“Dietrich’s Witness” by James Ulmer appeared in Issue 32 and can be read here.
We’d love to hear more about this story.
“Dietrich’s Witness” is loosely based on a disappearance in Camden, Arkansas in the late fifties. A woman named Maud Crawford, a prominent lawyer with political connections, disappeared from her house one night. A fire was left burning in her parlor fireplace and a bowl of peas sat undisturbed on the couch where she had been shelling them. There was no sign of violence, and no sign of her was ever found. This is one of those stories that exists in the rich territory where history and folklore intersect, and I always wanted to do something with this material. I changed the women’s name and moved the incident to the early sixties in order to give myself some leeway with the material. The characters who come to the house sixty years later to investigate, and what happens to them, are my own invention.
What was the most difficult part in writing this story?
The most difficult part of the writing was to resist the impulse (especially strong in a longer, more sustained story) to over-do the high points in the piece, particularly the climax. A story of this sort has to build and be subtly eerie at the same time, and it’s easy to go too far. I had to find exactly where that line was and not cross it.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
I would recommend a recent collection of stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Beautiful Days.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
I would like to have a drink (perhaps several) with Stephen King. This may seem like an odd choice, but I’ve always had a kind of love-hate relationship with his work. On the one hand, he has an enormous gift as a storyteller and has for many years (as one reviewer put it) “had his finger on the pulse of the American nightmare.” On the other hand, there is sometimes a lack of ambition in his writing that, in my opinion, keeps him from being the truly great writer that he might have been. I’d like to ask him some tough questions about that. He’d probably wind up kicking my ass – or maybe he’d just show me his bank account and laugh at me!
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I’m working on finishing a new collection of stories, tentatively entitled The Highway that Leads Beyond the World. “Dietrich’ Witness” will mostly likely be the closing story in that collection. Beyond that, I expect to keep writing stories as they come to me and demand to be written.
Our thanks to James for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this story. Read “Dietrich’s Witness” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/fiction-dietrichs-witness.
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James Ulmer’s most recent collection of stories, The Fire Doll, was awarded the George Garrett Fiction Prize from Texas Review Press. His poetry and fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The North American Review, The Missouri Review, Crazyhorse, New Letters and elsewhere. Ulmer is Professor of English and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages at Southern Arkansas University.