A Conversation with PEN America Best Debut Short Story Author Ben Shattuck

“I like to think of the people I personally know placed in deep history.”

On August 22, Catapult will publish PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2017, the inaugural edition of an anthology celebrating outstanding new fiction writers published by literary magazines around the world. In the weeks leading up to publication, we’ll feature a Q&A with the contributors, whose stories were selected for the anthology by judges Marie-Helene Bertino, Kelly Link, and Nina McConigley, and awarded PEN’s Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Submissions for the 2018 awards are open now.

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Ben Shattuck is a writer and painter from coastal Massachusetts. A graduate and former Teaching-Writing Fellow of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is now the director of the Cuttybank Island Writers’ Residency and the curator of the Dedee Shattuck Gallery. His writing has appeared in the Harvard Review, The New Republic, The Paris Review Daily, The Common, Salon.com, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Lit Hub. His paintings have been exhibited in galleries, including the Steven Amedee Gallery in New York, the New Bedford Art Museum and Sloane Merrill Gallery in Boston, and the Greylock Gallery in Williamstown, Massachusetts. “Edwin Chase of Nantucket” takes place on Nantucket in the late eighteenth century, where a young boy and his mother receive mysterious visitors to their remote farm.

When Will and Rivkah came—though I didn’t know their names then—Laurel and I were by the shed rubbing oil on Sadie. Her fleas had been bad that winter. I should have kept her stall cleaner. Before fleas it was thrush—the bottoms of her hooves smothered with white rot. All horse’s maladies are poetry, Dad said, like bog spavin or seedy toe. Our old horse Julius had moon blindness. Both corneas dyed milk-blue. We led him through the dunes and along the beach for exercise on our evening walks because he was scared into laziness by his cloudy eyes.

Sadie stepped back and turned her head when she saw them. That’s the way it always is—an animal noticing first. Gulls crowd in the sheep pasture before a gale; songbirds fly into the chimney. I try to think of the day before they came—if our cow was giving bad milk.

They were in the middle of the sand road that nobody used. We were ten miles to Nantucket town, and the only building beyond our house was the lighthouse, a mile away at the end of the point. Nobody came to our house. The only prints on the path were made by me, Laurel, mice, and the birds. The punctuation of our solitude—commas and periods in the footsteps of animals, the pauses between us and town.

“Who’s that?” I said to Laurel.

“What?” she said, looking up at me. She used the back of her wrist to brush her hair from her forehead. Oil dripped from her fingers.

She was thirty-seven then. That makes her seventeen when I was born. My father had been much older—somewhere in his late thirties. The bones in her face were severe in a way that might have been ugly. A straight nose, thin lips, narrow face, deep eye sockets. But it happened that everything was placed well, beautifully even, and she could easily have remarried if we weren’t all those miles from town. Two suitors did ride to our farm. One was John Throat, the butcher, whom I met twice a year at the end of Coatue. He came for Laurel cleaner than usual, with a bundle of meat tied to his horse. My mother was polite, fixed him tea, and then asked him to leave. Since then, each time I walk a hog down Coatue to meet him, neither of us mentions his visit. The other suitor was Uncle Amos, who stayed for two nights in the upstairs storage room. On the third day he told us at breakfast that he’d been mistaken in coming, apologized, and left. I haven’t seen him since.

“Behind you,” I said to her then. “Down the road.”

She turned.

“Oh,” she said, stepping back. “Yes.” She touched her hairline.

“Or—no.” “What?”

“I thought it was—but no, there are two. So I suppose not.” “Suppose not what?”

“Nothing,” she said.

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Catapult Books: Where did you find the idea for these characters?

Ben Shattuck: One summer day a few years ago I took a boat out to Cuttyhunk, a small island off Cape Cod. There’s a museum there, where I found on display a typed-up copy of a journal from the 1840s. The diarist was a twenty-three-year-old farmer who lived alone on an island near Cuttyhunk, keeping chickens and hogs and sheep. The entries were brief, but every so often, wedged between weather reports, inventories of butter or bacon, or descriptions of mucking out the harbor mud to fertilize his vegetable garden, he’d written short and poetic reflections on his life—usually in the winter months, when, I imagine, there was more idle time by the fire. In those entries he wondered if he was spending his time meaningfully, whether he was praying enough, if he was following a good path. I wrote down one line that I found chillingly familiar: “Since I came to my years of understanding, I’ve found my place in the world uncertain.”

I was also in my mid twenties when I read the journal, and this line was exactly what I—and it seemed my friends—was feeling at the time: a vague quarter-life crises; that shocking realization that life seems only more uncertain as you grow older. Nearly two hundred years apart, he and I shared the same jabs of uncertainty and longing in our “years of understanding,” wondering when we’d arrive at adulthood, wishing we were doing more or better but not sure how or why. I liked his honesty, his questioning, written for no one but himself.

That character turned into Edwin—out on a windswept farm, passive and daydreaming as he moved through his daily chores. Waiting for something to interrupt his life. I filled in Edwin’s biography while I was a fellow at the Nantucket Historical Association Research Library. After I moved his farm to Coskata, Nantucket, I pulled the time frame back a few decades to fit what becomes the major plot point of the novel: the robbery of the Nantucket Bank in 1795, the first bank robbery in American history, and which is still unsolved. I then structured his life around letters, journals, or archives kept in the collection of the Nantucket Historical Association’s archives.

The other characters are mash-ups of historical figures, friends, and relatives. I like to think of the people I personally know placed in deep history. I can never write in present day—a character always ends up carrying a lantern by page two. The lighthouse keeper, Paul Pinkham, was a real person in eighteenth-century Nantucket. In the novel version there are many characters based off Nantucketers. Laurel is partly inspired by a letter I found in the Research Library archives, in which the mother pleads to a relative to take her son, to give him a job at a saddlery. The relative writes back that the son is too young to be sent away.

Edwin’s father suffers from PTSD after the revolutionary war. How do Edwin and Laurel’s reaction to his silences and habits reflect attitudes of the time?

I can’t say if Edwin and Laurel’s reaction reflects the time, but it’s the response those characters would have had given how little was known about wartime trauma. The psychiatric terms needed to describe PTSD didn’t even exist. Without a community of understanding, eighteenth-century families might have felt isolated in their troubles, dealing with people who came home depressed, angry, haunted. Some, like Laurel, might have been frustrated or angry, unable to sympathize because she didn’t know why her husband had changed or how to help him. There’s more documentation of Civil War soldiers suffering PTSD. Veterans went to asylums, where they were treated with fresh air, gardening, tonics, and received naïve and hopeful letters from their families. At home, Civil War veterans sometimes drank themselves to death, committed suicide, started abusing their children. In Edwin’s time, there’s the added trauma of the Revolution taking place in New Englanders’ backyards. Everyone was strained. The British occupied Nantucket for a long time, took their sheep (though the island’s place in the Revolution is complicated and often Tory, which makes Edwin’s dad an anomaly). After the war, there were extreme financial, emotional, and physical pressures affecting all Nantucketers.

The outcome of the war—a new country—seems secondary to the harsh physical reality of life on a farm to Edwin. Why did you choose this particular setting?

This goes back to the diarist who inspired the story. I was interested in the way landscape, farm chores, and weather shaped his days. This setting—at least the landscape—is also the one I’m most familiar with. I grew up on what used to be a farm in SouthCoast Massachusetts. There are acres of fields bound by tumbledown stonewalls. The coast is filled with bayberry and huckleberry, stretches of salt marshes. If I was going to set a novel in the late 1700s, if I was going to write about a time so unfamiliar to me, I needed to have at least one factor that I knew perfectly. I know how spartina grass would feel on Edwin’s feet, what birds he’d see migrating at certain times of year, what the onshore wind would sound like as it pummels a house, how rodents leave tracks on the sand at night, what the air smells like in late winter, that snow makes a shushing sound when it falls on a marsh. I loved thinking about the relationship between a farmer and his animals—that Edwin and his animals are caretakers of each other, that they literally feed each other. But the other reality of farming is that it is a daily, sometimes imprisoning, extremely difficult job. He is bound to his chores, his routine. It is the perfect job for a character whose life is about to be twisted around by unexpected visitors.

How long did it take you to write the story?

I worked on this in little bursts over the years. I wrote a few pages of it in 2013, then quickly moved on to other stories. I returned to this project more seriously in 2015, to start the novel.

This story is part of a novel you’re working on. Did you know there was more in store for these characters when you wrote it?

Absolutely. The first version of this story wasn’t a story at all: On his way home from hunting ducks in a pond, a character (the 1840s diarist) finds a game path—one of those thin paths through a field—and, not wanting to go home, crawls along the path into a bayberry thicket. It was a weird and boring story, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the character, looking for a place to escape in the middle of a farm, unsure what he wanted escape from. I wrote more without a plot in mind, but followed his character, which means I think it was a novel from the beginning.

How has the Robert J. Dau Prize affected you?

The effect was immediate. I was in the middle of writing a first draft of the novel when I got the news. The prize put wind in my sails, gave me the push to complete a draft. It was the perfect antidote to the creeping uncertainty that might derail the project. I thought, Maybe people do want to read about a contemplative sometimes brooding young Nantucketer from 1790.

What are you working on now?

I just rewrote a story about two musicologists in the late 1800s collecting songs in the Maine woods. Otherwise, I’m writing the novel version of this story.

Finally, where do you discover new writing?

Recommendations from friends, mostly. Magazines and literary journals that feature fiction. Also, this inefficient and sometimes disappointing method: I go into a bookstore, am attracted to a cover, leaf through the first few pages, read the synopsis, and then buy the book.