KMWR: Can you tell us about how "Nothing to Declare" came to be? I always love to know the origins of a story and, especially, how a character like Lenny first appeared on the page.
EK: I have no idea how others come up with ideas for stories, but I benefit from a little conceit that can act as a driver. For example, I am working on a collection wherein a smallish character in one becomes a protagonist in the next. I had also found an old notebook where I’d jotted story titles I thought were snappy but that I had never done anything with and figured I would use them as starting points. So, “A Moratorium on Second Chances” becomes a story about an unorthodox and somewhat reluctant lawyer who—unbeknownst to his practice partner— fenagles some client funds to help his partner’s mother and ends up suspended by the Bar Association and (again unbeknownst to his partner) living in the boiler room of the office building where they’d shared a suite for many years. He stays sane by imagining the grubby little office to be the captain’s quarters of a 19th century Baltimore clipper. A small character in that story becomes, in “No Room for Sundays”, a sculptor retreating increasingly from the woman he’s living with and whose relationship finally dissolves in an argument wherein she takes him to task for creating a handmade calendar which she finds emblematic of his withdrawal from intimacy: his spacing is so slapdash that the weekend days—the time they would normally have together—are too thin to use. He spends the story making sense of his failing, having it inspire his sculpture, and making amends.
But, alas, after a handful, I ran out of these old titles. Luckily, my wife and I were taking a trip crossing the Washington border into Eastern BC, and I thought—how does one get posted to such a lonely border crossing? Is it punitive (I wondered, ungenerously)? Et voilà: Lenny.
KMWR: I'd love to know more about how you crafted the concise and informative prose in the first paragraph--did this appear in your first draft or after revisions? I was awed by its character building, exposition, and characterization without causing overwhelm. Tell us your secrets.
EK: The simple idea I started with was a border agent, serially demoted until he landed at the loneliest border crossing in the U.S. I wanted to establish as concisely as possible that he’d started at the top, had some unspecified failing in his work (his ‘alternative points of pride’), but that he took it all very seriously and appreciated the gravity of his work—saluting the president even as he was being chastened. That all came out in the first draft and set the stage for the rest of the story.
KMWR: I’m curious to know your thoughts about the links between your career as a physician and your writing career. How has working with one influenced the other, and vice versa? Do you find any metaphors between medical and writing work to be fitting?
EK: I think the fact that I have a full work life and thus the luxury of writing without a particular goal in mind: to support myself, to fulfill some expectation etc., frees me up to just enjoy the process. Writing exercises my creative side and makes the work-a-day more sufferable. Writing, like medicine, is many things but, from a certain simple view, they are both about solving problems. How to tweak a treatment plan to avoid side effects. How to create tension without hitting the reader over the head. How to discover what a patient’s actual health goals are—often unstated. How to indulge in descriptive passages that serve the story and not just one’s ego.
The vulnerability that patients must concede, the full panoply of human emotions and frailties that emerge in dealing with one’s medical problems, and the way the details of patients’ lives intersect and inform their medical conditions all serve to generate a palette available to create sketches that hopefully ring somewhat true.
KMWR: One of the things I loved about your story was the ambiguity of Lenny's presence in the world, as we are faced with surreal questions when Tali is confused to see another agent in Lenny's place. As I read through it again, I convinced myself that he was lost to the bureaucratic machine and easily replaced--but another readthrough had me wondering if he was a ghost enacting its worldly presence. I'm wondering what your intentions are--or is it meant to be up in the air?
EK: I think there are many ways to interpret the essence here. What I had in my mind though, was—here is a guy who wants to be good at his job, who really cares, but is increasingly lost in fantasy—constructing imagined lives for the folks passing through the border. Is this part of his unspecified failing that keeps getting him demoted? His fantasy life increasingly takes over, from entertaining himself with imagined lives to e.g., constructing and inserting himself into an elaborate drama for Tali and her boyfriend. In retrospect, he’d been fired, not demoted, and then had, out of the cognitive dissonance between his unswerving commitment to border patrol and his failure, constructed a fantasy that he’d been posted to a far-flung, temporarily unmanned border crossing. He drove out, dragged the barrier off the road, and just began his work. When an actual border guard showed up to re-open the crossing, he shuffled off to his next fantastical chapter…
KMWR: What's an ideal writing session for you? What do you like to have nearby as you write?
EK: I have been working with headphones and a Youtube recording of a tropical rainstorm. It’s 8 hours long and I love to look and see that 2 or 3 hours have passed in the blink of an eye. That feeling of immersion in the work attended by what feels like a wrinkle in time is the best…and chocolate.
KMWR: What have you been reading recently that you would recommend?
EK: I have been extremely enamored of Anthony Doerr lately. I have enjoyed much of his work, but most recently —his short story collection, “The Shell Collector” is just quietly astounding, and his novel Cloud Cuckoo Land is so creative and innovative, has a real heart to it, and is a great story.
KMWR: And finally, what are your current projects?
EK: Tali Larkin from the story above becomes a protagonist in, “Emphasis Mine.” (The last of my snappy, priorly unused titles.) It takes place many years before her time in Whitetail, MT. Tali is a young ceramicist in Toronto who, while cleaning out her mother’s attic upon her death, finds a box of her father’s memorabilia (he died when she was 3). She knows her father had been a professor at the University of Algiers before the war and had been dismissed by the Vichy regime, joined the resistance and then had moved to Canada. In the box she finds a ring roughly etched with ‘Algiers 1944’, some pictures from Algeria of her father with unfamiliar people, and some scraps of pages from books in Arabic. Tali travels to Algiers in 1968 to learn who the father was she’d never really known.
Her co-protagonist is Nazim Duran who runs a juice stand in the Casbah in Algiers. His mother had worked at the University before the war. Their stories converge as she follows her father’s trail through the dark passages of the Casbah, and Tali and Nazim’s shared history emerges. Those that knew her father refer to him as Tashdid. Tali learns this comes from a phrase appearing many times in scraps of her father’s academic books, burned by the Vichy regime and later found by his resistance comrades: al-tashdid min ‘indi, or emphasis mine.
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Raised in Washington, D.C., Evan Krasner is a physician and Chief of Primary Care at the VA Medical Center in Spokane, WA. He has a prior story published in Margins Magazine.
