#because I always remember the function on clip halfway through a file and turn it on and forget like I'm in a nursing home | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

soybeantree · 3 years

Text

a baby changes everything pt.2

pairing: do kyungsoo x (reader) genre/warning: artificial insemination, fluff word count: 3.6k description: when you decided to have a baby, you knew everything would change, but this is not what you expected… parts: o1 | a/n: october installment of our ‘trying to write a kyungsoo story for every month that he is gone’ series.

A fresh pile of folders thuds on your desk, and you raise an eye to the Filing Clerk who offers a weak smile. “You said you wanted the reports from the last three years.”

You did. You need them, but they forebode a long day. “Park wants my analysis by this evening?” You clarify, and he nods. You return the gesture before grabbing a clip and twisting

your hair up and out of your face. No time like the present to begin.

An alert sounds on your phone when you’re at the halfway point of the report pile. Resurfacing from the sea of numbers, you check the notification and suppress a string of curses. “Parent Teacher Conference” flashes on the screen. You had forgotten. You had promised your son you would remember, and you had forgotten.

The remaining half of the report pile mocks you. You have thirty minutes until the conference and no hope of making it through in time. You swipe away the alert to reveal your lock screen, a photo from Theo’s seventh birthday. Theo had covered the both of you in cake while Kyungsoo, standing behind you, managed to remain cake-free. You pick up the phone to call in the cavalry.

When you had chosen to undergo artificial insemination, against the advice and protestation of your family, you had been prepared to be a single mother. You knew, or at least thought you knew, the challenges you would face and were prepared to handle each one as they arose. After the first weeks with no sleep, no chance to shower, and no concept of self, you had been more than happy to have someone who would come on the first call.

Kyungsoo answers on the first ring. As the heir and president of a multinational corporation, one would expect to reach a secretary or voice-mail, but he answers each time.

“If Theo is still insisting that his grandfather will get him a pony for Christmas, know that I have spoken with his grandfather about it.”

“Theo hasn’t said anything about a pony.” You switch the phone to your other ear and close the file in front of you. “Have I missed a conversation?” The other end remains silent.

“Rather than offer other suggestions for your call, please tell me why you are calling.”

You chew the inside of your cheek for a moment before deciding the parent teacher conference is the more pressing issue. Kyungsoo agrees the moment you mention it. He already had it on his schedule. You can hear him climbing into his car before the call ends. With crisis averted, you return to the pile of reports.

Kyungsoo texts you when the conference ends – it went well - and asks if he can take Theo to dinner and ice cream. You agree. You have nearly finished your analysis but still need to do some grocery shopping, and grocery shopping is always easier without a seven-year-old.

They are waiting at the park down the street from your apartment when you walk by with your arm full of groceries. The bags dig into your arms, and a stray strand of hair refuses to leave your eye alone no matter how many times you blow it out of the way. After another failed attempt, you call out to the two. Theo stops mid jabber and races towards you. His face bright with enthusiasm. He restarts his jabbering as he skids to a stop in front of you. Kyungsoo follows at a milder pace. You glance from your son to him. “I take it you know what he’s saying.” You joke as you shift a bag further up your hip and blow at the stray strand again.

“Only because I was there when it happened.” He reaches forward and brushes the strand behind your ear. His fingertips graze your temple as he does. A shiver races down your spine, and you blame it on the cool autumn breeze. Taking one of the bags from you, he starts down the sidewalk to your apartment.

“I was telling you about the parent teacher conference...which you missed.” Theo huffs as he stretches his legs to match his father’s gait. You walk beside him, sandwiching the boy between you and Kyungsoo.

“I do want to hear all about that, but first what’s this I hear about a pony?” You stare down at him, and he stares at his shoes, his shoulders rising to cover his ears. “Theo?”

“The last time I was with grandpa I just said I would like a pony. I didn’t mean he had to buy me one.” He darts his gaze to you, then to his dad. Kyungsoo keeps a straight face as he stares ahead, so your son turns back to you.

You shake your head, and he smiles a toothless grin. He had lost another tooth a week ago and took every opportunity to show off the incoming big boy tooth. “What have I told you about your grandfather?”

He sighs, his tiny frame collapsing with the loss of breath, but he manages to roll his head back and stares up at the night sky. “Just because Grandpa has all the money doesn’t mean I should ask him for everything.”

“Because?”

“Because things do not make me happy.” His conviction is lacking, but you nod, encouraging him on. “And I have everything I need.”

“That’s right.” You three stop in front of the entrance to your apartment building. “Now, take that grocery bag from your father and thank him for all his help today.” His body droops even further, but he holds out his arms.

Kyungsoo clutches the bag tighter to him. “I can carry it up.”

“That’s okay. You’ve done enough.” The words slip out before you can comprehend their double meaning. Kyungsoo’s face turns to stone. “I’m sure you have work waiting for you.” You try to salvage the situation. “And Theo is more than capable of carrying groceries.”

He nods. A forced smile pushes against his cheeks, but he drops to his knees to pull Theo into a one-armed hug before handing him the bag. When he stands, you two stare at each other. His fingers twitch, ready to reach out for you. And he could. It would be normal, natural, but you remain rooted to the concrete. In the end, he waves, an awkward gesture, and is gone.

Even after seven years, you are still trying to figure out your relationship with Kyungsoo. When you had selected sperm for insemination, you had never expected to meet the donor or have any form of relationship with him. Fate is funny though. Before you had even given birth to Theo, Kyungsoo entered your life. He was there when Theo was born, and within that first month stepped into the role of co-parent. He watched him take his first steps, have his first birthday, go off to his first day of school. But he has also stood beside you when you quit your job, when you needed a plus-one to social functions, when your dad had his heart attack. Co-parent no longer seems to fit him, but nothing else does.

“I think my teacher likes Dad.” Theo pulls you back to the present as you reach your front door.

You unlock the door and hold it open for him, sneaking through with the groceries before it closes on you. “Why do you say that?”

“Because she kept going like this while we were talking.” He faces you and flutters his eyelashes. “And she laughed at everything he said, and you said that if a girl does those things it means she likes you.”

You nod along, the conversation fresh in your memory. He had come home in a state last week with many questions about girls. You had answered as many of them as you could and told him some would have to wait until he was older.

Setting the grocery bags on the counter, you start to pull things out and hand Theo the cold food for him to put away in the fridge. “Do you think your dad liked her back?” The question surprises you.

Theo shakes his head. ��No. He kept doing this:” he clears his throat, loudly and pointedly, “anytime she asked him a question that wasn’t about me.”

You smother a snort and mask any sound which may have escaped with the folding of the bags. “That sounds like your dad.” The image of Kyungsoo in a too small desk forcing a starry-eyed woman back on topic threatens to unleash another snort.

“Mom, do you like Dad?” You choke on air as you face Theo. He stares at you all innocence.

“Of course, I like your dad. He’s a good dad.” You grab a handful of groceries and head for the pantry before he can ask a follow up question. “Now tell me what you talked about with your teacher and slower this time.”

He huffs but answers. “She said I should join a sports club because it would be good for my social development.” His voice goes high and airy with the last words, and you know he is quoting her verbatim.

“What did your dad say?” You ask as you grab the remaining food and head back to the pantry.

“He agreed with my teacher, and she gave him a list of the clubs.” Theo closes the fridge and climbs up on one of the counter’s stools.

“Do you have the list?” He shakes his head, and you make a mental note to ask Kyungsoo for a copy. “Do you want to join one of the clubs?” He nods. “Which one?”

“Soccer.”

You change the mental note to ask Kyungsoo what you will need to do to sign him up and who to contact about schedules and equipment. “That sounds fun. Now, you’ve still got an hour of homework time before bed.” He groans, but you pat him on the butt, shooing him off to his room.

“Mom, where are my cleats?”

“In your closet on the bottom shelf.” You hear the clatter of toppling boxes, followed by thuds which you assume are shoes being thrown aside. Someone will have a room to clean after their game. You make the mental note as you finish up the snack pack: almonds, grapes, and dark chocolate, a perfect pick me up during half time.

“Theo, are you ready?” You ask as you dump ice on the top of the cooler bag and zip it up. After two more crashes, your son appears in the kitchen, dressed in his full kit including his cleats. “What have I told you about wearing your cleats in the house?”

“Mom!” He whines, his shoulders dropping in exasperation. He, thankfully, refrains from stomping his foot.

“Don’t ‘mom’ me. Do you see those scuffs on the floor?” He twists his torso to glance at the living room floor he nonchalantly raced through. Thin white lines scar the dark wood. He faces you again and offers a grimace in apology. “Take them off, put them in your bag, and wear your sneakers until we get to the field.”

He opens his mouth, ready to protest, but one look from you silences him. He crouches down and begins to unlace his cleats. “Is dad almost here?” Kyungsoo had offered to pick you and Theo up, saving you from a forty-five-minute bus ride.

“Yes,” you grab your phone from the counter to double check his last text. “By the time you finish what I told you to do, he will be here.” Tucking the phone in your back pocket, you grab your purse.

“Which car is he bringing?” Theo glances up at you, cleats in hand. His eyes shine with expectation.

“Why does that matter?” You cross your arms and arch a brow.

He has the decency to look sheepish. “I was just wondering.”

“And I was just wondering how long it’s going to take you to put on your sneakers.” He darts off and you shake your head.

Theo reappears wearing his sneakers and with his athletic bag slung over his shoulder. You do a final check of the apartment before grabbing the cooler bag and heading down to the parking garage where you know Kyungsoo will be waiting.

He is waiting by the elevator doors. The cooler bag is off your shoulder before you even start your greeting, not that you have a chance to give one. Theo is off, talking a mile a minute, as soon as he sees his dad. Kyungsoo smiles and nods along to the excited chatter. He offers you a smile, the only greeting he can manage with Theo’s barrage. You return the greeting as you follow him to his car which to Theo’s delight is the Range Rover.

“Soobin is going to be so jealous!” He comments as he climbs in.

“One of his teammates.” You answer Kyungsoo’s furrowed brow. “Apparently, he and Theo have a bit of rivalry about whose dad is better.”

“Mine is. Soobin is stupid.”

“Theo!” You scold. Kyungsoo closes the door, saving him from your reprimand. You glare at him, but he is already walking to the back to place the cooler in the trunk. “Boys.” You sigh as you climb into the car.

Theo’s team wins. While neither of the goals was his, he did have an assist. Soobin did score a goal, and the brewing foul mood was visible to both you and Kyungsoo which was why you both enthusiastically celebrated his skills when he trudged over after the game. Kyungsoo picked him up, a feat which will become impossible in the coming years, and promised dinner at his favorite restaurant.

The three of you sit around a table laden with food. Kyungsoo had also promised him he could have anything he wanted off the menu, and Theo, the growing boy that he is, ordered more than he could consume in five dinners. You throw a look at Kyungsoo as the waiter places the last dish on the table, but he shrugs and helps Theo load food onto his plate. You grab a plate of your own and begin to fill it more modestly.

“Has work calmed down at all?” Kyungsoo asks as Theo’s mouth is too full to continue talking.

You shake your head. “Unfortunately, not. I have a pile of folders on my desk waiting for me on Monday, and I’m sure more folders will be added to it before Monday even arrives. Mr. Park said he would hire an assistant for me, but I have yet to hear of any interviews, though I’ve reminded him.” You pause, biting on your fork as you think. “Three times now. I’m ready to send him a very nasty email depending on how bad Monday is.”

“I do know the CEO of your company.” Kyungsoo suggests as he leans across the table to grab a side dish. “We’ve attended social functions together.”

“Don’t you dare.” You wag your fork at him. “I am more than capable of handling Mr. Park. Besides, he’s not that bad, and I wouldn’t want him peeing his pants after a phone call from the CEO.”

“You still pee your pants as a grown up?” Theo joins the conversation, horror contorting his features. He had to wear pull-ups to bed until he was four. When he went a whole week without wetting the bed, Kyungsoo had taken you two on a weekend trip to the beach.

“Some people do, especially if you get a call from your boss’s boss’s boss.” You side eye Kyungsoo. He smothers a smile. “You don’t have anything to worry about though. You dad would never let that happen to you.”

“Of course not, because dad is going to be my boss.” Confidence brims from his eyes as he inhales another mouthful. You glance at Kyungsoo who shakes his head.

“Theo, where did you hear that?” He asks.

“Grandpa.” Though with all the food in his mouth, it sounds more like “fampfa”. He swallows and continues. “He said that when I grow-up I’m going to work at the company and when dad is done working that I’m going to have his job.”

“Do you want to work at my company?” Kyungsoo’s question eases the chokehold that you have on your fork, and you reach for your glass of water as you remind yourself to remain calm.

Kyungsoo put an end to his family’s machinations to steal your son long before Theo was born.

Theo’s lips purse, and he rocks his head from side to side before shaking it firmly. “I don’t think so. Your work is boring. I want to have a fun job.” Kyungsoo snorts. The uncharacteristic gesture pulls a laugh from you. Within moments, the table is full of laughter.

The combination of the game, a full meal, and the gentle hum of the car ride puts Theo to sleep before you reach home. Kyungsoo carries him up to the apartment for you. While you know you should wake him to shower and change, his face, soft with sleep, convinces you to let Kyungsoo place him in his bed. You need to wash the sheets anyway.

Kyungsoo returns to the kitchen as you are pulling a bottle of wine from the hiding place in the pantry. “A nightcap?” He asks, stopping at the counter.

“I need a drink.” You go to the cabinet and pull out two glass. “Would you like some?” He nods, and you fill both, yours a little more generously than his.

He cups the glass, swirling the liquid, as you take a large gulp of yours. “Is this about my father?” He watches the dark liquid coat the edges of the glass.

You lean back against the counter next to him and nod. “I’m grateful that Theo has a relationship with his grandfather, but I need him to realize that Theo is not his heir and that he can’t just buy him whatever he wants. At the same time though, I wonder if I am a bad mom because I’m stopping someone from buying him a pony.”

“You’re not a bad mom. Theo doesn’t need a pony. If he was going to pursue Equestrian Sports, maybe.” He shrugs, smiling at you. “But I think he is happy with soccer.”

You snort, taking another sip of your wine. “Did you do Equestrian Sports when you were his age?”

“No, but I did have a horse.” You raise a brow. “I barely rode him. There wasn’t time. My father was training me to be his heir.”

“And that’s exactly what I don’t want for Theo.” You glance at Kyungsoo and find that you have slid closer to him. The wine warms your body, and you find your attention drawn to his lips as he speaks.

“I know. I’ll talk with my father.” His voice is low and husky. His lips vibrating with the words. Wine coats them, making them shine in the dim light. Perhaps, you should have turned on more lights than the lamp in the living room. Theo’s question comes back to you. Do you like Kyungsoo? “Y/N?”

You shake your head, clearing the alcohol from your thoughts. A stray hair falls into your face. “Sorry. Thank you.” You try to focus, your hand going to brush the hair out of your eye.

Kyungsoo’s hand reaches it first. He tucks it behind your ear. His hand lingers on your cheek. His fingertips light on your skin. “Sorry.” He whispers. Your cheek grows cold as he reclaims his glass and swallows a gulp. “I should call a driver. This wine is hitting harder than I expected.”

“Or,” the word slips out, and you blame the wine for loosening your lips. “You could stay the night. The couch pulls out, and I have a spare set of your clothes.” You keep your gaze fixed on the living room lamp. “It’s been a bit since we’ve got to enjoy one of your breakfasts.” You add on when the silence stretches between you.

“I see. You just want me for my body.” He breaks the tension.

You snort. The wine in your glass sloshing and threatening to spill out. “If that’s what you want to think then sure.”

He takes the glass from you and sets it on the counter next to his. You’ve both had enough wine for tonight. “Do you have stuff for breakfast tomorrow?”

“My fridge is stocked with every healthy thing imaginable.”

“Healthy.” He scrunches up his nose. His glasses fall down the bridge when he relaxes it, and you fight the urge to take them off.

“Is that a yes or no?” You speak around the lump in your throat.

He thinks. The moments tick by as you berate yourself for asking something too stupid and risqué. Kyungsoo is Theo’s dad. No matter how blurred the line between you two grows that line will always be as crisp as a fresh stroke on paper, and you should be avoiding anything that could complicate that relationship.

“Yes.” You blink at Kyungsoo and wonder if hope has spread a filter over your ears. “Y/N?”

“Awesome.” You answer, assured that you heard correctly. “I’ll go get the clothes.” You start towards your bedroom but throw over your shoulder. “Since it is still early, but only if you’re up for it, there is this new movie on Netflix that I’ve been wanting to watch.”

“So, Netflix and chill?”

Stuttering to a halt, you whip your head around. He smiles at you all innocence. “You’re ridiculous.” He shrugs. With a shake of your head, you march into your room, his laughter trailing after you.

#kwritersworldnet #kyungsoo #do kyungsoo #exo #kyungsoo drabble #kyungsoo series #exo drabble #exo series #hmw #kyungsoo collection

57 notes · View notes

beautymouth72-blog · 5 years

Text

From the Edge of the World: An Interview with Brian Phillips

DECEMBER 9, 2018

HOW DO PEOPLE find meaning — in their history, in their community, in the landscape around them? Brian Phillips has traveled untold distances in search of an answer to this question, but he never quite figures it out. He knows he can’t, and that’s part of the fun. Instead, the essays documenting his journeys embrace the messiness and complexity of this world, and he operates with an enthusiastic resignation to the unknowable.

Phillips is eager to cut into the unknown, not in order to understand it, but rather to arrive at even greater questions and deeper mysteries — the good stuff. The essays in his first collection, Impossible Owls, take him to oddities at the edges of our understanding, as far as Russia and India, and back in time into the archives of his hometown of Ponca City, Oklahoma. Unbeholden to any sort of tidy knowing, Phillips follows the most absurd, tragic, and compelling elements of his subjects wherever they lead. His essays dig their way down determinedly and wind their way unpredictably, like a cross-examination at the hands of a relentlessly curious, self-aware, and hilarious interrogator.

The collection contains eight essays, four of which are previously published but freshly revised. Collections are often called “wide ranging,” but almost never do they span such topics as, among other things, the Iditarod, sumo wrestling, the great Russian animator Yuri Norstein, and the British royal family. Taken together, this energetic and imaginative collection highlights the strange and nonsensical corners of our world that sit beyond our line of sight.

ISAAC LEVY-RUBINETT: The subjects of these essays are all over the place. How do you find topics? At what point does something go from an interesting topic to the focus of an essay?

BRIAN PHILLIPS: That’s probably the hardest part of the whole job for me: knowing what to write about next. Because I do jump all over the place a lot. I find that I have a sort of restless imagination, in the sense that I can get obsessed with a story for a good while but when it’s finished, I don’t want to do more on the same topic. I want to find something entirely different, which is also a virtue I like in essay writing generally. I like essays that go places you aren’t expecting and with spontaneous turns that you didn’t see coming in advance. I really dislike stories that telegraph everything that’s going to happen at the beginning of the piece. So it’s a really unfocused process, of just trying to be open to what comes across my screen.

I got interested in Yuri Norstein, the Russian animator who I wrote about in “The Little Gray Wolf Will Come,” when a friend of mine, who ended up traveling with me to Russia as my translator, sent me a YouTube clip of one of his short films, Hedgehog in the Fog. And I watched it and thought, “That’s cute,” and then didn’t think about him again for two years. And much later, I was on some Wikipedia page about lost movies, movies that had either vanished or never been finished, or might have had canonical importance but that we didn’t have anymore. I was reading through this list and came across Norstein’s “The Overcoat” adaptation, which he’d been working on for 37 years and never managed to finish. And I kind of remembered having seen Hedgehog in the Fog when Alyssa sent it to me a couple of years earlier. And then I just started poking around and reading about him, and it became clear fairly quickly that this was something I wanted to write about. But if I had just clicked three different links that morning, I never would have done the story. I could have gone on to do something completely different. So it’s tenuous. I was speaking to a college class last week, and they asked that question: “How do we find topics?” And I felt really unprepared to advise them on that. I wish I knew, honestly. This is the longest “I don’t know” in the history of interviews.

Most of your essays involve traveling to faraway places and trying to make sense of them. In the final essay, “But Not Like Your Typical Love Story,” you focus your attention on your hometown of Ponca City, Oklahoma. What was it like training your focus on a place to which you have a personal connection?

It was a big change after having done a lot of pieces that involved far-flung travel and immersing myself in worlds that I didn’t know well at all. Like, before I went to Japan, I didn’t really know much about sumo wrestling. So it was definitely a change of mental frame to go into a story where I was partly writing about my own experience and also telling this story of this place that I had known and heard in many iterations since I was a little kid, involving, in some cases, people I had known or seen when I was a child. The main difference was just that I had known about these people for a lot longer and they hit home in a slightly different way for me.

That felt important to me, because the book was about borders and thresholds and places you come to the end of one or another kind of known world. It’s about gaps on the map and boundaries of experience where you don’t know what lies on the other side. So it seems to me that it was necessary to confront my own version of that, which is … instead of going outward, going inward to home and figuring out how history functions in that way.

The Ponca City essay was really important to me for clarifying certain things about the perspective that I brought to other essays in the book. I tend to come at things sideways or from a slightly oblique angle, and a lot of that comes from having grown up in a place that I liked, in many ways, but felt like I didn’t quite fit in. You know, when you grow up in a small town and you feel like you have a different sensibility from the people around you, you are always in a slightly ironic position in your childhood universe. You leave your small town and go to the city, or go somewhere else, trying to find a place where you feel you belong, but then you find that that sideways relationship to things goes with you, and you’re always slightly defining yourself against your surroundings rather than with your surroundings, if that makes sense. This is a common and age-old story, but one that I’ve thought about a lot with respect to my own life. So I felt that going through that Ponca City story was a way to explore that kind of obliquity in a slightly more intimate and personal way than I was able to do when I was in Alaska, or watching The X-Files.

The essays in this collection span six years and two presidencies. What was it like engaging with your older work during our current historical moment?

I certainly wanted the book to speak to the world it was being released in. I wrote my book overlapping the two most recent presidencies, and of course did all of the revising under Trump. I felt, as I went through some of the older essays — this may be sort of writerly thinking, partly because I was writing about small-town Oklahoma and American conspiracy theories, which I’d actually written about under Obama — that they seemed kind of anticipatory. They seemed to fall into the chain of events that ultimately led to Trump. You know, how our dads listened to conspiracy radio in Oklahoma and they played the Rodney King riots on a loop at the pizza place. That was stuff that I’d written about in 2012, but when I was reading it under Trump, it stood out.

When I started revising, I had two options: I could think of these essays as finished works that represented the historical moments when they were published on the internet, or I could think of them as open to revision, and try to shape them for this moment.

From my perspective, it was about trying to make the essays as good as I could, and in some cases that had to do with drawing out some of those trends and parallels. I mostly chose the second course, partly because it’s hard for me not to tinker with my own work if I read something that seems bad. So in some ways I was making this large-scale choice to try to represent the world in 2018 more sagely, but then a lot of it was me being annoyed by stuff I wrote five years ago and wanting to bonk myself in the head because it should sound better.

You often stop short of offering a neat conclusion. Why?

I like things that don’t end in too clean a way. I like essays that leave things a little bit provisional, a little bit more nuanced than they seemed in the beginning. If I write an essay that clearly presents to the reader a situation of incomprehensible complexity, or a situation where knowledge kind of expires in the encounter with complexity, then I feel like that is, for me, often the more valuable kind of writing than essays that explain things, tie things off, and tell you what things mean. I like uncertainty and ambiguity and surprise, as aesthetic features.

I was thinking recently about Montaigne, the French writer who wrote some of the most important early essays. What’s so wonderful about Montaigne’s essays is how spontaneous they are. He’ll be going off on one historical tangent and then pivot halfway through and start talking about something else that seems only distantly connected, and then at the end you get this poetic juxtaposition that is just stunning. And he’ll do that in three pages — very, very briefly. I realized that this arc, in the tendencies of the essay over the last several hundred years, had a lot in common with what I also liked about blogging, when blogging was really a thing, where you felt like you could discover someone’s blog and get these vignettes. Maybe you didn’t know exactly where they were going to go, and they were really free to experiment, and sometimes they worked and sometimes they didn’t. There was a lot of spontaneity, and I found that moment kind of exhilarating. I think if I’ve tried to do anything as a writer of longer essays, it’s to convey those virtues in a longer form.

As a result, your essays often take a kind of winding and unpredictable path. How do you decide which twists and turns to take?

That’s something else that really depends on the story. I mean, the Japan story wasn’t easy to write in a lot of ways, but it was easy to plan because as I was experiencing it, I just knew what the essay was. I didn’t see the end of it until I got to the end of it, but when I got to the end of it in real life, I knew that was the end of the essay, so it was just a matter of coming home and translating that experience into words. In other stories, where the experience is not so conclusive, it can take a lot of feeling and finding my way in. That was the case with “Lost Highway,” where I got back from Area 51 and then couldn’t find my way into the piece, and I moved to Paris for a while. I went to extreme lengths to try and figure out what I was doing, and it really took a lot of additional thinking and feeling and I had to come back and go see the Trinity Site. That piece felt like putting together a jigsaw puzzle blindfolded.

I think I am uncomfortable with the idea of knowing anything. But I am really intrigued by the idea of productive unknowns, or resonant unknowns. If I can get to a place where the unknowns I’m confronting feel irreducible in some way, or feels like I can’t think my way through it or around it, then I feel like I’m in the right place. As I’m writing, I think the in-between process is often the process of trying to outwit the analytical tendency of my own brain to arrive at a conclusion. I want to continue finding my way through the mysteries and ambiguities of everything until I can’t keep going. To me, that’s the story.

Did you have to look hard for the owl references? It’s uncanny.

I added a couple of them, but some of them were always there. And strangely, some of them had been there in cuts and then I just restored the cut. Like, before I knew that owls were one of the key images of the book, I had written the Alaska essay and had ended up cutting from it a section about how people in Nome had seen this image of this snowy owl in their dreams before they reported alien abductions. And then as I was driving to the Trinity Site in New Mexico, I just happened upon this place called the Owl Cafe, which just happened to be where all the guys who were guarding the bomb before the first test and some of the nuclear scientists had lunch. It slowly dawned on me that owls were showing up a lot in some of these stories. So there were a couple places where I had to insert them, but it was never hard to find an owl. I don’t want to sell it as some sort of paranormal or magical event, but it was a little bit uncanny, at least.

They’ll follow you forever now.

And that’s really true. It turns out that when you write a book with owls in a title, people buy owls for you. Like, I’m a little overrun with owls right now. My mom keeps texting me when she finds an owl, and I’m like, “Don’t get it, mom.”

Isaac Levy-Rubinett is an editor and writer in Los Angeles.

Source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/from-the-edge-of-the-world-an-interview-with-brian-phillips/

0 notes