Behind the Stories
Although eleven of the twelve stories in Last Call were published
in literary journals and magazines (see publication history on this page),
and some even won awards, I continued to rethink the stories,
often radically revising them after they were originally published.
In graduate
school, I had become particularly fascinated by the form of linked
stories,
short story cycles, and novels-in-stories—books like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg,
Ohio, Ernest
Hemingway’s In Our Time, Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine,
and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. I wanted
my book to work in that rich, and I think underrated, tradition.
I searched for the thematic and
character connections that would transform the book from a collection of
marginally related stories into a cohesive whole
in which the stories would maintain their integrity as individual pieces,
but also, when read sequentially, have the narrative momentum and sense of
resolution
we expect from novels.
I added more stories, wrote, revised, and discarded
many more. In one of the stories, “Penance,” the main character—Laura,
a woman fleeing her fourth failed marriage—broods over the disappearance
of her mother over thirty years ago. This image haunted me, and I wanted
to explore the circumstances
leading up to and immediately following this event and to track the emotional
effect on Laura and her siblings (Gene, Rich, Gloria, and Manny), who appear
in other stories in the book.
When I went back and wrote the Nature’s
Way sequence of stories that opens the book, I saw how all my characters
were part of three generations
of the same family, how I could use the comedy, turmoil, and tragedy of their
lives to examine the shifting boundaries of marriage, class, and culture,
and how Laura’s emotional journey emerged as one of the central narratives
of the book.
Also in this section…
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