Art Monster: Stories and a Novella
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ART MONSTER: STORIES AND A NOVELLA A THESIS IN Creative Writing and Media Arts Presented to the Faculty of the University of Missouri-Kansas City in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree MASTER OF FINE ARTS by ELIZABETH ANNE COOK B.A., University of Northern Iowa, 2011 Kansas City, Missouri 2014 © 2014 ELIZABETH ANNE COOK ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ART MONSTER: STORIES AND A NOVELLA Elizabeth Anne Cook, Candidate for the Master of Fine Arts Degree University of Missouri-Kansas City, 2014 ABSTRACT Monsters external and internal stalk the margins of the stories and novella that make up this collection. Though each selection engages in its own distinct exploration of the monstrous, the pieces hint at a shared question: how does entrenching and isolating ourselves in a singular experience—of place, of occupation, of grief—cripple our ability to understand one another? In Sea Monsters, a young girl comes to terms with how loss has hollowed out the adults in her life, morphing familiar faces and comforts into grotesqueries. Eva Americana explores the power and pull of a small Midwestern town on its inhabitants, suggesting that nostalgia might be the most monstrous indulgence of all. In Derivatives, a washed-up former prodigy sabotages his own happiness at every turn, punishing himself for failing to live up to specters of expectation. And in Mr. Jelly, a children’s book author confronts the horrific, perhaps supernatural power of her own creation, fearing she’s to blame. Art and sacrifice are so often conflated in the popular imagination. Art Monster: Stories and a Novella dissects this relationship, questioning who—or what—might be sacrificed in the stories we tell. iii APPROVAL The faculty listed below, appointed by the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, have examined a thesis titled “Art Monster: Stories and a Novella,” presented by Elizabeth Anne Cook, candidate for the Master of Fine Arts Degree, and certify that in their opinion it is worthy of acceptance. Supervisory Committee Christie Hodgen, Ph.D., Committee Chair Department of English Whitney Terrell, M.F.A. Department of English Daniel Mahala, Ph.D. Department of English iv CONTENTS ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iii Critical Introduction .............................................................................................................1 Sea Monsters .......................................................................................................................7 Eva Americana .................................................................................................................166 Derivatives .......................................................................................................................185 Mr. Jelly ...........................................................................................................................206 VITA ................................................................................................................................xxx v INTRODUCTION I’ve spent three years building up a bookshelf to protect myself. As a writer of young adult fiction—and, perhaps more crucially, a female writer of young adult fiction—I’m hyper-aware of a tendency to arm myself in academia, to clutch Serious Literary Influences to my chest as proof of my legitimacy. I deserve to be here, my bookshelf says to me. These are the hallmarks of an apprenticeship steeped in the works of the masters. And my exposure to the masters of craft over the course of my three years here has undeniably changed the way I think about writing. Sam Lipsyte gave me the freedom to inject sarcasm into storytelling. Kelly Link opened me to the possibilities of magic and mystery in the literary landscape. George Saunders raised every expectation for what writing should be and do, and Lydia Davis inspired me to give my sentences the care and closeness of a straight-razor shave. But if I’m being honest, the writer who’s had the most influence on my motivation as a writer—the writer who put me in touch with the why of it all—is popular young adult author John Green. I had the chance to meet Green last year while I was working on a piece defending young adult literature for The Kansas City Star. He spoke at the Kansas City Public Library’s Truman Forum to a packed house of mostly young women (“infatuated tweens,” an arch colleague appraised, a dismissal that raised my hackles), and he spoke about the importance of empathy and imagining others complexly. Admittedly, teenagers aren’t often lauded for 1 their ability to engage in either project, but I suspected then, as I believe now, that our shared conception of the younger generation as disengaged, insincere narcissists is as much a failure of our own empathy—our inability to imagine them as fully-formed humans with complex emotional landscapes—as it is theirs. When Green spoke, he shared a story that struck at the heart of what I want my writing to do. He detailed a year living with three roommates in Chicago at the height of the Iraq war. One of his roommates was a Kuwaiti man named Hassan, who spent his days stress-watching cable news on the couch, searching for some sign that his relatives were safe. One night, as Green and Hassan watched the news together, the camera cut to a reporter standing in a fraught Baghdad neighborhood, Arabic graffiti scrawled across the wall behind her in messy black spray paint. As she pointed to the wall, using it as a prop for the anger in the Arab streets, Hassan began to shake with laughter. “What’s so funny?” Green asked. “The graffiti,” he said. “It says, ‘Happy Birthday, Sir, Despite the Circumstances.’” That line appears, in a slightly altered form, in my novella Sea Monsters, a gentle homage to a story that stuck and a reminder to myself to consider, when I look at the world around me entrenched in pessimism or despair, the “Happy Birthday Sir, Despite the Circumstances” possibility. I’m not sure any of the writing in my collection could be descripted as optimistic. When my characters aren’t punishing themselves, the rest of the world steps in to do it for them. But in their struggle with monsters internal and external, they brush against moments of mirth and magic. They find opportunities—despite the circumstances—for relief and release. 2 They don’t always do this elegantly, of course. I’ve grown a great deal as a writer over the past few years thanks to the instruction and feedback I’ve received, but I remain keenly aware of two of my common narrative pitfalls: an overreliance on theatrical conventions and tropes and a rejection of authentic emotion. The first I chalk up to an undergraduate career in theatre, spending long hours in Acting and Script Analysis picking apart scripts to see how they were put together. Consequently, my first workshop submissions read more like overstuffed ten-minute plays than short stories. I prioritized dramatic scene to the exclusion of everything else: I didn’t have the patience for summary and “stage directions,” so I attempted to resolve conflicts— even internal ones—and suggest their resolutions almost entirely through dialogue. I still feel most comfortable when I work in scene, and I think Sea Monsters, in particular, reveals that predilection in dialogue-heavy scenes that stretch on for pages at a time. But I hope that it also reveals an attempt to temper that impulse with a little more narration, description and attention to internal landscape. I realize now that my first efforts completely discarded the unique entry point into character that fiction offers: the chance to turn inward, to peer at a character’s hidden emotional landscape and discover the feelings and motivations she hides from others. Mr. Jelly emerged as an attempt at course-correction. Its scenes are much shorter than is my habit, spliced with longer passages of reflection and reaction. That self-censoring impulse is perhaps exemplified by the “Three things happened the next day:” list, an efficient, if a bit clunky, narrative device forcing me to focus on the particulars of events instead of just the way people talk and move through them. I mentioned a second pitfall as a writer, however, and this is a snare I’m still trying to 3 claw my way out of: the rejection or disdain of authentic emotion. I recall a line from a feedback letter a professor sent me in my second year of the program: “I want to care about these characters and their problems,” he wrote, “but it’s hard to do that when I feel as though the writer is constantly undermining them and keeping them at an arm’s length.” His critique was spot on, although I couldn’t see it then. I recognized an impulse toward sentimentality in my writing and wanted to punish it. In the process, I excised it from my work at every turn, refusing to allow myself—or my characters—to own their emotions and desires. Though I’m proud of the writing in “Derivatives,” this story is a symptom of that disease. The main character, Righteous Bridges, takes his fears and insecurities seriously, but I don’t; instead, the narrator mocks him relentlessly, throwing the legitimacy of his actions and desires into question. Readers may wonder why they should care about Righteous, and the story fails to offer them a compelling answer. Part of this shift away from sentiment I ascribe to a larger cultural trend among young women, and part to my own misappropriation of two female writers I admire: Lydia Davis and Jenny Offill. The latter inspired the title of this collection with a line from her most recent novel, Dept. of Speculation. “My plan was to never get married,” Offill writes. “I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his umbrella. Véra licked his stamps for him.” Offill’s narrator tries to live as an “art monster” for a time, adhering a post-it to her computer screen that reads “WORK NOT LOVE,” but finds it unsatisfying.