A photographer documents her childhood friend's rise to fame. Foreign journalists try to adapt to life in a U.S. city. A clown pines for the love of a trapeze artist. These characters and more make up a new short story collection from Lenox, Massachusetts, author Brendan Mathews, called “This Is Not a Love Song.”
Brendan Mathews, author: I never had plans for a linked collection of stories. You know, there are some collections that have common characters or a common setting, and this is not that collection.
So in looking at the stories, and trying to decide which ones fit in the book, I guess one of the things that holds them together is longing.
Through these stories — which are written at different times, and different places — I saw characters who were in search of something, a connection with someone, or trying to understand how some crucial break had happened. And what often seemed to unite the stories was this real sense of longing, of wanting — wanting someone or some situation, or a return to some place that had been lost.
Sam Hudzik, NEPR: The title is “This Is Not a Love Song.” But when I think back through those stories, each of them has something to do with love. But a lot of it's messy, and some of it's really sad. Is it more fun to write something that's that messy than something that's sort of hopeful and uplifting at the end?
I think the messiness is what draws me to a lot of these characters. I think that one of the things that fiction allows us to do is to inhabit the lives and the minds of other people, in all of their gloriously complicated humanity. And stories that have a real neat resolution just aren't that appealing to me.
Short stories kind of give you this license, where you don't have to do the full rounded picture of something. I mean, some of these end quite abruptly — and I enjoyed that. I sort of enjoyed thinking about what comes next.
I guess the thing that the stories are driving for is some moment that resonates. So I think more so than in a novel, the last line — last paragraph — or probably last line of a short story really matters. Because like you said, in a novel, you have this really full and rounded experience. And sometimes the end of the novel can just feel like tidying up.
Whereas for a short story, the end has to be the moment of greatest tension, or kind of release. Sometimes it goes back — really in the writing process, the end, the last line, is about going back through the story, and looking at all these different chords that have been struck, and thinking, which one needs to echo?
There's one story in here, the shortest of these short stories, I believe, about the awkward interactions between teenage babysitters and the kids' parents when they get home from a date. I'd like you to read a quick section of that.
THE DADS DRIVE the girls home. Always, the dads drive. The dads turn the radio up. The dads change the station. The dads say, Do you like Vampire Weekend? The dads change the station again. The dads say, This one's an oldie. The dads say, I think I dance to this song at my prom. The dads say, You ever listen to the Velvet Underground? Or the dads turn off the radio. The dads don't want to be judged.
And all the while, the babysitter is playing with the phone, or ignoring it, or giving one-word answers. You've got four kids. Is this written from personal experience?
A lot of personal experience.
We've moved out of the "me driving the babysitters home" stage now, because we have — our oldest are teenagers now. Although my daughter did babysit last night, and when she got home, I did not ask her how the drive went. Although she did text me during the drive home, which happens in the story, too.
You've set these stories, I believe, at least mostly in Chicago, North Carolina and New York state — three places that you know really well. Did you write these stories while you were living in each of those locations, or are you able to sort of mix it up?
I think with one exception, they're all written after I'd left the place they were written about.
“Salvage,” which is one of the stories in there, probably one of the first I wrote, about someone who works for an architectural salvage company in Chicago — which I did for a time — was written, really, on our way out of the city. It's the story I wrote when I was applying to grad schools, and that was my writing sample. And in some ways, it was an effort to use, you know, what I knew of the city, but to get me out of the city — I mean, that's what it led to.
But I think all of the others were written after we'd left these places. You know, we've lived in the Berkshires now for the last 12 years, and the Berkshires are just working their way into my current writing now. So there's usually a pretty big lag.
And I think a lot of it is just about going back through memory and seeing what sticks.
Keep up here with the NEPR Summer Fiction Series.
