So what's How to Be a Man about? How did it come into being? Here's the Dear Reader letter to let you know more about it. You can get the new audiobook version read by P. J. Morgan at Amazon, Audible, and iTunes.
The stories in How to Be a Man were written over the
course of the last fifteen years. Some came hot and fast and did not need much
fiddling (“Men Are Like Plants,” “Oranges”) and some were the result of years
of revision (“Nose to the Fence,” “Mouse”). The oldest story in the collection
is “Snowshoeing,” and it’s flaws make me uncomfortable, but I love the striving
to capture something inexplicable that motivated it. The youngest story is “Dammed,”
and it’s a good example of my writing process now—I tend to revise extensively
as I go and write a lot in my mind before I put it down on the page. Once I get
started, it only takes me a session or two to get it all down.
Author’s often
get the question, “Where do you get your ideas?” I’ve never had a problem
getting ideas, and I mourn the loss of the multitude of ideas that have come
and gone, unfulfilled. I think there are lots of ideas out there—it’s just a
matter of recognizing them for what they are, and when I’m writing—not blocked—the
ideas come thick and fast. I may start with a voice, which happened with “Men
Are Like Plants.” I was lying in bed trying to go to sleep, and her voice came
to me so strongly I risked my husband’s displeasure—he hates it when I stay up
late—and got up to write it down. I wrote most of that story in one sitting. What
prompted “Revelations” was a contest a couple of years ago that had to include
the year 2010. It got me thinking about the end of the world and Revelations,
and so I wondered what a modern-day devil might be like. “Snowshoeing” started
with the idea of conveying that feeling of separateness that sometimes comes
upon a couple, that realization that you can’t always take your partner for
granted. “Oranges” arose in one sitting on a plane coming back from a writer’s
conference, the result of guilt over abandoning my kids for a week. “A
Dangerous Shine” is based on a real incident that took place at the Buckhorn
where I bartended. And on it goes.
Putting together
a collection is tough. The idea of revising so many stories at one time and the
nakedness that will result from other people seeing them all together is enough
to stop the hardiest souls in their tracks. And what order do you put them in? Do
you treat them like a mix tape—starting with an attention grabber, turning it
up, taking it back, orchestrating peaks and valleys? Or do you arrange them on
merit only, putting the best ones first? My protagonists are of different
ages—should they be organized by age? I ended up putting what I think of as my
best stories first and last, but then also taking into account the mood of the
story. I tried to start with some positive stories and then place some of the
darkest stories toward the end. I also tried to group them tonally,
thematically, and by protagonist, so “Mouse” and “Oranges” are together because
they’re about young girls dealing with their parents. “The Body Animal,”
“Revelations,” and “Dammed” are together because they’re about the body and
violence and alienation. “Wanting” is last because it’s a strong story but it
also is historical, while all the others are contemporary.
I’ve always
loved when authors tell the story of the story, and so I thought I’d choose a
few and talk about how they came into being. “How to Be a Man” was written in
response to “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie” by Junot
Diaz. I had long resisted writing a second-person story because it seemed so
cliché—the young writer thinking herself so edgy, taking such an avant garde
point of view. Then I read a couple of kick-ass second-person stories, and it
began to work on me: Why couldn’t I write one? Then I heard Edwidge Danticat
read Diaz’s story and I was hooked. The story wrote itself fairly quickly until
I got to the ending—well, the first ending where she becomes a whiskery-chinned
old batty. I stopped there. But I didn’t like that ending. I didn’t want her
life to end that way. I wanted her to have a chance at happiness. Then I
thought, why can’t I have two endings. I’m the god in this little world. I can
do whatever I want. So I added the second ending. “Wanting” is another story I
wrote in response to a story. Growing up in the West, I had strong Hemingway
tendencies—clipped sentences, withheld emotion, huge psychic distance—and so to
try to remedy that, I decided to take a great story that was a little more lush
to imitate it in sentence construction, paragraphing, even down to where the
dialog rests. The story I chose was Karl Iagnemma’s “Children of Hunger.” So I
tried to maintain the feel of his story and mimicked it as closely as I could
in my own story. It was a very helpful exercise, I think, and I really like the
results. “Mouse” began as a writer’s exercise at a conference workshop presided
over by Steve Almond. He had good advice about the mouse-killing scene: “A
little blood and gore goes a long way.” I later expanded the scene into the
story.
I will always
write short stories. They are harder than novels, in a way, because they
require the precision of a diamond cutter. They have to be so much more
concise, clear, compact, and well-written than a novel. In a novel, you can get
away with pages of loose extraneous stuff, while a short story must have no
fat. And I love reading short stories. I think we’re in a renaissance of good
short-story writing, and for that I’m very thankful.
Happy reading!
– Tamara
Linse, Laramie, Wyoming, 2013
