Stories of the New West by Evan Morgan Williams
Main Street Rag, 2021
Evan Morgan Williams’s third short story collection, Stories of the New West, came out in fall. The collection represents a move into experimental territory for Williams and explores the lives of an eccentric cast of characters from the Pacific Northwest. Evan Morgan Williams, whose fiction has appeared in over 50 literary journals as well as in two previous collections, spoke with me via email about his new collection.
Chrissy Kolaya: This is your third book; I can imagine a younger, more naive version of me assuming that by the time one had written that much, one probably had the whole writing thing figured out. The older, hopefully smarter version of me that’s talking with you, however, knows that often, after writing three books, you’ve only figured out how to write those three books, and that there’s always lots more to learn. At this point in your writing career, what parts of writing do you find that you still struggle with?
EMW: I’ve been writing stories for decades. I don’t feel that I have the same struggles as I used to. Staring at a blank page? Not a problem. Confronting the need for a radical revision. I’ll do it. For me, it’s the new struggles that get to me. I worry that I’m not using language as adroitly as when I was younger. You would think we get wiser, and I suppose we do, but I also worry that I’ve lost a certain edge in terms of alertness. I find myself wishing for longer spans of uninterrupted time to help my concentration. When I was younger, I could get useful work done in just a fifteen minute gap, here or there, throughout the day.
If I am struggling to concentrate, is this because of age? Is this because of the pandemic? Is this because I follow the news too much? Maybe everyone is experiencing the same distractedness.
Speaking of age, I have experienced major hearing loss and tinnitus because of a tumor on my auditory nerve. Did you see “The Sound of Metal?” That scene in the t-shirt shop where he experiences the muffled ringing? I hear that all the time. I wonder how it affects my interaction with the words on the page. I used to treat them as more physical, tactile, especially the Germanic portions of the language. Beowulf and Hemingway. Nowadays, I could go for silence on the page.
CK: I’ve been experiencing the same challenges with concentration, though one of the things I’ve found is that the short story form is great for reading in this condition. In reading the stories in this collection, I found that one of the strengths of your writing is your facility for sense detail and vivid descriptions like the following:
- A man driving himself to the hospital during a heart attack, “one hand white knuckled on the wheel, one hand squeezing down the explosion in his chest” (6)
- Describing some errant fireworks: “Chrysanthemum blooms, which should have towered overhead, burst in the cottonwoods and ignited the crowns” (11)
- “Canvasback ducks were running across the surface, wings grasping sky, their feet dashing the sky’s reflection to bits” (13)
- “Crunch of crampons, ping of ice axes, dull clink of ice screws and carabiners dangling from backpacks” (20)
- “Some days I heard the ocean. Some days a silence aching and forlorn. I heard gunfire once. My heartbeat. Ravens on a hot day gulping warm air in a sun I could not see, a heat I could not feel” (67)
- “He picked shards of shrapnel like seeds from the flesh of a pomegranate” (97).
Thinking about writers who may struggle with this, what are some of your tips and tricks for doing this well?
EMW: Sensory detail is key for engaging a reader. Especially touch. Visuals are great, but they’re common (I should tread lightly here: John Cheever’s stories are rich with visual imagery, and I must be careful to throw no shade). Instead, I prefer to give the reader something to touch, just as they touch the physical page. Use tactile imagery. “Wings grasping sky,” to give one example. But more than that: I’m going to give away one of my secret weapons here. We all hear about “show, not tell,” but I try to employ it at the bare level of the language itself. Choose Germanic words that you can practically taste in your mouth. Use alliteration. The “crunch of crampons” sentence that you cited is an example of both of those techniques. Another trick I use, which I learned from a professor’s analysis of Steven Crane, is to domesticate your imagery. There’s a line in The Red Badge of Courage where the bullet’s zinging is likened to a note plucked from a tightly strung clothes line. It’s pretty horrifying to associate a battle image with a domestic image, but it helps the reader’s experience with the story. In the shrapnel-pomengranate image you cited, that’s what I’m tapping into.
CK: Those are great tips, and thanks for sharing one of your secret weapons! Many of the first-person stories in this collection have strong narrative voices—I’m thinking especially about “The New Country Doctor” and “Ronnie Jackson and the Rainbow Lights.” For you, what works for getting and staying in these character’s voices?
EMW: Okay, earlier I said that I don’t have any old struggles, but you got me here. Finding the right voice for a story is the single most elusive stage of the writing process. But it’s also the most promising, because if I can find the voice, I’ll find the rest of the story rather easily. “The New Country Doctor” was going nowhere, many rewrites, completely from scratch, but when I got the voice of that opening paragraph, the rest of the story fell into place in just a few sittings. The Ronnie Jackson story was also a complete rewrite of a voice that wasn’t working. Everything you need to know about the narrator—his confessional insight, his righteousness, his simmering anger, the chip on his shoulder—it’s all right there, and it serves the remainder of the story well.
CK: What can you tell readers about the sorts of issues and ideas that were on your mind as you were writing these stories?
EMW: I would never have written these stories when I was younger. I am not grappling with the same considerations. I have been trying new forms, reading new writers, studying what they’re doing. Isaac Babel, for example. Maile Meloy. Luis Alberto Urrea. The stories are experimental… for me, anyway. I don’t think most people would consider them experimental at all. But for me, I was experimenting. I think I was successful; indeed, all of the stories but one found a home in a literary magazine, except the one I wrote after studying Isaac Babel’s stories. Of course, he had trouble getting published too!
CK: Some of the characters and relationships I encountered in this collection felt like they echoed across stories. I’m thinking here of Jimmy in “This Once, My Story” and the narrator in “Burn Barrel | Colfax Avenue;” of the father-son relationships we see in “Dinosaur Bones,” “Burn Barrel | Colfax Avenue,” “The River After Its Tail,” and “It Is Arranged;” of characters in the role of attempting to protect someone from or responding to a suicide, as in “Dead Weight,” “This Once, My Story,” and “The River After Its Tail;” and of characters experiencing unwanted or unexpected pregnancies, as in “Burn Barrel | Colfax Avenue” and “This Once, My Story.” Was this echo effect intentional? What can you tell us about how you think about these echoes, either as you wrote individual pieces or as you arranged the stories as a collection?
EMW: I’m thrilled and honored that you’ve found threads that I didn’t even know about! This is my favorite type of reader! A good reader is like a good therapist, unlocking aspects of myself that I didn’t know were there. Serendipity! Now that you’ve found those themes, I won’t be able to stop thinking about them! I will say this: in assembling the stories, the only thing I was aware of was a sense of aftermath. Even the father-son moments seem to occur in the aftermath of risks taken, risks failed. In two of the stories, the narrator, an older teen, feels so overwhelmed that he runs off. I was afraid of including two stories that relied on the same device, but I decided the reappearance of the device was significant, so it deserved inclusion. I strategically placed one of those stories in the front, and one of them at the end.
CK: As a writer who’s never published a collection of stories, I’m always curious to learn how writers think about that process of organizing a story collection: which stories go in and which don’t, what order they go in, the title for the collection. What can you tell us about how this process works for you?
EMW: There are aesthetic aspects to assembling a collection. You want cohesion, but you can be playful and imaginative about what that means. Stories centered around one place certainly have cohesion. Theme can be another cohesive element. Those would be easy to grasp. But there is also an innate capacity for range and diversity to achieve their own cohesion; if you establish an expectation early for the reader, they will ride along with you through a very diffuse assemblage of stories. The stories will still cohere. David Poissant’s Heaven of Animals comes to mind. There’s very little cohesion—every story contains an animal, but that’s it. The cohesion comes in the strength of the voice.
There are strategic aspects to assembling a collection as well. You want your best work first, because the screener at the small press might have to work through thirty manuscripts, and that first story needs to compel them to keep reading. Having said that, you want your second best story in the next slot. And so on. The last story in the collection should also be stellar, since it’s the last thing the screener will read. What I’m saying is this: you want your best work throughout the collection, right?! Don’t send out the manuscript unless you are confident in all of the stories!
As for a title, I always struggle with this. Stories of the New West was just a file name in my cloud storage. But I kept it because I think it’s doing the right work. It plays on our commonly held notions about the West and why people come here. Since the beginning of the European takeover of North America, people have been moving west with expectation and hope, then they have managed incredible risk, and then they have been left to process its aftermath. That final phase is perhaps the most interesting, because the feelings will be at their most ambivalent. I see my characters doing that. I see myself doing that as well. So while the stories in my collection are new, they revisit one of the oldest arcs in our history.
CK: These stories are a mix of flash and “standard-length” pieces. What, for you, is different about writing flash vs. writing a standard-length piece of fiction? How did you approach this mix as you set about ordering the stories in this collection?
EMW: I am still learning how to write flash, but I thought that the mix of standard length and flash might be enjoyable for the reader. Hemingway did it in his story collections. He is now seen as a progenitor of flash fiction. The mix enhances the tone of his whole collection. It also gives the writer a means to make abrupt transitions, like in a Broadway show, when they need an interlude number, in front of the curtain, while the crew is back there changing the set. Maybe that’s a finesse, but I enjoy such moments in the work of others, so I thought it would work here.
CK: I was especially taken with “Burn Barrel | Colfax Avenue.” What can you tell us about this piece, especially the effect you were going for with the choice of the vertical lines in lieu of traditional punctuation? Reading it and thinking about the way it’s laid out on the page reminded me of the way I think about line breaks and stanza breaks when writing poetry.
EMW: I could talk about this story at length! So of course I probably will! This story involves three converging elements.
One, I heard Luis Alberto Urrea read a story at the Tin House Summer Institute. After just a few minutes, I realized that he did not have any text with him at the podium. He was reciting from memory. After a few more minutes, I noticed certain inflections in his voice, certain changes in his pace, that indicated he was adlibbing parts of the story, even just a phrase here and there. Nearer to the end of the story, the adlibs became more extended. Think of what he was doing: he gave us a “reading” for one audience only. No one would ever hear the same story again. I have since noticed a few other writers ad-libbing their readings. Samuel Roxas-Chua comes to mind. Well, I wanted to create a story like that, designed for reading aloud, but with opportunities for variation, so it would always change. That’s why the story contains no conjunctions or introductory clauses: the reader is welcome to put them in wherever they want.
As for employing that single bar of punctuation, this is the second converging element. I had just read a nonfiction book, Shady Characters, on the history of punctuation, and I was inspired to invent a new punctuation mark. In this case, the single vertical bar sort of atomizes the narrator’s diction, which felt appropriate as he likes to keep aspects of his life in separate boxes.
The final element was an NPR piece I heard about Katrina refugees mal-adjusting to winter in Denver. It was a mental health tragedy. The entire Katrina response was an utter tragedy. Side note: this has to be the most heavily re-written story I have ever done. So many drafts, completely from scratch.
CK: Who do you think of as the “you” being addressed in the story?
EMW: The narrator of the story projects the “you” as someone who has never experienced what he has experienced. The narrator is defensive, thick-skinned, and almost dismissive of his listener. And then you see how flawed the voice is. He’s really quite vulnerable. The “you,” the listener, is invited to show him compassion.
CK: You work as a middle school teacher. Are there ways in which you see your work there influencing your writing and/or your writing influencing your teaching?
EMW: I often wonder about this connection. My stories derive very little from what happens at school. I need to aim my imagination farther off from my daily life due to its utter familiarity. But in a way, my job as a middle school teacher has already positioned me far from my daily life, so maybe it’s all part of a pattern where I understand myself better by projecting into an otherness, using it as a kind of mirror. Here is an example: the story “Knit, Purl.” The main character in this story, Jessie, feels caught in a deteriorating relationship, but the mirror, or the otherness, that shines an objective light on her situation comes from the two inquisitive Ukrainian girls that hang out in the little park next to Jessie’s apartment. Having a lot of Ukrainian students in my school, I think that I characterized them fairly, and they do important work in the story.
CK: You’re currently at work on a novel. What can you tell us about that project? What are you finding to be different about your process for writing short fiction as compared to writing a novel-length project?
EMW: Having written about sixty or seventy short stories, I feel that my novel marks a significant departure! Perhaps as an indicator of how new this feels, I can’t really give you my elevator pitch. I don’t even have one! Maybe this is where I’m supposed to say, “It’s a literary noir. Think of it as Diva meets Chinatown!” I really can’t be more specific. As for my process, I’ve been at working on the novel for five years. In my first draft, I tried to approach each chapter as I might approach a short story. I therefore utilized a familiar process to complete an unfamiliar task. But I’m way beyond that now. I look at the entire arc of the novel, all 500 pages, every time I open up the document. Even as I compose the second draft, I’m making third-draft revisions. I use Scrivener, which allows me to keep everything unified. And I rely heavily on my amazing writing group, six people who have read every single one of those 500 pages. When I get this thing done, my debt to them will be immeasurable. They keep me honest with regard to my main character’s development as the story moves along, and I need their insight to maintain that flow.
The novel demands larger chunks of time than an equivalent pile of stories. As I said, I need to conceive of the entire novel, every time I open the document. That’s not possible when I’m squeezing in a little writing time before the rest of the house wakes up on a Saturday morning. Now I understand why people try for residencies!
I got the idea for the novel around the same time I met you at AWP in Minneapolis in 2015. I attended a panel on literary noir, deep in the bowels of that convention center, on the very last day, during the very last hour of the convention. How perfect for noir, right? That panel gave me permission to write this novel. Five years later, I’m still not done, but I’m closer to the end than the beginning. Soon, I tell myself. Soon.
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Evan Morgan Williams has published over fifty short stories in literary magazines. His first collection, Thorn, won the 2013 Chandra Prize at BkMk Press. The book went on to win a gold medal from the Independent Publishers Book Awards. In 2018, Williams released a second collection, Canyons | Older Stories, in a limited print run. The book won a gold medal from the Next Generation Independent Book Awards. Stories of the New West (Main Street Rag, 2021) is his third collection. Williams holds an M.F.A. from the University of Montana. He teaches in a public school in Portland, Oregon.
Chrissy Kolaya is the author of one novel, Charmed Particles (Dzanc Books), and two books of poems, Other Possible Lives and Any Anxious Body (Broadstone Books). She teaches creative writing in the M.F.A. program at the University of Central Florida, where she oversees the Writers in the Sun reading series.