Chris Lowe, director of the College of Education’s Office for Student Success, is celebrating the publication of “Make Some Wretched Fool to Pay: Stories.”
Published by University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, the book’s 15 stories focus on the fraught relationship between parents and their children in the contemporary Deep South.
In tales set largely in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, power imbalances take center stage, whether that’s within the family unit or in the complex world of high school and college football – and, in all these stories, what is left behind by those who come before us must be reckoned with so new lives can be carved out.
Lowe is also the author of “Those Like Us: Stories” and three prose chapbooks, including “A Guest of the Program,” winner of the Iron Horse Literary Review Chapbook Competition. His writing has appeared widely in magazines and journals including Brevity, Quarterly West, Third Coast, Booth and Bellevue Literary Review.
He recently answered questions from the College of Education’s Ed News.
What’s your process for writing short stories?
I try to approach my writing without preconceived notions or planning. Stories for me can begin in any number of ways. Sometimes it’s with a particular image that’s stuck in my mind. Sometimes it’s with an actual line from the story (this could be the opening line of the final version of the story, but that’s not always the case). I’ve started stories with an idea for a character or a character’s action. One of the stories in the collection began with a challenge to myself: write an opening sentence that’s just two words long (“They woke” was what I landed on, and it lasted on to the final version of the story). And I’ve written stories where I just started writing whatever came to mind in the moments as I confronted the blank page. I love the sense of exploration and discovery that I feel when writing fiction, so remaining open to possibility is important to me.
Once I’ve written a draft of a story, I spend significant time with heavy revision. The poet Richard Hugo wrote in his great book on writing “The Triggering Town” that, “A poem can be said to have two subjects, the initiating or triggering subject, which starts the poem or ‘causes’ the poem to be written, and the real or generated subject, which the poem comes to say or mean, and which is generated or discovered in the poem during the writing.” He goes on to argue that a poet’s loyalty is to the generated subject rather than the triggering subject, as what the work becomes in the act of writing is always more real and more important that the initial impetus for writing, which can never be fully attained or fleshed out. I believe wholeheartedly in this approach for drafting, but it does mean that revision takes on significant importance for me. If you don’t fully arrive at the generated subject until you’ve written a draft, then it becomes difficult to organize and structure the story in its initial form.
In revision, I spend a lot of time examining what I’ve written and exploring how to develop and further its core. That can include looking at patterns, motifs or themes that emerged organically in the writing process that might need to be further teased out. Sometimes that process comes easily, but more often it’s much more labor intensive for me than the initial drafting was. That also means that my process for writing each story is fairly unique to that story. Some of the stories in the collection were written start-to-finish in a matter of hours. Some took years. I try to let the individual piece dictate to me how to write the individual piece.
What inspired the stories in this book?
There are really two threads that weave through “Make Some Wretched Fool to Pay.” The first is an interest in the power dynamics in high school and college football in the American south. I’m a huge football fan. Saturdays and Sundays in the fall, I’m usually watching multiple games, and I follow the progress of my teams passionately. There are real systemic issues with how football, particularly at the high school and college levels, can exploit the athletes who keep the sport going. I found myself growing more and more conflicted about my own complicity with this system as a fan of the sport, and many of the stories were born out of my need to come to terms with how I feel about a sport that I both love and hate.
The other thread is an exploration of family dynamics, particularly relationships between parents and children. I believe that art should engage deeply with the human condition, and for me, the ways that parents affect their children and children affect their parents are an area of the human condition that fascinate me. These stories are my attempt to grapple with some of that.
How does writing fiction fulfill you?
I knew at a young age that I wanted to write. It took me a long time to get to a point where that became a reality for me, though. I think most writers struggle with balancing two competing forces within them. First, the ego that it takes to believe that something they’re going to write will matter, that people will want or need to read it and engage with it. Then, the debilitating self-doubt that they’re fundamentally incapable of actually writing something that people will want or need to read and engage with. I wrote in fits and starts all through middle school, high school and college, and I was always pointing in the direction of being a writer, but I didn’t actually begin to think of myself as one until I got to graduate school where just being a part of a community of other writers gave me a kind of permission to see myself that way. I began to write every day, and what I discovered was that writing helped me to understand myself and the world around me. The two threads in “Make Some Wretched Fool to Pay” speak to that. I find deep fulfillment in being able to explore humanity through fiction, and I find that it enriches me beyond the time I spend writing.
What does the phrase “what is left behind by those who come before us must be reckoned with so new lives can be carved out” mean to you?
Many of my stories take place in the wake of pivotal life events for my characters. The loss of a loved one, an act of violence, an act of love. Often, these events are handed on from one person to the next. This is particularly true of stories about parents and their children. The decisions that a parent makes can affect a child in so many unforeseen ways that there are ripples from these actions across the surface of the child’s life. The result for many of my characters is that they’re not just dealing with the fallout of a particular event; they’re trying to discern what that event means for who they are as people. I’m especially interested in how we humans either steer toward or steer away from the examples set by those who came before us and what that means for us as individuals.
What do you hope readers find in these stories?
Above all else, I hope that readers find these stories to be entertaining. I operate with a very broad definition of entertainment, believing that any time a reader is engaged emotionally by a piece of fiction they’re being entertained by it. That’s true whether we’re talking about laughter, tears, joy, confusion, fear, anger or any other feeling. There are stories in the collection that are intentionally meant to disturb readers. There are also stories that are meant to be sad or to be funny or to be affirming. The best stories, I think, are ones that let these emotions comingle. I hope that readers find a little glimpse of humanity in the stories and that this glimpse affects how they move forward as humans the way we all do, into an unknown, daunting, exciting, scary, joyful future.
