by Will Allison
My wife, Deborah Way, is an editor at a magazine in New York. We met in the MFA program at Ohio State, and since then she’s spent countless hours editing my fiction. As an editor, she’s very thorough, has very high expectations, and takes my work very seriously, which is exactly what I think every writer needs. I do, at least.
My agent, Julie Barer, also made several helpful suggestions before we sent the manuscript out.
In your acknowledgements at the end of the book, you thank your dad “who graciously allowed his stories to be hijacked.” Are any of the characters based on real people? Was your dad a NASCAR aficionado?
None of the characters are based on real people, but a lot of the things that happen in the book happened to people I know. For instance, parts of Maddy’s childhood are loosely based on stories my dad told me about his childhood. He’s also the reason auto racing is in the book. He’d been friends with Cale Yarborough in high school and volunteered as a track steward at Columbia Speedway in the 1960s. When my brother and I were kids, he used to take us to the races.
Who would you say influenced you as a writer?
A great deal of what I know about writing—and reading, for that matter—I learned from Lee K. Abbott, whose workshops and literature courses I took as an undergraduate at Case Western and, later, as an MFA student at Ohio State. Mary Grimm and Michelle Herman were wonderful, generous teachers, too. I’m also indebted to the authors I worked with at Story. Reading and editing their work was an education in and of itself.
How has the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley impacted your writing?
I’ve had the good fortune of being a staff member at Squaw Valley off and on since 1999, when I was still at Story. At first I thought it was corny that they called it a “community” instead of a conference, but I quickly came to regard it as the most important community in my writing life.
I think writers have a built-in need to get together. Most writers I know are very social people, yet we spend a big chunk of our lives alone at a desk, shut off from the rest of the world. It’s good to come out of the cave and meet each other now and then. And of course it’s helpful, professionally, to spend time with such an accomplished group of writers, editors, agents, etc. But the big thing about Squaw is the friendships I’ve made. Also, the valley itself is stunningly beautiful, and I like staying in a house with a bidet.
You were executive editor of Story. What did you look for when you got that stack of stories in the mail each day? And how, in the end, did the job impact your own writing?
I looked for stories that I couldn’t put down, that were written with authority, and that in some way (voice, language, subject matter) stood out from others in the slush pile. Intelligent stories with a lot of heart. It didn’t hurt if they were funny, or sad, or funny and sad. It especially didn’t hurt if the author was unpublished, because we took a lot of pride in discovering new writers. Most of all, though, I just wanted to be moved.
Working at Story was very humbling. We got almost 20,000 submissions a year, and every day I was reading stories I liked better than mine—and rejecting most of them. The job gave me a fuller sense of the range and quality of fiction being written today, and it made me demand a lot more from myself as a writer.
Where do you write?
I have a nice little office at home that Deborah dreams of turning into a bathroom. There’s an old wooden desk, a metal chair on wheels. Usually the cat’s in my lap, at least until my leg falls asleep.
John Updike apparently has three desks. Do you use different physical places to create, write, and edit?
Mostly I write on the computer at my desk, but I do find it useful to revise on a hard copy, somewhere other than in my office. Reading the words on an actual page helps me see problems I missed on the computer screen. Somehow the change of scenery helps too.
Also, I spend about 90 minutes a day driving my daughter to and from school. I do a lot of brainstorming in the car, talking into a handheld digital recorder.
How would you define yourself as a writer?
I’m just trying to tell a good story and write a book that readers will enjoy. If I manage to do that, I feel like I’m doing my job.
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Reprinted with the kind permission of The South Carolina Review.
Dear Sara,
It’s hard for me to imagine the person you’ll be when you read this—probably on your way to college and a life of your own. Sometimes that feels like forever away. But other times—when you get into the car wearing your mom’s perfume, or shush me distractedly as you study the menu at a diner, or manage to throw a baseball that goes exactly where you want it to—I feel time racing by so fast I can hardly breathe. Not knowing where things will stand between us ten years from now or how this letter will change them, I need to make sure you understand, before I go any further, how grateful I am to have you in my life, how lucky I am to be your father, how sorry I am for the way things have turned out between your mom and me since the accident. I know it’s been hard. I know it’s been confusing. My intention here is to be honest with you about all of it, to write down for later all the things I can’t very well tell an eight-year-old now.
You may be wondering why I’m doing this. I won’t pretend I’m not hoping you’ll forgive me, but please don’t think I’m asking for forgiveness, or that I think I deserve it. Detective Rizzo once told me that all confessions boil down to one thing: stress. People confess, he said, to relieve the psychological and physiological effects of guilt, regret, anxiety, shame. To share the burden with someone else. To at least glimpse the possibility of redemption. It’s only human nature.
Remember the time you spilled orange juice on my keyboard and I didn’t know why it wasn’t working and you told me what you’d done, even though you could have gotten away with it? You said you couldn’t stop thinking about it. You said you felt so bad, you had to tell me, even if you got in trouble. That’s where I am. People confess when their need for relief overrides their instinct for self-preservation. I don’t claim to be any different.
Still, I’m not sure I’d be writing this if I didn’t also believe that, on some level, you already know the truth about the accident. You were there, after all. I have to think someday it’s all going to come clear to you, and when it does, you’ll know not only why I did what I did, but also that I wasn’t honest with you about it. You don’t deserve to be lied to. I don’t want that between us, not on top of everything else. I don’t want to make the same mistakes with you that I made with your mom.
Things didn’t have to turn out the way they did. The accident was no more a matter of destiny than anything else you can rightfully call an accident, just mistakes and poor judgment. With a different choice here or there—and I’m talking the small ones you wouldn’t otherwise give a second thought to—I could have gotten us safely home from school like I did every other day. Sara would have done her homework at the kitchen table while I prepped dinner, then we might have gone for a bike ride over to Ivy Hill Park, or played catch in the backyard, or worked on a jigsaw puzzle. She’d have kept me company in the basement while I folded laundry, or read a book on the rug in my office while I returned calls and checked email. At 6:38 sharp, we’d have gotten back into the station wagon to go meet Liz’s train, then the three of us would have sat down to stir fry or spaghetti and meatballs and talked about the positions Liz was trying to fill at the bank, or whose parents we wanted to spend Thanksgiving with. Mostly, though, we’d have talked about Sara—which one of her friends she wanted the next play date with, what she wanted to be for Halloween, whether she was going to keep growing her hair or get it chopped off. Putting her to bed, Liz and I might even have paused to remark on how lucky we were, as we were inclined to do, but at no point would we have considered the possibility that we’d dodged a bullet that day, that we’d come this close to our lives veering permanently off course. That’s the kind of thing you see only in hindsight.
ABOUT THE AUT
HOR
WILL ALLISON’S debut novel, What You Have Left, was selected for Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers, Borders Original Voices, and Book Sense Picks, and was named one of 2007’s notable books by the San Francisco Chronicle. His short stories have appeared in magazines such as Zoetrope: All-Story, Glimmer Train, and One Story and have received special mention in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories anthologies. He is the former executive editor of Story. Born in Columbia, South Carolina, he now lives with his wife and daughter in New Jersey. Learn more about Will Allison at www.willallison.com.