Paul Crenshaw’s stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Essays, anthologies by W.W. Norton and Houghton Mifflin, Glimmer Train, Ecotone, North American Review, and Brevity, among others. He teaches writing and literature at Elon University.
His essay, "This One Will Hurt You," appeared in Issue Sixty-Two of The Collagist.
Here, Paul Crenshaw talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about setting, violence, and direct address.
What sparked your decision to write this essay? How long was it between the day you described in this piece and your writing about it?
I knew shortly after it happened that I would write about it, although I only knew I would, not how or when or what the focus would be. It was a few years later before I actually wrote the essay. I don’t know if it needed time to spin around inside my head, or if I needed time removed from the event to see it more clearly, but I certainly needed time. We could quote Wordsworth here, but I’ll leave it at that.
You devoted a number of words in this essay to describing the neighborhood in which the events take places, including the state of the surrounding houses and the people you witnessed moving in and out of them. Why did you feel it was important to capture the setting beyond just the porch and the backyard?
I’ve always been a descriptive writer, probably from reading Poe and Tolkien and Frank Herbert and others when I was young. I like detail, and sensory perception—I’m drawn to writers who transport me to the scene of their tragedy or triumph.
But description should always serve a second purpose, and in this essay the people I describe—the drunk couple, the drug dealers and the people who buy from them—are all avoiding responsibility. As was I, and the people with me, gathering to drink on a Sunday afternoon and yell at a TV screen. But we were confronted with a situation where we couldn’t avoid responsibility, and were forced to do something we had no desire to do. The violence inherent in that situation made it even more difficult to deal with, so to put it off, I focused on the minutiae of detail surrounding me—the light, the drug dealer’s house, the sun going down, anything to not have to think about what was coming, to avoid responsibility for a few minutes more, which also helped to build a bit of suspense.
There are moments in this essay, surprising because they are so few, when you use the second person in what I interpret as a direct address to the reader. Most bluntly, you say to us, “You should understand by now where this is going.” And soon afterward, you write, “And now you listen to me, for I want you to know what I did, what I think about sometimes late at night in a quiet house when everyone else is asleep.” To me these uses of “you” made the speaker’s voice seem both more confessional and somewhat defensive. What kind of effect did you intend from this fourth-wall-breaking technique?
I took that from Ursula Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” Le Guin asks the reader what he would add were he writing the story; she invites the reader to create his own version. By doing so, she makes the reader complicit in the creation of Omelas, and therefore complicit in the darkness hiding beneath the city, which forces the question on the reader whether he would stay or leave.
Here, though, as you point out, it doesn’t function in exactly the same way. The first example gives the reader a chance to leave; if he doesn’t, if he stays to see the killing, he becomes complicit, and is forced to question what he would have done in that instance. The second part is defensive, true, but it also, again, forces the reader to evaluate what he might have done. By defending my own actions, I force the reader to consider his or hers.
I also feel compelled to ask about the title, “This One Will Hurt You.” Is this also a form of direct address? How did you come up with this title, and what does it mean to you?
I wish I had a great creation story for the title, but it really just came to me. Of course, it wasn’t as easy as that sentence suggests—I had the essay completed for a few weeks while I kicked titles around. The funny thing about titles is, once you get the right one, you know it’s the right one, because it works in more than one way.
This title is a direct address to the reader, another warning, like the ones I mentioned in the previous question: “This is going to hurt you—you might not want to read it.”
It’s also, in a more subtle way, about what I do in the essay. Not only that what I had to do was violent, and I could be capable—even as an act of mercy—of something so violent, but that the things we do often wound us in places we can’t see.
Finally, the act of writing itself can injure, and if you read my work, you might be hurt. At least I hope so. I certainly don’t want readers to feel nothing.
What writing projects are you working on now?
Over the summer I finished a novel set in an old tuberculosis sanatorium near where I grew up, so I’ve been writing short essays until I’m ready for another big project (which will be soon). Many of these essays recently have been on the military. I joined the Army National Guard in 1990, and was in Basic Training when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Over the years I’ve been slowly putting together a collection of military essays, and I want to finish it finally.
What have you read recently that you’d like to recommend?
Thrown, by Kerry Howley. A Ph.D. student becomes enthralled in the world of mixed martial arts, which is not a great way to describe it, but trust me that the book is better than that description. The Shell Collector, by Anthony Doerr, a collection of short stories that take on the feel of myth and magic. And I just re-read Brave New World, one of those books everyone should come back to every few years.