“The Wedding Dress” by Cynthia Reeves appeared in Issue 34 and can be read here.
We’d love to hear more about this story.
The opening chapter of Rick Moody’s Purple America contains an amazing sentence that runs four pages, and I challenged myself to replicate the feat. At the same time, I’d visited a friend after a very messy divorce and was surprised that she threw away her wedding dress in a dumpster behind her apartment building. I wanted somehow to capture the entire trajectory of her marriage in a single sentence.
What was the most difficult part in writing this story?
The discipline required to tell a story in a single sentence without “cheating”—the five semi-colons and the em-dashes notwithstanding—was most demanding.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
Lean Fall Stand by Jon McGregor. This novel is a great, dramatic story about a man who suffers a stroke in Antarctica while supervising a crew of scientists, but it’s also a terrific demonstration of craft in capturing the thought patterns of a person suffering from aphasia. His novel Reservoir 13 is also astounding, both an engrossing story and a masterful use of omniscient narration.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
A writer I haven’t yet met and with whom I’d love to have an extended conversation is A.S. Byatt. Her ability to merge archetype and myth into stories with contemporary subject matter is a part of craft I’d love to emulate. “A Stone Woman” ranks for me in the top ten of short stories—a tale steeped in myth and magic realism that beautifully captures the somatic quality of aging. Byatt also challenged readers to write a fairy tale of their own lives as she did in “The Story of the Eldest Princess” (contained in her story collection The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye). What a pleasure it was to take her up on the challenge and write my own “In the Deep Wood,” which Booth was kind enough to publish.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I’ve just finished putting together a story collection, which includes “The Wedding Dress,” as well as a novel entitled The Last Whaler.
The Last Whaler was inspired by my residency aboard the Antigua as part of the Arctic Circle Summer Solstice Expedition. During that voyage, we landed at a remote beach on the southern shore of Van Keulenfjorden in the Svalbard archipelago, the site of an old beluga whaling station called Bamsebu. Stretching to the horizon were whale bones, piles and piles of bleached beluga bones bearing silent testimony to the slaughter (or industry, depending on your perspective) that occurred there in the 1930s. The novel is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive under extreme conditions.
While waiting to see if either book finds a publisher, I’m finally finishing another collection of short stories loosely based on the immigration experiences of my Italian ancestors and the impact of those experiences on subsequent generations. I say “finally” because I started this project almost thirty years ago!
Our thanks to Cynthia for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this story. Read “The Wedding Dress” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/fiction-the-wedding-dress.
___________________________________
Cynthia Reeves’s publishing credits include Badlands (MU Press 2008), which was awarded Miami University Press’s Novella Prize. Her fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared widely. She’s won numerous awards and honors, including prizes in Columbia’s Fiction Contest, the DeMott Short Prose Contest (Quarter After Eight), New Millennium’s Short Short Fiction Contest, and Potomac Review’s Fiction Contest; several nominations for the Pushcart Prize; and residencies at Hawthornden Castle, the Arctic Circle Summer Solstice Expedition, Galleri Svalbard, and Vermont Studio Center. A graduate of Warren Wilson College’s M.F.A. program, she’s taught in Bryn Mawr College’s Creative Writing Program and Rosemont College’s M.F.A. program.