Updated Draft of Workshop Story

In case anyone needs this:

Sunflowers

The letter was unexpected.

First of all, it was the only handwritten letter Amy had gotten in years. No one handwrote things anymore. It was all text messages - hey, you on your way, bring a sweater, where you at. Even grocery lists were tucked away into virtual notes on phones. Dear blank, how are you? was no longer heard of.

Second of all, she thought he was dead.

Yet there it was. Two skewed stamps in the righthand corner, circle postmarks plastered all over it from across the world. The return address - New Zealand.

What else could it have been? After a whirlwind of two years, watching mom and dad pass away, one after the other. Dad went first. The cancer spread faster than they’d thought it would. Mom was always a fighter. She didn’t have cancer, but she didn’t have Dad after that either, and Amy always thought that’s what really led her in the end to slip peacefully into his arms in heaven. The doctors say heart attack. She said heartache.

Growing up she and her brother had always eaten dinner at the worn-out family table together, sure. They teased each other about the way their hair looked on bleary eyed early days before school, or watched Saturday morning cartoons while eating bowls of forbidden cookie crisp while mom wasn’t watching because that was basically the same thing as eating cookies for breakfast.

So they had done all the normal sibling things together, normal for a brother and sister who could actually stand to be in the same room as another. But when the two parts of their lives went missing that had been such a certainty, they bridged the missing pieces with phone calls and memories. Phone calls about how Dad always ate his peas one by one, mom’s favorite pair of dangly earrings and how she would even wear them when she would garden in the early mornings. Her favorites were sunflowers. She liked to think that heaven was full of sunflowers.

“Cathedral Rock. Remember it?”

“You mean in the Grand Canyon when you nearly killed me? No, totally don’t recall,” Amy had said. They had been sitting over two cups of coffee in her kitchen that had grown cold from neglect, the two not wasting time to stop and drink when there were stories to be told.

“If that’s your definition of nearly killing, I wouldn’t want to go against you in a court case.” He needed a haircut, his brown hair spilling into his eyes.

“A fall from thirty feet could definitely fit the definition, in my opinion.” Amy laughed and finally took a sip of her coffee, dabbing her mouth with a napkin. David would be home soon and they had both vowed to stick to only one cup a day.

“You have to admit the look on your face was priceless. And Dad was there to catch you.”

“Yeah, he was. He always was.”

So there were long phone calls, short phone calls, visits. But never letters.

The phone calls had stopped. One day they were laughing at Dad’s attempt to lure a bluejay into their backyard by making what he deemed professional bird calls, the next there was absolute silence. And then the next day, and the next. For the last ten years. There had been no signs of him drifting away, nothing that could have prepared her, not even a far off look in his eyes, phone calls that he had to step outside the room to take.

She got up and opened the blinds, trying to stop the pounding in her temples. When the sun streamed from the window in panels, she shied away from it like it might singe her toes, then sat back down on the kitchen chair. There were only so many emotions in the world. Happy sad angry furious depressed confused. She remembered telling her mother that she was pregnant, announcing the news while her mom beamed at her from the hospital bed, her hand frail in her grasp. Amy had been elated, but sad, dissapointed and regretful with her stomach churning in a knot. There was no specific emotion that could describe that moment, her mom smiling at her from her pale skin, smiling about something she’d never get to see. Emotions were no good at all at describing how someone was feeling. Each situation had its own unique set. She didn’t know how she felt now, but that churning knot was there.

Amy -

I guess you are probably wondering where I’ve been.

Soft tears, gentle, running over the wrinkles of her face that had formed that he had not been there to see. The wrinkle that formed at the place in her forehead when her husband Tom told her he was going on a business trip - two, three, four business trips. When those business trips finally led to the question, Whose perfume is that on your coat? Amy only liked to use Chanel, but this smelled of chintzy pear and ethanol.

The laughter lines when her second, current husband David and her stayed up late watching the cars pass outside their bedroom window because they both had a chronic addiction to coffee and kept drinking it into the wee hours of the morning. Those coffee addled nights where they got to that point of laughter where you don’t know what you’re laughing at anymore, but if just feels good. The little beginnings of crow’s feet around her eyes that started when Layla would cry in the middle of the night and “your turn” was David’s favorite phrase after the coffee finally wore off.

Her brother had missed her daughter growing up. He wasn’t there for the first time her son blew out the candles on his cake.

I don’t know if there a point in saying sorry. Sorry is an empty word people say when they want to feel better for whatever thing that’s eating their conscience. It’s up to the other person to realize the person saying sorry feels truly sorry about what they’ve done. I’m going to say it anyway though. I’m sorry.

Can a single word cover ten years? Sorry he’d said when both of her front teeth had fallen out at the same time and he made fun of her gappy smile. Sorry when he spilled the hot chocolate on her stuffed seal Sealo Blue. They affectionately referred to him as Sealo Stained after that. Sorry when they’d wanted to watch funny videos of cats on the internet late at night. When they were discovered up past midnight under the cover of the red scratchy picnic blanket, they told mom and Dad sorry too. Sorry for taking her bike to the beach without asking, sorry for never washing the car when he said he would, for missing her violin recital because Jessie the pretty new girl at school needed homework help.

Sorry for missing her first marriage, her second marriage, the birth of her daughter, the birth of her son, and all the life that happened in between.

The world had a finite amount of sorries in it and his might not cover all the pathways of her life.

He went on to say

I’ve never been good at goodbyes so saying bye mom, bye dad, was something I was not very good at. When I got offered the job I just went. I didn’t think I could stand saying goodbye to anything else. I thought, everything will be here when I get back, and that’s enough.

He never did come back, so she spent her life filling in the empty spaces where spaces should not have been.

He went on to say

Every day I told myself I was fine. I was lying to myself. No matter where you are, if something’s missing, something’s missing. It just took me this long to tell myself the truth.

It was three o’ clock in the afternoon and her hands trembled as they held the plain, cream colored paper. The sun wafted through her pink daisy curtains. The mailman was making his rounds and Mrs. Anderson’s rottweiler was barking at him. David would come home soon in the family Volvo, which would leak on the driveway and she’d probably go outside to try to soak it up with kitty litter. Bending down to put the litter on the driveway scraped her knees. She almost looked forward to it. It was a type of pain she could bear to feel.

Now I realize that saying hello can be even harder than saying goodbye depending on who you’re saying hello to.

He went on to say some other things about why when what who and how and then said

For now I will just start with hello.

How are you?

-Matthew

She stood up from the kitchen table. Her chair scraped the linoleum floor. There was stationery in the second drawer of the cabinet, mostly for to-do lists that never got done. It had a cat in the bottom right corner of the paper curled into a circle, three letter Z’s rising from its pointed ears.

The only pen she could find was orange. It matched the cat.

Dear Matthew, she began. Her hands were still wet with the teardrops she had wiped away.

From down the hall she heard her son wake up from his nap, knowing the quiet sounds he made before he started to cry.

“Coming, Matthew,” she said as she stood up to go to his room.

She left the letter lying on the kitchen table.

Reader Response to "Passion"

I admired the writing in this story. The content, not so much.
The whole concept of Har Gopal confused me. I might need to preface this with the unfortunate situation that a page near the end of the story seems to be missing. Maybe on that page everything is magically revealed. I'm more than a little skeptical of that though. In fact in the summaries I read, they made no mention of a magic "this is what you were missing the whole time page." So I can only assume I got the gist of it.
The gist of it to me seems to be that Betsy met this random Indian man and fell in love with him because he was so very distinctly Indian and that is all. And the random man, Har Gopal, just really randomly shows up one day and barely even says anything and seems to have no reason to even keep Betsy around.
I can't decide if I think that the way that Betsy sees Har Gopal is negative or positive.
"One Sunday afternoon he was reclining on her bed in his rather lordly way...his feet crossed comfortably at the ankle. He looked noble and sensitive and gave the impression of being sunk in deep philosophic thought. This impression, however, was false, for when he finally broke his silence it was to say nothing more significant than, "Just see, I have had this blister for two days. It is very painful."...Overcome with tenderness for him [she] threw herself on his reclining figure."Oh you're so sweet, so sweet!"
Ok I don't know about the next person but for me, the last thing that I'm probably going to think when someone is sitting on my bed staring into space and they tell me that they're thinking about the blister that's been festering on their foot for two days is that they're sweet. I think I would probably say that that's kind of gross and tell them to get their foot off my bed.
So I think it's weird that Betsy feels this way about him, but it's kind of in a "oh good for you way" where you love someone so much that even their blisters seem cool to you. Which is kind of nice, but also kind of delusional, so I am just not too keen on her character in general.
While delusional though, the characters are just interesting and off-kilter enough to make me want to keep reading even though I don't necessarily love what's happening, so kudos to Jhabvala.

Reader Response to "The Fix"

So being a genius I got the wrong version of the book at the library and it doesn't have this story in it. Will definitely hop on this issue ASAP.

Reader Response to "The Man Who Invented the Calendar"

There is really no criticism I can give to this story. With writing like this, I want to just keep reading it and appreciating it for what it is. I can say however I am supremely jealous of BJ Novak. I don't know if the Office or the writing came first, but dude, can you just do one cool thing and be famous for it instead of two cool things and being famous for both? Save a little love for the rest of us.
It's difficult to be critical because the story is meant to be just a fun little romp through a hypothetical world, I don't think it's supposed to have some deep underlying meaning. Still, I was actually confused about a couple things the character says. I would chalk it up to him being an unreliable narrator, but I don't even think that's how Novak meant for it to be read. I think we're supposed to take everything in stride.
"A lot of shenanigans today, like pranks (which are lies for no reason). People say it has something to do with the calendar, which I wasn’t crazy about. But I guess it’s good when your invention takes on a life you never expected."
This part baffled me. Wouldn't the person who invented the calendar know what April Fools day was? How would it be that on the very first April Fools day people decided that it would be the day to prank everyone? Were holidays in effect before the calendar? How would they know what holiday it was? Maybe Novak is doing one of those "it's all in the character's head" kind of deals where the guy actually just thinks he invented the calendar. That would explain for me how other people already have holidays. But again, don't really think Novak was going for that and we're supposed to just roll with it.
Then he said, “What else have you done?,” and I said that I’d been distracted about Jane being sacrificed but that I’m planning on doing something new soon, maybe involving clocks. 
HOW IS HE MAKING MONTHS IF TIME ISN'T INVENTED YET.
Another small fuckup: I put an extra “r” in all the copies of the calendar I handed out, even though I already told everyone the next month coming was called Febuary. But Alice came up with the best solution! She said, “Just tell everyone it’s spelled ‘February’ but pronounced ‘Feb-u-ary.’ That way,they’ll feel stupid!”
This didn't confuse me. I just loved it.

Reader Response to "Why Do You Write?"

When Margaret Atwood says that we write what we know, I think basically two things at once, and those things are "cool, that's definitely true" and "dear god why does it have to be so." This is due in large part to the fact that there are an overwhelmingly enormous amount of things that I do not know and a teeny tiny little pool of things that I actually do know. This is made even more certain by the constant re-occurrence of themes that always seem to weasel their way into my writing. Oh, there's wanderlust again, oh there's an absent father figure, oh there's a first heartbreak. And also there's usually a cat. Seriously, someone give me a dollar for every time I put a cat in one of my stories and I will be able to buy myself a full tank of gas.

A lot of the time, though, I will suddenly be struck by a really cool idea about some thing I do not know the first thing about, like underwater sea explorations or being stranded on a desert island and having to survive or how to properly tie a balloon (I have never been able to do this. Someone help.) But then I get really sad because I realize it's going to be super hard to write about any of these things, because I have not actually done them, and we write what we know. It's possible, of course, to write about things that we haven't experienced, but it just seems like a much more daunting task. If I was trying to write a story about surviving on a desert island I feel like I would probably get it all messed up because my character would probably eat poison berries that I didn't know were poisonous and then then the accuracy of the entire story would be discredited. 

So then I just make up a fantasy world where anything can happen and viola, the situation is more or less fixed. I have definitely written a lot of stories that required research or even just veered away from a story-line all together because I was afraid I wouldn't do it justice. Or I just keep writing about cats. 

Reader Response to "We Didn't"

Side note: I read the transcript of that random thing and thought that was the story we were supposed to be reading. Awkward.
Anyway, I like the actual story much more, fortunately.
The piece has a rhythm, an undercurrent that Dybeck keeps flowing throughout that drives the reader to keep going, to answer that question that the title promises: they didn't? Did they really? Lacan says that within every word, its inherent opposite is contained, so to me the title still asks the question of whether they did or not. Intentionally or not, this story played on this concept heavily:

we didn’t, not in the moonlight, or by the phosphorescent lanterns on lighting bugs in your back yard, not beneath the constellations we couldn’t see

They didn't, they could have - there's something beautiful in that concept alone.

Well, anyway, we find out they didn't. For me, that's not really the sad part. The sad part is the paragraph where they're sitting in the car.
This story comes alive in the specificity of the details right in the places they're needed; the details give it energy.
Maybe the most energy for me is contained in the part "in the Rambler at the dead end of the street" because basically this exact thing happened to me. But I feel the way that it's written gives the experience a universal quality that makes it feel like you could have been there, and felt those things, even if you haven't. It's written like a letter, to you, the unnamed you, that could be anyone that happens to be reading. For these people who are made very real by the details, it was a Rambler, for me it was a pickup truck. The rain brought out the smell of smoked fish for them, for me it was the heat simmering the candy bar you'd bought from the ice cream shop for your dad, because it was his favorite. But the same realization: I wanted to find some way that wasn’t corny sounding to tell you how much fun I’d had in your company and that we'd overlooked how close we’d been as friends -
I wanted you to like me again.
These lines capture so well what I think is going on in people's thought lives. Why is it so much easier to say "What beautiful weather we're having this afternoon" than "I had fun with you, can we have fun again?" We don't want to be vulnerable, so things just never get said, and the one we didn't turns into a string of we never dids.

Reader Response to Death by Landscape

At first I really really didn't like this story. I was reading a library copy but if I had been able to write in the margins I would have repeatedly written where is this going, where is this going on basically every page up to where "Lois can remember everything, every detail; but it does her no good." I feel like this would have been a good opening. That sentence is the one that hooked me, after about six entire pages. 

I cared a little bit about Lois and Lucy's relationship up to that point, but it was almost like every other camp story that you hear, and I was not entirely invested. I thought the dynamic was interesting, but still done before - Lois, the careful one, Lucy, the energetic one, the one that lives on the edge. "The difference was that Lucy did not car about the things she didn't know, whereas Lucy did." After working to the end, though, I understand why we are supposed to care about the paintings. The paintings represent Lois's inner thoughts - they are where Lucy went, still living in the corners of her memories.

I thought the use of tense was an interesting choice. It was another thing that bothered me at first, because the very fact that I was thinking about the tense being used took me out of the story. I understand it now though; the use of the present in both the flashbacks and the current setting show how Lois's mindframe is still very much stuck in the past. 

Overall, I still wasn't a huge fan of this story. I feel like the point is that we don't know what happened to Lucy, but still as a curious reader I still wanted to know or have at least a hint.

Dialogue

“You’ve reached the office of-”

“Yeah, David, hey listen. It’s Ronnie, I -”

“Mr. Douglass. Six O’clock on Monday. Six O’clock on Wednesday. Must I remind you that we are attempting to overcome phonecalls, and this is indeed a -”

“Yeah, I know, I know. Overcoming phonecalls. But this one’s a real doozy, doc, I promise it’s not like that time when my grandma’s cat did the thing, I got a real thing happening here and I -”

“Ronald. Remember. What must we do in these types of circumstances?”

“Breathe.”

“That’s right, breathe.”

“Ok.”

“Are you breathing?”

“Yeah. One, two, three”

“One. Two. Three.”

“Ok?”

“Ok.”

“Now, Ronald, what is your situation?”

“Ok well so I’m driving my truck around and it’s playing goddam wheels on the bus go round and round and round again and you know how much I hate that motherf-”

“Mr. Douglass. Breathe.”

“Oh. Ok.”

“Are you breathing?”

“One, two, three.”

“Good.”

“Ok. So I’m driving the truck. Through this tiny little town, right. And there’s this kid. I see him in my rearview mirror. Get this, he starts running after me, and you know how much that would freak me out, cause what’s he gonna do, you know, so I speed up a little faster but he’s still chasing me -”

“Ronald, let’s remember what we do in these situations.”

“Breathe?”

“Yes, breathe, and remember that we control our own actions.”

“Right, so I was remembering we control our own actions and I’m thinking, well I can’t control this kid’s actions so the only thing I can do is keep on driving and this kid keeps on running after me and he runs out into the middle of the street.”

“He ran out into the middle of the street. Ronald, are you still in your truck? You must pull over to the side of the street.”

“Yeah yeah I pulled over to the side of the street. But the point is - it doesn’t matter. Because right behind me those two cars smashed all up into each other just trying to avoid the kid in the middle of the street who was after my truck and now there’s cars all stopped up right behind them and I don’t even know what I’m supposed to -”

“Ronald, breathe.”

There was silence on the other end.

“Ronald?”

“I’ll take the green limesicle?”

The voice of a little boy on the other end, but Ronald never responded.

Reader Response to "The Disappeared"

(Outside he saw fireflies. No one had ever mentioned fireflies in Detroit. Night was coming on. He gazed up at the sky. Same stars, same moon.)
I thought the writing in this story was beautiful, I kind of just hated the storyline, or at least the outcome. Therefore I can't decide if I liked this story or not, because I appreciate the writing I just don't like the way the author chose to end it.
I don't really even get what is going on in the end. Is it trying to imply that he got Lauren pregnant and one day the baby that he's looking at in the end at the hospital will be his? And why did he just get randomly whacked in the head at the church? The ending seems so unfinished, like the author was just like "eh whatever I don't know what to do here so this is good enough" and moved on to another story hoping that the beginning of this one was good enough so we didn't care about the end. Nope, sorry Baxter, I just didn't like it.
I really do like Anders though. Even though basically his one and only mission for being in America is to sleep with an American girl (Standard rule of characters #1 explain what your character wants), he still seems like kind of a stand-up guy to me probably because of how innocent he is.
My favorite part is when Lauren asks Anders if he missed her and he tells her "It was hard to breathe." Something about that response is just undeniably real. Maybe it's got something to do with Baxter trying to write Anders as sounding foreign, but usually when someone asks if someone missed them they say "yes" and the response "It was hard to breathe" just sounds like a much more accurate description of how that actually feels. So Anders was the takeaway character for me in this, with his likability and unique voice.