Stopping for Strangers Liner Notes
I’m one of a dwindling number of people to still buy CD’s. Part of it might be habit, but part is also for the unexpected gems. When downloading music, you buy the track; with CD’s you get a package. Beyond the hope of stumbling on a rare jewel, my firm belief is that the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts. The best CD’s aren’t a series of singles, but a collection. And then there are the liner notes. There’s magic in the crinkle of the cellophane as it comes off, and after I open the disc, the first thing I do is look over the liner notes.
Short story collections are like CD’s. There are always unexpected gems, each story’s a time capsule peek into a world, and yes, the whole should be more than just its parts.
Here on the website I wanted to add a missing ingredient from the collection: liner notes of a kind, my chance outside the book to say something about each story.
Promise
For a while I’d wanted to write a story with a gun in it. I’d been thinking about that Chekhov line about when a gun is introduced in act one, “it must, without fail discharge before the end of act five.” While I know Chekhov wasn’t just talking just about gun’s, a pistol has a weight that can hold ominous over the length of a story. Strangely enough, in Promise, the gun appeared disassembled from almost the first draft.
The Last Great Works of Alvin Cale
I was in California visiting friends and family, and my sister in law told me about a dream. In it her friend said she was skinny. Rebecca called the friend the next day and found out her friend had been hospitalized as a result of an eating disorder.
Waiting to get on the ferry back to Victoria, I sat in a cafe and started this story with that stolen line. Odd how bits of life turn up unexpectedly in stories.
Cabbage Leaves
I wrote this story while we were living in France. We had a tiny flat in Aix-en-Provence. Step outside and you re in a post card, but inside our small family was cramped. I had no writing room so used to write in the bathtub before anyone else woke up.
Cabbage Leaves wasn’t the original title. It was originally called “Lover’s Story” but the editor at the Antigonish Review, where it first appeared, suggested Cabbage Leaves and as soon as I read that, it seemed obvious. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it.
The Leap
This is a story of two halves and I wrote them separately. For a while I considered the first section a whole story. I was taking a short fiction class at UBC with Zsuzsi Gartner at the time. At the end of the class, she wanted a significant rewrite. I considered the first half done, but decided to add a second half to the story. I remember reading her comments after she’d gone through the rewritten story. She kept saying, I don’t see what’s changed, Did you read my first set of comments? And then she hit the second half….
Florida
As a kid I always wanted to go to Florida. I used to walk into travel agencies and take home booklets and brochures about Florida. I collected train time tables and spent hours planning trips by Via Rail and Amtrak. I’ve been all over the world and I’ve still never been to Florida, but I think it holds a unique place in the mind of a lot of people from central Canada: party spot, endless summer, pretty girls and fine beaches. Whether that’s true or not hardly matters.
Stopping for Strangers
I used to hitch hike a lot. It’s now fading as a method of travel, but for me, its one of the best–largely because of the possibility it holds. Surprise awaits. You’re thrown together with a stranger for a time. I think some of that shows in this story. It’s a story with unexpected twists.
I’ve written a couple of hitch hiker stories, but this is my favourite of them, and because I didn’t feel quite comfortable putting more than one in this book, the others will have to wait…
Lucky Streak
I love the title Lucky Streak. In fact, luck’s one of my favourite words–a surprising thing for someone who doesn’t believe in it.
I was living in San Francisco the year the Giants made it to the world series and lost in game seven. My wife was doing massage out of our house and we had a three year old daughter. The rest, I assure you, is fiction.
Martin and Lisa
I worked on this story for about six months then gave it up though I don’t remember why. I do a lot of revision on paper–printing out the story, revising it then typing in the changes and printing it out again. It means there’s lots of papers lying around the house with my scribbled edits on one side. One night I was frustrated with my lack of progress on another story. The kids were in bed. I settled into an easy chair to try and figure my way out of whatever problem had stymied me. I used one of my wife’s cook books as a writing surface and from it fell a recipe printed on computer paper. On the back of the sheet was a page from Martin and Lisa. I read it, thought it was a heck of a lot better than the piece I was working on, and got back to work on Lisa and Martin.
X
I lived in Toronto only for a year. My second child was born there, but for me, I still associate the city with my early twenties and visiting friends in dingy basement apartments, slackers with Mcjobs of various kinds, bachelor pads hazy with dope smoke. I associate the city with the in between years and I think that’s where this story came from.
Mercedes Buyer’s Guide
I was trying to write an Ann Beattie story when I wrote Mercedes Buyer’s Guide. I’d just read Distortions and it had left me with a renewed vision of the elastic possibilities of short fiction. One morning I was listening to Car Talk on NPR and someone called in asking what to do after he’d found a couple thousand dollars in a used car he’d purchased. I can’t remember the advice he received, but that day I sat down and the story just wrote itself. It’s one of the earlier stories in this collection, and I think there’s something here that set the tone for stories that came several years later.
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