SOME STRING OR ANOTHER: FICTION AND NONFICTION STORIES OF CONNECTION Diane Michelle Salts, B.S. Thesis Prepared for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS May 2004 APPROVED: Barbara A. Rodman, Major Professor John Tait, Committee Member Scott Simpkins, Committee Member Brenda Sims, Chair of Graduate Studies in English Sandra L. Terrell, Interim Dean of the Robert B. Toulouse School of Graduate Studies Salts, Diane Michelle, Some String or Another: Fiction and Nonfiction Stories of Connection. Master of Arts (English: Creative Writing), May 2004, 89 pp., references 17 titles. Some String or Another: Fiction and Nonfiction Stories of Connection, a creative thesis, explores patterns of change in stories from the perspective of connection and disconnection. The preface examines the effects of temporal disconnection, the relationship of conflict and connection to narrative rhythm, and the webs of connection formed during the process of creation. Included in the body of the work are six fiction stories, one metafiction story, and two nonfiction essays. TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE Experiments in Temporal Disconnection.................................................................v Conflict, Connection, and Narrative Rhythm........................................................xii Webs of Connection..............................................................................................xxi References..........................................................................................................xxvii ONE STORY, TWO VISIONS Random Beach Shots (experimental version)..........................................................2 Random Beach Shots (chronologically ordered version)........................................7 FICTION The Pour.................................................................................................................13 Field in Abeyance..................................................................................................32 Timothy..................................................................................................................42 Tree Sitter...............................................................................................................49 METAFICTION Egged On...............................................................................................................67 NONFICTION Water-Borne...........................................................................................................70 Nesting Instincts.....................................................................................................80 ii PREFACE iii "If you can see a thing whole," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives...But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death." — Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed iv Experiments in Temporal Disconnection In his essay, “Plot in the Modern Novel,” Arthur Honeywell defines plot as “the particular temporal synthesis effected by the writer of the elements of action, character, and thought that constitute the matter of his invention” (148). More simply, plot is the effective blending of all elements of a story in time. Honeywell compares modern plots to those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He examines plot organizations and contends that modern plots “are organized around a progression not so much through time as from ‘appearance’ to ‘reality’” (147). These plots “must start by plunging the reader into the appearances, into the midst of seemingly unrelated, contradictory incongruous, inconsequential, and even fantastic facts, and let him discover for himself as he reads the structures of reality which gradually emerge” (157). A plot organizes a story and unifies it into a coherent whole, and it possesses an array of temporal characteristics. A narrative occurs over time. Reading takes time. A story develops and unfolds in time. Temporal order, however, does not mean stories must be told in a strict chronological fashion; in fact, most begin somewhere in the middle and fill in necessary background and details with the use of flashbacks, flashforwards or other techniques. Time in a story can have a regular even pace and rhythm, or it can be irregular and disjointed. A character can live an entire lifetime within the span of a single sentence, perhaps even dying before the period is set in place, or the character may take a hundred pages to draw a single breath. In John Barth’s “Ad Infinitum: A Short Story,” it takes the female protagonist six full pages to walk the short distance across her lawn. This pace effectively heightens the dramatic tension in the scene, but part of the reason the narrator seems to take the v opportunity to slow things down is so that he may savor his power to control this temporal aspect of the story: “In narrated life, even here (halfway between cherry tree and daylily garden) we could suspend and protract the remaining action indefinitely, without ‘freeze-framing’ it as on Keat’s urn; we need only solw it, delay it, atomize it, flash back in time as the woman strolls forward in space with her terrible news” (28-9). Writers can manipulate with words what they are unable to control in life, but Eudora Welty reminds us that time should be structured purposefully: “If a point is reached in fiction where chronology has to be torn down, it must be in order to admit and make room for what matters overwhelmingly more to the human beings who are its characters” (103). Time is both the primary subject and the major theme of my metafiction (metanonfiction?) story “Egged On.” The brief narrative centers on a conversation between a mother and her six-year-old son who are exploring the elusive boundaries and possibilities of time as a construct of language. The story proceeds in what is apparently a chronological manner; however, the two characters verbally confuse the temporal reality of the scene with their dialogue, the effect of which is compounded by the narrator- mother who wrests control of conventional dialogue tags and tense usage and makes them a focus of the story itself. The story is written in present tense, and according to Janet Burroway, this tense has become increasingly popular because it reduces distance and increases a sense of immediacy: “We are there,” she says (239). But are we? “Egged On” indicates we are not. The character of the son, aware that he is in a narrative, protests the illusion: “He rolls his eyes and suggests that present tense might (might, mind you) just not be the tense for you since you’ve waited until tomorrow to write about this. vi ‘Accuracy is all important,’ he says said” (67). Time in narrative is an illusion. Eudora Welty calls time “the wind of the abstract” and says, “Beyond its al-lpervasiveness, it has no quality that we apprehend but rate of speed, and our own acts and thoughts are said to give it that” (95). My story “Random Beach Shots” resulted from my ongoing interest in the temporal aspect of story. I wanted to play with time, to see what would happen when I layered scenes from different time periods in a non-linear way. This experiment began with a restaurant scene between a pregnant woman and her husband. I wrote a second scene that centered on the woman’s labor and began weaving the two scenes together. The resulting scene was flat. Finally, I wrote the third scene— the woman as a little girl visiting her grandmother— and wove the three scenes together. The story was a puzzle. I sat on the floor with scissors, cutting and rearranging pieces. The juxtapositions of the various moments created a story that interested me in a way that the linear version had not, despite the fact that the literal events of the story became more difficult to understand. The lines of time blurred, and the rhythm created by the changing scenes felt a great deal like the rhythm of labor: irregular and uncontrolled. The water and beach images became the shadows and echoes of the woman’s contractions; the changing scenes and the final convergence of voices showed a truer emotional and internal experience of labor than did the original version. Rearrangement of the scenes altered and enhanced meaning. When a plot is organized around a progression from appearance to reality, as in “Random Beach Shots,” the facts do not emerge in an easily understood sequence; instead, the reader must actively seek out the connections between the facts and discover vii or create a pattern that may initially seem elusive. Some advice from my first writing workshop: “Concentrate on the details. Trust your writing. Trust the reader.” Connections made by a reader are the most powerful, my instructor said. “Resist the impulse to always tell the reader what is going on.” Tony Earley’s “The Prophet from Jupiter” weaves details from past and present into an intricate story tapestry, and this story, more than any other, has taught me the power of juxtaposition when one time period is written over another. In this story, the present is a delicate, gauzy covering, not substantial or weighty enough to prevent the past from bleeding through. The town of Lake Glen was born when the dam was built and surrounds the lake that covers its old parent town of Uree. The damkeeper-narrator’s story is tied to both towns, both time periods, the significance of which must be pieced together by the reader from the details that the narrator chooses to relay in a seemingly random fashion. Another layer of the past, albeit, the more recent past— the damkeeper’s marital difficulties with his wife Elisabeth— are threaded into the narrative in an understated way: The problem was that the ducks swim on Tyron Bay every day, you just never know when. Elisabeth says that for years I had nothing to say to her, and that I shouldn’t expect her to have much to say to me. I am ashamed to admit that this is true. There are hurricane-fence gates at each end of the dam, and only Randy and the Mayor and I have keys. (10) The off-handed manner of this presentation serves to highlight the emotional importance of Elisabeth to the damkeeper. Nothing is spelled out, however. Earley trusts the reader to make the connections necessary to understand what is going on at the heart of his story. viii Honeywell describes another procedure that allows for this “gradual emergence of significance” (156). In order for this to occur, the causal sequence of a story must be broken up, or reordered. By disclosing the thoughts of a character in interior monologue, sometimes stream of consciousness, a writer gradually reveals new details and background. In my story “Tree Sitter,” Fran has a great deal of waiting time, time she uses to contemplate her past and to remember her children. Her thoughts make known her motivation for attempting to save an old oak tree, an action that is set in motion by an impulsive move, the underlying reasons of which become clearer to both Fran and the reader as the story progresses: “If she possessed the strength to climb up a little farther, surely she would find the scars from the boys’ old tree house, long since demolished and forgotten” (54). Other flashbacks reveal that Fran is estranged from one son and distant from the other. At a particularly weak moment, the past merges with Fran’s present in the form of an auditory hallucination— Fran’s younger son calling “Mama” from beneath the tree. Flashbacks and Fran’s remembrances inform the present of the story in a more immediate way than if the same information had been delivered through exposition. One method of arranging temporal order to allow a reader gradual insight into a character involves “the separation of the sequence of the presentation of the story from the story itself and its causal sequences” (Honeywell 156). A story may contain two separate temporal realities. In the short story “Underwater” by Luis Arturo Ramos, these two realities occur simultaneously, both within the present space in the story. A group of boys spend an afternoon swimming and swinging from a rope into a river. At one point, Raul, the best diver of the group, plunges headlong into the river and his temporal reality changes. The story divides. Under the water, Raul becomes uneasy; he is aware of the ix