Lincoln Michel is the online editor of Electric Literature and the co-editor of Gigantic. His work appears in Tin House, NOON, American Short Fiction, Pushcart Prize Anthology, and elsewhere. His debut collection, Upright Beasts, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press.
His story, "One or Two Afternoons," appeared in Issue Fifty-One of The Collagist.
Here, he speaks with interviewer, Keaton Maddox, about constraints, inversions, and the irrelevance of truth.
This story works because of the tension created between the two parts. What was your process for creating the parallel structure, and what inspired you to emphasize the narrative interplay in this way?
Although I don’t think the story reads this way—and I hope it doesn’t—it’s an experimental story in that I wanted to write a first person POV story that radically removed interiority. The narrator describes what he sees and how he acts, but he doesn’t describe his emotions, hopes, or secrets. After writing the first section, it seemed, well, incomplete, but also ripe for an inversion. Since we don't really understand the truth or the character's feelings, the two sections hopefully play off each other in surprising and disconcerting ways.
The narrator’s unreliability makes deciphering the end difficult. The reader is left unsure if he truly is the girl’s father (which means he lied to the woman) or if he’s merely curious (in which case, we can’t trust his motivation). Both possibilities leave the reader in a state of unease. When you wrote the story, did you have a definitive answer in mind, or did you deem knowing the “truth” as irrelevant for this context?
I've never been the kind of writer who writes entire family trees and histories for characters or thinks about the truth of stories beyond the text on the page. (Although I know many writers who do that kind of thing.) For me, I'm trying to have the stories follow their own internal logic and progress organically from the words and actions already in the text. If I initially think a character is going to chop down a tree with an ax, but then feel it makes more sense—for some aesthetic reason or random writer whim—to have him chop off his own leg, he chops off his leg. So, I think it's right to say I deemed the truth irrelevant. That's part of the joy of fiction!
The narrator tells the story in a very nonchalant voice that works in opposition to the peculiarity and intensity of what’s happening. What motivated you to explore this dynamic? What experimentations did you have to make to balance it?
Really just the experiment I said above. I think it can be really fruitful to impose constraints on fiction, and that's what I was trying here. Often, constraint based fiction can read like a wacky exercise or game, but here I was trying to write a story that had the flesh of a normal realist story with weird skeletal movements beneath.
What are you reading?
Currently I'm reading a galley of Kelly Link's new collection, Get in Trouble, which is fantastic, and Italo Calvino's The Nonexistent Knight, which is also fantastic! I think both are good examples of writers who impose interesting constraints or concepts on their work while still producing moving narratives.
What are you writing?
I'm currently in the middle of copyedits on my collection, Upright Beasts, that is being put out by the great folks at Coffee House Press in the fall. Sorry to plug, but it's true!