Your story “Appeasement, Ohio” revolves around a family visit: a man named Leo goes to see his cousin Maribeth and her son, Kip, because Kip has agreed to donate some tissue to help remedy an issue that Leo’s having with his eyes. What Leo discovers on arrival is that Kip is not the sweet little boy he took care of in the past but a gigantic adult man who, like his friend Mick, is now a Civil War denier. Are there actual Civil War deniers, and, if not, how did this scenario come to you?
The story started with something I read a few years ago about Helen Keller deniers, people who feel, “Since I, personally, can’t imagine how a woman who can’t hear, see, or speak could possibly write a book, therefore . . . she didn’t.” I was fascinated by the hubris of this and by the idea of a country in which every person, no matter how poorly informed, gets to be king or queen of their own self-curated information domain.
From inside such a system, regarding something as true (because it is, in fact, true) can look like naïveté. A person might feel that doubting everything is a form of power.
It wouldn’t surprise me if there were Civil War deniers, although I haven’t met any. Well, not yet. The publication of this story might be a terrific way to get to know some, however.
The story is a comic satire of the state of our nation, but it’s also a representation of the more personal devastation that happens when families are divided by political disagreement or by their different views of the truth. Have you witnessed any of that firsthand?
Oh, sure. My extended family can definitely blunder into those moments when we seem to have vacated our bodies and are allowing “our” media reps, from the left and the right, to speak through us. It’s a nasty, sort of sci-fi business, the way the huge social-media megalith (for lack of a pithier term) has coöpted not only private conversations but individual minds (as I hinted at in a piece I wrote for the magazine right after the election).
I think of a guy in the Middle Ages, whose head was full of maybe eight or nine voices that were not his own (mother, father, grandparents, priest, friends, etc.) and compare him to any one of us, who hears hundreds of outside voices every day, most of them the voices of strangers—strangers with agendas, who have access to appealing, highly addictive message-delivery systems. In the same way that a stomach built for fruits and nuts will not thrive on three Big Macs a day, I doubt that our dear little minds are built to accommodate so many agenda-laden voices. Has this contributed to our current level of stupidity and aggression and cruelty, and the abandonment of long-held standards of public courtesy and kindness? Well, I think, maybe?
Complicating things is the current Administration, which has mastered the art of using those message-delivery systems to spread doubt and discontent and suspicion.
For the family in the story, there is an added layer of estrangement that has more to do with social class than with politics. It’s not clear that Leo is much of a success in life, but Maribeth seems to feel that he abandoned her family because he felt superior to them. Is she right? How does his view shift in the course of the story?
As I imagine it, Leo and Maribeth were close when younger, and then he went off and had some success while she continued to struggle financially. It’s not like he got rich, but, within the context of the family, he moved away and then somewhat “up.” It’s a source of tension between them, especially since, now that he needs them, he’s come racing back. She’s aware of it, and he is, too. And this (and his desperate need for the eye graft) makes him more willing to stay quiet when he should be speaking up.
For me, that was the heart of the story: the way that people in it, including Leo, tiptoe around what seems pretty obviously to be a stupid idea, for their different reasons, and then find out that this avoidance has consequences. (Nobody, not even a President, not even a country, can evade causality forever.)
Twice in the course of the story, Leo has to choose between the laws of the country and the bonds of familial loyalty. He goes one way the first time and the other the second. Did you know from the beginning that you would put him on the spot in that way?
No. The way I tend to work is just to go through a story many, many times, waiting for such decision points to make themselves clear—to emerge from the stone, as it were. This seems to work better for me than trying to map things out. When a crossroad appears, it does so, seemingly, on its own. And, in a weird way, the story then decides which path it wants to go down. For me, writing is more about receiving than knowing, I’d say.
Sometimes I might notice that a character has made the same decision twice, and this registers as a “repeated beat,” and I try to address that. Other times, there are three or four places where a character is declining to decide anything at all, and I try to keep an eye on those places through the next series of revisions, hoping that the character will find the clarity to make one decision and that this will then inform the other decisions. It’s almost like watching a garden that I keep raking, in which (strained metaphor alert) whatever flower pops up influences . . . all the other flowers (?).
I always feel a little funny when we do these Q. & A.s because, in all honesty, I don’t know what my story means at this point; I just know that it should read exactly the way that it does—that this version has the most meaning in it, even if I can’t say exactly what that meaning is.
Mostly, my process is to trust that the story has a mind of its own and that the way I’ll get access to that mind is to rewrite obsessively.
“Appeasement, Ohio” went through multiple drafts over a longish stretch of time, and some things—particularly toward the end of the story—changed significantly. What was that process like for you? What made the story ultimately fall into place?
Yes, you saw it at least once before and gave me some very good advice on it. (Thank you.)
Often, the early drafts of a story of mine are overdetermined—I know too well what it’s supposed to mean. I try not to let this happen, but it nearly always does. That may just be the way my mind works as it’s making something up. It’s as if I have to take a break from the hard work of uncertainty and sit on a rock labelled “YOUR STORY HERE, FOR SURE, NOW YOU’VE GOT IT!” I sit there awhile, pleased with myself, until one day I read the story in a slightly more alert and skeptical state and . . . don’t love it. I don’t love the way it’s so sure of itself and is paused there, waiting for praise. It’s like a river whose job is to overflow its banks and surprise everyone with its untamed energy, but instead it’s just quietly, correctly (boringly) flowing along.
There were earlier versions of this story that were openly mocking of Kip, versions that threw Leo under the bus for being too sly; versions that were too overtly political; versions with ghosts that didn’t need to be there, and so on.
My main analytical tool is just that sinking feeling I get when reading a draft, which is also an uplifting feeling, sort of: “This isn’t good enough . . . but it could be.”
If I had to sum it up, I’d say that over the six or seven years that I was working on “Appeasement, Ohio,” Leo became a more active part of the story. The story began to be more about his decisions, maybe more about family and the constricted choices that a certain class of Americans have to make these days, in a land of vanishing horizons.
And I gradually got more comfortable with the idea that Kip and Mick weren’t the brightest, you know? Early on, I thought the way to make the story work was to be super fair to everyone—to show that the Kip/Mick outlook also had its merits. (This is a principle I believe in, generally—that fiction helps us look deeply into other people, even those whose views we oppose). But then it seemed that the more honest path—the more compassionate path, really—was to say, “Well, in some situations, certain characters can just manifest as . . . wrong. Dopey. They need management and correction. And this is one of those situations.” I think that was always where the story wanted to go. The title came to me very early, along with a feeling that part of our problem here in the good old U.S. might be that those of us who, say, are pretty sure the Civil War actually happened, might, if confronted with the contrary view, be hesitant to just say, outright, “That is a truly stupid idea. Shame on you. Stop it at once.” We are maybe a little in the throes of the “two sides to every story” vibe. I mean, there are (at least) two sides to every story, but sometimes one of them is demonstrably wrong. And it doesn’t serve compassion or fairness (or the people holding that wrong view) to tolerate (well, to enable) that wrong idea, especially when the idea might inspire its holder to harm other people (and the Civil War denial in this story has a definite white-supremacy vibe crouching slyly behind it).
When writing political satire (I’m guessing, not having done it myself), one wants to exaggerate the existing reality to a point of absurdity (in order to make it clear that the existing reality itself is also absurd). For this story, though, I feel that you didn’t have to push too far. Is denying that the Civil War took place so much more extreme than believing in Pizzagate or thinking that vaccines contain hidden tracking devices?
Right. The world is vast and people’s minds are just these amazing maelstroms, for good or for ill. I sometimes think that’s really what my writing exists to do: remind me and others that life is wilder than we can reasonably cope with, and so we should all try to go a little easier on one another.
I sometimes think, too, that a story is never really about the thing it seems to be about; it’s often about the reaction to that thing. So here, the idea “Civil War deniers” is like an instigator, to get us thinking about the question, “How should we respond to the outrageous?” Or, “How can we counteract a force that, though wrongheaded, won’t relent?” Or maybe the idea that, “When people show you who they are, you should believe them.” Something like that. But also, as I said above, the purpose of a story may not be to say, “This is right, this is wrong,” but, rather, to say, in a tone of wonder, “Wow, this is.” That, to me, is the Gogolian view of what stories can do: praise, through humor, the sheer wonder and outrage and unpredictability of it all, and of us.
Some of “Appeasement, Ohio” may be praising the sheer wonder of it all, but the story ends in a way that seems perhaps not so optimistic.
Yes, “praise” might not be quite the right word for what fiction causes us to do. (Gawk intensely/fondly at reality? Be correctly stunned by it?) And it is a dark ending (or maybe a cautionary ending?). On the other hand, I think it’s an honest ending. If we pander to a willfully ignorant force that is revealing itself to be also a violent force, we’ll find that, like the adults in the story, we’re left sitting on the floor with no phones, all our power to do good taken away from us. ♦