Lisa asked me if I had a favorite story among the eleven in The Benefits of Breathing.
Each of the eleven stories are important to me. They represent different concerns, even obsessions, in my life—mostly from the last three years. The title story only came to me a few months ago as my father was dying. The last story, “A Warm Front Moves from California and Deep into Minnesota,” came from a story I’d written more than thirty years ago. I tried rewriting it about every ten years. Perhaps it is reflective of how I write.
I’d better start with a brief backstory. After high school in Minnesota, I’d gone to the University of Denver where I double-majored in psychology and filmmaking. A year after I graduated from there, I made the leap to California, wanting to write and direct films.
“Follow your bliss,” mythologist Joseph Campbell had urged. Add that to all the Hollywood films where “follow your dream” brought you your dream. I now lived in La-La Land, my dream within my grasp. Within months, I was shooting my own film in 35mm black-and-white, sure I’d get the anticipated ten-minute film into a movie theater for a week and get it nominated for an Academy Award in the short drama category. I used my life savings of a few thousand dollars to shoot it. We had Panavision equipment for the weekend, and we had to shoot it all in two days.
On the first day of shooting, the fire department shut down the production and my ten-member crew for not having a filming permit. I could get a permit on Monday, but it would be too late. My producer was an AFI student, specializing in producing. How did she not know? “We were shooting in your apartment,” she said. “Who knew?” That event moved me to eventually write short stories and novels where I didn’t need no stinking permit.
Months after that, I flew to a friend’s wedding in Minnesota, and I fell in love with a young woman I’d met at the wedding. Let’s call her Sandie. I’d known her from my younger brother’s class. Within months and after many phone calls, she moved to L.A. to live with me, and it was a great time in my life. I had just started graduate school in USC’s Master of Professional Writing program, and Sandie had found a low-level job in aerospace. However, after six months, I could see Sandie was missing her friends and Minnesota a great deal. She was in Los Angeles for me, but maybe I should propose we move to Minnesota for her. Otherwise, I could sense this might all fall apart.
I came up with a cockamamie plan that she should go back to Minnesota and rent an apartment for us, and I’d find another graduate school in Minneapolis. She loved the idea and, indeed, moved back to the land of ten-thousand lakes. I researched grad schools, and the program at USC was the only one like it in the country. It was based around the idea that the modern professional writer had to master several forms. For an MFA, I’d have to write three theses: a screenplay, a stage play, and a novel.
I then wanted to finish at USC—only another year and a half. I started remembering too how damn cold it was in the Minnesota winter. After a few months of being apart, Sandie and I met in Carefree, Arizona. It was lovely to see her again, oh, how wonderful she was, but I had to painfully admit we had to break things off because I just couldn’t live in Minnesota again. I’d never felt so bad, and in my rearview mirror on the day I left, I could see her crying. My heart squeezed. So much for Carefree.
While I was still in the program, I wrote a draft of a story of what happened with few embellishments. It was from my point of view. It was terrible. After visiting my mother in Minnesota where the heat, humidity, and dramatic rainstorms sailed in as if from the Amazon, I rewrote the story from a female point of view. Now it was getting more interesting.
However, as I wrote that, I didn’t want the protagonist to be Sandie. I was too afraid of it being too close to the truth. In the end, I didn’t like the story. I didn’t fully buy my protagonist. Her background wasn’t clear. I wasn’t ready to be so truthful.
Maybe fifteen years later, I’d heard a story of the aftermath of a famous musician who had died. His eleven-year-old daughter had inherited his millions, but her mother, the musician’s ex-wife, spent it lavishly, ending up drinking a lot. The daughter became drinking buddies with her mother, both out of control until Mom died in a car accident. I went back to my story and used bits of that person’s life for my protagonist, whom I had now named Summer. At this point, the story was going to be in my second collection of short stories entitled Months and Seasons. Summer was clearly a season.
After the background had made the story richer, and Summer’s boyfriend, loosely based on me, seemed selfish, a literary journal published the story. I still felt I could do something more with it, though – change the ending. Summer died in the end, hit by a car, and we leave her flying in the air. I didn’t want her to die. Still, it seemed shocking and perhaps memorable, the way the ending of J.S. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” was.
I gave the story another go when I realized my new collection needed another story, and I’d already dismissed three stories for not fitting in. At this point, I saw the collection revolving loosely around relationships and love.
Then I simply started rewriting the ending from scratch, having things turn in different ways, when, voila!, I sensed it worked. When my editor, Carol Fuchs, saw it—and she’d read the previous ending—she loved it and thought the collection should end with it.
In one of my drafts, I made Summer a former art major, and she particularly adores a painting by Marc Chagall, Over the Town. It captures the spirit of Summer in the story. It echoes a positive sense of what she wants. In real life, a couple of years after me, Sandie married a great guy, had a daughter, and they have thoroughly enjoyed Minnesota together for over thirty years. The path to happiness is rarely easy or smooth.
Recommended Articles:
The Benefits of Breathing – a Review
Literary Fiction: What is it Really? – Guest Post by Christopher Meeks
Writing Literary Fiction – Guest Post by Christopher Meeks
Writing and Aging – Guest Post by Christopher Meeks
Amazon Link: The Benefits of Breathing
Thanks so much for hosting Chris!