of a handwritten draft, if that is necessary.
An early rough draft of NOUS NOUS. Credit and Copyright by John Vanderslice
I do like the sensation of writing in longhand, but one problem is that often I can hardly read my own writing afterwards. Then, transferring a story to computer is a matter of staring and squinting at an inscrutable sheet. I’m glad that part of the process was jettisoned for NOUS NOUS. As for time of day, I am decidedly a morning person and thus a morning writer. (At the latest, mid-afternoon.) And not only am I dedicated morning person, I am a dedicated coffee person. I have to have a mug in my hand when I write. It doesn’t have to be coffee, but it’s best if it’s coffee. As for music, I’m boring that way. I’d rather write in silence. When I am writing something important—and all fiction writing counts as important to me—I find that music or voices is a distraction.
Please include just one excerpt and include page numbers as reference. This one excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer.
NOUS NOUS, Chapter 7, pp. 92-102
When eight minutes later she pulled into the driveway that curved past the front door of the school, she yanked her car to a stop and jumped out. Principal Nixon was speaking with loud gestures to one of her teachers: a thin, dark-eyed young woman who seemed to have car duty quite often. Somehow, Elizabeth knew, it wasn’t the young woman’s fault. Whatever happened—whatever she would find out had taken place—it wasn’t this woman’s fault. She blamed Principal Nixon. It was Nixon and the policies she enforced or chose not to enforce that let what happened happen. Whatever that was.
“Have you found her?” Elizabeth shouted as soon as she was out of the car. “Jeannine Riddle?”
Nixon regarded her with something that could only be described as fear: naked, real fear. If she hadn’t been so dizzily anxious about Jeannine, Elizabeth would have savored the woman’s expression. Now it only made her mad. The young teacher, meanwhile, merely scowled. Obviously, she had no idea what to think.
Principal Nixon looked at Elizabeth from beneath her tower of frosted gold hair, from behind eccentric, loopy black glasses, and shook her head slowly. Elizabeth wished she knew the woman’s first name, so she could wield it like an axe. She’d heard the name before, but just couldn’t bring it up in the crisis of the moment.
“No? No? What are you doing? Are you even trying to find my daughter?”
Now the principal turned haughty. She permitted herself to be offended, as if the loss here were her own, not Elizabeth’s. “Of course we are.”
“Yes, and what does that mean exactly? Have you called the police?”
Elizabeth could see that it took Principal Nixon all her strength not to roll her eyes. “You can’t call the police because a child has been missing for twenty-five minutes. They won’t even listen to you.”
“Do you know that for a fact? Or are you just saying that so I’ll leave you alone?” Elizabeth knew her tone wasn’t helping, her expression wasn’t helping; her innate hatred for this well-connected local woman was keeping her and Principal Nixon from forming a partnership, which was the only thing that might bring about the discovery of the whereabouts of her daughter. But she couldn’t help herself. Her anger was real. It was automatic. It was the same as terror. Because, in fact, she was terrified.
“I know that for a fact,” Nixon said coldly.
“And that’s because you’re so experienced at losing kids?”
Elizabeth saw the outrage in the woman’s white eyes. They went wider and whiter; the hard kernels of brown at their center went browner. To her credit, the principal did not bark back. “I know,” she tried, “that this is very disturbing for you—”
“Oh, you’ve figured that out, huh? What a smart woman you are.”
“—But I don’t think exchanging insults is going to help us find Jeannine.”
Elizabeth’s eyes watered; her anger suddenly tasted like sour milk in her mouth. The next moment, her head went woozy and her vision darkened, as if with a sudden blood rush.
“Mrs. Riddle,” the young teacher broke in. “As soon as you called, Ms. Nixon and I started asking whoever was still around”—Elizabeth realized, for the first time since she arrived at the school, that there were still kids waiting to be picked up, five of them; and thirty yards away, two teachers were standing by their cars talking to each other in low tones; the head janitor, meanwhile, emerged from inside, carrying a large yellow plastic trash can; he walked toward the right side of the building, where the dumpsters were hidden away behind a brick façade—“and no one can recall seeing Jeannine getting into a car.”
“Has anyone seen her at all, doing anything?”
“Not yet,” the teacher said. Then: “I’m sorry.”
It was impossible—and yet terrifying—for Elizabeth to think that Jeannine could just be led away by a perfect stranger. Her daughter was too smart for that. Way too smart. Even more, she had spunk. Jeannine was not the kind to feel pressured or hurried by anyone. She had to believe—she had to believe—that her daughter had not voluntarily put herself into a strange man’s car. And if she’d been forcibly abducted someone would have noticed. Someone would have said something. Might she have just walked away by herself?
In the moment, this seemed actually possible, and the idea warmed Elizabeth’s heart. Both her daughter and son were so unhappy that their father lived 900 miles away; both of them blamed her even as they tried to act like they didn’t blame her. Was it so hard to believe that Jeannine, on realizing how late Elizabeth would be, had decided on payback? But to where would she have walked? Home? A friend’s? Nowhere in particular?
There were several snagging points to these ideas, however, and Elizabeth couldn’t chase them from her mind: 1) As late as she had been, she had been almost as late before—several times before—especially last semester. While not happy about it, Jeannine had never seemed overly angry, just annoyed. 2) Their house was three miles from school. How many seventh graders will walk three miles just to make a point? Jeannine would not. 3) A couple of Jeannine’s friends lived close to Virginia McKinley, but she couldn’t see her daughter just heading to their homes without an invitation—and wouldn’t the friend’s mom or dad have called her to say so? 4) Jeannine was too purposeful, too project driven, too task oriented to just start walking with no place in sight or in mind. Unless her project is to make me crazy with fear—in which case she succeeded. She wondered if she should walk around the neighborhood shouting to bushes and backyards and garages: You got me. You can come out now, Jeannine. You really got me good.
“I have a call in to Jenna White,” the principal said. “She’s the teacher who was helping the bus riders when school let out. I wasn’t able to get a hold of her, the first time.” Nixon hesitated, lifted her voice a measure. “I also have a call in to Amanda Mauldin.” Then, as if not confident Elizabeth was versant in even the basic facts about the school: “She’s my Assistant Principal.”
“I know that,” Elizabeth declared in a tone Principal Nixon could not misinterpret.
“But she left work early today, to start on her way to Knoxville. There’s a wedding over there. In any case, she didn’t answer. And I’m about to call Mrs. White again,” the principal said. “She was out here earlier with the kids but then she left, and Heather took over.” She gestured toward the young teacher. “I’ve called her twice already and left messages. I might as well try again.”
Elizabeth nodded, numbly. Okay, okay. She had to admit that sounded reasonable. “What about Mrs. Mason? Isn’t she the one who controls the door to her classroom? I mean she’s the only one who can open the door that Jeannine comes out of, right?”
Nixon nodded stiffly. Elizabeth wondered if she’d hit on something. Did somebody let her daughter out when they weren’t supposed to?
“I’ve already talked with Mrs. Mason. She’s on her way back, right now, to talk with you—with us. She’s very upset.”
She doesn’t get to be upset, Elizabeth thought. She gets to be guilty. If she is.
“Apparently, when she was releasing the walkers to their parents two boys started a commotion in the back of the room. She let Jeannine out quickly and then hurried to stop the fight. She said she thought she saw you there, waiting for her.”
“She couldn’t have seen me. I was on Western Street driving my son to his job at the mall.”
The principal nodded. “She thought she saw you.”
Elizabeth’s anger was back. “Now wait a minute. These teachers are responsible for the kids they let out that door. That’s always been my understanding. That’s what I’ve been told. I was told that unless they see a parent and make eye contact with that parent, they don’t let a kid out. In fact, they keep the door locked. They let the kids out one-by-one and lock it each time, after each one leaves.”
“That’s exactly right,” Nixon said, with the preening gloss of authority recognized.
“No, it’s not! That’s not right! Mrs. Mason sent my daughter out that door without making eye contact with me. Because I wasn’t there! And now no one knows where my daughter is. Does that sound ‘exactly right’ to you?”
Principal Nixon stared at her coolly—boy, did this woman know how to maintain her composure; no wonder the kids saw her as an ice witch—and then let out a carefully modulated, professorial sigh. “Mrs. Mason is very upset. I’ve told you that. She’s on her way back here. She should be here any second. And then we can talk to her and make some plan of action. Meanwhile, I need to call Mrs. White again. Or would you rather I not?”
Disgusted, Elizabeth waved her away. Of course she should call Mrs. White. Of course. For God sake. But that wasn’t fair. She was making a legitimate point about how Mrs. Mason failed in her duty—a failure that might be directly related to Jeannine’s disappearance—and Principal Nixon had shrewdly twisted the conversation away from the idea of guilt and brought it back around to action. Fine. Fine. For now, they would talk about action. They should. But sooner or later, Elizabeth was going to come back to the question of guilt. And none of these people—none of them—were going to get off easy.
Her head burned as she watched Principal Nixon, in her officious turquoise jacket, dark pantyhose, and not-so-low heels stalk back to the front door, her absurd hair sparking the air like a giant zippo lighter. The woman looked like a peacock. Hell, she was a peacock.
“I’m really sorry about this,” the young teacher said. Then: “She’s doing all she can.”
“No, she’s not,” Elizabeth shot back. “I’ve been here ten minutes and she hasn’t even apologized to me for losing my daughter. No one has, except for you. And you had nothing to do with it.”
The teacher studied her a moment with those sad, dark eyes. Then she shrugged and looked away at the same time. Elizabeth was mortally afraid that was what this all would add up to: shrugs and a refusal to even issue a simple I’m sorry. She heard a car turn erratically into the lot. She wheeled around and saw a champagne-colored Mazda, with a bulky woman behind the wheel, brake to a stop only a few yards from where she was standing.
Mrs. Mason emerged from the car crying and hobbling. “Elizabeth,” Mrs. Mason said. “What’s happened? Is Jeannine all right?” Elizabeth could appreciate how upset Mrs. Mason was, but she couldn’t help but think that she should be asking these exact questions to the teacher. Elizabeth wasn’t the one in charge of opening the classroom door.
“No,” Elizabeth said and stood in place. Mrs. Mason’s voice sounded like she expected Elizabeth to hug her—or maybe she wanted to hug Elizabeth—but Elizabeth didn’t want hugs; she wanted answers. “I’m worried that she’s very much not all right. I have no idea where she is. I don’t know. So far, no one here does either.”
“Weren’t you here earlier?” Mrs. Mason said. Then again: “Weren’t you?” As if she thought she could rewrite reality to her convenience. Elizabeth put an end to that.
“I was never here. Not until ten minutes ago. Jeannine’s brother had a car emergency, and I had to drive him to his job, and I just got here now.” She paused for only a millisecond. “Who did you release Jeannine to? Who was out here?”
All of Mrs. Mason’s hurt seemed to gather in her eyes at once and she began to howl. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m so sorry. I was letting the kids out, and then it was Jeannine’s turn and then two boys were fighting, so I had to stop them. I swear I saw you out there. I saw Melissa Singleton, and I saw Lauren Roop, and I saw Patrick Langley, and I swear I saw you there too. You were with them, like you always are. So, I quick let Jeannine out and then . . . I locked the door again . . . because I had to stop those boys. They’d been fighting so long. It was bad.”
Of all the disturbing elements of this account, one of the most disturbing was that a teacher could take a decisive, life-altering action based not on what she saw but only what she expected to see. Equally disturbing was that apparently keeping two stupid boys from squabbling was more important than the safe release of her daughter. It was clear which teacherly duty took precedence in the heat of the moment.
Guilt, Elizabeth thought.
Guilt.
Then she had an idea. Why hadn’t she done this first thing? She texted Aaron: Have you heard from J? She stared at her phone, begging it to give her an answer. And not just an answer but the right answer.
“Who are you—” Mrs. Mason started.
“Shut up,” Elizabeth said. “You’ve done enough.” She didn’t care or notice how Mrs. Mason reacted. She stared fixedly at her phone. In no time at all, Aaron replied: “What do you mean?”
Has she contacted you, maybe from home? Or a friend’s house?
No. Why would she contact me?
Are you sure you didn’t miss a call, from anybody?
I’m sure.
Really sure?
No calls since you dropped me off. No texts.
Can you check? Please?
A second later: Checked. No calls no texts no messages.
Her head went light—bad light, too light—but she forced herself not to break down.
If she contacts you call me immediately. Immediately!
OK. Why?
Just do it.
Is she missing?
Elizabeth stared at the question for seconds before she thumbed a reply that was both honest and thoroughly disingenuous: I don’t know.
She heard new footsteps behind her. Wheeling again, phone in hand, she saw Principal Nixon: her step stiffer than before, her face more closed and tauter. Her eyes were trying to hide something—or decide something. Perhaps hide while she managed to decide. Regardless, they were not the eyes of someone about to say, We’ve found your daughter. Principal Nixon did not seem relieved or pleased or hopeful on seeing Karen Mason standing next to Elizabeth. If anything, she looked like someone for whom hopefulness was decidedly fading but could not say so.
“I still can’t reach Jenna White,” she said. “I can’t guess where she might be.”
“You left a message?”
“Of course.”
“What about the other parents? She”—she couldn’t bring herself to say Mrs. Mason’s name—“says that Noah Singleton’s mom was here when she let Jeannine out. And Ava Roop’s mom and Ethan Langley’s dad.”
Principal Nixon lowered her head: a solemn nod. “Yes, I know. I tried them all as soon as Karen told me. Patrick Langley and Lauren Roop can’t remember if Jeannine left with anyone. They were paying too much attention to their own children to notice.” Elizabeth hated them for this, and she was jealous of them: to have a child you could focus on, just as on any other day. But she knew in a different set of circumstances she could easily have been the oblivious one, caring only and entirely for her daughter, not knowing what was out of place, who should not have been there. She shook her head. So far, she reminded herself, no one could say if anybody had been here who should not have been. No one could say that her daughter hadn’t acted entirely on her own.
“They apologized,” Principal Nixon said carefully. “And they asked me to extend their sympathies.”
Their relief, you mean. They’re glad it didn’t happen to them.
“And Melissa Singleton,” Nixon continued, “did not answer her phone.”
“Her phone? You only tried one number?”
Principal Nixon hesitated. She bestowed the condescending look of those who are unjustly tried—and by an inferior. “I tried every number we had.”
“What’s wrong with these people? How can they just not be around? How can they not be at their phones? Don’t they care?” It felt to Elizabeth as if the entire class, the entire school was closing her off, joining hands while she and her daughter were forced to the outside of the ring.
“I know how frustrating this is, Mrs. Riddle. But realize this may be perfectly regular. On a normal day I have no idea what these people do, what their schedules are. Once they pick up their children they’re not required to report to us their whereabouts.”
“Of course not!” she shouted. She was trembling now, and her head was burning, and her eyes were watery again. All of her joints—elbows, knees, ankles, hips, shoulder blades—felt like they might become unglued at any moment. No, not unglued. Explode. “Of course no one reports to you. But I can expect them to answer their damn phones!” She started crying, right where she stood. She couldn’t see anymore. She couldn’t stand. She wanted to run to the end of town and back, shouting Jeannine’s name—or shrivel up and die. She lost all sense of herself and of time and of location. She didn’t regain it until she realized she was sitting on the cold black pavement outside the front door of Virginia McKinley Middle School. She was missing one shoe. Someone’s arm was around her shoulder, and bureaucratic chatter went on above. Her daughter was still missing, and she needed to go find her, since none of these people could. But first—the terrible thought said in her head—first she would have to call her ex-husband.
Why is this excerpt so emotional for you as a writer to write? And can you describe your own emotional experience of writing this specific excerpt? What I remember most about this section was feeling the absolute, end-of-wits frustration, anger, and terror that Elizabeth was feeling. Definitely, I could relate. At the time I first drafted that scene, I was the parent of a middle-schooler. I knew that the single greatest trauma for any parent, especially when the child is younger, is to realize that they have lost track of that child. I don’t mean in a helicopter-parent kind of way; more like the idea that you have no idea where your child is or what they might be doing. Doomsday scenarios cannot help but play through your mind.
For Elizabeth Riddle the doomsday scenario was becoming her new reality. All I could do as I wrote was to channel the fantastic level of anxiety, desperation, and sheer fury I imaged I would feel in that moment. I found myself spitting out lines for Elizabeth to say to Gloriana Nixon, just going from my gut about what felt credible and inevitable. I guess what I’m saying is that I found myself writing what I in such a moment I would want to say and feel driven to say and would hope I had the courage to say.
It’s not a pretty scene. Elizabeth is not being nice to all assembled, and why should she be? Driven by her anxiety as I composed, what came out was an embittered and terrified response. I mentioned that I first drafted the book in a novel writing course. Well, one aspect of the course is that I put the students into small peer groups to provide them with some readers for their ongoing drafts. I put myself in a peer group as well. One student told me that her aunt had gone through an abduction situation with one of her children, and Elizabeth’s responses, this student said, seemed very true to her aunt’s reaction. I appreciated the student’s comment tremendously. It gave me a lot more confidence in my draft.
Were there any deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? And can you please include a photo of your marked up rough drafts of this excerpt. Of course, there were various deletions additions and changes to this except, as there were in the rest of the book. But I think less so in this section than in some others. In my original drafting of the scene, I seemed to hit closer to what I wanted and needed for the book than with some of the novel’s other scenes. As for being able to show my deletions, unfortunately I can’t. In my early drafts of the book, I simply wrote over what I had put down previously, and I did not think to turn on Track Changes while I did so. Big mistake! Later drafts I have saved in separate files, but without any indication of what was changed or when. Sorry! I have learned my lesson.
John Vanderslice hails from southern Maryland, specifically the eccentric community of Moyaone, which was developed in the 1950s and 60s by a fearless crew of over-educated, wannabe hippies and anti-social survivalists escaping from Washington DC and its ruthlessly expanding white collar suburbs. After twelve years of Catholic schooling, and too many summers working as a lifeguard, he left the southern Maryland woods to attend the University of Virginia, from which he graduated in 1983. A series of silly jobs, and a flurry of different addresses, in the Washington DC metro area finally led to him entering the MFA in Poetry Writing program at George Mason University in 1986, where he studied under Peter Klappert, William Matthews, and Susan Tichy. He graduated in 1991 and started teaching writing to college freshmen at GMU and Northern Virginia Community College-Annandale. In 1993, he entered the Ph.D program in the English Department at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, located at the epicenter of the Cajun cultural world. After four years of fine dining, great music, and inspired literary fellowship, he moved to Conway, Arkansas, where he began teaching part-time at the University of Central Arkansas while acting as a stay-at-home dad for his infant son. Two decades and another son later, he is a Full Professor in the Department of Film, Theatre, and Creative Writing at UCA, teaching fiction writing and other genres both to undergraduates and to graduate students in the Arkansas Writers MFA Workshop.
John’s sons are grown up and on their on now, leaving a household comprised of himself, his wife Stephanie, their three cats, and their two weird but lovable dogs–Mario and Asuna–the former not seeming to understand that they do not need his protection from old ladies and friendly neighbors, and the latter, who is a baby in dog costume, looking like a shrunken and impossibly skinny black Labrador Retriever. (She’s a mix.)
More than eighty of his stories, poems, essays, and one-act plays have appeared in literary journals and anthologies. A partial list of these journals includes Seattle Review, Notre Dame Review, Versal, Sou’wester, Laurel Review, Crazyhorse, The Pinch, Southern Humanities Review, 1966, Squalorly, Foliate Oak, Red Wheelbarrow, South 85, and Exquisite Corpse. Some of the anthologies are Appalachian Voice, Redacted Story, Chick for a Day, The Best of the First Line: Editors’ Picks 2002-2006, and Tartts: Incisive Fiction from Emerging Writers. His linked story collection Island Fog was named by Library Journal as one of the Top 15 Indie Fiction Titles of 2014. His historical novel The Last Days of Oscar Wilde was published in 2018 by Burlesque Press. His child abduction novel Nous Nous was published in November of 2021 from Braddock Avenue Books.