High Desert Journal: The Genesis of “Enough of Me”

The Genesis of “Enough of Me”

Back Story

Joe Wilkins' short story Enough of Me won our 2011 Obsidian Prize in Fiction. It beat out over 130 entries and was shortlisted by each of our four readers as a finalist to be passed on to judge Gretel Ehrlich. That all four readers earmarked Enough of Me as a potential finalist made it an obvious choice to make that final cut, and I wasn't the least bit surprised when Gretel chose it as the winner. What did surprise me (at least in one respect) was it was (again) Joe. Joe won our previous Obsidian Prize in Fiction two years before with an entirely different set of readers and judge. Gretel said of Enough of Me that it had a velocity and tough thread running through it that she liked. I liked it for the idea that stories can save us, which Joe talks about at the end of this back story. Enjoy.

My wife and I were back in Montana for Christmas a few years ago, and it was just bone cold— twenty below or more day after day. And the wind. It came hard from the north, a fine stream of snow whistling off the sheer, windblown crest of every scalloped drift. Getting into our car to drive over to my grandmothers one day, there was a scrim of snow across the floorboard and the passenger seat. We tried for a moment to figure out where it was getting in, then—too cold to continue our inspection—brushed the seat clean and climbed in and blasted the heater. On the ride over, I remember telling my wife that that’d be a good first line for a story: “The snow is getting in.”

I tend to write in waves. A bunch of poems. A long story. Essays. Poems again. That winter I was deep in stories, most of which featured narrators or protagonists who were young men variously adrift in the distances of Montana. But from the very beginning that line—“The snow is getting in”—didn’t sound like it was spoken by one of my usual characters. It sounded like someone not lost in distance but hemmed in, surrounded by something. I kept writing and soon realized the narrator was indeed in a city and was as well a young woman. It was the first story from a female perspective that I’d ever attempted. I was terrified. I cleaved to the rhythm and music of that first line. Her situation was desperate—I could hear that, but I could hear some power in her voice, too. Her voice. I was caught in it. I kept writing.

Following her voice a first draft spilled out rather quickly, but the revisions took years. I had to catch the narrative up with the music of the story. I had to untangle the timeline and clarify certain characters. And what to do about the end? Growing up in a hardscrabble eastern Montana town, I had friends who were connected to their own lives only by the thinnest thread. As an educator at the high school and college level, I’ve worked with a number of young people who are functionally homeless, or worse. At first, I felt the truest ending for the nameless narrator of “Enough of Me” might be some common, quiet oblivion, as that’s too often what I’ve observed. But the longer I spent with her voice, the more I wrote and re-wrote—the more I realized that her voice just might rescue her. Her witness, her honesty, her decision to speak in the first place—these would carry her through. I let her have the last word, and I finally found the ending.

There’s one more thing I want to bring up: one of the questions posed when I was asked to write this piece was, “Is there a cathartic need for people to tell their stories? Can stories heal us?” My answer to this question is simple: Yes. The act of story rescues the narrator of “Enough of Me”; in many ways the stories I was told, and eventually began telling, saved me; and I’ve watched any number of students begin to heal themselves in the creative writing classroom. In his stunning, necessary essay, “In Defense of Creative-Writing Classes,” Richard Hugo argues that “[w]hen we are told in dozens of insidious ways that our lives don’t matter, we may be forced to insist [...] that they do. A creative-writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters.” Can stories heal us? My answer is simple: Yes.

Yet I want to re-complicate things. I believe, too, that stories can wreck us, in all the right ways. I think stories act in different ways on those of us not necessarily in need of immediate salvation; for us lucky ones, the power of a good story is in ruination. A story cracks us open, brings down the walls we have so carefully constructed around ourselves. I’m thinking of pieces like Oregon-native Benjamin Percy’s “Refresh, Refresh” or Mark Slouka’s The Visible World or anything from Bonnie Jo Campbell’s story collection American Salvage. Trembling, I put these books down. I feel hewn, assailed and aching, thankfully wrecked.

High Desert Journal

The Genesis of “Enough of Me”

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