Foxgloves: Creating the Story
How I came to write one of my most successful stories.
I was very pleased to learn recently that my short story, “Foxgloves”, which was published last summer in The Arkansas International, has been nominated to Best American Short Stories and to the Pushcart Prizes. So, the main reason for this post is to encourage more people to read the story, which the magazine has very kindly put online to read for free (please subscribe to their beautiful publication if you can), but I also wanted to share a bit about the way I go about creating a short story by meditating a bit on the way this one came into being.
In many ways I think that a short story is more akin to a poem than it is to a novel. Like a poem, a short story deals in economy and tends to revolve around one moment. The canvas is smaller than a novel. However, a novel is no more important or grand than a poem or a short story. It is simply a different beast. I have spent as many years on some short stories as I have on novels. Others I have written in a very short time. “Foxgloves” is one of the latter. Despite the fact that the story was written in just about two months’ time, I spent a couple years turning the idea over in my head, thinking about it, studying on the proper way to tell it.
One of the questions that people ask me the most about writing is how I avoid writer’s block. The main way I stay productive is to have several projects going at once. Most of the time I am simultaneously working on a poem, a short story, an essay, a piece of journalism, and a novel. At least five writing projects are going on for me at all times. I always imagine them being on a stovetop. One of them has just been done and is ready to be eaten. One is just starting to boil. One is simmering. Another needs more salt. One is on the burner but not yet turned on. So, I first began thinking about the story that would become “Foxgloves” as I finished up my last novel, Lark Ascending.
The basic premise is that a man struggling with Alzheimer’s reveals to his daughter and grandson that he had loved another man in his youth and that he never really got over him. It’s a shock for them both, especially the mother, and for the grandson it has deeper layers because he, too, is closeted and trying to figure out how to go forward properly with his own life.
The first lesson for any writer is to always be on the lookout for a good story. The idea came to me because someone I knew revealed a similar secret while going through Alzheimer’s. In that case it was an old woman who revealed to her daughter that she had once had a dalliance with another woman. The daughter was so shocked that she denied this could be true and chalked it up to the disease. She simply could not accept this about her mother. As soon as I heard about this I knew I wanted to write about it because the story made me think about how we can never completely know our parents and how we all have secrets, some that we are never able to articulate…what if we are someday incapacitated in a similar way and our disease reveals the secrets we have carried with us? A good piece of writing, for me, always begins with a question of “What if?” and "that inevitably leads to “What next?”
I had my premise but I just had to create my characters. Although the real story had involved an old woman I wanted to write mine about an old man. I imagined my own grandfather’s physicality even though he had nothing in common with the character I named James Robert Carter (although he is mostly called “Papaw” in the story). The character is completely fictional otherwise. I based the main character, Thomas, on one aspect of myself…really on an alternative "What if?” version of myself. In this case, I thought about when I was a senior in high school and received a full scholarship to the prestigious journalism program at Western Kentucky University. I didn’t take it because my mother was ill at the time and I felt that two and a half hours would be too far from home. This decision greatly altered the course of my life in many ways. In the story, Thomas has taken the scholarship and has now returned to his small Eastern Kentucky town to work at his hometown newspaper. He is harboring a deep pining for a man he met in college—a man who is now at seminary to become a minister in a church that would not accept him as a gay man. I’m getting all of these details just by continuing to ask that “What if?”:
“What if Thomas is in love with someone he can’t be with, similar to his grandfather?”
“What if the main reason they can’t be together is because the man he loves is a reverend?”
“What if Thomas feels like he is frozen?”
“What if the grandfather keeps revealing more details of his relationship to Thomas that helps Thomas to understand his own pining better?”
Along the way, as always, I’m learning more about my characters and their place and situation by being on the lookout for details that might make them into more interesting and richer characters. One day I was working in my yard and saw that some foxgloves I had planted last year were in a glorious bloom. They’re some of the most beautiful flowers you’ll ever see. I had forgotten I had planted them the previous year and was surprised to find how well they had thrived. I had thought they were an annual and would not come back. So I read up on them and found this interesting detail on a gardening website: foxgloves are biennial plants, which means that unlike perennials, which come back every year, and annuals, which last only one season, a foxgloves takes two years to fully flower before dying out. That made me think about what a great symbol the flower could be for a man who is able to revisit an old love before dying, to be a metaphor for second chances or even being of two minds.
So, I made the grandfather a flower gardener. This seemed like a good action that he could be doing even in the midst of his illness. A friend of mine who is a great writer had to stop writing when she developed terrible dementia because she’d go back to the page to work on her novel but couldn’t recall what had led up to where she was in the book, making it impossible for her to write. So she turned to painting and gardening for her creative outlets because they didn’t require remembering in the same way writing did. So I wrote a passage like this that helps the characters take shape:
The foxgloves are his favorites, though. Even on the first day of September, when their blooms are long gone, having shone through the gap between spring and summer, he pauses at them, running their leaves between his thumb and forefinger. He is as loving to the crisp, dry sections as he is to the few leaves that still hold green. “I like their name,” he tells me, just as he has said to me many times before. “I like that they only bloom in their second year, and then they die. But before they die, they shed new seeds to start new plants.” Weeding and worrying over the flowers is like prayer for him. When his hands are busy, they seem to turn the engine of his mind more forcibly.
Once I had the foxgloves as my main metaphor everything else fell into place. Working with flowers made me think about the importance of a grave once someone close to you has died. And, not to give too much of the story away, but since the lost love is long dead, it would just be too expected for the grandfather to ask his grandson to take him to visit the man’s grave. Instead, he asks him to take him to a place where he was very much alive with the lost love as a young man. A river where they swam together. In many ways a river is the opposite of a graveyard: one is all about the living and the other seems to be so much about the dead. When I’m writing it’s important for me to fully see and experience the world I’m creating on the page as vividly as possible. So I visited a riverbank on the Cumberland River and described it in the story just as I experienced it:
We arrive at a bank where the river sups at the sand. Willows lean over so that the ends of their long fronds barely touch the water. Gray rocks show here and there along the shore, leading the way to a high cliff standing over the river. In my grandfather’s time, I can imagine a place like this full of wild boys jumping from the cliff and splashing in the river. Nowadays kids go to pools and waterparks, but it must have been unusual to claim it for just the two of them that day so long ago.
I also surrounded my writing area with photos not only of foxgloves but other important elements of the story: a mountain graveyard, a swimming hole, a highway through the mountains, a little farm house.
Music is always a huge part of my process so I thought about songs that went well thematically with the story. Often I return to favorite albums and become obsessed with them again. When I was working on “Foxgloves” I had recently returned to my favorite Emmylou Harris album, Cowgirl’s Prayer, and found that the lead song from it worked perfectly. “High Powered Love” is about longing for an obsessive love again, about the way age helps us to know what we want more fully, and it reminds me that passion like that can happen at any age. John Prine’s music is a touchstone for me and in writing about an old man who is in some ways being discounted by his own daughter I thought of the Prine classic “Hello in There”—probably the best song ever written about “old people”—and listening to it helped me to get some of the nuances about aging and loneliness into the story. I also listened to Prine’s “I Remember Everything” over and over because it’s about the memories of love that stick with us no matter what and in it I could hear my character’s voice. “Old Flowers” by Courtney Marie Andrews” is one of my favorite contemporary ballads and the piano in it sounded like this story to me. The fact that there’s lot of flowers imagery in it helped, too. Matraca Berg’s powerful “O Cumberland” has long been one of my favorite songs (it is foundational for two of my novels, The Coal Tattoo and Southernmost) and I listened to it over and over as I finessed the drive to the Cumberland River in the story. It’s one of the best songs ever written and listening to good writing certainly makes us better writers, just like reading good writing does. My favorite scene in the story is when the grandfather goes swimming so I knew that I wanted a joyful soundtrack for that. Loudon Wainwright III’s “The Swimming Song” was the perfect one for that and helped me to make that a scene of pure happiness and freedom. There are other songs on the soundtrack, too, which you can listen to on Spotify.
Most of all I wanted “Foxgloves” to be about the power and the danger of secrets. The grandfather’s admission is not the only secret that is revealed in the story and I love that element of it. That’s the kind of thing that just happens when the writing is going well. More layers begin to appear and take shape properly. When that happens you know you are cooking with grease. “Foxgloves” is one of the best things I’ve written, I think, because it does exactly what I set out to do with it. Those characters live vividly for me and I can see it in my mind’s eye. I hope you will read it and enjoy it.
A beautiful story and a rich writing lesson. Thank you.
Thank you for your writing. It enriches my life and many of my friends as well, as I pass out your books liberally.