What is the date you began writing this piece of fiction and the date when you completely finished the piece of fiction? I started working on the stories in my book The Town of Whispering Dolls in June of 2015, and “Here” was the first story I wrote for the collection. I wrote it in a week, and the rest of the stories were inspired from that one piece. I finished the book in 2018.
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My first collection of stories, Invention of Flight, won the Flannery O’Connor Award from the University of Georgia Press and the second, In the House of Blue Lights, the Richard Sullivan Prize from Notre Dame, but I’d been writing primarily creative nonfiction and hybrid work for several years.
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Writing fiction hadn’t been coming easily (one reason why it’s good to work in more than one genre!) until I read an article in The Indianapolis Star about a town in southern Indiana that was described as an epicenter of the Opioid epidemic and, in particular, an explosion in cases of HIV/AIDS.
Click to read NPR’s article about the Opioid and HIV/AIDS epidemic in Austin, Indiana
Click to read about THE INDIANAPOLIS STAR’s article on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Austin, Indiana
Some had turned to prostitution to support their addictions, and a local man described how odd it was to see women walking the streets of this small Midwestern town, putting their heads inside the car windows of men who had driven from out of the county to hire them for sex.
Read about Sex Trafficking in Midwestern towns
https://www.harvestpublicmedia.org/post/sex-trafficking-small-towns-it-happens-virtually-anywhere
It was that phrase—putting their heads inside of cars—that made me picture the women as dolls with detachable heads, like Barbies. I made that metaphor of the addicts as dolls literal. In “Here” I write about one of the addicts, the doll daughter-in-law of an older woman who lost her son to an overdose and, as we find out, an infant grandchild. The rest of the stories have a doll at the center, and I end up trying to draw this county through their stories, focusing on the military, economic, and historical forces that helped create and continued to sustain the problem.
I lived inside this project for four-plus years. For a time I saw the dolls as Barbies. They carried their heads around town, exchanged them in the convenience store, played music by blowing across the open neck hole. After a while, the dolls started changing. When I’d get stuck, I’d think of a different type of doll, and wrote a story called “The Wind Farm at Night”, for instance, where a Raggedy Ann-type doll falls in love with the robot who replaced her at the candy factory.
In 2017, I wrote one of my favorite stories, “Resurrection.” In this piece children in a grade school make egg babies to learn about being responsible for infants while, outside the classroom, they see what’s happening to their parents and older siblings. The outside world is echoed in how they care for the eggs and what the Fisher Price Little People do inside the shoeboxes they make to shelter their pretend families.
I started this story in April and finished it in October, but everything in the story and the book I’d been gathering, I realize looking back, for about twenty years, waiting for the thread that would pull the ideas together.
Where did you do most of your writing for this fiction work? And please describe in detail. And can you please include a photo? I wrote some of the book in my office at Butler University and most of it while sitting in the corner of my living room couch, my laptop in my lap. I have a desk at home, but I hardly ever use it. In my office at work, my office at home, and my living room, I have windows that look out onto a tree. I know that some writers like to have no distractions, but I seem to need tree branches and occasional birds to look at while I’m writing, or rather, being in that meditative space you occupy while waiting for the next phrase or turn to appear.
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? I always have iced tea or water while I’m writing. I write directly on the laptop. Sometimes I’ll have some notes, but usually not. Except for the birds, I need quiet. It was early April when I wrote “Resurrection.” Usually you can tell by the story because I do look outside a lot, and the weather seems to make its presence known. Though the story ends near Christmas, and there’s it’s October in the opening, there’s obviously an Easter feel to the story, and it was the time of year I’d be thinking about coloring eggs and wondering how to make them last. I can tell, even without looking, that I wrote the story from April through October.
While working on this book, in particular, I wrote in any gap of time I had. Morning is best for starting something, but once it’s going I can jump into it whenever I’ve got some spare time. I was teaching full-time while writing this book, and I remember a few days when I’d be done with class preparation and grading, would open my laptop and get so lost in the story that I started having to set my alarm so I wouldn’t be late to class again.
I don’t write after the sun goes down, unless I have a deadline.
Please include just one excerpt and include page numbers as reference. This one excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer. This is the ending of “Resurrection.” The “doctor” in the story is a child who has opened an egg baby clinic under the bleachers in the cafetorium:
All of this went on through October. The first week in November the skies turned the leaden gray they would remain until April and the little people in the boxes went into a kind of funk. More and more of them began disappearing together into a shoebox owned by a child who was spending a few weeks with his father. The teacher always kept his desk just like it was when he left so there would be some consistency in the child’s life when he returned. But when the owner was away, no one was taking care of the shoebox and it became a place with an unsavory reputation. The children told their teacher about it, and she asked the principal if a social worker might be persuaded to come to her classroom, but he reminded her that there were only two in the entire county and their plates were full. The only child temperamentally suited to take on a social worker’s role was the doctor, so as was usually the case, the children did without one.
So the little people kept going into the abandoned shoebox and some of them stumbled back to their own shoeboxes and some were covered with canvas and sent by watch box down to the hospital. When they didn’t return, no one knows what happened to them except for the doctor and perhaps the teacher. They were too toxic to put in the compost heap. A couple of them were in the back of the hospital with IVs and breathing tubes made from the same lunchroom straws they used to make playground equipment. It was rumored that the rest were thrown in the trash.
No matter. The doctor’s main concern was the babies of course, keeping them alive. But some of the babies seemed to be showing signs of abrasions and if you looked at them long, the baby’s child said, you could see them jerk like they were having seizures and inside their poor little hearts were beating irregularly and you could sometimes see the heartbeat through the fragile skin.
By the end of the first week in November, the doctor was overwhelmed and sad. She had permission to stay late after school and she sat underneath the stage listening to the AYS kids doing their homework and eating their snacks. It was all a distant sound, and it sounded a little bit like music to her as she sat in the semi-dark surrounded by babies. There were ten in the neonatal unit this week, lying there so still. She took the vital signs of each one, and there were, as far as she could tell, no vital signs, or only very faint ones. What would she tell her classmates? Her teacher couldn’t keep supplying babies. Soon it would be the holidays and she would have other things to think about. And what purpose did it serve to keep replacing them? They would grow up to be the little people who hopped from desk to desk or spent the day sprawled out on the floor of the absent boy’s shoebox.
The doctor’s mother had sent her to school that day with a safety pin holding up the hem of the pants she was wearing. Her mother, the LPN, was not doing particularly well and the doctor was feeling a kind of despair she wasn’t used to feeling. Most days she woke up feeling that she was a real doctor and she believed despite everything that someday she would be one or a teacher like her teacher. But some days, like today, she didn’t know how she could make that happen.
She looked around her at the babies lying in the soft flannel nests she’d made from one of her mother’s old nightgowns. She could still smell her mother’s scent on those nightgowns. Maybe she was meant for something different in this life or maybe she wasn’t meant for anything at all. It was in this mood that she took the safety pin from her hem and picked up one of the babies. She placed some tape over the places she would pierce and then she carefully pressed the pin into the skull of the baby and then into the baby’s bottom. She put the baby’s fontanel into her mouth and she blew everything the baby had inside it, every last bit of potential, into a bowl. She did it with all ten of them and took the bowl of goo back to the compost heap and said a prayer.
She was careful to wash the babies after that and she put them for a few seconds into the microwave in the teacher’s lounge to kill any lingering bacteria and then she brought them back to the infirmary where they would spend the weekend being cured.
On Monday morning she came in early and the teacher let her go down to the cafetorium with some poster paints and glitter. The doctor had some of her mother’s clear nail polish in the pocket of her white lab coat, an old shirt that had belonged to her mother. It took her about an hour to paint each one of the babies, each a glorious rich gem or Easter color with dots of glitter and glue. She covered them with nail polish to make them stronger. They were empty inside but they were so very beautiful now. She carried them back to the classroom and distributed the marvels to their parents. Don’t cry, she told them. See how light they are? Their spirits have gone to heaven with the others. They’re angels now, and nothing will hurt them, she lied. They’re watching over you and loving you, she lied. What you’re holding is just the beautiful reminder of where the life used to be. There’s no more suffering for them, so please don’t cry. See how they sparkle? Even if you crush them, they’ll be beautiful.
From “Resurrection,” p. 70—71
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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? It was emotional to write because it was from the viewpoint of a grade school child who is smart and kind and has ambition for herself and her community and at the end tries to comfort her classmates with what she knows is a beautiful lie. That, and the life of all these children, breaks my heart.
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. I’ve looked through my files and can’t find any earlier drafts. Even though I wrote this over a process of months, I remember that it came easily. I usually have several stories and essays going at the same time, and as I recall, the basic situation—the egg babies and Fisher Price people and the description of the classroom and the character of the doctor—came first. Then, as sometimes happened, it stalled and I went on to something else. I didn’t know how it would end, and I wanted it to feel both beautiful and sad, both light and tragic. When I went back to the story, it was October and I remembered all the bees at my son’s grade school at the beginning of the year, and the vegetable garden and composting project the kids had done when my son (who had to do the egg baby project) was in 4th grade. So I thought that’s where the eggs had probably gone and, as we were soon to enter the holiday season, I thought about Faberge eggs and that gave me a direction for the ending. After that it came out the way it appeared in the online journal Diagram and eventually the book.
Susan Neville is the author of six works of creative nonfiction: Fabrication: Essays on Making Things and Making Meaning; Twilight in Arcadia; Iconography: A Writer’s Meditation; Butler’s Big Dance; Sailing the Inland Sea, and Light. Her essay on women in the Klan in Indiana, “Into the Fire,” is available as an ebook from Ploughshares. Her collections of short fiction and hybrid fiction include The Town of Whispering Dolls, winner of the Catherine Doctorow Prize for Innovative Fiction, In the House of Blue Lights, winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize; Invention of Flight, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction; and Indiana Winter. Her stories have appeared in the Pushcart Prize anthology and in anthologies including Extreme Fiction (Longman) and The Story Behind the Story (Norton.) She lives in Indianapolis and teaches writing at Butler University and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.
https://www.susan-neville.com/
Most of the INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION links can be found at the very end of the below feature:
http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/03/stephenson-holts-arranged-marriage-is.html