Firelight – Tobias Wolff

 

I haven’t started recommending authors yet to my oldest son, and I believe that I could be coming in late on this move…can’t recall if my father recommended books/authors to me when I was my son’s age, but I feel that if I’m going to start attempting to lay down some examples for him, now would be a great time. We are working at nurturing a book-reading habit in them, but now perhaps would be a good time to stoke his interest in reading by offering suggestions of writers that I think he might enjoy.

As I’ve written over the years, this series has opened my eyes, heart, and mind to authors I am sure I would have never come across on my own. Of course, I will offer my copies up to the boys to read in a couple of years, but now, perhaps I’ll just stick with authors that I think they might find enjoyable.

Tobias Wolff is, without question, a writer that I’d recommend to my sons. I’ve had the chance to comment on his stories a number of times on this platform, and I always find comfort in turning the page and seeing that his story is next up.

A 2004 interview with him in the Paris Review, which I wrote about here back in 2011, gave meaning to this BASS project, and I’ve returned to his thoughts about reading and writing over the years.

Looking over my spreadsheet, I see we won’t encounter Wolff again until the 1997 BASS. He’ll surface again in 2006 and then again in 2008. Given my reading habits, I’m not necessarily pleased with the space between his stories – but that’s on me.

A part of Wolff’s short stories that I always look forward to usually lands in the last few paragraphs of the last page, and in this story, “Firelight,” Wolff delivers again.

“I watch the fire, watch the changing light on the faces of my family. I try to feel at home. And I do, mostly. It is a sweet time. But in the very heart of it I catch myself bracing a little, as if in fear of being tricked. As if to really believe in it somehow make it vanish, like a voice waking me from sleep.”

I enjoyed this story as it provided me with an interesting look at a young man’s relationship with his mother. It allowed me to step into a fictional character and gain a different perspective on a mother/son relationship.

And that, right there, is why reading fiction and short stories is so important.

In his contributor’s notes at the back of this issue, Wolff states, “The origins of my stories are always hard for me to pin down because the act of writing them inevitably tangles history and imagination in a way impossible for me to untangle later on.”

With that statement, we can see that a bit of fact might always seep into fiction – perhaps just enough at the right time to give us (perceive) that perspective we would not be afforded if we did not read the story…and become that boy.

 

The Golden Darters - Elizabeth Winthrop

 

Before I dive into this wonderful little story, I’ll do what I always seem to do in these entries and wander down a path that has absolutely nothing to do with the intended (I don’t think I ever actually outright concretely stated) purpose of this multi-year long exercise in reading and writing.

I spend much too much time online – in front of a screen. Today, as I was writing a post to share on a particular social media platform, I noticed that in the space where I was to paste my written content, a prompt offered to assist me in writing the “content” with the help of AI. For some reason, today, that hit hard. I have been reading and listening to people who are smarter than me discuss how AI and generative AI can stunt/damage a human’s ability to write – and possibly, as a result, to think. I need to do more reading on this validity, but I am leaning toward understanding and believing that this is true. As I sit and write this, the ideas flow from my brain onto the screen in a Word document. I am also fully aware that these words will probably be sucked into a LLM for training purposes. Perhaps it’ll be used to develop a personalized AI assistant for me that will be marketed to me someday, and they will take this chunk of content and use it to “sell” it to me.

Perhaps I am lucky that I experienced the written word and the ability to write without the taint of AI invading my thoughts. Will my children, though? Will they have the opportunity to suffer over written sheets of paper, struggling for the right combination of words to effectively communicate their feelings, such as I am doing now? Or will they select from a library of prompts that will generate a set of sentences allowing the reader to attempt to understand what they are feeling?  The in-person meeting, free of digital devices, might one day…or perhaps, it’s even now, the only authentic form of transmitting thoughts and ideas to one another. It’s not hard to find reports of the damage that these digital words have inflicted on the humanness of humans.

Looking back on our lives, perhaps we can remember that coming-of-age moment or a rebellion against control.

Perhaps the moment or act was something subtle and peaceful beneath the surface of everyday life over an extended period.

Perhaps the moment or act came crashing all at once, forever altering our lives, violent, hurtful.

Perhaps we had more than one moment that occurred during different stages of our lives.

Perhaps that coming-of-age moment hit at 40…or 50…buying that shiny red Corvette or finally getting that tattoo.

These moments can be quite impactful not only for us but also for those that we surround ourselves with.

They can change how others view us, perhaps for a moment…or forever moving forward.

 These transformations, these moments, these acts of rebellion are special – they make us human; they allow us to evolve, grow, and mature.

They bring forth the crazy electrical connections inside our squishy grey brains struggling to help us function in this shared reality.  

 

 

 

Under the Roof – Kate Wheeler

 

It happens, of course – After realizing, through reading hundreds of these stories over the past sixteen years, that not every story will deliver…something…anything. It took some time to realize this – but then again, how would I have known?

I sat with his story for some time and contemplated its message, just as the monk in the story considered his position in the space he occupied. It concerns me to some extent that perhaps there is part of me that would have quickly picked up on the message at one time, but now, after having my brain soaked in the digital waters, I have forgotten how to breathe oxygen. I struggled with the length of the selection, something that may not have been an issue a few years ago, but then again, Wheeler confesses that she too felt that “I’d come to believe that it was too slow, too long and serious.”

The time stamp on this post accurately reflects when I gave the story its most serious consideration, and even though I did first read it several months ago, I took the time to skim it over once again…giving it a mild second chance.

I approached my considerations from a few angles – as an expat, someone who has always found Buddhism interesting, the male/female relationship, and family relations (extending into step-family members).

I finally had to resign from a post stating that “Under the Roof,” and I couldn’t find common ground.

Forever Overhead - David Foster Wallace

 

I remember February 20, 2020, picking up the BASS 1992 anthology, flipping it over to read the list of authors collected, and seeing DFW's name listed. As I slowly worked my way through this collection, each story arriving before me through a very interesting period of my family's life (nothing scandalous…just a move and the growth of children), each story, of course, was colored by what I was going through at that moment. It's taken me 1610 days to reach the story and finally write about it.

I was excited to read it but intimidated to write about it. 

I mean, it's DFW – so much has been written about this guy, and he continues to draw love and hate from the lit world. My encounters with him have been mostly positive. I bring him up in conversations at least a couple of times a year, and his famous commencement speech/book has caused me to become more empathetic in traffic and grocery lines.

This story hit at the right time. Getting here has been a long slog, but it aligned perfectly, as far as I can tell. The story was enjoyable, and some passages hit home. It's a fast read that pulls you in.

I've mentioned before that I find the contributor's notes of this anthology so rewarding, and this is another that I feel delivers.

As the months drifted past between my first thoughts about this story and my thoughts about commenting on his Contributor’s notes, I decided to place them below and leave them – without spoiling them with my amateur musings.

His reflections are fun and very different from most BASS anthologies' notes. If they weren’t…I suppose I’d have more to say about it.

I was happy to have this insight into the story and again grateful that these little windows into the writers exist.  

 

 

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE is the author of a novel, The Broom of the System; a story collection, Girl with Curious Hair; and, with Mark Costello, a book-length essay on race and music called Signifying Rappers. He lives in Boston and is at this very moment restructuring his whole c.v. around inclusion in this anthology.

 

• This is a bit embarrassing, and I'd rather not discuss it, but will, since certain authorities have been polite but firm about these little post-story discussions being strongly encouraged, and I'd probably submit with cheer to way more embarrassing requirements if it meant getting the old snout into the B.A.S.S. trough.

 

The embarrassing issue here is I'm not all that crazy about this story. It's one of very few autobiographically implicated things I've ever tried. I did, like probably lots of kids, have a high-dive trauma. My real trauma was much more plain-old-sphincter-loosening-fear-based than the existential conundra this story's kid encounters. I basically got to the top, with a long line of jaded souls behind me, and changed my mind about going off. It was excruciatingly shaming, but in no way deeply or exceptionally shaming. I think it wasn't the memory of the shame so much as current shame that allowed so pedestrian a shame still to haunt my esteem-centers, prompting me to make the story so heavy, meditative, image-laden, swinging for the fence on just about every pitch. The thing seems to me a performative index of every weakness I have as a writer and as a person. And God knows why I let my desire for an Alienated Narrative Persona lead me to use the second-person point of view; now I'm scared people will read this and think I'm just a McInerney imitator in a black turtleneck, a copy of Kierkegaard under my arm.

The thing went through dozens of drafts, the first of which still sits in the pages of my undergraduate "Stories That'll Prove I'm a Genius" notebook. I went to grad school in Tucson, which is where I guess the thing picked up its setting: you can't spit in Tucson without hitting a pool, though darn few are public like this one is public.

I completely deny ever once kissing any part of my sister's feet at any time whatsoever.

I'm noticing that, with respect to any piece of fiction, my dissatisfaction with the final draft is directly proportional to the excitement that precedes the first draft. I remember doing the tortured artist thing back in school, all ego and caffeine, and thinking I had a genuine Big Idea for this story here, and seeing it finished, Big, published, lauded as Important by bearded titans. This was before I even bothered to start to try writing the thing. I preconceived it as deeply moving and imposingly cerebral at the same time, at once tender-psyche'd and tough-minded, just the sort of thing Eminences would pluck out of the glabrous herd by choosing for a prestigious anthology. By the second draft, my head was more or less permanently attached to the wall I'd been pounding it on. In black-lit contrast to the timelessly Big thing I'd preconceived, the actual ink-on-paper story seemed pretentious and trendy and jejune and any number of bad things: it seemed like the product of a young writer who was ashamed of a personal trauma and who was straining with every fast-twitch fiber to make that trauma sound way deeper and prettier and Big than anything true could ever really be. And here I mean "true" both artistically and historically.

I don't know why I kept putting the thing through drafts. I kept getting late-night twinges of that original preconceptual excitement. I kept seeing the thing as maybe just one image or two epiphanies away from blossoming, from honoring its entelechy of Bigness. Six years and many other completed projects later, I sent this story out in the old brown envelope. I sent it out for the same reason most young writers I know send stuff out: to have an excuse to quit thinking about it. My surprise when Fiction International took the thing was nothing compared to my feelings about the august endorsement that occasions this wordy little confession. Do not get me wrong: qualms about the story's failure to be anything more than a lumpy ghost of what I remain convinced was its initial promise of Bigness have not inhibited me from calling pretty much everybody I know and casually working in the B.A.S.S.-selection news. I'm extremely and yet of course also humbly grateful and moved and etc. I'm just coming to realize that I have very little personal clue about whether the stuff I do is good or bad or successful or not successful* which like most bits of self-knowledge is both mortifying and kind of a relief. It makes me glad I have opinionated critical friends and politely firm editors, not necessarily in that order.

 *Is "successful" the same as "good," here? Does inclusion in B.A.S.S. render a story de facto "good" the way a human reverend's pronouncement effects a legally binding union?