The Caravan
Hi y’all,
“The Caravan” is out in Uncanny today! It is also in the podcast episode, along with a short interview. I’d like to tell you a little bit about the process of writing the story, and the things I thought about on the way, but it’s better if you read or listen to it first because there are some slight thematic spoilers below. You can read or listen to it here.
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I wrote the first draft of “The Caravan” in February 2021, just after my father and I had driven from rural Illinois, where my parents live, to the DC area, where I lived at the time. On the drive, I was struck by the way the towns we passed all looked the same. Or, not that the towns looked the same, but the extension of the town by the highway looked the same. A gas station or two on each side, a few fast-food restaurants. And then, down the road, maybe even out of sight, the real town: the houses, the one little church.
This image of the town under the overpass (the original title for the story was, in fact, “The Overpass”) stuck with me. I wrote a story about someone who lives in one of those little towns, in a world where the highway is something bigger, beyond understanding. Where there weren’t any on-ramps for people from the towns underneath the highway to join it.
What I didn’t think about until much later was that I’m from one of those little towns, that the very journey that had literally transported me from rural Illinois to Washington, DC and inspired the story had metaphorically marked the same transition. I was moving from the town to the highway. I was leaving “flyover country” for the kind of place that calls it that.
If you’ve read much of my work, this probably won’t surprise you. I write about leaving small towns, being nostalgic for small towns, staying in small towns… a lot. But I think that’s because it’s the kind of thing I always feel like I have to explain. So many other parts of my identity are self-explanatory to people (even when they feel very confusing to me), but this one not so much. I went to a fancy high school (public, state-funded, residential) and an even fancier college. I worked in DC, and now I live in Spain. I fly over a lot of country.
But I know what it’s like to look at the world moving by and wonder if it would ever stop for you. I don’t think it’s something I’ll forget.
Let me know what you think of the story!
Love,
AnaMaria
P.S. No short story log this time because my laptop is sad and dying and it’s terrible to open spreadsheets to keep track of my reading, and I’m going to have to replace it with one with a Spanish keyboard, and then I’ll have to relearn where all the punctuation is, which is very annoying if you’re as fast a touch typist as I am. Anyway, no short story recs, but I really liked The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden!