The stories assigned to you this week are weird, I know. More, they engage with states of mind we may find uncomfortable: hallucinations, psychosis, otherworldliness, dream. Most likely these are the stories you found least relatable in our fiction unit, and possibly you didn’t enjoy them because of that (or possibly you enjoyed them because of that!).
But there’s truth in strangeness, if you know how and where to look. And, more importantly for our purposes, reading and practicing strangeness can teach us a few things about writing, even if we still plan to write our own stories grounded in the “real’ and familiar world.
Strangeness engages our imagination in new ways, which strengthens our imagination by exercising it like a muscle. When you need to work a bit to keep yourself grounded in a story, when you need to construct a world that feels alien to you, then you strengthen your own capacity for imagination.
Reading and writing strangeness can help us with our constructions of setting (not just dreamlike or hallucinated settings, but all settings, even realist ones). In “Don’t Write What You Know,’ Bret Anthony Johnston talks about how “rerouting’ his stories toward the Unknown has imbued his stories with a strange new life:
Before, I’d forced my fiction to conform to the contours of my life; now I sought out any and every point where a plot could be rerouted away from what I’d known. The shift was seismic. My confidence waned, but my curiosity sprawled. I was writing fiction, to paraphrase William Trevor, not to express myself, but to escape myself. When I recall those stories now, the flashes of autobiography remind me of stars staking a constellation. Individually, the stars are unimportant; only when they map shapes in the darkness, shapes born of imagination, do we understand their light.
Often, we take for granted that our readers can “see’ what we want them to see because their places and people and spatial layouts are clear to us in our heads, but in reality, we need to work hard to put those things on the page. We need to tell readers where people are in a room to orient them, and we need to focus on all the sensory details–sight, sound, scent, taste, touch–as much as possible to help readers enter the worlds of our characters. When we have to imaginatively engage unfamiliar settings and situations (such as dream spaces or drug-induced hallucinations), we need to work harder to construct them, and that gives us better practice for creating the kind of spatial and sensory details integral to good writing.
Reading and writing strangeness can also help us craft unique voices that would stand out in a crowd. In these stories, it is a marker for unreliability in our narrators, as well as a way to suggest they are in altered or fluctuating states of mind. Note how the narrators in these three stories are all memorably idiosyncratic. Kafka’s doctor sounds nothing like Percy’s telemarketer. They are each products of their own strange worlds, and they can exist nowhere else but there, in that story. This should be a goal for your characters: to make them memorable voices, yes, but also to be reflections of the places you’ve constructed around them.
And, lastly, reading and writing strangeness perhaps allows us to “let go’ and explore a little more. As Johnston notes, sometimes we want to have too much control over a story, and too much control makes for flat stories:
And writing what you know is knotted up with intention, and intention in fiction is always related to control, to rigidity, and more often than not, a little solipsism. The writer seems to have chosen an event because it illustrates a point or mounts an argument. When a fiction writer has a message to deliver, a residue of smugness is often in the prose, a distressing sense of the story’s being rushed, of the author’s going through the motions, hurrying the characters toward whatever wisdom awaits on the last page. As a reader, I feel pandered to and closed out. Maybe even a little bullied. My involvement in the story, like the characters’, becomes utterly passive. We are there to follow orders, to admire and applaud the author’s supposed insight.
Denis Johnson’s “Emergency’ reads organically, like a wild, sprawling ride alongside its characters, because it allows both humor and ridiculousness to play a role in the storytelling; and yet, the story contains great depth and insight into the world. Reading and writing strangeness encourages us to not take ourselves too seriously, to have a little fun with our characters, settings, and voices.
For your reading response, write about any one of the three stories you read for today. How did you feel while you were reading it? How did the author construct its unique place and voice? What details helped you enter the strange new world presented therein?
Sarah Corbett
I’m going to respond to ‘dial tone’ today.
Oddly, I feel a sense of connection with the narrator. I actually work for one of the cell phone companies he listed in the beginning, and while I rarely have to make cold calls the way the narrator does, I understand the emptiness and frustration that a customer service job like this can do to you. So I felt as though as I was looking into a warped mirror of my life, something from a parallel universe. I can’t tell you how many mean customers I’ve had to deal with like that, how many times I’ve been yelled at, cursed at, etc.
The way he described the managers, and their way of getting you back on the prewritten talk track was really what brought me into the story. It’s such a realistic detail, because we are really taught different talk tracks for different products. We’re allowed to pitch them however we want, but if our numbers are failing, then our managers will push us to use a different talk track – and they’re always super basic and generic. So those potbellied managers, who probably don’t have sales experience, putting their hand on someone’s arm and steering them towards this god awful talk track was the point that brought me into the story.
I think my favorite part was how the author brought you into the concept of phone conversations not being from right that moment, but are from weeks, maybe even a year ago. It seemed like an odd detail at the time, until he started overlapping the stories of the cold call and the murder. He was hearing himself murder somebody, but he didn’t realize it. And before he described the murder, he described himself experiencing the radiation poisoning from having climbed the tower, which we find out about at the end. I really loved the way he went back and forth, almost like a time traveler. I may have been drawn in by the description of cold calling; but that back and forth was what brought this piece to the next level for me. Hell, that’s why I loved Harry Potter and the prisoner of Azkaban, the time traveling! And I understand that he wasn’t actually time traveling, that is just the best way for me to describe it. I LOVE the overlapping stories, I think it is a really creative way to build up a character.
Christy Barrett
Funny that you mention strangeness. My response this week is for “Dial Tone”, and strange, it is. The narrator seems like a mundane man, and yet he’s a man who seems to also be on the edge. His thoughts and interactions are so commonplace, but they’re also bizarre. That doesn’t make sense, but it does. The story starts out with a man hanging by a dog’s prong collar. And then we enter a simple and seemingly boring life. Then it gets strange again. Then we get more glimpses of his boring life. Then, more strangeness. This is how life is sometimes, I guess. Everything he discusses I feel would seem like a completely different story from every other character’s point of view. He seems to just be trying to make some sense of this crazy, yet empty life. His descriptions really put me there and helped me to understand his train of thought. This train of thought made me feel unstable. This really set the stage for what we realize has occurred at the end. He’s a murderer. I enjoyed how the story was told. It slowly unraveled. It wouldn’t have been as interesting a read otherwise. We learn who he is and what his life and thoughts look like a little before we know the hard truth. Very interesting and strange piece.
Nadia Finley
I am responding to Denis Johnson’s “Emergency.” All of the stories this week reminded me some of “Concert” by John Wideman, of the utter feeling of being lost in someone else’s head. Though, Johnson’s “Emergency” was the one that felt closest to the disorientation that I experienced with “Concert.” There is a flow to the story, and I can understand where the characters are at in any given scene, but boy is it hard for me to understand what is going on through their eyes. Was it day? Was it night? Was it the stars that were blinding, or were the drugs making the sunlight dark? Why was there blood (or not) on the ground? Were they just unable to see the headlights? If Georgie said that the man’s face was dark, then how did he get the knife out? It was all bizarre.
Some of the events in the story felt so random, but they also somehow made sense. I was particularly drawn in through the baby bunnies. Like I said, so random but they somehow just made sense in the story. They were like a whole mini-story on their own, with a plot ark and an emotional ark too.
The bunnies, the drive-in/cemetery, the birds at the fair, all the details that somehow fit yet were so unique, helped make the closed in tunnel of a groggy, drugged-up world feel vast. Along with the landscape, the characters that Johnson wrote were not “capped at the end of their runs.” They were left open and living for the next time we may encounter them. Nurse still looks out for her own, and the Family Doctor still roams the halls collecting groans.
The world in “Emergency” is not capped. There is room to expand and imagine other scenarios happening. In my own writing, I tend to attempt to define all that is going on, to serve the places and situations on a silver platter where all is easily picked up the first run through. While it is important to not sink too far into my own line of thought, I think that non-orienting stories like “Emergency,” “Country Doctor,” “Dial Tone,” and “Concert” show that it is just as important to let stories that make sense in my head be written in a way that is not trying to be understandable to everyone all at once. If I write for everyone to understand, I lose my own understanding and the story is blunted.
There is something to be said about stories that make you want to understand the world they bring, that make you want to read through them again and again. That kind of desire does not come from a work written to be easily understood.
Miranda Reynolds
I am going to respond to “Dial Tone” by Percy. I think what was intriguing to me was the way the setting and place were constructed, elements that sometimes tend to be forgotten behind the plot or the action. Percy used both story-building elements to reach a stranger place than the action would have allowed by itself. As a reader, I felt that I was able to enter the story easily as he started with two familiar ideas: an unsolved murder case and the uninteresting day job of a call center employee.
However, he slowly overlapped mysterious details on top of that setting so that the original, realistic setting was eventually lost. Starting with small details like giving everyone a computer-type name, C5, C6, he followed with more unnerving details about the prison-like existence in the call center with bulky guards and endless calls and the circling birds of prey, which added to the stakes and transported the reader away from the ordinary situation that was assumed at the beginning. I think that this use of strangeness perfectly paralleled his message of a man becoming so overwhelmed or isolated from others that he loses his mind and does not even realize it.
The use of two differing voices also furthered the sense of isolation from the benign. Because most of the story is written in the first person where the narrator is fully aware of what is going on and not hesitant to speak directly to the audience, the change to the second person near the end is jarring. This change supports the claim that the man does not realize how far gone he is. It separates the reader from an easy conclusion where the man might have made up for what he did or realized he needed help. It keeps the reader guessing, which makes for an unnerving conclusion.
I felt oddly empathetic towards the protagonist, even though it is apparent that he has made horrible decisions. It was almost as if Percy was using him to point to the underlying causes that make bad choices, implying that they are provoked by something else.
Ainsley Smith
I decided to read “Dial Tone” by Benjamin Percy. When I was first reading this, I had to re-read it again because of Percy’s unique use of voice. He uses two different voices near the end of the story, that captures both the sad, boring marketing assistant, and the mysterious murderer. In reality, they are the same person. He switches both on and off between these two “characters” which can be super confusing, but it showed the depth of the protagonist. We learn that he is a person who may not know why he feels the way he does, which gives a sense of empathy.
One of the most interesting things Percy does in his writing, is his details of the world around the protagonist. He mentions the many cubicles in his work space, all the same, differentiated by labels, C5, C6, etc. He describes the workspace using language like “forty-by forty-foot room with white walls and white dropped ceiling, and a white linoleum floor,” which gives context to how he views his life. Boring, simple, plain. His depictions sort of reminded me of a psych ward; people guarding and watching you, doing the same thing every day, similar colored walls, etc. Then we are taken to where he is killing Pete Johnson, and he is amazed by the “thrill.” It is as if he is no longer the same person and he enjoys the gruesome things he has done. It is as if he escaped his cell and became what he wanted to be.
In the story he also gave clues, talking about the miscommunication between calls between radio towers, which coincidental is where Pete Johnson, the murdered soul, was found. At first, I was unsure of why those details were listed in the story. However, later on, the connection to how the the protagonist was able to get away with the murder instantly clicked in my brain. On the call, he was listening to himself as he was committing the murder.
When I was reading the story, I was super interested in how Percy was going to connect the mystery of a allusive murder to the cubicle of a telemarketer. I felt as though I kept a guard up, ready for the “horror” that I’d learn as I kept reading. I was interested the whole time, trying to discover what kind of person the protagonist was, and how he could’ve gotten away with the crime.
Adeline Knavel
For this week’s reading response I decided to read “Dial Tone” by Benjamin Percy. I was not prepared for the first sentence of “Dial Tone”. My first thought after reading “A jogger spotted the body hanging from the cell tower”. Benjamin Percy starts his story with a man hanging off a cell tower by a dog collar that you buy at a pet store. He writes about the story thinking that this type of thing wouldn’t happen or seem to happen in Redmond Oregon. The story continues with glimpses of a simple boring life and then some strangeness. I think this entire story was a bit intriguing to me because of the setting and plot of the story. The author goes back and forth from writing about a boring life to writing about a strange life and then his empty life and then back to the boring life and then the strange life and then the empty life again. While reading Benjamin Percy’s story Dial Tone I was interested in his writing and how Benjamin Percy connected the mystery of a murder to a telemarketer that sits at a cubicle. I enjoyed this story and the way it was told. We learn who the character is and his boring empty life.
Kyleigh McArthur
I’d like to respond to dial tone today in my reading response. I found it a very captivating story and it felt to me like a movie that has you confused until the very end where everything starts to make sense because of one key detail. I was confused at first by the detail used to describe the main character and also confused with him when he wasn’t sure why he had a bloodshot eye or scraped knuckle. I was also concerned about Pete Johnston and what happened to him, until the main character decided to describe what it would be like to kill someone and what he would do and feel in the moment. He described what happened to Pete, to the detail about the knife entering the body and what it felt like comparing it to entering a woman’s body. It almost made it easier for me to visualize or picture this scene, as weird of a comparison as it was, it worked. Then when he went on to describe climbing the radio tower and how his legs were trembling, I could picture what it was like to be climbing or even just using my legs for so much in a workout that they start to tremble because they are so exhausted. Percy wrote his story so well by using descriptions and comparisons that I haven’t before seen used, or haven’t seen used a lot. It was a very curious piece, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, my favorite added detail was the one where he made it apparent that when on a call you can get messages from the past, so he heard himself kill Pete and then almost talked to himself, it was crazy!
Johnny Bishop
This week I’m going to respond to Dial tone. Reading through the story reminded me of reading through Charles Dickens A tale of Two Cities because it took a minute and a simple detail to actually understand what was happening. I also felt empathetic towards his feelings about the man that he attacked. The author made it feel very real as if I was there witnessing the act for myself. In my opinion that is what makes a fictional story real. Even if it is the smallest detail that keeps the reader hooked. I actually have to remind myself that I’m reading something fictional because the kind of fiction that I read always seems real to me.
Jewel Blanchard
This week, my reading response is on Emergency by Denis Johnson. I had to read through it a couple of times but even after reading it through a couple of times, I’m not sure I understand what actually happened in the story and what the story is trying to tell. I understand what was written but don’t actually understand what it is trying to tell. I felt rather confused, so I read it a couple of times and read the reading response page and at the end you state that this story contains ridiculousness and humor in the role of storytelling, and I must be boring because I did not get the humor that much. I tried to see where the humor was, and I was able to see it through the character of Georgie. The author does well at character development of Georgie I think and setting the scene. The imagery given because they are on drugs is interesting and made sense like at the hospital and while they were driving around. The small details of what was happening in the story helped me enter the strange new world that they presented in the story. It was an interesting read to say the least.
Ta'Mariah Jenkins
One of the things I noticed about all these stories is the mix of nonfiction and fiction that’s incorporated. The use of their own experiences and lives, in order to develop the plot for their stories. I feel like there is an intervention between the two concepts. Whether that is a good or bad thing is dependent on the direction the author is trying to get the writers to perceive. After reading all the stories, I found Dial Tone by Percy to be the most captivating as for plot, but the story I want to talk about is ” Don’t Wrote What You Know by Brett Anthony Johnston.
When first reading the article, I simply thought it was going to be a “think outside the box” concept but I was surprised to find that the author was pointing to how much we really know. You can’t really think outside the box if you don’t have cardboard, if you know what I’m saying. Thoughts start off with experiencing or observing things. Thinking outside of the box is easier said then done.
Another part I found interesting in the article was objection of peoples stories and how the author felt about that. Characters in stories are representations of real life things and feelings. They may be presented in a type of fiction, but the fiction is along the basis of real life and a bigger sum of something that has happened, or how a person has felt. I really liked this article and its representation of the knowledge we have is more than we may even know.
Casey Fetterhoff
Off topic, but I’ll start by saying this week really reminded me of the works of a Polish artist named Zdzisław Beksiński (try saying that one five times real fast!) in the surreal, psychosis, dream-like inspirations of the art and writing presented. I have an obsession with Beksinski and his art, and I’m so glad to have this topic on my plate! For this reading response, I chose the story “Dial Tone”. What actually struck me most about this story was not the strangeness, as I know the week’s topic is, but the contrast-The way the author changes the narrative from normal, to strange, to normal, to strange again. It was very significant to me to see a contrast and cycling pattern in the presentation of the story, and I think the contrast and cycling helped make the strange parts stand out more. Think about some more outlandish books you may have read-Where crazy things happening are not longer that crazy by the end of the story. This story, however, douses you in cold water, then warms you up, and then douses you again. It’s a great way to keep the reader in a constant state of excitement, and I loved reading it.
Gabriel Miller
Out of the three stories, I feel that “A Country Doctor” was easily the most abstract. In “Dial Tone” had a more unconventional plot, it still had enough logic to it to easily understand the overall story: That the man hanging from the radio tower is the narrator, and that the story uses the theme of echoing to tell this. Even though the actions in the story are more surreal than “A Country Doctor,” the theming creates a through line to make sense of it. In “A Country Doctor,” however, there is no true through line. It’s essentially a reversal of the way “Dial Tone” is presented, as instead of a surreal story told in a comprehensible way, “A Country Doctor” has a normal story told in a more surreal way.
At a surface level, the story of “A Country Doctor” is about a doctor that tries to visit a far away patient despite losing his horse, and is unable to cure the patient. The small details of the story, such as the groom leaving red toothmarks on Rosa instead of a kiss, and how the infected wound is described as a flower. These sorts of details left me confused when I first read them, especially when deciding if things were literal or symbolic, but that confusion lends to the theme of disorientation in the story itself. The blunt beginning of the story with simple and direct sentences helps to give attention to the situation, but the surreal elements mostly come about randomly.
Devin Byrd
My first instinct when considering how to describe “Emergency” was to describe it as a roller coaster ride, but roller coasters typically stay on the tracks and predictably start and end. Reading “Emergency” was more like riding a busted shopping cart down a mountain highway during peak traffic. I’d sooner expect to read it from a police report than I would a book.
The opening of the story immediately seems a bit unfocused, but doesn’t entirely forsake the hope of a sane plot, or at least some semblance of meaning or structure. But only a few paragraphs in it’s easy to see that the narrator has no desire, or perhaps ability, to make sense of the characters’ actions or thoughts. The narrator, referred to in the text only as “Fuckhead”, and their friend George are two hospital employees that are far more concerned with steadily ingesting a stream of LSD and mystery pills, and entertaining their own fanciful whims over pretty much everything else.
The story’s opening in the hospital and the characters’ positions within it initially suggest some sort serious nature to the story, but that notion is promptly erased as the two characters quickly engage in a series of nonsensical actions and dialogues that the narrator never really attempts to explain or justify, and persist throughout the story from beginning to end. Their behavior ranges from the silly to psychopathic, and I genuinely hope the characters and events within the story are not real, or inspired by any real events, and if they are, I do honestly hope those two are locked away.
Timberly Kneebone
I read Denis Johnson’s “Emergency” for this week’s reading response. Honestly when reading this story I was extremely confused. The author obviously made the story slightly deceptive Although the story had plot it almost seemed to have no reasoning or point behind it. The story started in the middle of a scene which made it seem almost unfocused. When reading the story a sense of humor emerges. The only problem is I didn’t find it funny. The lack of focus among character and setting shows that the author is trying to bring you to a new perspective. Behaviors within the characters are extremely bipolar and range from psychopathic to humorous. The description in the story really helped create a visual in the reader’s head. Although it was definitely confusing at times there was always a visual running through my head. I honestly thought the piece was enjoyable but was also extremely confusing.
Curtis Wolfe
I’m writing my response for “Dial Tone” by Percy. I found the way the narrator use of different voices was very intriguing. The way Percy put the setting in the beginning of the work very intriguing. The way he was able to describe managers, felt like a very realistic element in his story. There were some confusing parts in the work while reading through, but the reader was given an important detail, it all came together. I felt like it was and easy fun read.
Zofia Sheesley
I read Dial Tone. Strong Strong Strong opening. So candid and a little startling. When the author starts talking about going to work and doing the same thing everyday, turning on the computer, putting on the headset, etc, I could feel it in my body and I could feel the utter disappointment, I worked at an Insurance Business as a Licensed Insurance Professional and that is DRAINING, so I get it. And then the unravel starts. The forgetting things, like the beginning of Alzheimers or Dementia. This stroy is such a monotonous base line with horror mixed in, the clear murder that happened over the phone while he was at work and the guy hanging from the cell tower with his cheeks pecked out, its bone-chilling. The mundane tone of just an average guy working a regular boring job and then horrible things snuck in makes this whole story work. And then HE WAS THE MURDERER, somehow, maybe, i don’t even know, this whole thing is trippy and I love it. The strange unfamiliar familiarity of it all definitely kept me engaged and enthralled in this world. All in all, this was a gripping, horrifyingly relatable story. It hurt me to read because it was so “every american’s plight” but also murderous and scary. It felt like watching a thriller where the killer is revealed at the end but you’ve been picking up clues and guessing the whole time.
Anna Johnson
I am choosing to respond to “Dial Tone” by Percy. Right away I was captured into the first sentence when the jogger spotted the hanging body from a cell tower. As I continue to learn about this man, I caught myself being uncomfortable with what this setting looks like. A man who is hung and we hear about birds pecking on him later which added to my uncomfortableness. I think the story was very interesting and we learn about the protagonist who we think is this ordinary guy. He is a telemarketer, works in a cubicle office for three years now, meets co-workers who he doesn’t seem to like, so we know his life is simple and boring.
What kept me interested was the use of the different tones by the narrator and the use of imagery. What caught my attention specifically was the call with Pete Johnson, it was odd because I didn’t expect there to be something like what happened, hearing ruckus and then the line being cut off. Later on, we learn that it was him all along, he was the one who murdered Pete. This was a major plot twist for me and was a bit confusing to piece together. I thought the entire story was put together nicely and was uniquely told from who we thought was a normal guy.