Tag: Objective Correlative

Pawn by Starr Davis

By Starr Davis | Longform CNF, CNF | January 17, 2024

I am on the East Side of Columbus, Ohio. One street over from Lev’s Pawn Shop is an abandoned storefront where I met my ex-lover when we were in high school. He cuts hair now in a barbershop on…

Stick Shift by Jawziya Zaman

By Jawziya Zaman | Fiction, Short Stories | January 12, 2024

After the texts fizzled out with the fifth guy in six weeks, Naz finally gave up and changed her app settings to full-on gay. Self-cannibalism would’ve been less painful than having a conversation with these one-neuron fools and she…

North Country, New York by Gabrielle Hovendon

By Gabrielle Hovendon | SSC, Flash Fiction, Fiction | October 4, 2023

Image is a color photograph of snowy barn with tracks leading toward it; title card for the CRAFT 2023 Setting Sketch Challenge Winner, "North Country, New York," by Gabrielle Hovendon.

In dreams at the backs of my eyelids, I was still twelve years old traveling in a car luminous with anger. I could feel the slow braking as we turned onto the county highway. I could see the horizon…

Conversations Between Friends: Coco Picard and Sue Mell

By Guest Author | Interviews, Craft, Classroom | September 26, 2022

alt text: image is two book covers, HEALING CIRCLE and SUE MELL; title card for a conversation between Coco Picard and Sue Mell

Consider the personal effects one leaves behind, the way those objects, once laid out, recall the idiosyncratic logic of a life—is there more compelling inspiration for a novel? Authors Coco Picard and Sue Mell met through the BookEnds SUNY…

Gurov’s Watermelon: Prop Work as Character Work in Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Pet Dog”

By Guest Author | Craft, Classroom, Critical Essays | February 15, 2022

alt text: image is a color photograph of sliced watermelons; title card for the craft essay "Gurov's Watermelon" by Patrick Thomas Henry

By Patrick Thomas Henry • Wherever I write, I stow props: photographs and notebooks, found objects, mementoes of life away from the page. Despite my effort to shake off the strictures of my own workshop experiences, I still believe…

Little Things I Hug Huge by Sudha Balagopal

By Sudha Balagopal | Flash CNF, CNF | January 26, 2022

The way Appa held the sponge-tipped brush of white shoe polish. The way he ran the snowy viscosity over my scuffed canvas shoes, on top of the laces, around the eyelets. The way he placed my shoes under the…

Ball by Siamak Vossoughi

By Siamak Vossoughi | Fiction, Short Stories | July 16, 2021

This shape, he said to his niece as he tossed her the ball on the grass. This roundness, this perfection of throwing and catching, this can be the thing for a good long while. He did not tell her…

Interview: Eric Nguyen

By Guest Author | Interviews, Books | May 18, 2021

Memories Have No Expiration Date Eric Nguyen’s Things We Lost to the Water ruminates on the constant disruptive sounds of waves regardless of which shore we land on, and on how the past echoes. “New Orleans is at war”…

A Terroir of Parsley by Natasha Sajé

By Natasha Sajé | Longform CNF, CNF | March 10, 2021

At first glance, a reader might miss the “i.” And see terror, from the root for “fear,” which many people feel these days. But the French word terroir comes from terra, land, and refers to the quality an environment…

Nachlass by Melissa Bean

By Melissa Bean | Fiction, Short Stories | February 5, 2021

When my father died, I expected I would receive the old station wagon, scratched up and 100,000 miles old. Or nothing. I really thought I would receive nothing. But what I got was a Nachlass. That is the word…

Author’s Note

Writers writing about writing is the stuff of cliché at this point. In my defense, I had tried and failed to write this story in a couple different ways first. A previous version of this story centered around a mother-daughter road trip to visit the father in rehab. The heart of the story—the bit that came to me first and animated the rest of the piece—was the moment where the daughter lies to her mother. The mother is optimistic that this stint in rehab will produce a substantive positive change in their family dynamic. The daughter cannot bear to break her mother’s heart by disagreeing. Another version of the story changed the road trip to a friendly sports betting pool. The family dynamic was much the same: an optimistic mother, a toxic father-daughter relationship that went unacknowledged. Eventually the story comes to a head in a similar way: the main character chooses to lie about the irreparable damage done by the father-daughter relationship to spare the mother. I ended up shelving both versions after I had run out of ideas. I hate to say I do this quite a bit.

I was able to turn a corner when I realized that the story I was trying to tell wasn’t just about intergenerational trauma and fraught familial relationships, it was also about how family stories are crafted. In all families, I imagine, there is a story that gets passed along not because it is the truth, but because it is the most idealized version that survived. I realized that the preservation of a particular family narrative was integral to those previous drafts, but I had a hard time bringing that into focus. Around that time, I overheard a story about someone being left the literary estate of a friend who had succumbed to an illness. The person mentioned how going through and editing the remaining work was its own kind of trauma on top of the death itself. “How do you speak for someone else in this way?” they asked. “Especially when there is so much you still want to hear from them.”

Morbid as it was, that helped this click for me. I was able to go back and rewrite the story. By making the story about a literal story, I was able to more deeply explore the act and implications of telling (or not telling) a story. I was also able to bring in elements of public vs. private family narratives. By making her father dead as opposed to alive, whether or not the daughter’s experience is told is now entirely left up to her. This change also gave me a little more leeway to play around with form a bit. I still had to figure out how to balance tension and conflict in such an internal story, but realizing this aspect of the story made the subsequent revisions much easier.

MELISSA BEAN received her MFA from New York University and is currently working toward a PhD at Fordham University. She has been the Assistant Fiction Editor and Awards Editor at the Washington Square Review. Her work has appeared in Literary Orphans, The Gallatin Review, and Scissors and Spackle among other places. She lives in New York with her fiancé and two dogs. Her website is melissabeanwriting.com.