What can I say about our April web exclusive, “Squirrel” by David Schuman? I might say that it’s that rare sort of story that conveys with equal grace the featherlight details of daily life and the ponderous mysteries of this crazy planet. I might say that it’s beautifully written, with sentences that’ll cut right you right open. But maybe I should just let the author speak for himself: “there are other stories besides ours, and of course in the end these other stories are part of our story, the big one, which will end someday.” Oh, yes. It’s a good one, y’all. Read more about “Squirrel” in our interview with the author below. You can read the story on the ASF website.
1. Tell us about the genesis of “Squirrel.” Where did the idea for the story come from and what kind of evolution did it go through to get to us?
I was walking around one day and there was this squirrel in the grass, just like the one in the story. I got up really close to it and it didn’t budge. The squirrels on campus are really tame, which is why this one didn’t run away, but it did start to freak me out a bit, and I changed course to veer away from it. I’d been bested by a squirrel, which for some reason put me in a story-writing state of mind. On the drive home, I wrote the first couple paragraphs in my head, which I like to do since repeating the lines over and over again to commit them to memory establishes a rhythm that often carries me through a story. Once I had Dolly, the story just kept going. I had intended to end the story back on the beach, inside the narrator’s point of view, but then I became interested in making the point of view sort of elastic, and then I wanted to see how far I could stretch it.
2. When I first read “Squirrel,” I had just finished Paula Fox’s novel Desperate Characters, and I found some really lovely echoes of Fox in your story. Both begin, for example, with an animal bite. In our initial email exchange, you mentioned that one of the ways in which you see “Squirrel” diverging from Fox’s novel is that your main concern was to tell a story that was as much about animals as humans. Can you expand on that a bit for us? Certainly, the turn the story takes at the end gestures in a really provocative way at the wildness of the animal world.
Desperate Characters is great because it’s a relatively small story concerned with these gigantic things. In some ways I feel like Fox predicted the modern world as she chronicled the erosion of sixties earnestness and innocence in the seventies, the ways in which the ideals of that era were co-opted by the capitalism-loving world of the eighties and beyond. The couple in the novel are like pre-yuppies, and I think the main character is struggling with just what she is, what she can call herself. There are issues of class and race boiling beneath the surface, but in the end it’s just s story of a woman who gets bitten by a cat. I wanted my story to be about the natural world—maybe my own fascination with it and my particular set of fears about things that are happening. There’s something wrong, I know that, birds falling out of the sky, bees disappearing, frogs, everything. I don’t understand why these things are happening. I keep asking myself about them. So I let the natural world enter this story through an animal bite. I was thinking about this as a zombie or lycanthrope story in a way—you get bitten and you’re infected. Other “infected” animals kept appearing—they’re infected by the world in some way, and so are the humans in the story. Fiction is mostly human-centric, but there are other stories besides ours, and of course in the end these other stories are part of our story, the big one, which will end someday. Writers I admire, like Joy Williams and Kathryn Davis, never let you forget this. And hey, Jaws also begins with an animal bite, but you didn’t ask me about that one!
3. Can you talk a little bit about literary influences? You wrote me that, while you had read it, Desperate Characters wasn’t on your mind when you wrote “Squirrel.” It’s interesting, though, to think about the ways in which the authors we read influence our writing, even in oblique or unexpected ways. Where do you see the authors you love showing up in your own work? How do you learn from and absorb great writing while still staying true to your own voice?
I can’t imagine doing anything without all of the stuff that I love and admire and hate and can’t understand informing it. For me it’s exciting to make something that’s a reaction to something else, a tribute or a continuation of some sort. Things bubble up as I’m working. This is what I love about writing, these surprises. I understand that some of this is going to come from the writers I’ve read who have lodged themselves in the crevices, and some of it is going to come from other stuff that’s stuck in there.
4. I absolutely love the way you write the father-daughter relationship in this story. The father approaches Dolly with this love that seems to be equal parts tenderness and curiosity (bewilderment, even) almost as if she were some exotic species of animal herself. Do you have children, and, if so, how does that affect your writing?
I am a father. I’ve got a four-year-old daughter who I approach with tenderness, curiosity, bewilderment and, often, paper towels. She’s got a fresh pink brain it’s great to have access to—the other day she told me, “Sharing is when you take something away from yourself.”
5. What are you working on now?
I’m always working on stories, and right now I’m writing a novel. Dolly from this story has a part in it now. She seemed like a keeper.