Who doesn’t love when fantastic things happen to talented people?
All of us at Fuse Literary were beside ourselves with excitement when we found out that Allison Alsup, writer of a plethora of fiction, co-writer of last year’s The French Quarter Drinking Companion, and pro blogger at GoNola.com, was awarded a spot in The O’Henry Prize Stories 2014 Anthology from Random House. Allison’s piece “Old Houses” was chosen out of thousands of stories published in literary journals from all over the world.
Today we are celebrating Allison and just how darn awesome her achievement is by getting to know her a little better. Enjoy!
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I’m so thrilled to share a bit of this special week with you, Allison! Your award-winning short story “Old Houses” in The O’Henry Prize Stories 2014 Anthology hit shelves this past Tuesday. Tell us about the award and how you found out!
The award came as a complete shock. O’Henry prizes are not the result of nominations or a contest and so, I had no idea my work was even being considered. A small crew led by Laura Furman at Anchor Books reads an astonishing amount of journals and picks what they think are the top twenty. That’s the process. That my very, very short story was selected for those ranks remains utterly delightful.
At first, I thought the email notification last October was to sell me, as in pre-order, the 2014 Prize anthology. I had to read the e-mail several times to make sure that I had won. I called my husband and in my tearful elation, couldn’t even manage a simple explanation. He asked if I needed to go to the hospital. The hardest part of receiving the award was keeping it between us for several months until the official announcements were made. It was a diamond in my pocket that I had to keep secret.
“Old Houses” tells the story of a community that bands and celebrates together, but the true characters are the classic homes chock full of their own histories. I understand you injected an occurrence from your own childhood into this piece.
Most of the work I write is very different from my own experience, but “Old Houses” was not. While none of the characters are modeled on specific individuals, the street and the key events in this piece, as well as the houses themselves, are based on the street where I grew up. It’s a picture perfect street overlooking the San Francisco Bay. However, several years before my family moved in, a grim double murder took place next door. The crime was never solved, and I grew up with the strange incongruity of a seemingly safe, beautiful environment and the lingering shadow of two women’s brutal deaths.
The idea of old houses also comes from the fact that I have lived in New Orleans for fourteen years and have had a significant amount of experience renovating old houses – as both a grunt and designer. Old houses outlive us, and I believe they retain the traces, for good or bad, of their former inhabitants.
I could see you expanding “Old Houses” into a collection of stories about this neighborhood. Is something like that even on the radar?
I have written and published a couple of other stories based around the same street and characters stemming from them – certain times and situations I was never able to make sense of at the time. Writing the stories helps me to assign pattern and meaning, which eluded me when I was younger. Writing should always leave room for interpretation and grey areas, but I also believe that the very act of writing, that is putting one word in front of the other and making specific choices, allows creative thinkers to work through a list of endless possibilities and to situate their minds.
What do you think is the key to writing a sharp short story?
Some writers are fortunate and work from clear visions; you hear them say things like, “The story wrote itself” or “Oh, it just came to me”. Usually I want to strangle them. I have almost never been so lucky. What I start with is an image, a single line. What does it mean? I’ve haven’t a clue. Like most writers, I have to find the story. It’s like digging for treasure with teaspoons. For instance, “Old Houses” was elusive. I wasn’t sure it was a story at all, only that it kept nagging – a sign that something was waiting to be discovered.
How do we discover that something and shape it into a voice that sings? How to find the right details? Bring and purge, I think. I add, add, add until it’s too long, too much. The result can be unseemly, obese. But if I did not expand, I would not arrive at the right detail because I hadn’t allowed myself to exist in that world long enough to find the ripe image or thought, the one that made the others extraneous. You have to stay a while to find connections and resonance, to think in terms of a particular setting and exist within its perimeters.
And then I cut, cut, cut. I read aloud. I take out any word I can. I have even given myself word limits on occasion. And I trust that the intelligent reader can interpret, indeed must be permitted small gaps to fill in with their own vision.
Your other book, The French Quarter Drinking Companion, was released last year. How do you adjust your mindset after writing a fun non-fiction book like that to settling down to creating a succinct fiction story?
Creating The French Quarter Drinking Companion involved a different part of the brain, not to mention my liver. Along with Elizabeth and Richard, writing the FQDC meant bending our individual voices into one entity that represented all of us. So the voice, style and aims of the book felt quite distinct from my fiction. The Companion is a narrative or anecdotal guide; the one hundred entries — one for each bar — were the result of moments unfolding before us, round by round. It’s fun, quick, clever. Compared to my fiction, the Companion felt liberating. I didn’t have to invent everything or dig for profound meaning.
How to then go back to the demands of fiction? Well, if I didn’t enjoy problems or difficulty, I wouldn’t be a writer.
What’s coming up for your next?
My current project is a historical novel called Foreign Seed. In fact, I just returned from a two-week residency through the Aspen Institute during which I was able to make considerable headway with the manuscript. The novel is based on the final, ill-fated expedition of Frank Meyer (of Meyer lemon fame) to China. Meyer was an obsessive walker and wanderer; he was also an idealist and disillusioned with the state of the world: World War I and China’s disintegration, its poverty and early signs of environmental exploitation. Like all obsessives, Meyer was exceptionally driven, and his work as an Agricultural Explorer for the US Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction was incredibly physical and emotionally demanding. Meyer was often lonely and without as he put it, “a sympathetic mind” for company. His exploration came at a cost of personal relationships.
By his fourth and last expedition, he was questioning his ability to press on but also felt unable to stop. It’s that contradiction that draws me. Suffice it to say, this is ambitious material and has involved a lot of research, including visiting the National Archives and sifting through boxes of letters and photographs. Of course, I’ve had to invent naughty stuff as well.
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Thanks so much for joining us, Allison! Good luck with your new project and absolutely enjoy your honor!
Find Allison: Official Website | The French Quarter Drinking Companion
