Fear of a One-Note Collection
On becoming more generous toward thematic repetition.
Throughout my two year MFA program, I dragged along with me a fear, a concern, of generating a “one-note collection.” The summer before, I re-read a short story collection that I’d loved the first time, and on the second reading, I noticed that most of the stories were formally disjointed narratives about protagonists of a certain gender expression indulging in a certain self destructive behavior and waffling over a certain affirming surgery. I was like wait…this is the same story, over and over.
Over and over, I expressed to my advisor, Sam Ligon, that I did not want my collection to be one-note. Over and over, he assured me I was not heading in that direction, with one exception. I’d written two roadtrip stories where one young transitioning character is in love with and traveling with a bi dude who is a little older (and in a band). The main characters were so different to me – one nonbinary, kinda femme, and angry, the other a binary trans man grappling with his caregiving tendency – that the stories’ external similarities never crossed my mind. (The fact of the matter is, I fell in love with Kaden when we were 19 and 20, on a roadtrip through the US West together. So it might be a situation dear to my heart. Although he is 4 months younger than me and chose studying history over making music.)
Lately, I’ve become interested in themes that repeat over time in artists’ and writers’ work. Last month I read this New Yorker article Lisa Yuskavage's Bodies of Work. Compelled by the descriptions of her paintings, I looked up her website https://yuskavage.com/, which has a gallery of over 900 images. I spent hours scrolling through them (note, they have a potentially disturbing uncanny quality) and was struck by the consistency of her themes and references across a forty-year span. While the internet makes works of art more accessible to viewers than ever, it is still rare to spend much concentrated time with an artist’s entire body of work.
Without realizing what I was doing, right after this I read three novels in a row by Dan McCall. McCall wrote what I consider the perfect novel, Jack the Bear. After reading that for roughly the fourth time, I bought all his other books I could get my hands on. Reading them in close succession made me very aware of the themes he carries and develops through his novels. McCall is interested in father/son relationships, characters who come in contact with gruesome body realities in their occupations, narrators soaked in self-loathing. Both Jack the Bear and Bluebird Canyon reflect on father/son relationships where the father has an outsized personality. In the former, we are given a generous view of an alcoholic father via his thirteen-year-old; in the latter, the narrator witnesses his friend sabotaging his relationship with his young son. Both narrators – the thirteen-year-old Jack in Jack the Bear, and Triphammer, the working class sidekick of a wealthy, lineage obsessed television star in Bluebird Canyon – constantly berate themselves for not living up to their own ideals of behavior. In Jack the Bear, it’s heartbreaking, because you see that Jack is a kid doing his best under extreme duress. In Bluebird Canyon, the narrator is a cop approaching middle age who can’t quite get it together. I couldn’t help wondering if this is who Jack, with all the trauma that occurs in Jack the Bear, grows up to be – not literally, the books are not directly linked (and their timelines wouldn’t align), but sort of spiritually or whatever.
Before and after this block of reading, I was working my way through Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans. Taylor, like Jennifer Egan in A Visit from the Goon Squad (which I also re-read this summer and yes, she writes characters who have salient wants), labels what could be considered a linked short story collection a novel. I value Brandon Taylor as a public intellectual and I love that he gets away with it. The Late Americans is consistently interested in cross-class struggles between (mostly) gay men, students in a collegiate setting. The theme is so consistent that the couples seem nearly interchangeable – in fact, there is some swapping of partners going on in the background. When I began the book, I approached this critically, but after viewing Yukavage’s paintings and reading McCall’s novels, I’m thinking of development of and variations on a theme more generously.
I would, ideally, like my short story collection to have something like the arc of a rock album. Last spring, on a long drive with friends, I played Monomania by Deerhunter (2013), which I might have considered among my favorite albums. As the songs competed with the sound of the car on the road, I realized they all sound the same. Listening to the record alone, I can hear the differences, the arc of the narrative. Hearing it the way my friends might have heard it, I was embarrassed by the repeated inflections. Bradford Cox has said that during the recording, he and Lockett Pundt only listened to Ricky Nelson (if I remember correctly), so perhaps it was the singular influence that made an album with a singular sound.
Until the second-to-last draft of my thesis collection, I resisted the idea of making a linked collection, although my advisor had been able to see my project as linked since the first stories of mine he read. I spent the summer making connections between short stories that weren’t already explicitly connected, but making sure they came organically and didn’t seem contrived or gimmicky – I don’t want it to feel like look what I can do! It’s more like this is the constellation of queer culture in the Pacific Northwest, and it includes 1960s girl bands, ecoterrorism, and massage school, and it really is that small (as Michelle Tea recently wrote on this platform, “queer people in fact all know each other, even when they don’t”). But I can’t deny, it’s also a bit of look what I can do! How cool is it that this character in the 60s is actually that character’s mom in the 90s?? So now I’m writing a book that’s partially about one family, and partially about one family member’s larger (queer) community from Bellingham to Eugene.
The second class I took with Marilyn Frasca, a summer class in 2004, was called Drawing in Series. In 2016, I had the opportunity to do an expressive arts class with Mo Golden, who is a teacher in Marilyn Frasca’s lineage, and my work there culminated in a series of images. As artists, the themes in our work are not only our fantasies (although I am deeply curious about the function of the author’s fantasy interfacing with a public’s fantasy), they are often what we are directly or indirectly working on healing. In my final MFA class, Polly Buckingham’s Form and Theory class on the novel, I took notes that read:
Subject matters: regional, marginalized, obsessions in terms of topic, recurrent images or types of stories…[ask yourself] what am I obsessed with, what images do I come back to, what feels natural vs. unnatural to try?
The development, repetition, and variations on theme I’ve been thinking about for the past month+ with regards to certain artists/writers, and with regards to my own work, while I might not use such a strong word as obsession, are all about certain problems or questions we are drawn to explore. It’s my current belief that all expressive practice is, whether consciously or not, a form of healing work. I’ve been pushing on a story that attempts to make sense, through fictional characters and situations, of previous relationships that partners I’ve had were in before they were with me, which I couldn’t understand. I’m trying to understand in as nuanced and complex ways as I can, while also writing from the perspective of a person much younger than I am now. I was a nasty jealous piece of shit when I was young, but now I’m curious about the dynamics that my partners might have had with their exes. Yet I’m inescapably writing from the framework of my own relationship ethics. So…it’s fucking weird, right?? But it’s worthwhile.
In March 2023, Mary Gaitskill published a revision? rewrite? reimagining? revival? of her well-known story “The Secretary” in the New Yorker. She has occasionally picked up and re-examined characters in short stories in different collections. Elizabeth Strout’s characters continue speaking to her, so she writes novels about them in series. I’m about to read my final (for now) Dan McCall book, Triphammer, which I believe, based on the title (ha ha), continues the story of the cop in Bluebird Canyon (ACAB). Linked stories but they’re novels. Linked stories but they’re written a decade or more apart. Linked stories but they’re actually the same story. I’m over my fear of being a one-note writer. Come at a wound from every angle until it’s healed.