A Conversation With PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2019 Author Doug Henderson

“Some stories just flow out of you and you try to keep up as you write them. This story was not like that.”

PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2019 is the third edition of an anthology celebrating outstanding new fiction writers published by literary magazines around the world. In the upcoming weeks, we’ll feature Q&As with the contributors, whose stories were selected for PEN’s Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and for the anthology by judges Danielle Evans, Alice Sola Kim, and Carmen Maria Machado. Submissions for the 2020 awards are open now.

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Doug Henderson received his MFA from the University of San Francisco and lives in the Castro District with his husband and daughter.

“The Manga Artist” was originally published in The Iowa Review.

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Panel 1: The English teacher stands in front of his class. He is smiling and relaxed, leaning against his desk. Over his shoulder, the whiteboard reads: You can go to London. You can go to Paris. But you can’t go to shopping.

He is blond with blue eyes, young and fresh-faced, a more idealized version of myself. He doesn’t have to pluck the space between his eyebrows or lose those last five pounds.

His top button is undone. His tie is loose. His shirtsleeves are rolled up, exposing his hairy forearms. Chest hair rises above his collar, sandy and golden. He is exotic to his students. They never knew blonds could be hairy. He is teaching more than language.

Panels 2–5: The teacher is speaking, but there are no word balloons. What he is saying isn’t important. He is teaching in the way that American college students spending a summer abroad do, with an emphasis on charm, on telling jokes, and on winning the class over. The smiles on the students’ faces make it clear they are entranced. To watch him move, to be in his presence, is reason enough for the class to meet three times a week.

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Where did you find the idea for this story?

Sometimes it’s a mystery to me where my stories come from. Ideas bounce around in my head until they connect and the layers develop. The form often comes separately from the narrative arc. I’ve always liked when I go to a museum and the sign next to the art says mixed media. For the longest time I’ve wanted to achieve that in my writing. For this story, the mouse Alphonso came to me first. Like many artists, I work in opposition to the things around me. At the time, I was frustrated and not really feeling it with whatever I was reading and writing. I was in grad school finishing my MFA, which was a struggle. I thought, you know what? I’m just going to write a simple story about a school mouse who teaches himself to read by sitting in the back of a third grade classroom. Of course, I knew even then that the story would bounce around, and it wouldn’t really be simple, and it wouldn’t really be about a school mouse.

How long did it take you to write this story?

Around three or four years, although I wrote the first draft in about two weeks. That draft was a mess, though. The rules of the story were still unclear, the panels were too full of needless detail. The story was workshopped three times after grad school, which really helped to get it in shape. The title was one of the last pieces to fall into place. There were several bad titles before that, including “The School Mouse.” Part of the challenge was that I needed the title to do a lot of work in setting up the story and the basic expectations for it. So, it took me a long time, as in years, to land on something as simple as “The Manga Artist,” but once I did, the story felt complete.

The story’s form is one-of-a-kind, narrating the story manga panel by manga panel. In editor Alexa Frank’s words, it “verbalizes the pictorial language and formal constraints of manga to compress time but maximize emotion.”

How did you decide on this form, and what was the writing process like for you?

I knew I didn’t want a traditional form for the story, but I initially rejected the idea of writing the story in panels. I didn’t know if I could pull it off, and I didn’t know if such a story would be fun to read. I could easily see it being an annoying and exhausting experience for the reader. I was immediately annoyed and exhausted just thinking about trying to write it. But once I sat down and wrote a few panels, I was hooked. It was very fun and satisfying to describe the panels and to play with the visual language of comics in a written way. And then to push that and see how far I could take it. What would a flashback look like, or a montage? It took a lot of trial and error and a lot of revisions. Some stories just flow out of you and you try to keep up as you write them. This story was not like that. This story was a work of engineering as much as it was of writing. The process was an exercise in precision.

Certain moments bring the submerged first-person narrator into view, for example: “Scotty collapses on top of Masashige. They are both huffing and puffing, but eventually their heartbeats slow down. Their bodies press together . . . These two panels are sketched in pencil. I never inked them. Heavy black lines cross through them.” The narrator also seems to know a lot about both Scotty and Masashige. Who is the narrator? Is it Scotty?

Yes, Scotty is the narrator. When I began thinking about the panels and who was describing them to the reader, and why, it became clear that there was space for a story there. Why did the narrator draw this manga? Allowing that to be Scotty gives some emotional background to the panels, which I hope helps make this more than just a relationship story, or an East-meets-West story. To me, it becomes a story about the creative process, and how our lived experiences become art.

The story ends with a juxtaposition between Scotty and Masashige and the rodent characters in Masashige’s manga, Alfonso and Hamuchan. Scotty and Masashige are saying their goodbyes, and in Masashige’s manga, the mouse and hamster run free “down the wide front stairs, fear and excitement in their eyes.” Interestingly, Masashige was described as never finishing any manga he draws, but he seems to have finished it here. Can you talk a little about the significance of the ending? Do you think it’s true that Scotty and Masashige will never meet again?

My favorite flavor is bittersweet. I always like an ending with mixed emotions. The final panel of Alfonso and Hamuchan was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever written, both to get to the idea of what the final panel would be, and then the emotional and technical experience of trying to write it. Scotty, as the narrator, is very distant from the final panels of the story, which leaves much of the interpretation of the ending up to the reader. But, if the whole story is a manga in a manga that Scotty drew himself, then it is entirely possible that Massashige never finished his own manga, and that the final panel is Scotty’s creation, and perhaps that says something about Scotty. On the other hand, if Scotty simply re-drew Masashige’s manga into his own, then what does the ending say about Masashige? In regards to the question of if they will ever meet again, if Masashige never did finish his manga, and that final panel is not the end of the story for Alfonso and Hamuchan, simply the last panel Masashige drew, then I think that would seem to imply that Scotty and Masashige may yet meet again someday to have more adventures together.

How has the Robert J. Dau Prize affected you?

It’s been amazing. A whole world has opened up. It has given me confidence, and courage. I’ve made new friends, and contacts, and I’ve gotten to share my work with more people than I ever imagined. I’m so thankful to everyone involved. I no longer feel like I’m writing into a void.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on various short stories, and I have a novel I’ve been querying about the Cleveland Heights LGBT Sci-Fi and Fantasy Roleplaying Club.

Finally, where do you discover new writing?

My favorite journals, The Iowa Review, who I owe a huge debt of gratitude, F(r)iction, and The Rumpus. But also neighborhood book stores, comic book stores, and the dark corners of the internet.