Tag Archives: everyone remain calm

When Social Media and Short Fiction Intersect

Great piece in the Toronto Review of Books about social media and short fiction, mentioning Everyone Remain Calm.

“The recent work of writer Megan Stielstra is an emblematic example of the hybridity that characterizes new short work infused with online elements. Although Stielstra is based in the U.S. her debut book, Everyone Remain Calm, was published by an alliance between two Canadian entities, Joyland and ECW Books. The book is only available electronically, which lends visibility and a means of distribution that flout international borders. In the collection’s captivating short story ‘I Am the Keymaster,’ Stielstra’s protagonist uses a distinctly digital mechanism—Craigslist—to approach a thoroughly corporeal problem—a need to secure affordable birth-control pills.”

Thank you to Shawn Syms!

Research in Necessary Fiction

This essay was originally published as part of the Research Notes series at Necessary Fiction. I love, love, love this site, and am thrilled to be included in their work. Thanks for having me, Steve!

The Right Kind of Water

The first hour is great. I’m in the bathtub, submerged to my neck. The water is warm and lovely, I’m more relaxed than I’ve been in months, and the best part?—what I’m doing here is work. It’s rewriting. It’s research.

While finishing up final edits on my story collection, Everyone Remain Calm, I couldn’t shake this nagging feeling that one of the stories, “One One Thousand, Two One Thousand, Three,” wasn’t right. It was missing something. I read it over a thousand times and couldn’t pinpoint what bothered me, which is the fucking worst. If I can name the problem, I can fix it. I can go to my bookshelf, pull down the Marquez, the Tolstoy, the Hubert Selby or James Baldwin or Dorothy Allison and figure out the literary gymnastics necessary to make the damn thing work.

Here’s the gist: a 13-year-old girl, Eliza, is skinny-dipping in a quarry in Southeast Michigan. She thinks she’s alone, but turns out there’s a group of high school guys nearby getting drunk in the woods. They discover her. Threaten her. Trap her in that quarry like a cage and demand she get up so they can look at her. Like a lot of  fiction—mine, at least,—this is based on some assemblance of a true experience, and what interested me the most as I wrote it was the tension. Would she stand or wouldn’t she? How would they react when she did or didn’t? How would she react to their reaction?—and on and on.

I teach creative writing classes, and what finally cracked the issue was a discussion my students and I had around a scene from Don DeGrazia’s American Skin. Alex, the main character, boards the el, all hell breaks loose, and then he gets off. “How much times passes between the on and off?” asked one of my students. “Like five minutes? How does the reader see those minutes passing?” and all of a sudden—I knew. In “One One Thousand,” the story starts when Eliza gets in the water, and ends when she gets out. But how much time passes between the two? I didn’t know. Later, rereading the story, I saw certain clues I’d placed unconsciously: at the beginning, the sun is high, warming the water, and by the end, it’s freezing and the stars are out. So that’s—what? 3pm to 8pm? Five hours? That’s a lot of time for somebody to be naked in the water. What happens to a body when it’s submerged for that long?

This is the point where, historically, I hit the library. I’m the stay up all night/drink too much coffee kinda girl, finding esoteric details in random books. Even now, with the internet, I still stalk libraries, milking electronic reserves for all their worth.

But.

I’d recently published a story set in a greenhouse. I wrote that greenhouse from memory—blah blah plants and trees,—adding in fancy-sounding names pulled from the 25th Anniversary Edition of The Book of Plants. And then, not long after, I stopped by the Gethsemane Garden Center and realized my description had been totally, completely, utterly wrong. I’d forgotten the tropical temperature. The hoses full of pinpricks, spraying everything with a fine, hot mist. The ceiling of green, like a jungle, and I knew then that I needed to up my research game. If I could go there, I’d go. If I could do it, I’d do. If I could live it, I’d live.

So.

With no quarries in the immediate vicinity of Chicago and the late-fall chill already here, I decided on the bathtub. I would sit in the bathtub. For five hours. iPhone alarm set to count down the minutes, journal on the nearby toilet to take notes about my skin, my fingertips and toes, my teeth (chattering?). I had very vague, very naïve, very uninformed ideas of what would happen, and a silly sense of pride in what I was doing.

Research!

I was so totally a writer!

*

In the second hour, my hands and feet are, predictably, wrinkled. The water is cold and draining slowly, down from neck-level to just below my breasts. More than anything, though, I’m bored. Usually, when I take baths to relax, I either read or prop my laptop precariosuly on the toilet to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer free-streaming on Netflix. But this?—here, in the bathtub?—this is not relaxation. This is research! Serious research! I’m experiencing what Eliza experienced, feeling what she felt, living what she lived! That’s what I tell myself, at least. The reality is that I’m safe at home in my bathtub and can get out any time I want. In order to really experience what Eliza experienced, I’d have to enter a situation in which I also feel trapped.

I’m fascinated by writers who engage experientially in research. I admire their commitment and worry for their safety. I think they’re profoundly courageous and batshit crazy. Whenever I bring this up, someone asks if I’m talking about Hunter S. Thompson—the drugs. The Hell’s Angels,—but my personal case-in-point is far less well known. In fact, I have no idea if he ever published anything.

Again, the gist: I was at a techno club—black lights, strobe lights, relentless beat—and some guy asked if he could buy me a drink. I was a first-year Philosophy major (don’t ask) with a newly purchased fake ID. It was my first time in a real, grown-up bar. I ordered an Amaretto Stone Sour and as I took the first sip, he asked if he could be my slave for a week.

I asked him to please repeat the question.

“Can I be your slave?” he said, and, in response to the look on my face: “I’m a writer. I’m writing a collection of essays. In each one I’m someone’s slave for a week and I write about what they make me do.”

“What do they make you do?” I asked—and yes, I know, I was gullible as all hell and probably he was lying through his teeth, but who cared. It was the best, craziest, most awful story my eighteen-year-old self had ever heard. One woman prostituted him to her gay friends and kept the money. Another made him clean her house wearing only a saddle. A suburban couple filmed him setting fire to himself—“They made me pour lighter fluid in my hair,” he said, “like it was shampoo or something.”

“Why do you do all this stuff?” I asked, aghast. “Why not just imagine it?”

“You mean like fiction?” he said, like it was a bad word. “People don’t want fiction. They want the truth—the blood and guts and piss and shit.”

I didn’t have the wherewithall then to tell him how, for me, fiction is truth. I hadn’t yet lived enough, read enough, or dealt with enough writers in bars to be able to explain how a story—when it’s done right—can help you find yourself in others, share realities that can’t possibly be real, show a person or people or world that you never before imagined. Blood and guts and piss and shit?—sure, but joy and courage and hope and understanding, too.

The kicker is the when it’s done right.

Which is why I was sitting in the fucking bathtub.

 *

In the third hour, the water has drained below my hips, my knuckles and the soles of my feet are cracked like spiderwebbed glass. My dad is a fisherman in Alaska now and I think of the dead fish he pulls from the water, bloated and eerie blue. I think of all he taught me about appropriate wilderness behavior back when I was growing up in Michigan, camping and hunter safety and taking the canoe over waterfalls on the Shiawasee River. If he saw me now, sitting in this icy water for no discernable reason, he’d think I’d lost it entirely.

“It’s for a story,” I’d tell him.

He’d try hard to be sensitive. He’s a big reader, although one time he got pissed at Tom Wolfe for making a character go quail hunting with buckshot. “Does it have to be five hours?” he’d ask, rational and reasonable. “Can it maybe happen quicker?”

Could it? I thought of when the Eliza story actually happened to me, some two decades ago around my sixteenth birthday. The day was so beautiful, the water warm, I floated on my back, listening to my own breath underwater, in and out, in and out,—and then suddenly they were there, first just one and then he called for the rest, six, maybe? seven? all standing at the edge of jagged rock, looking down at me trapped in a fishbowl below them. Instincively, I locked myself into a ball and moved towards shallow water, low enough so I could stand by still high enough to shield how naked I was. God, the shame! When you’re sixteen! I’ve had so many relationships with my body—it’s been a source of power, hatred, pride, life—but that day in the quarry is the first time I felt shame.

How much time passed that day? Truly, I don’t remember. It could have been five minutes. It could have been five hours.

“Stand up,” they yelled. “We just want to see!”

“Stand up. We’re not gonna do anything to you!”

“Fucking stand up! Are you fucking deaf?—stand up!”

—but I didn’t. I was frozen. I was terrified. I was ashamed. It was so much bigger than five minutes.

But five hours?

After five hours, I’d surely remember the water growing cold. My feet, split and cracked. My skin blue like fish. Wouldn’t I remember?

*

In the fourth hour, I panic. The tub is nearly drained and my face is puffy, my hands swollen, my body heavy like a wet blanket. I’m remembering bits and pieces of biology lectures, articles from Scientific American, things dad said on the boat, out on the ocean where being smart might mean your life. What had he said about hypothermia? Didn’t I read something about Trench Foot? Muscle Atrophy—what was that?  And didn’t David Blaine do this and his skin like peeled off?

This is stupid, I decide. Even for me, and I’ve done some stupid shit. I did acid one time at the opera. And now I’m counting down the minutes, shivering in an empty bathtub? A bathtub! It’s not even the right kind of water! Eliza’s quarry is full of organisms! Minerals! The setting sun changes the water temperature! She is thirteen-years-old, I am thirty-five, and sixteen, too; all of us were in that quarry, the story changes with every telling, and—like Tim O’Brien being unable to remember the smell of the mud in Vietnam—I can’t for the life of me remember what happened to my skin that day in the quarry.

*

By the fifth hour, I’ve given up. I’m on the couch, wrapped in a blanket. My body is too heavy; my head too light. I feel better after the first hot water and bourbon. Better after the second. And the third.

After a while, I get my laptop and google BEING UNDERWATER FOR LONG PERIODS OF TIME. Then I start my research.

Best review ever

“I bought your book. The first sentence gave me a boner.” – Samantha Irby

I am in love with Samantha Irby. I wrote her a fan letter one time but I was too shy to send it. Sometimes, though, I hate her pretty, shiny guts ’cause she writes this stuff at her blog Bitches Gotta Eat that makes me pee. Like, in my pants. I’m saying that aloud on the internet. She makes me pee in my pants and then I spend the whole day with wet pants, cursing Samantha Irby and her hilarity and profundity and spot-on truth, seriously, this girl is so honest that the rest of us should immediately attend therapy and work out the things we’re not admitting, an unexamined life is not worth living, right? Right? Anyhow, I got to meet her last month at The Paper Machete and I was all, Samantha, I love you, and she was all, Talk louder, I can’t hear you over this bourbon I’m drinking, and I was like, Sometimes you make me pee, and she said, There are diapers for that, and I was like I am going to JCPenny to buy one of those heart necklaces that crack in half and you give half to your best friend and I’m going to give half to you, and she said, Or we could just make out? and I said, OMG yes.

It was awesome.

And then, then, then she wrote to tell me that my book gave her a boner, which is totally the best review I’ve ever got in my whole life except for the time I asked my friend Amanda from 2nd Story to blurb my book and she wrote, MEGAN STIELSTRA POOPS GLITTER.

That was really nice, too.

CBS Chicago and I might pass out

Everyone Remain Calm is an Editor’s Pick on CBS Chicago’s Best New Chicago Books! Also, this review is so nice I might die. Thank you, Mason!

“Those who know of Chicago author Megan Stielstra are probably more aware of her 2nd Story readings: amazing theatrical readings that are usually held at Webster’s Wine bar. Check them out. Megan’s performances are intense, composed of a powerful cadence of speech and strong storytelling you won’t find anywhere else. Somehow she has bottled the presence of her performances and sprinkled a little bit on each story contained within Everyone Remain Calm. Each story has a presence that is similar to the intense Megan Stielstra sitting a few feet away from you on a stage telling you a really good story. So check it out.”

Literary Friendship

This essay was originally published at The Nervous Breakdown, along with both versions of Oscar and Veronica. Here’s mine; here’s Jeff’s. I’d like to thank Gina Frangello and Leah Tallon, two women made of all things magic and awesome.

The OMG We’ve Got To Write About This Look

When I found out my story collection was being published, the first person I called was Jeff. He’d been there from the beginning: the writing and rewriting; submissions and rejections; and, most importantly, all of the living that inspired the stories in the first damn place.

We met up to celebrate. We drank champagne. “What did your editor say?” Jeff asked, and then, gleefully, “You have an editor!” We giggled, drank more champagne, and talked about the stories. Jeff had been my first reader on all of them—all except one.

“So,” I said. We’d killed one bottle and had ordered another. Celebration! “There’s a story. In the book. It’s about… us.”

This is a tricky moment in the life of a writer. Let’s call it… The Talk. Historically, The Talk has referred to asking whomever you’re dating whether or not they want to be exclusive, but for a writer, it’s what happens when you’ve written about somebody close to you and you want their permission to publish it. It’s a nerve-wracking thing: You squeezed your heart into this story! It’s a great opportunity for your work! You changed the person’s hair color and made them from Novia Scotia!—still, you care enough about the relationship to discuss it first.

For the record, I knew Jeff wouldn’t care that I’d written about him. Not because I’d done it before (I had), and not because I’d disguised him enough that he’d never be recognized (I hadn’t); rather because hegets it. He, too, has done it. He, too, is a writer.

See, my friend Jeff is also J. Adams Oaks. J. Adams Oaks, author of Why I Fight with his speaking engagements, his YA awards, his Author Page at Simon and Schuster, but just then? Sitting across from me, pouring champagne? It wasn’t J.Adams Oaks. It was Jeff, and when I told him I’d written a story about us he said, “Okay. Which part about us?”

“It was forever ago,” I said. “We were living in Wicker Park, and we played that game called—“

He cut me off. “Oscar and Veronica?”

“Yes!”

“You wrote the Oscar and Veronica story?” There was something nervous about his voice, like how he sounded back when we were both interested in the same guy (this happened a lot). Or when he told me that the guy I was dating was actually gay (this happened three times). Or when he told me that he was gay (this happened once, fifteen years ago, back when I was hopelessly in love with him).

“Is there a problem with the Oscar and Veronica story?” I asked. “You know I’ve written way more personal things about you, like the time—”

He cut me off. “It’s just weird, that’s all.”

“What?”

“I wrote the Oscar and Veronica story, too.”

*

Here’s how it worked: If Jeff called me Veronica, or I called him Oscar, it meant there was a cute guy within earshot so we had to pretend to be brother and sister. The act was to appear natural, but be loud enough for the cute guy to overhear. “Did mom call you?” “Dad called last night.” “Remember when we were six and our cousin Johnny ate that lightbulb?” It was silly and ridiculous and an absolute necessity because wherever Jeff and I went, everyone assumed we were together, thus contributing to all sorts of awkward situations and complicated emotions—the stuff that makes good stories.

To hear Jeff tell it, some ten+ years ago we made a pact that each of us would, someday, write the Oscar and Veronica story. I’m sure it could’ve happened that way. Jeff and I have made pacts to write a thousand different things: the time I told off his ex-boyfriend at a hotdog stand; the time his very fabulous roommate used a loaf of French bread to teach me proper blow job technique; and on and on. The thing is, over all these years, all these stories, all these seemingly secret moments when we’d give each other the OMG we have got to write about this look—up until now, we’ve never actually done it.

*

When I think of literary friendship, I think of the heavyweights: Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis. Emerson and Thoreau. Their relationships are full of inspiration, of arguments, of jealousy and letters and reading and late-night talks about life and literature. Are Jeff and I like that? Sometimes. I hand him drafts of stories I’m sure are done, and then he asks a single fucking question that keeps me awake for weeks. He’s the one who put Gabriel Garcia Marquez in my hands, to this day my favorite writer. When his editor asked for yet another rewrite, we spent hours in front of my bookshelf, trying to figure out how exactly writers pull off this whole writing thing.

Every week, we sit in restaurants around Chicago, drinking champagne or coffee, depending on the hour, and typing from opposite sides of the table. Sometimes we talk—I know Jeff’s fictional characters better than I know some of my real-life relatives,—but, more often than not, we work. We type. We Ass in Chair. If I feel stuck, if I feel like walking away from the computer, I look up and he is there, hard at work, and I will not let him beat me! I will order another coffee and keep at it. Whatever it takes.

*

If I’m really being honest? All his literary influence is, to me, secondary. Forget literary friend—he’s myfriend. He’s my son’s godfather. He gave me away at my wedding. He and my husband, Christopher, have weekly movie nights.

In another lifetime, we’d stay up all night drinking bourbon while one of us cried and complained (me) or spoke very elegantly and poetically about how our current misfortunes influenced our growth as human beings (Jeff). When I’d introduce him to guys I was dating, he’d say, “What about that guy Christopher?”

In a lifetime before that, we sweated over grad school and paying bills. When I’d introduce him to guys I was dating, he’d say, “He looks like a troll. You know those troll dolls? With the … hair?”

Before that was the fateful night where, after he walked me home from a late night class, I took a purposely long time looking for my keys, drumming up the courage to look up at him and say, “Would you like to have dinner with me?” I was twenty years old. I’d recently broken up with my high school boyfriend. I was brand new to the big city, brand new to my adult life, and Jeff had walked me home after class every night for months.

“I’d love to have dinner with you!” he said. “You know I’m gay, right?”

Looking back on it, this was the moment where I learned that there are different kinds of love. It’s a long, complicated novel, not a three-minute pop song, and, for me, that’s what Oscar and Veronica is about: letting go long enough to move on to the next chapter.

*

I recently read that Emerson owned the property at Walden Pond, and gave it to Thoreau to build his cabin.

Jeff? Are you reading this?

Hurry up and buy some land so I can build a cabin.

I’d prefer this land to be in Spain.

But I’m not picky.

I like to think I’m above revenge. But… well… that’s a lie.

I am interested in how different people define the same word.

In another lifetime, I had a Critical Thinking teacher who tried to explain the difference between denotation and connotation. “This,” she said, pointing at her desk, “is the denotation of the word desk. The connotation of desk is how we all individually feel about desks.” She paused, letting that sink in, and then asked, “How do you all, individually, feel about desks?” There were sixty-some of us in this class, all college freshmen. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that, at the time, desks were not a primary focus of significant emotion response. Sex, maybe. Money. Grades or jobs or fear or art or all sorts of crazy things. Think back to yourself when you were a college freshman. What did you think about? Me?: my folks were splitting up, my boyfriend back in Michigan was seeing another girl, and I shared a 10X10 dorm room with a girl looped on esctasy three nights a week, I’ll tell you what, desks were the last thing on my mind!

sidebar: this all happened over a decade ago. Now, I have very strong feelings about desks, primarily A) I don’t ever want one in a classroom because pedagogically I find that it unecessarily divides my students and I and B) I’m dying to have one in my house so I can have a place to put all my shit. Right now, it’s everywhere, and I can’t ever find what I need, and my poor husband, he’s got to contend with my paperwork all over the place, and also my kid is at that phase where he wants to draw spaceships on everything, which is awesome except that now there are spaceships on my teaching contracts and time sheets and student work and story ideas and lesson plans and tax forms and schedules, and, yes, I know you’re thinking Get the kid some paper, whydon’tcha? and I promise you, he has it! He has every art supply you can possibly imagine! But why would anyone want to draw on paper when they can draw on the bathroom wall? Or Daddy’s web designs? Or mommy’s… everything? Also: last week, at his school, one of the little girls did orgami for show-n-share and now my kid is convinced that paper is for folding, not drawing, so my tax forms are now little birds. Which is actually pretty cool—birds are way more interesting than tax forms. Also: I’ll never again be able to think of taxes without thinking of birds. Which would mean that birds are now my connotation of taxes! Huzzah! Right back to the point!

Anyhow—desks were, at the time, not quite as ripe for connotation as some other words, words like love or race or faith. I remember, years after this whole connotation/denotation thing, reading One Hundred Years of Solitude and thinking about all the different connotations of the word solitude and how all of them were given to a different member of the (fictional) Buendia family:

You’re so brilliant that no one can understand you, so you’re alone.
You’re so beautiful that everyone’s intimidated by you, so you’re alone.
You’re so old that no one even sees you anymore, so you’re alone.
Your penis is so big that women are scared and men are jealous, so you’re alone.
And on and on.

Genius.

sidebar: Dear Marquez I love you.

Anyhow—connotation. It’s mind boggling to think about how many misunderstandings I’ve had over the years because of differing connotations. On the flip-side, I’m in awe of what I learn by listening to the connotations of others; how much I’ve grown as a human being and widened my world view. I’ll listen to how different people—friends, artists, the guy sitting across from me in a class—define words like marriage and protest and illegal and and parent and education and life. Our connotations of these words shape our politics, our values, how we spend our money, how we love—and the thing that creates those connotations are our stories.

A few years ago, there was some big case in the news about parents who were seeking revenge for something that had happened to their teenage daughter—the clincher was, she didn’t want them to. She wanted it to just go away. I remember talking about the ethical implications of this over and over again: what was justice in such a situation? There’s another word with multiple connotations—justice. Justice for whom? For her, or her family? Did her parents have the right to move forward with something she didn’t want? I remember wondering why she didn’t want revenge. Or maybe she didn’t want the kind of revenge they were seeking—the legal kind. Maybe she wanted a different kind?

What exactly is revenge? When I wrote the story Shot to the Lungs and No Breath Left, I was thinking about my connotation to that single word. And—as often happens in writing—the story became about other things, as well: revenge, and the relationship between a parent and a child, and gender roles, and all this other shit that sort of surprised me, but hey—what the hell. This is what came out. It’s here, let’s examine it.

For over a decade, I’ve worked with a Chicago theatre director named Amanda Delheimer Dimond. She’s the Artistic Director of 2nd Story. She’s my friend. She challenges me to look deeper with every project, to really figure out what the hell I am talking about. I knew I wanted to make some sort of video for Shot to the Lungs, so I brought the story to her and the very amazing Kyle Hammon of KBH Media, whom I can’t suggest enough if you want to explore video/audio/multimedia in your own stories, personal or professional. The three of us got to talking about revenge, and we thought it would be intersting to ask some very different people to speak to their own connotations of the word.

I am grateful to Kyle and Amanda for creating a piece that digs into this question of how different people view the same idea, and what might happen if we take a moment to listen to each other. I am grateful to Ada Gray, Lauren Kelly-Jones, Nic Dimond, Aaron Stielstra, Jennifer Shin, and Coya Paz for sharing their time and their stories. I am grateful to a Faculty Development Grant from Columbia College for helping to fund this project, and to all of you for giving it a look and maybe a share.