“Hunting Lessons” by David Colosi appeared in Issue 42 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about this story.
When I was having trouble publishing this story, I wrote ideas in retrospect about what I thought it was about and what made it important. It’s mostly a satire of the traditional father-son bonding story. But it also has in it the idea that guns are one of the few things we buy that we can’t, or should never, use. When we buy a car, we drive it from the dealership; a new piece of music, we play it on repeat and sing it; a hamburger, we eat it; new shoes, we put them on for a night out. With guns, it’s different. We can shoot at cans, targets, and in ranges, but these we call practice. Few of us need to rely on hunting to feed ourselves, so that too is a kind of practice, like a game or sport. The real use of a gun – at least according to the news and movies – is suicide and homicide. With the way capitalism and free will are tied to gun promotion in the USA, there’s an insurmountable buyer’s dissatisfaction when we’re denied the ability to use our new purchase. This is not true for everyone, but with the rate at which we sell and fetishize guns, it’s inevitable that a percentage of owners will not be content to leave it unused. Chekov’s literary maxim is true in life.
What was the most difficult part in writing this story?
I conceived of the premise in 2008, finished a first draft in 2015, and started submitting this story in 2017. I’ve submitted it 18 times to different journals and contests, many taking six months to tell me, “No. thanks.” Lucky 19, I guess, in 2024. Finding a publisher is always the hardest part. Admittedly, a story about a father who shoots his kids to teach them how to hunt is a hard sell.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall (Metropolitan Books, 2023). Sadly, it’s nonfiction, but it reads like a novel. At this point, we are all aware that we live in a world where Palestinians live in apartheid conditions, and yet we find excuses and false premises to celebrate as if Jim Crow and Steve Biko are characters from an overcome past. Nathan’s book and Abed’s story show us how much we are willing to ignore to pretend that we are morally superior to our ancestors. And yet, because we have their failures and the evidence of unfolding atrocities to learn from and witness daily, we are much worse. At first, Nathan’s book is reminiscent of Ursula K. Le Guin’s story, Those Who Walk Away from Omelas, where, for some to live in fallacies of prosperity, one, at least, must be locked in a basement. But Nathan’s book and Abed’s story are more akin to N.K. Jemisin’s rewrite The Ones Who Stay and Fight, reminding us that we have to work our way out of our invented fictions and confront reality.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
I’d rather meet with a bold, goofy, and risk-taking literary editor or agent. At this point meeting another author is like giving me a sandwich. I need to meet someone who can help me open a restaurant. Michael Pietsch and Warren Frazier come to mind for their measured insanity in publishing Infinite Jest and House of Leaves, respectively. I’d sit down with either of them for an Acai bowl, or someone new with a similar hunger to publish the seemingly impossible. I actually had a kind and encouraging exchange with David Foster Wallace when I was writing my first novel, and that tasted fine, and I also had a memorable conversation with Jacques Derrida in an elevator which ended when he asked if I wanted to get a coffee, and I answered that I don’t drink coffee. Something more actionable than sage wisdom from a mentor would go a longer way for me at this point.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I have a novel I’m submitting to publishers. It’s the only novel ever written about snails that is actually about snails. It consists of six stories that center around a for-profit research and entertainment center called Snailnasium, Inc. It’s fiction, but each story pushes the edges of recent factual research to explore our desire, on the one hand, to use snails as an extractive resource and, on the other, to allow a snail to be a snail. There’s a science fair project that proposes eating invasive snails to conserve endemic species; a couple who adds a fertility snail to their sex life to help them conceive a child; a cancer eating snail from Bikini Atoll; humans injected with snail DNA as a corrective to homelessness; and a conference of gastropods where species from around the globe discuss their common predator, Homo sapiens.
Our thanks to David for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this story. Read “Hunting Lessons” here.
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David Colosi’s short fiction has appeared in The Wisconsin Review, The Offbeat (Short Fiction Contest finalist 2018), Permafrost,Intercourse, and Konch. His poetry is included in the anthologies, The Power of the Feminine I and From Totems to Hip Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900-2002; the journals Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora (Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial Poetry Prize finalist 2017) and The Los Angeles Times; and a collection of poems, Laughing Blood is published by Left Hand Books. His Three-Dimensional Literature projects have been exhibited nationally and internationally. He hosts The Napping Wizard Sessions podcast. He has an MFA from CalArts and an MA from NYU, both in art practice and theory. (http://www.davidcolosi.com/)