223’) says American writers ought to ‘reflect the sprawl and smallness of America, its greedy optimism and dangerous sentimentality’, and lately I think her directive gives a pleasurable, liminal responsibility to the interloper, the visitor, the non-native-but-long-resident writer. Joy Williams (in a writing lecture quoted in the Paris Review’s ‘ Art of Fiction No. In the past few years I have written short fiction set in the south, but ‘Kiddio’ is where I gave myself most go-ahead to scrutinize the stinging newness of this place. I have lived many years in the United States: for a long time in Massachusetts (where I continue to work), and now in the American South, specifically Alabama. If we’re measuring by the mega-annum, it’s as fixed a place as can be. I grew up in the Irish countryside, on the edge of the Burren. She makes an alliance with a child who has shown up from ‘one of the most terrible places on earth’. The town is fictional, but likely – its details distilled from places I know. In the story she has come home to a town in the American south. I started to enjoy sentence-time spent in her prickly company. She was vexed with her lot, biggity, and in need of something to give and do. The narrator inaugurated herself early in the writing. And so I made peace with ‘superannuated’, and gauged I might also care for the stroppy consciousness that cooked it up. My orderliness has its procedural and mechanical outlets, the better to behave profligately once inside language. My longhand is clerically neat, and undistinctive as a five-year-old’s. In ‘The Reading and Writing of Short Stories’ (1949), she bids a writer, ‘Beware of tidiness.’ I write at a morbidly tidy desk. But nothing struck quite the same blow for unseemliness.Īnd then, absolution, by way of Eudora Welty. I tried to use other words in its place, words more miscible with fiction. I’m also very keen on what’s unbefitting or foolhardy in language: in this case the immodesty of a word like ‘superannuated’. ![]() And I’m devoted to sound and to listening. Here was a narrator, itching for a hearing. Truculent as its rhythms first seemed, though, I recognized that the sentence came with certain sonic arrangements, and they goaded more work. This brashness? I shoved it aside for some time. The first sentence of ‘Kiddio at the Wedding’ arrived shrilly, as unmitigated as the mockingbirds squabbling for sex-attention outside the window where I am writing this. I don’t mean in the responsibility to plot construction or character development I mean the obligation to voice. I suppose the first sentence of any story is a stone-cold delivery of formal consequences: writing the sentence calls down a penalty which the story must serve out. ‘Kiddio was between shoe sizes when we went to my cousin’s wedding in a superannuated church that smelled of cooked dust.’
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