The Case for Strange
by Shannon Garvey
Adam and Eve in Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights”
We recently discussed Roy Spivey by Miranda July in my introduction to fiction class. I chose the story because it seemed like a perfect way to dive into the multiple plot lines that occur in short stories. What’s happening on the ground? And what’s emotionally at stake for the character? A professor of mine, writer and memoirist Jaed Coffin, describes this as the “Floaty/ground-y concept.” I introduced that terminology to my students.
In the story, a woman describes a chance encounter with a celebrity. They deeply connect and share moments of quick intimacy. He smells her armpits and bites her arm. She bites his shoulder in return. They part ways, but he gives her a number to reach him with. The number is unfinished. He asks her to memorize the number: four. Four becomes the lucky number she whispers throughout her life. She never calls. It’s a gorgeous story about the inner worlds we keep hidden and how it might feel to move through life plagued with indecision.
As we went around the room to share initial thoughts, each student was hung up on the strangeness of the story. It took a lot of facilitation to move them from their initial reactions to the “weirdness” to points more related to the text. Their obsession with that which is out of the ordinary, even in their own writing or experiences, has continued since.
Our conversations usually kick off with:
“Then a strange thing happened…”
“It was really weird when…”
“I thought it was odd…”
While the weight and responsibility of being a teacher is never absent from my mind, these conversations spark an even greater recognition of responsibility within me. It’s difficult to remember what I was reading when I was eighteen, nineteen, or even twenty, but I remember coming up against a sense that I was reading about life concepts that were unfamiliar to me — like infidelity, aging, secrets, failure, and regret.
Reading is one major way we grow our emotional literacy. While I might not have been able to identify what I was feeling while reading those stories, I was gaining understanding on the page and out in life and returning to the text with a greater landscape of emotions and experiences. Reading was how I developed and conferred my vocabulary for life.
This recognition extended to my students. While not assuming what I know of my students’ vast personal tapestries of life, this might be the first time for some of them to interact with art that tackles these human concepts in a less straightforward way. The short story isn’t a mainstream mode of media consumption. We are changed by novels and films, of course. But there is something odder about the short story. It has to act fast, needs to compel the reader, immerse them in its small world, and then spit the reader out, changed. It makes sense then that the content needs to be thick with strangeness, avoid numbness, and deal with heavy emotions. It’s visceral. I’m witnessing my student’s visceral reaction to the form as well as to the content.
I was listening to an interview with George Saunders the other day where he was discussing the short story form. He says “when you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just six percent more awake to the world.”
That is the job of the short story — to catch you, change you, and spit you out on the other side, transformed. I think we all know the feeling of being in an art haze. We’re momentarily stunned by the truth of life. Saunders described this feeling as “the birds singing louder.”
I want nothing more than for my students to hear the birds singing louder. I hope we can continue asking deeper questions that relate to the text in the class. Perhaps a way for readers to gain more empathy for characters and to be more open to the weird is through writing prompts.
What’s the weirdest thing your character has ever done? What was their motivation? What’s a moment where you felt intense inner conflict? What’s your character’s biggest inner conflict? How does this present itself to the world?
Asking them to seriously consider these questions of self and of character will hopefully spark some deeper understanding of fiction, the way it can move audiences, and maybe even help them feel more empathetic to characters and others around them.
I plan to continue assigning “weird” short stories that deal with these strange, sharp, chaotic moments of being a human, represented in fiction. It’s spring and the birds are sounding louder every day.
Shannon Garvey is fiction editor at Barnstorm Journal. She is currently pursuing an MFA degree at the University of New Hampshire.