“A Divorced Man’s Guide to the First Year” by Jen McConnell appeared in Issue 35 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about this story.
The use of second person can be so powerful. But because it asks so much of the reader, it’s best used in small doses. When the story, “A Divorced Man’s Guide to the First Year,” came to me, the narrative felt like instructions, so “you” seemed the natural way to tell it. I did try to re-write the story in third person, just to see the difference, but then the voice felt too distant from such an intimate situation.
What was the most difficult part in writing this particular piece?
This is one of those rare stories that was easy, and a pleasure, to write. It must have been brewing under the surface for a while because there I was, driving along the shore of Lake Erie, when this voice came up and I had to pull over. I took out my notebook and wrote the first draft of “The Divorced Man’s Guide to the First Year.” From there it didn’t change much to the published version. When this happens, I just get out of the way of the voice and the story and just transcribe.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
I recently read The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philaw. We always hear about the impeding death of short stories but the people saying that aren’t reading collections like this. If they were, they wouldn’t say that. Philaw’s stories show that you don’t need 400 pages to tell a deep story with complex characters living their complex lives.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Jhumpa Lahiri. Since her first book, the story collection Interpreter of Maladies, she’s been one of my favorite writers. And as a writer, I study her stories and novels for how she does it. Like in the novel “The Namesake – how does she make a story so very specific in a time, place and culture and yet it is so universal that anyone in the world could pick it up and say, “Oh yeah, I totally get that”? I’ve yet to figure it out but it’s fun trying.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
Putting the finishing touches on my second collection of stories and then getting it published (fingers crossed). I’ve also been working more in micro- and flash fiction. I took Cheryl Pappas’ fabulous workshop on Hermit Crab Flash Fiction and found that those kind of prompts spark something in my writing that traditional open-ended prompts don’t.
Our thanks to Jen for taking the time to answer a few questions and share these poems. Read “A Divorced Man’s Guide to the First Year” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/fiction-a-divorced-mans-guide-to-the-first-year.
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Jen McConnell is a fiction writer and poet. Her work has recently appeared in DASH, Paragraph Planet, October Hill, The Disappointed Housewife, and Sledgehammer Lit. Her debut collection of short stories, “Welcome, Anybody,” was published by Press 53 and she’s polishing up her second collection. Jen’s story “Earthquake Weather” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College in Vermont. By day, she works as a copywriter in the corporate world. Her website is jenmcconnell.com.