AWP 2019: I'll Show You

At my first AWP conference, I attended a panel titled “Unrealism: The True Art of Fantastic Fiction,” and I listened reverently as Carmen Maria Machado discussed the origin of her short story “Inventory.” She was in her MFA at Iowa, she said, when a male classmate submitted a story involving BDSM. Machado explained that her classmate’s story was not only poorly written overall, but also lazily irresponsible with regard to its portrayal of this type of sexual relationship. Basically, she said, the story was sexist, and in workshop she told the writer that she thought so. He retorted by accusing Machado of being a prude. Machado was being disingenuous, he claimed, by offering a feminist critique of his story. She was just a prude.

After thatworkshop ended, Machado sat down to write. In direct response to her classmate,she composed “Inventory,” an apocalypse story about love and loss that is comprisedsolely of sex scenes. I wrote the story straight through, Machado told us. HearingMachado tell this story was thrilling. She recounted the birth of “Inventory”with both humor and fierceness. I’ll showyou! she seemed to have been saying to this jerk of a classmate. Call me prude one more time! I scribbledan outline of Machado’s experience into my notebook, underscoring those words: wrote it straight through.

I’ve been thinkingquite a bit recently about what it means to write a story. When we write weare, on the most basic level, trying to show someone something. I embrace thedouble entendre here. We want to show the reader a character, a setting, anemotional evolution, but oftentimes we also want to show the critics—the haters—athing or two about what we can accomplish on the page, despite their would-be detractions.

More and more,though, I am realizing that when I sit down to write a story, I’m trying toshow—to prove—something to myself. I want to respond to that voice in my headthat tells me I can’t do something, that I’m too prudish, too sensitive, too scaredto make the thing I want to make. I want to rediscover the feeling I had as a child,the intensity I channeled almost without thinking about it, that allowed me towrite a story straight through—withoutpausing after every sentence to consider what some hypothetical reader might ultimatelythink of my work, or whether my writing might be deemed “good enough.” I wantto say to my inner critic: Just watch. I’ll show you.

Alexandra Grimm is one of Barnstorm's Fiction Editors.