In December of 2018, my department chair sent the Writing Department faculty an email saying she expected each of us to apply for a summer research grant from the university, and so I decided to come up with a writing project that would require funding. I made a list of what I liked to write about: teenagers, queer teenagers, places I knew a little bit about but didn’t consider home.
None of this sounded “grant-worthy.” Previous grant recipients had traveled to study university archives and conducted large-scale political surveys. Eventually, trying to make my interests sound more academic, I decided I would write a collection of short stories featuring queer characters who lived in different regions of the United States and that these stories would highlight the ways in which queer Americans’ experiences still varied depending on local attitudes, laws, and rhetoric.
To begin the project, I would visit South Dakota, a state that often served as a testing ground for anti-LGBTQIA+ laws and had been designated by the most recent Human Rights State Equality Index as one of twenty-eight high priority states in which “basic equality” had not yet been achieved. I would interview people and conduct “site visits” and then I would come home and write a story set in Sioux Falls.
Since the 2016 election, everyone was talking about our divided nation and the gap between those in “red” states and “blue” ones, but as a queer woman who’d found a gay scene in Tallahassee and Dubai and who’d been completely welcomed by the Catholic University where I worked, I suspected the reality was more complicated.
That was what I said in the grant application anyway. I hadn’t quite sold myself on the project. My writing process didn’t match that of an academic researcher or a journalist, and it was hard to write a grant proposal without feeling like I was making things up.
My writing process didn’t match that of an academic researcher or a journalist, and it was hard to write a grant proposal without feeling like I was making things up.
Yes, I’d researched something for every story I’d ever written and had even conducted a few interviews to make sure I got certain details right, but the research had always come after the story and its characters, and my questions were often things like, “What kinds of snacks are sold in Phoenix’s Greyhound bus station?” or “What is an entry level job on a construction site?”
I had also always thought of fiction writing as a more intuitive and exploratory endeavor, a chance to, as Joan Didion wrote in her famous essay, “Why I Write,” figure out what I think. I wasn’t convinced that a writing process that began with a theme and an idea would result in compelling creative work. But then, to my surprise, I got the research grant.
I arrived in Sioux Falls that summer elated to be alone in an unfamiliar city. I loved having time to explore a new city slowly and without distractions. I also felt a bit like an imposter. I’d read a lot about South Dakota and had set up interviews with the president of Sioux Falls Pride, a PFLAG volunteer, and two local educators who worked with a local high school’s gay-straight alliance, but I wasn’t sure what I’d end up writing and didn’t have much of a research question beyond, “So what is it like for a queer person to live here?”
Everyone I spoke with, though, was exceedingly kind, patient, and generous with their time. They met me for coffee or lemonade and let me record our conversations.
I learned about the concerns of the local high school students, many of whom followed the anti-LGBTQIA+ bills at the state house closely and sometimes took a bus to Pierre to protest the ones affecting queer kids. I learned that most of the queer adults I spoke to were out, but they almost all knew queer people who weren’t out to their families or coworkers. I discovered that the city’s first Pride Parade, which had happened just a couple weeks earlier, had come about mostly just because that year’s pride president had thought Sioux Falls should have one.
“I get stories from our youth going ‘this is great, but you know I have pride 24/7.’ You have people my age—thirty-six—that are going, Oh yeah, this is really exciting,” she told me, “and then you have our older generation…going ‘Oh my God. I never thought I would see this in Sioux Falls’….They’re at the Holiday Inn Parking lot with their partner, holding hands, and almost in tears because they never thought they’d see this in South Dakota.”
In these conversations people also told me things I didn’t think to ask such as the names of the loudest, most obnoxious local proponents of anti-trans legislation or the fact that although most people who lived in Sioux Falls were not farmers, they often had an older relative who owned a farm. They also directed me toward places I might want to check out while I was in town, such as the EROS federal science center north of the city that monitors land change, a site I’d been on the fence about taking the time to visit, but which turned out to be one of the highlights of the trip.
My interviews took up less than half my time in Sioux Falls, though, and I spent the rest of it wandering around and taking notes. I went to restaurants and grocery stores, a gay bar, an outdoor music-in-the-park folk concert, the falls at the center of the city, a butterfly garden. I noted the wide streets made of glittering pink quartzite, the many twelve-pump gas stations, the verdant farms that, just past the city limits, suddenly sprang up in every direction.
When I noticed something unusual, such as a shocking number of big box stores that couldn’t possibly be supported by the local population or the fact that many people seemed to trust each other enough to leave car doors unlocked and laptops unattended, I asked around, googled, tried to get to the bottom of it. Time slowed down the way it always does when I’m in an unfamiliar place with no procedural memory, when everything from sitting in a park to eating breakfast in a café is cause for curiosity and wonder.
I felt a little guilty that I was being paid to think and observe, but mostly, I felt grateful. The trip had ignited my curiosity and joy.
Later that summer, I wrote an essay about LGBTQIA+ rights in South Dakota framed by a narrative of this trip, and when I published it in Iron Horse Literary Review, I had, from the university’s perspective, proven I had made good use of the grant money. I still wanted to write a story set in South Dakota, but I was running into trouble. Although I’d claimed I would do so, I didn’t feel inspired to write a story that was explicitly about political issues or gay rights, and I didn’t feel like I knew enough about South Dakota to write from the perspective of a local.
At some point I decided I would write from the point of view of a newcomer, and an image popped into my mind the way I’d heard other writers talk about and always envied, a phenomenon that had never happened to me before or since. I saw an image of the monitors in the EROS research center that capture land data all over the world and imagined someone staring at these images with a great sense of longing and sadness.
For months, I wasn’t sure who was staring at the monitors or what explained their depth of emotion, but I knew that if I wrote a story set in South Dakota, it would end with this image.
It wasn’t at all the story I would have described in the research grant and it wasn’t a story that was directly based on anyone I’d met or any story I’d heard, but it also was not a story I would or could have written without that trip.
That winter, in the final months before the Covid pandemic hit, I imagined a teenager losing a baby to stillbirth and wrote a story about this straight young woman who moves in with her mom’s cousin in Sioux Falls and eventually joins a gay-straight alliance as an ally. She makes friends in the club and accompanies a group of kids to throw feed corn at the home of an anti-trans state legislator. At the end of the story, she looks at the constantly changing landscapes at EROS as a kind of promise that her life, too, will shift.
It wasn’t at all the story I would have described in the research grant and it wasn’t a story that was directly based on anyone I’d met or any story I’d heard, but it also was not a story I would or could have written without that trip. The story included the bright green crop circles I saw from the airplane window, the pristine city park, and many of the details about South Dakota politics that I learned from my reading and conversations. Eventually the story was published in The Iowa Review and listed as a notable story in Best American Short Stories.
About a year after the pandemic began, our son back in daycare but, in Maryland at least, mask mandates and social distancing still in place, I came back to this collection during a sabbatical. I produced a lot of pages, many of them fine, but I didn’t feel especially creative or inspired. Like many people’s lives during the early days of the pandemic, mine had become small and repetitive.
I thought often of the trip to Sioux Falls and the role that novelty and surprise played in my creativity, and I began to engineer new experiences that didn’t require me to travel or go inside buildings. I walked through unfamiliar neighborhoods, read about new subjects, and altered my daily schedule. I even set an alarm for the middle of the night and drove around Baltimore and its suburbs, noticing how different everything looked in the dark.
The results were not as dramatic as traveling to another city, but the process worked. The unfamiliar slowed me down and made me curious. I eventually wrote a story, “Near Strangers,” inspired by this early morning drive that followed an elderly rape crisis volunteer through a night helping a survivor at a local hospital. Eventually it would become the title story for my collection.
By this point, I had given up the idea that the book would make any clear case about the effects of regional politics on the lives of queer Americans, but I kept some of the original constraints. Each story would include at least one queer character, and the stories would be set across the United States.
When I could, I would also try out techniques that were new to me: a retrospective story, a story in the form of an essay, a story in the form of a letter, a story in the first-person plural. I can imagine someone in a writing workshop asking if these stories really needed these experimentations, if they were, in fact gimmicks. I’m not sure.
I do know that the creative challenges helped to drown out my inner critic and often took stories in new directions. I’d been trying to write about a group of families connected by a sperm donor, for example, but kept getting bogged down in a large group of characters. When I tried telling the story in the first-person plural, this problem disappeared, and the story became about the group itself rather than any particular person.
After struggling with this story for over a year, the new draft came fairly quickly and, to my delight, was picked up by Ploughshares, a magazine I’d long admired and had been submitting to without success for about fifteen years.
My favorite part of the Best American Short Stories series is reading those process notes at the back that tell the stories of how each piece was written. Over the years, I’ve found some practical strategies. In Ha Jin’s note in 2000 on his story, “The Bridegroom,” he said that he’d written the story to speak to the themes of a mostly completed collection.
I was in college at the time and connecting a collection through themes felt like a revelation. I was similarly fascinated by Tom McNeal’s 2002 note on his story, “Watermelon Days” that he drew from the history section in a small-town library with the help of the local librarian and Z.Z. Packer’s note on “Every Tongue Shall Confess” that she wanted to show the vibrancy of the Pentecostal religion without judging it.
Most of the time, though, the stories of the stories are not especially instructive. Writers say they pull from everywhere and nowhere: lines from poems, political anger, a collection of images and impressions, a newspaper headline, a story from a friend. Many writers say a version of, “I have no idea where this story came from.”
Sometimes good stories seem to start with what writers eventually decided were foolish ideas, and I might love these notes most, such as Rebbeca Makkai’s note on “Painted Ocean, Painted Ship,” that she originally planned to write a series of stories “in which professors are victimized by the literature they teach,” a project she eventually abandoned, and which sounds much less interesting to me than the beautiful story that resulted from this idea. I also like the stories of false starts and major revisions, which feel like permission to keep moving forward, to change course when needed, to write your stories however you can.
I don’t anticipate that the university where I teach will fund a research trip every time I’m looking for inspiration, but a lot of what I gained from my trip to South Dakota is available to me for free, without traveling, whenever I need it.
I don’t anticipate that the university where I teach will fund a research trip every time I’m looking for inspiration, but a lot of what I gained from my trip to South Dakota is available to me for free, without traveling, whenever I need it. I can be curious and open to new ideas and experiences. I can go to new places and take notes or educate myself about a new subject. I can even force myself to talk to strangers.
Who knows which of my experiences and memories will make their way into a story? I might as well embrace it all.
______________________________
Near Strangers by Marian Crotty is available via Autumn House Press.
