Skip to main content

Story-notes for "Implicate Order"


In 2016, my wife and I took a short vacation in Nantucket. I'd never been to the island and we were looking for a quick getaway during one of my school vacation weeks. As I joked with friends afterwards, Nantucket was 'fine.' Everything about it was fine. The food was fine. The weather was fine. The views from its beaches were obviously fine. It did feel a bit like a Martha Stewart Theme Park but that's what I expected going there and wasn't much disappointed to find that confirmed. 

"Denise" by Zhang Jingna (2010)
There was, however, one moment that stuck with me. After renting a car, Lauren and I took a tour around as much of the island as we could. We reached the extreme western edge of Nantucket and pulled over to take in this wide stretch of marshy lake called Long Pond. While there I noticed a scrap of black trash bag caught in some reeds, flapping in this solemn, almost beckoning way. And that was it. I had the beginnings of a story. 

Read "Implicate Order:"

At the beginning I knew the story had something to do with ghosts and the people who seek them out. To be clear, I'm not a big believer in ghosts as actual phenomena to be studied and pursued. I do like the idea of ghosts as an idea, however, an ancient metaphor for the past and its scars.

I wrote this story towards the end of that summer in about three days and spent the rest of that year and the winter of 2017 tinkering with it. I've had some stories that went through truly radical transformations during revision but "Implicate Order," wasn't one of them. This story seemed to know what it was about from the beginning and mostly I felt my job as a writer was simply making its pieces fit together with the minimum of visible seams.

The ideas of the story — hidden malevolent ecosystems and the human guards that stand ready to defend against them — came from some reading on parasitic wasps and other pleasant aspects of the microscopic world. I didn't write the story as any manifesto about the world or our place in it, but this sense of being prey, of being hunted, is certainly one I feel familiar with. I guess that explains my strong personal connection to the story and my wish to find it as good a home as possible. Lamplight was extremely generous to choose this story and place it along side truly staggering works from KL Pereira, Sarah Read, Haleh Agar, and Noelle Henneman. The most I can hope is that you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. To paraphrase Charles Dickens, may this tale haunt you pleasantly.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

With the title World War Z

Early on in the mostly disappointing zombie epidemic thriller World War Z, UN Investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) hides out in a Newark apartment, trying to convince a family living there to flee with him from the hordes of sprinting, chomping maniacs infesting the city. The phrase he uses, drawing from years of experience in the world's troubled war-zones is "movement is life." Ultimately he's unsuccessful, the family barricades their door behind him and they join the ever-swelling ranks of the undead. As far as a guiding philosophy goes for a pop-action thriller like World War Z, 'movement is life,' isn't bad. And for the first half of the movie or so, it follows its own advice. Similar to other recent zombie movies (Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead) the warning signs of what the rest of the movie will bring are subtle and buried until all hell is ready to break through. The television mentions 'martial law,' Philadelphia traffic snarl
Post a Comment
Read more
I’m going to take a slightly abbreviated approach to this year’s best-of lists and mostly focus on movies. It’s not that I didn’t read or listen to music but for whatever reason I feel uninspired to talk about either topic. C’est la vie! So in no particular order are five movies I greatly enjoyed watching this year. Firstly, Avengers: Endgame. Well, I guess there is some order to this list because literally the first thing I thought of in terms of movies I’ve seen is this movie. It is inevitable! This is the one MCU flick it’s hard for me to remember as simply a super-hero film. Although I found its predecessor a bit more more compulsively watchable, I really enjoyed this film. First of all it’s tone, which veered from despair, heist hijinx, parental reconciliation, to epic mega-brawl was never boring. Even the gorgeous mess which is that final fight has its own interior logic and sports some of the best looking cinematography this side of Black Panther. With Endgame MCU found a
1 comment
Read more

Reading Response to "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

Reader Response to “A Good Man is Hard to Find” Morgan Crooks I once heard Flannery O’Connor’s work introduced as a project to describe a world denied God’s grace. This critic of O’Connor’s work meant the Christian idea that a person’s misdeeds, mistakes, and sins could be sponged away by the power of Jesus’ sacrifice at Crucifixion. The setting of her stories often seem to be monstrous distortions of the real world. These are stories where con men steal prosthetic limbs, hired labor abandons mute brides in rest stops, and bizarre, often disastrous advice is imparted.  O’Connor herself said of this reputation for writing ‘grotesque’ stories that ‘anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.’ This is both a witty observation and a piece of advice while reading O’Connor’s work. These are stories about pain and lies and ugliness. The brutality that happen
1 comment
Read more