Which Tesserae story is your favorite?  Let the world know -- anonymously! 

The Story behind the Story

Here are some brief descriptions by the author of how some of the stories in tesserae: a mosaic of story came into existence:  how it was conceived, where the idea came from, or some other interesting fact(s)…because it’s the first question everybody asks, anyway!
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 Knife River Flint
 
There are a couple of interesting things to note about this story. 
  • First, I started this story in a class taught by Robert Gardner McBrearty, a virtuouso short story writer, at CU Boulder.  This story may have been one of the hardest I’ve ever written. I wrote dozens, maybe hundreds of drafts until I was making myself crazy. The characters and the story were totally alive in my mind, but I couldn’t get it down on paper in a satisfactory way, and it took many years and many drafts to get it into publishable form.
  • Second, my father had a beautiful arrowhead collection, and just like the character in this story, I did, indeed, accidentally break one of the arrowheads when I was a little girl in a moment not unlike that in the story.

Cowboy Heart

This is probably my favorite story. For some reason, I just really relate to Gus.  It was based on an incident I observed, of a person flying from New York to Taos, apparently with his heart set on establishing a relationship with someone who didn’t remember him and didn't know he existed. It was heart-wrenching to watch it unfold.

Losing My Grip

I was at the Taos Writer’s Conference in 2004, and had had an amazing week. As I drove out of Taos, it was so beautiful I pulled over to the side of the road just to stare at the landscape. I remember thinking, “I wish I had an Exact-o Knife to cut this scene out of the backdrop, roll it up, and take it home with me – I want a souvenir of Taos.”  At that moment, the entire story of Losing My Grip came to me, almost all at once.  I had the experience of “receiving” the story, almost whole.  I sat on the edge of the road and wrote and wrote and wrote.  Then I started driving, but all the way home I had to keep pulling over to write.  By the time I got home I had the whole story. I submitted it to the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers anthology, and it was selected.  It was the exact opposite experience from “Knife River Flint,” which involved endless drafts and rewrites.  A “received” story is what every creative dreams about – I got lucky!

Father-Son Time

There’s not a lot of “story behind the story” here: someone related a similar incident to me and I was very taken with the notion of these nuns, representing trust and innocence, betraying that trust. I respect religious figures and I don’t have an axe to grind with nuns – it was just such a beguiling image of a universal theme:  trusting certain people who then utterly betray us.  Or did they?