In Process with: Nick White
On working in layers, getting deep in the research, and going Dragnet mode
Hi Friends,
Today’s In Process With… brings us to the desk of the writer and teacher Nick White. Nick’s collection, Sweet and Low, is one of my all time favorites; if you’ve ever taken a class with me, or discusssed short stories with me, you’ve heard me sing its praises.
Nick’s characters are deeply flawed and deeply desirous, and this always makes for quite a combination, the wobbliness and wantingness that propel characters and stories forward. In his story “The Curator,” one of the characters, Holcomb, a writer who is our protagonist’s competition in both romance and career, is so full of himself he doesn’t even imagine such competition possible and adopts a chummy attitude towards the more fledgling writer. One night, he links his arm through our narrator’s as they walk to the grave of a Very Famous Author that the southern town they live in has built an entire industry around, and, unnprompted, describes his thoughts upon waking up in the morning:
“Those bright few seconds,” he is saying, “I lie there in my bed and am not myself. I am not Bradley Holcomb, but just—-I don’t know, you know?—pure animal, pure need. Need to piss. Need to fuck. Need to—to…be. Really incredible, and disheartening, when my ego clicks back into place and I remember who I am.” Here, he pauses, gives me time to reflect, squeezes my arm. “You know what I mean?”
No, I tell him. I don’t.
Let’s take a moment and appreciate the punctuation in that dialogue up there. Can’t you hear that? Doesn’t it make you feel as if you have been involuntarily looped through Bradley Holcomb’s arm? Next to this scene, I wrote “He’s intolerable. It’s perfect—we’ve been set up for this foil.” Nick’s stories make me laugh a lot, but they also invoke a tenderness towards his characters, even the insufferable ones, as I watch them careen toward ruining one another’s lives. I teach his stories a lot, this one, and “Break” and “Lady Tigers,” for their complex mastery of storytelling, for their iconic endings (next to the end of “The Curator,” I wrote, simply: “jesus christ. liars, together”) and their exploration of queerness, for the threads between them (Part II of the collection, The Exaggerations, is a brilliant example of how to link stories without being redundant), for his deft hand with sex scenes and subversion of what one expects from Southern fiction.
Nick’s name may ring a bell to readers of this newsletter as the writer who saves my novel on the regular—Nick and I check in once a month or so to talk through our work and encourage one another; the number of writing ledges he has talked me off of is innumerable. We’ve tragically only been in the same room together once, at a bar where all the staff wore mechanics overalls. We shared tater tots. This was not a fever dream, but it could have been. It’s my pleasure to give you a little taste of why Nick is such a good writing friend and brain by having him share his process with us this week.
What have you been working on this week?
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