More Lies

Like millions, I’ve loved fiction for a long time. Until recently, I’d never tried hard writing it. A while ago, though, when I was still teaching high school I was lucky enough to convince the principal to let me offer a creative writing course. I didn’t really know what I was doing (the theme of my entire career, and even life), but improvised. I gave an assignment to the class that asked them to write a short story. We’d read a few and talked about them, and I gave them a week. These were motivated high school students, and they ate it up. Instead of twiddling my thumbs while they worked, I decided I’d do the assignment, too. So we wrote alongside of each other for a week. Those were some of the quietest, most focused days I can remember.

I’d been living in the little ranching town for a few years, and had grown even more obsessed with chukar hunting and trying to understand the complex attraction it had for me, particularly the paradox of killing something you thought you loved. So my story focused on a ranch kid, the son of a colleague, who’d asked us — in real life — to take him chukar hunting. Leslie and I wrote about him a lot back in the day. “The Kid.”

But I had to lie to write the story, and — knowing I wasn’t the first — was okay with that. In the meantime, I’d found a book while wandering around Powell’s in Portland titled Grateful Prey: Rock Cree Human-Animal Relationships. The title spoke loudly to me, almost as if it answered the paradox. I had to create a character that would bring that into the story. And so I started writing.

But before I’d written much at all, I’d gotten into a spot in the story about a feral cat, and that consumed all of the pages and time alloted. That was maybe ten years ago. I’d never even worked in the stuff from Grateful Prey. Last winter, though, I took it up again and expanded it to a novella, adding four more characters. Once I’d finished it, I started the arduous process of trying both the get an agent interested in the book and to adapt parts of it to short stories that I sent out to literary journals.

All of this was new territory. I knew that rejection was part of the game, and I got lots of that. In the first couple months of 2024 I sent out more than 60 pieces of various lengths and parts of the book, all “stand-alone” (so they would make sense on their own). I’ve had four stories from the book accepted by literary journals now. I’m still working on finding an agent. I’ve also nearly completed a sequel novel.

Anyway, I’ll share the first story, published in The Vassar Review last spring. If you click the thumbnail below, it’ll open the whole issue (it’s kind of a big file so it might take awhile). My piece, “Facing Death,” starts on page 48. Some of the stuff from Grateful Prey is there, and lots of hunting-related things. Let me know what you think.