Andrea Caswell
A CRAFT CHAT WITH KIM MAGOWAN

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

In her story “The Back Nine” (Issue 45), Kim Magowan shows us a character with a growing list of personal losses, trying to come to terms with the lost connections that still haunt her.

“You rejected people, and then they died, and your feelings of longing or bitterness had nowhere to fasten onto. Regret undulated like some aquatic plant.”

Kim Magowan, “THE back nine” from Cleaver Issue 45

Andrea: Where did this story begin for you? With the main character of Marianne, or a general situation, or the story’s thematic preoccupations? Thanks for sharing your early ideas as you crafted the narrative.

Kim: This story has a basis in fact. Several high school classmates of mine have died in the past decade, and “Sad News” is, indeed, the subject heading of these emails that go round announcing their deaths. Another classmate of mine died just a couple of months ago, after I’d already written this story. I guess I’m getting to an age where these deaths will start seeming more normal and commonplace, but right now, I experience each one as shocking. (A mortal being in denial of my mortality!). For a couple of days after one of these “Sad News” announcements, the email thread keeps growing, and I find myself obsessively tracking everyone’s comments. It’s a way I can both pay respect and make sense of these losses. One of my classmates mentioned something about being on “the back nine” of our lives, and though I’m not a golfer, that phrase burrowed into my brain. The next morning I started this story.

Andrea: The POV is third-person, but the distance varies, sometimes close to Marianne’s inner experience, and at others, seemingly further away than close-third. Could you give us a sense of how you modulated the POV, or used it to suggest the protagonist’s comfort level with her emotions?

Kim: As I reread the story, I see what you mean. Those junctures where we’re more removed from Marianne’s mind are mostly when she’s reading other people’s memories of Chip. Her most distinctive moment of contact with him is a kind of anti-contact, when he’s facing her but looking through her, so she can’t entirely access how classmates closer to Chip see him. Memories that to her are a little repugnant—she calls them “violent”—are warm ones to her classmates. At the end of the story, she’s removed again, unable to account for why she still displays an unflattering photo of herself and her ex-husband. But my hope is that the reader will have thoughts about what that photo means to her, what it is “proof” of, even if Marianne “doesn’t have the capacity to name” it. I see Marianne as a limited character, carefully guarding her emotions and her insights, because truly feeling them, and truly seeing people, is frightening. It’s always scary, to be proximate to loss.

Andrea: At first the title felt like a mismatch, with its golf terminology as we’re meeting a former football player. Yet within a few paragraphs, it became clear that a larger metaphor was at play (!) regarding sports idioms and “the game of life,” as well as gender differences in approaching that “game.” Please tell us about the title, and the possibilities it opened up for you with “The Back Nine.”

Kim: I mentioned this already, but the title was the seed of the story, the kernel of truth from which the story sprung. My writer friend Mike read an early draft, and he didn’t like the title: he thought it was a cliché. Though I’m often willing to bail on titles (I suck at titles), I clung to this one, partly because the phrase had dug into my brain, and partly for the reasons you describe above. In high school, sports matter; sports are how a lot of friendships are formed, and they convey social status. Almost forty years later, I still remember who the varsity captains of my high school’s teams were: football, track, soccer, field hockey, ice hockey, tennis, crew, and lacrosse. Playing sports is one of the early ways we start coping with losses; being a “good sport” is about a graceful approach to loss. So those things were all in my head regarding the title: that in high school, sports have an outsized role in one’s life and lexicon. I understood Mike’s point about how “the back nine” as a cliché, but that made the analogy more interesting to me—the idea that life is a game that, ultimately, we all must lose. (Heavy thought! Well, this story is all about the painful confrontation with mortality, something few of us cheerfully face).

Andrea: What were some challenges you experienced while writing or revising the story? How did you address them?

Kim: I wrote this story quickly. It was one of those bursting-to-get-out stories. I’ve been thinking a lot about aging and dying lately; I see preoccupations with mortality in much of my fiction and nonfiction from the last year. I’m definitely one of those writers who processes thoughts by alchemizing them into stories. All this is to say—the challenge of writing this story was that writing it made me sad. It made me think about things I don’t like thinking about.
The craft problem I had with the story was how to end a story about endings, in the close-third perspective of a character who tries to avoid pressing her bruises. I thought a lot about those items on the table; I saw the ending in an almost cinematic way, as a film shot, a tableau. I thought about what Marianne literally displayed, and what those items displayed about Marianne.

Andrea: What are you working on now?

Kim: Two big things, which feels very daunting! But fortunately, I have a partner for one of them. Michelle Ross and I have a collection of co-authored stories coming out early next year from EastOver Press. Our book is called Don’t Take This the Wrong Way (that title is in part a nod to the way we wrote these stories, emailing paragraphs back and forth). Writing those stories together has been so fun and joyful. I highly recommend collaborative writing! We just finished final edits, and we have a lot of book promotion tasks ahead. Promotion generally feels like a grind, but it will be much more pleasant getting to do them with Michelle, and we’re in great hands at EastOver Press. Also, I have another short story collection of my own, my third collection, that I think is just about done. I still need to puzzle some things out about the manuscript—identify weak links, tweak the sequence, figure out the right story to open with and the right title, but I’m close. I’m within spitting distance.

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Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Writing Tips.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #45.