Putting Your Ear to the Tracks: A Conversation with Leesa Cross-Smith

Jessica Wilbanks asks Leesa Cross-Smith about the craft choices at work in her short story, “Whiskey & Ribbons,” which later became a novel.

In this column, writer and Catapult instructor Jessica Wilbanks sits down with a diverse range of contemporary writers to take a close look at the craft choices they made while writing a single short story, essay, or poem.

The full text of each piece discussed in the column is available online. This month’s interview focuses on Leesa Cross-Smith’s short story “Whiskey & Ribbons,” which was published in Carve magazine after winning the Editor’s Choice Award for the 2011 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest, and which later became a novel published by Hub City Press.

Leesa Cross-Smith is a homemaker and writer from Kentucky. She is the author of This Close to Okay (Grand Central Publishing, 2021), So We Can Glow (Grand Central Publishing, 2020), Whiskey & Ribbons (Hub City Press, 2018), Every Kiss a War (Mojave River Press, 2014), and the forthcoming Half-Blown Rose (Grand Central Publishing, 2022).

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Jessica Wilbanks: So many of the qualities I love most in your work show up in that first paragraph of “Whiskey & Ribbons”: the smoldering sexual tension between characters, the elevation of the domestic sphere, and your deep attention to the emotional and romantic lives of women.

Can you walk us through some of the decisions you made as you began to immerse the reader into the story?

Leesa Cross-Smith: Originally, in my first draft, I had Evangeline waking up. We’re not supposed to do that, right? But everything that was happening to her was an awakening. Everything was new.

Once I read a craft book that said you should start the story at the most important point in the person’s life, or the moment everything changes. The thing that changed Evangeline’s life completely (the death of her husband, Eamon) had already happened, but this weekend of being snowed in with Dalton marked another huge shift for her.

So when I took out that part about waking up, I decided to just go for the gut and say what the story was about as quickly as possible. At first, I worried about jamming too much into that first paragraph, but then I decided it’s okay if the reader feels overwhelmed for a second, because after that, I’m going to slow it way down.

I read a lot of classics. That’s what I went to school for. I learned to read that way—first having no idea what was going on, and having to keep turning back. I like it when that happens to me, because it’s a really rich experience. I like being trusted as a reader. I don’t want anything dumbed down for me in any way.

JW: In my experience of that opening paragraph, the first few lines are emotionally neutral, even though we’re learning how Evangeline was widowed during her pregnancy. Then in the third line, the narrator begins repeating the phrase “I don’t think that applies.” The intensity is ratcheted up gradually until we are immersed in her anger and pain. Then she comes back to that cerebral place again, and the language you chose reflects that.

LCS: I wanted Evangeline to just feel how she was feeling. I specifically chose to use the word mother-effing, even though that’s not a word I use. I was raised Southern Baptist. My dad’s a preacher. I have to be very, very angry to use that word, but I gave it to Evangeline. She doesn’t walk around saying that word every day, but I don’t know if I can think of a more appropriate time.

When the story begins, Evangeline’s having a lot of complicated feelings—feelings that some of the people who read Whiskey & Ribbons don’t like. She’s grieving, and she’s also lusting after someone who’s basically her brother-in-law. I didn’t want her to worry about being judged, so I didn’t worry about the fact that she repeats herself.

That kind of grief is claustrophobic. You can’t end it; you can’t escape. Evangeline and Dalton are trapped in the house because of the snowstorm, and she’s trapped her in life. She’s also trapped in her mind, circling around all these things that have happened to her. Yeah, I’m definitely doing that unapologetically in the language I chose.

JW: Can you talk about how you toggle back and forth between the big-picture situation Evangeline is in (grieving the death of her husband) and this moment in time (being snowed in with Dalton)?

LCS: With this story, I always knew I was going to turn it into a novel. I forgave myself for not being able to put everything in the short story that I wanted. I knew that a man’s voice was missing. In the novel, we get Eamon’s point of view, as well as Dalton’s. I needed to let the boys get their say.

Structure is hard for me—probably the hardest thing. The fact that Evangeline is stuck in her home for the duration made things easier. She and Dalton are just in the kitchen, talking. They literally can’t get anywhere. Nothing else is happening. I did that purposefully, so they would just be talking, and you would get Evangeline’s inner thoughts without knowing his. And then it made sense to pepper those conversations in the same way that you would in real life—Hey, what do you want to eat? What do you want to drink?

When you’re so tender, one little thing happens that brings everything back. Evangeline is living in the same house she lived in with Eamon, so he’s very present. She and Dalton can’t get two sentences out without bringing up something about him.

JW: I’ve heard you say that when you begin to write a flash fiction piece, you have a flicker of an image in your mind. Was it the same way with this story?

LCS: Yes—the image that set the story off for me was a man standing at a window. It was snowing, and he was holding a baby. I could see it so vividly in my mind. Originally the guy was sort of like Tim Riggins from Friday Night Lights. He was a little whiter than the brown baby he was holding, and the baby wasn’t his. So why was he holding this baby in the middle of the night? That’s how I write entire books, from an image like that.

JW: Let’s talk about the ending. I used to think that when I was finishing a piece, I needed to find a solution to whatever the main character was going through. But so often we can just articulate a new way of thinking about the situation our characters are in. Evangeline doesn’t land anywhere that different by the end of the piece, but she develops a new language to think about what’s happening to her, and that’s very satisfying.

LCS: Yes, that ending felt really natural. She was finding a soft place to land at the end of the story. She was beginning to trust herself.

There’s this beautiful scene in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Jesse James is getting ready to rob another train, and he puts his ear down to the tracks to see if a train is coming. I lived near train tracks when I was a little girl, and I used to do the same thing. That was always going to be the ending image for me, because it’s about being in that liminal space. Evangeline is in a state of deep, inescapable grief, but she has to go on living. Nothing is fixed, but Dalton is there, so she isn’t alone. She realizes that maybe she won’t always feel as bad as she does then, and that becomes enough.