I picked Jeff up from the airport. We’d met online and chatted for a few months. Newly divorced, he said, about fifteen years older than me. But he was normal, and he was from somewhere else. I’d spent hours…
“I wish she’d just hawk it up and spit it out. You know? Loogie-style.” That’s what I say to Dave in front of the Kwik Stop. We’re on our lunch, drinking off-brand iced tea in plastic bottles and as…
By Gwendolyn Edward • I’ve often battled with how to better develop secondary characters in short stories that use a limited, third-person point of view. While I’ve learned how to use my main character’s memories and current thoughts to…
“Can you get to Heaven with broken teeth?” Louis asks Margaret. “Sure can,” Margaret says, as she yanks his dresser drawer, derailing the shelf and spilling clothes onto the floor. Two hours into her shift, already exhausted and dreading…
Fred was a runner, so it’s been hard to keep him still. Now we’re both still, save for his tremors. A once-in-a-lifetime athlete, they called him. And not that he didn’t run fast, he did, but Brewster was a…
Our hotel in Rome is a former monastery, darkly shadowed, stone. There is no elevator. He hauls both of our suitcases up three flights of stairs. I wait for him at the top. His muscles flex, his forehead creases.…
Amy had never noticed it before. It might have just appeared during the night, but it was so innocuous, it could have been waiting there, unobserved, for years. This childish symbol, something like a diamond with rays emanating from…
“You’re a spring now,” says Hee-Bon, wintering Soo-Na’s complexion with a chilly setting powder. “Pink undertones, freckles—lot of sun in you. And I love your hair. Mom’s going to hate it. Why’d you dye it so bright?” Because her…
My husband, Gordon, looked as though he’d found religion—as though he’d never tasted real food before this beef stew meal at Angie and Ron’s. He appeared to be sucking his teeth after every bite, taking his time, thinking about…
The night sky above the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Shufat burned with magnesium. Sizzling flares swayed to the earth on tiny parachutes, trailing smoke tendrils like a demon’s nostrils. Yaccoub leaned over his elbow onto the ambulance’s open windowsill,…
Revered by the three Abrahamic faiths, the capital of two warring tribes, and a singular archeological curiosity that doesn’t contain one uncontested stone, Jerusalem emboldens fanatics, enthralls visitors, and intimidates writers. Or at least it intimidated the hell out of this one.
In the summer of 2015, the UN Department of Safety and Security reassigned me from “Mogadiscio” to the “Palestinian Territories, Occupied.” (This was, by the way, how the place names were actually written on the reassignment letter, which leads me to believe that certain HR systems in the organization have not been updated for a REALLY long time.) In my new capacity, I held safety and security responsibilities for UN personnel, operations, and assets in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza.
My family and I moved into a recently constructed apartment building in Jerusalem’s North Talpiot neighborhood. The apartment’s modern façade did little to mask the shoddy workmanship—from loose doorknobs to bizarrely inaccessible light switches—of a building thrown up in a hurry.
But you couldn’t beat the location. Sandwiched between Israeli and Palestinian neighborhoods on the Haas Promenade, with a view that stretched from the Dome of the Rock to windswept desert. Close enough to the Old City’s ancient walls to witness firsthand how Jerusalem’s terrestrial realities jarred with its celestial mystique. During our time in Jerusalem, the Al Aqsa Mosque muezzin’s call melded into the background of our days, while the hiss of teargas canisters foregrounded the worst nights.
On one particularly bad night, my nine-year-old daughter stepped onto the balcony and asked, “Is that fireworks, Dad?”
What I proceeded to describe was place and setting, while trying my damnedest to avoid any bullshit. But then, that’s the tricky thing with place and setting, isn’t it? Avoiding the bullshit.
As the ugly stepbrothers in the family of fiction craft, place and setting are frequently outshone by their more interesting siblings: point of view, characterization, plot, and theme. Let’s face it, the ugly stepbrothers do tend to bring out the worst in writers—their most self-indulgent, flowery, and inflated language—also known as “the stuff readers skip,” or, more colloquially, as bullshit.
But in many ways, those glitzier craft elements owe their very existence to the ugly stepbrothers. Many themes are products of place and culture, atmosphere often dictates the significance of our characters’ actions, and conflicts are born in hostile settings.
Since the Trump administration relocated the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, I’ve found myself more frequently asked to describe the city. I’m proud to report that I’ve resisted the urge to wax poetic about a city that somehow exists in both heaven and earth. That’d be bullshit. Politically expedient? Yes, absolutely. An easy way to sidestep describing East Jerusalem’s absence of streetlights and rubbish removal services, or the militarized policing of the city’s Palestinian neighborhoods, or any of the many terrible things that are revealed when a powerful community subjugates a powerless one.
So, instead I tell people how my expatriate bubble shielded me from the city’s tension, but didn’t obscure it. The Palestinian and Israeli faces that smiled in my direction scorned each other as if national injuries had been inflicted yesterday, because some of them had. More than any other factor, it is place and setting that define what is at stake for Keren and Yaccoub in “The Knife Intifada.”
Here’s hoping I managed to cut out all the bullshit.
DEWAINE FARRIA holds an MA in International and Area Studies from the University of Oklahoma and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Outpost Magazine, and Drunken Boat. He is a frequent contributor to The Mantle. Follow him on Instagram at @dewainefarria.
