Andrea Caswell
A CRAFT CHAT WITH PATRICK STRICKLAND

In this Craft Chat, writer Patrick Strickland reveals how questions about loss and (dis)location guided him through years’ worth of drafts and revision, leading to the published version of his riveting story, “Screaming East on I-80” (Issue 47). Strickland spoke with senior fiction editor Andrea Caswell about his belief in the writing process, and his sense that he would eventually find a way to make this story work. 

“I’m sure we’re all, in one way or another, trying and failing to outrun some previous iteration of ourselves.”

Patrick Strickland

 

Andrea Caswell: The first sentence of this story is so powerful: I just want to get home, but home’s never quite where I left it. How did this story begin for you, aside from that sentence? Thanks for sharing how the piece initially developed. 

Patrick Strickland: The opening sentence came in a very late draft of this piece. This story, in fact, went through more drafts than any piece of fiction I’ve ever written. I’d been working as a journalist for more than a decade in the Middle East and Europe before I went back to school for an MFA. I wrote the first version of this in 2020, early in the pandemic, and it was a much shorter, less layered, and perhaps even more chaotic rendition. 

Over the years, different versions of the story racked up just north of a hundred rejections. But it still felt to me as if there was something there, if I could just get it right. I spent a long time trying to understand and draw conclusions from the narrator’s predicament. One thing that stood out to me was how he was in the distinct stage of life when you first understand that moving somewhere new isn’t a guarantee that you’ve escaped your old life, but that the place you left behind is no longer home. I know that feeling of rootlessness well, as I’m sure many people do. I left my hometown shortly after high school and have spent most of my adult life avoiding it, in part due to a fear that mere proximity to a place where heroin took a lot of people I knew might be enough to do me in. I hope that the sense of fear and hopelessness in the story is heightened by the narrator’s loss of his brother, a tragedy intertwined with his feelings about his hometown.

Andrea: The narrator hopes to escape the pain of his losses by leaving Texas, yet his loved ones are often front of mind. He’s haunted by them in a way that makes this piece feel like part-ghost story. Could you elaborate on this issue, what I might call, “Wherever you go, there you are”? 

Patrick: Exactly. He tears off to California—where else do we go to try to outrun ourselves?—with the hope of putting his losses behind him, but he learns quickly that you can’t ditch your life experiences. It reminds me of a line from the film Magnolia: “The book says we may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.” For this narrator, Hank and his mother represent that past most poignantly. I’m sure we’re all, in one way or another, trying and failing to outrun some previous iteration of ourselves.

Andrea: In the final exquisite paragraphs, the narrator experiences a sort of reckoning with his pain and its omnipresence in his life. Thoughts on endings, and how you knew this was the right one?  

Patrick: Thank you for those kind words! The ending is a part of the story that was more or less consistent from draft one through—I don’t know?—draft ten or eleven. The narrator knows he has to face his loss head-on, but he learns that the relief in doing that is so minimal that he can only laugh at the absurdity of his life. His life is chaotic and desperate, and those qualities have led him to a state of mind where he can hardly make sense of one moment or the next. He’s grappled for so long with the feeling—and I think we all have and do—that life merely happens to him, even when he’s trying to impose a degree of control over it. I’ve certainly felt that way before, and it throws into disarray your entire sense of whether you truly have any freedom of will. That was, I think, one of the more challenging aspects of writing this story. Most of the narrator’s choices only come in reaction to something—his brother passing, roommates wrecking the house, getting evicted—over which he has very little, if any, control. In the end, for him to experience a hard-earned, albeit gradual, change, I felt he had to come to terms with how little control he could exert.

“I understood that the sentences needed to be somewhat strange, do a lot of work, and have a hint of musicality to them here and there.” Patrick Strickland

Andrea: The story portrays a form of dystopia, the sense of an apocalypse at hand or on the horizon. What were some of your goals in showing a life or a world going up in flames, as it were?  

Patrick: Though this story is entirely fiction, there were some parts rooted in very visceral memories. I moved to the suburbs of Los Angeles not long after high school, and when I think of that time now, I remember so routinely seeing wildfires. I’d never really thought about wildfires at that point in my life, or much about climate change (this was a lifetime ago). In the story, the recurring presence of wildfires underscored the reality of the world we live in now: it doesn’t matter what you think about the climate catastrophe—it’s happening. I didn’t want to overstate that or make it part of his interior thoughts, but I felt it was necessary to include that reality. Now I live in Greece, and I go about my daily life like I would anywhere else. Meanwhile, the last couple months—much like every summer I’ve lived here—have seen wildfires break out in different parts of the country, and every year, it’s worse. To some extent, I could ignore it if I were inclined to do so, but at some point, none of us will be able to. No matter what day-to-day and even longer-term problems preoccupy us, the world is and has been burning all around us.

Andrea: What problems or challenges did you encounter in revision? How did you resolve them?

Patrick: As I mentioned earlier, this story had so many rejections. I felt fairly certain I’d never get it quite right. For a long time, I think, the narrator’s passivity in the face of what was happening to him made the story a difficult sell. It’s very challenging to convey that feeling I mentioned before—that life is something inflicted upon us. At some point, I understood I had to make it a much more cerebral story as far as the narrator was concerned. (After all, the plot is batshit.) That took a lot of work and a lot of time. I also understood that the sentences needed to be somewhat strange, do a lot of work, and have a hint of musicality to them here and there. Getting the voice right took a while. Then, for this final draft, I decided to print out the story and rewrite it from the start, making changes wherever it felt necessary, and it really came together. That was such a welcome development after four years of writing and rewriting it, and not ever feeling that it was there yet. I’m so grateful the story is out in the world now, and though it can be a slog to reread your own work, reading back through this really felt good.

Andrea: What are you working on now? 

Patrick: I’m working on a few more short stories. I have three or four in different stages of the process. I just finished my third nonfiction book, which will publish next spring, and it’s largely journalistic. So, I’ve pivoted back to focusing on short stories and hoping I can soon find a home for a collection of short fiction. Let me tell you what everyone already knows: it’s been brutal. I love writing and reading short stories, but as long as our literary art is determined by publishers forever lashed to the whims of a “market,” collections are tough. (Agents? Publishing houses? Give me a holler.) I’m also working on a novel, though it’s a long-haul project that, I expect, will take a decent while. I work full-time as the managing editor of a journalistic outlet, and writing fiction is slotted into early mornings or late evenings. The long and short of it—I’m just working on writing. Writing and editing are just about all I do.

Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Writing Tips.