Kristen Tsetsi on "They Three at Once Were One"

In another interview with a writer from the Fiction Prize Issue, Storyglossia editor Steven McDermott and Kristen Tsetsi discuss her contest winning story "They Three at Once Were One."

Steven McDermott: Why "They Three at Once Were One," where’d this story come from?

Kristen Tsetsi: How not this story?

Someone in the military serving in Iraq or Afghanistan is reported dead every day. (According to a recent story I heard on NPR, the average is three a day.) The stories might sadden people a little, they might think, "Oh, no. Not another one . . . ," but then the following story—this year's fashions and how to make sure you're stylin' in the snow—takes over, and the next thing people are thinking about is whether to buy an orange or purple plaid scarf.

And I'm not being accusatory—I've done it, too. It's just the way desensitization works. And while everyone is thinking about their scarves—and maybe even being angry about the toll war takes—the person whose dead friend or family member or true love was just listed as one of the day's casualties is sitting somewhere shattered (if they even know, yet . . . at that moment, they might be trying to remember whether John was on that convoy, or where in Baghdad he was fighting, and if one of those three might be him). As much as I've heard, "Oh, they know what they're getting into, so . . . "—" . . . so, they've really no right to complain; you get with a soldier, and what do you expect, hmmm?,"—no one knows until they know. You cannot believe your best friend/lover/brother/sister is actually going to die over there. You're pretty sure—you have to hope—that it will be someone else's friend/lover/brother/sister, if it's going to be anyone.

It was important to me to make people truly understand the fear of not having that reunion, of not seeing that smile one more time or feeling that hand again. Of the thousands of people who sympathize, sincerely, with the effects of war, if they don't know someone fighting, the best they can have is a pretty abstract or imagined understanding. I'm hoping that through Nan—who represents everyone who experiences the constant worry that someone they love could be destroyed at any minute—the people (not the "soldiers," not the "families," but the people) will become more real.

SM: What’s your revision process generally? What surprises surfaced as you revised this story?

KT: When writing short stories, I revise, for the most part, as I go. There'll be a language/punctuation/images/wording check, and then I'll leave it alone until I find a place to submit. Then there's one more read-through with tinkering before sending. I probably won't look at it again until the first rejection comes back, and then it's another read-through before sending.

The surprise that surfaced with regard to "They Three . . . " would have to be that it worked better shorter. In the beginning, it was going to be a much longer story and with two other characters, but then I found a few places I wanted to submit, one of which had a 2,000 word limit. Cutting is sort of a fun personal challenge, so I'll try, and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But this one seemed to work—and better.

SM: With its lack of narrative interpretation, your story was nearly unique among contest entrants. You'd previously mentioned to me that you've been working on minimizing explanation in your stories. How have you been approaching that task?

KT: It's become almost habit, now, to keep moving forward (that's how I see a lack of explanation . . . just moving moving moving, whereas proving backstory or inner thoughts or explanation feels like a pause). But when it's not, and when I find myself thinking, "Hmmm . . . I should really put something there to make it crystal clear," I'll remember sitting in workshop with either Alan Davis ( Alone with the Owl, Rumors from the Lost World) or Gordon Jackson ("Billy's Girl," published by Quarterly West and anthologized in Sudden Fiction). Both used Hemingway as an example of how to show and not tell, and the more they directed attention to the technique—the use of body language, dialogue, setting—and to the Iceberg Theory, the more I was intrigued by it. I didn't want to be or write like Hemingway, but I did want to see how little I could tell and still safely say, "Oh, no—it's all right there."

I think I got off track. My approach: Cut cut cut cut. It makes my husband nervous ("How do you just DO that, after you took the time to write it?"), and I used to hate the idea when the necessity of "revisions" were introduced to me in my intro to creative writing class (also with Alan Davis), but it's now one of my favorite things about writing.

SM: The hairspray. Absolutely brilliant. Reveal the dirty secret we writers have; what was your reaction when you first wrote those words?

KT: I sort of cheated. I'd already used a similar idea in Homefront (which tackles the same subject matter as "They Three," but in a book-length version). The main character, during a "bad" time in the course of a deployment, decides beauty in things is useless. You can't own it, can't "have" it, can't make it yours (much like the life of her deployed boyfriend, which she'd like to have enough control over to make it not end, somehow). She spots a geode, sparkling and gorgeous, and has a sudden compulsion to crack the rock into pieces so she can shove the crystal shards into the whites of her eyes. That way, she can have the beauty. (She doesn't do it, of course . . . even if she did, she wouldn't get to see the sparkle unless she looked in the mirror . . . she still wouldn't possess it the way she wants to.)

When I wrote the paragraph about the geode, I was thrilled. It seemed to me an effective way to get across the feeling of needing, so strongly, to possess something utterly intangible that it can drive you almost crazy.

When I wrote the bit about the hairspray, I thought, "Well, it's not rocks in her eyes . . . but it does what I need it to."

SM: Although a war story, "They Three at Once Were One" is really the story less told. What prompted you to present the overlooked viewpoint?

KT: I . . . it's . . . I mean, frustration! That's what made me do it. We have hundreds of books from the soldiers' point of view. And that's great—really. But the soldiers are only half of the number of people who experience emotional and mental effects of deployments.

It's a sticky subject, actually, because it starts to sound like a contest if the ones at home talk about how difficult it is for them. A stock response to their torment becomes, "Oh, shaddap. What, you're having a tough time eating your steaks and waking up to the sound of birds instead of mortar fire? Poor fucking baby."

Yeah.

The thing is, 24-7 worry is extraordinary phychological stress. I've heard women say they got not one full night of sleep for months, and when they did manage to sleep a full night, it was when their boyfriend or husband was home on leave. Some waiting at home start losing their hair, others experience a day of relative—relative—normalcy, and then the next day they're frantic with anxiety and spend hours crying.

For however long the deployment lasts, there is constant, conscious waiting. Waiting for them to come back. Waiting for the phone call or the visitors you don't want. Waiting to not have that weird, hollow feeling for even five minutes. Waiting for mail. For a phone call. Any proof everything is okay, that—for now, at least—the one you're waiting for is alive and safe.

I may get in trouble for this, but my husband (who was my boyfriend when he was deployed to Iraq when the war started) gets it, so, here I go, but with a disclaimer, first: The soldier's story is a hard one. They're the ones who have to worry about getting blown up (or suffering worse fates). They—depending on their specialty—experience extreme conditions, see unimaginable things, and are expected to go on with life as usual. There is absolutely no denying that theirs is a story that needs telling.

However, they also know when to feel safe and when to be scared. They do, to some degree, become acclimated.

Walk into any bookstore, and you'll probably find more books than you can carry in the "Military/War" section that explore the plight of the soldier.

But where are the accounts from the other side? And where are the ones that aren't collections of paragraph-long, non-fiction anecdotes or guides for the military wife? Where are the ones that get inside the person who doesn't know what they'll be feeling from one minute to the next and whether their feelings are "right" or "justified" ("Well, I've no right to complain about the way I feel. John is the one over there, after all, so . . . ")? The ones that don't have a moral to the story, the ones that don't make the focus suddenly-single parenthood or how the family changes with the return of the soldier? Where are the stories that share with you the dirty truths—the jealousy, the selfishness, the anger, the abject fear, the beauty of that kind of torture?

I could go on about this for too many pages.

I wrote the story because these people, the ones waiting, are going through emotional and psychological changes that very closely resemble what soldiers go through (thought obviously in a different way), but they're given little attention because they're not the ones who might be shot.

If a reader who is distant from what war does to both sides develops, through Nan's fear, a greater understanding of a deployment, and gets closer to the war by experiencing it on a personal level, then the Johns and the Mikes and the Joanies with sand in their boots and in their eyes will be remembered as something more than a two-minute news bite. As will the ones you see crying when reporters stuff a fat mic in their face to say, "Tell us about John, who we understand died last week in a battle in Baghdad."


They Three at Once Were One

Fiction Prize Issue

And Then There Was One

As you've no doubt noticed from my reviews, there are many qualities to admire in the stories selected for Storyglossia's Fiction Prize Issue. Choosing a winner from among the finalists was challenging, and taste being what it is, you probably have your favorite, perhaps would have selected a different winner. For me, however, Kristin Tsetsi's "They Three at Once Were One" was the clear winner.

The submission came late in the contest, the day before the deadline, so I'd had a chance to read most of the entries already, and from the first read I knew the story would be a finalist. A couple of things separated Tsetsi's story from the others. The first is that it was among the few entrants to forego explanation from the narrator. I reject so many stories because they over explain. What am I hoping to see instead? More stories such as "They Three at Once Were One" where the experience is rendered from within the character, in her language, in her emotional shorthand, without the narrator explaining what is significant and why. Consider the first four paragraphs and all that is not said:

The news recycled again on the small TV, rabbit-ear antennae half alert, half asleep: A downed helicopter outside of Mosul. A roadside IED. A flipped-over tank in the Euphrates.
   Nan checked her phone again for signal bars, then set it beside the plastic plate of Chinese food, uneaten and cold, and lit another cigarette.
   A flipped-over tank in the Euphrates.
   Just some string of words crossing the Teleprompter, and the anchor even smiled before commercial. "Coming up," she said, "America's obesity crisis." Nan looked past the lobby windows at drifting storm clouds, their depths and flowering expansions revealed in teasing, random lightning flashes. She willed a strike to wipe Marc from her memory—flash!—and render him foreign, the way her own language had once sounded foreign when overheard at the fringes of her attention.

Any doubts about what is going on? As readers we don't have all the details—the details explanation would provide—for example, we don't know whether Nan is girl friend, wife, sister, or mother, but we have enough, and we have it from inside her perspective looking out rather than from a narrator's perspective looking in. Resisting the urge to explain, to instead just put the experience on the page for readers to settle into and interpret, seems one of the more difficult styles for writers to accept as valid. Is it the lure of storytelling, the desire to hear one's own voice overriding the story and its characters? Or is it a lack of trust in one's readers to get what you want them to get in just the way you want them to get it? Certainly it is a difficult style to master and Tsetsi deserves props for such an excellent example of the aesthetic. As you'll see from the interview, there was much explaining she, as author/narrator, could have done. That she allowed the character's experience to stand on its own—and saved the explanation for the interview—is a big part of why I selected "They Three at Once Were One" as the winner of the contest.

Even if you won't go as lean on explanation as Tsetsi does in this story, you can still learn from her explanation-lite techniques. For example, do you really need to say that a character has been "crying?" Or does this work as well:

Nan put out her cigarette, wiped her face with her sleeves, and turned down the TV.
   She took her spot behind the counter and noticed mascara on the cuffs of her sleeves. She bunched them in her palms.

Or how about this gem, when Tanner is trying to watch TV:

The girl climbed on the bed. Nan heard her sniffing, and then the TV powering on.
   The bed squeaked. "Sorry," said the girl.
   "It's all right. Hey, you like this show?"
   Nothing.
   "Hey?"
   "Hm?"
   "I said, you like this show?"
   "It's all right, I guess."
   One television character said something to another and the other made a noise—Nan couldn't see what was done from underneath the bed—and she heard Tanner laugh loud with the laugh track.
   "Tanner?" said the girl, so low Nan barely heard her. She wondered if she might have imagined it. But, there again: "Tanner?"
   He laughed, said, "Ahhhh, shit."

Easy image to conjure up, isn't it? I think reading is more fun when a writer allows me to share in the ah-ha moment with the character. Can't do that if the narrator is explaining to me how and why the blouse is coming off.

The other thing that set this story apart is its perspective on the war: rather than a soldier's story, it is the story of the one waiting at home. Another of war's dirty secrets. A story deserving to be told, but censored in so many ways (as Tsetsi alludes to in the interview), and it was exciting to see a writer champion such an ignored perspective and give it vibrant life. Nan is not a passive character, and her job as a hotel clerk puts her on the front lines of her own battle as she is constantly reminded, with each arriving couple, of what she doesn't have and may never have again. One way the story achieves its emotional affect is that it allows us to follow Nan in the efforts she makes (including putting her job at risk) to move girls like Jennie to better rooms; in doing so she fights her own metaphoric war:

Nan pressed her pin-pricked thumb into one of room 129's pillowcases until the blood soaked through. Three days ago, it had been cornflakes softened in milk and splattered in a dark corner. The memo had read, GUEST FEARED SUBSTANCE A HEALTH HAZARD; MOVED TO SIMILAR ROOM AT REDUCED RATE TO APPEASE. The cleaning women were yelled at and the manager didn't believe them when they swore it wasn't there before, that they'd have seen it.

I've frequently written about the use of objective correlatives, especially in the context where the correlative is not simply used as a symbol, but also (apologies to Gass on this, who is adamant that characters are just words—actually, noise—on the page) employed consciously by the character as poultice and painkiller. Words on the page they may be, but when characters act like that, they act like us. The prime example in "They Three at Once Were One" is the entire final scene, which has Nan sneaking into Jennie and Tanner's room to vicariously share the soldier's leave they get but she doesn't:

Such privacy they'd created in just minutes with their clothing, their little things, their scents. The air was heavy with their presence and Nan thought of Christmas lights strung under snow, or of the soft melody made by a body moving under bathwater in a still room, and she was there, right in the middle of it, drowning in it, but not really, because even with her eyes closed and her fingers clutched around the girl's necklace and her breathing deep to take it all in and make it hers, it wouldn't take, and trying to be a part of it was like trying to throw a lasso around a ghost. It wasn't hers for the having, not for a long time, not until Marc came back, and he wouldn't be back. Not for a long time.

Not enough, of course, so Nan needs a more radical connection:

She let go of the necklace and picked up the hairspray and sprayed it in her mouth because it was the only thing in the room she could ingest, but it didn't taste like grape, not at all. It tasted the way bug spray smelled, and it burned.
   "Fuck." She spit on the floor and felt her tongue and lips swelling. "Fuck." She started for the bathroom to rinse out her mouth when she heard movement, talking, outside.

Which is just a completely unexpected action that also seems so perfect that it puts the story over the top for this reader. Except that an even more heartbreaking moment is yet to come as Nan hides under the bed, slobbering still from the hairspray, until the pain, anger, and other emotions become unbearable. And then, following the brief struggle, we get this:

Nan slumped to the floor to check her phone for a signal. She moved it this way, that way, never getting more than two bars, and her lips felt sticky and thick when she said, "Can you turn on the news?"

With the ending, Tsetsi takes as much risk as she does elsewhere in the story, once again choosing not to elaborate or explain, just leaving us hanging on the emotion, also waiting for news.