October 25, 2010
Monday

[Catherine] saw it happen on her way back to school after lunch. The cat darted out between two parked cars and started across the street directly into the path of a green and white Studebaker. The front wheels hit the cat with a thud, tossing it the few feet to the curb near where she had stopped, frozen, unable to change what was happening, unable even to call out either to the cat or the car.

                  — Margaret DeAngelis, b. 1947, American apprentice fiction writer

                       from a work in progress

 

When I got back from Bread Loaf in August I made a plan for what I call the Fall Term. In Fall Term A, eight weeks from August 30 to October 23, I would work exclusively on my novel, Perpetual Light, taking it from 30,000 words to 50,000. I got only about 5,000 new words in, but I worked on it in other ways as well. Fall Term B, the four weeks between October 23 and November 19 of my residency at the Vermont Studio Center, I would work exclusively on revisions to four short stories, stories that went through workshop at Bread Loaf and, in some cases, elsewhere as well.

 

I avoid revision, especially after a piece has been thoroughly analyzed, evaluated, and commented upon. It’s been my pattern in the past to work steadily on an idea or a theme from January to March, submit it to Bread Loaf, perhaps do a light edit or rearrangement between notification time and late June, and then more or less abandon the piece. In the other months I am working on my novel (mostly). In January it’s time to get the next piece of short fiction for Bread Loaf going, and the cycle starts again.

 

Because I don’t do major revision, I don’t send stories out for consideration by literary magazines. They’re good drafts, good enough to win admission to Bread Loaf and residency time at places like Jentel and Vermont. But they are nowhere near the quality, in terms of structure, character development, language, and theme, demanded by the top tier magazines like Ploughshares, One Story, or Glimmer Train. One of the stories I chose for this revision exercise has actually been rejected by one of those magazines, but there was an invitation to send them something else.

 

I’ve set a goal of placing at least one piece of short fiction in a literary magazine, print or electronic, by the end of 2011. Today was Day 1 with Story 1, a piece called “Bad Girls.”

 

I assembled all the materials I have and did an inventory. I have a project diary of sorts. The piece began with a prompt in a class at Bread Loaf given by Carol Anshaw in 2004: Choose an incident that happened to you before you were ten years old, and write what you don’t remember. I didn’t work on it much until 2007, when it became the major text I developed during  my month at Jentel. That draft became my Bread Loaf piece for 2008. Along the way the main character’s name changed twice, she went from being eight to being twelve, the setting changed from 1949 to 1959, and the dramatic event that ends the story went from being an explosion to merely a kitchen fire.

 

The story proceeds from an incident that did happen to me when I was eight years old. On my way back to school after lunch, I saw a dead cat in the street, at the curb behind a parked car. At least I think I did. I think I was alone, and I think I was the one who told Sister Bride, my second grade teacher, about it. But it might have been Donna Gaspari, or Angela Fogarty, who showed me the cat later. I know for certain that it was Donna to whom I whispered, “She just doesn’t care,” when Sister failed to be concerned about the cat. Or maybe it was the other way around. In 2008 I visited the scene again. The old school building isn’t there anymore, but the curb the cat lay beside and the trees that shaded it are. That much is certain.

 

Today I read the story again, and also read the collected comments that classmates made at Bread Loaf. Included were the extensive notes, both written on the manuscript and taken down from our lengthy conversation, given by my workshop leader that year, Antonya Nelson. She called it “a fine story” that just needed some tweaking, some “braiding,” some “shaping.”

 

Antonya Nelson talks a lot about “shape” in short fiction. She will be here, as a visiting writer, at the end of next week. I’ll attend a craft lecture she’ll give, and a reading, and will have the privilege of getting her take on two short pieces I’ve submitted for her study. (I decided against sending a portion of my novel which features a character I’ve named after her.)

 

And I’ve begun on the changes she (and others) suggested in 2008. I  reshaped the piece as the story of a summer, and mentioned the Bad Girls in the very first sentence:

 

A week before the last day of sixth grade, Catherine saw the Bad Girls’ cat get killed. She was on her way to school, walking alone, skipping a little and making the clicking sounds that helped her pretend she was riding a horse. She saw the cat, and clicked twice to check her friend Flicka.

The Bad Girls lived in what was known in the 1950s as a “home for unwed mothers.” This one was not in my neighborhood, but my cousin’s, and we sometimes went out on the porch off his bedroom to look down into their yard at them.

 

“They’re not bad girls, honey,” Catherine’s father tells her after he hears her use the term. “They’re just girls who need, well, who need a place to stay while they figure out some problems. They’ve made some mistakes, but they’re not bad. They’re just . . . . unfortunate. They’re unfortunate girls.”

 

The school building I went to every day the year I saw the dead cat is no longer there, but the Bad Girls’ house is. It’s called Lourdes House now, and it still functions as a place where women can go to figure out the same kind of problems. I walked past it several times when I worked on early drafts of this piece, as I walked along the sidewalk where the unfortunate cat met his demise.

 

I’ll be spending a lot of time with Catherine, and her friend Stacey, and the Bad Girls this week.

 

Love it? Hate it? Just want to say hi?
margaretdeangelis [at] gmail [dot] com (replace the bracketed parts with @ and a period) OR
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/silkentent