Stephen O'Connor

SENTENCES (1/​27/​12)
"'You see,’ Stan Laurel smiles with satisfaction. ‘Some of us are what we are, and some of us aren’t.’”
--From “Another Nice Mess”

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From WHAT NEXT

Now they tell us that we have destroyed our world
with our fires and our feasts, but isn’t that what
we have always feared? Isn’t that what our priests
have always muttered in incense smoke and cave
dark from one time to the next? Isn’t that the worry
on our doctors’ faces? The answering sweatiness
on our finger tips? Our mute and sacred knowing?
We keep changing the words, but the meaning
soaks through: That shadow on your lung, your filth,
your shame—you dared to think that you
were loved, but joy must have its revenge...

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Jack’s singular discovery was that things are, in fact, as they seem. Keys that get lost, for example, especially those that turn up in what would appear to be in plain sight—on a desktop, a counter, or the middle of a made bed—actually do cease to exist until the instant they are found. Likewise, the sky is, in fact, a bowl placed over the earth—a pale blue bowl, matte-surfaced, lighter near its rim, darker near its crown; or, at night: a sort of colander, randomly punctured by buckshot, light shining through...

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So the first thing is I get out the gate and there’s this big crowd. Mostly it’s women and kids. But also there’s. I mean. Parents. And signs. And everybody’s yelling and everything. And. You know. Welcome back! Our Hero! Stuff like that. So I’m looking for Trudy, and it’s like there’s so many people, and everybody’s jumping up and down, screaming. So for a long time I can’t see her. Then all of a sudden, there she is. She’s. You know. Just like all the rest. Her hands up in the air. Her mouth open. Like this is after some football game, and we’re the victorious players coming out the locker room. Like we won the championship and everything. And when I get closer, I see that she’s crying. Her cheeks are all shiny with her tears. And. Well, here’s the thing. I just hate her when I see that. I just. Well. Hate her....

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It is possible in space—normal, in fact—to feel the emptiness on every side of you expanding at such a terrific speed that the words “I” and “me” will soon have no meaning, and yet to feel, simultaneously, the sheer massiveness of the universe bearing down on you with such force that in an instant you will undergo the radical invasion of self normally experienced only by miners in a cave-in, and that half an instant later you will be reduced to such an infinitely slender filament of being it would make little sense to imagine you exist.

Fortunately, the simultaneity of these opposing tendencies of space allows astronauts to achieve a sort of stasis that passes for sanity. But once they are back on earth it is absolutely impossible for them to explain their new reality—their sense that everything is hypothetical, for example, or their altered understandings of the words “hypocrisy” and “hope.” This is why, when you run into astronauts at parties, they always have robot eyes, and why so many show up drunk at church, and why at their memorial services their children so commonly say, “I never really knew my father,” or, “When Mom said, ‘I love you,’ it was as if she were speaking a language she didn’t understand.”...

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Sunday, March 27, 2011 "On Saturday, Tim Curry captivated the sold-out crowd at the Getty as he read Stephen O'Connor's story "Ziggurat." It was part of the three-program "Selected Shorts" series at the Getty, run by New York's Symphony Space..." -- Carolyn Kellogg

To read more about this amazing event, and to see a slide show featuring Stephen O'Connor, Tim Curry, T.C. Boyle and others, please click on the links below. The program will be broadcast three times during Selected Shorts 2011-12 season, and will be available as a CD and on iTunes.

You can also hear Stephen O'Connor, himself, read Ziggurat on KQED's The Writers Block at this link:

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I always start a poem by trying not to think—which is one reason why I prefer to write first thing in the morning, before I have eaten, when I am still partly in the associative mode of dreams, and the cares of the day have not yet taken hold of my mind. Often I am deeply groggy when (coffee in hand) I sit down at my desk, and it sometimes astonishes me that I can write at all, given how utterly incapable I would be of talking to another person...

To read more, click on "BLOG" above.

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The first time I read Franz Kafka’s “A Country Doctor”—at around age twelve—I had the distinct impression that I was discovering myself, that in his language and images, and in particular in his always surprising juxtapositions and narrative turns, I was experiencing something essential about the way I was and wanted to be in this world...

My favorite way to start a story is to get myself into a jam. I try to sit down at my computer with an utterly blank mind—that is with no idea of what I am going to write. As rapidly as I can, I jot down a sentence that is both surprising (to me, at least) and has some form of narrative potential. Then I try to follow the sentence with another that would seem profoundly incompatible with it, at least in a sane or coherent world. That’s the jam I like to be in, because then my challenge is to make this impossible world seem as natural and real as the world outside my window, and out of that challenge come all sorts of unexpected images and ideas....

INTERVIEW BY CATHERINE LACEY

Catherine: What one attribute (or attributes) do most (or all) of the characters in Here Comes Another Lesson have in common? (Feel free to answer this question by inverting it.)

Stephen: One of the things that has most disconcerted me about my books is that almost everything I have written — fiction or nonfiction, realistic or not — tells the same story about a character who tries to do the right thing and fails. In my memoir about teaching in the public schools, Will My Name Be Shouted?, I am that character. In Orphan Trains, a nonfiction account of a controversial 19th century child welfare effort, Charles Loring Brace is that character. But this character also appears over and over again in Here Comes Another Lesson, just as he (or she) also did in my first collection, Rescue. He’s the Minotaur in “Ziggurat,” the Iraq veteran in “White Fire,” Charles in the “Professor of Atheism” stories, and so on. The reason I am disconcerted is that I never set out to write about this character, and only find out that I have after the fact….