A Conversation with PEN America Best Debut Short Story Author Jim Cole

“A story comes to me like a match and I’ll write the first draft frantically until it burns out.”

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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Jim Cole is a writer in northern California with a rhetoric degree from University of California Berkeley and an MFA from the University of San Francisco, where his work was nominated for the AWP Intro Journals Project. He lives in the town of Duncan Mills, on the Russian River. In “The Asphodel Meadow” is an unsettling story about a husband, a wife, two hikes, and another man.

He invited my wife to hike up a mountain. She laughed. She twisted her hair in a tight bun. He stepped out onto the porch and picked up the morning newspaper. The air was cool. Dew covered the buttercups. He put the roof down on his sports car. A neighbor peeked through the curtains. Lamb’s wool covered the car seats. My wife put on her shorts. She pulled a pink T-shirt over her black bra. She slipped her feet into white sandals. She nestled in the sheepskin. He handed her the newspaper. She dropped it on the floorboard.

She turned to him and said, “Look at what passes for the new. You will not find it there but in despised poems.”

She pushed her feet against the dashboard and stroked black polish on her toenails. “Don’t hit any fucking bumps,” she said.

He dropped a backpack behind her seat. Inside the backpack there was a bottle of water and a map and a bag of almonds and a pomegranate and a pocketknife.

“Don’t fucking drip on my upholstery,” he said.

He turned the key in the ignition and they headed toward the mountain.

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Catapult Books: Where did you find the idea for this story?

Jim Cole: “The Asphodel Meadow” began as a husband and wife taking a hike—a happy story. But, for an unknown reason, it came to me in this detached monotone voice. As I spent time with this narrator, it became clear he wasn’t happy, and then it became clear he wasn’t the one on the hike with his wife, and then I realized that it sounded like he was dead. This idea of a dead or dead-like narrator led me to asphodel meadows—a place for the indifferent souls of those who lived neither good nor evil lives. That, in turn, led to William Carlos Williams’s poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” and so, of course, the adulterous wife then had to quote from this poem to complete the story.

The story contrasts two different hiking trips. How did you choose this setting to contrast the different emotional experiences?

For the past three years, I’ve lived in the tiny town of Duncans Mills, California. Outside my door I have a river, redwoods, foxes, etc.—a lot of inspiration there. I’ve become much more aware of natural settings for my writing, so keeping everybody in the wilderness for this story just felt right.

“The Asphodel Meadow” is terse and ambiguous—who is his wife with? Is it the narrator? Is he imagining it?—to great effect. Why did you choose to leave the story open-ended?

In most of my fiction, I try to achieve something thought-provoking with the voice and language of my narrators. This particular narrator raises a lot of questions, and the voice left me with one big open-ended question: Is the narrator dead or not? For someone like this narrator, is there a difference? He is numb, his language is numb, he is emotionless—which is no way to live our lives—while his wife (or perhaps former wife) is, as the story ends, “perfectly happy.”

How long did it take you to write this story?

Many of my stories, including “The Asphodel Meadow,” I write fairly quickly. A story comes to me like a match and I’ll write the first draft frantically until it burns out. Then I go off and work on other stuff, but the story smolders inside my head and the deeper meanings develop over weeks, months or years. Taking that all into account, the quick answer is more than a year.

How has the Robert J. Dau Prize affected you?

I feel incredibly fortunate to have had my writing recognized with a Robert J. Dau Prize and to have my work published alongside eleven awesome writers in the upcoming PEN America Best Debut Short Stories anthology. The award is an important affirmation for what I’m trying to do as a writer, which is not mainstream. I avoid the phrase “experimental writing” because I’m not experimenting, I think I know what I’m doing! But, yes, my work is atypical, so the Robert J. Dau Prize gives me hope that there is a place for my fiction.

What are you working on now?

I’m so glad you asked! I am close to finishing an atypical novel called ffrrfr. Inspired by Christian Bok’s Eunoia and the French writers’ movement Oulipo, the novel explores the question: Can constraint spawn creativity? ffrrfr is a fun coming-of-age adventure that uses various writing constraints, such as chapters written in the future tense and passages written without the letter e—the most common letter in the English language. Without spoiling it for you or boring you, I’ll just offer a taste with the opening line: “A harsh woman commands that I go look into—go sniffing around for—a smoking pot.”

Finally, where do you discover new writing?

This is a hard question because I’m not very methodical in my approach to finding authors to read. I’m all over the map, all over the internet. That said, I have a few thoughts. First, I’m a faithful reader of The Summerset Review, which published “The Asphodel Meadow.” A few other places recently where I’ve landed include The Masters Review, Indiana Review, and Granta’s newest Best of Young American Novelists. Finally, I take the lazy route: I’m in a writers’ group, Bay Area Manuscript Group, and I turn frequently to these closest writing friends for recommendations.