June 2004
On writing “Divers”

I wrote the original draft of “Divers” about a year and a half ago, when I first started writing short stories. In exercises that we had done in my fiction class, a lot of people were really extending their imaginations and coming up with some pretty far-out ideas, stuff that made me think what I was doing was probably pretty boring and unexciting. Luckily my professor for that class, Leigh Wilson (From the Bottom Up, Wind), sat me down and explained that plot didn’t have to be an explosion, some cataclysmic mind-bender, but just something to hang your hat on. I let that bubble in the back of my mind and just tried to let the characters and their relationships, the tangle that they formed, be the main attraction. At the same time the invasion of Iraq was gearing up pretty quickly, a situation that I had a very personal tie to, and which was also quite a tangle. It was pretty much all systems go and people were waiting for something to happen, waiting to be sent somewhere, waiting to hear bad news maybe. I felt like I never had time to wrap my head around the whole thing properly, and “Divers” was a way to get that across; not necessarily the discovery of a belief or feeling toward it, but the expression of ambivalence, of wondering who was right and who was wrong, and why that had become such a hard decision to make. That’s the heart of it I think. The story isn’t so much about a political or social landmark, but how those things interrupt our paths, obscure them enough that we wander away and get lost.

Extreme thanks to Leigh Wilson, who read the story first and let me know what it was really about, and all at the Tallman-Sawyer Workshop, without whom the story would have never left my notebook.

Read the story!