It started with a 900-word story that I wrote in a
day and a half, then edited over three days. I had been asked by a friend to
submit a short story for consideration by clients for whom he was editing a
magazine. I was proud of what I had created and optimistic for its future.
Months earlier I had submitted a story to him for
inclusion in a portfolio of Toronto writers. The idea was that the clients
would solicit a short story from one or more of the writers included in the
portfolio. They chose someone else, but the solicited story that their selected
writer submitted needed more work before the clients would consider it
suitable. I had been on their short-list, but had not been selected because the
story I submitted to the portfolio was considered “too overworked,” and “a bit
try-hard.” Plus, the writer the clients initially selected had “books they
could sell.” I did not.
Their feedback was helpful and coupled with the
extremely tight deadline I felt free, if not forced, to loosen up.
Also, I’d been doing a lot of work with my
students on fairy tales. We read a Kate Bernheimer article “Fairy Tale is Form,
Form is Fairy Tale” from The Tin House’s The Writer’s Notebook. Bernheimer identifies four characteristics of
fairy tales: “flatness”; “abstraction”; “intuitive logic”; and “normalized magic”. Then we read two of Italo Calvino’s Italian
Folktales and one of the stories
from Sheila Heti’s The Middle Stories looking for each of the four characteristics Bernheimer identifies.
As far as my own writing goes, I was interested in
Bernheimer’s notion of “intuitive logic” and trying to use intuitive logic to enrich my stories.
As far as the story I’m telling here goes, as an
aside to the lesson, I shared with my students the fact that way back in 2001
when I bought The Middle Stories,
I imagined a rivalry with Heti, who is my contemporary and who, at the time,
was friends with some of my friends. I myself had only just started writing
short stories after realizing that film, with all its long days and weird
hours, was not the medium for me. Still, I felt like I should already have a
collection out.
So, my 900-word story—rich with intuitive logic
and inspiration from both Bernheimer and Heti—was one of three stories that the
clients were considering for publication. They ended up selecting a story
written by Heti.
Mostly, I felt honoured that my work was
considered alongside the work of someone so capable and so accomplished. Of
course, I also felt a renewal of that old rivalry and even a sense that maybe
that rivalry I had imagined so long ago was a sort of premonition.
To deal with my complicated feelings, I did what
anyone would do: I Google-searched Heti then I Google-searched myself. She is
the only Sheila Heti the search-engine cares about. Lots of other Lee Sheppards
were given priority over me.
I shared this new development with my students
because I thought they would find it funny. Then they Google-searched both Heti
and me.
I realized I needed more of an internet presence.
My thoughts coalesced as this idea: I would write
52 short stories, one a week for a year, and share them each week on a blog.
This blog.
I explained my idea to my partner. As we pulled
off the highway on our way to my mother’s place, my partner, often a voice of
cautious reason, suggested that it was possible that somewhere on the world
wide web someone might have had the same great idea. Of course, this was
possible. The modernist in me resented the possibility.
A short while later, our friend Regan Clarke was
over for dinner and I was sharing my various dilemmas with her: I needed an
internet presence; I had this idea, and maybe someone else had already had it.
She pulled out her phone and searched “52 stories”.
Turns out that Ray Bradbury had this idea before
me. Goodreads.com quotes him
as saying, “Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad
short stories in a row.”
I thought for a while about taking up Bradbury’s
challenge.
During this while I went to the book launch for Jim
Guthrie: Who Needs What by Andrew
Hood. At the launch, Regan mentioned to one of my closest friends and musical
collaborators, Scott Ballem, that I was going to do a blog where I posted a new
story every week. I walked home with Scott and talked about my ideas.
Then I read Jim Guthrie: Who Needs What. It was an inspiring reminder of the fearlessness
exhibited by many young musicians in Guthrie’s and my cohort. Then Guthrie
re-released all his demo cassettes on Bandcamp. I discovered Jim Guthrie too
late to have ever heard the cassettes, so I listened to them with fresh ears. I
loved them for the music, yes, but also for their joyful, boisterous, restless
experimentation.
Also during the while I considered Bradbury’s
challenge, I delivered a workshop at a Professional Development session for
English Department heads. A colleague and I presented a creative writing
activity I had developed a year earlier.
The idea was inspired by an emoji message a
student sent to me. I’d been trying to figure out how to bring the concepts
from Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies into my classroom. The premise of The Castle
of Crossed Destinies is that a
group of travelers find themselves sharing a meal and an affliction—they cannot
speak. They use Tarot cards to tell their stories, stories that are interpreted
for us by the narrator based on their understanding of the cards. I didn’t have
any Tarot cards, but emoji seemed a simpler and more readily available source
of images. My students reproduced emoji images on cards. They randomly selected
a sequence of four or five images, then used the images to create short
stories. The activity was a productive one and the students liked it.
The teachers liked it, too.
I decided that I would start my blog with emoji
stories. Because they inspired and encouraged me, I asked for sequences of
emoji from Jim Guthrie and Regan Clarke. Jim sent me two sequences. I worked
with the first one and created “Microphone Satellite Dish Spaceship Alien
Kiss.”
Then, I needed a name for the blog. Of course
every variation of “52 stories” I could think of was taken. So I tried a phrase
I’d honed when I was working on journals from my 2013-2014 teaching year—Not
Know, Notice.
“Do not know, but notice,” would be the less
musical way to put it, and really it’s just “Show, Don’t Tell,” rephrased and
refocused to be about habits of thought. Maybe it works much better as a title
for a blog of non-fiction writing, but it is still a principal I adhere to when
writing fiction because it encourages me to back off and let my stories make
their own meanings. Also, if I approach my thoughts about the stories with the
openness that the above imperative statement demands, if I notice and honour
each thought without necessarily knowing how it fits into the story I am
creating, I can occasionally achieve the intuitive logic of fairy tales.
Followers of my blog will know that so far I’ve
stuck with using emoji sequences created by the people around me. I have a few
sequences still in my back pocket and I expect to continue soliciting and using
emoji sequences for the duration of this project.
However, I have also acquired some Tarot cards and
I am re-reading The Castle of Crossed Destinies and familiarizing myself with my Major and Minor
Arcana before I start asking the cards for stories.
I’m looking for stories, too. My friend Marc
Stonestreet of The Stonestreet Carpentry Company shared a photograph with me
that reminded me of the power of a photograph to imply a story. I expect to
also begin working with photographs as inspiration. The way I currently
envision it, is that whenever I see the aftermath of something—like the jeans I
found discarded in some tall grasses and flowers between a path and the
Cowichan River in Duncan—I will write a story that would leave the same
evidence.
Thank you to everyone who has provided and who
will provide me with emoji sequences, thank you to emojipedia.org for helping
me with meanings when the emoji aren’t speaking for themselves. Thanks to Jim
and Regan, Scott, Marc Stonestreet and my partner, Jenny Gilbert, for the
inspiration, encouragement and advice. Thank you to Kate Bernheimer, Sheila
Heti and Italo Calvino for the various forms of inspiration.
Finally, thank you to you for reading.
Toronto, August 2, 2015
Lee Sheppard
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