Samuel Jensen is a writer from Texas. He holds an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, where he now teaches. His fiction has appeared in Cimarron Review, Strange Horizons, Masters Review, and elsewhere, and has been listed as “distinguished” in Best American Short Stories, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and awarded a fellowship from the Denver Lighthouse Writers Workshop. He is currently at work on a novel. An excerpt from his story “The Fourth Child” can be found here. It appears in the Sept/Oct 2020 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “The Fourth Child”?
A lot of my stories come from, not dreams, but that moment right before you fall asleep when your mind seems to be awake and asleep at the same time. “The Fourth Child” was one of those. I dreamed (half dreamed?) about a war, and people living in tunnels, no lights. So the main ideas were there from the start. Whenever this happens I have to get up in the night and write the idea down, because otherwise it’s gone.
Later, thinking about the practicals of such an existence, I realized you’d have to cook and eat in the dark. The fact that you wouldn’t necessarily know who was showing up to dinner hit me—I knew that was the inciting incident of the story.
Can you talk a little bit about the decision to write this story from the perspective of a character in the future, writing to those in the past? Even from the opening lines, the reader knows “when I say war I do not mean a war that has happened, but a war to come.”
“Child” is definitely about being afraid. Maybe it’s a generational thing, but the future has never looked good to me. I was born onto a dying planet, was nine when my country first went to war—a war that is still going on. This year that planet is burning. Democracies everywhere are being stripped of their principles so brazenly we wonder if they were ever democracies at all. For me, there’s always been a void waiting down the timeline, some Great Terrible Thing.
I think the story’s point of view backwards in time tackles that fear by inverting it. Instead of me being afraid of a future, it’s that future being afraid for me. Which, of course, is a fruitless fear, as, in this version of the future, I’m already gone. That idea became very interesting to me as I wrote. It’s Barthes’s punctum as I understand it: the realization that, looking a historical photograph, the people pictured are dead and, in the photograph’s suspended time, are also going to die. You can’t save them. Their doom has already befallen them.
Being afraid of the future is also a fruitless endeavor. Such fruitlessness is really at the heart of the story. Why do you write if you know your addressee will never read your words? And I think many of us do still write in that situation. It’s funny: I didn’t know who was behind this story’s voice until three or four drafts in. So it’s a character writing about themselves without revealing that they are. The same probably goes for the author.
The pandemic hadn’t started when you submitted this piece. Do you think COVID will affect the way the story resonates with your readers?
I think it has to. The story was written in response to fears and disasters that hit before COVID, and living under quarantine isn’t anything like living through an actual war, but it’s hard to argue against the fact that my characters’ lives and our lives have become eerily similar. “Child” absolutely thinks about isolation and, well, being inside all the time.
Before COVID, I didn’t really think of Davey’s quest to find the fourth child as being a desire for a new connection, but it can certainly be read that way now. Maybe that’s the only way to read it. I’ve also been thinking about the story being about distrust of institutions, of being forgotten and threatened by the larger forces in the world, and that’s certainly in line what I think are a lot of folks’ feelings about how governments have failed to care for their people during this pandemic.
What is either the best or the worst piece of writing advice you’ve received or given?
I was very lucky to attend a Q+A by Colm Tóibín once. Someone asked a question about how, in his excellent novel Nora Webster, he managed to gracefully include a ghost at the end of an otherwise completely realistic book.
Mr. Tóibín told us that, to include a ghost, you have to go slow, then go fast, and then slow again. Which was so great: he could have given us some vague answer about “knowing what feels right” or “not being afraid to break the rules,” but instead he gave this specific tip that gets at how you can use pacing to prepare readers for newness or strangeness, and it’s informed a lot of my writing. The more I write the more I feel like timing is everything. You can get away with a lot if you time it right.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
I’ve recently completed work on a novel about a troubled family who manages a colossal, haunted facility that controls the weather. In its own way, it too is about isolation, and the future, and people under and within the sticky power of institutions. Quite a bit of it also takes place underground; I guess that’s where my head is at, lately.
Right now, I’ve recently started the first draft of a second novel. Not sure what it’ll end up being about, but it has skaters in it, and floods.