From “The Deep”: Fiction — Anthony Doerr

Jan 132012
 

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Herewith, an excerpt from Anthony Doerr’s award-winning short story, “The Deep.”  Recipient of the prestigious Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award in 2011, “The Deep” is included in the paperback edition of Doerr’s 2010 Story Prize winning  collection Memory Wall.

Born with a heart defect in the early days of last century, Tom is told he will not live past the age of eighteen. His concerned mother protects him at every turn. ‘Go slow’ his mother says. But Tom discovers life in the midst of fainting spells and industrial collapse, falling in love with the beautiful, red-haired Ruby Hornaday, a girl who dreams of diving on the ocean floors. Set against the salt mines of Depression era Detroit, the reader is transported in time and space in this heartbreaking story of love, hardship and the irrepressible human spirit.

Listen to a reading of “The Deep” by the actor Damian Lewis at the 2011 Oxford Literary Festival.  Read an Richard Farrell’s interview of Anthony Doerr on Numéro Cinq.

—Richard Farrell

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 From “The Deep”

Tom is born in 1914 in Detroit, a quarter mile from International Salt. His father is offstage, unaccounted for. His mother operates a six-room, underinsulated boardinghouse populated with locked doors, behind which drowse the grim possessions of itinerant salt workers: coats the colors of mice, tattered mucking boots, aquatints of undressed women, their breasts faded orange. Every six months a miner is laid off, gets drafted, or dies, and is replaced by another, so that very early in his life Tom comes to see how the world continually drains itself of young men, leaving behind only objects—empty tobacco pouches, bladeless jackknives, salt-caked trousers—mute, incapable of memory.

Tom is four when he starts fainting. He’ll be rounding a corner, breathing hard, and the lights will go out. Mother will carry him indoors, set him on the armchair, and send someone for the doctor.

Atrial septal defect. Hole in the heart. The doctor says blood sloshes from the left side to the right side. His heart will have to do three times the work. Lifespan of sixteen. Eighteen if he’s lucky. Best if he doesn’t get excited.

Mother trains her voice into a whisper. Here you go, there you are, sweet little Tomcat. She moves Tom’s cot into an upstairs closet—no bright lights, no loud noises. Mornings she serves him a glass of buttermilk, then points him to the brooms or steel wool. Go slow,she’ll murmur. He scrubs the coal stove, sweeps the marble stoop. Every so often he peers up from his work and watches the face of the oldest boarder, Mr. Weems, as he troops downstairs, a fifty-year-old man hooded against the cold, off to descend in an elevator a thousand feet underground. Tom imagines his descent, sporadic and dim lights passing and receding, cables rattling, a half dozen other miners squeezed into the cage beside him, each thinking his own thoughts, men’s thoughts, sinking down into that city beneath the city where mules stand waiting and oil lamps burn in the walls and glittering rooms of salt recede into vast arcades beyond the farthest reaches of the light.

Sixteen, thinks Tom. Eighteen if I’m lucky.

—Anthony Doerr

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Prayers & Dreams: Poem — Denise Evans Durkin

Jan 112012
 

Denise Evans Durkin writes poems that glow with a gentle melancholy (all memory is tinged with melancholy) unexpectedly laced with joy and wonder. They are wonderful to read, not just for their warm humanity, but for their loving attention to detail, details that seem to accrete spirit and luminescence as the poems develop. She was raised in Brooklyn and lives in Putnam County, New York, with her husband. She wishes me to note that the poem “Letter to My Sister from Bellevue’s Prison Ward” includes a line from Gil Scott Heron’s “Dirty Low-Down.”  These are her first published poems.

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Impedance
………(circa 1979)

The girl downstairs waits mostly. Sitting on her luggage
by the cattails, side of the road. Embroidered each star
on the velvet pillow of sky — they glitter
through the pin-pricks.

She waits, lonesome as the notions in her felted sewing box —
mismatched buttons, thimbles and threads in bright
remembered colors — bobbins and hat pins —
good things going away.

She’s there in the spaces where the dime store and
the pay phones used to be. The cart that sold ice-cream and
hot waffles. Relics.

Seeping cold. Click, drag, stop — over
imperfect stones. Her gradual world — ohms build
between receiver and vintage turntable on the dresser
in the bedroom she has not visited in thirty years.
Glass & leaves falling. Dust falling down in the hush —

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Letter to My Sister from Bellevue’s Prison Ward

Traveling up from blue-black dreaming
those first pin-pricks of pale blue light give such sudden joy.

Once at a farm I saw eggs that color blue; the class learned
about farms, about far-off things and places where people
know their food, know their land and don’t live like we do.

Do you remember when we used to sing it?
Said I wonder, wonder, wonder, wonder who put those ideas in your head?
You closed your eyes when you sang back up; we got it right.

Mornings are my best time — even the doctors agree — when I wake
full of hope, and my hope is the color of morning, and my eyes

the color of the sea and I know all that the seas know.

A thrum of bees where my heart should be when my eyes flutter
open mother your face dissolving in the water swirling in the silver bowl —

were you here in your white nurses’ shoes? I thought I saw you
in your white dress adjusting the tubes that feed me, that dispense
the medicines, checking my bandages, and my restraints I thought
I felt all the little red lights on the living machines
silver mechanical fireflies that blink and glow redder
through the gauze of my forgetting pieces of what I thought was
my life and I can no longer remember how I got here —
I watch your white shoes walk away squeaking on the tiled floor.

Don’t think I don’t know nothing but the sea stays around
long enough to get old — and all I do in here is imagine
this gossamer daylight everyday — all just going by —

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Come September

This morning the darkness is thicker — like spider’s webs
spun especially for the heavy snow they know is coming.
Crickets sing in the perpetual twilight of the field beyond my patio —
my small wilderness — where even now leaves are falling.
The vine wound up around that oak; some of its leaves
are already red. This is how I measure time: by leaves
changing color, by feeling the dew clinging to grass,
to wildflowers, waiting for the late summer sun.

The day you left draws nearer now.
Noted on my calendar, of course, but I don’t need reminders.
This is how you return to me: in the small twigs I pick up
for kindling, in the rain battering my old house,
beating the glass skylight, letting me know everything
is the way it’s supposed to be. I walk my solitude
past the fading clapboard and the weeds, deer at dusk
and whitecaps on the lake. These are what you left me.

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Fall Notebook: Prayer & Dream

Inside a deep longing I dream alone by the sea.
Wooden table laid ready with black beans, rice and cornbread.
I imagine an indigo sky and wild horses.

Here I dream closer to the weather, to the light, to any decision.
Angel, how long is this bridge?

Over my heart on a lanyard of silver stars, my tiny imagined locket
opens into a mansion where my necessary delights reside.
These rooms full of one wish: for the sisters who
look in on me when darkness falls, who brush sweet almond oil
into my skin, my hair. Lord, my needs are small.

Mother returns in firelight, starshine, moonlight — her fingers
touching the top of my head, reminder that everything is what it is.

Deep cobalt sky and then the moon laying on its cold blessing —

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Soothsayer
………spoken by my mother

Rootworker they call them in the Carolinas where I was married far from Georgia
where I was born and raised — farther still from these misty Coney Island streets
strewn with blown paper, dirt and sand.

Across the street from the Mount Zion Baptist Church where I sing in the choir,
collect tithing baskets and light white votives at sunset, my sisters wait at the bus stop —

old women with knitting in their straw totes, they nod without looking for me —
like they know I’m in here —

and they do. They know rootworkers are never welcome in this church or any other —
unnecessary anyway with the devil in the first pew every Sunday loudly singing
hymns he knows much better than my choir ladies in their cloches tipped down
on one side threaded with beads like bits of sea glass keeping close together
moving in tune as they file down into the pews, careful
not to touch him whom they have always known.

Lord, I am your child, walking and talking right, gone to the river and
baptized into the ease of your arms, my heavenly home.

Choir leader of my church under this indigo sky —
vesper-quiet in here with this cross and these candles
constant flame of love in my heart —

ruler of this elemental kitchen magic
my sisters call me Soothsayer
and I know what I know.

—Denise Evans Durkin

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Turbulence: Paintings by Anne Diggory

Jan 102012
 

Here are a selection of stunning landscape paintings from Anne Diggory’s solo exhibition Turbulence, currently on display at the Blue Mountain Gallery in New York (January 3rd – 28th). Not only do we get the paintings, but for Numéro Cinq Anne added reference photos and images of early versions of work and works-in-progress, delivering an amazingly revealing glimpse into the artist’s process and the provenance of these lovely paintings.

Anne Diggory has a BA in Studio Art from Yale and an MFA from the University of Indiana. We have been friends for years in the Saratoga Springs, NY, demimonde. She has been featured in Adirondack Life, American Artist Magazine, and The NY Times. She is known for her combination of accurate detail with expressive painting and strong abstract structure – an outgrowth of education at Yale and Indiana University and many years of exploring and painting the natural world. Her painting locations include the Adirondacks, the Hudson River Valley , Alaska and Arizona. A current series based on Lake George vistas was inspired by her research on John Frederick Kensett for an article that will shortly be submitted to the Metropolitan Museum Journal.

Diggory shows regularly at the Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City. She recently had solo exhibitions at Fairleigh Dickenson University and Suffolk County Community College, Selden, NY. Those two shows focused on her hybird works that combine photography and painting in a multi-layered process.

Her work is included in many public and private collections including the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, NY, the Yale Art Gallery, and DePauw University.  Recent commissions include several large murals for the Adirondack Trust Company in Saratoga Springs (one is a 22 foot high mural of a waterfall), a collaborative commission of art work for the Saratoga Springs Train Station and a large interactive public artwork for the Albany Institute of History and Art.

Here is the text of the Blue Mountain Gallery press release for the show:

Shifting surfaces of waters and skies inspired the artworks for Anne Diggory’s solo exhibition, Turbulence, at the Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City that runs January 3rd – 28th,, 2012.  The exhibition includes motifs from the Adirondacks, the shores of Long Island and South Carolina as well as scattered tabletop arrangements.  Diggory’s preference for images featuring dynamic instability extends to her choice of medium in many works that combine sections of photography and painting in a multi-layered process. Further disruptions, slightly tempered by stable horizons, occur with deep spaces, off-kilter compositions and irregular perimeters that energize the work.

The artwork in the exhibition is mainly from the past year and a half. The title “Turbulence” is both a reference to the imagery and a reference to the process of making art, which involves disturbing the surface of the canvas or paper.

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Turbulence

Paintings by Anne Diggory

 

The Water Improvisation Series

While all representational painting is of necessity an invention in order to create illusion out of paint on a flat surface, some of these images are more fictional than others. Some started as plein air paintings that selectively used elements within a motif and were then finished in the studio.  The larger works and those with photographs inserted were started in the studio based on smaller works or photographs I had taken. The Water Improvisation series began with water-like patterns of paint and were developed from a well-informed imagination.

Cross Currents

  Continue reading »

A Bargain, a short story by Dave Margoshes

Jan 092012
 

Herewith a gorgeous story from Dave Margoshes, who has contributed already two poems–“Theology” and “Becoming a Writer“–to these pages. I have long admired his work; I put him in Best Canadian Stories when I edited that estimable annual collection (over a decade of editing). “A Bargain” is excerpted from the author’s new collection A Book of Great Worth to be published by Coteau Books in April. A Book of Great Worth is a collection of linked stories based loosely on Dave Margoshes’ father. The title story was actually published in Best Canadian Stories, but in 1996, just before I took over.

Dave Margoshes is a Saskatchewan writer whose work has appeared widely in Canadian literary magazines and anthologies, including six times in the Best Canadian Stories volumes. He was a finalist for the Journey Prize, Canada’s premier short story award, in 2009. He’s published over a dozen books, including Bix’s Trumpet and Other Stories, which was named Saskatchewan Book of the Year in 2007. He’s been fiction editor of the literary magazines Grain and Dandelion, and was literary editor at Coteau Books for several years. He lives on a farm outside Saskatoon.

dg

 A Bargain

by Dave Margoshes

 

My father used to say that my mother was the one in the family who wore the pants. As he said it, he would invariably be wearing pants himself, either the pants of his suit or one of the Sears catalogue blue jeans my mother ordered for him, and she would be wearing one of her many flower-printed skirts, so the remark was surely meant to be ironic, though at the time, and until I went off to college and learned its delicious meaning, irony was a concept I was unfamiliar with, and what my father said was merely puzzling. The closest my mother ever came to wearing pants was the voluminous denim culottes she put on to tend her garden in the summer. Beyond those, and the one-piece swimsuit she wore when we went to the beach, I never saw her out of a skirt or dress, though she would occasionally walk around the house in her slip for a while after coming home from work. She was never embarrassed to be dressed that way in front of me, and so I in turn was never embarrassed to see her.

I think what my father meant by the remark was that my mother made all the big decisions in their life together. Another of his favourite remarks – again, ironically – was that he made the big decisions, on war and peace, world hunger, the economy and other weighty matters, while my mother contented herself with the small decisions, those related to the family and household, things like spending money, feeding and clothing them and the children, what movie to go to and so on. My father also often said that he and my mother did everything around the house together, with him doing the physical labour and my mother “supervising,” if it was something to do with the outside, and her doing the work and him supervising if it was inside – chores like the dishes and the laundry. All of these comments – conveyed in a joking voice but with a serious undertone – related to my father’s often-expressed grievance that my mother was “bossy.”

It was true that she almost always got her way. But not always. My father liked a drink now and then, meaning several times a day, I don’t know how many. She would have liked him not to drink at all. His concession to her was to rarely drink his preferred rye whisky in her presence – never at home, but he would let his guard down and have one or two at family gatherings where liquor was flowing. “I’m just doing this to be polite,” he would say, a little too loudly but usually with a wink, and the uncles would smile. But he kept a flask in the glove compartment of his car, a bottle in the bottom drawer of his desk at The Day, the Yiddish newspaper where he worked as a reporter and columnist, and during the course of his day he made occasional stops at barrooms where he was a familiar customer. At home, at night, usually seated at the kitchen table in his undershirt, he would have a glass or two of sherry or port, usually the cheapest brands. My mother bought it for him, and that’s what he specified, the cheapest, which, I imagine, also appealed to her own sense of frugality. This was her concession to him, these fortified wines, “a gentleman’s drink,” he would say when he unscrewed the bottle, as if to imply it was no drink at all then, and didn’t count.

Although I was a witness to them all through my growing up, this to-ing and fro-ing, these nuances of their life together, it wasn’t until I was grown and involved in a relationship of my own that I came to understand the delicate balance they had constructed and maintained. Well, not understand, but begin to.

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Cave Diving With Einstein, Poems by Laura Behr

Jan 082012
 

“Let’s start by making ourselves unfamiliar,” Laura Behr begins one poem, and she does, continuously through her poems that are filled with sudden leaps, surprising twists, non sequiturs, surrealistically tinged phrases—anything to let us see the world and our relationships in it anew. Laura has been a private student of mine for a few years now, starting after we met at the Iowa Summer Writers’ Festival. To be honest, when she began I wasn’t enthusiastic about the work but she is a voracious reader and reviser, and she has become one of my favorite all time students. I look forward to every poem she sends and shake my head in wonder at the new ways she finds to see herself, all of us, in the world. She’s the kind of original that makes us more original ourselves.

—Richard Jackson

 

Cave Diving With Einstein

Poems by Laura Behr

 

Reflections on Magritte’s Painting The Therapist: You Are My Suitcase

 

Let’s start by making ourselves unfamiliar.
Listening, to the puzzles of silence. Travelling
as far as we can go. We’ll form an Optimists Club.
Rewriting ordinary things: a straw hat, reed cane,
the red blanket. I can see every third page is missing,
so you can wear the blanket first.  Later, I’ll try it on
for you and invite you into my lap. I want you
to look into my bird cage. If you’d like I’ll turn
and show you my dove-heart, and you can sit
on the heart-ledge of my cage cooing, and keeping
my dove-heart company. Sky and water open the illusion.
Every particle of yellow sand, atoms of myself sitting
resolutely on the beach, the darkness of a midnight-blue sky,
my Sunday hat, meld with every particle of you
collecting inside my portrait. Bring your Lindy Hop,
and uncover me in the quiet music of waves. Breathing in
the scent of sand pines. Stop and rest with me in these
exotic blues of children’s books and imagination.
We’ll lose our bearings, mixing up horizon-lines and dreams,
falling open to each other, learning to love in solitude.
We’ll need a pair of carrier pigeons, trained to carry messages
written in invisible ink. Let’s wash away the old answers,
letting the horizon form a new tracing-line decoding the cipher
between us leading on to the future. Sit with me. The future
of the thing, sees for us without a face, with its well-trained heart
and finds itself in balance, if mystery lifts her veil. The weight
of things, two birds: one free, the other caged by a lover’s cross,
as primal navels open insides first to love all bird-cage heart.

On the Banks of the Cedar River Finding a Rare Igneous Rock

 

All he wants. A soul’s weight. Washed up
from a century’s flood. Not the rock he pressed
into nameless hands long ago. The felt how
of living. His words bent by gravity and time.
Her name long forgotten.  Smooth, black,
almost volcanic. The world outside is not enough.
Pressing his rock into her small hand at recess.
He imagines her now. Her face, nameless.
And every word exchanged transgresses memory.
Working things through as the world wakes.
At the mercy of one task. He wants to be
a time traveler. The best day of his life could be
in the future. Stripping down.  Jump and crossing over.
Freed by the river’s forward moving questions.
The chaos seems insurmountable. Time moves truth
into view. Where to go from here? A still quiet moment
poses in dark woods. He wants to go back, capturing stars
hanging above the silent pines. Falling back
into night’s silver lining, as its spirited double-helix hums
an incantation in star-speak counter measures.
And even his affection for living can’t hold him safe
enough to see his own ignorance. He wishes he had
been smarter, moved faster. A regret. Still, the future
is alive with a promise which marks the things he carries
of her into infinity. Uncharted in shadows, he wants.
The world’s beauty, recovering eyes that wonder.
Silent, in a moment that doubts the mystery. Its haunting
stripped and smitten as words lose meaning slipping
into ambivalence. A perfect set of magnets, and closeness
enough to touch fingers and toes. That is all he wants.
Eternity, reliving what has yet to be lived.

 

Owen Meany at the Alamo

 

A few stone buildings, a neatly trimmed lawn,
a nice place to take a picture. A reason
to take off a hat. None of it changes the ending.
It’s happening now, expected signs and all the rest.
A home for missionaries and Indians,
a freak storm hits in shirt-sleeve weather.
If you dare ask what will kill you. The ghosts
will tell you. Or ask how you know
what you don’t know. Be willing to do something.
Act like a baby or a fallen star. Both roles have merit.
When life isn’t so beautiful it’s hard
to put into words. Faith isn’t pure
or sure of itself or of you.  It’s a word born and blurred,
in veils and regret.  It proves itself against
the disorder.  Blow it up, you can’t leave it undefended.
How do you hold happiness? It’s the oddest things,
the unexpected turn of a moment you don’t see coming
but you see, and there are no survivors. Practice.
Living with what is missing, an arm,
a father, it’s a no win argument, chosen, human.
Faith in faith means walking, not figuring it out.
A hero is only a street light away.

 

Cave Diving with Einstein

 

Two minutes underwater and the last thing
you see is the pale gray shadow of clouds
falling down to uncover angels dancing
within the electric blue glow. Eternity is blue,
holy as the first touch of skin radiating light
thru deep black waters. Within its light lies
the weight of everything that we cannot say.
And, waiting on the lap of gods for a second wind
or a kiss, as ghosts walk, as rain falls clearing the air,
we laugh. Dreaming of love’s savages warm
and expecting summer rains. Suppose the earth
above us is the illusion. Water rushes, siphoning silt
thru a slit in the rocks. Grounded by live oaks
and scrub jays the sandy path above is the netherworld.
The Harrier hawk mid-flight and lost is a Firebird,
his feather tips are your hands. Will you believe
with me in implausible things? A turbulent
storm-tossed sea. Electric blue spheres of light.
Enwombing us, in the binding intensity of heat.
Gravity healing and unruly, shifts its boundaries
and leaning in forces jumps of spiritual force
that spread out and over the tides to woo us away.
Facing the whiteness of surf light, looking into
the blue-sky water, I watch as the shadow borders
of ordinary life disappear. Entering with you
into dimly lit worlds, hidden below a glassy surface,
I hold my breath. Listening for the strange music
of a seashell over a roar of waves, the music tells stories
of our very natures and of places beyond this, where
things are truer than real. Waiting to see this murky
dreamscape with the soul’s eye, we uncover in the quiet
music of waves the taste of salt on tongues, the scent
of ambergris and an ever growing feeling of buoyancy.
Sometimes, when we talk about things the light seems
to go away from us, as lightening over the sea
follows the wind. We almost always need more
than we can ask for and so we don’t ask for anything.
And though we can make anything out of light,
darkness into tender night, we cannot make
things un-happen. This is what makes all the rest
so hard. Even as night is grave, waves erase.
The way it used to be. The way you want it to be now.

 

 

This Land Who Could Know

 

Smelling of cigarettes, you ask me
to turn my bones into a beaded necklace
for Timordee bartering. It’s not that easy.
It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want to tell you
what I felt that night, I didn’t know how
to tell you. Splayed out like a broken cross,
my chest rising and falling like fire coils inside a star
or a wave of slaked breath crosses, a catch of longing
wanting more. I was willing to be with you, asking
nothing, taking what comes. Pretending with you,
this can go on forever. There was only one star
in the sky, the moon hidden by a navy haze.
I took that as permission, the moon’s illusion
of what counts. I was older than I’d ever be,
commanding the star to reverse. Giving myself away,
learning the business of love, stuck in the past
where anything worth knowing looms contented
and even the future doesn’t know everything.
Where everything beautiful is a trick. If you knew
anything, you’d know how to run your hand
up my thigh, running your hand over my why not,
until practiced eyes leave off unexpectantly and pass
over truth. But it’s not that easy. Neither of us can say
when it started or how long it took the wind to carve
an arch thru the flagstone wall. I walked thru at the place
where truth pleads for a way to betray or to put up
with each other and the world. It felt like an invitation.
I can’t remember the beginning. So ask
a different question. I remember wavering
and waiting for you in dangerous moments
with empty hands. I remember trying all night
to convince the light to mold itself into an apology.
Wanting to hear, All is forgiven. Learning instead
what goes unsaid never gives fair warning. Today,
the lavender sky takes the light away with you,
all tangled purple-heart. And I can see in the secret goings
of stars the advantages of losing. The night looked
into me to speak. My eyes stripped and final,
a reason to love is destination enough. A lasting solo.
What comes after? All that exists is love’s simple intent.
More than anything precious a cooing then sleep.

—Laura Behr

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Laura Behr lives in Montgomery, Alabama. She is a psychotherapist, a partner in a business consulting group advising business and its leaders on mental health and preventative wellness from a combined Neuroscience, CBT, and Psychoanalytic framework, and the mother of two girls. She has published in The Café Review.

Letter from Paris: Life Lessons in Père Lachaise Cemetery — Sion Dayson [Selected by Utne Reader, The Best of the Alternative Press]

Jan 052012
 

EDITOR’S NOTE: Utne Reader, The Best of the Alternative Press, reprinted Sion Dayson’s excellent essay “Life Lessons in Père Lachaise Cemetery” in its July/August, 2012, issue. This is terrific recognition for Sion’s work and for the magazine. Congratulations all around. Raise a glass of Talisker, everyone.

See all of Sion’s work on NC here.

dg

 

Life Lessons in Père Lachaise

By Sion Dayson

 
Stunned to stillness
by beauty
we remember who we
are and why we are here…

In the immense
darkness
everything spins with
joy.

 —From “Winter Solstice” by Rebecca Parker

For the past three and a half years, I’ve lived a ten-minute walk from Père Lachaise, the famed Parisian cemetery that’s home to many historic luminaries – everyone from Abelard to Chopin, Edith Piaf to Marcel Proust.

In recent weeks, talk has centered on writer Oscar Wilde; his tomb now stands encircled by thick glass, a barrier aimed to protect the stone from endless admirers’ kisses. (Of course people have already started leaving their lipstick prints on the Plexiglas instead).

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The Mind’s Eye: Character Thought in Fiction: Essay — Erin Stagg

Jan 022012
 

To begin the New Year at Numéro Cinq, here’s a terrific addition to our growing collection of literary craft essays from Erin Stagg. In “The Mind’s Eye—Character Thought in Fiction,” Erin gives a terse, clear explanation of some of the basic techniques of character thought using a gorgeous Lorrie Moore short story as her example quarry.

Erin Stagg is a freshly-minted graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing Program. She grew up in Taos, New Mexico, studied Spanish at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and now lives in New Zealand where she teaches skiing in the winter and works in retail in the summer. She was awarded the 2002 Wellesley College Johanna Mankiewicz Davis Prize for Prose Fiction. Her short fiction has also appeared in The Battered Suitcase.

dg

 

The Mind’s Eye – Character Thought in Fiction

By Erin Stagg

 

Character thought is text in the story that tells the reader what is going on inside the character’s mind. When I started looking for it in other writers’ work I suddenly realized that good writers are constantly weaving their characters’ consciousness into their stories. They write it into their stories using the techniques of narrative inscription, direct indication, free indirect discourse and imaginative reconstruction, all of which we will look at in depth. We will also look at how character thought functions in fiction as backfill, motive and thematic interpretation.

I was astounded at the sheer volume and density of character thought as well as a bit embarrassed that I had never really noticed it before. It’s everywhere. Flannery O’Connor begins “A Good Man is Hard to Find” inside her main character’s mind, telling the reader what that character wants: “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind.” (O’Connor, 9) Jane Austen’s Emma is constantly thinking her way through what happens in the novel Emma and reflecting upon it:

Her own conduct, as well as her own heart, was before her in the same few minutes. She saw it all with a clearness which had never blessed her before. How improperly had she been acting by Harriet! How inconsiderate, how indelicate, how irrational, how unfeeling had been her conduct! What blindness, what madness, had led her on! It struck her with dreadful force, and she was ready to give it every bad name in the world.

James Joyce uses it in “The Dead.” Here is a section from the final scene. The character thought is in bold.

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live. (Joyce, 160)

 Good writers insert character thought into every story and novel – characters think their way through stories. And it’s important here to realize, because I know some of you are thinking that character thought is telling and we should not tell, that character thought is not telling at all. In his essay “Notes on Novel Structure” Doug Glover writes, “Thought is action.” (75) Thinking is something characters do. Not only that, but it drives a story forward by giving every action and reaction a motive. Writers use it to give their characters a past, an imagination and the ability to interpret what is happening to them. In other words good writers use character thought to flesh out the bare bones of the plot and fill their characters with the semblance of life.

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