Hi y’all,

“The Glass City” is now up in Uncanny!  I must be honest with you: this is a weird one.  There’s no dialogue, for one, and it has been quite controversial among my critique partners.  I really hope you’ll read it and see where you land.  And afterwards, you can read a bit about what inspired the story (among other questions) in my interview with Caroline M. Yoachim!

So as not to overlap too much with the excellent questions in the interview, I thought I’d expand a little bit on my thinking (and overthinking) around one aspect of the story: the fruit. 

My beloved writing group has a series of jokes about the themes that tend to appear and reappear in my stories (homoerotic friendships, errant grandmothers, homesickness), and fruit is high on this list.  I love fruit.  And I love the symbolic and thematic potential of fruit, the ways it can hold so many different kinds of meaning. (A total aside, but my love for fruit is best exemplified in one of my shortest stories, “Ten Fruits and Other Memories of Rialynas” in Beneath Ceaseless Skies.  Still a personal favorite!)

This story, without spoiling, has a fairly important fruit.  An apricot, to be precise, but it almost wasn’t.  The thing is, the fairly plot-relevant (well, theme-relevant) apricot had its role significantly expanded in a very late revision to this story.  It was originally an orange, but then I realized it needed to have a pit.  But then I realized it also needed to be able to be thrown. 

Then I realized that in an oblique and highly irrelevant way, the story was about how I felt about both rural Illinois, where I grew up, and Spain, where I live.  So now it had to be a fruit related to at least one of those places, ideally both.  I considered pawpaws (very Illinois), dates (but did it have to be fresh?), pomegranates (interesting, but wrong thematically).  I bored a dear friend of mine nearly to tears talking about the attributes of half a dozen kinds of fruit.

And eventually I settled on the tart, not-quite-humble apricot.  There was an apricot tree growing in a gravel lot halfway between the house I grew up in and my great-grandparents’ house.  Spain has some of the most delicious apricots I’ve ever had.  It has a pit.  As a fruit, it does bruise easily, but… I wasn’t going to find a better option.

Revising this story felt a lot like that.  I felt very strongly about certain aspects of it, especially because the weight of the story depended a lot more on the themes and prose than I’m used to.  But I never quite convinced myself that I found the perfect answer, the perfect version of the story.  I’m not sure the fruit I was looking for exists.

Still, it’s almost apricot season, and I’m not going to let perfect get in the way of delicious.

Upcoming

You’re going to be hearing from me a lot this month! I should have a story out from Beneath Ceaseless Skies later this month (also, uh, a weird one). Also releasing in May is A Breath of Time (which includes my story “Stitching Time” and which is, frankly beautiful). Author copies have arrived and I’m delighted by mine! So keep an eye out for all of that.

Love,

AnaMaria