Hi, friends.
How’s the writing coming along? The reading? Life in general? You’ve made it to the end of January, and I think that’s something to celebrate. Right now there’s a loud flock of hungry birds making a racket in the neighborhood. There are signs that spring is coming. We’re going to make it. I hope that these stories and prompts have helped get some words on the page. That’s really the best medicine to make it through cold months or hot ones, sunny ones or gray ones. No matter what transpires outside your door, the notebook can be your anchor.
Story.
Today’s is The Husband Stitch by Carmen Maria Machado from Her Body and Other Stories. I was late to the party on Machado and if you are too, let’s fix that today.
Craft tidbits.
This is a story I wish I could teach in the classroom, but fear I could not talk about the things I’d want to talk about without turning twelve shades of red. If you shy away from writing sex scenes, there’s a lot here to consider. Machado does not hold back. Neither does our narrator. She is full of desire and agency, especially in the beginning. As a seventeen year old she declares:
In the beginning, I know I want him before he does. This isn’t how things are done, but this is how I am going to do them.
She is the aggressor here and she fancies herself a rules breaker. But as time goes on, she loses this feistiness and her agency diminishes.
It occured to me, coming up with the prompts, that sex is all there is between these characters. There are no shared interests or discussions outside of sex (unless you count the ribbon). No dinners. No parties. No dancing, no theater, no other couples. No parental reunions or deaths or complications. Only Halloween.
Likewise, there’s not a lot of description in the story. We don’t know where we are. (There is a lake and woods.) We don’t have a time frame. (Girls get married young. They wear pantyhose. It makes be think of the 50s, but I suppose girls still get married at 18. And somewhere, someone would sell me pantyhose if I wanted. Which. Nope. Never again. Thanks, though.) As someone who’s inclined to write in great detail about every leaf and tree, it’s a reminder that you don’t have to.
The dialogue is pretty spare. There are a few metaphors and similes but language is not particularly showy.
But what we do have intertwined (ribbon-like) with our main story are the ghost stories and urban legends. And the reading instructions?
Me: as a child, high-pitched, forgetable; as a woman, the same.
All other women: interchangeable with my own.
Oof. Ok. The reminder that you didn’t need. (The world may think you are interchangable but I, for the record, do not.)
What would the story be without the other stories? In a lot of ways, the story itself is a meditation on storytelling. I mean, our narrator is one of these stories come to life. You’ve heard a variation on the ribbon tale before, right? (My version involves a yellow ribbon, a wedding night, but the result is the same. The head was always bound to fall off.) The reading instructions serve as a way to make this tale within the tale more meta. (Retell this story around a campfire or in an old fashioned drawing room. Turn the lights down low.)
The tales we tell - fairy tales, urban legends, ghost stories - they are all cautinary in some way. The dangers of the world. The afterlife. How young girls should behave. The ones here seem to focus on death and betrayal in some way. On hauntings and fear.
Anything could move out there in the darkness, I think. A hook-handed man. A ghostly hitch-hiker repeating her journey. An old woman summoned from the rest of her mirror by the chants of children. Everyone knows these stories —that is, everyone tells them — but no one ever believes them.
Ah. Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s human nature to think we will be the exception to every rule. And geez, if we take a look around, don’t we see that playing out before us in a dozen different ways?
Our narrator seems to know this and does not care.
I have heard all the stories about girls like me, and I am unafraid to make more of them.
We never get an explanation of the ribbon. It just is.
Tell me about your ribbon.
There is nothing to tell. It’s my ribbon.
The narrator repeats a version of this may times. As the story progresses, we come to realize the ribbons are some kind of injury that have befallen the women. They are different colors, in different places. There is a silent understanding about them. And yet, the menfolk do not seem to understand how they come to be. In fact, during pregnancy, the husband asks if the child will also have a ribbon. She has to explain it to him. He has luxury of not knowing how it works.
I feel my jaw tighten. My mind skips between many answers, and I settle on the one that brings me the least amount of anger.
The least amoung of anger does not mean that it’s the truth. This exchange is one of the first instances of a power shift. He wants to untie the ribbon. And she’s startled by it.
I get up and go to the bathroom. I run the tap and then frantically check my ribbon, tears caught in my lashes. The bow is still tight.
He becomes increasingly interested in removing the ribbon. It’s been there for years and yet as time goes on, he is threatened by it.
A wife, he says, should have no secrets from her husband.
The son, who has been disinterested in it, suddenly picks up on this shift. And he too wants to untie it.
If you know a version of the ribbon tale, the ending shouldn’t come as a surprise. And yet… why does she let him untie the ribbon? What has changed? Where has our feisty narrator, the one with all the agency, gone?
Resolve runs out of me. I look at the face of my husband, the beginning and end of his desires all etched there. He is not a bad man, and that, I realize suddenly, is the root of my hurt.
He doesn’t untie it out of anger. She gives him permission. In the beginning, there are two rules. Then one. Then… none at all.
Sparks.
New work. Take one of the other stories that are woven into this story and use that as a basis for a new work. Or maybe there’s another urban legend that you’re fond of. Another ghost story. How could you build a story or an essay around that?
Or. Use the Klimt above as a prompt. Did you notice all of those eyes in her dress? She’s watching you…
Revision. Notice how efficiently Machado moves through the son’s growing up. Nine years, one paragraph. Too, the aging is cast through the lens of storytelling. He accepted her fairy tales until he questioned them, growing into ghost stories and urban legends and then growing away from stories altogether. Where might you have some bloat that you can cut or condense? How might you show a relationship through a single lens?
Other tidbits.
There’s been some talk on Twitter this week about a publishing scam involving Violet & the Bird. Lots of other mags have stepped in to republish the “accepted” pieces. Duotrope’s delisted them. But they were once there. In a space to provide legitamacy. When I was first starting out, I submitted to an outlet that was going to pay (it was only $25 bucks or so if memory serves). My piece was accepted (it was a pretty good piece). The outlet wasn’t really anthing other than a woman and a blog site which is down now. Let it serve as a good cautionary tale. I don’t submit to start ups any more. I wait to make sure that it’s really real. I read through the contributor lists. If I don’t recognize any names, I also don’t submit. Just a couple of ways I safeguard myself and my writing. It is, I suppose, a lesson well learned. One I hope you don’t have to make.
I do tend to leaf through lots of calls for submissions, so if you’ve got a piece that’s ready to go and you’re looking for a lovely home for it, maybe we can do some matchmaking in the comments. Just let me know a bit about it themewise, lengthwise, stylewise.
Okay, Scribblers. That’s it for now. Happy writing ~
Marsha
Soon after I hit send, Victoria Strauss (who is a great resource for such things) posted a thread on Twitter about a new, potentially scammy lit agent. She breaks down all the red flags (submission fee being the first) as she sees them and it's a good to get her insight on such things. I know we've all been working on these babies for so long and we want them to find homes. But be skeptical, friends. Make sure they are the best, loveliest homes.