Nancy Zafris is the former fiction editor of the Kenyon Review and the former series editor of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. She has published four books of fiction and has just completed a new novel. An excerpt from her story “The Zimmerman Trees” can be found here. It appears in the Nov/Dec 2020 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “The Zimmerman Trees”?
Well, “The Zimmerman Trees” definitely wasn’t an “oh that’s a great idea” kind of story—I know! Let me write a story about a married couple in their 70s sitting around in the afternoon! This is a story that evolved out of something vague and modest.
My husband Jim and I were driving around a small isolated Ohio town with a very conservative Amish order in it and I noticed the maple trees tapped to collect sap. The ones on Amish land were very low-tech compared to the other systems. The pale, bulbous plastic bags they used looked quite eerie on such a gray day. So that was a good image for a story, but what I like to do is avoid a one-to-one correspondence where the image embraces the very thing it represents. In other words, I wasn’t going to give the image directly to whom it belonged, to an Amish character, but to someone else. Although I didn’t know this rural couple in their 70s who became the protagonists of the story, they were at least a part of my modern world.
One of the strengths of this story is the way the small pleasures—the delight Henry experiences drinking his dad’s recipe for “hobo coffee” in a can on an early morning; Ginny’s admiration for the fresh chives in the Pizza Hut salad bar—contrast with the pain in Henry and Ginny’s bodies as they navigate their home. Can you talk a little bit about why you called attention to each of these, in turn?
So details like the hobo coffee are kind of the breezes that blow through a story. I guess the writer is opening up porous spots in the narrative, letting things through, and then closing them up as needed to take the story through its more plot-centered paces. It’s morning, he’s alone, he’s going to stand at the window and drink his coffee. I’m looking for openings here that begin to layer the story—in particular, tense openings where past and present merge quickly and then move on. How that happens is rather organic and you just have to trust that you’re making enough of the right moves for things to bubble up. No one wakes up in the morning and thinks, I’m going to think about my father today. In fact, I’m going to get out my little playlist of thoughts and memories that I go through. Such a thing runs the risk of becoming rather like product placements where the character is guided to a photo on the wall and thinks of his dad or reads the framed award his dad won or some such thing. That presents it linearly like a filmstrip instead of what I’m looking for, layered in one piece all at once.
For example, we sit in a meeting and our thoughts blip through all kinds of things while we still manage to attend to the meeting. What’s magical here are not the details themselves that we blip through, but the collection of tenses we can deal with all at once—present, past, conditional, and future. So when Zimmerman drinks the hobo coffee, for me it’s about merging past and present into a single sentence that continues to work completely in the present tense.
The story is set in rural Ohio in February during the opioid crisis, though there’s only one explicit mention of Narcan, which the local police officer took “leisurely time” administering to Henry’s son and his partner. Danny, Henry and Ginny’s son, is entirely offstage during the course of this story, though Henry’s relationship to him is at the heart of this story. How did you find a way to get us invested in Danny throughout the piece, and still hold so much of him away from your reader? How did you manage to whittle the opioid crisis down to this one heartbreaking image?
As soon as I wrote a couple of paragraphs I realized I liked the Zimmerman couple and I liked their tender relationship and wanted to keep it tender. That begged the question, why does a couple that sweet seem so alone? This led to their back story of an adult child lost to drugs. Again, I just tried to take advantage of opportunities as they arose by building a porous enough narrative. In this case, it means building passing thoughts of the son into the more climactic Narcan incident you mention. Focusing on that too early and making it too much of the story completely changes the story. For me, portraying that incident early requires the author to step out of the story with the pre-ordained image. It works best for me if I don’t even know the image, but am working toward it. Plus, I’m not interested in forwarding bad behavior, for lack of a better word, as the centerpiece that always grabs the attention, so I didn’t want all the focus on this damage. Since I’m writing this response during Thanksgiving season, I’m reminded of the relative who always ruins Thanksgiving with antics of varying horror. It might make for an amusing anecdote down the line (or maybe not) but for me it doesn’t have the sustenance of story and it doesn’t ask the questions I like to ask. So I wanted to avoid that.
Is this a piece of a larger project? If so, is there anything you’d be willing to share about it?
I completed the novel that this story comes from. The premise circles around a crime or prank, depending on your point of view, that lands some high schoolers in juvie while others, not incidentally the star football players, are let off the hook. The novel explores not the malefactors themselves but the other students affected by the divisions this incident provokes in the town. I’m trying to explore the diversity that can co-exist in such a town as long as there’s a herd compliance to take no notice of it. What happens when things break open? What happens when heterogeneity is cracked out of a passive, supposedly benign accommodation? How does a young person deal with a revised community view that now highlights their sexuality or ethnicity, things that before could remain blissfully unacknowledged while the teen dealt with it on their own schedule? By the way, the female doctor quickly referred to in “The Zimmerman Trees” is Indian: not an issue—until it is. It mimics, in that way, the Amish community which the town ignores while co-existing and doing business with it—until something happens to change that.
Which non-writing-related aspect of your life most influences your writing?
I like studying languages, especially when I am going to travel there. I took a semester of Chinese at Ohio State University before going to China, and my husband and I took a semester of Hindi at the university before traveling to India. Granted, we don’t get that far in the language, but we take it seriously and we’ve always been able to make lasting friends that way. And of course that feeds into writing.
What is either the best or the worst piece of writing advice you’ve received or given?
I think advice that begins “I need to know more about . . .” can get the workshop in trouble. It’s that bossy word “need.” Really? In addition, advice like “This character should be a little nicer or shouldn’t say that.” (Usually directed to the female or minority writers in the workshop so I tend more to bristle.) In the Kenyon Review writing workshops, I like to examine things technically. So, say, if someone has a detail that is historically or culturally or scientifically inaccurate, the class doesn’t tell them they can’t do it. The issue becomes this: hey, this is obviously important to the story. Can we find a way to make it work? Everyone working together to brainstorm a solution is one of the most exciting moments for me as a teacher.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
While trying to get representation for the novel I just mentioned, I completed my first young adult novel. I also worked with a Kenyon professor, Ric Sheffield, to write a screenplay about a group of black domestics who bring the famous African-American classical singer Marion Anderson to a concert in their small town in 1939. And my good friend Ellen Weeren and I are trying to put together a teaching book of prompts.