Because, in 1978, we were the first Thai family in a working class neighborhood of Chicago, predominantly inhabited by Polish and Irish. Because we found our mailbox off its post every weekend, the aluminum dented in the shape of…
When someone yells “Boom!” on a sailboat, you are about to get hit by a bar at the base of the sail, unless you duck. “Hard alee” also means something like “duck,” but to the side. You never remember…
When we were twelve, we taught ourselves to fly. —John Murillo, from “Renegades of Funk” All of us girls, now women. —T Kira Madden, from “The Feels of Love” That winter, we watched New York Undercover on group phone calls,…
By Gerry Stanek • James Baldwin finds a unique way to interiority in “Sonny’s Blues,” which was first published in 1957. I say unique, because I’m not sure there’s another story like this; a character’s thoughts and perceptions are…
He’ll want the Moana one with zippers like cresting waves and straps that glisten blue plastic glitz. He’ll cry that Michelle Naylor’s mom let her buy that one in purple. You’ve only met Michelle Naylor’s mom once, at family…
We make a ton of money off Christmas in July, because customers have too much hope. It’s not their fault. Me and Rubina feed it to them. We decorate Paradise Pawn with tinsel and lights. We smile and hold…
By Candace Walsh • In Zadie Smith’s short story “Crazy They Call Me,” the author makes the unconventional choice to present Billie Holiday as a second-person-singular narrator. This strikes me as a literary high-wire act, plausibly the result of…
There are funnel cakes. There are deep-fried Kit Kats. There are even deep-fried sticks of butter. Sam’s feet sink into the mud that’s covered with straw because it rained ten inches in forty-eight hours and it’s probably going to…
After Dinner A woman sits at a kitchen table, sipping chamomile tea and reading a book. The dishes have been rinsed, the counters and sink cleared, the dishwasher hums. Outside the window over the sink, the night is…
Once you could sleep. At five a.m. the ravens are a collective of voices, neighbors in the apartment next door. You wake to their arguments or their lovemaking or their overwrought drunken discussions but there is no wall to…
There’s a war on against the passive character.
Plunge into an MFA workshop or an evening writers’ group and you will likely hear a participant suggest that the main character in a workshop story isn’t active enough. This comment will open a slew of follow-up comments, falling along a spectrum of accusations that the character in question tends to “react rather than act” or “speak only when spoken to.” Eventually, someone will suggest that the character seems to lack objective.
The fix to this workshop trope is to develop bombastic protagonists. These are people with clear visions for their futures. Oddballs with loud voices are popular, as are characters with obsessive but slightly unusual objectives. These types of characters are seemingly born of Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to have characters want something, even if it’s just to free a piece of floss from their teeth, and they are quite popular in a workshop discussion.
While it’s true that eccentric, “active” characters can carry a narrative, it is also true that in our daily lives, these people are in the distinct minority. How many of us know exactly what we want at this moment? How many of us could state our own primary purpose or objective?
“Five A.M. Ravens” is a piece written for these quiet types, for the wanderers who want something, but not that thing, or the other thing either. I believe that the central conflict for many of us is our inability to control our outcomes (or to know what we want), and I believe we deserve to have our stories told, too.
With that said, I will admit that it is not easy to create propulsion in a narrative where the central conflict is the main character’s inability to act. Quiet stories like this sometimes benefit from the art of threes—in this case, the birds who are oblivious to the protagonist, the loss of the protagonist’s name (which is intentionally lost in the narrative as well), and the weight of responsibility. Braid these three components well enough, and they can add drive to a story when a character cannot.
The central idea I was working with here was how we can be swept up, or perhaps swept away, by forces beyond their control. In this story, that force is the first year of motherhood, when women are faced with so much change that it can be difficult to navigate identity, desire, exhaustion, and worth. To return to the working world after having a baby is to find the world has moved on without you—perhaps the world you believed you belonged to never needed you at all.
NATALIE TEAL MCALLISTER is a fiction writer by night, marketing director by day, based in Kansas City. Her short fiction appears in Glimmer Train, No Tokens, SmokeLong Quarterly, Pigeon Pages, Midwestern Gothic, and CHEAP POP, among others. Natalie is also a two-time Tin House Summer Workshop participant, where the ravens woke her every morning.
