Writing an Earthquake

San Francisco Earthquake, 1906

I am thrilled that my short story “Earthquake” is being published by Digging Press Journal. I have been a fan of Gessy Alvarez, editor of the journal, for several years, and grateful for the encouragement she gave me when an earlier version of the journal, Digging Through the Fat, gave echo and a broader audience to my story “Carnivores” in 2017. While we have never met in person, I enjoy Gessy’s energy on social media, her commitment to creating live and virtual spaces for writers to use their voices. The chapbooks she publishes, in particular, lift up writers whose voices are often overlooked or tokenized in the publishing world. I’m honored that my story has been invited into that space and shared.

“Earthquake” is a story that arose from a dream — I woke up one day with the voice of the narrator in my head, having just seen the central action of the story unfold before my eyes as I slept. It’s also a story that resisted editing.  While I have revised the story a number of times to respond to beta readers and to suit my own desire for clarity and emotional impact, the truth is, that voice has stayed the same. It’s a slightly fussy voice — a narrator who uses “whom” rather than “who” — yet also a voice of a character who is highly self-aware, even if that awareness has not necessarily helped her. Nothing in the story is autobiographical — though a distant relative of mine did once experience something akin — but that phenomenon of knowing one’s limitations yet failing to surpass them, that one is familiar to me in a personal way.

First drafts tend to come to me quickly — not always as quickly and clearly as “Earthquake” did, but quickly nonetheless — while revision often takes me months or years. Years! Perhaps that is in part because of a hope that I’ll grow enough as a writer, in the meantime, to solve the issues I see in the writing, even if that growth is never as quick or as sparkling as I want. Even now, I look at the story and wonder, couldn’t it be better? Yet there is something I like in the story as it is now, and I have to trust that it goes out into the world to find readers, as it is now, imperfect yet finished, leaving space in my head for the next story, and the next.