When we think of teachable stories, we often reach deep into the rucksack of the literary past, pulling out classroom-tested stories that have worked their way into the canon. While there is obviously a ton to learn from these pieces, contemporary short story writers are also completing strong work built upon teachable literary foundations, while also finding fascinating ways to advance the form. In this space, we’ll highlight some of these more modern stories and explore a bit of what they have to teach us as we continue to do our part to push literature forward.
Introduction
In “Featherweight,” by Sterling HolyWhiteMountain (published in The New Yorker March 2021), we meet a Northern Plains Native man as he reflects upon his passionate college relationship with Allie, a woman “from another tribe, people [his] people used to kill.” He’s figuring his way through college, a few years older than just about everyone else there, and she’s deeply serious, heavily focused upon Native justice to the exclusion of almost all else, including him. Their passion is tempered by a cruelty that each recognizes and suffuses in the other, an honesty of purpose and a recognition of speech and thought that each are unable to find in anyone else. Eventually, the relationship falters, at least partially because of a sex act he cannot perform and that she won’t explain the reason for suddenly wanting, and the world tilts on its axis as she distances herself from him and from her classes (eventually coming to the admission that “I don’t believe in this anymore”) while he spirals in his own ways. Once she leaves college behind entirely, he is left at the university, sitting in the back of classrooms with long hair and stolen sunglasses, and a sudden awareness of the chasm that exists within himself.
The Basics
This story is written in a first-person, present reflective tense, from the perspective of our narrator looking back upon the relationship that exploded him onto the path of the person he’s now become. We learn almost nothing about that future person in terms of actual detail, but we are heavily in narrative summary throughout the piece, all of which is guided by the voice and experience of the reflective narrator rather than the character we’re watching. As much as anything, this is a story of ideas, and our scene breaks are almost always built around concepts rather than set pieces; indeed, there’s really only one setting explored with much depth, that being Allie’s dorm. We bounce through time and place constantly, sometimes from sentence to sentence, but are always anchored deeply within the mind of our narrator, for whom these times and places are not disparate but instead all distinct threads within the reality that has brought him and Allie to the ending that it has; the straight throughline cannot be told without all the other elements, ideas, digressions, and people that built the characters we’re seeing.
The Opening Paragraph: Plot and Language
Even in a story that steps out of scene and steps away from clear plot points as much as this one does, it feels important to point out that we set up the machinations of the story from the opening sentence. We get a timeline (“off my reservation for little more than a year”), and we get an action that leads to all the tension and conflict (“When I first met my love…”). We learn the setting, a university, in the next sentence, some important character notes are presented from there, and then we get an incredibly quick blip of backstory that leads us through a quick whirlwind of characters into the character (Barbara) who most fully prepared him for Allie. That’s a ridiculously effective opening paragraph, bringing every major literary element to the table immediately while also preparing the reader for the narrative style the story will employ throughout the piece: playing with both the specific and the larger context at the same time, and using both grandiose language (again, that opening clause; also, “acculturated”) with the harsh straightforwardness of a man almost okay with a woman “who liked to call me her favorite indian toy… as long as we keep knocking those boots.” A quick note that indian is actively not capitalized by the story, and so I’m rolling with that here too.
Let’s stop and look at the propulsion of this paragraph, which is driven on a grammatical level. Just in that first paragraph, we get an em dash, an exclamation point, a semicolon, and an ellipsis. There’s also a combativeness to the language right from the start (“I had my nose up everyone’s ass”), but also something like world-weariness already from the jump, something that might land to other people as viciousness or dismissive or even overly masculine language (“First there was Lana, then Julie, then . . . a few other names I can’t remember”; “That should have been the name of a grandmother…”). All of these are features of the voice that will stand throughout the entire piece.
The Close-In and the Farther-Out
In this story we’re always aware both of the immediate moment and of the larger context, and we often jump between the two without much, if any, indication that we’re moving. A great example of this constant shifting, of the large awareness the story utilizes at all times, shows up here: “Me and her, seventeen children of our own, adopt nine more, a farm next to a lake full of muskrats. Two rescue dogs, probably. Lana, Julie, Barbie—their names were mantric.” That last sentence on a quick read could scan as potential names of the rescue dogs, but is instead transitioning us entirely out of the fantasy he’s spinning in the previous two sentences back to names that he’d presented us in the opening paragraph. It’s a fairly large jump back to a fairly small detail from the intro; what we learn from this is that time in this story is elastic, that every piece of information given to us matters, and that every element of the board is spread out in front of us all times, ready to be brought back to play at an instant’s notice. It’s a tiny moment early in the story, but that rubberband snap sets the tone of the story: a narrator in complete control, who can sound almost like rambling but is instead weaving threads that all come together constantly, and an audience that is expected to be sitting up and paying attention. Also extremely important to notice: This wouldn’t have mattered at all if there’d been a paragraph break; the names as opening sentence of a paragraph would have presented completely differently. But here, the reader has to work for it a bit, has to make the connections themselves and watch it unfold rather than have it immediately, and that process of work on both ends, the conversation and give-and-take between writer and reader, is always what amazes me about great writing.
Of course, the full scenes of this piece are a great example of this exercise as well. Our opening sentence mentions “my love,” who doesn’t appear again until the opening sentence of the second scene. In between, we’re given a woman named Barbara who easily could have been conflated with “my love” since she’s presented as the natural progression of his paramours in the first scene, and then from Barbara we dive into the women that our narrator has been with in general, as well as a bit of who he was and what he was looking for in full-on narrative summary while also wandering through the narrator’s self-made politics on Native success and failure and the awkwardness that eventually comes out of these relationships. Voice-and-idea driven, but first “my love” is introduced and then disappears behind a more general sweep of discussion, then Barbara, then college, his backstory, and so on and on as the ideas keep widening. It’s beautiful to see in action, both in the smaller paragraph and the larger scene.
Plot, and the Collective
I’ve read a few interviews with the author, and he often talks about the awareness of the collective in his fiction, which to me scans as the constant awareness of writing as/for an entire people while also writing as a singular within that group, but then also the way that family and tribe shows up in various thoughts and moments because everything is always interconnected. This piece uses that constantly; Allie’s mother tells a story when our narrator first meets her that leaves open the possibility that our lovers might be related, and he then tells us about asking his mom and getting one answer so asking his grandmother and getting another; when the relationship begins faltering, the narrator’s mother sends an uncle down to check on him; when Allie leaves, she “moved back to her reservation to live with her cousin.” There is never a question that everyone will be involved, because everyone is.
This concept of the collective also plays into our plot. This is a story of a relationship that ends, and while our narrator will never know exactly why, there are plenty of potential reasons; some are tied to the differences in their peoples, some to the story her mother told, some to who and how they as individuals react. It’s never as simple as decisions two people make, with no one or no thing else involved. Since we’re in a reflective first-person narrator, the arc of the story is as much about what he’s discovered as it is how the relationship falters, which thematically plays in perfectly with this idea of being influenced by and constantly interacting with the larger world around you; he is thinking about her because the person he has become is at least partially crafted by his experiences with Allie. And the end of the story is introduced via traditions of his people, and, “Thus it is that we still prefer that our endings be intensely elemental and not without a certain amount of self-harm.”
In Conclusion
Every time I read this story, I walk away thinking about how incredibly effective fiction is when you make a choice and bear down on it. There are some very simple literary elements at play that make this story run: the first-person reflective narrator, the propulsive voice, and the use of the expansive collective in both character and idea. Everything this piece does stems from those choices, relatively straightforward in technique, but in committing to them, we have magic.
by Brandon Williams