Suzie Eckl’s work is published or forthcoming in the Arkansas International, where she won the 2020 Emerging Writer’s Prize; Nimrod International Journal, where she won the 2020 Francine Ringold Award for Emerging Writers in Poetry; and Bat City Review, where she placed runnerup in the 2019 Short Prose Contest. She received her MFA in creative writing at the University of Virginia and her BA in English at Davidson College as a Patricia Cornwell Creative Writing Scholar. Currently, she is working on a collection of stories set in the American West. An excerpt from her story “Visitation” can be found here. It appears in the July/Aug 2021 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “Visitation”?
You know, I’ve had this story for a while, and I don’t remember exactly what kicked it off. What I do remember is how clearly I heard Randall’s voice. He was so insistent, so there. He started speaking to me, and all I had to do was follow him around. He told me everything about himself, all of his fears and yearnings; I really didn’t have all that much to do with his story. Of course, I had lots to do with revision, and I moved Randall around quite a bit (see below!). But the core of the story—the central trauma—always remained the same.
Can you talk a bit about your process of crafting the character’s internal dialogue and narrative voice in this story—with its conversational tone, simple sentence structure, and shifting temporal scope—and how you see it to relate to the psychological experience of trauma or mourning?
I’ll say again that Randall’s voice has stayed true throughout every revision. He’s kind of a no-nonsense guy: he lives in the woods in a small, Alaskan town along an estuary. I guess it seemed right to me that his language came out more conversationally, more plainly—though I want to be clear that Randall is not simpleminded, even if his wants and needs are, indeed, fairly simple.
When I think of what I actually did deliberately, in terms of craft, I think of the way Randall’s consciousness sometimes spins off and doubles back. The spiraling and repetition felt key to me. He returns, circles. Trauma can be so obsession-inducing, and that’s true for Randall, perhaps more so for him than for his wife. (Although Waverly has her secret depths, “all those thoughts she keeps to herself,” which Randall understands and never questions.) I was very careful to make sure that Randall’s obsessions came through as well, both those he might have been aware of and those he certainly wasn’t. His attention to perceived thresholds, levels of consciousness, the comings and going of the tides, gull prints that appear and reappear—it was all important to me. I wanted Randall’s mind to be attuned to points of separation and the way things come and go. He needed to have a mind that would be open to the possibility of a return. He needed to be someone willing to reach out for it.
I’ll also admit something maybe I shouldn’t? I was really worried about melodrama in this piece. I tend towards it, I think, and try my best to avoid it. Sometimes I may even overcorrect. But in this piece I thought simpler language would help temper any potential melodrama.
I was really struck by your incredibly vivid descriptions of Alaska and the Chilkat River written throughout this piece—especially as the environment so uniquely sparks the family memories and amplifies the isolation of the couple’s experience with loss. Was place an important part of imagining the development of this story for you, and if so, why did you choose this particular setting to surround the characters in their navigation of grief?
Oh gosh, maybe I’m admitting yet another thing I shouldn’t, but . . . would you believe that the early versions of this story took place in Wyoming? And that there was no airplane? At this point, I can’t! When I first wrote this piece, it really languished. There was something there, I knew that, but it wasn’t really working. I drawered it. A year or two later, I spent nine weeks in Alaska and the Yukon, including four along the Chilkat River. I loved it. Actually, that’s not true. I was pretty bored there, fairly miserable traveling by myself without a car, without Internet or even reliable cell service. But I digress. The point is, a few months after that trip, I undrawered the story to try to figure out a way through. In a burst of inspiration at 10 p.m. in Charlottesville’s only open coffee shop, I rewrote the whole thing in Alaska. The airplane, the river, Randall’s imagined dinner conversation with his wife and impossibly grown son. All of this was possible because of my daily walks at low tide in Alaska, and an off-hand comment made by someone at a bar one night, when a plane groaned overhead. Something about it having to be a medical flight because it was so late. Getting that landscape right and somehow reengineering the story in a way that made that landscape inextricable, fixed the story.
How has your writing changed since you started out?
I’m not sure it has so much! Is that terrible? I want to say I have more confidence, but that would be a lie. In fact, I think for a while there I lost a lot of confidence and had to wrest it back for myself. I would say my relationship to my writing has changed. I have more patience. I trust the revision process more. When my stories get rejected, I’m not so woe is me. In fact, I tend to trust the rejections; when I get a certain number of them, I know I’ve jumped the gun on submission and need to revise.
What is either the best or the worst piece of writing advice you’ve received or given?
If you’re obsessed with something, write it until you’re through with it. That’s all the permission I needed! I’ve been writing about western landscapes ever since, and not once have I gotten tired of it. Not once have I said, “Okay, did that, what’s next?”
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
I’m currently finishing up a collection of stories set in the American West. “Visitation” is one of them! I’m also embarking on a novel project set in Texas, but it’s still very new, and as much as possible I’m trying to keep the magic in the bag. I hope I’ll feel more ready to talk about it soon!