What is the date you began writing this piece of fiction and the date when you completely finished the piece of fiction? This is a collection of short stories, most of which were written in the nineties. Collating and revising them occupied much of the summer of 2019. One of the most interesting aspects of the latter process was the decision as to what to leave rooted in the time of its composition and what to bring into the present. In one story, for example, a journalist didn’t have a cellphone—an impossibility now. That I left as it was, because I was afraid that if I started tugging on that piece of yarn I’d be left without a sweater. In another story, though, I changed an iPod to an iPhone and the music playing on it from Hoobastank to Billie Eilish.
Where did you do most of your writing for this fiction work? And please describe in detail. And can you please include a photo? Almost all of it was done in the study of my old apartment in New Haven CT. By a curious coincidence the previous tenant had been Hunter Biden, while he was at Yale Law School. I can’t imagine why we never got a call from Fox News. In any event it was a small room—as they all were in a 19th century brownstone—made even smaller by red walls, crammed bookcases, and a lot of pictures—shown here are a Polish poster whose translation I’ve forgotten and a poster advertising the 75th anniversary of Hemingway’s first book. I wrote at a computer desk I’d bought at Staples.
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 wrote at night, directly onto an iMac, with jazz in the background, refreshing my muse with cheap malbec. Every page or so I’d take the dog for a walk while smoking a cigar. Just a block or so because I wanted to get back to work. I never smoked in the house so I’d park the to-be-smoked portion of the cigar on the stoop. When the dog said he was tired of walking I was done for the night.
Please include just one excerpt and include page numbers as reference. This one excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer. (I’d like to include an entire story that’s 953 word.)
CHANGELING
When she saw what the dog had in its mouth, she screamed so hard that a vessel burst in her throat. She fainted and fell on her back. The blood poured into her lungs. She would have died on the kitchen floor. But because the mill closed early her husband came home to find her. Three days before, her baby had taken his own desperate gasps, a dozen all he had in this life. When she stopped crying and fell asleep her husband pried the little body out of her arms and wrapped it in newspapers and twine. There were five other children, still alive, in the two rooms of their tarpaper shack past the end of a dirt road near the ridge line. FDR had yet to bring Happy Days Here Again to Osage, West Virginia. Until then there wasn’t going to be money for a funeral or even spare sheets for a shroud. He went behind the house and up to the tree line. With a summer Appalachian downpour beating on his back he scooped out a grave with a few turns of a shovel and laid his baby in it. When he told his wife what he had done she cried harder than she thought she had tears for. She swore and swung at him. Her nails raked his cheek. Because he was ashamed, this once he took it. For days she lay in bed and listened to the rain drum on the plywood and tarpaper above her. She thought of the baby sleeping in the mud. But at last, she remembered the babies who had lived and got out of bed.
Click on the below link to purchase Turing’s Graveyard Stories from Running Wild Press
https://bookshop.org/p/books/turing-s-graveyard-terence-hawkins/17051869?ean=9781733647489
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? There are a couple of layers to this. My father’s family is from West Virginia and he and his siblings grew up there during the Depression—a time unimaginably hard. I have a present recollection of as a young boy in my Aunt Bertha’s house hearing the basis of this story—that is, that a young mother was so poor she had to bury a recently-deceased newborn behind the house and then went crazy when she saw a dog dig it up. But forty years later at a family gathering no one would admit ever having heard of such a thing. It led me to question not only my memory, but my stability—what kind of nut would not only make something like that up, but believe it?
Click on the below link to purchase Turing’s Graveyard Stories from Amazon.
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https://www.facebook.com/terence.hawkins.50
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